Not Another New Year's by Christie Ridgway

Author:Christie Ridgway [Ridgway, Christie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: romantic comedy, california, contemporary romance, holiday romance, beach read, sexy romance
Publisher: Christie Ridgway
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

The bar wouldn't open for at least half an hour, but Bartender Jack had the music already blaring. Troy wore his earplugs and had turned off the lights in his office, but the relative quiet and the half shadows didn't dull the clamor inside his head.

Guilt, anger at himself, the nauseating throb that signaled the beginning of one of his recurrent headaches, all three pounded on the inside walls of his skull. Unfortunately, not one of them was breaking free.

He folded his arms on the desk and dropped his aching head on top of them, cursing his weakness. Cursing himself. He deserved the pain, he supposed.

The last time he'd seen Desirée, he'd crushed her like a boot heel crushing a delicate flower.

"And you call me lazy," said a voice from the doorway. "Here's my butthead of a boss, snoozing when he should be stacking glassware or something."

Desirée, the delicate flower.

Her belligerent sass would have made him grin if he dared risk moving the muscles of his face. Instead he lifted his hand and gestured with it, shooing her away.

As if that would work.

He heard her stomp farther into the room, each of her footsteps seeming to vibrate through the floor and into his head, adding more chaos to what was already tumbling inside his brain. She halted on the other side of the desk.

"Troy?" Her voice sounded uncertain this time and had lost its waspish edge. "Troy?"

"Go 'way, Dez," he mumbled. He didn't want to deal with her right now, and he damn well didn't want her to see him like this. He wanted her dislike, not her pity.

Her fingertips touched his bare scalp.

His skin jittered and he cursed her, and whatever impulse that had caused him to shave his head in the first place. Funny, he often jabbed at Tanner by laughing at his long "sissy" hair, but now it was obvious his own big bad baldness didn't render him more macho.

At least not where Desirée was concerned.

Hell. He had to be strong around her, he had to stay strong around her. "Go 'way," he said again, trying to put a Marine-like bark in his voice.

"You get migraines."

"Not migraines." He made himself lift his head and squint at her, even though the movement sent shafts of pain to his belly, where they knotted and writhed. "I'm fine. Get back to work."

"One of my roommates at boarding school got migraines. She looked like you do when they came on. Mean, and her eyes squinched."

He was glad he looked mean, he told himself. "My eyes aren't squinching." Squinching. Yucktard. What kind of woman made up words like those? They made his head hurt even more.

"Squinching isn't even in the dictionary."

She ignored the criticism and lifted the receiver from the phone on the desk, and then, after glancing at the speed-dial list, pressed a number.

Troy didn't know what number. He was directing the gaze of his squinching eyes off to the side. It seemed to help the pain.

"Tanner?"

That's who she'd called, then.

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