Clearly Olivia was suffering from selective memory and/or delusion.
She surveyed the bed. ‘But just in case we’ll build a barricade.’
With great precision she leant over the mattress and Adam’s heart skipped a beat at the sight of her heart-shaped bottom.
Very carefully Olivia arranged an armful of pillows in a straight line down the middle of the bed. ‘Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy. Sleep well, Adam’
Somehow that seemed unlikely.
But it would be another first. Sharing a bed with a woman and a barricade; he must be losing his touch.
* * *
Olivia squeaked her eyelids open and hurriedly closed them again. Sunlight. That was definitely a clue. So was the whirr of air-conditioning.
Enough to tell her that she wasn’t tucked up nice and safe and warm in her bedroom at home in the middle of a Bath winter.
Then there was the flower-sweet scent borne in on the sunlit breeze.
She was in Thailand.
Memories surfaced. Of a bar on the beach. Golden sand crunching underneath her toes. A fantastically beautiful sunset. Drums... A napkin scribbled with notes... And beer...lots of beer.
And there had been Adam.
‘Rise and shine, Liv.’
‘That’s a joke, right? And who said you could call me Liv?’
‘You did.’ His deep tone was tinged with amusement. ‘So, rise and shine, Liv.’
Olivia hauled her eyes open again and turned her head, wincing. ‘Rising is a faint possibility. Shining, not so much.’
‘I’ve brought tea,’ he said, and stepped forward to place a steaming mug on the bedside table.
Bedside.
The word was ominous, opening the floodgates to the next wave of memory.
Olivia braced her hands on the mattress and hoisted herself up gingerly, wriggled backwards and leant against the padded headboard. She reached for the life-saving cup of tea, devoutly hoping that everything could be cured by a nice cuppa.
‘Thank you,’ she murmured, her tongue thick and fuzzy, but soothed by the strong brew, and her parched throat grateful as the reviving liquid slipped down her throat. ‘So...’ Gripping the folds of the blanket, she forced herself to meet his gaze. ‘Hit me. How embarrassed should I be?’
‘How embarrassed do you want to be?’
She very rarely got even so much as tipsy, and even then only if she was with someone like Suzi, whom she trusted implicitly. Alcohol was a known inhibition-destroyer and a sure-fire route to loss of control. So what had she been thinking last night? Somewhere along the line she had quite clearly dropped the ball.
Please let that be the only ball-associated activity that had gone on. What a crying waste it would be if she’d slept with Adam and didn’t remember it. No. That wasn’t possible. Every molecule of her would retain every second of the experience. This she knew.
‘Just tell me, Adam. What did I do?’
‘Nothing so terrible. Honest. I like sleeping with a barricade down the middle of the bed.’
His eyes glittered, and the glints of amusement were oddly reassuring. Adam was teasing her, and he wouldn’t do that if she’d done anything spectacularly daft. Like climbing over the barricade and jumping his bones.
Trepidation returned and Olivia licked suddenly dry lips, heat shooting through her as his eyes followed the movement, snagged on her mouth ‘Did it work?’
‘Yes, it worked.’ His face was suddenly unreadable.
For heaven’s sake. She was being an idiot. Of course the barricade had worked; it hadn’t even been necessary. Not only had she drunk enough beer to knock out a football team, she’d also passed out. That was enough to kill off any attraction.
And should any lingering tendrils have remained he’d now been treated to her in all her morning glory. A surreptitious glance down showed she was still in the grey top and trousers, now rumpled beyond repair. The strong tea had at least obliterated the fuzzy taste in her mouth, but Olivia could only imagine the state of her face. The remnants of yesterday’s make-up; her hair back in bird’s-nest mode. So one thing was for sure: any attraction Adam might still have retained for her would have been killed stone-cold dead.
Which was a good thing.
‘Good. So now, if you leave me to it, I’ll try and transform myself into something more human.’
‘OK.’ He nodded. ‘I’ll be in the foyer in half an hour.’
Thirty minutes later she surveyed herself in the mirror. This worked. Cool, calm, and the epitome of poised.
No one would believe the woman in the mirror capable of mad drunken exploits. The navy sleeveless dress had been chosen with a view to impressing Zeb with her professionalism, but it would now hopefully convey to both Adam and Olivia that she was a together person with a mortgage and a business. As opposed to a drunken idiot.