Total pages in book: 64
Estimated words: 63862 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 319(@200wpm)___ 255(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 63862 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 319(@200wpm)___ 255(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
His lips tipped up, not quite a smile, and he reached for the back passenger side to open it for me.
When I opened my mouth to say something to the driver, who was looking at Harrison like he was the one to bloody my lip, Harrison offered an address that wasn’t to my hotel as he passed cash to him.
“Don’t worry,” I said as the driver took the cash but kept casting worried glances at me in the rearview, “he wasn’t the one to ugly up my face. That was some assholes who saw me waiting for a ride.”
It was a short ride to Harrison’s hotel, which, no surprise, was much nicer than my own.
“What?” I asked when he turned to shoot me a look.
“Will you just come with me so I can clean you up?”
Those warning alarms?
Yeah, they were going off again.
But the other part of me that was aching for a little comfort after a bad night moved out onto the sidewalk with him.
“Okay, but I still want an annulment,” I said.
His smile was soft, almost as soft as the look in his eye as his hand went to my lower back.
“Yeah, sweetheart, I know you do.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Harrison led me through the lobby, pausing only to request the concierge find and send up a first aid kit, then using his body to block the other passengers in the elevator from gawking at me.
He reached down during the short ride, gently grabbing my wrist to lift and turn my arm so he could inspect my palms.
I’d felt that telltale burning sensation that said I’d scraped them when trying to break my fall, but I hadn’t looked at them myself until that moment.
They looked pretty gnarly: a dozen or so scratches of varying depth, all jagged like pavement cuts always were, with bits of grit and dirt filling the cuts.
Harrison’s thumb gently moved side to side across my wrist before giving it a reassuring squeeze when we reached our floor.
“What? No presidential suite?” I teased as we stepped off onto a relatively normal hotel hallway, albeit with fewer rooms.
“This hotel doesn’t have one,” he admitted. “We will have to make do with a king suite with city views.”
We.
There was no rational reason my heart flip-flopped at that word.
Thankfully, if any tell was on my face, Harrison was too distracted by his keycard to notice.
The inside of the suite was nothing like the one in Vegas, but was pretty in its own way.
The carpet was dark blue, and the windows were abundant.
We stepped right into a lounge. No kitchenette or office area, just a few nice chairs to sit in, a TV, and a good view.
Harrison led me through the bedroom with its king bed and gray sheets, then the bathroom that featured tiles made to look like gray hardwood, a soaking tub, and a glass shower niche.
He led me over to the sink, running the tap, washing the blood off his knuckles, then pressing my hands under the running water.
“One second,” he said when there was a knock on the door.
Alone, I stared at myself in the mirror, taking in the tousled hair, the dried blood on my lip and chin, the split in my lip that still shone with fresh blood whenever it moved, and the wild look in my eyes still from the fight.
I looked away, carefully adding some soap to my hands to clean out the wounds.
Harrison was back quickly, setting down the first aid kit, then grabbing a towel to put around both my hands before pushing me down on the tub deck.
I turned on the tap and scrubbed my feet together to clean off the dirt from stepping out of my shoes before turning back to Harrison.
He worked on my hands first, squatting down with a tweezers to pick out any small pieces of gravel, squeezing some saline on the wounds, swiping on some triple antibiotic, then wrapping them loosely with nonstick gauze.
When his gaze slid up to mine, the look had impact, a little punch to the gut that knocked out my air.
“It’s not bad,” I said to the tender look in his eye. “I’ve had worse scrapping with my cousins. My girl cousins,” I added, making his lips twitch.
He wet some gauze with saline and wiped the blood off my skin before gently pressing a fresh wet gauze to my lip and holding it there until it stopped coming away wet.
“I can’t put anything on this,” he said, “or you’ll be eating it.”
“It’ll heal fast if I don’t do too much smiling.”
“Guess we’re lucky that you don’t usually smile much around me.”
I was sure when he was thinking it, he meant it as a sarcastic throwaway comment. But when it came out, there was a heaviness in his voice that made my chest feel weighted too.