She’d never claimed to be a saint.
Or anywhere close.
So, sue me.
“Don’t you think you’ve seen enough vomit for one day?”
She slowly shook her head without turning around. “Not nearly enough. I think we both could use a drink. We’ll go back to my hotel room, drink our pain and bad memories away, sleep it off, feel like shit in the morning, and move the fuck on. Deal?”
More awkward silence. The car was full of it. Then Rhett cleared his throat and said in his panty-melting tone. “Sounds good to me.”
CHAPTER 4
Rhett
“To the Berns. May they burn in hell.”
Bella grinned. The empty bottle of whiskey sat on the table between them. They’d taken turns, passing it back and forth between them. It wasn’t until the thing was down to its last leg that Rhett actually took the set of plastic hotel cups, unwrapped them, and poured them each a healthy three ounces that finished the bad boy off. He offered a toast, and since he was shitfaced on an empty stomach, it came out all garbled and slurred.
“I’ll drink to that.” Her words were equally as slurred.
Rhett would have felt bad, normally, for doing this. But he’d just been through one shit day. The worst that he could remember in a long time. He’d just found out his fiancée was two-timing him, been accused of having a small dick, fled the church, driven around aimlessly while the sister of the woman he was supposed to marry, tried to help him feel better in the most incredibly strange way. He was insulted half the time, but honestly, he did feel a little bit better. Or maybe that was just the whiskey, seeing he was now back in her hotel room, hiding from the world, and had just consumed that whole bottle.
A record for him, since he didn’t normally drink and especially not anything hard. A few beers were usually his limit.
Bella was actually handling it far better than he was. His head swam and he had to throw a hand out onto the table top to keep from falling out of his chair. The odds of him throwing up again were definitely very good.
Pathetic. No wonder my fiancée left me.
Or I left her.
Whatever.
They both downed what was left in their glasses. The whiskey didn’t even burn Rhett’s throat anymore. It was amazing, how as he got more drunk, he tasted it less. The amber liquid might as well have been water for all he noticed.
The chances of him having just given himself alcohol poisoning were pretty good. And it still felt better than how he’d felt back at the church.
That was the great thing about whiskey. It numbed all of the shit he didn’t want to think about right out.
He started noticing other things instead. Like how pretty Bella was sitting across from him. How the sunlight coming in through the curtains on the large window illuminated her gorgeous hair so that it looked almost blue from certain angles. How her lashes were so thick and long. How her lips were full and pinker than before. How her smile dazzled him. How when she leaned forward, her dress gapped just a little bit, giving him a view of her creamy skin and a peek at the swell of her breasts. He was a gentleman normally and would have looked away, but not this time. His eyes remained transfixed like the drunk asshole he currently was.
“Up here.” Bella reached out, set a warm finger underneath his jaw, and tilted his face upward. She didn’t seem bothered, offended, or flattered. “You were talking to my boobs.”
He tried to slur out an apology, but his tongue was thick and heavy in his mouth and all he wanted to do was lean forward and taste Bella’s sweet looking lips.
He’d wanted to do that when he was still sober.
The urge was practically punching him right in the face and he couldn’t stop himself from awkwardly leaning in.
She didn’t pull away. God, she was delicious. Glorious. Her mouth was like being a sinner and somehow stumbling into heaven anyway. Her lips were so, so soft. Petal soft. Her tongue was honeyed perfection and when it parted the seam of his lips and thrust into his mouth and found his, he was gone. Finished. Done.
Whiskey was responsible for so many bad decisions. So many regrets. But they’d come later. Later he could deal with it. At the moment, whiskey or not, bad decisions or not, all he wanted was Bella.
***
Rhett’s heart pounded out of his chest. Strange bright flashes clouded his vision, while his eyes opened, and the room began to spin violently, compliments of half a bottle of whiskey he’d downed in record time.
His first instinct was to stick a leg out of bed and plant his foot firmly on the floor. He’d done that when he was sixteen and been drunk for the first time at his best friend’s house. Matt’s parents were out, and they had a bar in their basement. They’d sampled a few bottles, again of the hard stuff, and got completely tanked. It was late and Matt had the idea that they should just sleep it off. The only problem was that Matt had bunks in his room. Thankfully, Rhett got the bottom one. He was able to stick his foot out and that helped with the spinning. It didn’t help with the fact that Matt pissed himself on the top bunk and it might have dribbled down onto Rhett’s face in the middle of the night.