Page 16 of Safari Murder Party
“How do you know my usual drink order?”
Waylon’s head fell back with a laugh. “Do you know the first cocktail I learned to make?”
“I’m sure you’re going to tell me against my will.”
“A Manhattan,” he answered himself.
“It’s a classic.” Fletcher crossed her arms.
“Exactly. And that’s how I knew you’d order it. It’s safe. It’s predictable.”
“It’sreliable. The best judge of a bar is their Manhattan. There’s nothing wrong with being pragmatic.”
“It’s barely a step up from a Jack and Coke. It was probably the first real cocktail you ever ordered because you wanted to impress someone. Everybody’s had one, and they might even consider it their favorite. But you know what I think?”
He leaned perilously close to Fletcher. Close enough she could smell the single malt Scotch on his breath and the Tom Ford cologne on his neck. Not unlike the first time they met, but deeper somehow. Older. She’d say maturer, but that would be giving him far too much credit.
The next time he spoke, his voice trailed into a whisper. “I thinkpeople who order Manhattans are too afraid to ask for what they really want.”
Fletcher gulped, a shiver skittering over her skin from his proximity. The air between them buzzed with electricity. Like a blow-dryer a little too close to a bathtub. She took a step back for good measure. “And I think you should lay off the armchair psychology. You made a guess.”
“A damn good one.”
The bartender reappeared with her Manhattan before Fletcher could find her words—or, at the very least, words that weren’t expletives.
“May I?” Waylon asked the bartender, before reaching over the counter and retrieving a gold skewer with a plump green olive. When he tossed it at her, Fletcher reared back to dodge its slimy arc. Her drink sloshed, splashing onto her blouse, a dark stain blooming. “Thatwas how I knew you didn’t drink a dry martini.”
“Okay, fine. I hate olives. They looked like eyeballs. Tiny, impaled eyeballs.” Her shirt clung to her skin as liquor dripped between her boobs. Humiliating. Through her teeth, she said, “You’re a menace.”
“And you’re on vacation,” he said as he downed the last of his drink. “Ditch the receptionist’s clothes.”
“For the last time, I’m not a—” Fletcher stomped as he walked away.Ugh!
Waylon stretched his arms overhead, tugging his henley off in one clean motion to dive in the pool, and suddenly her eyes were magnetized. Warmth spread across the high points of her cheeks.
It wasn’t like she didn’t expect him to have a private trainer and an entire wardrobe of swishy exercise shorts. Someone with as much disposable generational wealth as he had shouldn’t also have the gall to be hot. Like, abs in the double digits, bronzed-Adonis levels of hot.
Toned or not, it didn’t change his status as the bane of her mortal existence. A splinter digging under her skin. The titular vermin in the Whac-A-Mole of her most indulgent dreams.
Seeing him here, surrounded by people she knew, people she worked with, sent jealous flares over the trenches of her heart. He looked like hebelonged. Belonged in a way Fletcher never had, and maybe never would.
She was about to pull herself away, really she was, when something clamped down on her shoulder. The hand belonged to Molly, the People team lead, who had never once in her life been seen without a pressed pantsuit. Tonight included. (But was anyone reprimanding her for dressing appropriately? No.)
Like Fletcher’s, Molly’s hair was red. But unlike Fletcher’s, Molly’s nearly radioactive hue came from painstaking hours in the salon. Her roots had started to grow in, and Fletcher wondered if she noticed. Molly straightened the tote on her shoulder. Had she brought performance-review paperwork and boilerplate contracts, ready to sign?
“Truly the last person I ever expected to see on the Lydell trip,” she said, and it took Fletcher a few blinks to realize Molly wasn’t talking about her. Her mascara-rimmed gaze was fixed on Waylon’s blond curls. “I haven’t seen him at one of these things since he was still with—oh, what was her name? Tall, supermodel, perfect hair?”
It didn’t matter that Molly had described every woman Waylon Cartwright had ever entertained. Fletcher knew.
“Eliza Shelton.”
“That’s right!” Molly let out a low whistle. “Hard to believe it’s been three years.”
Three peaceful, Waylon-less years since the Cartwright Media Annual Gala for Impact disaster, a night involving a shatteredchampagne tower, the camera flash of a front-page photo being taken, and a little-known coat-closet encounter where Fletcher and Waylon briefly became allies before vowing to share a mutual hatred.
Back then, the ladies’ man with a fool’s gold smile had a fiancée. A living human being had agreed to marry him. Presumably of her own free will.
They’d broken up shortly after the charity nightmare, but as Fletcher watched Waylon shake the water out of his curls like a shepherding dog post-bath, purposefully trying to soak Joplin, she pictured the younger, scruffier version of him she’d met. Drunk, hiding from his dad at the biggest party of the year, no sign of his betrothed in sight. One foot out the door before he’d even dumped her.
