I throw a thumbs-up over my shoulder. “Getting out right now. I swear. You come find me when you’re done, and we’ll sort this out.”
“Get out!” she shrieks again, making my feet fall into a jog all on their own. I grab the edge of the bathroom door and swing it closed behind myself as swiftly as I can but stop there before going any farther.
Katy Dayton. Naked. In the bathroom of my vacation rental.
Man oh man, this three-day vacation just got very interesting.
3
Katy
Mack Houston is here?! In my freaking rental?!
What kind of fresh hell of a nightmare am I living in right now?
And come find him when I’m done? Why is that even a thing when I’m six hours away from home on a vacation that was only supposed to include me, myself, and I?
Not to mention, he saw me naked. Not completely naked, I hope, but considering we’re coworkers, he definitely saw far too much of me
Lord help me.
This whole situation is a mental mindfuck, and I can’t keep myself in the shower long enough to wash the soap out of my hair. I need to figure out why in the hell he’s here, and I need to do it right now.
Frantic, I jump out of the shower while it’s still running, and shampoo drips from my hair and onto my forehead. My feet miss the mat in front of the glass door completely, and I play slip-and-slide on the tile.
“Owww, shit,” I yelp, my knee hitting the hard surface and slowing my descent into the buck-ass splits. If the Dallas Cowboys went pornographic, this move would be right on brand.
“Frackkk,” I groan, twisting my hip and squirming on the floor to get my feet back under me. My skin is wet and aggressive against the tile, and my hair smacks me in the eye and deposits shampoo. “Gah!”
All thanks to adrenaline, I’m a one-woman vaudevillian act of disaster.
I use one palm to put pressure on my lava-filled eye and the other hand to pull myself up off the floor. Once I yank a towel off the bar, I wrap it around myself haphazardly.
My dripping hair is officially cutting a river through this condo like the Colorado through the Grand Canyon, but I don’t care. As long as my tits and bits are covered, figuring out how in the motherfuuuck Mack Houston ended up in my vacation rental with me seems like the priority.
I’ve always been heavy-footed, but my everyday gait’s got nothing on the thunderous sound of my progress across the hardwood floor as I burst out of the master bedroom and head toward the kitchen.
Of course, Mack just stands untroubled at the counter, his ankles crossed and a stupid smile in place on his face. Instantly, my rage spikes from an eight to an eleven. How can this man be so calm right now?
It’s only after my boiling blood rises to the whites behind my eyes that I notice the glass in his hand and the corkscrew on the counter and my bottle of now-opened wine.
No. Flipping. Way.
A gasp flies from my mouth. “Are you drinking my wine?” I shriek as months and months of saving that bottle for a special occasion flash before my eyes.
“This?” He tips his chin down to the glass in his hand and studies the liquid. “Is it yours?”
“Yes, it’s mine!” I yell, much louder than I expect. To be honest, the volume actually makes me startle myself a bit. I clear my throat to get my bearings and lower my voice back to normal. “What on earth made you think you had a right to drink it?”
“It was sitting with a welcome note,” he protests, jerking his chin toward the counter. “I assumed it was a gift with the rental.”
I follow his gaze to the note and bottle on the counter and bite my cheek to stop the evolving sting in my nose. I do not want to cry in front of Mack Houston over a bottle of wine, so help me God. But I’m on the emotional brink. I scrimped and saved and sold my soul to the devil to be able to afford this weekend in the first place, and now it’s one giant freaking catastrophe.
“This is unbelievable! I cannot believe this is happening!”
“Relax, it’s not that big of a deal.”
“Not that big of a deal?” My jaw drops. “I’ve been counting down the days to this vacation, and now I’m here and not even an hour into my weekend getaway and you show up out of nowhere while I was in the shower!”
“Uh.” He scrunches up his nose. “Wow. That ‘you’ was said really distastefully, Katy Cat.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Yeah, it was,” he answers with an infuriating smirk. “It was one step away from you just saying ‘Ewww.’”
“Forget what I said.” I heave a deep sigh. “Why are you here? How are you here? This has to be an April Fools’ joke. Clowns have to jump out of the corner at any moment now, right?” I glance around the kitchen maniacally. “I swear on everything, I’ll stab you with that corkscrew if you’ve somehow managed a stupid candid camera prank.”
“First of all, April Fools’ Day was yesterday, and there are no clowns or cameras.” He winks, and I hate that my eyes deem that wink as an attractive—more like, sexy—expression. “At least, I don’t think there are.”
I also hate that my gaze takes note of just how defined his body looks beneath his loose surfer-style tank top and board shorts.
You might hate the realization, but it is the reality, honey. No matter how much he annoys you, Mack Houston is a certified stone-cold fox, and there’s no way you can get around it.
I glare, but I’m pretty sure it’s more at myself than him. “Then why are you here?”
“Because I rented this place.”
“What? No, you didn’t.”
“Yes, I did.”
“You didn’t. You couldn’t have. Because I rented this place. I secured the reservation several months ago.”
His face morphs into amusement, and his voice is one-hundred-percent confident. “So did I.”
I shake my head. “No, you didn’t.”
“Listen, I know you keep saying that over and over, but it’s not going to make it true,” he responds, still infuriatingly unfazed over the whole debacle. “I talked to Kimmie about renting her parents’ house on the beach right when we came back from Christmas break.”
“So did I,” I retort. “And I confirmed the rental through RentBNB. Did you? Or did you just assume talking to Kimmie made it so?”
“I’m not an idiot, Katy Cat. I booked it on the website, just like you did.”
“How?” I cry.
Mack shrugs, the laid-back, nothing-fazes-me bastard. “I guess they double-booked us or something. Technical glitch, I don’t know. I’m as clueless as you right now.”
“We have to call Kimmie. We have to sort this out right now.”
“Okay. Call Kimmie, then.”
“I can’t call Kimmie. I don’t have Kimmie’s number. You call Kimmie.”
His shoulders straighten and eyes narrow pointedly. “Well, I hate to break it to you, but I don’t have Kimmie’s number either.”
“You don’t?” I could have sworn he was friends with her outside of school. He’s freaking friends with everyone, and now he doesn’t have a relationship with the one person I need him to?