She needed to get out of here. Now.
She rushed forward. Her foot caught in a twist of the towel, and she went down. Her ass hit the carpet with a hard thunk that did more harm to her pride than her tailbone, but her pride was already pretty dinged up and didn’t need the extra scuffs. Closing her eyes, she hung her head so her hair fell in front of her face to form a frizzy curtain while she took a deep breath. Of course, it wasn’t like her humiliation would be complete with only one massive, sixty-story-skyscraper-sized gut punch to the ego. No, she had to be a total klutz, too.
“Are you okay?” Ford asked.
Huffing out a breath, she sent her hair flying out of her face, determined not to let this man know how embarrassed she was. So she looked up—way up—at him, and her brain stuttered to a stop as soon as her mutinous gaze landed on his thick, muscular body, hard dick poking against the sheet, and handsome face. Good Lord, did the fates have no mercy? Before she could reach out and touch him to make sure he was real and not another hoax, some last vestige of self-preservation kicked into gear and she averted her gaze and kept her hands to herself.
“Just peachy,” she said as she got up, her right ass cheek protesting after that tumble, and hustled over to the small piles of her discarded clothes.
Ignoring the granny panties in her hurry to get the hell out of there, she pulled on her dress and reached around in an awkward move for the zipper.
Ford stood up and reached out toward her.
Her heart leapt into her throat, and she jumped back. “Don’t touch me.”
His hand fell to his side, and his shoulders sank. “I was just going to help with the zipper.”
Okay, that would be nice since she was tugging for all she was worth and still only had the damn thing halfway up, but it wasn’t going to happen. She’d had all the embarrassment she could take, without adding being dressed by a man who’d never left her his hotel room key to the list. How pathetic must she have seemed, just showing up and sneaking into his room? It probably happened all the time to someone like him. That thought pissed her off, too.
She glared up at Ford. “How about you just pull the sheet around you instead?”
He swiped it off the bed and wrapped the thousand-count material around his waist. “I’m gonna get Gallo and Ruggiero to apologize to you. This was beyond going too far.”
The guy seemed genuinely pissed, as if this sort of thing didn’t happen in his world. In fairness, it probably didn’t to someone like him.
Tall, good-looking—her gaze landed on the police badge on the bedside table—and a cop, everything probably went his way. That last detail registered in her brain. Cop. Oh my God. Just when she thought the whole situation couldn’t get any worse, she’d forgotten that Ford was a cop, just like almost everyone else at the wedding. Shit. If her brothers knew, they’d kill her, or maybe him. Probably him. They may have been loan sharks but they were overprotective brothers right down to the cellular level. They’d lose their minds if they ever found out. Some things—some people—just weren’t done.
Giving up on getting her zipper any higher than her shoulder blades in her desperation to get away from the scene of the crime, she shoved her foot in a shoe. “I’m leaving.”
Ford’s face darkened, and his square jaw tightened. “Maybe we can figure something—”
“Let’s not, okay?” she interrupted him as she jammed her foot into her other shoe. A pity fuck? Yeah, she wasn’t going there. She counted to twenty in her head to distract herself from the tears making her eyes hurt and the sinking, fatalistic feeling of this-is-as-good-as-she-can-ever-expect that sucked the air out of her lungs. “Your friends are real pieces of work.”
What else could she say? Nothing. And to top it all off, those jerk friends of his were probably still at the bar, waiting to watch her walk of shame out of the hotel. They were probably laughing their asses off about the whole thing right now. And she’d have to fake being all right until she could get home and finally let her real emotions show.
Twenty minutes. That’s all you have to get through, Regina. You can do this.