Too bright. Way too bright. Cath buried her face in the pillow with a moan, trying to shut out the morning light. She must have forgotten to close the curtains last night.
Head pounding, she reached for the glass of water she always kept on her bedside table, but her fingers scrabbled through empty space.
No water.
Further flailing of her hand produced no bedside table. Huh.
With a groan, she cracked her eyes open and turned her face just far enough to bring the wooden corner post of a headboard into focus. A very nice hardwood headboard. Cherry maybe. Edwardian, she’d guess.
Not hers.
Shit.
She rolled over and surveyed the room, a white cube with sparse furniture—just the bed, a massive wardrobe, and an antique chair upholstered in gold brocade. Above it hung an enormous painting of a smiling girl with one arm around a dog. Cath didn’t recognize the artist, but the piece was excellent. Whoever lived here had taste. Money, too, if the furniture was anything to go by.
She sat up, wincing as she waited for the hangover judge to pass his sentence. Headache: check. Queasy stomach: check. But neither was debilitating. Certainly, neither was going to give her as much trouble as the fact she had no idea whose bed she was in.
She ran a hand through her hair, and the soft cotton of a man’s oversized white shirt brushed her cheek. Drawing the collar away from her neck, she peeked inside, then let out a breath in relief. At least she still had her bra and panties on. Maybe this wasn’t as bad as it seemed.
Bad enough, though, Mary Catherine. Bad enough.
Unwilling to subject herself to a lecture in the voice of her dead mother, and not quite ready yet to face finding out what—or, more to the point, who—lay beyond the closed door, Cath sank back into the pillows and squeezed her eyes shut, making a polite request of the universe to remove her from this situation and put her somewhere else. Anywhere else. Aspen would be nice.
Nothing happened.
Damn it, she didn’t want to be here. She’d been here before, and she’d sworn she was never going to wake up in the wrong bed again. When her mother died, she’d made up her mind to be a better person. She’d planned to prove to herself and whatever was left of Mom, ghost or spirit or what-have-you, that she could pass as an upstanding human being. Mary Catherine Talarico 2.0 paid her bills reliably, drank rarely, worked her fingers to the bone, and, most important, avoided men like the plague.
Yet here she was. New Cath had obviously taken a pretty catastrophic fall off the reform wagon. The question was, how?
A sense memory from the night before offered itself up: her hand wrapped around a cocktail, and the pinched voice of the Blind Date saying, “Cheers.”
Oh, God, the Blind Date. The glass of wine with dinner that had turned into two glasses because the man was excruciatingly boring, some kind of engineer who worked for the Newcastle municipal council and kept quantifying everything. He’d told her what her meal was costing him to the penny and the exact number of calories in her wine, and she’d ordered a third glass for the sole purpose of spiting him.
That had been her limit for the evening, established in advance. Three glasses of wine. But three glasses of wine wouldn’t have impaired her memory or landed her in this bed. So what—
She smacked her palm into her forehead. The concert. Amanda hadn’t warned her they’d be venturing out to a club at the end of the Northern Line to listen to a very talented drag queen sing Patsy Cline songs. If she had, Cath would’ve begged off regardless of how badly she wanted the straitjacket, because Patsy Cline made her cry. Always. The singer had been her mother’s favorite, Patsy’s smoky voice the perpetual soundtrack to rainy afternoons in the Chicago brownstone of Cath’s girlhood.
When the Patsy impersonator had launched into “Crazy,” Amanda had taken one look at Cath wiping her wet cheeks and sent the Blind Date up to the bar for a round. He’d come back with some cocktail called a K-12 that Cath had never encountered before, and she’d been too rattled to ask what was in it until afterward, when the tip of her nose went numb.
Cath turned her face into the pillow, which smelled of summer and clean cotton. She wondered how many different varieties of stupid one woman could be.
A great many, obviously, because she was here. Wherever here was.
God, she hadn’t gone home with the Blind Date, had she? What if he’d dragged her back to Newcastle, and she’d been too drunk to remember any of it?
Please, please, let this be Amanda’s spare bedroom.
She pulled the summer-smelling comforter up over her face and willed her pickled brain to release the details of what had happened after the Drink of Doom.
Her brain gave her snapshots of a dodgy, solitary walk back to the Tube. The echoing clomp of her heels down underground staircases and over concrete hallways. The buzz of the fluorescent lights making her heart race as she wove her way toward the Northern Line. Waiting for the Docklands train at Bank, staring at her shoes and trying to breathe herself calm. The hot whoosh of stale subterranean air on her face as the train arrived. She’d been on her way home to Greenwich, alone. So how—
Oh. Canary Wharf. The evening unfurled more rapidly now. The thick jasmine perfume of the woman seated next to her making Cath’s mouth water, sour and vile. Rushing off the train before the doors could close. Later, leaning on the map kiosk, watching the strangers on the platform as her stomach settled.
A black and clawing loneliness had crept into her bones, eating the marrow and leaving behind an ache she didn’t know what to do with. A million miles from Chicago, from anything resembling a real home, she’d been in tears, bleary and tired and fuzzy when she’d spotted City’s familiar face.
Then, his hand at the small of her back, guiding her onto another train. His keys in the lock of the flat.
Of all the guys in London, she’d gone home with City.