All Through the Night: A Troubleshooter Christmas Read Online Free

say before the taco tried for an encore. “Use my phone. Call Alyssa.”

    Sam Starrett was a sympathy vomiter. It didn’t take him much to join the Technicolor interpretive dance, so he backed way off as Robin pretty much carried Jules into the hotel room.
    â€œBathroom’s this way.” Alyssa took charge. Or at least she tried. Robin refused to relinquish control, even when, from the sound of things, Jules lunged for the toilet and started singing the age-old hymn to the porcelain god.
    â€œLys, you all right?” Sam called.
    â€œI’m fine,” she called back. What a difference the time of day could make.
    Feeling a tad green himself, Sam stepped out onto the balcony, closing the slider tightly behind him.
    This was going to be an interesting night. When Robin called, Alyssa had been in the middle of trying to get Sam naked—which was not really that difficult a task. Sam had never been much of a challenge to his incredibly gorgeous wife, particularly in the
let’s delay dinner to make love
department.
    It
had
been something of a mood-changer, though, when she’d suddenly turned away from him, reaching to answer her phone. Like, there was anything in the world more important than this…?
    But then he’d recognized the jaunty melody, too, as being Jules Cassidy’s emergency ring tone. And the chances Sam was going to get some before dinner dropped to a solid “probably not.”
    Jules and Alyssa had been whispering together a lot recently. Alyssa didn’t want to talk about it, but Sam was pretty sure it had something to do with Robin, who was a dysfunctional emotional time bomb, just waiting for the most inopportune moment to explode.
    From her seat on the edge of the bed, Alyssa said, “Oh, my God,” and “Of course,” and “A taco? Oh, no. Poor Jules,” and then? The kicker. “We’ve got two double beds—there’s plenty of room. Definitely. Bring him here. The Sheraton. Room 842. Do you need me to come to the lobby?”
    Sam let his head flop back against the pillow of one of their hotel room’s beds. The place had been out of kings, which was a shame because he was tall and his feet dangled off the end of a double.
    But that wasn’t as big a shame as the fact that he was not only
not
getting some tonight, he was going to have to endure Jules’s misery as he attempted to dry out his alcoholic fuckwad of a boyfriend, who’d no doubt gone off on another binge from hell—his first since getting out of rehab.
    â€œOkay,” Alyssa said into her cell phone. “But if you need any help…” And then she totally surprised Sam with her next words. “Robin, shh, sweetie, it’s really okay. We’re glad you called. Honestly. Just get Jules over here as quickly as you can.”
    Sam sat up. “
Jules
is bingeing?” It was a stupid thing to say—he knew it as soon as the words were out of his mouth. Jules wasn’t a big drinker to start with, and ever since Robin had gone into rehab he’d cut himself off, too, in solidarity.
    Fortunately Alyssa was accustomed to Sam’s occasional idiotic verbal explosions.
    â€œJules has food poisoning,” she informed him as she closed her cell phone. “They couldn’t get a hotel room, so they have nowhere else to go. Robin just managed to get them a ride—I think he stood in the street and stopped traffic. They should be here in about ten minutes.”
    You better get dressed.
Sam waited for the words, but they didn’t come. Instead, Alyssa smiled at him, heat in her ocean green eyes.
    Sam thought his wife was achingly beautiful when dressed in bulky cammie-print BDUs. She was gorgeous in jeans and a T-shirt, too, with her long legs, perfect breasts, and athletic build, without even a hint of makeup on her mocha-colored skin, her dark hair cut short and sleek, capping her African-princess face, framing