It's Always Been You. Elle Wright
hate you,” she growled as she stomped into the bathroom. Kicking the door closed, she leaned against it. A hotel robe was hanging on a hook and she snatched it and slipped it on. Once she secured the tie, she whipped the door open and stormed back into the bedroom toward a now clothed Drake.
His back was to her and he was murmuring curses to himself. She jumped on his back and wrapped an arm around his neck. “You took advantage of me.” With her other hand, she yanked his hair.
He fumbled with her weight and they both crashed down on the mattress. She flailed her arms and kicked at him until he grabbed her wrists and pinned them to the bed.
“Calm down,” he pleaded. “Stop trying to fight me.” The vein on the side of his temple jumped and his biceps bunched as he held her arms above her head.
Love was angry, but she was something else, too. Something that she’d never felt before. Well, tried to never feel before. His hard chest pressed against her soft one made it kind of difficult not to feel aroused.
“Get off of me, Drake.” Needing to put some distance between them—because the last thing she needed was to be aroused—she bucked against him.
“Love, would you just...” He sighed, his hooded bedroom eyes boring into hers. Bedroom eyes? Her stomach fluttered and a warmth spread over her. She cursed her body for responding in ways she wouldn’t dare admit.
Is he doing this on purpose? His eyes stayed on hers, seeming to look straight into her soul. Maybe he wasn’t trying to turn her on, but he was.
“Promise me.” His husky voice seemed to light a fire in her belly. “If I let you go you have to keep your hands to yourself.”
“You took advantage of me,” she muttered, her voice shaky. The anger she felt was melting under his gaze. Unclenching her fists, she let the tension ooze out of her arms. She chewed on her bottom lip. His breath fanned across her mouth and she couldn’t help but entertain the idea of letting him take advantage of her.
“We don’t know that,” he said, snapping her out of her thoughts. “Neither of us remembers last night. You can’t say for sure that we did anything but sleep.”
“But we were naked,” she murmured. Why am I whispering?
He squeezed her wrists. “Stop saying that. Let’s concentrate on the present.”
“Well, get your naked chest off of me and I’ll try.”
He jumped up, leaving her splayed across the bed, angry with her body for betraying her and with her mind for its wayward thoughts. She glared at the textured ceiling and prayed for a time machine that could zap her into yesterday, where Drake was merely annoying—not annoyingly sexy. Would she ever be able to look at him as the friend he was without thinking about his mussed hair and lean physique? Let alone the fine line of hair that trailed down his stomach and disappeared under the waistband of the low-riding sweatpants he’d donned. She tightened the belt on the robe and sat up, smoothing her hair back.
“What do you remember?” he asked, in the tone he often used on his patients. Detached.
Obviously, he wasn’t as affected as she was. Ouch. She cleared her throat. “Lana called. One of my patients went into labor and was admitted to the hospital, possible peripartum cardiomyopathy,” she answered, as if she was reporting to her chief resident during rounds. “Instead of paging me, she had paged Blake. The mother insisted on a natural birth, but her heart couldn’t take the labor. She died. I was upset that I wasn’t there, so you took me out to get my mind off of it.”
He lifted his eyes toward the ceiling and muttered a string of curses. “I keep replaying last night over and over in my head. I can’t remember how we got in bed. I remember the bar, the shots. You were finally loosening up. When we left Caesars, you were tipsy, so I had to kind of hold on to you. I can see us laughing at random people on the way back to the room. Then we ran into a few of our high school classmates. They asked us to go out with them, but you didn’t want to, so we headed back here. Then...” He averted his gaze, swallowed roughly.
She bowed her head and wondered what he’d just remembered. They were friends. Best friends, in fact. They’d grown up finishing each other’s sentences. Love knew all of Drake’s “tells” and was certain he’d just filled in some blanks.
“The bar and walk I remember,” she croaked. “That’s about it.”
It wasn’t a complete lie. She’d been very inebriated, inconsolable over the loss of her patient. Drake had done what he always did—make it better, help her forget.
“Hopefully, it’ll come back to us later. For now, we can’t assume anything happened.”
They’d shared the same bed many times during their lifelong friendship, and nothing had ever happened. Not even an accidental brush of arms. Hell, he’d seen her in her underwear plenty of times. But...
“We were still clearly on our own sides of the bed,” he continued, without meeting her gaze. “There’s no clue—”
“I feel sore,” she blurted out. “My whole body does.”
“You were drunk. You could’ve fallen or something.”
Love wondered when Drake had turned into Mr. Positivity. The proof was staring them right in the face. The bed. She scanned the rest of the room before zeroing in on the bed again. Frowning, she walked closer to it and ran a finger over the tiny bright red spot. Closing her eyes, she gasped. “Oh, my God!”
“Stop saying that,” he said, between clenched teeth.
“It’s blood. There’s your clue. We had sex.”
“Love, you’re not a virgin. The blood is probably from a paper cut or something.”
“You don’t really believe that, do you?”
He glared at her. “Just...be quiet. Let me think.”
“You know we had sex,” she muttered under her breath. And the worst part? She didn’t remember the details. If she was going to participate in something that would more than likely ruin her friendship with Drake, she would’ve liked to remember it.
Drake had a headache. And it was getting worse by the minute. He peered down at the tiny speck of blood on the stark white sheet. Shit.
The evidence was there. They’d woken up in bed together naked, she’d admitted her body was sore, and now there was visual proof. Not that he needed it. He knew exactly what had happened between them, but he couldn’t say the word out loud. The memories were coming fast and furious with each passing minute, with her standing in front of him in nothing but the hotel bathrobe.
“What are we going to do?” she asked, sitting on the edge of the bed.
“Nothing.” He cracked his knuckles, rolled his neck and plopped down next to her. When she scooted away from him, Drake tried to tell himself that he wasn’t bothered. “We just have to deal with it. It happened.”
She twisted the tie of the robe around her fingers. “I know we have two bedrooms, but maybe you should move into a separate room for the remainder of the trip.”
He hated this. Love was his best friend. They’d spent countless hours together, shared many a hotel room and even a bed—platonically. He’d never thought anything else about it—until now. “What’s that going to prove? Apparently, we’ve already seen everything there is to see.”
“That’s not funny.”
It wasn’t; he knew that.
“What if...it happens again?” she whispered.
His eyes snapped to hers. “It won’t. I’m never drinking with you again.”