Oh dear God, that was a huge relief. Somehow, being a drunk was preferable to being a drunk and a skank. “Thank God,” she breathed. “Oh thank God.”
“Poor girl,” Adolfo said sympathetically. “You want orange juice? We have orange and papaya juices.”
No, she didn’t want orange juice, she wanted to be dragged outside and shot. “No thanks. I think I just need to get my clothes and go, okay, Adolfo? I think our little flirtation thing,” she said, gesturing at the two of them, “is over.”
“As you wish,” he said genially. But he didn’t move.
She frowned at him. “Come on, what time is it?”
Adolfo smiled sympathetically. “It is as I said, mi amor. Time makes no difference to us now.”
It did to her. Time would tell her, for example, how long she had been living this horrible drunk, and if she had any prayer of making the all-call for the rafting trip, or had to show up later when everyone would know—or guess—why she hadn’t been on the raft in the first place.
She hated that. She wasn’t like that, didn’t go home with guys she didn’t know. Frankly, she wasn’t the type to go home with guys at all, and especially not drunk. Leah put her head down again and closed her eyes. Her head was spinning, her mouth incredibly dry.
“Have some orange juice, Leah,” Adolfo said again. His voice startled her—it was suddenly very close. She looked up and instantly swayed backward. The man was standing over her with a glass of OJ shoved in her face. She recoiled at the sight of it. “Thanks . . . but I don’t know if I can keep it down.”
“You must try.”
Leah shook her head and rolled away from him, to the edge of the bed. “Okay, all kidding aside now, Adolfo. Where are my clothes?”
“You don’t need them here.”
“I beg to differ.” She needed them even worse than she needed liposuction on her thighs, and speaking of which, she had never intended to show those puppies to anyone. “I really need my clothes. I have to get back to camp or they will leave without me.” And really, did she have to justify needing her clothes? Didn’t everyone, eventually, get up and dress after they’d recovered from a dead drunk?
“Let them leave without you,” Adolfo said cavalierly.
Clearly, Adolfo was not getting the message that she was regretting the whole thing, so she grabbed a sheet and stood up, testing her weight on her legs. When it looked as if they would hold, she turned around to look at Adolfo through the haze of a remarkably bad headache.
He was so relaxed. He was sitting in a threadbare upholstered chair, his feet propped on the end of the bed, sipping from one of two glasses of orange juice and casually checking Leah out. He was, she noticed through her haze, rather bold in his checking her out, nodding approvingly at her shape in that awful sheet, a wolfish grin spreading across his face.
Leah really did not care for that look—it was a little predatory for her tastes, and if he thought anything was happening now that she was conscious, he had another think coming. “Where are my clothes?” she demanded, a lot less nicely this time.
He shrugged. “Here. There. Everywhere. Come then, mi amor, have some orange juice,” he said, and held up a glass. “Trust me, you will feel much better once you have had the orange juice.”
What was it with him and the orange juice?
He was really beginning to annoy the hell out of her. So they’d had a fling that stopped short of completion due to her inebriation. Okay, she could accept it. Well, not accept it, really, but at least swallow the awful lump that accompanied the realization of how close she’d come. She could get used to the facts and maybe even believe that life would go on again after this spectacular mistake if she could only get the hell out of here. “Listen, I don’t want any orange juice,” she said sternly. “I just want my clothes, and I want to go home. Or at least to camp. So please show me where my clothes are, so I can get dressed.”
Adolfo shrugged and nodded in the direction of what looked like a bathroom.
Leah stumbled in that direction, managed to make it inside and shut the door. She let the sheet fall away from her body, grabbed the edge of the chipped tile countertop, turned on the cold water, and stuck her face beneath the cold stream. A few minutes of that went a long way toward making her feel less foggy.
She stood up, glanced around the small bathroom, looking for a towel. Seeing none, she used the sheet. She noticed that the cute pale blue dress she had worn last night was draped over the edge of a pink tub. She grabbed it, pulled it on over her head, and struggled to zip it. But the thing wouldn’t zip, and upon further examination, she saw that the zipper had been mangled.