The room spun as my vision grew spotty and dark before the floor rushed up to greet me.
There were no thoughts left after that.
Chapter 3
Maverick
“Oh shit!” I yelped, scrambling so fast I fell off the bed. “Is he dead? Did he have a heart attack? Oh my goddess, what do we do?”
“Mav…”
“He’s dead, isn’t he? We’re gonna get arrested and have our faces splashed all over the front page of the newspaper back home, and it won’t be for our cookies this time either!” I screeched. “What are our folks gonna say? I just know mine will try to blame it all on you when I’m the one who scared the poor guy to death. Number 723 in the long list of reasons they have for why we shouldn’t be friends or business partners, you just watch.”
“Mav, I don’t think…”
“What are we gonna do now, Briar? Do we move the body? Hide the body? Eat the body? Oh eww, please say we don’t have to eat the body. I don’t think I can. I’ll puke, Briar, I know I will.”
His arms slid around me, and he hugged me tight, lips tickling the shell of my ear as he spoke directly into it.
“Relax, Mav, breathe. Just breathe, okay?” Briar cooed. “He’s not dead. He just passed out and hit his head on the floor. We’d better call up to the reception desk; they’ll know what to do.”
“What the hell was he doing in here anyway?” I squeaked, clinging to the arms he’d wrapped around me. “Why break into our cabin? This better not be another of Pasqual’s attempts to steal our recipes, ‘cause I swear I will eat him and deal with the heartburn later.”
“Just relax and put some pants on,” he said, nudging me in the direction of the dresser where I’d unpacked our clothes. “I’ll call the receptionist, and we can take it from there.”
“How are you so calm about this?” I asked as I yanked the drawer open so hard, I pulled it out completely and dropped it on my foot. “Owe! Fuck! Dammit! Son of a fucking bitch!”
Now we had a passed-out human on the floor and me hopping around on one foot, cussing up a blue streak.
“Shhhh, shhh, it’s okay; let’s see what you’ve done to yourself,” he said as he sat me on the edge of the bed and took my foot in his hands. “Hardly even a bruise; it will be gone in a second, sweetheart. Just slow down. We’re not going to get into trouble for this, I promise. He’s the one at fault for breaking in here, not us. As soon as they look at him, they’ll see that we didn’t lay a claw on him.”
“Why didn’t you? Why were you just lying there staring at him when I woke up?”
Pain made me angry. Fear amplified it. I was usually the chill one, while he tended to go off half-cocked and threatened to claw people’s eyes out and feed them to them.
“I don’t know,” he said as he picked up the drawer and slid it back into place. “I just didn’t sense a threat from him. He seemed more curious than dangerous, at least until you scared the shit out of him.”
“Me?” I squeaked; glad my foot had stopped throbbing so I could help him pick up the rest of my clothes. “I scaredhim? How do you think I felt seeing a stranger standing beside our bed watching us? Not that there was anything to see, but…you don’t think he was looking for a thrill, do you?”
I was getting worked up again; I could feel it. My nerves were completely frazzled, there was still a passed-out stranger on our floor, and we were both still fucking naked.
“I really need you to get yourself together before your imagination runs even further off the rails and takes us both with it,” Briar said. “I’m sure he didn’t come in here hoping I had you pinned to the bed.”
“Good,” I snapped, “because we swore we were done with all of that when we shut down our OnlyFans page.”
“And we are. I don’t know what the hell is going on, but we will get to the bottom of it. Now put these on and let me find my phone.”
“They’re in the pocket of your jeans, which are still on the floor of the kitchen,” I replied as I wiggled into the pair of sleep pants he passed me. “I’ll go get them. I don’t want to be alone in here with him.”
Before he could reply, I scrambled out the door, keeping my eyes straight ahead so the sight of the stranger wouldn’t send me hurtling back to the edge of a meltdown. I gathered all the clothes we’d left discarded on the kitchen floor and carried them back to the bedroom, not wanting whoever they sent up here to deal with the stranger to think we were a bunch of slobs or had decided to fuck right there on the kitchen floor the moment we arrived. That’s pretty much where my brain would have gone if I’d seen the way our clothes were scattered. I had to go up on tiptoes to get my shirt down from the chandelier, but I snagged it and without putting a hole in the collar when I flipped it free.
It was only when I left the kitchen and stepped back into the living room area that I noticed a bunch of things by the door that we certainly hadn’t left there. There were snowshoes behind the boot rack and a bulging brown paper sack sitting in front of the couch. Several other items had magically appeared since we’d curled up to nap, including some kind of wooden contraption that was propped up behind the door.
What the fuck?
“Hey Briar, you’re not gonna believe this; he brought a bunch of stuff with him,” I said as I stepped back into the bedroom to see that Briar had pulled on a pair of sleep pants too.
“Really?”
