The woman, Kayla on her name tag, looks at me like I’ve sprouted another head, but she checks and then shakes her head.
“I’m sorry. There’s just the one room. How many keys will you need?”
“Two’s perfect, Kayla. Thank you,” Charlie says.
In the middle of nowhere Montana with Charlie Avery surrounded by literally thousands of people about to be punch drunk about their state’s biggest college football rivalry and there’s only one room at the inn.
Great. That’s just great.
Chapter 6
CHARLIE
There’s only one bed.
Technically.
There’s a sofa that I’m pretty sure will pull out into a bed if I look. And I will since I’ll obviously be camping out there tonight.
I toss my bag onto a luggage rack built into the wall and admire the view: not the tree-lined streets with the shadowy outlines of mountains in the distance, as nothing in the Bozeman skyline is high enough to obscure them. No, the view I mean is Sullivan, leaning up against the door jamb that leads to the suite’s bedroom, pulling one high pump and then the other off her feet with a breathy sigh of relief that sends a visceral jolt through me.
She pads into the room, walking back and forth with her eyes closed, taking deep breaths, scrunching her feet as she does. Her toenails are painted a neutral color.
“What are you doing?”
“Making fists with my toes.”
That’s . . . not what I expected.
“Fists with your toes?”
One stormy blue eye opens and studies me, the other still shut. “Haven’t you ever seenDie Hard?”
“I have,” I admit. “I just . . .”
“Didn’t thinkIwould have?”
“Doesn’t seem like your style.”
“Yeah, and what’s my style?”
“Moneyball?”
She smiles and I know I’m right as she quotes, “How can you not be romantic about baseball?”
I roll my eyes, hearing Brad Pitt as Billy Beane’s voice in my head over hers. “I can be plenty romantic about baseball. I have a hard time being romantic about a team that never actually won anything getting lionized like it has. I think it’s been bad for the game.”
“Here we go,” she groans.
And she’s not wrong. I haveopinionsabout that movie.
“They had Hudson, Zito and Mulder at the top of their rotation that year and you’re gonna tell me that Scott Hatteburg’s on-base percentage was why they won a hundred and three games?”
“I’m not telling you anything. Analytics were a thing beforeMoneyball, they were a thing before the book came out, before the movie came out and before you ever got to the big leagues. And I’m not going round and round with you about it. That bathroom has one of the biggest bathtubs I’ve ever seen, so, if you don’t mind, I’m gonna go soak it in for a while before I have to deal with Ethan Quicke’s massive ego.”
And that’s a visual that I absolutely will never get out of my head. A tub full of steamy water, a smattering of bubbles, her hair up at the top of her head, a few strands falling down, stuck against the damp, glowing skin of her cheek and her neck, her toes peeking up out of the water at the edge of the tub. Before my fantasy can travel up the length of her legs to where fuller, curvier parts of her would rise up out of the water, the click of the bathroom door closing behind the fantasy’s real-life counterpart pulls me back to the present.
The sound of water filling the tub escapes through the smallgap at the bottom of the bathroom door, and while I can’t hear the sound of fabric hitting the floor, my imagination is good enough to know I probably should get the fuck out of this room before I spontaneously combust.
