Mitchell woke up to find himself lying in the middle of the empty bed.
The shower was running in the bathroom.
He remembered Arielle’s tiny gasps in the bed the previous night and himself taking advantage of the situation to touch her.
His brain regretted the trespass and cited clauses of the contract that governed their behavior that he’d broken, but his body had no such misgivings. Feeling her writhe so delicately in his arms as he’d pleasured her had been a delight. His body had no conscience, and now, he had an appetite for more.
But it had been a mistake.
If Arielle broke their contract and walked out of his life that morning because he had taken advantage of the fact they’d been in a bed together, Mitchell would lose the bet with Gabriel Fish, a combined four hundred million dollars, Match Play, Last Chance, his own and his friends’ livelihoods and futures, not to mention the humiliation of being publicly caught out faking a relationship.
Because he knew those reporters would definitely break the story and rhapsodize about Mitchell Saltonstall’s sordid downfall.
And then there was the fact that he must have absolutely ruined any glimmer of hope of a future relationship with Arielle after the charade was over.
He’d thought about it in the secret recesses of his mind, the crypts and catacombs of his heart, that maybe, just perhaps, on January second of next year, he and Arielle might turn to each other, shrug, and say, “Should we give it a real go, then?”
Dear God, he was a stupid, rutting ox.
She’d been wearing something silky and flimsy under the covers. His hand had slipped inside the leg of her pajamas, and he’d wished he’d known what color they were or if they had any—his belly clenched with desire at the thought—lace.
He pressed his fist against his temple and sighed. He was an idiot. They needed to talk about what this meant and what she wanted to do about how he had disregarded their contractual agreement.
The bathroom door flipped open.
Mitchell braced himself.
Arielle trotted through the bedroom without making eye contact, a white hotel robe fluttering around her, carrying her makeup bag in one arm, clothes draped over the other, and curling irons dangling and clanking off her arms while jabbering, “Oh, hey, you’re up, so I thought you might need to use the bathroom because the car should be here to pick us up to take us back to Pebble Beach in an hour, and I ordered some breakfast from room service, but I’ll just finish up in the powder room off the living room so you can shower or whatever you need to do, and I didn’t mean to suggest that you need to shower but you do you, buddy, so I’ll be out in the living room whenever you’re ready, bye!”
The bedroom door closed behind her. Silence and stillness collided in her wake.
Arielle hadn’t flipped him off or offered violence. That was a good start.
And yeah, he needed to shower. Mitchell rolled out of bed.
After mentally kicking his own ass while he showered, shaved, and otherwise groomed himself because his six-foot-four-inch muscular body had a lot of surface area to keep presentable, Mitchell ventured out to the suite’s living room. “Arielle?”
Her dulcet voice drifted in with the sea breeze from the balcony. “Out here.”
A knock sounded on the door behind Mitchell, and he let the room service waitstaff in. Mitchell took the breakfast cart from her and pushed it onto the balcony where Arielle was standing.
Mitchell leaned on the railing beside her. “Breakfast is here.”
She wore a tee shirt and shorts because the hair and makeup team had told her they would provide a different costume for Sunday. Her face looked naturally pretty like she wasn’t wearing makeup or not much. Mitchell was not good at quantifying makeup on women, despite Emily insisting on applying “guyliner” and “dude powder” every time he went home to his parents’ house.
Plus, the makeup team at Pebble Beach the day before had used some very subtle cosmetics in gray and black tubes that were specifically for men, according to the flittering makeup artist who was probably accustomed to more squeamish clients who didn’t have sisters.
Mitchell wore a darker blue suit than yesterday because his Tom Ford suit was better than the clothes they’d shown him, and of course, his suit was properly tailored.
The sea breeze blew Arielle’s blond tresses out behind her. She said, “I got you eggs and hash browns. I realized that we’ve never seen each other for breakfast before.”
“My favorite.” Broaching the subject seemed impossible, so Mitchell took a deep breath and pressed on, full steam ahead. “About last night—”
At the same time, Arielle said, “Look, we should talk about last night.”
They both laughed, cringing.
Mitchell said, “This is all my fault. I shouldn’t have rolled over. I shouldn’t have touched you. It was inappropriate, and I apologize from the bottom of my heart. I’ll find a different hotel room for tonight.”
Arielle was talking fast, too. “I shouldn’t have flicked the bean with you in the room. It was gross, and I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean for you to know. This is all my fault. I thought you were asleep.”
“I was never asleep. As soon as I lay down, I knew I’d made a mistake because I wasn’t going to sleep at all last night with you in the bed beside me. I planned to lie there, wide awake, until morning.”
Arielle said, “I should’ve slept on the couch. I’m obviously so much shorter than you are. I should never have crawled into the bed with you. This is all my fault.”
“And it wasn’t gross. It was the most alluring thing I’d ever heard. The minute your breath caught in your throat, I knew exactly what you were doing and could not help myself, and I should have been able to help myself. It was all my fault.”
The wind was whipping Arielle’s hair around her head, and she pulled it out of her face. “It’s all my fault that we got so worked up in the car. I never should’ve taken off my seatbelt. Isn’t that against the law in California anyway?”
Mitchell steeled himself and launched his foray. “I feel that I’m entirely at fault. I apologize for taking advantage of you. I apologize for breaking the rules of our business relationship as established by the contract we both signed. I hope you can forgive me and we can move forward.”
Arielle stared at him, blinking her dark eyes with her blond hair flipping around her head in the ocean breeze, and then she seemed to recover as she pulled her arms tightly around herself. “Of course. Of course, yes. I appreciate that, and yes, I think we can maintain our business relationship because that’s what this is, of course. It’s just business. I mean, I don’t want this little slip to mess up what we’re doing here.”
“Right.” A rush of relief and sadness swamped him. “It was a slip. Just a slip.”
“I mean, finishing out this year is important to me, too. My dad sank all his retirement savings into Match Play and lost his investment.” She sucked her lips into her mouth and nodded. “It’s important to me to make sure that we don’t break the contract. It’s in both of our best interests to not mess this up. We’re partners here. We both want the same thing.”
“Exactly,” Mitchell agreed, and he forced a smile to raise the corners of his mouth. “Partners. And we only slipped because the hotel had only one room with only one bed. We always get two hotel rooms, and we always will from here on out, even if I have to reserve three rooms to ensure we have a spare. It was entirely due to the hotel’s miscalculation.”
“Right,” Arielle said, her eyes still big, but she was nodding. “The hotel made a mistake. So, this little slip didn’t change anything between us. This is a business relationship, and that’s all it is. It was a mistake, an aberration,”
“Absolutely,” Mitchell said, “an aberration.”
“And it’s just a good thing it didn’t go any further.”
Mitchell waved his hand in the air as if dissipating smoke. “It couldn’t have gone any further.”
“Oh?” Arielle stilled. “I mean, you’re right, of course. You’re you, and I’m me. And you wouldn’t have wanted to take it any further. You’re not really attracted to me, of course.”
“Um, no. It couldn’t have gone any further because I deliberately didn’t pack any condoms in my luggage. It’s the male equivalent of wearing ‘granny panties,’ I think they’re called.”
Arielle looked up. A grin lifted her mouth and sparkled in her eyes, and then she laughed. “Seriously?”
“As serious as a heart attack. It works every time,” he told her.
She laughed. “I can’t believe you know that trick.”
He squinted at her. “I’m twenty-nine. I like talking with women. It’s come up.”
“But you’re a guy. Why would you not want to, you know?”
“It’s a conscious and logical decision. We shouldn’t. It doesn’t matter what I want. It doesn’t matter if we have a little slip or an aberration, as you so charmingly put it. We shouldn’t. So I didn’t pack any condoms so I won’t.”
And yet Mitchell wanted to carry her in his arms back to that bed and make an even bigger mistake.
“A guy like you, loose on the town without protection?” Arielle asked him. “That just seems like a recipe for disaster.”
“As I mentioned earlier, I am not a manwhore like my work associate Jericho. I’m a gourmet. I only sample the very best and what is appropriate. And you, my little kitten, no matter how enticing and attractive I think you are, you are entirely inappropriate.”
Arielle looked down at their feet standing on the carpet covering the balcony and smiled a funny, bent smile before she said, “Well, everything that happened doesn’t change the fact that emotion is entirely off the table because this is just business.”
His molars seemed to be grinding together in his head. “Right. Of course.”
“And this is why we usually get two rooms,” Arielle continued, “so slips like this don’t happen.”
“Correct. I’ll find a different hotel room for tonight. Maybe I can call a friend of mine and bunk with them. One of the good things about the boarding school I went to is that there’s a network of alumni that stretches all over the world. Surely, either someone lives or has a summer house in Monterey where I can crash for the night.”
Ariel nodded. “And I have cousins down in Poway. I can go stay with them tonight. Surely Aunt Monica will let me couch surf. She’s actually my great-aunt, but we don’t worry about those things.”
They argued gallantly, each thinking up yet another place to stay for the night, but neither made a phone call to follow up on those ideas.
They ate breakfast out on the balcony, listening to the traffic below and the cries of seagulls over the bay and discussing ever more wild and unlikely options—glamping in the Redwoods, hiring a private plane with a bedroom to fly in a holding pattern over SFO all night, paying one of the unsheltered people a thousand dollars to share their underpass—and they continued concocting ever more harebrained schemes as they joked in the back of the car as they were driven to Pebble Beach Golf Links for their photoshoot that afternoon.
They did not touch the whole time, and any time they looked at each other, they both looked away as if their eyes had been the problem.
As they walked from the car to the clubhouse, Mitchell accidentally grazed his knuckles against the back of Ariel’s hand, and both of them leaped back as if snapped by a blue static shock and apologized profusely.
The hair and makeup team separated them, and both heaved a sigh of relief and yet wanted the primping to be over with so they could start the shoot.
The photographer was ready for them all too soon.