I winced. “Okay, okay. You caught me.” I chewed on my thumbnail, thinking hard. “I need to tell Marcie soon. I just don’t want to add to everything she’s dealing with right now with her dad, since it’s her dad that I’m dating.”
Kresley nodded. “That makes sense. I don’t think you should put it off for much longer, though.”
“I won’t.” I paused, before confessing, “Clive’s in town. He’s meeting with Marcie tonight to extend an olive branch, but I haven’t heard anything yet.”
“Oh,” Kresley said, one eyebrow shooting up. “Is that why you’re so jumpy?”
I took a long drink of my wine to soothe said frayed nerves. “Is it that obvious?”
“If you’re me, then yeah,” she said sardonically. “And, you keep obsessively checking your phone.”
I sighed. “Yeah, this has been…tough. For everybody. Clive has a lot of unresolved stuff from his wife’s death, and he’s taking a little time to deal with those issues. I’m just…I’m nervous about things. They have a lot to talk about and I haven’t exactly been passing messages back and forth between them, you know?”
Kresley took another long sip of her margarita. “I understand. You can’t put yourself in that position of being the person between them, and you deserve to be happy and work on your own stuff, too. But I just—” she stopped herself, worrying her teeth with her bottom lip.
“What?” I said, sitting up straighter in my chair. “What is it?”
“I worry that secrets aren’t good for our friendship,” she finally admitted. “And everybody seems to have them lately.”
Everybody?“Kresley, is there something you want to tell me?”
She shook her head, her eyes downcast. “No…not yet.”
I reached out and took her small, soft hand in mine. “You know I understand, and when you’re ready to talk about whatever is going on, you always know that Marcie and I are here for you.”
On the table next to me, my phone suddenly buzzed with a text message. I picked it up and tapped the screen impatiently. A text message from Clive, and it wasn’t good, I realized. My stomach felt like it was sinking into the floor.
I found out about the baby,Clive wrote. Three dots wiggled on the screen, then the rest of the message appeared. Fuck, it went badly. Can you come to the hotel?
I looked up at Kresley. “It’s Clive. He found out about Marcie being pregnant.”
Her eyes opened wide. “Is he mad at you?”
“I don’t think so.” I reached for my purse and fished out my credit card to pay the bill. “But I should go to make sure he’s okay.”
Kresley glanced at her own phone. “I think I will, too. I have…some other plans.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask her about her plans—what exactly she was up to, but I decided against it. If I deserved privacy—well, then so did she.
Traffic slowed to a crawl in the driving Seattle rain, and it took me more than an hour to inch my way out to the Pacific Heights Hotel, located downtown. Before Clive’s text, I had been excited about a night in a suite with him, room service, fantastic sex—but it seemed like all our plans were on ice after his text message.
I barreled into the hotel in a frantic rush, dripping wet after running through the rain without an umbrella. My feet squished and rubbed painfully in my high heels as I skidded up to the front desk, but I ignored the discomfort and slapped my hands down on the desk.
“I’m looking for Clive Davenport’s room, please,” I said, panting from exertion.
The clerk raised an eyebrow. “Busy guy,” he muttered, and picked up the phone, quickly dialing a number.
“Mr. Davenport?” he said into the phone. “Someone else to see you.”
Someone else? That was weird.
He hung up the phone and smiled pleasantly. “Room sixteen-forty, ma’am.”
The elevator practically crawled up to the sixteenth floor, stopping at what seemed like every floor to let passengers on or off. My face hurt from smiling pleasantly at the apologetic faces that the other passengers made, but somehow I managed to stop myself from screaming at any of them and shoving them out of the car so I could get to my destination. Finally—finally, I made it to the sixteenth floor and hustled my way down the hall to Clive’s suite.
“Clive, are you okay?” I asked as he opened the door. He reached out and hauled me into his arms, burying his face in my hair. “Is Marcie okay?”
He pulled me inside the suite, kicking the door shut behind him as he tore at my coat and grabbed my purse to set it on a low table.