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I wiggle my brows, glad he’s finally circling away from grumpy Murder Maddox territory. “Is that a promise?”
“Let’s call it more of a guarantee.” He carries me to the bed, drops me onto the mattress, and is crawling over me when someone knocks on the door.
Loudly.
Maddox groans. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” His demeanor shifts in the blink of an eye, his teasing temperament immediately replaced by sharp intensity and focus.
I tense at the sudden change. “What’s wrong?”
“That’s the something’s wrong knock.” Maddox climbs off me. “Let me see what it is.” His eyes snap to where I lay. “Don’t move.”
I feel silly, but I do as he says and stay right where I am, the promise of his hands on me enough to keep me in place.
Maddox answers the door, speaking in hushed tones with Luca. After a few tense words, he closes the door and comes back, looking irritated. “You’re not going to believe this.”
At this point, I’ll believe just about anything. “Try me.”
Maddox holds out a hand, taking mine and pulling me up off the bed. “Butch is here and ready to talk about everything he knows.”
I think I understand how Luca felt when Butch showed up at the restaurant yesterday, because the guy is turning out to be kind of a cock block. “So I’m guessing this means you’re gonna give me a rain check, right?”
“You can have as many rain checks as you want.” Maddox pulls me close, pressing a kiss to my lips. “But I don’t know how long this is going to take. It could be an hour. It could be three.”
“I’ll be fine.” I look around the room I’ve spent the majority of my time in recently. “I’ll probably take a shower and straighten up a little bit. Maybe call and check in at work.”
Maddox’s expression tightens at the last bit. “Don’t tell them where you are.”
“I know.” I grab him by the shoulders, turning him toward the door. The sooner he gets this done, the faster they can hunt down Becca’s sister and kill everyone involved in her abduction.
And the sooner I can go home. Wherever that is.
Maddox stops to give me one more kiss and then he slips out the door, ducking into Luca and Owen’s room next door.
Turning back to my own room, I blow out a loud breath. “Guess it’s just you and me again.”
I decide to hit the shower first. I didn’t have as much to drink last night as Becca, but I’ve still got a little bit of a headache, and the hot water will probably ease that. Going into the bathroom, I flip on the light and scowl. I’ve skipped housekeeping since it’s weird to hang out while someone cleans your mess, but we’ve been here long enough that it’s probably time to get some fresh towels. I don’t mind using the same one a few times, but they’re starting to get a little past their prime.
While I wait for housekeeping to start making rounds, I decide to move on with my to-do list. Grabbing Maddox’s cell phone, I call Ginny. When she doesn’t answer, I leave a message, asking her to call me back. Then I try Dane. He’s on the schedule today, so he should be able to fill me in on how things are going.
But his phone also goes to voicemail. I leave him the same message I left Ginny, then I sit at the desk for a minute, completely unmotivated to make the bed or collect trash.
It's still a little early, but I decide to poke my head out into the hall anyway, hoping I’ll get lucky and the housekeeping staff will be making their way through the rooms, but there’s no one in sight.
I should just suck it up and start cleaning, but I can’t make myself do it. Instead, I go to the phone on the nightstand and dial the front desk, planning to ask them to bring towels. It rings a crazy number of times before someone finally answers and puts me on hold. I wait. And wait. And wait.
I finally give up and decide I could probably use the exercise anyway. Grabbing the room key, I head out to place my request for more towels in person.
The halls are quiet as I make my way down to the main floor, but once I get there, I see why I had so much trouble getting through to the front desk. There are teenagers everywhere. They’re loud. They’re rowdy.
They’re making my head hurt.
I start to turn back to my room, but the prospect of picking up and organizing the same things I’ve picked up and organized countless times over the past few days is way less appealing than whatever this is, so I make my way through the crowd. The line at the desk is pretty long, but eventually I step up to the counter. After giving the overwhelmed looking woman on the other side a smile, I put in my towel request. Then I ask, “What’s going on?”
She sighs. “They’re hosting the Future Farmers of America conference here this year, and somehow they got the dates wrong. Everyone showed up a day early and now they don’t have anything to do, so they’ve turned the lobby into their personal hangout spot.”
I cringe. “What a nightmare.”
She shakes her head. “You have no idea.”