Behind the glasses, Tean blinked.“Well, yeah.”
“Top and bottom.”
“I mean—” And then his eyebrows did that thing where they get scrunched up and somehow even fuzzier, and he started stabbing the straw into the ice again.
“Colors would be helpful.”
“White shirt.Or a light color, anyway.Dark pants.”
So, maybe colorswouldn’tbe helpful.But Jem nodded and said, “Point her out if you see her before we leave.Meanwhile, I hope you’re feeling up to driving, because I have had a super shitty night, so I’m going to have another drink, and I’m going to get super horny—”
“Big change,” Tean muttered.
Grinning, Jem said, “And when we get home, we’re going to absolutely wreck each other.”
“Or we could go straight to bed,” Tean said.“And talk about wrecking each other in the morning.”
“Nope.”Jem caught the eye of the bartender—finally—and reached into his back pocket.
And found nothing.
He said, “Fuck.”
“What?”Tean said.“What happened?”
“My wallet.”He patted his jacket, checked his front pockets, made sure he hadn’t stashed the wallet somewhere else.Still nothing.“Hold on.”
He fought a path through the crowd, trying to scan the floor.Afterski was so busy that it was possible, if the wallet was on the floor, nobody had spotted it yet.But the bigger question washowwould his wallet have fallen out?It wasn’t like the wallet was fucking spring-loaded.
By the time Jem got to the lobby, he’d seen no sign of his wallet.
Tean appeared at his side a moment later, his brows doing that scrunchy thing again.“I asked the bartender, and she said nobody’s turned in a wallet.”
“Shit,” Jem said.“Okay.Maybe when I went to the front desk…”
But he couldn’t even finish the sentence because it was the same fucking problem:How?Howhad it fallen out of his pocket?
He made it two steps across the lobby when he spotted Maeve and Milo.The kids were still trying to hide behind one of the potted plants, but now they weren’t watching or spying or whatever they’d been doing.Now their attention was on something small that Maeve held.Milo was taking something out of it.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”Jem said under his breath as he changed course.Then he barked, “Hey!”
Maeve’s head snapped up.Milo froze.
Then Maeve dropped what she was holding, and the kids sprinted out of the lobby.
Jem jogged two long strides, but he slowed again almost immediately.Chasing kids was never a good look, and on top of that, he didn’t want to catch them.He just wanted—
Yep.There it was.
He scooped up the wallet.His freshly acquired—at Tean’s insistence—driver’s license lay on the floor next to the wallet.Milo had also taken out a couple of the credit cards, which were tied to Tean’s account and Tean’s credit score.The cash was still there.
“Is that it?”Tean asked.“Is everything there?”
Jem frowned as he double-checked, but he said, “It’s all there.”
“Was that Maeve and Milo?”
“Yep.”
