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Cruise Control
While Jake isin the bathroom doing whatever he’s doing, I decide to search for another one and take a bathroom break myself.
I need a moment to clear my head of him and his sexual voodoo. It comes to him so easily. And I flashback to the bar over a year ago around Christmas. The bar we met at before we went back to the hotel to…
I see the same Jake at the table in the bar as the one I was just toe to toe within the room. The Jake with intensity. The one suddenly hopped up on some hedonistic blend of pheromones and desire as if a switch was flipped from joking and relaxed to ready to see me naked.
The one who puts himself out there at the perfect moment to gauge where I’m at.
Except the Scarlett back at the bar was open and irrefutably drawn to his confident charms. This Scarlett, the shark, is clinging desperately to her wits and professionalism.
It would be a lot easier if I didn’t know how good he is in bed.
The hallway is dim, silent, and eerily long, like something out of a Stephen King movie, the candlelight on the antique sconces not helping in the least. I head left, away from the foyer and onto a silk rug. A board creaks beneath it and I pause, then chastise myself. I’m not sneaking, I’m looking for a bathroom, which is a perfectly normal thing to do in this perfectly strange situation.
I continue on and push open the first door to my right since it’s already cracked. An office. I quickly scan over the bookshelves along the back wall, the desk in the center, and a filing cabinet to its left.
Files.
My mouth waters just thinking of them. But not now…
“Need something?” a man’s voice echoes down the hall.
I jump, press my lips together to smother a yelp, then try to casually turn to see who it is. A butler, but not the same one as before. This one has a blond man-bun. He has the same dark eyeliner, though. And black bowtie and pants.
Bare feet.
Their uniform.
Doesn’t make this home creepier at all. Not at all. I fight the urge to ask him where the amateur Chippendales show will be and say, “Bathroom?”
He nods further down the hall. “Guest bathroom is the third door to the left.”
“Thanks,” I reply and scurry on my way, pretending he didn’t catch me gawking at the office.
I takemy time and snoop around the bathroom. Smell the guest lotions and soaps. Look in the closet at the towels, feel the towels, and admire how the shower is bigger than my entire bathroom back in the city. Mine is decorated better, though, thanks to Stephen.
This Gothic country chic thing isn’t doing it for me.
When I finally emerge and make it back to the room, it’s empty, as well as the bathroom, which means Jake left me. Or maybe he thought I left him, which technically I did, but I’m certainly not ready to go roaming around looking for him. I decide to open my suitcase and search through the things I brought.
Too many things.
I didn’t know what to be prepared for.
I decide to wear what I already have on for dinner, pull out my toiletry and makeup bags, and head to the bathroom to freshen up.
This one is smaller with nightmarish ivy wallpaper and a clawfoot bathtub against the back wall. No shower. I don’t do baths, so I guess I’ll be using the other bathroom to clean off.
The one-sink vanity has just enough counter space for one person’s things, and I see where he graciously stuffed his toiletry bag in the cabinet beneath, so I spread out the contents of my bags against the tiled surface and get to work. Only this time, I skip the red lipstick.
When I’m fluffed and freshened into something acceptable, I spritz some perfume on my neck and take a deep breath. Grip the sides of the sink. He hasn’t come back, so I guess I should venture out and see where he is.
The fire in the living room has died down and there are no butlers or icy mothers to be found, so I stand in the foyer and listen. From somewhere in the back of the house, in the same direction Magnolia emerged from earlier, faint voices carry on a conversation over the sound of clinking glass, like ice cubes in lowballs, and a hint of cigar smoke lingers in the air. I follow as if they’re breadcrumbs.
The closer I come, the louder the voices get and the stronger the smell of cigars. I also catch wisps of something else…something peppery and fragrant—a pot roast, maybe, that wars and dances with the smoke in a way that reminds me of home. Dad loves his pipes, and Mom loves roast.
I move through another empty sitting room and turn to find a gaping entrance to a library, no door, and a pair of slender feminine legs in a leather chair. The rest of her is hidden behind the wall. Someone saunters past the doorway, oblivious to my standing here and fills his glass at a bar cart. He’s tall and broad-shouldered with a dark ponytail. Preston.
