I had also been constantly licked, sniffed, and prodded by dogs. Apparently, everybody had decided their dogs would like to swim as well, which the resort staff hadn’t seemed pleased by. By the time I had headed back to my room from lunch, I had been soaked from the waist down from canine attention—and numb from the shoulders up after several conversations with women who hadn’t bothered to hide their intentions.
It was just past seven when I gave up for the night and went back to my room, feeling oddly defeated. I wasn’t used to letting go of control, but that was exactly what I’d done with Miranda. The right thing to do was to keep my nose out of her business, so that was exactly what I was going to do, even if it killed me.
I heard muted laughter about half an hour later. I half tossed my laptop on the bed and moved to the door, pressing my ear against the wood. I stepped out onto the porch of my cabin and looked toward Miranda’s. She was heading out in a little black number and looked dressed to kill.
Jealousy spiked through me. Who was she trying so hard to impress, and why did I want to strangle them so badly?
“Hey,” I called out. Our cabins were separated by only a dozen feet of space, and I barely had to raise my voice to catch her attention.
“Oh,” she said. “Hey.”
“Got plans?” I asked.
She busied herself looking for something in her purse but apparently had no plans to answer me.
“If you are trying to look for a chocolate bar in there, no thanks. I’ve seen where you stash them for your friends. I can only imagine where one for me would come from.”
She gave me an odd look. “What?”
I blew out a breath and rubbed the back of my neck. What the hell? I never had trouble talking to women, but now I was trying so hard to walk some blurry line between professional and personal that I was failing at both. “I was trying to make a joke. Since you had stuffed the candy wrapper ‘for your friend’ in your bra the other day. At the office,” I added awkwardly. I was suddenly wishing I’d been smart enough to stay in my goddamn cabin. I was doing about as well here as a hormonal teenager who was trying to hide a boner behind his calculus book—not that I’d ever had any personal experience with that technique.
“I was looking for my phone, actually,” she said. There was a cold flatness to her voice that made my stomach feel empty.
For the millionth time, I reminded myself that I was only getting what I wanted. I had been the one to decide I was going to push her away, and, go figure, she was thoroughly pushed. “You enjoying yourself so far?”
“Ready?” asked a deep voice from inside her cabin.
Miranda turned, nodded quickly, and gave me a tight-lipped smile. “Gotta go,” she said.
Max Frost stepped outside wearing a button-down shirt and so much cologne I caught a whiff from where I was standing. I bet the dickbag was wearing his favorite underwear too. He probably thought he was going to score tonight. Maybe he was. Maybe he already had, and tonight would just be the extra-point attempt.
A strange, stifled groan came from my throat. I coughed, cleared my throat, and waved back. “We’ll catch up later,” I said.
Then I went back in my room and tried to clear my mind. There were a few ways I could handle this. The least productive, but most satisfying, would be to grab a heavy object and go give Max Frost and his stupid name a concussion so he couldn’t try to worm his way into my vice president’s pants. The most pathetic would be to skulk around and try to spy on them so I wouldn’t have to sit here and imagine the worst. And the smartest thing to do—the thing I was going to do—was to sit my ass down and go to sleep.
The hardest things to do were usually the ones that were the most worth doing. And if that saying held any truth, then staying inside my cabin was going to be one of the most worthwhile things any human being had ever done since the beginning of time.
Except I didn’t sleep. I flicked on the TV and tried to find something to watch. It took me several minutes to find a channel that wasn’t on commercial break, which meant I was stuck watching some sort of dog beauty contest. I leaned against the headboard and watched with glazed eyes. At least it meant I could take my mind off what Miranda and that jackass were probably doing right now.
Chapter 13
MIRANDA
Max and I sat down at one of the many bars throughout the resort. This particular bar was a beautiful outdoor space strewn with dangling white lights and a stone patio that overlooked the mountains in the distance. There was a pleasant chill to the air, and it should’ve been a perfect night. No, it was a perfect night.
I’d been doing some soul-searching and decided that I needed to do more than just shove Nick to the back burner in my brain. I needed to aggressively get over him, or it was never going to happen. That meant I had to do something, like say yes when Max asked me if I wanted to go grab a drink with him. Maybe I hadn’t felt any spark between us, but that was the whole point of going on a date, right?
So here I was. A handsome man was sitting at the bar beside me, the view was breathtaking, and I was basically on a free vacation.
“I’m glad you agreed to come,” Max said once the bartender set our drinks down. We had both been pleased to learn that even the alcohol was covered under the company tab. I was never much of a drinker, but tonight, a little liquid courage sounded like a good plan.
“Me too,” I said. I sipped the wine I’d ordered and made an appreciative noise.
“Your boss is kind of an asshole, isn’t he?” Max asked.
I took another sip of my wine that was admittedly more of a gulp at his question. “Sort of,” I said. “I mean, it depends on how you look at it.”
“Then tell me how you look at it, then.”
I sighed. I’d come out here tonight to get Nick off my mind, not talk through my feelings for him. “I don’t know, exactly. Like he has always sent me extremely frustratingly mixed signals? One minute I think he’s romantically interested, and the next he’s actively trying to make me not like him.”
Max looked at his drink thoughtfully, then smiled in a way that made me think he hadn’t really cared about my answer, after all. “You deserve better than that,” he said.
I smiled, but it felt forced. I drained the last of my glass. I could already feel a slight buzzing in my head that told me I was right about where I should stop drinking if I wanted to keep my mind sharp. I hadn’t really eaten since that huge breakfast, and I was already a lightweight to begin with.
“She’ll have another,” Max said.
I shook my head. “No, it’s okay. I think I need to eat something before I drink any more.”
“Hey,” he said, leaning in. “What are you worried about? That asshole reprimanding you for having too much fun? If he’s going to be a dick either way, why stop yourself from having fun at his expense?”
I thought about that. There was a certain satisfaction in the idea of doing something to spite Nick, even if it was petty. “Just one more glass,” I said.
An hour later, my head was thoroughly spinning. Max was about ten minutes deep in a story about some locker room confrontation that had led to a fistfight back in his high school days. He had stood up and was acting out the story, punching, ducking, and weaving to the side.