Adam

by Foster, Lori

  “Excellent choice, Masterson.” He grabbed his wallet from inside his suitcase. “You settle in here, and I’ll go see if I can get us a cot and some food.” Ben headed for the door. “If I’m not back by midnight, check the ice machine for my corpse.”

  Chloe might be having a really bad day, but his was turning out pretty well.

  CHAPTER 2

  BEN MAY HAVE neutralized the no-shelter problem for her, but he couldn’t help her with the Dragon Queen—her mother. She was going to have to slay that beast herself.

  Chloe cast a covert glance at her purse, which was sitting on the floor where she’d abandoned it, about four feet away. Just do it, she lectured herself. Woman up and stop putting off the inevitable.

  She heaved herself off the bed to retrieve her purse, grabbing her coat off the floor, as well. After she’d wasted a couple more seconds arranging her coat on the back of the desk chair and applying some ChapStick, there were no more stalling tactics left in her arsenal. With a resigned breath, she pulled out her cell phone and dialed the number she’d been dreading calling since the moment she’d realized she’d be spending the night in Chicago.

  “Hello.” The frigidity of the word let Chloe know that caller ID had already announced her identity.

  She exhaled. “Hey, Mom.”

  “‘Hey, Mom’? You’re calling me during the rehearsal dinner where everyone is staring at the gaping hole where the bride’s sister is supposed to sit and all you have to say is ‘Hey, Mom’?” Fiona Masterson’s voice was eerily calm. Which meant her mother was furious. “Everyone is wondering where you are.”

  She had no doubt that was true. Her sister’s big day might be the main event, but more than a few of the attendees were waiting with gossipy glee to see the sideshow—Chloe’s return.

  “My flight got canceled. There’s a really bad storm here in Chicago. I’m really sorry.” Chloe paced the short length of the hotel room.

  “This is why we wanted to buy you the first class ticket that would have gotten you here days ago, if you’ll recall. To avoid just such a situation. You know winter weather is completely unpredictable. Never mind the fact that you’ve missed your sister’s stagette, her bridal shower, her lingerie party, the family brunch, the luncheon for out-of-town guests, the—”

  “I told you I couldn’t get that much time off work. I’m really sorry I missed...all those things, but it’s not as if I’m a bridesmaid or anything.” Thank God.

  Some people might have felt slighted by the oversight, but Chloe had been all kinds of relieved. Standing up at the altar in front of all those people... Just the thought of it was enough to give her PTSD. “And I’ll be there for the wedding. I promise. Even if I have to hitchhike, I’ll be there.”

  Her mother sighed, and Chloe hoped she’d sounded much less melodramatic when Ben had called her out for the same thing on the plane earlier.

  “So help me, Chloe Marie, if you do not arrive in time for your sister’s wedding...”

  “Mom, I gotta go. I’ll be there tomorrow around ten.”

  Chloe disconnected the call and sat heavily on the side of the bed.

  What was it about talking to her mother that made her feel like she was sixteen years old again? She’d moved across the country to escape the phenomenon. Yet all it took was a phone call to bring back all the feelings of being less than.

  The tears caught her by surprise. They were followed closely by sobs that made her shoulders lurch. The more she cursed and fought the show of weakness, the more torrentially it manifested itself. After a while, she just gave in.

  The sound of the door opening couldn’t have startled her more if it had been a gunshot.

  Shit. She wiped desperately at her puffy, tear-swollen face, trying to erase the evidence of her breakdown. The man had the worst timing of anyone she’d ever met.

  “Chloe? You should have seen the lineup for the restaurant. It’s a madhouse down there, so I had to improvise. Also, I added my name to the cot waiting list. Which is hilarious because— Hey, what’s wrong?”

  “I’m fine,” she lied, willing him to turn around and give her a minute so she could pull it together.

  He came closer. Chloe kept her eyes down and her body still, but he wasn’t deterred by her attempts to ignore him. She hiccupped as he set an ice bucket on the nightstand and then sat on the bed beside her.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” She shot him a watery smile, with every intention of leaving it at that. But when she saw the genuine concern on his face, felt the warmth of the reassuring hand he’d placed on her back, she spilled her guts.

  “It’s just, today has sucked,” she said with a sniffle. “I’m talking monumental amounts of suckage, and I’m tired, and moody, and people have really been getting on my nerves. All I want is to go home, but I’m stuck sharing a hotel room with a complete stranger who must think I’m mentally unbalanced. And you’ve been really nice to me anyway. And now I’m crying again. I hate crying,” she finished on a shaky sob.

  Ben reached past her to the nightstand and snagged a tissue, handing it to her.

  “You see? You barely know me, you have every reason to believe I’m deranged, and still you have the decency to hand me a Kleenex.”

  “It’s really not that big a deal.”

  “Yes, it is, Ben. You’re nice. And you’re tall. You’re very tall.” She wiped her nose with the tissue. “How tall are you, anyway?”

  “Six-three.”

  “That is very tall.” Chloe shook her head, looking down at her hands. She picked resolutely at the flaking black nail polish on her right thumbnail. She must have been chewing on it—she did that when she was stressed.

  She expected him to bail then, distance himself from his sobbing lunatic of a roommate with some teasing remark about how tall guys are known for their big wangs or something equally ridiculous. She’d laugh, and he’d laugh, and they’d get back to the superficial banter that befitted two strangers stuck in a hotel room together.

  But he didn’t.

  He just sat beside her, respecting the silence. And her thoughts slipped out. “Honestly, Ben. How is it possible for one person to mess up her life so monumentally?”

  “Hey, I’m sure it’s not as bad as it seems right now.” He rubbed her back, his big hand hot against her T-shirt. “You’ll figure it out. You’ll fix it.”

  Tears brimmed in her eyes with a vengeance. They burned like acid. “No. I won’t. And do you know why?”

  Ben shook his head.

  “Me, neither! I mean, do you see this? Do you see my hair?” She grabbed a handful and held it in his direction.

  “Yeah...”

  “I did this for them!” she exclaimed, dropping the strands back into place. “I colored it boring old brown so they wouldn’t be embarrassed by me, but it didn’t work! I’m not even at the wedding yet, and I’ve already disappointed them. Nothing I try ever works, Ben. I don’t know what to do.” She’d never said that to anyone before and admitting the truth hurt so badly she thought her ribs might crack.

  Chloe dropped her face into her hands. Ben’s arms came around her, pulling her close, tucking her cheek to his chest. She gave in and greedily took what he was offering. Wrapping her arms around his waist, she leaned into him and let herself cry.

  She wasn’t sure if it was minutes or hours, but he held her until she had no more tears.

  “You know what, Chloe?” His voice was soft and deep, breaking the silence she’d been measuring with the rise and fall of his chest beneath her cheek. “Maybe there’s nothing to do. I mean, I realize I just met you, but you seem okay to me.”

  That tiny reassurance allowed Chloe to muster enough gumption to reach up and wipe the wet tracks from her face. She couldn’t quite bring herself to lift her head off his s
houlder, though.

  “And they’ll see it. One day, they’ll see it. You just gotta give them some time.”

  Her lip trembled, and she bit it, fighting the sadness. “They’ve had twenty-six years, Ben.”

  She felt him exhale. “It’s a really hard thing, you know, not taking the people we love for granted.” She looked up at him then and he smiled, a sad-but-reassuring little half smile that made her believe there was a chance that the despair she felt in that moment might not be insurmountable.

  Chloe pulled away with a final sniff. She was trying desperately to hold onto that moment of comfort even as the embarrassment of her epic cry-fest in front of a virtual stranger began seeping in at the edges.

  She exhaled shakily. “Sorry I got mascara and snot on your fancy shirt.”

  “It’s just a T-shirt,” he averred as he pulled the black-smeared wet patch away from his chest. He even managed not to look horrified.

  “Yeah, but I bet it cost, like, fifty bucks.”

  “Seventy-five,” he corrected. “But I’ll accept it as punishment for being douchebaggy enough to have spent that much money on a plain white T-shirt in the first place.”

  Chloe’s chuckle was waterlogged.

  “C’mere,” he said, tucking his thumb in the hem of his shirt. She leaned ever so slightly forward and let him rub the cotton-covered pad of his thumb under her right eye, then her left. She’d be surprised if she had any makeup on at all at this point. Some warrior, she thought, choking in battle and crying off her armor.

  “There,” he said, showing her the black smudges on the fabric. “All cleaned up.”

  She frowned, letting him know she wasn’t buying his bullshit.

  “Okay, you should probably go wash your face before we have dinner,” he admitted. “Unless the raccoon look is a thing now.”

  Grateful for the reprieve, Chloe headed for the bathroom, pulling her suitcase into the tiny room with her. She groaned when she caught sight of herself in the mirror.

  Apparently in addition to being an all-around good guy and world-class hugger, Ben Masterson was also the King of Understatement. She looked like a comic-book villain whose face was melting off. Chloe shut the door and set her suitcase on the toilet, rifling through it for her toiletries case.

  A couple of swipes of a makeup remover pad later, her cheeks were clear of black streaks, and her eyes were bare, if a little puffier than they had been this morning. She’d have liked to take all her makeup off and start again, but snotting all over Ben had been all the weakness she could handle. No way was she going to be bare-faced in front of him. She didn’t even start the makeup videos on her YouTube channel that way.

  “Hurry up in there, Chloe. I’m starving!”

  “Almost done! Don’t eat everything!” She ran a brush through her hair, topped up her deodorant, and rooted around in her suitcase in search of her pajamas.

  * * *

  WELL, TONIGHT HAD certainly not been the typical room-service-and-work type of night that tended to dominate his business trips.

  Chuckling to himself, Ben pulled off his T-shirt, wiping his shoulder with it before folding it up and placing it in the dirty laundry bag he kept in his suitcase. He’d say one thing about Chloe Masterson, she was the antithesis of boring.

  A woman who couldn’t decide whether to smile at him or punch him in the face. A woman who was super tough one moment, and vulnerable the next. A woman who had no idea her expressive face betrayed her, even in her most badass moments.

  He tugged the white button-down he’d worn on the plane back on—she’d walked in on him before he’d gotten around to changing out of his suit pants, so it wasn’t like he’d be overdressed—but he left the hem untucked and the buttons at his throat open anyway.

  She was such a nice change from the women who’d inundated his world lately. As he’d moved up the corporate ladder, everything had gotten more proper and refined. So serious. He’d met a lot of very pretty women with very pretty plans for their future. The few dates he’d been on in the past year had felt more like job interviews, and they’d fizzled accordingly.

  But Chloe didn’t look at him as if he was a steak on display at a butcher shop. She wasn’t angling for marriage, sizing up his earning potential or evaluating his parenting qualities. Which was good, because marriage was not high on his list of priorities anymore. She was the kind of woman who understood that a date should be fun and flirty, two people trying each other on. No expectations, just opportunity.

  Not that this was a date.

  In fact, he wasn’t sure what this was, but he kind of liked it. Tonight he got to hang out with a flawed, stressed-out, hot-then-cold-then-hot-again woman with a kick-ass body, a pierced nose and a star tattoo on her right arm. And he couldn’t wait.

  He moved her abandoned phone to the nightstand so he could prop the pillow upright against the headboard, and sat down against it. He’d just stretched his long legs out in front of him when he heard the bathroom door open.

  She appeared from around the corner a moment later.

  Ben let his gaze slip from her berry lips down to her bare shoulders, then to her arms—that star tattoo was going to be the death of him, he was sure of it—lingering a moment on the way she filled out her tank top before sliding past her black boxer shorts to take in her truly spectacular thighs, her shapely calves and the shiny black polish on her toenai—

  “Oh, my God, are you walking on hotel carpeting in bare feet?” he asked, lunging forward. “Do you have any idea how gross hotel carpet is?”

  He was half expecting another sardonic smile, but apparently the panic in his voice had registered, because her eyes widened in response to his alarm.

  “How gross?” she asked, scrunching up her nose in preparation.

  “My grandma was a nurse, and she once had this patient who ended up with cellulitis from walking barefoot on hotel carpeting—”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “—and he didn’t get it checked right away, so by the time he went to the emergency room his whole leg was full of pus—”

  “Ew, ew, ew!” She was hopping from foot to foot by this point.

  “—and he had to stay in the hospital for three days so they could give him antibiotics intravenously.”

  “Okay, enough, enough!” She jumped onto the bed beside him, scrambling into a sitting position and staring down at her feet. “Oh, God! My feet are itchy. Is itchy a symptom of cellulitis?”

  “Yes.”

  Her eyes went wide.

  “Well, probably.” He didn’t remember all the details of the story...just the gross ones. “Do they feel swollen? Like there’s a bunch of pus accumulating under your skin, getting ready to erupt and—”

  Chloe recovered enough to sock him in the arm. “Shut up with the gory details, wouldja?”

  Ben rubbed his arm where her punch had landed. Chloe crawled over to the end of the bed. She braced one hand on the very edge of the mattress and reached toward her coat, which was hanging on the back of a chair that was just out of reach. Her fingertips brushed the thick material, but she didn’t quite get purchase on it. He watched in fascination as she set herself up for another attempt.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I left my suitcase in the bathroom, and if you think I’m setting one bare toe on that hideous, infested carpet then you’re way dumber than you look,” she said over her shoulder.

  He shot her a tight smile. Ha, ha.

  “So I’m going to stand on my jacket, slide my way over to the bathroom, and get myself some socks.”

  “Or you could just ask me to get your suitcase,” he pointed out, getting to his feet.

  She gazed up at him with such wonder that he honestly believed the idea had never occurred to her. “I... You don’t have to. I mean,
I can do it myself.”

  “I’m sure you could, eventually. But I’m happy to help, because if you slip and contract cellulitis, the amputation would ruin your sister’s big day.” Ben smiled angelically and dodged when she chucked a pillow at him.

  Her ugly suitcase was sitting on the toilet. “You should really have a lock on this when you’re flying,” he advised, grabbing the scratched-up plastic case and heading back into the bedroom. He dropped it on the suitcase stand and set it down beside her. She threw open the lid to reveal bedlam inside.

  “You know, most people fold stuff before they put it in the suitcase, just FYI.” Ben resumed his position on the bed beside her.

  “Thanks for the packing tips.” Her voice sounded less than sincere as she hunted through the chaos. She rescued a ratty sock from inside the suitcase and jammed a foot into it. “Wow. That looks sexy.” She stuck her foot in the air so Ben, too, could admire the purple, elastic-challenged sock that was slouched around her ankle.

  “Yeah, well, it’s sexier than athlete’s foot.”

  “Amen, brother.” She reached out to give him a high-five before quickly pulling on the other sock. She closed up her suitcase. “Okay, now that that’s taken care of, on to more important things, like food.”

  He reached over to the nightstand and dumped the contents of the plastic ice bucket on the bed between them. An avalanche of candy spilled across the sheet. “Dinner is served.”

  “Whoa. What’d you do? Knock over a vending machine?”

  “I wasn’t sure what you’d be in the mood for—salty, sweet, stale,” he offered, rapping a rock-hard, prepackaged Danish against the headboard with a disconcerting tap, tap, tap, “or all of the above—so I got one of everything.” He lobbed the Danish at the trash bin on the floor beside the television stand. It landed inside the plastic container with a heavy thud.

  She did that cute nose-scrunch thing again as she deliberated over the colorfully-wrapped mound of sucrose and diabetes. “SunChips, Skittles, Aero Peppermint. And I’m taking the cherry Life Savers,” she decided, grabbing each of her picks from the junk-food dog pile as she named them. “You know, in case of emergency.”