The Morning After

 

This wasn’t her hotel room.

The suit jacket tossed on the chair was Lara’s first clue.

The discarded matching pants on the floor in front of it was her second.

The dip in the mattress as someone got off the bed behind her was her third.

Oh my God. What had she done?

Well, it was pretty obvious what she’d done, but, oh God...

Lara clamped her eyes shut as that someone came around the foot of the bed, peeking only when she heard the bathroom door slide open.

Oh my. The guy’s bare naked ass looked really good. Probably better out of those pants than in them—too bad she didn’t remember what it’d looked like in them.

Too bad she didn’t remember him.

The door clicked closed and Lara shot to her feet—to the second shock of the morning.

She was wearing only a t-shirt. And it wasn’t hers.

She didn’t want to think about whose it was or how she came to be in said t-shirt; she just wanted to grab her dress, shoes, and purse, and get the hell out before her one-and-only one-night stand finished doing whatever it was a one-night stand did the morning after.

She scooped the dress off the dresser—no, she wasn’t going to think about how it’d gotten there—tore his shirt up over her head then the dress down over it, and bagged looking for her bra. She just wanted out.

Her shoes were next to the chair—one was under it—and her purse, thank God, was hanging on the hotel room door.

Twenty-five seconds. That’s all it took her to escape from the most un-Lara-like thing she’d ever done in her life.

It took thirty-five more seconds for the damn elevator to make its way to the—she squinted at the floor marker above the “Down” arrow—the tenth floor.

Thank God there was no one in the elevator. She didn’t need witnesses to her walk of shame.

God, wouldn’t Jeff be shocked to see her now? “Sexually boring and uninspiring” was what he’d said to explain the affair—among others—but this walk of shame negated those.

She couldn’t believe it. Thirty-years-old with her own up-and-coming bakery, yet one too many shots at her college roommate’s bachelorette party had her picking up some random guy for a night of uninhibited monkey sex to soothe her smashed-to-smithereens ego from an ex who didn’t deserve the time of day let alone this kind of prove-him-wrong strategy.

It had been uninhibited monkey sex, right?

She closed her eyes and tried to conjure up an image, but the last thing she could remember was jitterbugging on the dance floor.

She didn’t know how to jitterbug. But, apparently, that hadn’t stopped her.

Oh, God, her head. And her stomach. And that cotton mouth thing…

The bell dinged as the elevator arrived at the second floor. She fumbled for her room key and stumbled out into a blessedly empty hallway. Her room was down a few doors, and thankfully she’d decided to forego a roommate on this trip.

Well, a regular roommate.

Who was the guy? She didn’t even remember what he looked like, let alone his name.

She groaned as she made it into her hotel room. How bad was it that the only recallable part of him was his bare naked ass and that she only remembered because she’d seen it on her way out the door?

She peeled the dress off her body—it’d been on backwards—and headed into the bathroom. Shower, breakfast, and a big glass of orange juice, then she could grab her car and get the hell out of Dodge so she wouldn’t have to risk running into her biggest regret anytime soon.

But the question was: what was her regret for? That she’d picked him up in the first place, or that she couldn’t remember a damn thing about what had come after?

 

***

 

Gage ran the towel through his hair, then wrapped it around his hips. Didn’t want to shock Sleeping Beauty out there with nudity upon opening her gorgeous eyes.

He caught his smile in the mirror. Yeah, it was wolfish, but why shouldn’t it be? He’d ended up with the most gorgeous woman at the party, and that included the bride-to-be.

Of course, he’d broken his own rules to do so—no partying with the patrons—but she’d walked in and knocked him sideways.

It’d be funny, really, if it weren’t so, well, not. He never went for short, dark, and curvy. Model-thin bombshells were more his type. At least, they had been. But then she’d walked in, her curves making his palms sweat, her curls begging for his fingers to dive in and hold on, and those chocolate brown eyes... They’d screamed bedroom so loudly they’d almost drowned out the music, and he’d had a hard time keeping his mind on the show.

Thank God the guys knew their shit. Markus had known it a little too well; he’d been focused on Lara from the first bump-and-grind number.

Luckily, no one had questioned the quick change-up in routines he’d made so that Markus was off stage until the middle of the second act.

By then, the shots that’d been flowing around that table had insured Lara’s interest had no longer been solely on Markus.

That’s when he’d made his move.

Made his move. Gage groaned. What was he—twenty? He never had to make moves; women flocked to him.

But she’d been wedged in the corner of her booth, surrounded by friends, staring at the stage, and hadn’t looked like she was going to get out anytime soon.

He grabbed his toothbrush. He should have moved sooner. Then maybe she wouldn’t have done those last two shots. The woman was a lightweight. She’d made it to the hotel elevator and had literally passed out in his arms. It’d put a damper on his evening, but not his libido.

He just hoped she was more awake this morning.

He finished brushing his teeth and poured a glass of water. She was going to need it and it’d give him the excuse to sit beside her.

And hopefully do much more.

He opened the door softly. He wanted to be the one to wake her, not the noise or the light from the bathroom.

Except… she was gone.

He slumped against the doorframe. Served him right. He played to the fantasies of hundreds of women every weekend, but the one whose fantasy he’d personally wanted to grant apparently had no interest in letting him.