It would have been kinder just to put a pillow over her face and let her die a slow painful death than what she was going through now. Oh, my god. Her head weighed a ton and was filled with explosive marbles swirling about that detonated on contact.
Gripping the towel bar in the powder room off the big kitchen, Angie steadied herself and peered into the mirror. Oh, no. It was worse than she thought. Good lord. She looked a fright. How the hell could she fix this? Turning the water to a slow trickle, she dragged her fingers through the stream and splashed a smattering of droplets onto her face.
A face, which was pale as death, crowned with a mass of wildly tangled hair, with eyes that looked sunken due in no small part to yesterday’s make-up which was now a smeared and smudged mess. The bride of Frankenstein looked better than she did.
And her mouth? Oh, dear god. Her mouth felt slimy and tasted like roadkill left too long in the sun.
Slowly turning back her sleeves, she had to take it easy, or her head might topple from her shoulders. Angie let a groan out from the taxing effort. Fucking tequila.
By the time she’d washed her face and done what she could about the horror happening in her mouth, her head began to clear a bit as well.
What-the-hell-had-they-done? She wasn’t sure. Not only was their evening after they’d returned to the Villa a blur, what she did remember was confusing at best.
Waking up to a sound that made her want to kill something, she knew the second one eye cracked open that she’d fucked up big time. Instead of finding herself all comfy and cozy in her big wood bed in the familiar hacienda, she was staring at a rustic beamed ceiling hung with all sorts of stuff. The barn. She was in the damn barn.
And then that sound happened again, and she had to groan as mightily as she could to drown out the obnoxious racket. What the hell was that?”
Groaning again, she tried to shift to her side but couldn’t. She was restrained somehow-unable to do more than wiggle. And she tried to do as little of that as possible because every movement caused a thunderous boom in her head.
Checking to see if her legs worked, she stretched one, knocked something over with her foot that sounded like an empty bottle when it fell.
A new noise joined the growing racket in her head. A roar. No, a growl. Sounded animalistic and not just a little menacing.
“Stop fucking wiggling,” an angry, muffled voice demanded.
Parker. Shit. It all came rushing back. Dinner with his folks. Uncle Matt’s deadly margaritas. Driving back to the Villa. Sneaking around in the barn. Polishing off more tequila. With Parker.
It felt like some sort of man-shroud weighed down with half his body covering hers. Struggling to untangle from him, she pushed at his dead weight. Feebly, but she tried.
“Get off me!” she groaned. “You snore, and I need to pee.”
It took a couple of minutes of effort to get them both upright where she realized they’d passed out cold on the big round table in a bed of riding blankets. Nice.
But the icing on the cake? Although they were both dressed, when she managed to pry both eyes open at the same time and looked at him, she was horrified to see that dangling from his arm were the pink panties she’d worn last night. Somehow, and she shuddered to think how they’d gone from being on her body to his entire arm in a leg opening as the pale pink against his cowboy heartthrob denim mocked her.
She and Parker seemed to notice those damning panties at the same moment, both of them letting go simultaneously with a tortured sounding groan.
“What did you do?” she croaked-the words causing shards of hungover agony to pierce her brain.
“What did I do?” he ground out indignantly. “I’m not the one with no underwear on,” he snapped.
She needed a bathroom-like stat. Not only did she desperately need to pee, now she had to hope she could tell just how fast she was going to hell. The suspicion that they might have succumbed to an interlude of drunken sex made her stomach gurgle.
With a strangled, “Ugh,” she slid carefully off the table relieved to discover that yes she actually could feel her feet. Unfortunately, the room chose that moment to spin. Clutching her head, Angie closed her eyes and swallowed down the embarrassing vomit threatening to join the proceedings.
Unable to deal with Parker while she felt like the walking death, she wobbled carefully toward the door only to find him hot on her heels.
“Move it or be carried,” he grunted, crowding her from behind with his big body.
Instinctively, just like when she was a kid, Angie shoved him with her shoulder. “You’re not the boss of me,” she gritted out, not caring that she sounded like a peeved five-year-old.
Thinking she could stomp away, leaving him in her high-and-mighty dust, was a joke. Instead, she stumbled and lurched awkwardly, her hand on the wall of the barn for support as she made her way along.
At the door, she fumbled with the heavy latch and snarled when it didn’t immediately open.
“Move,” he scolded on a throaty growl pushing her hands away and attacking the latch himself. “Don’t want you to break a nail.”
“Oh, fuck you,” she scolded.
His response was a husky croak.
Note to my bad self; tequila was not her drink. Maybe a couple but not enough to get falling down shitfaced because on the other side of that? Well, she didn’t know about separately, but together they were one snarling, mean-spirited unit of tequila excess. Not their best look.
Angie tripped over the door jamb but managed to keep from face planting as the door swung open and bright sunlight smacked ’em both dead on.
Groaning, she covered her eyes and headed for the house on auto-pilot until he practically knocked her down in his haste.
“Back off, counselor,” she ground out.
“Move your ass or…” he drawled then gave her a shove along the path.
How they made it into the house was a blur, but they had with Parker quickly dropping onto a stool at the kitchen island, his head cradled in his hands.
“Do I smell coffee?” he mumbled to no one in particular.
Leaving him to figure that part out himself, she scuttled away as quickly as she could and barricaded herself in the powder room to assess the damage.
Copyright Suzanne Halliday 2017