Blaze of Winter: A Loveswept Contemporary Romance (44 page)

For Cath, though, Amanda’s proposal was worse than a problem. It was a disaster waiting to happen.

She hadn’t been on a date in two years. No concerts, no bars, no men. These were the rules that set New Cath apart from her irresponsible predecessor—the restrictions that kept her from making the kind of mistakes that had necessitated the creation of New Cath in the first place.

Cath didn’t want to break the rules. She
needed
the rules.

But she needed that straitjacket more. It would be a coup for the exhibit, which meant it would win Judith’s gratitude, and Judith’s gratitude was Cath’s ticket into a permanent curatorial position.

She had to do it.

“Sounds like fun,” she said, her cheerful tone the first of many frauds the evening would no doubt entail.

Surely she could spend one night with a guy in a club without doing anything she’d regret.

Chapter Two

Too bright.
Way
too bright. Cath buried her face in the pillow with a moan, trying to shut out the morning light. She must have forgotten to close the curtains last night.

Head pounding, she reached for the glass of water she always kept on her bedside table, but her fingers scrabbled through empty space.

No water.

Further flailing of her hand produced no bedside table. Huh.

With a groan, she cracked her eyes open and turned her face just far enough to bring the wooden corner post of a headboard into focus. A very nice hardwood headboard. Cherry maybe. Edwardian, she’d guess.

Not hers.

Shit.

She rolled over and surveyed the room, a white cube with sparse furniture—just the bed, a massive wardrobe, and an antique chair upholstered in gold brocade. Above it hung an enormous painting of a smiling girl with one arm around a dog. Cath didn’t recognize the artist, but the piece was excellent. Whoever lived here had taste. Money, too, if the furniture was anything to go by.

She sat up, wincing as she waited for the hangover judge to pass his sentence. Headache: check. Queasy stomach: check. But neither was debilitating. Certainly, neither was going to give her as much trouble as the fact she had no idea whose bed she was in.

She ran a hand through her hair, and the soft cotton of a man’s oversized white shirt brushed her cheek. Drawing the collar away from her neck, she peeked inside, then let out a breath in relief. At least she still had her bra and panties on. Maybe this wasn’t as bad as it seemed.

Bad enough, though, Mary Catherine. Bad enough
.

Unwilling to subject herself to a lecture in the voice of her dead mother, and not quite ready yet to face finding out what—or, more to the point, who—lay beyond the closed door, Cath sank back into the pillows and squeezed her eyes shut, making a polite request of the universe to remove her from this situation and put her somewhere else. Anywhere else. Aspen would be nice.

Nothing happened.

Damn it, she didn’t want to be
here
. She’d been here before, and she’d sworn she was never going to wake up in the wrong bed again. When her mother died, she’d made up her mind to be a better person. She’d planned to prove to herself and whatever was left of Mom, ghost or spirit or what-have-you, that she could pass as an upstanding human being. Mary Catherine Talarico 2.0 paid her bills reliably, drank rarely, worked her fingers to the bone, and, most important, avoided men like the plague.

Yet here she was. New Cath had obviously taken a pretty catastrophic fall off the reform wagon. The question was, how?

A sense memory from the night before offered itself up: her hand wrapped around a cocktail, and the pinched voice of the Blind Date saying, “Cheers.”

Oh, God, the Blind Date. The glass of wine with dinner that had turned into two glasses because the man was excruciatingly boring, some kind of engineer who worked for the Newcastle municipal council and kept quantifying everything. He’d told her what her meal was costing him to the penny and the exact number of calories in her wine, and she’d ordered a third glass for the sole purpose of spiting him.

That had been her limit for the evening, established in advance. Three glasses of wine. But three glasses of wine wouldn’t have impaired her memory or landed her in this bed. So what—

She smacked her palm into her forehead. The concert. Amanda hadn’t warned her they’d be venturing out to a club at the end of the Northern Line to listen to a very talented drag queen
sing Patsy Cline songs. If she had, Cath would’ve begged off regardless of how badly she wanted the straitjacket, because Patsy Cline made her cry. Always. The singer had been her mother’s favorite, Patsy’s smoky voice the perpetual soundtrack to rainy afternoons in the Chicago brownstone of Cath’s girlhood.

When the Patsy impersonator had launched into “Crazy,” Amanda had taken one look at Cath wiping her wet cheeks and sent the Blind Date up to the bar for a round. He’d come back with some cocktail called a K-12 that Cath had never encountered before, and she’d been too rattled to ask what was in it until afterward, when the tip of her nose went numb.

Cath turned her face into the pillow, which smelled of summer and clean cotton. She wondered how many different varieties of stupid one woman could be.

A great many, obviously, because she was here. Wherever here was.

God, she hadn’t gone home with the Blind Date, had she? What if he’d dragged her back to Newcastle, and she’d been too drunk to remember any of it?

Please, please, let this be Amanda’s spare bedroom
.

She pulled the summer-smelling comforter up over her face and willed her pickled brain to release the details of what had happened after the Drink of Doom.

Her brain gave her snapshots of a dodgy, solitary walk back to the Tube. The echoing clomp of her heels down underground staircases and over concrete hallways. The buzz of the fluorescent lights making her heart race as she wove her way toward the Northern Line. Waiting for the Docklands train at Bank, staring at her shoes and trying to breathe herself calm. The hot whoosh of stale subterranean air on her face as the train arrived. She’d been on her way home to Greenwich, alone. So how—

Oh. Canary Wharf. The evening unfurled more rapidly now. The thick jasmine perfume of the woman seated next to her making Cath’s mouth water, sour and vile. Rushing off the train before the doors could close. Later, leaning on the map kiosk, watching the strangers on the platform as her stomach settled.

A black and clawing loneliness had crept into her bones, eating the marrow and leaving
behind an ache she didn’t know what to do with. A million miles from Chicago, from anything resembling a real home, she’d been in tears, bleary and tired and fuzzy when she’d spotted City’s familiar face.

Then, his hand at the small of her back, guiding her onto another train. His keys in the lock of the flat.

Of all the guys in London, she’d gone home with City.

Cath relaxed, relieved to know whose bed she’d slept in—and to confirm she’d only been sleeping. Even drunk, lonely, and out of her head, she wouldn’t have thrown herself at City. He wasn’t her type at all. When she fell, it was for the bad apples, the unapologetic scoundrels with funny stories, wiry bodies, and battered guitar cases. Not for guys like City. Not for men who were
good
.

And she’d been watching City long enough to know he was definitely good. He was the sort who helped mothers carry their strollers down the station steps and gave up his seat on the train to anyone female, old, or less fit than himself.

Come to think of it, he didn’t sit much.

She flipped back the comforter and swung her legs over the edge of the mattress, scanning the floor for the outfit she’d worn last night. No luck, but the sight of the red wool rug brought back a sudden, dismaying image of herself sitting splay-legged on it, giggling helplessly, arms tangled up in her own shirt. She’d shouted for City to come and help her. She could still feel his hands at her rib cage, large and warm, pulling her to her feet. Unzipping her skirt. Smoothing his T-shirt over her shoulders, as impersonal as if he were dressing a child.

How utterly humiliating. How utterly Cath.

But no, that was the
old
Cath. Bad Cath. New Cath had been doing pretty well before last night’s cocktail had knocked her flat on her ass. What had the Blind Date said it was? Some kind of energy drink thing with tequila and gin and triple sec and she didn’t know what-all else. The sort of cocktail undergrad girls with low self-esteem downed by the pitcher on spring break in Florida. Had she not been half stoned on wine and pain and Patsy Cline, she’d never have let it
past her lips.

You did, though. And how many mistakes does that make, Mary Catherine?

She counted, pushing her fingers into the mattress one at a time.

One. You agreed to the blind date. Two. You had too much wine
.

Three. You didn’t flee at the first sight of the cross-dressing Patsy Cline
.

Four. You drank that nightmare of a cocktail
.

Five. You took public transportation home instead of a cab
.

Six. You hooked up with City and then, what? Passed out?

On four drinks?

No, dumbass. On four drinks and two antihistamines
.

Oh, hell. The twenty-four-hour allergy medicine she’d taken yesterday morning wouldn’t have mixed well with alcohol. After City had rescued her from the Canary Wharf train platform, she must’ve conked out on him.

She took it back. City wasn’t a mistake. He was her guardian angel.

A guardian angel who’d seen her in her underpants.

Cath took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Time to find a bathroom, locate her clothes, thank City for the safe harbor, and get the hell out of Dodge.

The bedroom door opened onto the hallway of a modest flat. The main entry was at one end, and that had to be the kitchen at the other. Which left two rooms with open doors and the third directly across the hall from the bedroom with the door mostly closed. Cath crossed her fingers.
Let that be the bathroom
.

It was. She peed for approximately nine years and then splashed some cold water on her face, working up the courage to look in the mirror. Ugh. At least when she’d been a bad girl, she’d had spiky hair dyed black to match her clothes, and she’d been able to do the goth thing on hangover days, accentuating her pale skin and the dark circles under her eyes with heavy eyeliner and lipstick the color of dried blood. Now that she was playing it straight, she just looked like
Tinker Bell coming off a bender. After scrubbing her mascara off as best she could with cold water, she ran damp fingers through her chin-length, wispy brown hair in a futile attempt to restore some semblance of a style.

She spotted a new toothbrush still in its package on the back of the sink and eyed it covetously. Even after a drink of water, her mouth tasted like … There were no words. And the toothbrush couldn’t be City’s, because his was on the wall in a holder with his toothpaste. Unless there was another woman lurking around here somewhere, he must have put it out for her.

Had any of the guys she’d actually slept with ever been so considerate?

No, definitely not. Rating a toothbrush of her very own was a first. She picked it up and smeared some of his toothpaste onto the bristles.

How strange to be in City’s neat little bathroom, using his toiletries. Her favorite stranger. Silly as it seemed, she retained a vivid impression of the relief that had flooded through her when she saw his face on the train platform last night. It had felt like she’d known him all her life rather than just observing him from afar for the better part of three seasons. Her intuition told her she could trust him.

Given how bad her instincts were, he’d probably turn out to be a serial killer.

She spat and rinsed out her mouth, beginning to feel almost human. What she really needed was a hot shower. Glancing with longing at the claw-foot tub, she noticed a towel neatly folded over the edge. Another one was draped on the radiator. She poked it with one finger. Still damp, so it had to be City’s. The towel on the tub was for her.

A clean towel and a toothbrush, and he hadn’t even gotten into her pants. What a guy. No wonder she hadn’t slept with him.

She paused a moment before stripping off the T-shirt. New Cath didn’t get naked in strange men’s apartments. On the other hand, New Cath had made six significant mistakes since dinnertime yesterday. How likely was it that mistake number seven would be the one that sank her?

Cath shook her head. If City had planned to assault her, he’d have done it last night.
Instead, he’d put her to bed and set out a toothbrush and a towel for her. He was a regular Boy Scout. She’d known that already.

The shower felt heavenly, the water nearly hot enough to scald—just how she liked it. She stayed under the spray for a long time, wishing she could wash the shame away along with the grime. Smoothing City’s spicy, man-smelling soap over the tattoo that wrapped around her lower back and one side of her stomach in a wide band, she reminded herself she’d done worse things and managed to get over them.

This thing, whatever it was—this oops, this slipup that had landed her in City’s shower—did not have to mean that New Cath had slid off the rails and plowed into a hedgerow. This could be a blip. Two years without a blip was pretty good. If she went right back to New Cath with no further blippage, she might manage to forget this had ever happened within, say, six months. Blips did not count on one’s permanent record.

After drying off with City’s plush towel, Cath pulled on her underwear and shrugged back into the T-shirt. Mostly headache-free and heading toward hungry, she ventured out in search of her host and, she hoped, her own clothes.

The unmistakable odor of bacon wafted through the flat, but the kitchen was quiet, so she peeked in the door next to the bathroom. An empty office. She moved toward the remaining door, which had to be the living room.