The Rebel of Raleigh High (Raleigh Rebels #1)(109)

“Yes, yes. Disowning. Eternal silence. I’ll do everything in my power to make it, I promise.”

“Don’t promise me you’re going to try! Promise me you’re going to be here!”

“Okay! I promise. If I have to get up in two hours and break through the road cordons, I’ll make sure I get there. How’s Ben?”

“I don’t know. Drunk?” Amy said pathetically. “Who has their bachelor party two nights before the wedding?”

“Hmm. I’m sure he’s fine,” I replied. I wasn’t really paying attention, though. The guy who’d just entered the guesthouse was standing at the front desk, and he was about to ring the bell.

“It doesn’t work,” I told him.

His back was to me; he didn’t turn around.

“Sera, we can push the ceremony back to later in the afternoon, but that’s it. The weather’s not going to hold into the evening. We have to make sure we’re inside by five.”

“I know.” I pinched my brows, trying not to groan. “Everything will be perfect. Please don’t stress.”

I recognized the manic edge to my sister’s voice. The vein in her temple would be visibly pulsing right now. “Oh, okay. My maid of honor’s telling me she might not make my wedding, but I shouldn’t get stressed. I’ll just start popping those Valium Ben’s dad pre—” The line crackled, and I couldn’t hear Amy anymore. Static flooded down the line.

“Amy? Hey, Aim?” Nothing. The static grew louder, roaring, drowning out the thunderous rain hammering against the lobby windows. I pressed my forehead against the side of the payphone, slowly closing my eyes. Perfect. She was gone. No surprise, with the weather being what it was. I must have seen four or five downed telephone poles on the way into Liberty Fields. It was a miracle I’d even managed to make the call in the first place. God…

She was going to be freaking out so hard.

I turned away from the payphone, resting my back against the wall. The guy with the suitcase had moved away from the front desk and was stabbing at his cell like he was trying to force it into cooperating by sheer force of will alone. “Good luck,” I muttered under my breath. “I had service until I turned around on the highway, then…poof! Gone.”

The guy glanced at me sideways, and once again I was startled by the intensity of his pale blue, silvery eyes. His mouth lifted up at the corner into half a caustic smile. “You don’t say?” His voice was the snarl of a chainsaw: rumbling, low and raw. He’d probably smoked a pack a day for fifteen years to get a voice like that.

If I hadn’t already been frozen solid, I would have melted from the wave of heat that exploded across my cheeks. Turned out Mr. Black (as I’d named him in my head) wasn’t so friendly. He slid his phone into his pocket, straightened his spine, allowed his head to tip back, and then cracked his neck.

He looked like he was about to say something else, then apparently thought better of it. He rubbed his hand through his dark, wet hair, sending a shower of water droplets up into the air. He was dressed head-to-heel in black, nothing too out there or ostentatious, but it was clear the plain shirt and the plain pants were brand name. His shirt was soaked at the shoulders, and his leather shoes were splattered with mud, but other than that he was very well turned out. His facial stubble wasn’t due to neglect. It was the perfect length—not too long, and not too short. His neck and his throat were trimmed neatly, too, showing that he obviously took care of his scruff on a daily basis.

The men in my line of business were a little more showy with their wealth, their clothing, and their personal hygiene. A couple of the guys at the law firm opposite my offices had even started wearing makeup, believe it or not. I certainly had not believed it when Sandra told me she’d found a guy touching up his eyeliner in the elevator mirror one morning. It had taken seeing the exact same guy, doing the exact same thing, a couple of weeks later for the idea to really take root in my mind.

Mr. Black definitely wasn’t wearing any eyeliner. His eyelashes were dark enough already, inky against the paleness of his skin. Perfect, really. The kind of eyelashes a woman would lynch a sales rep at Sephora for. I quickly glanced away when he turned to face me. Had he noticed me looking? Fuck, I hoped not. That really would have been the perfect way to end an already shitty day: busted checking out a particularly cold, frosty character in a crappy motel lobby.

“You’re in the doghouse, then,” the guy said. Once again, his unique, devastatingly deep voice caused a relay of electricity to run up and down my spine, lighting up my nerve endings.

“I beg your pardon?”

He pointed an accusatory finger at the payphone.

“Oh. Oh, right. Yeah. My sister. Her big day’s on Saturday.”

“And you’re stranded in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a giant rain storm.”

“Yeah. Bad luck, I know.”

He shrugged, scratching at his jaw. “Or bad planning.”

I’d been told in the past that my death stare could literally eviscerate a man at twenty yards. Mr. Black didn’t wither and die under the weight of my cold look, though. If anything, he seemed to be enjoying the attention. I buttoned my lip, choosing to ignore his barb. Yeah, sure, I could have made better arrangements. I could have checked the weather ahead of time. I could have used common sense and caught a goddamn plane, and yada yada yada. Just because he was right and I did land myself in this particular predicament through my own lack of foresight, didn’t mean he got to chide me like I was a complete moron. But I could take the high road. I could be the bigger person and not sink to bickering with a stranger.