“If someone else told her the information she needed to have, then why was it your responsibility and not theirs in the first place?”
“Because this is what I do. I listen. I study. I read between the lines. I know things before other people know them. And I knew this one a long time before the person who told her. I grew up in a—a hair salon, learning from the best of the best how to be the good kind of gossip. And then I choose to share or not share based on the theory that I know how to parse out if sharing or not sharing will cause the greater harm. I chose wrong. She thought we were coming here for…the next step… in their relationship, and instead, our entire friend group is splintered. And they’re not just friends. They’re family. At least, they are to me.”
I stifle an instinctive response of family sucks. I have Zen and I have Mimi and I know family can be great.
But when I think of my siblings and my parents and the rest of my nieces and nephews, family sucks.
When I think about my business partner and newly former best friend, family sucks.
But this woman—Duchess—has family that she loves enough to feel bad for hurting, no matter how good her intentions.
Her hair lifts in the breeze, and it’s instinctive to tuck it back behind her ear for her.
Soft. So soft. And deliciously curly.
I want to sink my hands in it and twirl it around my fingers and grip it while I kiss her.
She sucks in a breath but doesn’t pull away. If anything, she leans closer. “You shouldn’t be nice to me. I hurt people who are nice to me.”
“We all do.”
“Not like this.”
“You’re being very hard on yourself for someone who went out of her way to do nice things for dozens of people and animals tonight.”
“That’s not enough to make up for what I did.”
There’s so much more to her story, and I want to hear it. I want to hear all of it. “If it helps, I’m a disaster myself. Helping me is a bigger burden than you could ever imagine.”
Her lips tip up again. “You are not.”
“Oh, I am. I think I’m your biggest good deed tonight.”
“You want to be my biggest good deed tonight.”
“Guilty. But I had a shitty day. Wouldn’t I be a good good deed?”
“My high school English teacher would have a field day with that sentence.”
“See? I’m trouble. I need good deeds done to me.”
She laughs again.
And then she shrieks and leaps to her feet, swatting at her hair and spinning in a circle. “Get it off get it off!”
Behind us, a cat yowls and takes off into the night.
“What—” I start, vaulting to my feet as well.
“Get it off!”
“Get what off?”
She’s dancing in a circle, shaking her fingers through her hair. “Bug! Lizard! Lizard bug in my hair!”
“Hold still. Let me see.”
“I can’t hold still! Creepy crawlies. Creepy crawlies!”
I grab her by the shoulders on her next circle around. “Duchess. Let me see.”
“It was—wait. Wait. Was that a cat? Was that a freaking cat playing with my hair?” She quits fighting and looks up at me, her hands dropping away. “Tell me that was a cat playing with my hair.”
I comb my fingers through her hair, enjoying this more than I should. “Can’t find any big bugs. Small ones either. Or lizards.”
“Oh god.” She clenches my shirt while I keep combing through her hair. “I thought a cockroach was crawling in my hair. Or one of those geckos.”
“Nope. You haven’t been that bad.”
“I have.”
“You haven’t.”
She grips my shirt tighter.
And then she seems to realize what she’s doing.
How close we’re standing.
Shit.
If I can feel her belly against my half-mast cock, she can tell I’m turned on too.
Her breath quickens.
So does mine.
“I do not deserve your kindness,” she whispers.
“Call it my selfishness. You fascinate me. And you’re hot as fuck.”
She doesn’t smile.
Instead, she simply gazes up at me in the moonlight while the waves roll to shore just beyond us.
And then she arches her belly into my hard-on.
Fuck, that feels good.
And when she slides her hands up my chest, to my neck, holding eye contact the whole time, rocking her belly against my cock again?
I swallow hard, but it’s not enough to keep the primitive desire from making my voice husky. “My hotel’s right around the corner.”
“Can you make me forget today happened?”
“Duchess, it would be my absolute pleasure.”
3
Sabrina Sullivan, aka a woman who can’t stop piling on the regrets
I am going to hell.
Or maybe I’m already in hell.
Either way, the reward for ruining my best friend’s Hawaiian destination wedding should not have been the hottest one-night stand of my life.
Yet here we are, with me sneaking around a man’s hotel room, wallowing in guilt and trying to find my clothes in the dark without waking him up so I can go pay for my sins.
My sin.
Just one.
But it’s the only one that matters.
I probably shouldn’t have told Duke that I let my BFF sleep with a guy who murdered kittens.
But it was preferable to the truth.
You know that video rapidly going viral on social media of that hot mess of a wedding this afternoon where the bride stopped everything right before the vows to confront the groom about letting her adult entertainment star brother go to jail for something the groom did a decade ago? I was the maid of honor. Might’ve seen me in that video too. And I could’ve prevented the very worst moment of Emma’s life if I’d told her about the jail thing years ago, but I didn’t, because I forgot the first rule of gossip, which is that sometimes, there’s no right answer to sharing a secret, only the less-wrong answer.
He'll figure it out eventually. Pretty sure you can’t log on to the internet right now without seeing Emma’s wedding video.
Duke will likely think Chandler murders kittens.
That, I don’t care about.
What I do care about?
Emma will probably never talk to me again.
And I don’t blame her.
There’s no amount of she knew who Chandler was and she chose to love him and wanted to marry him anyway that can make me feel better.
I should’ve told her.
He might be my cousin, and until yesterday when he unexpectedly sold it, he was technically my boss at our family’s café—which is one more thing I need to process emotionally and deal with when I get home—but Emma is my sister in my heart, and I shouldn’t have assumed she knew what he did to her brother, especially when I was nearly certain she also didn’t know he was having money problems.
We don’t have secrets, she always told us.
She didn’t keep secrets.
But he did.
And I knew it.
Oh, good. There’s my bra. Still can’t find my panties, but at least I have my bra. I shove it in my pocket and crawl closer to the bed, feeling for both my underwear and my second boot.
It has to be here.
Unless Duke hid it and is planning on keeping it because he has some kind of Cinderella fetish.
Or unless he’s holding it for ransom to make sure I don’t spill any of his secrets.
Not that he seems to have any beyond the fact that he has a Latin phrase scrolled along his broad ribs, had a bad day yesterday for reasons he didn’t disclose, and didn’t want to give me his real name.
And if I wasn’t suspicious Duke wasn’t his real name, the fact that I called him that and he looked around like he was expecting to see someone else instead of answering me after we left the bar, and then the way his cheeks went pink when he caught himself and stumbled through replying was all the proof I needed.
Definitely not a secret though?
He’s hot. His dark hair is thick and unexpectedly soft. When he grins, his blue eyes crinkle at the edges, there’s the barest hint of a dimple that pops out in his left cheek, and the whole world stops spinning. When he watches you, you feel like he wants to know everything there is to know about you. He’s effortlessly charming with an irresistible sense of humor.
And most important of all for someone like me who has zero interest, ever, in pursuing long-term relationships but loves to enjoy a short-term fling here and there, the woman at the bar was right.