“Gray,” I whisper, hoping to get his attention before this gets worse. When I look over his shoulder and see the small crowd gathering, I realize it can get a lot worse. There’s at least fifty people standing around watching us, and I’d lay odds that all fifty have seen as much of me as Gray has. I burrow against his back, feeling embarrassment and shame wash through me.
“Mr. Lucas? What are you doing here? Do you know that young lady? Why are you both naked?” another man asks from beside us. I look up enough to realize that he must be the manager. Great.
Gray can’t take the time to acknowledge the man, though, because he’s taking a swing at the doorman. Which, by the way, makes it very hard to hide behind him. I’ve wrapped my arms around myself as best as I can. Someone is handing me a black suit coat and I reach out to get it. When I see the man holding it looking at my body, it feels wrong to take his coat. I start to anyway, but Gray is there in front of me and he’s holding the black suit jacket the doorman was wearing. He wraps it around me.
“Get the fuck away from my woman,” Gray growls towards the other men and several others who have joined the small crowd and gather too close for comfort. I feel like I’m hyperventilating. The world is starting to spin, and if I pass out, I figure that will be the ultimate embarrassment. I manage to hold on enough to watch Gray take a tablecloth from someone. He wraps it around himself. The fabric strains to meet at his hips and doesn’t quite make it, but at least he’s mostly covered. He’s exchanging words with the manager and is demanding the doorman be fired. I really can’t listen to any more, and if one more person in the background keeps asking what that horrible smell is, I might go off.
That’s when I realize I’m crying. I feel the tears sliding down my face and it makes me mad. I’m not a crier. I don’t cry hardly ever. And the fact that I’m doing so now in front of all these people who have seen me naked—and in front of an irate Gray who is still yelling about the doorman copping a feel of my ass—pisses me off. I can’t control it. The more I try, the faster the tears come. So before I start sobbing in front of the vultures, I take off toward the elevators.
Not nearly fast enough, however.
“Claudia, can we talk to you?”
I turn when I hear my name and freeze when I see a reporter there with a photographer behind her, his camera zoomed in on me. Then I take off running because, yeah, the sobs have started.
What did we do?
“Ow! Damn it, Mom, that shit stinks worse than the skunk.”
“It definitely does not, trust me on that one, son. You smell like old Mr. Simpson’s outhouse. If you’re going to pick wildflowers with your woman, you should at least wait until you’re home. There, at least I have my own tomato juice. This store crap is hardly making a dent in it.”
“I didn’t exactly plan on getting sprayed by a skunk, Mom.”
“Apparently not. Why on Earth you felt the need to do something this asinine is beyond me. I mean, you have a king size bed and a kitchen table here. Not to mention that big shower, or heck, even that chair in the sitting room!” she mutters, pouring another can of tomato juice into the tub.
It’s a good thing I’m not a modest person because having my mom pour juice over my naked ass would definitely be on my list of things that would kill me. I hang my head down as she pours another can over it. Shit. I feel like the biggest asshole on the face of the Earth.
“How’s CC?” I ask, afraid to know the answer, but scared not to. I haven’t gotten to speak one word to her since we went running back to the hotel.
There was chaos downstairs when the doorman grabbed CC. My fist found its way to his face, and then a reporter showed up trying to get a picture of me and CC. It was all bad. It probably didn’t help that I ripped the camera way from the photographer and threw it on the ground so it busted into a million pieces, inadvertently dropping the damn tablecloth I had covering me.
I followed CC up to our room, but she didn’t talk; she was too busy crying. I wanted to console her, but when got to our room, it finally hit me that without my clothes, my wallet, or anything else—we were stuck… which required me knocking on the door of my mom’s room. Which brings me to getting drowned in store-bought tomato juice and vinegar by Mom in my hotel room after she already did the same to CC in hers… and not getting two minutes alone to check on my woman. I’m mad, worried, and stressed the fuck out. I’ve already put a call in to Seth about the press, but as much as I don’t want to admit it, there’s a very real possibility that pictures of me and CC in our birthday suits will be all over the papers in the morning. CC has to be so pissed off at me, and I can’t blame her.
“How do you expect the girl to be after running across a busy golf course butt-ass naked, getting groped by a doorman, and then having her future mother-in-law washing her from head to toe and seeing every nook and crevice the good Lord saw fit to give her?”
“Can I see her?”