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1
RAYNE
However bad your night is going, I promise mine is worse.
Two seconds ago, I was holding a wine glass. Now, the lithe blonde woman I’ve been serving all night is holding it…
In her lap.
“You klutz!” the woman cries out as she slaps my empty hand away. She leaps to her feet. The glass tumbles across the floor with a wince-inducing thunk and rattle. The barely audibledrip-drip-dripof red wine on the hardwood floor is somehow the loudest sound I’ve ever heard.
The rest of the people in the ballroom watch with bated breath. It’s a weird feeling to have five hundred sets of eyeballs on you at once, especially when the combined net worth of those eyeballs’ owners outweighs the GDP of Guam.
But one pair of eyes is more skewering than all the rest of them put together.
And he’s looking right at me.
Despite me having spent half the night eye-humping the dark-haired, green-eyed demigod across the table, I can’t bear to look at him now. Looking at him is how this entire problem got started, actually. If I’d been focused on my job instead of the way his huge, tattooed hand curled around his glass of whiskey, maybe I wouldn’t have made a Cabernet-soaked mess of his date.
“My gown is ruined!” the woman howls. She’s trying to swipe the wine away from her shimmering gold mini-dress, but it’s only making matters worse.
“I am so sorry,” I stammer. “I didn’t—Let me get you a towel. Can I get you a towel? And some club soda. I’ll just…”
I start to back away, but the woman rears on me. “You dropped that glass in my lap on purpose,” she hisses. “I saw you!”
I shake my head dumbly. “I didn’t, I swear. It was an accident. It slipped.”
The red wine stain spreading across her golden yellow bodice looks like blood. It might as well be, as far as I’m concerned, because my boss is going to kill me for this.
Irving made it very, very clear that tonight was one of the most high-profile events of the season, and that the utmost attention to detail was required from all of his waitstaff.
I wasn’t even supposed to be here. I’d planned to take the night off of work since it’s my mom’s birthday. Well,washer birthday, I guess. All I wanted was to take it easy and be alone and cry into a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. But Irving called for all hands on deck, and I had no choice but to come into work, waiting hand and foot on the city’s rich and famous.
“I’m putting my best waitresses on the most important attendees,” Irving had said during the evening’s prep. “Rayne, you’re on Kirill Zaitsev’s table. Can you handle that?”
Another waitress I sort of knew, Miranda, had mumbled to her friend, “Lucky bitch. I’d gladly be on his table. Or bent over it. Whichever he prefers.”
I didn’t know what she meant until I strode up to table two and caught an eyeful of the spectacle of man that could only be Mr. Zaitsev.
Bright green eyes, long lashes, and a chiseled body. The combination is enough that even I, the notoriously sexless Rayne Garner, had to take notice.
My best friend Harmony has accused me of being in a “sex drought” and keeps demanding I take steps to get out of it. I told her I had no interest in a relationship, and she went ballistic.
“Who said anything about a relationship?” Harmony croaked when we talked on the phone two nights ago. “I’m talking about sex! Banging! Making sweet, sweet love with some handsome, sweaty stranger. For the love of God, just go get yourself laid, Rayne. It will make you feel better.”
I’d waved her off. “It just doesn’t feel like such a big deal to me,” I’d told her. “I don’t need extra drama. My life has plenty of that as it is.”
Back in the present, the blonde woman turns to me, arms outstretched. “Well? Are you an inbred, or just run-of-the-mill stupid? Say something!”
Every time she opens her mouth, I regret dumping wine on her a little bit less.
“I said I was sorry. Iamsorry,” I repeat. “Would you like a refill?”
“Why? So you can dump it on me? Christ, no, I don’t want anything from you. I knew this was a charity event, but I didn’t realize the waitstaffwerethe charity.”
I hear my mom’s voice in my head.Rise above it.There aren’t numbers high enough to describe how many times I heard that throughout my life.
Rising above this snobby woman shouldn’t be that hard, seeing as how she’s stooping pretty damn low. But Mom was always better at this sort of thing than I was. Even when my dad left us to start a second family, my mom never said a bad word against him. She always knew how to turn the other cheek. Even when there were tears running down them.
