Slate Solis blew Max Tremaine out of the water, and he took my breath right along with it.
***
An hour later, Slate was holding me on his back in front of the elevators, cursing silently underneath his breath as more and more people crowded us to get on the elevator.
“We could take the stairs,” I suggested. “Someone propped open the fourth-floor door, remember?”
“That someone being me,” Slate grumbled. “This goddamn elevator is the stupidest thing I’ve ever witnessed in my life.”
It really was.
There were five elevators in total, and only three of them worked. The other two were for people coming down from the roof—people who paid a shit ton of money to access a private club up there—and staff. To make matters worse, from the hours of eight until ten in the morning, and then again at six until ten in the evening, the elevators got so jam-packed with people that the wait for an elevator could take upwards of fifteen to twenty minutes.
And the stupid thing was, there were no stairs that accessed the rooms. You could leave out of the stairs at either end of the hallways, but you couldn’t come back up.
“You can put me down. I can walk,” I told him.
Maybe.
I wasn’t sure what the lady had done to my foot, but it’d gone from being swollen just a little bit and aching, to swollen a lot and throbbing with pain.
It was very possible that I’d broken something in my foot by her running over it.
Though, I felt somewhat vindicated as we were leaving out and Slate accidentally stepped on her foot when she tried to cut us off with her stroller.
“No,” he said. “We’ll take the stairs. And I’m not putting you down.”
And he didn’t. Not until he’d climbed four sets of stairs and set me down to rest on the bed.
“I’m still hungry though, Slate,” I told him, smiling slightly when he gently placed me upright on the bed, scooting me until my back rested against the headboard. Seconds later, he was putting a pillow underneath my foot.
“I’ll go get food,” he said. “And I’ll get some ice on the way back up.”
I smiled at him. “That sounds perfect.”
After placing a quick kiss on my lips, he dragged my cell phone charger over to me, handed me the remote off the end of the bed, and then left the room without another word.
It was when I was considering losing my pants that I realized that I really, really had to go to the bathroom.
Also, I hadn’t taken a shower yet and I was fairly sure I smelled like sweat and sex.
Sure, we’d changed into clean clothes after our afternoon festivities, but that didn’t mean I was clean.
So, while he was spending thirty minutes ordering us food and lugging it back up here, I’d take a quick shower and hope that I didn’t slip and die while he was gone.
Plus, maybe if I got it done before he got back, he wouldn’t be too mad at me for doing it without him. Because ever since he’d seen the swelling on my foot, he’d refused to let me do a thing. Even open the hotel room door for him.
Acting fast, I hobbled to the bathroom and started stripping off my clothes on the way.
It was halfway through my shower that I heard what I thought was the hotel room door opening.
But when he didn’t come in and start ripping me a new one, I finished up my shower, packed all my stuff into the zipper compartment of my travel cosmetic case, and then got dressed in the clothes I’d set out this afternoon for me to wear home on the plane tomorrow.
Once I had everything all nicely stacked and ready to go, my foot was throbbing once again, and I was fairly positive that something in my foot had to be broken for it to be hurting this bad.
This was no ordinary pain.
And what kind of loser got ran over by a stroller and broke her foot?
Obviously, this loser.
But I wouldn’t go see a doctor while I was here. I’d go see one in Kilgore tomorrow when we finally made it home.
Hopefully the worst of the pain would be taken care of by the ibuprofen that I had next to the bed.
Thinking to grab a glass of water on the way to the bed, I bent down and reached for the small refrigerator that was right outside the bathroom door. When I stood back up, I found my gray Magic Band sitting on the counter.
I frowned hard, wondering where it’d come from.
I’d lost it and had to go to the front counter at our resort to get a new one.
I’d thought I left it at Animal Kingdom but…
Something hard hit me in the back of my head, and I fell to my knees before rolling all the way over to my back and curling in on myself as I tried to figure out what in the hell just happened.