Page 49 of The Accidental Beauty Queen
I wish I did. I wish that very, very much.
“All right then,” the beauty queen says. She and Gray are still so close that I can hear the ice cubes shifting in the bucket as he hands it to her. “Thank you so much.”
Finally.
I stay right where I am, with my back pressed against the door, as the voices in the hallway recede. I’m so anxious to get out of here that I could jump right out of my skin, but I force myself to wait.
After a torturous minute of silence goes by, I crack the door open and peer into the hall. It’s blessedly empty.
I sprint back to my room on wobbly legs. My hands are shaking so much that I have to swipe the card key in the lock three times before I get the little green light. When I finally do, I swing the door open and dash inside.
Home free. We didn’t get caught.
Everything’s fine, I tell myself. Nothing to worry about at all. It’s all a-okay.
But it’s not. Not really. That kiss—and everything that followed—was a monumental mistake. And it can’t happen again, no matter how very much I want it to.
He’s a judge, and I’m a fake contestant impersonating her twin sister. The situation is too problematic for words.
Now that I’m back in my hotel room, I realize how lucky we were that someone interrupted us and put a stop to our improper shenanigans. I don’t even want to consider what would have happened if the knock on the door hadn’t shaken some sense back into me.
Except, I sort ofdowant to consider it. A lot.
But I won’t. Because recent hijinks aside, I am generally a good person. An honest one. I don’t even dog-ear my books, much less engage in the kind of Sandra Bullock–rom-com subterfuge I’m embroiled in at the moment.
I take a deep breath and make a promise to myself. I’m going to do whatever needs to be done to get Ginny to the finals, and then I’m telling Gray the truth. The whole, ugly lot of it. In the meantime, no more sneaking around with him. No more clandestine meetings in the stairwell or the ice closet.Definitelyno more kissing.
“Where on earth have you been?”
I jump at the sound of Ginny’s voice.
She rounds the corner from the direction of the bathroom, jams her hands on her hips, and studies me through narrowed eyes. “Um, didn’t you forget something?”
You mean, like how to tell the truth?
I bow my head, certain that she’ll know what I’ve been up to if I look at her head-on. My gaze drops to the floor, and I notice that Buttercup is miraculously still sitting in the exact spot where I left her. She’s peering up at me with her round, googly, Frenchie eyes, waiting to be praised.
I scoop the dog into my arms and cast a fleeting glance at Ginny over the top of her head. “Like what?”
I should probably know what she’s talking about it, but for the life of me, I can’t remember. My head is still back down the hall with Gray. And so, I fear, is my heart.
Ginny throws her hands up. “Theice.”
Oh yeah.
The ice.
“Sit down. We need to talk,” Ginny says, motioning for me to take a seat at the foot of her bed.
I’ve managed to convince her that when I got to the ice closest, the big, rumbling machine was empty. Then, because I’m such a great sister, I went to five other floors, but none of them had ice either. Somewhere in my epic quest for frozen water, I lost our ice bucket.
I feel a tad bit guilty that I’ve made myself out to sound like such a devoted twin in this complete and utter fabrication, but it’s the only believable excuse I can come up with off the top of my head.
What am I supposed say?
Oops! I was so busy letting Judge Number Six kiss me silly that I forgot all about the fact that I hit you in the face with a baton.
So much nope.
