Page 18

18

ALEX

T wo rooms, Alex reminded herself, sitting at the hotel bar with Orson Davison.

The biggest problem with this man was not that his arrival jeopardized her job and had the possibility of destroying the business she’d rebuilt. It was not even that he was devastatingly handsome and clearly knew it.

It was that he was smart and funny and completely willing to listen to her.

He wasn’t afraid of her or intimidated because she’d flipped him over and sat on him. He wasn’t put off by her insisting on two rooms or trying to pretend their dirty-bad night of passion hadn’t happened. All the things she’d expected from his gruff good looks and high-handed introduction had proved wrong .

And Alex wasn’t that good at being wrong.

Orson, on the other hand, was really good at it. He cheerfully admitted that he knew nothing about Alaska or running a company, with no trace of false humility.

“I was going to come up here and try to take everything over and be this commanding figure, all gruff and grouchy and bad-ass like my brothers, but I was as terrible at that as I am at everything.”

“You’re not terrible at it,” Alex lied kindly.

“I’m terrible at it,” Orson insisted. “Almost as bad as you are at being all giggly and girlish.”

“I’m girlish!” Alex protested. Then the bartender came to take their drink order. “Whiskey on the rocks. Single malt.”

Orson gestured as if that proved his point. “I’d like a Manhattan,” he said. When the bartender moved down the bar to get their drinks, he said in a stage whisper, “I like the cherry.”

There was a dirty joke there, but Alex didn’t bite.

Alex had enough fries and pulled pork in her stomach that she wasn’t afraid of a few drinks, but as the evening went on, she realized that she was a little afraid of Orson.

Not because he could turn into a bear—which ought to have terrified a regular person—but because he could talk about things like babies and marriage, and she wasn’t running in the opposite direction.

He started by asking questions about the business and offering bits of his outside observations that weren’t entirely nonsensical. By the second round, he had coaxed her into talking about her childhood, terrorizing the little suburbia wilderness she grew up in, racing around on her ten-speed with skinned knees and pine sap on her sleeves.

He told her about his misspent youth in return, being the screwball of his brothers.

“So there I was with about fifty-three gallons of coffee creamer, and it’s coating the surface of this fishpond when someone flicks a cherry”—he didn’t volunteer who was smoking what—“and the whole thing goes up like a giant Viking funeral pyre. I didn’t even know coffee creamer was flammable! The fish were fine. In fact, they were probably better off with the stuff burning off the surface than mixing in and suffocating them. But of course, I got blamed for the whole thing, even though it was clearly not my fault. My brother Theo got me a shirt that says fish killer, even though not one of them died except the one already floating sideways, which was probably a coincidence.”

They lost track of time, laughing and talking about everything under the sun. Alex forgot to count how many times her whiskey was refilled, confident that she could hold her own until it was closing time and she had to climb to her feet.

“Two rooms,” Orson told her, and she wasn’t entirely sure how they’d gotten to the hall outside their side-by-side rooms.

“Two rooms,” Alex echoed him foolishly. She didn’t want two rooms by this point, she just wanted Orson to strip her naked and do things to her body like he had before. “We could share one.”

His arm was under hers and she used the other to catch his face and kiss him.

“You’re drunk,” he observed, after a kiss that wasn’t nearly long enough.

“No, I’m not,” Alex protested. “I don’t get drunk. I drink other people under the table.” She was usually the one carrying someone else to bed. This was a very strange position to be in. She could imagine some much better positions, and she found herself running her hand over Orson’s arm suggestively.

“I’m a bear shifter,” he reminded Alex as he unlocked her door, keeping her propped up. “I forgot you wouldn’t be able to keep up.”

“I can keep up!” Alex pushed him away and made it to the bed, which tipped up to meet her. “I just need to take my shirt off…”

He came to help her, to her delight, unclipping her bra and taking off her jeans while she lay, laughing helplessly. Then, he tucked her under the covers and kissed her forehead.

“Aren’t you going to get in here with me?” Alex asked when she realized he still had all his clothing on.

“I love you, Alex Vex,” he said tenderly. “We have two rooms tonight.”

“I’m saying yes,” she reminded him.

“I couldn’t take advantage of you in this state,” Orson said.

“It’s a big state, Alaska. If you cut us in half, Texas would be the third largest state.”

He laughed at her because she was being funny, and then he did the forehead kiss again. Alex meant to intercept him for a real kiss but closed her eyes instead. Then he was gone, the hotel door clicking behind him.

Alex woke up much later feeling dizzy and a lot less amused, and staggered to the bathroom. She drank several tiny cups of water from the tap, and stared at her reflection.

What was she doing, drinking with Orson Davison, thinking about having kids with him and teaching them to ride 10-speeds? She was getting drunk with him at a bar and laughing? It was wrong on every level.

And Alex wasn’t that good at being wrong.