His Property(20)

She brought it, and I moved to the chair next to him.

I took a bite of the dessert, the chocolate exploding on my tongue. It was rich. Almost too rich, too sweet.

“Delicious,” Robbie said, and I suddenly felt… wrong. The way he was looking at me, it was…it made me uncomfortable. It made me feel like I was cheating on Liam, which I knew was ridiculous.

I took another bite of the dessert, waiting to see if this one was any better, but it wasn’t.

“I’m sorry,” I said, pretending to check my phone. “I need to be somewhere.”

“Okay,” Robbie said, eating the last bit of ice cream from the bottom of the bowl. It was stupid of me, but something about it seemed a little selfish. He was used to getting things handed to him, this Robbie. “Can I get your number?”

I was thrown off, and I didn’t know what to do.

“Umm…I don’t…” I groped around in my head for an excuse, but I’d already told him I didn’t have a boyfriend. So when he reached into his pocket and pulled out a pen and a business card, turning over to the blank side and holding it out to me, I scribbled my number.

He entered it into his phone. “Most people would say this is an extra step,” he said. “Making you write it down when I can just put it in my phone. But I like to make sure I have your number in two places. That way I won’t ever lose it, even if something happens to my phone.” He winked at me, and I resisted the urge to roll my eyes, wondering how many other women he’d used that line on.

“I’ll see you later,” I said.

“Bye, Emery.” I could feel his eyes boring into my back as I walked out of the bar.

The cool air of the concourse rushed over me and hit my cheeks. I’d felt claustrophobic in the wine bar, and I’d drank my glass of wine way too fast. I also hadn’t paid for it, I realized as soon as I’d walked out.

But there was no way I was going back.

I turned around, half-expecting to see the bartender chasing after me, demanding I pay. But no one was there.

I began walking toward the elevator bank that would take me back up to my room, but the thought of being back in that room by myself still held no appeal. I didn’t want to go back upstairs until I was pretty sure I’d fall right asleep, until I was sure that I was tired enough that I wouldn’t lay in bed, tossing and turning, thoughts of Liam and what he was doing torturing my brain.

It should have been easy – I was on West Coast time now, which meant that my body’s internal clock was three hours later than the actual time – but I didn’t feel sleepy at all.

The wine should have made me sleepy, but all it had done was make me feel a little wired and buzzy. I walked around the casino for a while, taking laps and trying to work the alcohol out of my system.

Finally, after my third trip around the shopping concourse, I wandered into a bookstore. It was the kind of bookstore I loved. Good selection, but not too big, and without tons of aisles filled with things that weren’t books, like puzzles and toys.

I slid down the aisles, looking for something to read.

Definitely not romance. Definitely not thrillers, nothing too dark or twisty that was going to make me feel even worse than I did.

I found myself in women’s fiction, my eyes zeroing in on books with brightly covered spines, with bonus points if they had a title that made it clear that they were about getting over a break-up.

I’d just found one that looked promising, about a girl who was dumped and spent a year finding herself overseas, and I was sitting on the floor, wondering if I should read the last page to see if she ended up with a new Parisian love – if so, it was going back on the shelf, because I was in no mood for a book that showed me that I needed another man to get over one – when my phone rang.

It took me a second to realize it was mine, since I hadn’t had access to my phone for a while.

It took me so long that a little girl looking in literary fiction with her mother put her hands over her ears and whined, “Mommy, why won’t that big girl answer her phonnneee?”

Her mother glanced at me, and shook her head. “Because some people don’t know courtesy, honey. Remember what they taught you in school about courtesy?”

I wanted to snark back that maybe she should think about herself when it came to courtesy, since calling someone “that big girl” wasn’t a nice thing to say to someone when they were a size twelve, which was actually smaller than the average size of the American woman, which was a size fourteen, although obviously much bigger than the modelized ideal that was presented to us in fashion magazines. Ugh.

I silenced my phone and answered it.