TAKE A CHANCE (Chance Colorado Series) (18 page)

Like something out of a horror movie, the hallway appeared to stretch out for miles in both directions. An arrow attached to an EXIT sign pointed to the right, so she chose to go to the left. She didn’t want to leave the building. She simply needed to find the ladies’ room and a spot to sit down before her legs gave out.

The door next to the ladies’ room had a keypad affixed to it, and she spared only a moment’s thought as to where it led or to how often people must have wandered in there for them to have gone to the expense of adding a keypad to keep it locked.

Inside the ladies’ room, she stumbled to the sinks and turned on the faucet to splash cold water on her face. It didn’t help.

This was horrible.

Behind her one of the stall doors opened and a young woman stopped at the sink beside her.

“You okay?” she asked as she handed a paper towel to Allie. “Too much to drink?”

“I don’t think so.” Allie’s brain felt like it was turning to mush as she stared into the mirror. “I only had two.”

“You must be drinking the Gold Strike Margaritas.” The young woman chuckled. “Those things are, like, so seriously dangerous, they should come with warning stickers. Smooth as fruit juice going down but with an alcohol content that kicks your butt. You don’t even feel them until you stand up the first time and then
whoosh!
I can only handle, like, one of those, even though I consider myself a drinker.”

Butt-kicking margaritas. Who would have guessed? Allie only wished she’d run into this girl before she’d had that first drink. Or, at the very least, before she’d had the second.

“You here with somebody? You want me to send them back to, like, help you?”

“No.” Lord, no! That was the last thing on earth she wanted. “I’ll be fine in a few minutes.”

She would be. Just as soon as the room stopped spinning and her brain quit trying to convince her she was viewing the world through a long, narrow tunnel.

“Okay, then,” the other woman said, skepticism lacing her voice. “You take care.”

Allie held the paper towel under the cold water before draping it over her face. After a minute or two, or maybe thirty, she pulled it off. Even her sense of time had deserted her.

She worked to focus on her reflection in the mirror, but it wasn’t easy with the mirror hung so far away down that tunnel. When she finally did bring the world into focus, she wished she hadn’t.

Great. Another date where she ended up looking like a drowned rat. A drowned rat with her top wide open, she amended, fumbling to stick the two pieces of strategically placed tape back together. Thank goodness she’d worn her best lace bra tonight. Just in case that happened again.

A tiny giggle bubbled up, humming low in her throat as she tucked strands of damp curls behind her ears and headed for the door.

When she stepped out into the hallway, a strong, acrid scent burned her nose and she stopped to look around. The door that had been shut and locked when she’d first come down this hallway now stood ajar, a chair propping it open. A thin layer of white smoke wafted out through the open door and into the hallway.

A fire? Hey… that could be a good thing. If all the sprinklers went off at the same time, then everyone would look exactly like she did. Since she had no idea how long she’d been in the restroom, maybe it had already happened. And what a weird fluke of chance to have a fire start when she was on a date with a firefighter.

The giggle moved further up her throat, lodging at the back of her mouth, waiting for its moment to emerge.

Two steps brought her around the door, and the giggle that had wanted its freedom evaporated as if it had never had a reason to exist.

Ahead of her people bustled around a busy, smoky kitchen, avoiding a man and a woman. A man and a woman clutched together in an embrace, his hands on her black-silk-clad arms, her hands on his smoothly shaved face as her lips pressed against his.

“Shit me,” Allie whispered, turning much too fast for her brain to handle. She twirled back against the wall and held out her hands to steady herself.

Shayla and Logan. Right there in front of God and the whole damn kitchen staff. And with her, his date, for crying out loud, waiting patiently at their table for him to return as if nothing had happened.

Only something had happened and she wasn’t at the table.

She wasn’t going to be there either. Ahead of her, down the mile-long tunnel of a hallway, the exit door stood wide open, beckoning her with its easy access to escape from this horrible excuse for a date.

Outside she paused, one hand on the wall, struggling to get her bearings. She must be at the back of the building. If she followed the alleyway in either direction to the street, she could easily make her way home. In Chance, no place was more than seven or eight blocks away from anything else. She grew up here. Even with her brain feeling this addled, even in these shoes, walking home was no big deal.

Getting dumped in the middle of a date—now
that
was a big deal.

“Big deal!” she told the light pole on her left. “Big freakin’ deal. Leave me sitting in the dining room while he plays kissy-face in the kitchen? Oh, I don’t think so. Not this girl.”

She leaned on the pole for a moment longer before patting it like an old friend and starting forward, only to step squarely into a patch of squishy mud.

“Yuck.”

She looked down at her foot, struggling to focus on the icky mess it had made on her shoe. Mud? Seriously? There hadn’t been any rain for a couple of days, and if it wasn’t from rain…

“Gross.”

She wasn’t going to allow herself to go there. Just the very thought of all the things it could be made her stomach tighten, and that was the last thing she needed right now.

What she needed was to keep moving and get home. Whatever it was, it wasn’t anything half an hour in a hot shower couldn’t erase from her memory.

Ahead of her, a large grate covered the sidewalk where one of the little gullies ringing Chance darted under the street. She paused at the grate and laid her hand on the rail to step cautiously across.

Not cautiously enough.

Her heel plunged into one of the metal holes and she toppled over sideways, saved from a nasty fall by the metal handrail slamming into her side.

There was no moving forward. Her heel was firmly lodged in the grate.

Fine. It wasn’t like she needed to wear these stupid shoes again or anything. Obviously, not even shoes like these could win out over tight leather pants and a half-open slinky silk shirt.

“That you should button up!” she hissed as she leaned down to unbuckle her shoe and slip her foot out.

Two steps farther and she knew one shoe off and one shoe on wasn’t going to work. Walking was difficult enough right now without doing it on a moving incline. She squatted down until she rolled onto her bottom in a full sit. That was better than what she’d planned anyway. Now it was much easier to get the remaining shoe off.

She stood and started forward again, finally dropping the shoe she carried. What was she going to do with one stupid shoe? She didn’t need it. The night was warm and she was…

“Where am I? Wait.” The words buzzed as she spoke and she licked her lips before repeating them again to test their feel. “Wait.”

If only she didn’t feel like she was wandering through a rotating fog machine.

“Wait.”

This was ridiculous. She was in Chance, of course. No way she could get lost here, just a little turned around. She’d simply wandered to the end of the paved streets and past the area where the streetlights were even moderately close together. Everything was okay. Nothing bad ever happened here. Nothing bad, nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing even remotely—

“What the heck is that?”

In the distance, down the other side of the road, odd white lights danced up and down, heading in her direction. Odd little white lights with long yellow lights on either side of them.

Wings maybe?

In one of the books in her shop, it would be an alien. A benevolent alien, of course. Those were the books she preferred to read. Happy books. Or maybe a fairy.

“That’s it. My fairy godmother,” she murmured.

This she had to see, up close. Crossing to the other side of the hard-pack dirt road, she waited, hands on her hips, swaying just a little as the small, bouncing lights drew closer.

Was it her imagination or was her stomach doing little sloshing flips to keep time with the movement of that light?

Maybe it was magic. Maybe it really was a fairy. Maybe it was…

Someone she knew?

As the lights moved closer, she could see they were attached to a man. A man she recognized.

“Tanner?” she whispered as the rays of the light he wore hit her square in the face.

“Allie Flynn?” Tanner’s deep voice held a note of surprise. “What are you doing out here? I thought you were supposed to be having dinner with Logan?”

“Two’s company,” she muttered, remembering her earlier ego-bruising dinner date as she walked toward him. “Three’s a cloud. Crowd. Ow!”

A sharp, stinging pain assaulted her feet with every step. Trying to escape only made it worse.

“What’s wrong?” Tanner was at her side, a hand on her shoulder. “Hold on while I… oh, geez. Sticker patch. Just be still for a minute.”

Be still? Didn’t he realize she had a million needles jamming into her feet?

“We can fix this. Let’s just pick you up and get you back on the road. Hold still and hang on.”

Tanner leaned down, grabbed her around the waist and hoisted her up over his shoulder.

“Like a sack of flour,” she giggled.

It was an innocent enough movement. But the pressure on Allie’s stomach, accompanied by the whirl through the air with her head hanging down his back, was more than the margarita slurry brewing in her stomach could handle.

“Sick,” she groaned, any desire to giggle long gone.

Her brain had so much more to say but her body simply wouldn’t allow her mouth to cooperate. If she opened it again, it wouldn’t be words coming out.

“Here’s a clear spot. We’ll just set you down and then we’ll work on those stickers.”

“Sick,” she repeated, scrambling to her knees as he released her.

“Wait a minute,” he said.

But why he wanted her to wait or anything else he might have to say was lost in the heaving contractions of her stomach emptying itself.

When she could stop, could finally catch her breath, she was aware of him crouched down next to her, one arm around her shoulders, the other across her chest, supporting her weight as the next wave of nausea gripped her and passed. His murmured, unintelligible reassurances were lost on her as one after another the waves hit and subsided until she felt as if she must have heaved up her stomach, her intestines, and maybe even her toenails.

“So sorry,” she managed to say at last. “So, so sorry.”

Somewhere along the way tonight she must have died and gone to hell. This was sheer agony. Complete and total misery, coupled with total humiliation. Her only consolation was that it couldn’t get any worse than this.

“What the hell is going on here?”

She glanced over her shoulder to see Logan standing in the middle of the road, his wide shoulders highlighted in the rays of Tanner’s headlamp.

Okay, she was wrong. It not only could get worse, it just had.

* * *

“Knock it off, Shayla.” Logan peeled his ex-fiancée’s fingers from his face and backed away, putting some physical distance between them.

“What?” she asked, holding her hands up innocently, fluttering her long, fake eyelashes. “I’m only trying to thank you for saving my kitchen. If you hadn’t shown up when you did, we might have had an expensive tragedy in here instead of just a smelly little electrical fire. It’s what you do, Logan. Accept it. It’s who you are. Responsibility always was your middle name.”

“Whatever,” he muttered, making his way back to the front of the kitchen. “You need to get an electrician in here to take a look at that mess of wires. And, for the record, I’ll be checking the files when I get to the fire station on Monday. Looks to me like your kitchen is overdue for a fire inspection.”

His hope tonight had been to try to sneak in and avoid Shayla as much as possible, not to end up with her arms wrapped around him. The fact that she was right didn’t help him feel the least bit better about the situation. And she was right, both about his saving her restaurant some major damage and about his actions defining him. When he’d smelled those wires burning, there was nothing he could do but track down the source.

He shook his head, as if he could physically clear away the last few moments. If he’d had any sense at all, he’d have insisted that Allie pick another place for their evening out.

But he hadn’t.

Instead, he’d walked right into a predictably uncomfortable situation. On top of everything else, he’d ended up wasting a good chunk of their evening together dealing with the kitchen staff and the fire in the wiring.