“Good to see you here for a second night, Mr. Thorn.”
“Finally found some time to play as hard as you work?” purred Blair, the brunette at the front desk with whom I generally spoke to secure reservations. I offered something of a smile as I took the room key from her hand.
“Just a little,” I replied before stepping around the corner to take a call from Drew.
And for the next two-and-a-half minutes, I let him rant about everything from pre-school applications and how surprisingly early you had to start to electronic sign-stealing in baseball and how I should drop any client who’d ever done that against him.
By the three-minute mark, I’d detected the lack of an actual emergency in the call, so I drifted back to the lobby, my eye immediately catching on a glimmer of blonde by the bar.
Holland.
She was leaning over a menu stand to read the menu, and I felt the corners of my lips curve up in a smile as I took a moment to simply look at her.
Her hair was neatly wound at the top of her head, save for two pieces that fell down to frame her face, and she was wearing a pale blue sundress—tight on the top with a flared skirt and thin straps that tied in bows at her tanned shoulders.
She looked so mesmerizing that I had Drew fully tuned out till he asked, “Are you even listening to me?”
“I stopped several minutes ago,” I said. “Are we still on for tomorrow evening?”
“Yeah, but dude… I was fucking pouring my heart out to you just now.”
I snorted. “You were spiraling into sign-stealing paranoia out of boredom because it’s your off day but you’re in Boston and Evie’s in New York, and my guess is you can’t call her right now because she’s putting Kai down for a nap. Which is why I got the honor.”
As Drew took a long pause, I watched Holland go up on her toes, craning her neck in search of the hostess.
“I don’t think I like how well you know me,” he finally said.
“Well, it’s entirely your doing considering how often you insist on calling me.”
“Oh, excuse me for valuing our friendship after you set me up with the mother of my child,” Drew said as I drifted across the lobby toward Holland, laughing to myself as I watched her frown deeply while flipping the menu front to back several times, as if a second side of options would magically appear if she looked hard enough. “Dude,” Drew groaned when I ignored his last few pleas for attention. “I’m so bored. Boston is boring. What are you even doing right now?”
“Work,” I said distractedly, though my peripherals could spot Blair waving to me from the desk.
“Mr. Thorn! I apologize, I never gave you your second room key.”
Drew stopped mid-sentence to boom into the phone.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, motherfucker! Why are you checking into a hotel in the middle of the—”
Removing the phone from my ear, I hung up, giving a wave of my hand to decline Blair’s offer of a second key. I’d half-expected Holland to turn around at the sound of Blair saying my name, but she was studying the menu so curiously she didn’t even seem to notice.
DREW: Dude. Tell me you’re not meeting Keira
DREW: If you get back together with Keira we’re breaking up
Eyeing Drew’s texts, I suppressed a snort and my need to assure him that I was not in fact meeting my ex.
A continued barrage of his questions buzzed into my phone, but I silenced the thing and slid it into my pocket once I found myself standing behind Holland.
As if sensing me, she peeked over her shoulder then jumped in surprise.
“Oh! Hey,” she breathed out, eyes wide as she smoothed nervous hands over her skirt.
“Sorry to interrupt. You looked pretty engrossed in your reading.”
She laughed. “Yeah, probably because a burger here is twenty dollars. Isn’t that crazy?”
“Are you hungry?” I asked.