Page 16 of Love’s a Script (Hearts Collide #1)
Chapter Sixteen
On the second morning under the shelter-in-place advisory, Ruben was awakened by the sunlight slipping past a gap in the curtains. It softly defined everything in the hotel room, including Mary.
He smiled upon seeing her. The invariably elegant and put together Mary was not a graceful sleeper. Her limbs were sprawled out like branches. The thin top sheet was tangled around her waist, and the scarf that had been covering her head had vanished.
Before last night, he thought he understood Mary, but learning she didn’t always show up as the bold, incisive force she was with him piqued his natural curiosity.
It made him want to lean in and discover more fascinating complexities.
As he continued to consider her, a stray desire rose to reach across the cavern that separated their beds and sweep the mussed hair from her pretty face.
It was a jarring thought that drove Ruben out of bed and quickly into the bathroom with his toiletries.
The last thing he needed while rooming with Mary was to entertain any ideas that could alter his general regard for her into something specific and potent.
He stepped into the shower before the running water had a chance to warm up and doused the yearning from his body.
Mary couldn’t ever suspect this attraction.
It would mess with their congenial relationship, turn it awkward, and more importantly, it could affect how she did her job as his matchmaker moving forward.
After dressing and double-checking that he’d not left even a speck of toothpaste in the sink, he emerged from the washroom with his thoughts fairly sorted out.
Mary was awake by then, sitting in bed watching the news.
The anchor was numerating the damages from the last twenty-four hours and forecasting another harsh day.
“Morning,” he said, avoiding direct eye contact.
“Morning,” she replied, her voice husky from sleep.
The sultry sound set off a gentle quake across his chest as if it had been murmured directly against him.
“I’ll give you some space,” he said, quickly straightening the duvet on his bed. He needed to get out of there. “Do you want me to save you anything from the buffet?”
“No, it’s all right. I won’t be coming down for breakfast.”
Ruben paused and looked at her. “You okay?” he asked. She was propped up against her headboard with the top sheet tucked under her arms. Besides the faint lines marking her face from where she’d lain on her pillow, she appeared herself.
“The bride from the wedding I attended this weekend misplaced her engagement ring, so I’m going to help look for it.”
“Do they need extra hands?” he asked.
“No, it should be fine. It’s me, plus her entire wedding party.”
“All right,” he said. “Find me if things change.”
He left the room then and headed down for breakfast. The confusion in the lobby and restaurant from the previous day had greatly improved, and folks seemed to have accepted this would be their circumstances for a while.
A few old men casually chatted with each other as they watched the snowfall at the biggest window in the restaurant, someone was walking around in their robe, and a group of kids were playing a game of tag in a corner of the lobby.
The spread at the breakfast buffet was less varied than the day before, with the offerings including two types of cereals, whole wheat bread, and a fruit salad.
“What you see is what there is,” the staff member nearby would periodically announce.
Ruben ate his breakfast with the Arizona couple who spent the meal outlining more of their endgame preparations. Today they’d be stockpiling lithium batteries they could find around the hotel. At first, Ruben humored them with questions, but grew fascinated by their intensive plans.
Once Ruben was finished with breakfast, he visited the activity desk.
Anything he might have tolerated was already full for the morning, so he returned to his empty hotel room.
He spent a portion of time reading, another completing a lower body stretch routine for his aching calves, then he worked on his laptop before abandoning it for television when the internet connection began to lag.
He became restless and was seriously considering the 11:30 a.m. bracelet-making session when his cousin called.
“They’re predicting it’ll be at most another day,” Junie said.
“And thank god because I don’t know how many more rounds of Yahtzee I have in me.
” She’d been hunkering down through the blizzard at her parents’ home, and Ruben had been getting a play-by-play of the trying experience through text: All I’ve watched today is Sanford and Son episodes and the news…
Time has no meaning here… I keep forgetting not to swear.
“It’ll probably be longer for us up here,” Ruben said. “The roads to the highway haven’t been cleared at all.”
“An extended vacation in a nice hotel doesn’t sound bad.”
“It’s not exactly a restful alpine getaway right now,” he replied, telling her about the guest overcapacity, middling food, and haphazard summer camp entertainment. “I’m also rooming with Mary.”
“Who’s—wait, you mean your matchmaker, Mary?”
“Yeah, it was a coincidence. We were attending different events at the hotel. She didn’t have a room, I had two beds in mine, so I offered one to her.”
“Okay, so you’re definitely having a better time than me. Getting snowed in with a beautiful woman is actually my dream scenario.”
“Well, my situation is not that,” Ruben said with a dismissive laugh that sounded forced to his own ears, but he quickly changed the subject. This situation could never be that.
* * *
Inside the bridal suite of Mary’s former client, things were already in disarray. The bed had been stripped of its sheets, the mattress thrust off its base, and suitcases had been opened and emptied.
Vanessa sat on a chair in the corner of the room, eyes red and swollen as her bridesmaids looked on helplessly.
“Hey,” Mary said softly as she advanced toward the group.
Vanessa leaped from her seat and raced to hug Mary. “It’s not here! I’ve looked everywhere!” Vanessa wailed, her arms like a vice around Mary’s neck. “It was Ian’s great-grandmother’s ring, and I’ve lost it!”
“It’s going to be okay,” Mary said, pulling back to look straight into her former client’s eyes.
“Listen to me. We know you wore the ring on the wedding day, so it’s in this hotel somewhere.
We’ll go through this room again. Then we’ll search all the spots you took photos.
Ian and the groomsman can tackle the ceremony and reception halls. ”
“Ian doesn’t know yet,” Vanessa said, on the verge of tears again. “I don’t want to tell him.”
“It’ll be faster if we divide and conquer, so we should tell him what’s going on. Does that work for you?”
Vanessa nodded, and once Mary gave the bridesmaids instructions on how to systematically go through the space, she found the groom in the hallway, baffled as to why his wife had refused to talk to him all morning.
After Mary explained the situation, Ian asked, “Is she okay?”
“No, not really, but it would help if you went in there and told her you don’t hate her for possibly losing a family heirloom twenty-four hours after your wedding.”
With the slight tension in the new marriage on its way to repair, Mary joined the search efforts in the suite.
She scrutinized the carpet, several times mistaking glitter remnants from the bachelorette party for the ring. She went through every drawer in the room twice over. Nothing. And when Mary and the bridal party broke for lunch, the ring was still missing.
The women sat around on different available surfaces, waiting for the groomsmen—whose search of the halls had also produced nothing—to deliver lunch from the restaurant.
“I was so scared this whole wedding would fly by and I wouldn’t remember a thing,” Vanessa said dejectedly, “but I can say these have been the longest days of my life.”
The bridesmaids, realizing their friend needed distraction, overwhelmed the moment with good memories, gossip, and inside jokes. There was hardly a gap of silence, and Mary looked on with admiration at the display of friendship.
“Mary,” said the maid of honor, a tall woman with shiny auburn hair, “who is that man you sit with at mealtimes? The one with the freckles.”
Not only had Mary not expected the question, but she was surprised to see the entire bridal party had leaned in to listen to her reply.
Mary fumbled for an answer that wouldn’t breach Ruben’s privacy as a current client. “He’s my—I suppose we’re…acquaintances,” she finally said.
“Do you know if he’s single?” the maid of honor asked. “Because Bethany is single.”
“Oh, my god, stop, you guys,” Bethany said with mock modesty. “But is he?”
The friends laughed, and Mary, uncomfortable, replied, “Ah, yeah. Yeah, he is.”
“Could you introduce us?”
“I’m off duty,” Mary said with a laugh she couldn’t help including even though she knew its undermining effects.
“All you have to do is make an introduction,” said Vanessa, appearing spirited in a way she’d not been all morning.
Mary hesitated, but under the other women’s fixed gazes, she buckled. “All right, but I’ll first make sure he’s interested in meeting someone.”
There was a knock at the hotel door that turned out to be the groom and two of his groomsmen with sandwiches and juice boxes for lunch.
And as the meals were divided up, Mary retreated to the suite’s bathroom for a moment alone.
She needed to rein in her annoyance, but she took her job seriously and this was not how she worked.
As a matchmaker she didn’t just throw people together.
There was a method. Things to consider, and Mary knew nothing about Bethany except that the cool-toned bridesmaid dress had suited her complexion the best.
Mary sat on the edge of the giant bathtub and flipped her head over her knees.
The rush of blood gave her the impression that all her worries were draining out of her, and when she turned back upright, she was slightly dizzy but thinking clearer.
A simple introduction did not have to bear the weight of her entire matchmaking practice.
Plus, if Ruben and Bethany made a genuine connection, Mary would’ve unofficially but technically succeeded in matching him, and he would no longer be a client.
No more contact, no more contention about thinking he was good-looking. She’d be free.
Mary moved to stand from the tub, but a flicker of light caught her eye. She cocked her head for a second look, and there, just behind the basin sink, lay Vanessa’s emerald-and-diamond-cluster engagement ring.