Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
E den
A half hour in the biggest soaker tub I’ve ever seen gives my anger a chance to rise to the surface, replacing the humiliation I felt before. And to think I bought that dress believing Justin would go crazy for it.
Jackass.
I finally get out of the tub when my fingertips get pruney, and I see a white cotton bathrobe hanging on the back of the door. Did Marius put that there? I don’t remember seeing that when I walked in.
Then again, I do only have one working eye, so maybe I missed it. No matter. Whoever hung it there, thank you.
I slip it on, and oh my God, it feels heavenly against my skin! This is no ordinary cotton robe. It feels like the softest cotton known to man. I guess there are perks to staying in a suite here.
When I walk out into the hotel room, Marius is sitting on an enormous black sofa watching something on a large screen TV. He smiles when he sees me, patting the cushion next to him.
“Come sit down and rest. Did you have a nice bath? I ordered room service. Since I didn’t know what you liked, I got a bit of everything.”
After I do as he suggests, I suddenly feel awkward when I remember my eye probably looks awful. I lower my head and focus my attention on the white hotel robe.
“You okay?” he asks, but I don’t look at him.
“Yeah. The bath was nice.”
He falls silent, so I assume he’s returned to watching TV.
All the better. I really don’t know what to say right anyway.
I don’t understand why he’s being so nice to me either.
Maybe it’s because Ava is my best friend and she’s with Matthias.
It certainly isn’t because we’re good friends since I don’t think Marius King and I have spoken twenty words to one another before today.
Yes, we attended the same high school, but he was a year ahead of me.
The closest I ever got to him was knowing his ex-girlfriend.
All of this fills my head so I don’t pay much attention to him until he taps me on the knee. I look at my leg and notice the robe has fallen open. Great. First, I get punched in the face by my lovely ex-boyfriend, and now I’m flashing the guy who’s trying to help.
What a day.
“Eden, are you sure you’re okay?”
I nod but still refuse to look at him.
He leans over and slides his finger under my chin. Gently lifting it, he forces me to look at him. “What’s wrong?”
“My eye hurts. I don’t even want to look at it. I bet it’s horrible.”
Marius smiles and shakes his head. “Nah. You look great, like always. I think you just need to learn to duck.”
His eyes light up, and he says, “That’s going to be your nickname from now on. Duck.”
Terrific. Other women get called kitten or baby or honey. I get duck.
I don’t try to hide my frown at his nickname for me. I’ve always hated my name and wished for a cool nickname. Duck is definitely not that.
“That pout tells me you’re unhappy. Don’t like the nickname? What if I make it Little Duck? That’s definitely cuter.”
Twisting my expression into a grimace, I shake my head. “I bet you’ve always loved your name, but I hate mine. Always have. And I always wanted a great nickname. I just don’t think Duck or Little Duck is great.”
He tilts his head left and right like he’s unsure what to say to that. “I like my name. It’s unique. I’ve never met another Marius. For that matter, I’ve never met another Eden. I like your name.”
I can’t help but smile. I remember Maia saying a lot of terrible things about Marius, but one thing she mentioned over and over was how charming he could be when she was feeling down. As I sit here feeling like I’ve been beaten down by life, literally, I understand what she meant.
“Thanks. You wouldn’t like it if every teenage boy you ever met insisted on saying something about your garden of Eden.”
Marius lets out a belly laugh at what was supposed to be a serious point. He realizes I wasn’t kidding a second later and forces himself to stop laughing.
“Sorry. I want to say those guys were just assholes, but I’m pretty sure I would have said that to you as a teenage boy.”
A knock on the door interrupts our conversation, and he jumps up from the couch to answer it. “Time to eat! I hope you’re hungry.”
I’m just thankful for a break in the discussion of my name and my new nickname.
I watch him walk through the suite and can’t help but notice how good he looks in his gray dress pants and black dress shirt.
Like all the King boys, he’s good looking with an incredible body, but for my money, Marius King is the best looking of all five brothers.
I chastise myself for thinking that since I look like some kind of beat up pathetic thing.
It’s doubtful he’s seeing me as anything other than a damsel in distress, which is never a good look.
I prefer to be a woman with confidence, and usually I am, but after what happened with Justin today, I’m struggling to remember who Eden really is.
He leads two men dressed in black waiters’ uniforms past me to a big round table on the other side of the room near the giant floor to ceiling windows that offer a gorgeous view of Las Vegas. I watch as they make two trips and then a third and then a final trip in with dishes filled with food.
Marius hands them both hundred dollar bills and walks them to the door. “Thank you, gentlemen. Have a great night!”
“If you need anything else, Mr. King, please call. We’ll be happy to help,” one of the men says on his way out.
When Marius returns, he points to the table so jammed with plates and food that there’s no room for us to sit at it and eat.
“I may have gone overboard, but I wanted to make sure you had whatever you wanted to eat. Dig in. There’s soda, champagne, and whiskey.
Oh, and water, but who the hell wants that? ”
I stare at the table, stunned he went to so much trouble for me. “That’s a lot of food.”
He nods and shrugs like it’s nothing to have ordered over a thousand dollars’ worth of room service. “You know what they say. Go big or go home. Come on, eat. What do you want to drink? For me, it’s definitely a whiskey day.”
Standing, I walk over to the table and study all the food I can choose from.
French toast, eggs, salmon and steak dinners, four burritos, a hamburger with fries, two ice cream sundaes, pancakes, what looks like some kind of club sandwich, and a charcuterie board, and that’s not including covered dishes hiding more food I can’t see.
“Um, I guess champagne.”
I might as well be drunk if I have to look like I went twelve rounds.
He smiles and pours me a glass. “A woman after my own heart. I might have been disappointed if you said water or soda.”
As I reach for the plate with the club sandwich, I say, “Normally, I would, but I’m not feeling myself today. It could be that I had some jackass punch me in the eye. Maybe my brains were scrambled. I don’t know. All I know is I feel like champagne.”
“Then champagne it is,” he says, handing me my drink.
I settle in on the sofa and start eating, famished from all that’s happened today. Marius sits down next to me and drags the coffee table toward us so I have somewhere to set my champagne flute. We don’t speak as we eat, and when I finish my sandwich, I sit back and let out a heavy sigh.
“Getting beat up gives you an appetite, I guess.”
He doesn’t respond to my attempt at being self-effacing, so I wait a few minutes before I say, “Marius, I owe you big. Thank you for jumping in with Justin and giving me a soft place to land. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to repay you for all you’ve done.”
All he does is shake his head while he continues to eat his steak. When he finishes, he sets the plate on the coffee table and downs the rest of the whiskey in his glass.
“You don’t owe me a thing. As for your boyfriend ? —”
I immediately correct him. “Ex. Ex-boyfriend.”
Smiling, he says. “As for your ex-boyfriend, if those security guards weren’t so close, I would have schooled him on how to treat a woman.”
That makes me laugh since I know Justin isn’t a fighter. He was never much of a lover either, but he did have his moments when he was kind. Why all of that vanished today I honestly don’t know.
“So are you going to put that gorgeous dress back on so we can go have a good time?”
Confused, I point at my eye, which I know is rapidly turning black and blue. “How can I go anywhere looking like this?”
“This is Vegas. Nobody knows you here. You could have been one of the women fighting in last night’s bout down the street. If anyone asks, I’ll warn them that you’re a female MMA fighter, and if they know what’s good for them, they’ll shut the hell up.”
“You won’t mind being seen with me looking like this?”
“No.”
“People are going to think you’re with a woman who’s sporting a black eye.”
Marius walks over to the bar and pours himself another drink. “I don’t care what people think. I never have. Now go get ready and make sure you put that dress back on. We’ll go gamble for a while.”
Thrilled someone other than me loves that dress, I smile and start walking toward the bedroom where all my clothes wait for me to put them away. I knew that dress looked great on me. Screw Justin and his puritanical nonsense.
From behind me, Marius says, “Duck, don’t worry. You’re beautiful, even with the black eye.”
I thought I’d hate that nickname. Maybe it’s not so bad, after all.
We get back to the hotel room right before midnight after hours of gambling in the casino.
I lost all the money I had put aside within the first two hours, but that didn’t seem to faze him in the least. He just said we deserved to have a good time and proceeded to pay for both of us for the next four hours.
Never in my life have I had so much fun with a man. There were no worries about what I was wearing or how much we were spending. We just had the best time.