Page 4 of Sucker For You

Zipper down, shirt flapping, Chase staggered after her. He shouted for her to listen. “It’s not what it looks like! It didn’t mean anything,shewas the one who came on tome, I didn’t—”

She opened the dining room doors to—silence.

Everyone had heard him. Everyone had just heard Chase’s incriminating confession. Now they saw him. Karen Meyer; Chase Meyer Sr.; Ethan and Erin, emerging from the pool room; the BioPulse representatives. Every single person saw the caterer, too, holding her stilettos behind Chase, with her panties showing under her skirt.

Everyone saw Isabel’s mascara-streaked cheeks.

Pretending that she hadn’t caught her fiancé with one of the waitstaff wasn’t an option. Her swallow was hot and painful under the watching eyes. Her heartbeat rolled in her ears. A glass of Bordeaux stood among crumpled napkins on a highboy table and her fingers itched toward it, but—no. She didn’t throw the wine in Chase’s face. She didn’t even reach for the glassware. She dug her nails into her palms, breathed back the fire boiling in her throat. Anger was a luxury she didn’t have.

She was left with the dilemma of how a happy fiancéeshouldreact to this situation.

How should she respond to Chase screwing a caterer?

Whatever the right reaction for that woman-in-love was, it wasn’t standing mute and blank in front of the guests and cameras, under Chase’s renewed grip on her arm. If she didn’t do something now,right now, then people would wonder why. She couldn’t have anyone prying, not when she had to marry Chase on schedule.

Had to—

“Isabel.” Ethan Meyer’s voice reverberated through the quiet: low, firm, unexpectedly close. She hadn’t seen his approach. Ignoring his brother’s glower, he extracted her from Chase’s hold. He pressed a set of keys, a valet ticket, and a business card into her hand. “Welcome to the family. We can talk logistics tomorrow.”

“I—”

The card’s address was in Monterey.

She couldn’t waste time on a beach vacation.

But if she could only be alone for a while, somewhere dark and still and cold, she could collect herself, couldn’t she? Could think. Could fix this. Fix herself.

And running off was definitely a viable reaction to these circumstances.

September first.

September thirtieth.

Twenty-nine days. Could she spare one night?

She gripped the keys, crumpling the ticket and the card.

“—thank you.” Then she was running again, back down the hall, past the anemones, through the yacht club’s exterior doors, into the parking lot. She startled a valet into retrieving her overnight bag from a BMW at the curb (Chase had bookedthem into the St. Regis for two nights, before his flight to Las Vegas) and into bringing Ethan’s hatchback around.

Isabel accelerated out of the marina, onto the freeway.

Wes Monaghan heaved his duffel bags from the trunk of an airport taxi and circled around to lean through the sedan’s passenger window. He shook the driver’s hand, then passed off a cash tip for the late ride south from San Francisco International Airport to Palo Alto.

“Thanks, man. Have a good night.”

“You too, sir.”

The “sir” was generous. He hadn’t showered in forty-eight hours, his stubble was approaching a full beard, and he’d scarfed down a veggie New York hot dog with onions and too much pickle relish during a layover in JFK Airport. Scrubbing a hand over his jaw, grimacing at his own breath, he waved as the cab flashed its taillights and peeled away, leaving him on a dark sidewalk near his sister’s house.

Also dark. No golden retrievers barked behind its juniper hedge.

No one was home.

Erin hadn’t known that he was arriving in the United States tonight. He’d texted her from the location of his latest photography assignment in Costa Rica and explained his plans to land in California on Monday for his next shoot. However, a last-minute deal for an earlier flight out from Central America’s biodiverse hydrothermal springs had been too good for his bank account to turn down, despite the hellish series of layovers and the fact that his hostel room in Moss Landing wouldn’t beavailable for another few days. He’d touched down hoping to crash on his sister’s couch for the night.

But:dark house, no dog.

. . . had Erin mentioned something about renting out a beach house in September?