Chapter Four
Outside her door, he hesitated.
Hand raised to knock. Mind racing, heart pounding.
He had not thought of what he would say if she answered, which was—when it came to having to do anything in front of another person, at least—unlike him.
Even on the plane, he had practiced his intervention in his mind before he stood up.
He’d begun practicing basically as soon as he heard the man across the way barking out his displeasure over the sick girl.
Be quiet
If you want off this plane quickly
If this disturbance carries on
But in the roughly twenty-five hours since he had first seen the woman he now knew as Layla Bailey, he had not managed to practice anything when speaking directly to her.
He said things like, Get up from there or Are you the ex or I’m not afraid of flying.
He did not like the way she looked at him, keen and curious.
He did not like the way she blanked her eyes and smiled when she looked at everyone else.
He did not want to knock on this door.
But then he remembered Michael this morning: four a.m., tears in his eyes, elbows on his knees, every part of him sagging.
“I don’t know how this could have happened,” he’d said, and Griffin’s entire body flared with white-hot pain.
How could this have happened? Michael had cried to him once, and Griffin hadn’t been able to say anything.
Hadn’t been able to do anything.
He could not do that again. He would never do that again.
So, he knocked.
Even though he had no plan.
Only after, as he waited, did he consider how this might look to her: a strange man at her hotel room door, a man who had been rude to her by all normal standards of human behavior, a man who only knew her room number because they’d checked in at the same time, both at the mercy of desk clerks who didn’t speak quietly enough for his comfort.
How could this have happened?
He did not care how it would look to her. He cared about Michael.
He stared accusingly at the pale gray paneled door. Why weren’t there peepholes on the doors of these rooms? Did the French think they were too good for peepholes?
Well, if Layla Bailey was smart, she wouldn’t answer.
He heard a soft thud and a few rustling movements.
She opened the door.
And for a few seconds, he forgot what he came for.
She was wearing the same robe that hung, unused, inside his hotel room’s closet, a fluffy white thing that he bet felt the right sort of soft to her.
Her dark brown hair still had traces of the waves she’d worn last night on the elevator, flatter and more uneven.
Makeup smudged beneath her eyes, a pillow crease on her cheek. Her full pink lips parted in surprise.
“I thought you were the paper,” she said.
“They don’t knock for the paper,” he said. “You shouldn’t answer this door.”
He thought they might’ve blinked at each other in perfect sync.
“Why are you here?” she finally said, which was the more appropriate first thing to say. An opportunity to reset the entire exchange.
Unfortunately, as she said it, she raised her hand to the front of her robe, clutching it closed tighter, not that it was gaping.
Now, though, there was her hand, right there, and that distracted him, because it was her hands he’d noticed first. The girl had fainted, and the flight attendant had called for a doctor, and then she’d come, walking by his seat, and it was such an old habit, to look first at a doctor’s hands, at any medical professional’s hands.
He didn’t think it made sense, but a lot of things about the habits he’d developed over the last decade didn’t make sense.
She had nice hands, he’d thought then. Long fingers, short nails.
When she knelt to talk to the girl, she pressed her palms together, occasionally twisting one against the other, re-clasping her fingers.
She was warming them up, he realized, before she started her exam.
Temperature was very important, in his experience. She was probably very good at her job.
Now, she cleared her throat. Loudly.
Pointedly.
He snapped his eyes back up to hers. Her eyebrows—she had thick eyebrows, a shade darker than her hair—were lowered accusingly.
He should somehow indicate that he hadn’t been looking at her breasts, which he could not even see in the robe, but it wouldn’t be less strange to say he had been staring at her hand, probably.
“Get dressed,” he said instead.
“I beg your pardon?”
She was using that same indignant tone from the elevator. What is your problem?
Well, part of his problem was that he had no idea how to start a conversation with her. His brain still felt full of the four a.m. pitch-darkness. His body was still disoriented from the chaotic hours the trip here had required.
Michael, he thought desperately, and grabbed hold of the memory of this morning. The knock on his own door. His best friend’s pale, shocked face. The stunned, disbelieving note to his voice as he’d told Griffin everything.
He reset himself this time.
“I need to talk to you about Michael and Emily. And what happened last night.”
Impossibly, her eyebrows lowered a little further. “What do you mean, what happened last night?”
“When you were out with Emily.”
“Nothing happened when I was out with Emily. We had dinner and came back here, all together.” Something panicked crossed her face. “Is she okay? I walked her and Rosie to their rooms.”
“She’s fine,” Griff said.
He almost asked, Who walked you to yours?
but that was a stupid question to ask of a woman who opened her hotel room door when there was no peephole.
In fact, it was a stupid question to ask of a woman who had absolutely no sense—judging by the fact that she was attending this wedding in the first place—of self-preservation.
“If she was fine you wouldn’t be here. What is going on?”
He didn’t want to talk about this while she was in a bathrobe. Her door was open enough that he could see part of the unmade bed over her shoulder. Her room was very small. He would not be comfortable in there, not that it mattered. He would never have occasion to be in her room.
“Hel-lo?” she said, clearly frustrated.
Well, he was more frustrated. With her, specifically.
“Emily told Michael she’s having doubts,” he said, pitching his voice low.
In addition to not having peepholes, these doors were not very soundproof.
Last night, when he finally came back to his room, he thought he could hear every step that went by in the hallways.
He hadn’t been able to fall asleep, of course.
When Michael knocked, Griff had only been dozing, his mind hazy with fatigue but his body—still shot through with pain—not quitting even for a second.
He maybe should have stayed out walking for longer, but he’d been so tired.
Layla stared at him. “When?”
“When what?”
“When did she tell him that?”
He ground his molars together. Had he not made that clear already?
“Last night. After your dinner.”
He could admit she looked genuinely confused. A blankness to her face that did not, for once, look like a practiced effort.
“I don’t—we had a nice dinner,” she said.
He could see her mind running in the background, sifting through memories.
His own mind couldn’t help a crude, invented mimicry: He wondered if the restaurant was candlelit.
If the folds of her skirt touched the floor when she sat.
If she left lipstick behind on her glass. If she actually smiled, at any point.
What was he thinking?
This time difference was killing him; not sleeping was killing him. Being away from home, away from his things, out of his routine was—
No.
No, this morning with Michael was killing him.
“You said something to her.” He could hear the frustration in his voice, mostly at himself, but he didn’t care if she thought it was all directed at her. “She told Michael it was something you said.”
He watched it all pass over her face: more confusion first, then a swell of disbelief. Finally, a pulse of fear.
“Something I…?” she said quietly, not finishing.
The way she looked at him—this searching, desperate look, these seconds where she forgot the plane and the lobby and the elevator and his fucking face. Her robe, her mussed hair, her hand still held at her heart.
She looked like she just needed some help.
But he was not here to help her. He was here to help the man who was basically his brother. His best friend, his best friend who had come to his room before dawn, worried that he was about to lose the woman he loved.
That could not happen.
Griff had not come all this way—an entire ocean away from everything he needed to be comfortable, everything he needed to survive—to see this fail because of some loose-lipped woman with an axe to grind against the family Michael was marrying into. He needed this wedding to happen.
When this wedding happened, Michael would be happy.
He set his jaw against that look on Layla Bailey’s face. He would not let her get away with ruining this. He would make her fix it.
Somehow, he would make her fix it.
“There’s a courtyard off the lobby,” he said. “They serve breakfast. I’ll meet you there in fifteen minutes.”
He didn’t wait for her reply.
He walked away, and didn’t look back.