Page 13 of Holding Penalty

The remnants of sobriety in my brain kick into gear, reminding me I have no business entertaining thoughts like that.

“I’ll get us two hotel rooms for the night,” I say. “I saw one down the block as we were driving here.”

Obviously, getting behind the wheel of my truck right now is out of the question. I take it Piper lives with her fiancé, and that that’s the last place she wants to go back to. Piper can figure out what her next step is in the morning. She’ll be hungover, and so will I, but at least she’ll be sober.

At that point, whatever she does won’t be any of my business. I’ll drive back to my place with a pounding head, leaving her to sort out her own life that I don’t have any part in.

That thought suddenly makes me feel about a quarter less drunk, like I just chugged a big cup of strong, bitter coffee.

“I guess that makes the most sense,” Piper says. “But at least let me pay for my own room.”

“No.”

Piper blows an exasperated huff as I start to stride forward, toward where I remember seeing the hotel as we drove through the streets.

Piper falls into step next to me. She sways, even tipsier than I am, and her arm brushes against mine. Electricity rolls through me. My groin swells, tight heat throbbing between my legs. I clench my teeth to fight back the reaction.

“Come on, Nash,” Piper says, a coaxing tone in her voice, “you can’t tell me that your animals haven’t grown on you.”

A quiet groan rumbles in my throat. I never should have told her about my petting zoo clusterfuck. She’s been giving me shit ever since, cooing over how funny it is for a stuck-up grump like me—her words—to be living on a ranch with a bunch of cute animals. Despite me assuring her that it’s nothing but an aggravation.

“They’re not mine,” I grunt.

“You own them,” she says, her voice a teasing singsong.

“The staff takes care of them.”

The staff are the only reason I didn’t back out of the sale when I found out about the damn petting zoo attached to the property. The sellers didn’t mention it until the last minute.

But when I learned that if I didn’t go through with it, the whole operation was going to shut down, a dozen people were going to lose their jobs, and the animals were going to be shipped off to sanctuaries …

I shake my head at myself. I should have just told myself that none of that was my problem, because it wasn’t. Then I’d be able to enjoy the peaceful, private tract of land with no one else around for miles, like I wanted to.

Instead, I’m dealing with crowds of visitors, a manager who insists on running every decision by me no matter how many times I tell him I don’t care and that he can manage the zoo however he wants, and an over-attached capybara who wanders to my house every day and won’t leave me alone.

Piper pokes her elbow into my arm. “You should embrace it. Call it Nasty Nash’s Petting Ranch. Giant billboards advertising it around Austin with you in a cowboy hat riding an alpaca. It’d end up making you more money than your hockey contract, I bet.”

I groan, picking up the pace to get to the hotel quicker.

Piper might be cute as hell, but I’m starting to remember why she annoyed me so much in college.

But then I remember that her making fun of me is distracting her from the horrible shit that she found out tonight, and a strange warmth buzzes in my chest. Must be the alcohol.

The motel is as much of a blast from the past as the bar was. It sits on a corner lot, a dark beige three-story building with a small parking lot in front. It looks like something out of an old movie set in Vegas.

Piper looks out of place standing next to it in her jaw-dropping dress, that’s for sure. That thing must have cost a couple thousand bucks, and she looks like a couple million bucks in it. Even with a pair of New Balances on her feet.

An image rushes into my mind: Piper still wearing those New Balance sneakers, but not wearing her dress. Not wearing anything else at all. Heat blasts in my cheeks. There must be something wrong with me to conjure up that thought. I shake my head back and forth, hoping it flies out and doesn’t return.

“Let’s get our rooms,” I say, hoping my voice isn’t really as thick as it sounds to me right now.

We step into the office. It’s cramped, and the rumble of the old air conditioner is deafening. Behind the desk sits a man reading … a newspaper?

A real newspaper, with the rough grey paper and small black print and everything, held in his hands as he leans back in a chair.

Okay, now I really feel like I’m in a time warp.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not hating. We’re neck-deep in a literacy crisis, so I take my hat off to anyone who reads, especially physical media. It’s just that between the bar and the old discount motel with the desk guy’s nose stuck in a newspaper, I didn’t expect to be transported back to the seventies or eighties tonight.