“I know. Me either.”
“I think I pulled a muscle.”
“I think you bit me. Am I bleeding?”
I laughed. “No, but I hope you’re not seeing anyone. If you are, she’s going to wonder about all those scratches on your back.”
“I’m not seeing anyone.” He paused. “Are you?”
“No.”
Neither of us moved for several minutes. When I caught myself falling asleep, I sat up. “I should go.”
“Why? Just stay here.”
I looked down at him. “You want me to stay?”
“Yeah.” He opened his eyes. In the low light, they almost looked black instead of blue. “Spend the night with me.”
I waited for it—the dirty joke, the excuse, the subtle dig—the reason he’d toss out for asking me to stay. It couldn’t just be that he wanted me here.
But he didn’t say anything more. He just reached out and covered my hand with his.
I looked at our hands for a moment, and a thousand memories came rushing back. Some good, some bad, but all us. I felt close to him, and I didn’t want to leave. “Okay. I’ll stay.”
“Good.” He took off his watch and put it on the nightstand.
“What should we do today?” Oliver traced the letters of my tattoo with his finger. “Museum? Aquarium? Stroll down Michigan Avenue?”
I was on my stomach, arms folded beneath my pillow. “What day is it?”
He laughed. “Saturday. Do you have to be somewhere?”
I tried to think, but my brain, like my body, was complete mush. We’d spent the entire night alternating between mind-blowing sex and short, heavy naps. Neither of us had gotten enough sleep. “I can’t remember.”
“You don’t work on Saturdays, do you?”
“No.”
“Good. Spend the day with me.”
“I have no clothes.”
“Even better.” He looked at the window. “It’s raining anyway. We’ll just stay in bed.”
Smiling, I looked at his tousled hair and stubbled jaw. “How long are you in Chicago?”
“For the weekend.”
“Do you have plans?”
“Yes. Fucking you ten different ways. Giving you lots of orgasms. Making you scream my name some more.” He leaned down and kissed my shoulder. “Doesn’t that sound fun?”
Of course it did. But I wasn’t sure my body could take another day of it.
“I don’t know, Oliver. I’m kind of sore.” I tried to stretch and winced at the pain in my back muscles.
“I have been pretty rough on you, haven’t I?” He sounded proud.
“Yes.” I flipped onto my side and threw an arm and a leg over him. “But I like it.”
He pinched my ass hard. “That’s my girl.”
During the next two days, Oliver only left the room twice—once to run down to the ballroom and get my coat and then to the lobby store to pick up a toothbrush for me, and the second time to buy more condoms.
I never left once all weekend.
We ate ridiculously expensive room service meals, drank a pricey bottle of bourbon, rehashed childhood memories, argued incessantly about everything under the sun, and had so much sex I didn’t think I’d be able to walk out of there.
And somewhere in between all the eating and drinking and laughing and orgasms, the idea for Brown Eyed Girl was born.
“I just don’t know what I want to do with my life,” he’d said, taking another five-dollar mozzarella stick from the basket. “Now that I’m done with grad school, my parents want me to come home and work for Pemberton, but I don’t want a desk job. I’m scared if I take it, they’ll turn me into someone I have no interest in becoming. I’ll wake up one day and discover I hate my life but it’ll be too late to do anything about it. I’ll have a boring job, an ex-wife who can’t stand me, and two kids who blame me for fucking up their lives. Even the dog will hate me.”
I giggled. “So don’t take that job. Change course. Do something else.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. What do you love?”
He thought for a second. “Sex, sailboats, and whiskey.”
“Well, I’m not sure how to make a living with the first two, but want to hear about an idea I’ve been kicking around that involves whiskey?”
“Yes.” Stretching out on his side on the bed, wearing only a pair of jeans, he propped his head on his hands.
“I’m moving back to Cloverleigh this fall to take over the marketing and PR, as well as manage the tasting rooms at the winery. And I’ve been thinking about starting a small batch distillery.”
“That’s so crazy. I’ve thought about that too,” he said excitedly. “Ever since I took that trip to Scotland, it’s been in my head.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” He shook his head. “It’s like we share brain waves or something.”
I grinned. “We might.”
“So when will you do it?”
“I’m not sure. Not right away—I’ve got more research to do, and I need to make sure I have the financial resources, but I’m excited about it.”
“I’ve got financial resources. Let’s do it together.”
“What?” I stared at him.
“I just turned twenty-five and inherited a chunk of my trust. Let’s do it together.” He thought for a second. “But maybe we should locate it somewhere other than the farm. Cloverleigh gets a lot of wine people and families, but we’d want a different demographic—younger and hipper.”
“You’re thinking here? Chicago?”
“Not necessarily. What about Detroit? There are some distilleries doing well there already. We’d have to think of a way to stand out, but I bet we could do it.”
I sat up. “Oliver, are you serious? You’d go into business with me?”
“Of course I would.” He grinned at me. “Let’s do it.”
We stayed up half the night taking notes and researching things online and sketching ideas on hotel stationary. We figured we’d start with something simpler to make, like a vodka or gin, and then work our way into whiskey, which was more difficult and took more time. As the hours passed, we got more and more excited, convinced this was the best fucking idea in the world, we were geniuses, and everyone was going to say they knew us when. We might have been half drunk, or half crazy—probably both—but at that moment, the entire world belonged to us.
“Would you move to Detroit?” he asked, leaning back against the pillows, stretching his legs out in front of him. He wore only a pair of hunter green boxer briefs, and his bare chest bore faint red scratch marks.
“Fuck yes, I would.” I sat cross-legged next to him in one of his T-shirts, our pile of notes between us. “I’ll start looking for PR jobs there right away, since our business won’t turn a profit for a while.”
“Don’t worry about that. I’ll make sure you have enough money so you don’t have to work another job. The marketing is going to be critical for us. There’s a lot of competition.”