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Still did.
Only, the future that had seemed so possible for them both, so attainable last night, somehow in the light of day and without the powerful influence of alcohol seemed like a silly fairy tale. Women like Payton didn’t end up with guys like him.
They ended up with guys like Brad.
And as soon as Payton woke up and remembered everything, she was going to realize that. Realize the mistake she’d made in asking him to be her husband. Maybe she’d even been teasing him, not expecting he’d say yes. Then again, she was drunk and vulnerable. And he should have said no.
Any decent guy, no matter how much his head was clouded with his emotions for the woman, would have said no.
Meaning when he walked into that room, she just might try to kill him.
He took the stairs up, balancing their coffee in his hands along with some aspirin from the front desk, trying to think of what he was going to say.
Then he was at their door and there was no putting off the inevitable.
With the coffees stacked and balanced between his chin and his left hand, he slid the key in and pushed the door open.
She was awake.
And standing naked in the middle of the room, a puddle of water spreading around her feet.
Her eyes lifted from the paper in her hands to meet his, wide and shocked. It was safe to assume she had figured out some of the events of last night.
“Please tell me that this is a trick? That this document doesn’t say what I think it says.”
This was going to take some time. And as much as he enjoyed staring at her lovely naked body—a body he’d become quite familiar with over the past few hours—he was going to need to be thinking clearly. He headed to the bathroom and turned off the water she’d left running before grabbing a towel.
She barely acknowledged his overture, as he tucked it around her. A naked Payton made it hard for him to concentrate. Period.
“I have coffee. Why don’t you have a seat, and we’ll try and figure this out.”
“What’s there to figure out?” Her voice was a couple of octaves higher than usual. “Not only did I spend a drunken night in a hotel room in Mexico with a man I barely know, but I decided to pile on the craziness and marry that man too. I’d say with my track record over the past few days, I might be certifiable. How on earth could you let this happen?”
He sighed and took both coffees and sat down on the bed. He raised one up in her direction. “I seem to recall I wasn’t the one who actually proposed.”
At that, her eyes shifted to the side and she paused, almost like she was replay
ing a movie in her head. Realization seemed to hit her and she met his gaze again. “But you didn’t have to accept,” she practically screeched.
He took a sip of his coffee. He couldn’t even respond to that. Mostly because he had been asking himself the same thing.
“My mother is going to kill me.”
She began pacing the floor in front of him, one hand on the towel—barely keeping it around her, giving him an enticing reveal of her backside mid-step—the other hand waving the paper about.
“The one thing she’s made clear to me since I could remember is that she’s been planning the minute details of my wedding since I was born and that under no circumstance was I ever to even consider the possibility of elopement or she’d skin me from head to toe. And I did it. Not only did I go out and marry some guy I barely even know in a Mexican church with the proof in a language I can’t even read, but I did it practically on the eve of my marriage to another man.”
“After last night, I wouldn’t exactly say you barely know me,” he couldn’t help adding.
But she didn’t appear to hear him as she stopped and her hand went to her mouth. “I haven’t even officially broken off my engagement with my fiancé. Haven’t canceled the caterers or flowers or church—even though I told my planner to do it I knew that there was no chance she would have the guts to do it without getting my mother’s approval and that she would never get—”
“Payton,” he said a little louder this time, figuring her monologue had gone on long enough.
But she paid him no mind, only resumed the pacing again. “My father will be horrified, having to face Dick Eastman, the man he’d been ecstatic to call family…”
And that was when Cruz heard the other shoe drop.
He hadn’t even begun to consider the consequences to himself for this little indiscretion. Cruz would guess that hearing the news that the man he’d asked to watch over his future daughter-in-law had gone and married that very woman would probably not sit well with the man. Not when Dick Eastman was under the impression she was still going to marry his son. If Dick found out, Cruz could kiss their business agreement good-bye as well as the hopes he’d had for the company.
