Rock Chick Reawakening (Rock Chick 0.5)(32)

He left her room, closing the door behind him at the same time sliding his phone out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket.

He flipped it open and made the call.

“Boss,” Brady answered, sounding mostly alert, somewhat drowsy.

Within a minute, he’d issued his order.

He finished with, “Hopefully that pawn shop will still be open. If it isn’t, maybe someone who ran it will be around and they kept records. But I don’t care what it takes, Brady. Even if you have to pull Nightingale into it. Find those pearls and get them to me.”

“You got it, Mr. Sloan.”

“Goodnight,” Marcus said and hung up.

Then he took off his suit jacket, his tie, shirt, shoes, and socks and he stretched out on Daisy’s couch, tucking a toss pillow under his head and pulling one of her throws over his body.

He closed his eyes, and within seconds, with Daisy resting safe in the next room, Marcus was asleep.





Chapter Seven



Deal

Daisy



I opened my eyes and saw daisies.

Then I realized I was hungover.

On this realization, and the others that bounded in after it, in a tizzy, I pushed the covers down and saw I was in my dress from last night.

I touched my naked earlobe, felt my necklace gone, and looked back to the daisies to see my jewelry sitting at the base of the vase.

Then I turned, saw the other side of the bed was empty, stared at the fluffed pillows I hadn’t slept on but grabbed one of them and pulled it to me to take a whiff.

It still smelled of Marcus, but this morning, only faintly.

He hadn’t slept like I assumed he slept the night before, holding me.

He’d taken off.

I dropped to my back and closed my eyes in despair.

Wonderful.

I’d had a date the night before with the classiest man I’d ever met, and I got drunk, passed out in his car, and he’d had to put me to bed.

At least Marcus Sloan proved another way he was all class. He might have made sure I was comfortable, but he didn’t give himself a show by taking my clothes off.

He also didn’t stick around.

My hands balled into fists, my nails digging into the palms.

Because I was me, in the back of my mind, I knew if I was stupid enough to take a shot at the something special that was a man like Marcus Sloan, I’d screw it up with him and there I did it. The first date. I got shitfaced and I remembered laughing too much, being way too nosy asking too many questions, and doing that staring at him like every word he spoke dropped a bar of gold in my lap.

If drunken memory served, every time I laughed or touched his thigh, arm, or hand, he looked at me the same way.

I still passed out in his car, just like white trash.

And now he was gone.

“Ugh,” I mumbled, the dull headache and subtle queasy feeling making it easier for me (just a touch) not to scream at my stupidity, find a way to kick my own ass (even mentally), or burst into tears.

Instead, since I was Daisy and from the moment I came out bawling I had no choice, I shoved the covers aside and got on with it.

I pushed myself out of bed, pulled my dress off on the way to the bathroom, and did my morning bathroom routine, this time adding the complicated procedure of getting all my makeup off.

My hair still rocked it since I rocked doing my hair, so I left it as is.

I went back into my room, tugged on a pair of baby-pink, drawstring, fleece shorts (that had diamanté sprinkled along the curves of the seams of the pockets) and a skintight white tank top that had emblazoned all across the front in hot-pink and glittery diamond rhinestones Nothing a Little Sparkle Won’t Fix.

My mantra.

Though, that morning, post-f*cking up my date with Marcus Sloan, I knew all the sparkle in the world wouldn’t fix the feeling I had sitting in the pit of my belly that had nothing to do with being hungover.

I moved to my door in order to get water (for the aspirin I needed) and coffee (because every true red-white-and-blue American drank coffee), and find alternate ways to avoid the pain of a heart I refused to acknowledge I’d broken my damned self by acting like the white trash everyone thought I was.

I opened my door and stopped dead.

It was October, dead-on fall, and the sun hadn’t yet hit the sky like only sun in Denver could, washing the base of a glorious mountain range in bright.

But the rising sun was doing its best lighting a room where every surface was covered with a spray of daisies. Some of them were pretty white ones with little yellow buttons in the middle. Others were white with green buttons. Some, a mixture of both. And others were pink. Or orange surrounding the black button blazing out to a startling yellow. Others were red. Then there were those that were coral. There were also those with color combinations.

On a routine basis, I carefully clipped their ends, added fresh water with food, all in an effort to keep them alive as long as I could.

Over the weeks, I’d had to throw some away.

But they were of a quality that most of them were still going strong.

And right then, in the midst of them, lying on his stomach on my couch, one long arm having fallen off the side, my throw having slid down to his waist, the delineation of the muscles of his tanned back on show, his head turned from me resting on a toss pillow, his thick dark hair disheveled, lay Marcus.

He hadn’t left the drunken, stripping floozy who’d passed out in his Mercedes in her bed and taken off.