“Try.”
“Why?”
“You’re drunk, duchess.”
“I’m not so drunk,” I told him, knowing it was only half true, but even stone cold sober, I wanted him. He knew that. I knew that. And half-drunk me, well, she was refusing to accept that this was a bad idea.
“Sloane, please,” he asked, tone doing that low, sexy rumble thing that made my sex clench hard even as I registered the frustration sparking off of his skin.
“Why are you fighting it?” I pressed, apparently finding out I was tenacious after a few drinks as well. “I wasn’t drunk last time.”
“This is a job for me,” he said, and had my stomach not been dropping at that, I might have heard something in his tone, something that said he regretted that it was work. “That’s it.” He turned away, giving me a view of his back – and more tattoos I wanted to learn about – as he reached for clothes. “And you’re not thinking clearly. In a week or so, I’ll be gone. You’ll never see me again. You don’t want this. Not really.”
I did.
I wanted it.
But he – this man who was more action-based than practical – was voicing all the logical arguments I had running through my head for days.
And even drunk-me couldn’t argue with it.
So I rolled away.
I pretended to sleep.
I listened as Gunner pretended to as well.
Eventually, we both did for real.
Then went back to the usual the next day.
Driving.
Not talking.
Me sketching.
Both of us trying to ignore each other in an impossibly small space. Like a couple of children instead of the rational adults we really were.
“Oh my God. I can’t take it anymore,” I growled sometime around one that afternoon, battling a hangover that was hammering in my temples and behind my eyes somehow at the same time, reaching over to jab my finger into one of the other saved station buttons.
“You’re bright and chipper today,” Gunner said, and I imagined he was smirking like he usually was.
“How do you listen to that day in and day out?” I asked, ignoring the comment on my obvious misery. “Is there anything worse than talk radio? A bunch of people focusing on the most negative things going on in the world.”
“If you didn’t like it, why didn’t you change it three days ago? Or is it just your epic hangover talking?”
“Epic is pushing it,” I half-lied. I had only drank to the point of drunk a handful of times in my life. Only once did I have a worse hangover than this. But I was attributing the intensity of this one on the fact that I wasn’t twenty-one anymore… and I had horrible sleep thanks to my sexual frustration the night before. “I just ignored it the first few days. But my head hurts, and listening to all the arguing is getting to me.”
“Drink the water, you stubborn ass,” he told me, tone light. “I’ve been suggesting it for hours.”
“I don’t want to have to make a dozen pitstops.”
“Then take one of your pain pills. Your stomach should be mostly better. You won’t need them for that.”
“I’m fine,” I insisted. “I just need to move around, get some food, maybe a nap. I think being in the car is getting to me too.”
“Only another day and a half after this,” he assured me, but his tone was oddly distant.
That night, we were staying in Wyoming.
The next night would be Utah.
And then we would be in Carson City.
In my new life.
No more long drives stuck beside one another.
No more sleeping in the same hotel room, just feet from each other.
I tried to tell myself that that was a good thing.
A little distance would do us good.
But nothing about even the idea of it felt good.
It was the exact opposite actually.
“It’s not the Ritz,” Gunner said almost apologetically after we had checked into a hotel that obviously did not fit his standards. Honestly, I couldn’t figure that his tastes ran toward the Ritz Carlton, so I had no idea why this seemed to be bothering him so much. But I had come to accept that Gunner was just an unpredictable kind of person.
“But it isn’t a sleep-and-fuck either,” I offered, shrugging off the outdated and overused red, white, and black oriental-style rugs that ran down the center of the halls toward the elevator. The art on the walls was mass produced and too matchy-matchy. The wallpaper must have been an off-white at some point, but was currently settled at aged yellow.
Dated, sure. But it was clean, kept with pride in a clearly bad economy in a town that – as I saw on our way through it – likely did not attract much tourism.
“Well, there’s that,” he agreed without enthusiasm as we exited the elevator to the third floor that looked much like the lobby – same carpets, wallpaper, art. The doors even had good, old-fashioned keys instead of keycards.