Page 21 of About Last Night

She fell asleep with a vision of her and Steve in black and white, toothpaste smiles, hair perfectly coifed... and sleeping in twin beds.

Chapter 7

FRIDAY, 6:00AM

WHEN DEREKstarted awake, several seconds passed before he remembered he was in Atlanta at the resort where Steve was to be married on Saturday. Other memories of the previous night were too ludicrous to believe. When he lifted his heavy, aching head to find he was alone in the room, he nearly laughed aloud with relief. Those were some strong pills he'd taken for his cold. For a while there—

Derek chuckled despite his headache.No way.

From the filtered light coming through the floor-to-ceiling windows to his left, he estimated the time to be around 6:00 a.m. Typically, he'd be rolling out of bed for a bike ride, weather willing, or a run on the dilapidated treadmill that sat less than five steps from his bed. Then he'd shower and arrive at the office by seven-fifteen.

But at the moment, he needed more cold medicine, hallucinogen or not. He pushed himself out of bed gingerly, tossing the still-damp towel twined around his legs to the floor. Holding his head so it wouldn't explode, and swallowing to moisten his dry throat, he stumbled through the semidarkness to the bathroom and pushed open the door. By the illumination of the skylight, he felt along the vanity for the box of cold medicine, but instead came up with a perplexing object, flat and flexible, with ties and mysterious textures.

Bewildered, he groped for the light switch and flooded the room with light. He blinked at the pink-and-black thingamajigin his hand for an entire second before a shriek sounded behind him. Derek swung around to see a person sit up in the bathtub, and when he registered the dark coat and the blond hair, he grasped the horrifying fact that he hadn't been hallucinating after all. Gripping both sides of the tub as if she were in a sinking lifeboat, Pinky looked at him and screamed.

As if he'd taken a bite from the forbidden fruit, Derek suddenly realized he was naked. He thrust the top of her costume over his privates, straining from their morning call, and backed up against the counter. "What the devil are you doing in the bathtub?" he thundered, grimacing at the pain in his temples.

She pushed a mop of hair out of her eyes. "Sleeping."

The woman was a bona fide nutcase. "I can see that," he said calmly. "But why are you sleepingin the bathtub?"

"Because," she mumbled, "you were in the bed." She spit hair out of her mouth. "I can see your butt in the mirror."

He clenched and opened his mouth to say something he hadn't yet thought of, but the phone in the other room rang. Backing out of the bathroom, Derek sneezed twice on his way to answer. He flung the corset on the bed and managed to grab a handkerchief before he yanked up the handset. "Hello?"

"Hey, man, what's going on over there?" Steve Larsen's voice sounded concerned, but a little indistinct, as if his last drink was not in the too-distant past. "I came back to the hotel a few minutes ago and they wouldn't let me past the gate. Something about a quarantine?"

Derek stretched the phone cord taut in order to reach his jeans on the valet. He jerked them on as he answered Steve. "Yeah, several of the guests have come down with something, and the CDC put the entire facility under quarantine."

"That's nuts. For how long?"

He sat on the bed and leaned forward to cradle his head in his hands. "The top guy said at least forty-eight hours."

Steve cursed. "Which means we'll have to postpone the rehearsal and the dinner for tonight. Maybe even the wedding." He swore again, this one causing Derek to wince. "My mother is going to be irate, and I don't know how I'm going to break it to Janine."

The topic of their conversation walked into the room. With her bare legs and feet sticking out below her wrinkled black raincoat, she resembled a bag lady. A very fetching bag lady, Derek realized with a start. "Steve," he said, loudly enough to gain her attention, "Janine already knows about the quarantine."

"What? How does Janine know?" Steve asked. "Wait a minute—how doyouknow that Janine knows?"

Derek watched her face crumble with dread as he mulled over how best to break the news to his friend. She bit her lower lip, beseeching him to... what?

"She's here at the hotel," he said, nausea rolling in his stomach. Only his brother Jack made him feel this way: protective, yet taken advantage of. He hated it.

"At the hotel?" Steve shouted. "Where? How?"

Janine Murphy, Derek decided, was a big girl who'd gotten them both into a big mess and she and her big blue eyes could take responsibility for it. "She's... I'll have her call you when I see her," he finished lamely, ridiculously warmed at the expression of gratitude on her face. "Are you at your place?"

"I'm at a friend's," Steve said. "But I'm going to my folks' house to break the news to my mom before she hears it on television."

"Television?"

"There were at least four TV crews in front of the hotel," Steve offered. "And so many uniforms we thought a bomb had gone off. By the way, what's Janine doing at the hotel?"

For a few seconds, he panicked. "Looking for you, I suppose." Derek strained to remember what she'd said when she'd crawled on top of him, but he'd been kind of distracted at the time by her roaming hands.

"So where did you run into her?"

"We... saw each other in the lobby," he hedged, looking to her for affirmation. She nodded. And it wasn't exactly a lie, though he hated covering for the minx.

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