Butterface (The Hartigans #1)(9)
“Just peachy,” she said as she got up, her right ass cheek protesting after that tumble, and hustled over to the small piles of her discarded clothes.
Ignoring the granny panties in her hurry to get the hell out of there, she pulled on her dress and reached around in an awkward move for the zipper.
Ford stood up and reached out toward her.
Her heart leapt into her throat, and she jumped back. “Don’t touch me.”
His hand fell to his side, and his shoulders sank. “I was just going to help with the zipper.”
Okay, that would be nice since she was tugging for all she was worth and still only had the damn thing halfway up, but it wasn’t going to happen. She’d had all the embarrassment she could take, without adding being dressed by a man who’d never left her his hotel room key to the list. How pathetic must she have seemed, just showing up and sneaking into his room? It probably happened all the time to someone like him. That thought pissed her off, too.
She glared up at Ford. “How about you just pull the sheet around you instead?”
He swiped it off the bed and wrapped the thousand-count material around his waist. “I’m gonna get Gallo and Ruggiero to apologize to you. This was beyond going too far.”
The guy seemed genuinely pissed, as if this sort of thing didn’t happen in his world. In fairness, it probably didn’t to someone like him.
Tall, good-looking—her gaze landed on the police badge on the bedside table—and a cop, everything probably went his way. That last detail registered in her brain. Cop. Oh my God. Just when she thought the whole situation couldn’t get any worse, she’d forgotten that Ford was a cop, just like almost everyone else at the wedding. Shit. If her brothers knew, they’d kill her, or maybe him. Probably him. They may have been loan sharks but they were overprotective brothers right down to the cellular level. They’d lose their minds if they ever found out. Some things—some people—just weren’t done.
Giving up on getting her zipper any higher than her shoulder blades in her desperation to get away from the scene of the crime, she shoved her foot in a shoe. “I’m leaving.”
Ford’s face darkened, and his square jaw tightened. “Maybe we can figure something—”
“Let’s not, okay?” she interrupted him as she jammed her foot into her other shoe. A pity fuck? Yeah, she wasn’t going there. She counted to twenty in her head to distract herself from the tears making her eyes hurt and the sinking, fatalistic feeling of this-is-as-good-as-she-can-ever-expect that sucked the air out of her lungs. “Your friends are real pieces of work.”
What else could she say? Nothing. And to top it all off, those jerk friends of his were probably still at the bar, waiting to watch her walk of shame out of the hotel. They were probably laughing their asses off about the whole thing right now. And she’d have to fake being all right until she could get home and finally let her real emotions show.
Twenty minutes. That’s all you have to get through, Regina. You can do this.
Pep talk completed, she pivoted and headed for the door without giving Ford another look—she just couldn’t. Even with her high humiliation tolerance, this was right on the edge of what she could take. Her hand was on the doorknob when his voice stopped her.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice soft, apologetic.
She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment to block out the kindness in his tone, because that was the last thing she needed if she was going to make it out of here without falling apart.
Steadier after a breath, Gina opened her eyes and pulled open the door. “Yeah. Me too.”
Then, her throat tight, she walked out the door.
If there was a silver lining to this shit cloud, it was that she’d never see Ford again.
The door felt like it weighed a million pounds as she started to pull it closed behind her. And saw the shocked faces of her brothers. She was too startled to even wonder why these two were at the same hotel as a cop’s wedding.
Rocco and Paul gaped at her. Both had their arms slung around women she’d never met before and wasn’t supposed to, guessing by the scarlet flush eating its way up Paul’s throat as he moved to stand in front of the bottle-blonde in the micro mini-skirt swaying just a bit in her four-inch heels.
“What in the hell are you doing here, Gina?” Rocco asked, his tone calm, not that that fooled her.
Older than her by four years, he’d assigned himself the role of guardian-in-chief when their parents moved down to Florida. The fact that she was a grown woman or that he wasn’t exactly on the legal up-and-up didn’t seem to make any difference.
Stuffing her granny panties farther down in her small clutch before reaching behind her for the door handle to steady her, she glared at her brothers. “I had a wedding.”
“In a hotel room?” This from Paul, who was recovering his equilibrium, no doubt as his suspicions grew about why she was walking out of a guest room.
“Not exactly,” she said, attempting to finish shutting the door behind her as subtly as possible. Too bad something hard blocked the way. If she had to guess, she’d peg the obstruction as one that belonged to the man she’d been in bed with moments before.
Some of her annoyance must have shown on her face, because Rocco dropped the hand of the tall redheaded woman he was with and took a step closer, peering over her head into the sliver of darkness slipping through the not-quite-closed door.