Prep work Read Online Free PDF Page A

“I’ll even make you a cup of tea before you go.”
    If I knew what I needed to say, I might have gotten something intelligible out, but I was still standing there, the rushing of the water making more sense than the rushing in my brain when he flipped a towel through the door. “Don’t waste the hot water, Jude; I’d like some,” he said, and closed the door between us.
    I did get in the tub, thinking the water would help me form the right words, but all that happened was that I scrubbed his scent and our fluids off with no plan for getting more on me. My phone shrilled from my pants pocket, lying on the floor where they’d been abandoned in such a hurry last night. Marcie or Sam, no doubt, wanting to know where the hell I was, what the hell I thought I was doing, and telling me to get back to the hotel now, damn it. The phone stopped ringing before I got out of the tub.
    Tommy had slid in and left a toothbrush for me, making him less perfect one-night-stand material and more just perfect. Breezing into the bathroom as I came out, he passed me a cup of tea and disappeared behind the shower curtain without a word. If I pulled the curtain aside to talk, assuming I could get the foot out of my mouth or speak around it, he’d probably turn the spray on me. Besides, I didn’t deserve another look until I made this right.
    “Tommy?” I tried from the doorway.
    “Can’t hear you over the water!” he called back, and that was my cue to pat my pockets, because anything I left here, I couldn’t return for.
    He appeared moments later, his face utterly shut off, his words brittle. “I’m off to the market, Jude. Have a nice flight.” He locked the door behind us, and without lifting his face for a kiss or any other clue that we might have been intimate in any way, Tommy gave me that “So long, amigo ” tip of the head and was gone.
    The stairs were steeper coming down. Maybe it was me walking with one foot so far in my mouth it was kicking tonsils.
    Once on the street, I took a good long look around. It had been dark when I’d arrived, and only the lights and motion inside had lured me into the pub. Now I looked up at the sign to see where I’d been. “The Good Man” stood in gold script against a black signboard, but no cheerful bit of folk art or heraldry went with it. No swans, oaks, elephants, castles, harts, gryphons, or tradesmen, as might have swung before any other pub, just “The Good Man.” And he was. And I’d hurt him. If anyone painted me a pub sign, it would have an ass on it.
    The hotel was only a few blocks over, and when I let myself in, it was to see Sam and Marcie clattering around, packing.
    “For someone who’s been out catting around all night, you certainly have a long face,” Sam observed. “Or did you just drink yourself into a stupor and spend the night in the gutter? You look too tidy for that, but still….”
    Okay, that had happened once, and I did manage to wake up with everything but my watch. In no mood to hear about other mistakes I’d made, I sat heavily on the edge of the bed that wasn’t tumbled, and barely avoided rolling backward into the dip. The flailing spoiled the intended dramatic gesture of putting my head into my hands.
    “We had that problem, too,” Marcie chirped. “Good thing you didn’t come home. We ended up using your pillows to fill in the sag.”
    “Great, like I’d want to rest my head on the same thing you’d propped up your ass with and probably—” I stopped, not liking where that was going. “I feel sorry for whoever gets this room tonight.”
    “Hah!” Marcie whapped me with a towel she’d picked up off the floor before hanging it.
    “And I was not out catting around.” But Tommy might not see it that way.
    “So when’s the wedding?” Sam had to stick his two cents in.
    We’d established two continents ago that he was enough bigger, stronger, and heavier than me that only really dirty fighting would let me prevail, and I just