interesting.” Sloane’s gaze frosts over, and she gives Winona’s dress a lingering, scornful glance. “You could have fooled me. I wouldn’t have taken her for someone with good taste.”
“Right?” Winona laughs easily. “I mean, look at the company I’m keeping.” She grins up at me, eyes shining with affection that looks so real it steals my breath. I return her grin, and I don’t have to fake it at all.
Sloane’s face flushes red with anger. She draws her arm back and hurls the contents of her drink directly into Winona’s face.
Chapter Eighteen
Winona
“Ow! Motherforker!”
Before I know it, Blake’s looped his arm around my shoulders and is steering me through the crowd. My eyes sting and tear from the alcohol, and I can barely see.
Behind us, Sloane is squealing in outrage. “Get your hands off of me! Do you know who I am? My daddy will have you arrested!”
A door opens, and slams behind us. I stumble, and Blake holds me upright. “Oh, damn,” I groan, as he pushes me into an elevator. “I know that was the last thing you needed. Did the reporters get all of that?”
“Yes, but it’s not a big deal. It makes Sloane look bad, not me. Now if she goes crying to the press about how I done her wrong, everyone will say ‘no wonder’.”
The elevator goes down two floors and stops. That means we’re on the womenswear floor.
Blake leads me out of the elevator. I’m still half-blind, tears trickling down my cheeks, and I almost crash into someone. “Sorry!” I cry out.
“The store is empty. That’s a mannequin.” Blake lets out a low rumble of laughter. “And she does not accept your apology. She says some people just can’t handle their alcohol.”
“Tell her everyone hates her for her plastic personality. Because, uh, I guess you speak mannequin.” He walks me away from the elevator, hand gently clamped on my arm, and I stumble after him. “My mascara’s doing the thing where I look like a melting panda, isn’t it?” I shake my head, and a blob of margarita-slush slides off my hair and plops icily onto my cleavage, making me shudder. “You’re always seeing me at my worst.”
He stops walking and puts his hands on my shoulders. “Are you crazy? Wait, never mind, we’ve already established the answer to that question. But I’ve never seen you look less than amazing.”
I screw up my face and squint my eyes at him, trying to blink away the sting. “The first time you met me, when I came storming out of the apartment wearing rainbow unicorn jammies with my hair in rollers?”
He laughs. “You were this gorgeously retro 1950s pinup angel of vengeance. A passionate little fireball. I said you were cute, didn’t I?”
“You said I was cute when I was mad,” I correct him snippily.
“I might have said that,” he concedes. “You threw me off guard, which doesn’t happen to me often, and I retreated behind a defensive wall of smart-assery. You’re also cute when you’re not mad, by the way.”
“The next day, when I came out in kitten-sunglasses pajamas?” I’m a little girl, begging for more candy. And Blake’s compliments are very sweet candy indeed.
“I didn’t notice the kittens.”
“What did you notice?”
He hesitates just a little too long. “Nothing.”
“You paused! That was the pause of a liar!”
He sighs. “Your pajama shirt had a button open.”
“Oh my God,” I squeal. “You perv.”
“Only for you.”
He really just said that. My heart pumps faster, and I bite my lip and turn away so I don’t say anything mushy or stupid. “Which way is the bathroom?”
He points to the sign. My vision is clearing enough that I make my way there without accidentally molesting any more mannequins. I wash my face off and use a few squirts of lotion to swipe my smeary eye makeup away. Most of it was on my cheeks anyway.
That’s okay, Blake said he’d never seen me look less than amazing.
Loves me no matter what I look like. My middle-school bookmark list pops into my head. Doesn’t matter. He hates dogs, doesn’t say thank you because it would take three quarters of a second and therefore put him behind schedule, and I’d bet my left kidney he’d rather pay someone to walk an old lady across the street than do it himself.
Also, he’s Blake Hudson, the man who’s so busy he schedules two minutes a morning for shaving. This is so not a man who’s in relationship mode.