by Sierra Rose
“Maybe not. What about Big Bubba?”
“You keep this shit up, and he can have you!” I said, making sure to yell it loud enough for him to hear. “On my way though.”
I was out of bed the next second, wincing painfully against the overhead light as I threw a long overcoat over my silk pajamas and raced down the stairs. Louise, Nick’s longsuffering housekeeper, was watching television on the couch.
“Miss Abigail?” She sat up in surprise as I rushed into the room. “What are you doing awake at this hour?”
At that point, I didn’t even slow my momentum as I breezed toward the door. The old publicist had kicked in, and the new girlfriend had fallen along the wayside. “Nick’s in trouble, Nick trouble,” I clarified.
Halfway up from her chair, she quickly plopped back down. “Oh,” she said.
“The most I got out of him was the name of a bar. It sounds like the place erupted into civil war a little after three.”
She nodded briskly and returned her attention to her show as I snatched up my purse. “Just be careful,” she said as I hurried out toward the elevator.
As I pressed the button, a frown crossed my face, and I turned back to look at her. “Wait. What are you still doing here, Louise? It’s four in the morning.”
“Cable,” she said flatly. “If I’m gonna watch TV, I may as well let Mr. Hunter pay for it, no?”
“Fair enough,” I said with a smile as her episode of some horrible old sitcom returned to the air. I waved farewell and disappeared through the doors.
She bid me a cursory “Good luck!” before picking up a bowl of popcorn and staring at the television again.
My body wilted, and I shook my head. “Good luck? I ‘m gonna need more than that...and so is he once I get hold of him,” I muttered to myself with a weary sigh.
Gosh, how many times has she said the exact same thing to me as I raced off in the middle of the night to rescue Nick from some fresh batch of trouble? How many times have I made this ridiculous journey, only to end up facing some unknown lunacy on the other side?
My hand slipped again to my belly as I punched the button for the lobby, and the elevator began to descend. A far more pertinent question floated into my head, and I was almost afraid to discover the answer: How many more times is this gonna happen?
***
The bar Nick told me about wasn’t in the Upper East Side, as I expected. In fact, a quick address check with my cab driver told me it wasn’t even on the island.
Queens? What the hell is he doing in Queens? I thought he was meeting friends, I reasoned. Besides James, I was sure none of Nick’s friends would dare venture so far away from Manhattan. How the hell did he end up all the way out there?
Like it or not, I was about to find out.
I leapt out of the cab as soon as it pulled up to the curb, quickly tossed the fare and tip to the driver with my thanks, then turned to see that the door to the bar was hanging open—not pushed but actually hanging on nothing but cracked hinges and a prayer. I stared at it for a moment, tilting my head curiously in the dark.
“Miss, you sure ‘bout goin’ in there?” the cabbie called out of the passenger window. “Looks kinda seedy to me, not really a place for...”
As he trailed off, I finished his thought with a little sigh. “Yeah, it’s kind of like the seventh circle of hell, huh?” We shared a quick grin before I shook my head and pulled my trench coat tighter around me. “I’ve got no choice, I’m afraid. I’m the Cavalry he called in. It’s not the first time, but it had better be the last!”
The man raised his eyebrows slightly before looking back to the bar. “And who you gonna call to rescue you?”
I knew he was half-serious when he said it, because I had always been extremely delicate-looking, a real feminine, damsel-in-distress type, even if that wasn’t at all who I was. I was used to fielding those off-handed, protective comments all my life, and I knew he meant no harm or disrespect in it. “I’ll be fine,” I said, then shot him another smile. “Still, is there any way you could wait around back for us? I only need about five minutes, and I’ll pay you well for your trouble once I get him out of his.”
“Five minutes?” he said, looking down at the large bill I’d already tipped him. “Sure, lady. It’d be my pleasure.”
I nodded gratefully and made my way toward the door. I could actually feel the pounding vibrations coming from the inside, but just as I reached the door way, a large, sweaty man went flying out into the cold. He landed with a drunken laugh on a pile of splintered wood before getting back up and charging back into the fray.
“Screw the five minutes,” I said, turning back to the cabbie. “Better make it ten.”
Chapter 20
The second I stepped inside, I felt like I had stumbled onto a movie set. It was a cross between a food fight and a wrestling match. More accurately, it was reminiscent of one of those old taverns full of pirates, the kind of pub where every inch of space would bear witness to the mayhem the next morning.
The air was punctuated with equals parts screaming, laughter, and music, as well as shattering glass and splintering furniture. Not a second went without some wildly thrown shot glass sailing past me in the air. Bodies seemed to be flying left and right, and liquor in all shades of brown and amber was dripping off the walls. Ironically, an infomercial for a key-locking breathalyzer flickered on a cracked television screen up above, and in one of the far corners, the remnants of an indoor fountain were leaking water all over the place, flooding the wooden floor and washing away the sticky beer and cocktails and who knew what else. It was chaos, yet it was strangely ordered; everyone racing around seemed to have a particular mission in mind, but their endgame was totally beyond me.
“Lady, watch the hell out!”
I ducked just in time to prevent a ceramic vase from shattering over my head. Two more followed in close succession, and I saved myself from head trauma by dropping into a crouch as I let out a half-strangled shriek.
Nick, when I find you, I’m going to kill you myself!
“Hey!” I shouted at the nearest man to me as he lay on the floor. At the moment, he was right in the middle of getting his ass kicked by someone kneeling on his chest, but that didn’t stop me from grabbing his ear to get his attention. “Hey, mister!”
The fight came to a momentary pause as the drunken man kneeling on top actually made a time-out sign just to be polite. “Yeah?”
I rolled my eyes and raised my voice to a conversational yell. “Have either of you seen a guy named Nick? Tall and blond, in a designer suit, probably mouthy as hell and spouting off some nonsensical speech about medieval archery or the spawning rights of fish?”
The description didn’t hit home, but I could tell I’d made a bit of progress with the “nonsensical speech” part. While I still had their attention, I reached quickly into my bag and pulled out my phone; it was easy enough to pull his picture up on the screen since I had a thousand of them.
Their eyes locked on the photo for only a moment before lightening in surprise.
“Oh, that pretty boy? The one in them fancy duds?” said the man kneeling on top of the other. He then threw his arms wide to gesture around the bar. “That cocky punk started this whole mess!”
Why am I not surprised?
The man beneath him glared up at his attacker with the strength of a nova. “Yeah, and you ain’t gonna touch him, man! That guy paid me fifty smackers to defend him with my life! I’m his personal bodyguard, and you won’t lay a fuckin’ finger on him tonight or ever!”
I turned to the man in surprise, but before I could say a word, the guy sitting on his chest threw up his hands in exasperation. “The billionaire’s a menace, Carl. He doesn’t belong here, and he’s not worth your life.”
Carl, however, was loyal to a fault—after a payoff, of course—and would not be swayed. Apparently, fifty bucks was enough to by a lifetime of loyalty, no matter how long or short that life might be.
&nbs
p; I left them to their own devices, interjecting only once more to ask, “And where might I find this menace to Queens society, gentlemen?”
Carl pointed in the general direction of the bar. “Last time I saw him, he was barricading himself over there,” he panted between punches to the face. “He said he was gonna call someone who can put a stop to this shit, make it all go away.”
How sweet. Nick tries to re-create Scorsese’s Gangs of New York right here in Queens, and the first person he thinks of is me. If he wants to play moviemaker, I’m about to show him a little Fatal Attraction!
“Thanks, Carl,” I muttered, wincing as his head slammed into the floor, “and good luck.”
Without another word, I was off, staying low as I weaved through the battle as best I could, making my way to the bar. I had to leap over broken furniture, duck flying projectiles, and dart to the side as tangles of intoxicated men barreled past me.
So glad I decided to wear my pajamas for maximum flexibility.
By the time I made it across the room, feeling like a ninja unaware, I was dismayed to realize what Carl meant when he said Nick was “barricading” himself at the bar. The thing was a fortress. Stacks of chairs and overturned tables were lined up around the perimeter, cutting off any and all access to the outside. What looked like an army of sporks stuck out from every available corner, hoping to catch the enemy off guard. Knowing Nick as well as I did, I was sure he was the one who’d sabotaged the fountain in the corner, hoping to create a little moat for added protection.
As if all of that wasn’t enough, there was someone perched high on the shelves amongst the bottles, a sniper firing shot glasses down with precision aim. He was bathed in shadows beneath the broken light, camouflaged in a souvenir hoodie to blend into the surroundings, so hidden that it took me a second to realize he was the man I’d been looking for.
“Nick?”
There was a pause in the fire, and the hoodie shifted my way. “Abby?” he said. A second later, he jumped down and landed in a sea of glass with a look of euphoric victory lighting up his face. “Abby, you came! We’re saved!”
I had no idea where to start, not a fucking clue. I simply stood there gawking at him, while he beamed back in drunken triumph.
He wasn’t exactly fighting in the trenches like Carl and the others, but he’d obviously taken the idea of urban warfare to a whole other level. The sides of his cheeks were smeared with what looked like charcoal soot, assumedly to help him blend into the darkness; in true Rambo fashion, his blond hair was tied back with a torn bandana I didn’t recognize; and unless I was mistaken, he’d been whittling a stolen pool stick into what looked like a harpoon.
After a second, he finally broke the silence between us. “Check out my moat! Cool, huh?”
“Cool is not the word I’m thinking of,” I said, clearly unimpressed. My eyes snapped shut as I repeatedly reminded myself of the punishment for homicide in the state of New York, a criminal mandate I’d memorized the first week I’d met Nick. Grinding my teeth together, I still managed to speak with a smile, “What are we into this time, Nick?”
It was the standard line, the one I’d thought I’d left permanently behind me when I put down my PR phones and found myself pregnant with his child.
He glanced around, the tips of his blond hair dipping down into his eyes. “What, this?”
It was a serious question only because he was seriously drunk, so drunk that he was having a hard time standing up straight and had to lean on the counter behind him for support.
My face softened, and my anger melted as I tried my very best to put myself in his shoes. He had just found out his girlfriend is pregnant. He’d been hit by a taxi, and the whole world thought he eloped to get married in Peru. Not only that, but after decades of abuse and tension, he’d just reconciled with his estranged father. They were not all bad things, but they were all traumatic, a lot for anyone to deal with. Yeah, I guess that earns him a drink or two...or twelve, I decided, taking pity on him and on myself since I couldn’t even have a sip.
“Honey,” I said, taking a deep breath and trying to steady my voice, “I guess you were feeling a little stressed out, huh? So you decided to play war games in a biker bar in Queens?”
“Games?” he scoffed, automatically ducking his head as what looked like a chrome hubcap sailed toward him at a lethal speed. “Abigail, I’ll have you know this is serious, and I got a few good punches in too. I even hired protection!”
“Yes, I spoke to Carl, and... Wait. You’ve been throwing punches?”
He lifted a hand to rub his right jaw. “I couldn’t just let that big bully catch me with a right hook! I had to nail him back.”
“How did this start?”
He ducked again, then answered, “We’re fighting for...”
I folded my arms across my chest and cocked my head to the side, waiting. “Yes?”
The tops of his high cheekbones flushed a moment as he tried to remember the mantra that had started the whole mess to begin with. “Well, for justice, I suppose.”
“How noble of you,” I said with a sigh, wrapping his arm around my neck. “C’mon. We’ve gotta get out of here.”
He looked surprised. “No, Abby, we can’t just leave. Besides, this isn’t my first bar fight.”
“You can’t count that college bar brawl.”
“You’re right. I mean, back then, no one bashed me in the head with a beer bottle. At least this one will be my most memorable.”
“I doubt that, considering how much you drank,” I mused.
“We need to see this through,” he argued. “I need to get back out there and back up my brothers. They’re still fighting the good fight, and—”
“See this through?” I tugged on his arm again, harder this time. “Nick, the cops are going to be here any minute. The last thing we need is to be associated with this so-called justice you’ve stirred up here.”
Drunk as he was, he didn’t budge an inch. No matter how hard I pulled, he simply stood there with an infuriatingly patient smile on his face, looking like the gorgeous extra in every war movie ever made, the one who would tragically blow up in the first two minutes, leaving every woman in the audience sobbing for hours.
“Abby, it’s natural to have doubts,” he said kindly, “but never fear, my love. The battle is ours. Any minute now, my friend Carl is going to—”
“Carl didn’t make it,” I blurted.
Nick stopped short as the two of us gazed out across the room at his drunken savior, who was currently lying in a pool of vinegar and beer, tracing the air above him with a dizzy grin on his sweaty face as his broken nose dripped a steady stream of blood onto the floor.
“Carl!” Nick’s face fell with genuine sadness as he pulled a bottle of rum off the shelf behind him and took a swig. “A true hero among men. We’ll never forget your years of service and dedication to the cause. You, my friend, are—”
“Yeah, okay.” I snatched the bottle and put it back on the counter, cutting short the lyrical lamentations before they could get off the ground. “Can we go now?”
Nick lifted his head high, surveying the battlefield as the war raged on around him. It really was a gruesome sight, yet the corners of his lips lifted with a hint of pride.
“Yes, Abigail,” he said softly, albeit a bit more formally now. “Things did escalate quite quickly, and it certainly would be bad publicity for us newlyweds. Let’s get out of here.”
“You don’t say?” I snarked. “You, alcohol, and crowds are a potent recipe for disaster, and we both know this would end up on the front page. I can see it now. ‘When Billionaires Attack’ or ‘Billionaire Temper Tantrum’ or ‘Billionaire Completely Loses His Cool’ or ‘Look Out for Little Unsaintly Nick!’ You’ll be on the next episode of Troubled Trust-Funders before you know it.”
“Are you saying that this is my fault?”
“It doesn’t matter. You know how the tabloids would spin it.”
“Yeah. Hell
hath no fury like Nicholas scorned.”
As he said the words, a gigantic man spotted him from the far corner and took off running in our direction. Halfway to us, he lifted an empty beer mug above his head and let out a guttural cry.
Nick’s regal composure left him at once, and he started tugging drunkenly on my arm. “Yeah, definitely time to go!”
Without a second of pause, he and I began scrambling away, tripping over drunken bodies and shattered furniture as we headed down the hall. The front door was effectively blocked, so instead of even trying for it, we sprinted toward the bathrooms. Of course, we didn’t actually pull off sprinting, because Nick had never been so unsteady on his feet. The lights had been knocked out, and the only thing we had to guide us was a neon green Heineken sign flickering on the wall.
“Come on, babe. We’re almost there,” I said, reaching behind me to grab his hand. I was just about to pull him inside when we passed the door to the kitchen and froze in our tracks.
No less than five men were standing there, all of them as wasted as he was and each armed with some sort of cooking paraphernalia. Their heads were bowed together as they engaged in some sort of drunken huddle, but they looked up when they saw us, and in what felt like slow motion, the man standing in the middle raised his finger to point at Nick’s chest.
My brilliant boyfriend, of course, did a drunken who-me? double-take as I slowly backed into the wall.
For a split second, nothing more happened. No one moved or said a word, and in that split second of inaction, I seized the foolish notion that cooler heads might possibly prevail. That was shattered, however, when, with a fearsome cry, the man launched himself toward us, wearing a hateful scowl and wielding a whisk, prepared to turn us into merengue.
Chapter 21
“Nick!” I shrieked.
Somehow, even in his inebriated stupor, Nick was ready to face him. No matter how many quarts and fifths and shot glasses of alcohol were coursing through his veins, he managed to spin easily out of the way with all the grace of a ballerina, then laughed as the man’s own forward momentum sent him crashing into the wall and the whisk clattering to the floor. Nick grabbed the would-be weapon and threw it down the hall. Then, with a violent grace I couldn’t begin to fathom, he leapt into air and spun in a high circle before knocking the man to the ground with a single roundhouse kick.