“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.
“Who’s in there with you?” he asked.
She yanked harder, but Ford didn’t take the hint. The obstruction remained. “No one.”
One of Paul’s bushy eyebrows shot up. “If our mother heard you lie like that, she’d be lighting candles at church.”
Their mother had been doing that for all of them since they’d been born—not that it had helped. Gina was still single, and her brothers were still involved with the wrong people. The blonde behind Paul took a weaving couple of steps forward and flashed a friendly smile at Gina. The woman may not be the smartest for getting involved with Gina’s brothers—definitely love-em-and-leave-em types, but that wasn’t Gina’s call to make, just like it wasn’t theirs to get all judgy on her. Of course, that didn’t mean she wanted them to know anything about the guy lurking behind the door, and he was lurking. She knew that because she’d tried to yank the door closed twice now and he hadn’t moved his stupid foot. Time to get her brothers out of here. Now.
Gina gave her brothers her most innocent wide-eyed look. “You two look busy, why don’t you just go—”
Rocco interrupted, “Who are you with, Regina Marie?”
Her middle name? Really? Like she wasn’t thirty-one years old with a mortgage, job, and brain of her own?
“You’re not Mom or Dad, so don’t use that tone with me.” She let go of the doorknob so she could cross her arms and give her oldest brother the death glare he deserved, with a popped-out hip and everything. “And for the last time, I’m—”
The hotel room door swung open.
“With me,” Ford said from behind her.
And totally not shockingly at all, the floor did not open up and swallow her like she so wanted in that moment. Instead, she got an up close and personal look at her brothers’ faces as they turned blotchy with anger way out of proportion for even her overprotective, we-wish-we-lived-in-the-caveman-times brothers. Instinctively, she took a step back so she blocked a direct line of attack against Ford and, hopefully, made it harder for her brothers to notice that the other man was wearing only a sheet.
“Hartigan?” Rocco practically spit out.
Oh. Shit. “You know each other?”
The men ignored her while the women just watched with wide, unblinking eyes.
“Is this what your little task force has sunk to?” Paul asked, taking a step closer to where she stood in front of Ford. “Pillow talk with our sister?”
Crap on a gluten-free cracker. Ford worked on a task force. And her brothers knew him. That meant only one thing. He worked organized crime, and that meant he was all up in her brothers’ business. Judging by the way Rocco’s hands were fisted at his sides and Paul’s not-very-subtle move toward the inside of his suit jacket, things were about to escalate quickly. That she would not have.
Her brothers might be idiots sometimes, but they were her brothers, and she wasn’t going to have them going to jail for assaulting an officer just because she’d been dumb enough to believe that Ford had actually wanted to sleep with her.
“Stop all of this now,” she said, standing as tall as she could. No one paid attention. “He’s not after information about you,” she tried again, her voice rising as panic made her nerves jangly. Desperate to stop this before she couldn’t, she blurted out, “He’s my boyfriend.”
“What?” Rocco bellowed.
Ford stiffened behind her. She couldn’t risk a look back at him to let him know she wasn’t stupid enough to believe what she was saying. If she did, she’d blow everything. She could fix the lie. She couldn’t fix her brothers going to jail, and she’d promised their mom that she’d watch out for them.
“Yeah,” she said in a voice that shook even on that one-syllable word. “We’ve been seeing each other for months.”
“And you’ve known the whole time that he was a cop?” Paul asked, his hand still resting inside his jacket.
Ford made a growl of a sound, and she reached behind her back without looking and grabbed his hand, squeezing it tight enough that even a completely clueless person would know it was code for “shut the fuck up.”
“Ever since I met him.” Okay, not a lie. Not the whole truth, but not a lie.
“I don’t like it,” Paul said, but he moved his hand from being half hidden beneath his jacket to totally in view at his side. “Just imagine a cop at Grandma’s ninetieth birthday party next week.”
“You don’t have to imagine, because he’ll be there.” She could brazen this out. She could. Oh my God, let the earth swallow me up at any moment, please. “I’m a grown woman, and I don’t need your permission when it comes to who I date.”
Rocco’s vein pulsed near his temple. “I don’t approve.”
“I don’t care.” She shrugged, hoping like hell that it looked natural instead of like a jerky movement brought on more by nerves than actual confidence. “Look, I’ve watched out for you two for years since Mom and Dad moved to Florida. Now it’s my turn to have a little fun.”