Page 67 of My Irresistible Enemy

I inhaled deeply, my eyes still closed. Something smelled good. Good, but foreign. I used herbal shampoo, but I was smelling citrus. Delicious, but wrong.

Then I felt something brush my chest, something warm and firm, shifting against me, and my eyes flew open.

What the hell? Where was I, and who was I holding in my arms?

I pushed back a few inches, my eyes widening as I took it all in. I was lying in bed, withAidenof all people. My right arm was still trapped underneath him.

I looked around the room wildly. I was still at the Wisteria, still in the same room I’d been in for the past four weeks. Everything looked normal, but I had no idea what Aiden was doing in my bed, and—

Shit. I couldn’t even remember getting into bed. I couldn’t rememberanythingfrom last night. Everything after arriving down at the harbor for the festival was foggy.

“What the fuck?” I whispered, panic rising in my chest.

My left arm had been draped over Aiden’s body, holding him close to my chest. I brought that hand to my head. It felt curiously weightless. No headache, no pressure, but there was a footprint of something. Like sunspots, the afterimage of pain.

Aiden looked so peaceful, so quiet and still. He was facing me, and his eyes flickered back and forth under his eyelids, his lashes fluttering against his cheeks. He had a light sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of his nose. I’d never noticed that before.

His lips were parted slightly, and some feeling I didn’t have a name for constricted my chest as I looked at him. But it was quickly drowned out by the growing realization that I could only remember one other day like this, one other time that I’d woken up with no memory of the night before.

These were different circumstances. Different bed, different city, different clothes—which was to say, at least Ihadclothes on this time.

But it was the same crumbling, detached feeling. The same fuzzy blank when I cast my mind back and tried to remember the night before. The same utter inability to explain how I’d ended up here.

Bile rose in my throat, and I swallowed hard. It burned my esophagus.

“Fuck,” I said, my skin starting to crawl. “What the hell happened last night?”

My words woke Aiden up. He blinked sleepily, then smiled.

“Oh, hey. You’re awake.” His smile broadened. “Aliveand awake. That’s awesome!”

My brow furrowed. “What are you doing here?”

He frowned back at me and pushed up onto his elbows. “Do you…not remember?”

“Inviting you into my bed?” I said, trying to shove down the dread that rose in my chest. “No. No, I do not.”

Aiden sighed. “I guess that’s really not surprising.”

I waited for him to elaborate. He didn’t. He just stared at me, which really wasn’t helping me combat the urge to lash out, or run screaming, or both.

I swore I’d never let this happen again. I scrambled into a seated position. This wasn’t a conversation I could have lying down.

“Are you going to tell me, or am I just supposed to guess?” I asked, my voice strained. Fear licked at my throat.

“Trust you to find a way to blame me for this.” Aiden sat up too. “Allow me to enlighten you. Last night, about halfway into your second drink, you started acting really fucking weird. Slurring your words, zoning out, stumbling. When I said I thought you should lie down, you tried to take a nap on the bench we were sitting on. It took an hour just to get you back to the inn, you were so out of it. I think, somehow, you were roofied.”

My stomach plummeted a thousand feet. I’d known what was coming, known it in my bones the second I’d woken up, but I still broke out in a cold sweat. It had happened again.

“Did you haveanythinglast night, other than the two glasses of punch I saw you drink?” Aiden asked after a moment. “Did you drink something else while I was getting those refills, or eat something weird that someone offered you?”

I shook my head, a numb kind of horror settling over my body. My skin felt too tight.

“Well, something happened,” he continued. “And whatever it was, it wasn’t good. I wanted to get you to a hospital, but you kind of lost it when I suggested that. You were really emphatic about not going. Not wanting people to see you.”

I swallowed hard as my stomach churned. I wasn’t sure I could handle hearing any more.

“You were kind of messed up. Like, crying and stuff.” Aiden gave me a tentative look. “I started to leave, but you asked me to stay, so I did.”

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