Awk-Weird (Ice Knights, #2)(5)

“Don’t freak out,” she said as she lowered one foot to the floor and stood up, taking the sheet with her. “We got weddinged.”

Of course he looked at her now, while she was trying to hold up the sheet with one hand and put on her panties she’d swiped off the carpet with the other. One-handed pantie put-on-ing was not easy for the uncoordinated like herself. Looking up at the ceiling and away from the man in the bed seemed to help, though, so that’s what she did, using a standing-on-one-foot hop move followed by a quick yank up to get her undies in place.

“Weddinged? What does that mean?” Cole asked.

“We got caught up in the whatever of the happy occasion.” She glanced down at him. That was a mistake. He was totally naked, but the blanket around his waist stopped her from getting the whole view in the morning light. “Then this happened.”

“Weddinged.” He added a little huh sound to the end of it, as if he was putting the new vocab word in a mental filing cabinet for use later.

“Exactly.” She clutched the sheet to her chest as if he hadn’t already seen, touched, and licked every bit of her, which she was not at all thinking about as she walked sideways to the chair where her dress had landed in the rush to get naked last night. “But hopefully it’s still early enough that I can get back to my room without being seen.”

He grabbed his phone off the bedside table. “It’s ten.”

“What?” An electric zap of panic shocked her right down to her toes. Shit. No.

Abandoning the sheet, she sprinted the rest of the way to the chair, grabbed her dress, and tugged it over her head as she hurried to the door. “I was supposed to be in Lucy’s suite getting my hair done thirty minutes ago.” She grabbed her purse, stuffed her bra inside it, and picked up her shoes from the floor by the door where she’d left them last night. “I gotta go.”

“I’ll see you later at the wedding.”

Later? She had to face him again after this? Oh, fuck me running.

And since she had no idea what to say to that, she did what she always did and fell back on her friends the random factoids, whether she wanted to or not.

“Romans used to give newlyweds a special loaf of bread, and some grooms would break it over the bride’s head, which is why we have wedding cakes now,” she said.

Shut up, weird brain.

Cole chuckled. “I really hope Frankie doesn’t try that with Lucy. I don’t see it going over well.”

She didn’t disagree, but she didn’t trust herself not to give a whole lecture on the history of that phrase, so she opted for brevity. “Bye.”

And she all but ran from the room, down the nearby stairs, and to her floor. Setting a speed record, she showered, got dressed, grabbed her bridesmaid’s dress, and hustled with still-damp curls to Lucy’s suite. Her girls were all there. Lucy was getting her makeup done. Gina sat on a stool while a hairstylist pulled her hair into a complicated updo that seemed to be held together by hope and hairspray, but there were probably a million hairpins in there. Fallon sat in the corner, dress already on, hair pulled into a simple French braid as she watched hockey highlights on her phone.

“Look who finally arrived,” Lucy said with a smile as she gave Tess an assessing once-over.

Tess jerked to a stop, biting the inside of her cheek to keep from spilling secrets or factoids. She did not want them to know what just went down. Cole would forget about her before the vows were said, and she was totally okay with that. She knew how to deal with being forgotten about.

What she didn’t know how to handle was her three best friends all looking at her like she was a king cake with a surprise hidden inside.

These women knew her. There was no way she’d hold up under an interrogation. Her best option might be to beg the makeup artist to do something drastic with her look so she’d have to stay perfectly still and couldn’t move or talk or make eye contact. Was that possible outside of getting a Mission Impossible–type mask? Probably not. She was definitely screwed.

Gina let out a relieved sigh. “We were about to send the search party.”

“That would be me,” Fallon said, raising her hand.

“Sorry,” Tess said, sitting down in the on-deck chair for the makeup artist. “I forgot to set an alarm.”

“So it had nothing to do with sneaking off with Cole Phillips last night?” Lucy asked.

“We went into the conservatory for some quiet,” Tess said, clasping her hands tight in her lap. “The DJ was loud.”

“Poor Cole,” Gina said between blasts of hairspray from the stylist. “That guy is in a rough way. Thanks for hanging out with him.”

“How do you mean rough?” Not that she cared, but she was naturally curious. That was all.

Gina shook her head, much to her stylist’s annoyance. “He’s been dating and not dating Coach Peppers’s daughter, Marti, for about a million years, and she finally called it off a while back. According to the online gossip, he’s totally brokenhearted.”

“Yeah,” Lucy said before blotting her bright-red lipstick. “But will this one take?”

“That’s the million-dollar question.” Gina got down from the chair as the stylist checked her over from every direction. “But she seems serious about it, even if he may not be ready to walk away. Oh, I hope it works out.”