Bridget hadn’t slept at all the night before, wandering down the beach in the dark until she was afraid that she would be too drunk to find her way back if she didn’t turn around. Once she made it back to the guesthouse, she checked her phone, hoping maybe there would be a message from Jay, explaining that Hana was nuts and he had spent the night looking for Bridget and was so worried and she should call him right back. But there were no messages, and when she swallowed her pride and tried his phone? Straight to voice mail.
After that she’d thought about just leaving, driving Scarlett’s car back into Manhattan. But it was late and she’d downed most of her champagne, and damned if she was going to let some ridiculous broken fling make her do anything stupid.
So she lay in bed with her eyes wide open until the sun came up and then she washed her face and packed her stuff and wheeled her suitcase into Scarlett’s sunny kitchen.
Scarlett wasn’t up yet. She never got up before ten, especially not the night after a party, but Liam Maguire was sitting at the huge, scrubbed oak kitchen table, nursing a cup of coffee and looking like a miserable, beaten and battered puppy.
For a moment Bridget almost felt sorry for him. But then she remembered, this was all his fault. If he hadn’t run away with Jay’s wife in the first place, Jay would have stayed married and Bridget never would have been in this stupid, brokenhearted predicament.
“Good morning,” she said. She didn’t smile. She didn’t feel like smiling. He didn’t deserve a smile, anyway.
He looked up at her and nodded.
“You mind if I join you?”
He shrugged.
She poured herself a cup of coffee. Damn, it smelled so good. She wondered what obscure, ridiculously expensive brand Scarlett was buying these days.
She sat down across from Liam and baldly examined him. He was wearing his dress shirt, which was wrinkled and stained and open at the collar, and a pair of equally rumpled tuxedo pants. His hair was a mess, and not in a casual, I-just-rolled-out-of-bed kind of way—there was nothing studied and charming about the crazy that was going on there. His skin was bleached of color, except for the black stubble on his chin and the purple bags under his eyes, and his hand shook when he lifted his coffee cup to his lips.
She took her own gulp of coffee. Bliss. “You look like hell,” she said casually.
He glared across the table at her. “You don’t look so hot yourself, Steele.”
She shrugged and took another sip. “So did they leave together last night?”
He curled his lip. “Who?”
She sighed. “Who do you think? Jay and what’s her face.”
“Hana.”
“Yes. Fine. Hana. Jay and Hana. Hana and Jay. Did they leave together?”
He sighed. “I have no idea.”
“Well, what are you doing here? Don’t you have a house in town?”
He put his coffee down. “I was too drunk to go home. Scarlett invited me to stay the night.”
“You going home now? I’m going to get Scarlett’s driver to take me to the jitney, but if you’re driving anyway, maybe you could drop me off?”
He picked his cup back up, clenching it to his chest like he was cold. “No. I think I’m going to stay here awhile.”
Bridget wrinkled her brow. “Here? Why?”
“Because Scarlett invited me, that’s why. And I don’t feel like going back to my house here or my loft in the city.”
She finished her last gulp of coffee. “Wow. Okay. Well, enjoy. I don’t know how Scarlett does with broken hearts, but she makes a hell of a frittata.”
He stuck out his chin. “I don’t have a broken heart.”
She laughed. “Me neither.”