“Not yet. Please?”
“It’s early, so I’m good to stay up for a while if you are.”
“What time is it?”
“Not even nine o’clock.”
Her eyes clouded with sadness and she shook her head. “Nine o’clock. That’s what time the limo was supposed to pick us up.”
“What do you mean?”
“Marty and me. We were supposed to leave for our honeymoon late tonight. Hey! There’s one for I Never.” She bent forward, and this time she didn’t even bother with the glass. “I’ve never been on an amazing vacation to Puerto Rico,” she said, and took a shot straight from the bottle, but she didn’t stop there, thrusting it in the air for emphasis. “On the beach, with sugar-white sand and aquamarine water. And mojitos with umbrellas in them instead of this crap.”#p#分页标题#e#
Her tone was incongruously jovial and he knew she’d reached point break. She moved to drink more of “that crap” but he stayed her hand.
“No more. You’re going to make yourself sick.”
The borderline hysteria faded from her eyes and she let him take the bottle. “I’m already sick,” she mumbled, absently mopping up a few spilled drops of whiskey with the sleeve of her shirt.
He set the bottle on the table and gave her arm a tug until she toppled into his chest. “It’s going to get better. I promise you,” he whispered into her sweet-smelling hair.
“I know it will. But right now, it blows. I’ve never been on a real trip without my parents. I was so excited. It felt so decadent and fun. I thought…”
“You thought?”
“I thought I could be someone else for a couple of weeks. And maybe Marty could be someone else, too. We could do all the fun, wild things we—well, at least, I—imagined doing. I know that sounds so stupid.”
The thought hit him like an oncoming bus, and no matter how hard he tried to squash it, his liquor-soaked brain wouldn’t let it go. He pushed her away. “Let’s play truth or dare.”
“Wait, wha?” Visibly baffled by the abrupt change in subject, she stared at him, a question in her eyes.
“Truth or dare. Let’s play,” he pressed.
She held up her hands in surrender. “Uh, okay.”
“I’ll go first. Do you want truth or dare?” He tried not to let the importance of her answer show on his face, but it was all riding on this. If he truly wanted to help her—and God help him, but for some strange reason, he did—he needed to set her free. Over the past few hours, he had realized how much she deserved that, and he wouldn’t rest easy until he’d done it. He was going to find a way to show her what she’d missed living under her parents’ thumbs. If only she’d let him…
She finally met his gaze after a long pause, fire lighting her eyes, and he knew her answer before she even spoke.
“Dare.”
Chapter Four
Sunlight streamed in through the window, like red knives piercing her closed lids. Lacey rolled to her side to escape it, wincing as her knee connected with something harder than itself.
“Oof. What the hell?” a low, male voice hissed.
She lurched into a sitting position, regretting it instantly as pain exploded in her temples and the whole room began to spin. Clutching at her aching head, she turned to see Galen stretched out on the bed next to her.
“Sorry,” he said through gritted teeth. “It’s just, when you gave me that nice little wakeup kick to the Johnson, you grazed my nuts. Makes it hard to be polite.”
He sat up, sucking long breaths in through his nose and blowing them out his mouth, moving the sheet in the process. His broad shoulders came into view, and she found herself needing to do the whole breathing thing, too. Man, he was fit. His traps were thick and strong. Hard-looking, like—
Oh my God. I kneed him in the wiener. And oh my frigging God, it was like stone.
The gauzy white curtains across the room fluttered in the balmy breeze, inviting and coy. So unlike the curtains in the Thomas family cabin. Memories from the previous night battered around in her mind until she settled on the only one that mattered right now.
They’d done it. They’d really done it.
“I dare you to go on your honeymoon without him,” Galen had said last night. “I’ll even go with you to keep you company. I could use the rest. I just came off a big fight, and my organs haven’t settled back into their proper places yet. You’d be doing me a favor.”#p#分页标题#e#
“You’re insane!” Even as tipsy as she’d been, it had taken her almost twenty minutes to talk herself into it. She’d tossed up every roadblock she could think of at first, ticking them off on her fingers as she went, ending with, “The flight’s probably sold out by now and you don’t have a ticket.”