Hold Me Today

by Maria Luis

  In other words, Nick is a gravity-defying beast.

  With his arms braced against the walls to balance his weight off his submerged leg, Nick’s biceps strain with maximum, veiny effort. My gaze gleefully tracks the inverted triangle of his chest, and then lowers. His jeans are ripped at the thigh, torn through by jagged, splintering wood, and it’s probably not the time to bring this up, but . . .

  “Nick, your—”

  He doesn’t make eye contact. His cheeks do, however, flush with color. “Please, don’t.”

  I swallow past the lump in my throat. “Is . . .” I lick my dry lips. “Is The Great One—”

  Every line in his body sharpens. “Ermione. Please.”

  Wringing my hands in front of me, it’s all I can do not to burst out laughing. Going from straight-up alpha, I’m-going-to-make-you-mine mode (not that I’m complaining) to wiping out from a weak plank of wood is something that would happen to Nick Stamos. Though I suppose we’re both to blame since I was in his arms. His muscular, I-lift-things-for-a-living arms. Hold me while I swoon. Plus, now that I know he’s not actually going to fall straight to his death, seeing Nick like this has me feeling like I’ve won the lottery.

  All those years of me losing bikini tops and other, more humiliating moments, have culminated in this one moment where we’ve swapped places.

  I’m secretly living for it.

  “We can do this one of two ways,” I tell him, purposely masking my tone of all amusement. Do not laugh. Do not laugh. The full-on dread in Nick’s expression has me biting my lip. Oh God, just don’t make eye contact. I seek strength by staring up at the wood-paneled walls. “Actually, there is a third way, but I doubt you want me hammering anywhere near your leg. Coordination really isn’t my thing.” My nose scrunches. “You’d also probably fall to your death.”

  He drops his head forward in defeat. “Death sounds pretty good right about now.”

  “Is that because your tsutsuli—”

  “It’s fine. I’m fine.”

  “You’re the one who squealed as soon as it made contact.”

  “I didn’t squeal.”

  Fingers suctioned to either wall like he’s sprouted tentacles, Nick moves his free leg into a wide kneeling position to better distribute his weight. God, his abs must be insane to hold himself steady like that. Though his cheeks are rosy, he’s yet to break out in a sweat. Impressive. Though not nearly as impressive as the size of his hard-on. The dick-print from my admittedly active teenage imagination was not misleading, thank you, Sweet Baby Jesus.

  “And,” Nick spits out, clearly desperate to defend his manhood—literally—“no man likes to have his junk flattened. It’s like sitting on your balls—it happens all the time, but it still hurts like a bitch.”

  I consider him with a tilted head. “You say this like you’ve had previous experience.”

  “Mina.” He mutters the two syllables of my name peevishly, in that way only a male whose pride has taken a beating can. “I’ve worked in construction for fifteen years. There’s not one guy who hasn’t been where I am now, but at least, usually, we don’t have a witness.”

  “Aw, are you worried about what I think of you?”

  He grumbles something unintelligible beneath his breath.

  To fluff up his ego, I drop to my haunches and cup his stubbled jaw. Yup, his cheeks are totally flushed. It says something about the state of my mind that I think it’s adorably cute. Dogs are cute. Babies are cute. Men like Nick are—

  Pewter eyes flick up to my face. All train of thought careens to a standstill as I lean in and impulsively mold my lips to his, simply because I want another taste.

  Delicious. Men like Nick are delicious.

  He tastes better than in every one of my fantasies combined. For years, I’ve pictured him as the consummate gentle lover with a warm but unassuming embrace. Classical music might provide background noise to an otherwise romantic joining. He proved me wrong. Nick’s kiss, his touch, the way his erection hardened unapologetically in my hand, was the very antithesis of unassuming. He took and he pushed and he bit and he sucked, and he almost had an orgasm knocking on my door without removing a stitch of fabric off me.

  His body, tailored from years of hard, physical labor, left me breathless.

  Leaves me breathless still, even as I fight to keep this kiss one of playful flirtation and not dirty hand jobs and dry-humping sessions against a wall. I kiss Nick long enough to distract him while I reach down and return The Great One to the confines of his briefs. Steel wrapped in velvet—all the authors of the romance novels I listen to would be pleased to know that Nick Stamos not only fits the description, he exceeds it.

  I zip up his torn jeans and pat his ridged lower abdomen.

  “We’ve got to keep him safe,” I say with a grin.

  Nick looks like he doesn’t know whether to laugh or shove the rest of his body through the broken slat.

  Taking the decision out of his hands, I pop a quick peck on his mouth and spy the staircase over his shoulder. Stairs that now taunt me like a deathtrap in the waiting. Ten minutes ago, my only concern was my condom-less apartment. A tragic ending to a hot, PG-13 groping session, but one easily solved with a run to the corner store down the block. Now these stairs are just one more thing to add to my never-ending list of Shit-That-Needs-Fixing around here. It’s not as if my bank account can cry anymore at this point.

  Carefully, I step over Nick’s extended arm. “Hang tight, will you?”

  “Mina.”

  “Too soon?” I deadpan, trying not to laugh at his expense. Clearly, the two of us together were too much for this old stairwell to handle. But I’ve gone up and down these flights tens of times on my own, and I’m confident they won’t buckle under my weight alone. Hopefully. “I’ve got to get the guys.”

  “Ermione. No. Absolutely not.” I glance over my shoulder in time to see him struggling to yank his leg out from the hole. He freezes within seconds. The broken wood is gnarly. One wrong move and it’ll slice right through his skin. Something he must realize, too, because he blows out a long-suffering sigh. “I’m going to regret this.”

  In the end, Nick doesn’t live to regret anything.

  “No mean jokes,” I warn the guys after I’ve filled them in downstairs.

  Affronted, Vince plants a hand over his heart. “Mean? You’ve got the wrong guy, Mina. I’ve never been mean a day in my life.”

  I point a finger at him. “Or stupid jokes. Nothing that’ll make Nick feel . . . embarrassed.” Not that I don’t think he can’t handle any and all smack talk from his employees. I’m sure Nick can dish it with the best of them.

  “Now you’re just taking away my fun.”

  “You missed your opportunity,” I say with a loose shrug. “The position has already been filled.”

  Vince’s espresso-coffee eyes glimmer with humor. “Yeah? By who?”

  “This girl.” I flash him a quick grin, then circle my finger in the air in a let’s go gesture. “Remember, no trash-talking of any kind. Bring me Mr. Stamos and not only will you three be eating more pizza than you can handle this week, but I’ll also throw in a free haircut. You can thank me later when I make you look like the rock star you were born to be.”

  Bribery, my friends. It’s a game-changer.

  Bill slips me a proper side-eye. “All I want to know is if any of the pointy bits got stuck in his—”

  Mark playfully swats him over the head. “Pizza, dude. Shut up and walk.”

  Holding back a laugh, I follow the trio to the stairwell where we can hear Nick cursing loud enough for his mother to overhear from the other side of town. Four-letter words. Accented words. He gives them all his devout attention, and I holler, “Your rescuers have arrived!”

  Vince leads the pack, Mark and Bill flanking him.

  Within twenty minutes, after a fair bit of sawing and more than a handful of colorful phrases I’ll never be able to bleach from my memory, Nick is extracted and doing
a poor job of disguising a limp as he takes to the stairs.

  When I stare a little too long at his roughed-up leg, he irritably grumbles, “I look worse than I feel.”

  I’m sure he’s telling the truth. Even so, guilt sloshes around in my belly like I’ve downed one too many shots of Tito’s as I touch a finger to his ripped jeans. They hang open from his right hip, exposing his navy briefs and the tiny scratches that are now etched into his muscled thigh. Most are pink but a few bleed red, and I force Nick to sit down while I rush out in the cold to the Stamos Restoration company van. It doesn’t take me long to find the First Aid kit tucked away in the spare duffel bag he mentioned would be behind the driver’s seat.

  Back in Agape, I stomp the snow from my shoes and shake the flakes from my hair. After announcing, “You should go to the doctor,” I drop the duffel at his feet. It hits the concrete flooring with a dull thud.

  Nick spares me an inscrutable glance before unzipping the bag and riffling through its contents. “And you need to find somewhere else to stay while we fix that stairway to hell.”

  My lips purse at his unintended play on Led Zeppelin’s infamous “Stairway to Heaven” song. Focus, Mina. Right, right. Under my breath, I can’t help but hum along to the melody.

  Pulling out a fresh pair of jeans from the duffel bag, Nick drops them to the floor and flicks open the medical kit. Only when he’s stripped off his tattered jeans does he say anything else—and, truth be told, I’m too busy admiring him in a pair of tight briefs to do anything but gawk.

  The man is seriously blessed in more ways than one.

  A masculine hand waves in front of my face. “Did you hear anything I just said?”

  Cheeks flushing, I jerk my gaze up to safer territories. “Not a word.”

  I expect him to reprimand me the way he’s always done, condescension coating each word. Instead, his mouth quirks up and he throws me a look like he doesn’t know what to do with me. Under normal circumstances—you know, with him being surly and uncommunicative—that glance would leave me feeling chilled all over. Instead, I feel indescribably toasty which is insane considering I’ve still got snowflakes melting into my hair and clothes.

  “Let me repeat from the top.” Bending over, Nick grabs the medical wipes and proceeds to wipe away the beads of blood on his thigh. “You aren’t staying here.”

  This time, I hear him perfectly. “Of course I am.”

  “Not a chance in hell.”

  Watching the rough way he deals with his injured skin, I bat his hands away and sink to my knees. “You would have gotten your point across better if you’d said, ‘over my dead body.’” With the chill of the concrete flooring seeping through the thin layer of leggings, I crane my head back to look Nick in the face. “At least that would be reasonably appropriate given the situation.”

  He lifts one brow coolly. “Over my dead body.”

  “Great.” I poke him in his uninjured shin. “Now lay down and play the part. You’re bleeding all over the place.”

  “Better do what she says, boss,” remarks Bill with a hearty chuckle. “She sounds like she means business.”

  Though I’m sure it grates on his nerves to play the part of damsel in distress, Nick maneuvers his big body onto the ground. While he doesn’t lie back as ordered—and I don’t blame him because this floor is filthy with sawdust and debris—he nevertheless reclines back on his palms and leaves his bare legs to my ministrations.

  Even sitting, the muscles in his thighs are tight and incredibly firm. They clench when I hold a square piece of sterile gauze to the deepest gash. Pressing down with my thumb to stem the blood, I rearrange my legs so that I’m mostly seated on my butt. It’s more comfortable this way, and I have a sneaking suspicion we’ll be here for a while yet. No matter what he says, I can’t just stay elsewhere until the stairs are restructured.

  Hell, it’s not even a matter of can’t but a matter of won’t.

  “Let the guys go home for the day.”

  Tensing beneath my fingers, Nick shakes his head. “Can’t. We need to stay on schedule. Drywall by Wednesday and floors put in by Friday. We keep this pace up, and you’ll be ready to go by the middle of the following week.”

  I strip off another piece of gauze and apply it to one of his deeper wounds. Already the blood is drying. Growing up, First Aid kits weren’t a thing in our house. My mom loved concocting creams and herbal remedies, allegedly all passed down through our family. One time, Dimitri sprained his ankle, and instead of painkillers and a set of crutches, my mom whipped up a poultice and slathered it all over his foot. My younger brother gagged from the noxious smell, and even I watched on with my fingers plugging my nose shut as my mom bandaged his ankle with plastic wrap from the kitchen.

  Crazily enough, it worked.

  Without my mom’s magic, I settle for more hydrogen peroxide from the kit.

  With a hasty look thrown over my shoulder, I spot the guys back at work. Rock music blares from the Bluetooth speakers as they nail another frame into place, and I find small comfort in all the noise. Hopefully it’s loud enough they won’t pay us any attention.

  Nick’s fingers brush my arm. “Get it off your chest,” he murmurs, tracing those long, nimble fingers down to my wrist. “I can see the worry all over your face.”

  I keep my gaze on the task at hand, cleaning each scratch like it’s a life or death situation. “I can’t stay anywhere else.”

  “What about with Effie?”

  Baby wisps of my hair fall into my face when I shake my head, and I shove them behind my ear with the back of my hand. “Not an option. She and Sarah are stressed enough without adding me as the unwanted third party to their twosome.”

  “You could stay with me.”

  He says it so simply, so matter-of-factly, that I laugh. Except—except that he doesn’t laugh along with me. Lifting my chin, I meet his somber gaze and . . . oh. Oh. He was being serious. My heart performs a strange flip in my chest, like a beached whale moored on shore. “A fake relationship and moving into your house?” I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth to hold back a startled giggle. “What are we? The leads in a Hallmark movie?”

  His broad shoulder lifts, even as his gray eyes shine with amusement. “You’d be helping the I’m-over-Savannah storyline. Consider it payment compensated for that hydrotherapy room.”

  “Now that’s a shameless plug if I’ve ever heard one. We’re not doing the hydrotherapy room.”

  “It’s only shameless because you’re considering it.”

  My hands pause over his leg. “Nick, I’m not—”

  “Kidding,” he says with one of his customary tight smiles, “I’m kidding. Though it probably would help with the media.”

  “We don’t need to move in together for that.” It’s only when he gives me nothing but a blank stare that I realize he doesn’t know anything about Celebrity Tea. Oh, boy. Dating TV show or not, privacy is Nick’s jam. And he has no idea someone followed us last night. Wishing I had some water to quench my suddenly dry throat, I motion between us. “Well, you know.”

  His lips press together. “No, I don’t.”

  Ugh, great. Couldn’t Effie have been the messenger for him too? “How do I even put this?” Struggling for the correct words, I drop the hydrogen peroxide bottle back in the kit and flip the lid closed. “You . . . we were tailed last night.” Immediately his expression turns hard and I hastily add, “I mean, maybe not tailed. That might not be the right term. But obviously someone did their research and found out where your parents lived, so they—”

  “Stalked me.” His voice is pure grit. “They stalked me and caught us instead.”

  I fumble for the right thing to say. Words have never been my expertise. “Nick, this is . . . this is what you wanted, right? Out of the deal?” Pushing the kit to the side, I tuck my feet beneath me, sitting cross-legged. Wanting to calm his frayed nerves, I touch my fingers to his knee. “The gossip rags are reporting that you’re seeing s
omeone new, so it looks like we’re in business.”

  The right thing to do would be to move into his house and uphold my end of the bargain. The right thing, maybe, but not the smart thing. I want to kiss Nick again. And, yeah, I want to strip him naked and let him return the favor. But I don’t want to actually sleep with him, not together in one bed. That sort of proximity breeds closeness and deeper bonds, and the thought of baring more than just my body to Nick terrifies me.

  It’s one thing for him to look at me and feel like the attraction is lacking physically—another thing entirely for him to see into all the dark places in my soul and realize that my baggage, my insecurities, are not at all what he’s looking for in a partner.

  “It’s not the same.” Rising to the balls of his feet, Nick grabs his jeans and pulls them up his legs. Already I mourn the sight of all those muscles on display. He has the legs of a rugby player, and I can’t help but wonder what sort of activities he does in his spare time because mortal men are not built like him. “It’s not the same at all,” he repeats roughly. “I figured we’d head into Boston, do something big and elaborate and public. Maybe post a picture on Instagram—even though that’s against my contract with the show. Not”—he spears his fingers through his hair—“have someone camped outside of my parent’s house on a Sunday night. Where’s the common decency these days? Aren’t there any goddamn boundaries? Fuck.”

  I drop my elbows to my knees. “So, I guess moving into your house is out of the equation then, right?”

  Deep, husky laughter curls around me. “You’re a piece of work, you know that?”

  “I specifically remember you telling me that I get mouthier every year.”

  At my pointed stare, he only laughs again. “You’re a woman of many talents, Ermione Pappas.”

  I throw him an exaggerated wink. “Just you wait and see, Saint Nick. Just you wait.”