Power Play. Nancy Warren

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      He opened it with his key card and walked inside.

      A woman screamed.

      His day had started this way. He really didn’t need the bookend.

      He dropped his bag with a thunk and regarded the woman who was doing the screaming. Well, more like a cry of alarm. She’d stopped pretty fast and was glaring at him instead.

      It was the woman from this morning. The cute one from across the hall. She wore pajamas so new they still had the creases from the package. Blue and manly looking, which only accentuated her woman’s body.

      He noticed a mane of sleek brown, big dark eyes and a mouth made to whisper dirty secrets.

      “Hi,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

      “I think you’ve got the wrong room.”

      He looked down at his key card. Of course, it had no number, but the little folder did. “Weird that the key worked. I’m in room 318.” He checked the number on the door. Yep, 318.

      She shook her head. “Not possible. I’m in 318.”

      He glanced around the room. It was nice enough. Cozy, he supposed was the word, with two queen-size beds and not a lot of space for anything else. There was a small desk with a lamp, a dormer window looking over the woods behind the lodge, a partially open door into a bathroom and, incongruously, where the fourth wall ought to have been, a curtain made of white tarpaulin.

      He walked across the room and pulled back the curtain far enough to see the buckets. There were half a dozen twenty-gallon plastic tubs, the kind that store pickles and condiments for industrial kitchens. The wooden beams above showed extensive water damage. Not quite the small leak he’d been told to expect.

      “The girl who checked me in said they don’t normally rent this room because of the leaky roof,” he said, thinking that a new roof for this old lodge was going to cost a fortune.

      “That’s what the young man who checked me in said.” She turned back to what she’d been doing when he’d come in, cutting the tags off an assortment of new clothes. “You’d better go back to the front desk and get another room.”

      But his mama hadn’t raised any fools. If you didn’t count his older brother Steven. “They told me this was the last room.”

      “Well, I was here first.”

      “I’ll call down and get them to send someone up.”

      She glared at him. She could patent that glare, it was so good. “What is the point? This room is taken.”

      He’d never been in the army, but he knew that once you retreated from disputed turf it was tough to fight your way back. So he gave her his best smile, and it was usually pretty effective with women. “I’m sure it’s a simple clerical error.” He picked up the room phone before she could argue any more and asked for the manager to come up.

      Fortunately, they didn’t have long to wait. The woman continued cutting tags off clothes, using a small, curved pair of nail scissors that clicked with annoyance.

      They stayed like that, she snipping tags and he standing by the phone until a soft knock was heard. When he answered, a corporate-looking type in his fifties stood there with a bland, practiced, everything-will-be-fine smile. “How can we help you, sir?”

      The manager’s smile wilted like week-old lettuce when the woman stepped up and yanked the door wide. “You seem to have booked both of us into the same room. I think we have a problem.”

      And she was right. The manager, two front desk clerks and the computer all confirmed what he’d known from the moment that woman screamed. He and the lady in blue pajamas were both booked into the very last room in the hotel.

      “But that’s impossible,” Emily argued. Emily Saunders, that was her name; he’d found out as they went through the bookings. “I can’t share a room with a strange man.”

      “I’m not that strange once you get to know me,” he assured her.

      She sent him a glance that suggested she didn’t find this setup remotely funny.

      “I am very sorry, Ms. Saunders. There are simply no more rooms.”

      “But I booked a single room. In advance.”

      “Me, too,” he interjected.

      “Naturally, your money will be refunded in full,” he promised them smoothly, which didn’t exactly solve the problem.

      “What about the lobby?” she cried. “Isn’t there a cot, or a sofa or something he could sleep on?”

      “All the cots are in use. And, as you’ll recall, we only have wing chairs in the lobby.”

      “A sleeping bag on the floor, then.”

      Jonah was a pretty easygoing guy, but this was going too far. He had his team to think of. “I have an important day tomorrow,” he told her. “I need my sleep. You bed down on the lobby floor.”

      She stalked right up to him, nose to his collarbone. Their lack of equality in the height department seemed to aggravate her even more. “I have an important day tomorrow, too.”

      “I’m competing in a hockey tournament.”

      “I’m a bridesmaid in a wedding.”

      “My condolences.”

      The way her eyes suddenly widened, he got the odd feeling she agreed with his assessment of being stuck in a wedding party. “But this is ridiculous. There must be somewhere else you could stay.”

      He’d booked the hotel for a reason. He was too old to bunk in with a bunch of hockey players trading war stories and shooting the bull. Most of the others were too old for it, too, but it didn’t stop them. He thought with wives and kids at home, they needed the male bonding time a lot more than he did. At this point, he’d rather sleep on the floor of the Elk Crossing Lodge’s lobby than on the floor of a cabin with six guys, at least half of whom were bound to snore. But he’d much rather sleep in a nice comfortable bed right here in this room.

      “There isn’t anybody else I can stay with. What about you? Can’t you stay with somebody else from the wedding?”

      She blinked at him once, slowly, and then shook her head sharply. “Impossible.”

      He shrugged. “It’s not ideal, but we’ll just have to share for a night or two. There are two beds. I don’t snore.”

      She crossed her hands under her breasts and he tried not to notice. “It’s not your snoring that worries me.”

      “I don’t have evil designs on your body, either,” he said, trying to reassure her of his integrity. She was a good-looking woman and if they’d both stumbled into this hotel room in passion it would be one thing, but that wasn’t the case.

      If he could get her to see him as a platonic roommate, they’d be fine. “Look—” he indicated the hockey stick СКАЧАТЬ