She hadn’t figured Robby would pay any attention, and she was right. The door opened and light—a lot brighter than the little nightstand glare—hit her like a white wall. She wailed and shut her eyes.

“Poor thing.” Robby sounded unsympathetic. “Time to get up. I’ve got to go.”

“Where?”

“Work. Come on, get up, you’ll feel better if you move around. Do you remember getting here?”

Velvet tried to shake her head. It was a bad idea.

“You opened the door at three in the morning and hit the floor like a sack of bricks. On top of that, the intrusion alarm went off. I didn’t know whether to kill you or call the paramedics.” Robby was doing something behind her, straightening up, pawing through clothes in the closet. The rattle of bangers was enough to make Velvet’s eyes bleed. “I put you in a cold shower just in time for you to start throwing up. All in all, it was a glorious morning, and don’t you ever do that to me again, ever, or you’re out on your ass, understand me?”

Velvet pried her fingers away from her eyes and blinked until Robby’s face came into focus. Hard. Cold brown eyes. A mouth like a straight razor.

“Sure,” she agreed, and gulped back a hot mouthful of something she didn’t want to identify. “Sorry. Won’t happen again.”

“It had better not.” Robby glared at her another minute, then went back to rattling hangers. “Have you seen my brown pants?”

Actually, from where she sat, Velvet could see them real well. They were crumpled in a ball under the dresser, probably covered with vomit and Chivas and Listerine. She covered up her eyes again.

“No. Got any aspirin?”

“Bathroom.”

She tried to get up. She managed to get about two inches off the bed. The resulting fall back to the mattress made her think her brain might actually explode, but it only throbbed until her teeth rattled. Scotch. She knew better than to get drunk on Scotch.

“Uh, could you …” The question died under the weight of Robby’s stare. “No. Didn’t think so.”

Somehow, once she’d got her feet under her, the room stopped swaying like a rope bridge and just felt like a tilt-a-whirl instead. Not so bad. She kept both hands pressed against the hallway on the way to the bathroom, averted her eyes from lemon yellow and cheery day-glo orange, and dug aspirin out of a cabinet. She swallowed four of them dry, found vitamin C capsules, and swallowed them, too.

As she stood slumped and miserable, staring at her bruised swollen face in the mirror, Robby appeared in the doorway and handed her a frosty glass of orange juice.

“There’s coffee on the counter,” she said. “Turn the pot off when you’ve had enough. Unplug it, too. And wash out the pot, just water, no soap.”