by Sarina Bowen
Shit. Seriously.
She looked at Nick and bit her lip. “How important is it that I go back to the table?”
He raised an eyebrow. “You don’t think anyone will notice if you vanish?”
She shrugged. “Notice? I don’t care. They don’t know me. But I’m not trying to piss off your mom, either.” She pulled out her phone and thumbed it to unlock it.
“She’ll probably think it’s hilarious.” His tone was dry, drawling out the words slowly.
“Whoa.” She wasn’t listening to him any longer. Seventeen missed calls and a dozen texts? They’d only been distracted for, what, fifteen minutes?
She remembered his hands playing with her, dragging her to the top of that cliff before pushing her over. A ghost cramp of desire flashed between her legs.
Twenty, tops.
Ruben and Marcus both had called. She was about to call one of them when her phone lit up and buzzed in her hands again.
Marcus.
“What’s going on?” She braced herself for the bad news.
“Fire at the warehouse.” His voice was low. Urgent.
“Fuck.” She pushed the heavy velvet to the side and hit her stride as she hustled down the straight hallway, heading for the stairs. Screw the gala. She had to get there. Now. “How the hell did that happen?” Before Marcus could say a word, she started up again. “Those damn kids. I have to go,” she called over her shoulder. “My warehouse is on fire.”
“Wait.” Nick was stripping his jacket off as he followed her. “Here.”
She shoved one arm into a sleeve as he held the jacket for her, the phone still pressed to her ear. Marcus was playing relay for Ruben, who she could hear shouting at him in the background. 911 had been called, engines were on the way, but the guys had used fire extinguishers on the blaze, and they thought they had put out most of the fire.
Her heels clattered as she raced down the stupidly shallow stairs, what felt like hundreds of them. God, how long did it take to get out of this frigging mausoleum?
“Get out of there. Now, goddamn it. Tell Ruben he’s not a fireman.”
She knew her assistants. They took everything about this business as seriously as she did, but no one should be putting their frigging lives on the line for a warehouse full of replaceable goods.
Still, she’d sunk every penny she had into this business and replacing her stock would take years. A surge of nausea broke like a wave over her amped-up body, leaving her sick and dizzy. Shit. She’d never recover.
She hit the front doors, exiting on Wacker Drive. For just a second she stopped, her hand on the brass push bar, and held on. God, this could wreck everything.
Through the phone, she heard Marcus shouting, whipping insults at Ruben in Spanish.
She had to shout to get his attention as she pushed out onto the street, wrapping Nick’s jacket tight around her torso.
“Marcus. Marcus!” She scanned the street. No cabs. Of course. She headed for the corner to maximize her chances.
“You two are so fired, right now, if you don’t get outside.” She choked out the words around the knot in her throat. Fear made everything blurry. Where were all the damn taxis? “Tell Ruben I am not kidding. Get out. Now.”
Her cheeks were cold. She put a hand up to warm her face and it was wet. Was she crying?
She knuckled her tears away and shook her head. Focus. Find a taxi.
She barely felt the hand on her arm until Nick tugged her around to face him. He had his phone tucked between his ear and his shoulder. He was holding his other hand up, as if he was hailing a taxi, of which there were none, goddamn it, or she would have hailed it herself.
“I don’t have time—” She trailed off as the Town Car she’d made so much fun of earlier glided to a stop at the curb.
“Get in. Tell Tommy the fastest way to get there.”
She didn’t ask how he’d done it. How he’d gotten his car here from wherever it had been parked, waiting for the end of the evening. She ducked in and slid across the seat, calling instructions at the back of Tommy’s blond head.
When Nick joined her, she stared at him.
“What about…?” She didn’t even know how to finish her question.
“The Lyric already has my money. I’ll leave my mother a message. I don’t know those people at our table. They won’t miss me.” He grabbed her hand and squeezed it between his own. “Just in case.” He smiled at her. “Never turn down backup, right?”
She twined her fingers around his and tilted her head back. The pressure in her eyes and nose was fierce. Blinking hard, she hissed out a slow breath between her teeth and nodded.
“Right. Thanks.”
When they reached the warehouse, the street was blocked by two red CFD engines and an ambulance. The car pulled to a halt as close as Tommy could get it and Maxie was out the door and sprinting in heels before they’d even come to a complete stop.
She spotted Ruben and Marcus standing shoulder to shoulder at the corner of the building. No flames or smoke were visible anywhere, and firemen were striding at less than emergency speeds into and out of the open bay doors of her building.
The sudden release of tension hit her like someone cutting her puppet strings. She slowed to a walk, her steps less noisy, and took a deep breath.
Everyone was okay. And maybe, just maybe, the damage wasn’t too awful.
She drew to a halt right behind her boys.
“I’m just saying, that one cute firefighter was giving you the eye.” Ruben could always be counted on to spot a romantic entanglement that would end in disaster and give it his personal thumbs up.
“No way.” Thank god Marcus was too smart for that.
“Way. You should totally give him your number.”
“What? You know I only date guys who are out. Like there’s an out gay firefighter.”
A brief pause was the only sign that Ruben was questioning himself.
“It could happen.” Never a quitter, that Ruben, when it came to true love.
“In Chicago?”
The pause lengthened dramatically.
Ruben doubled down on love. “It could happen.” He bumped shoulders with the dreadlocked Marcus, setting his twists swinging. “I could slip him your number, if you’re too chicken.”
“Yeah, ‘cause that would be subtle,” Maxie said with a smile and braced herself. Both assistant stage managers spun around and jumped on her with happy cries, all of them talking and hugging at once until she shut them up by punching them both in the chest at the same time.
“Ow!” Ruben rubbed where she’d hit him and scowled at her. Marcus ignored it and just squeezed her against his hard chest while she sniffled a little as it finally sank in that they were okay.
“No worries, baby doll. We’re all good.”
She pushed away from him, blinking back tears again.
“Don’t you EVER—” she poked him in the belly, then turned and did the same to Ruben’s much softer tummy “—do that again. I mean it. I will fire your asses.” She could smell smoke on them, and it made her angry all over again.
Before she could say anything else, the fire captain approached and threats took a backseat to nailing down all the details of how, what, where and when exactly she could set foot inside her warehouse.
Halfway through his description of the fire that appeared to have started from a cigarette butt tossed behind a rolling dressmaker’s rack of costumes, someone handed her a cup of coffee. When she turned to say thank you, Nick was standing next to her, white dress shirt still gleaming, bow tie undone and dangling, sleeves cuffed.
For the first time in an hour, she realized that she was still wearing her loosely draped gown and Nick’s tuxedo jacket. Jesus, she must look ridiculous. She’d also lost her shoes, having kicked them off at some point when the pain of standing in heels had gotten ridiculous. She looked behind her.
“Looking for these?” Nick held up the pair of dusty gold heels, a finger hooked i
nto the spiky end of each shoe.
She grinned and mimed wiping her brow.
“Lose those and Sarah will cut out my heart.”
He just shook his head and held onto her shoes.
“You almost done?”
“Think so. Just waiting to find out if we can get in there tonight. I’ve got no idea what I’m going to find.”
The answer was no. The fire department was going to monitor the entire building for the rest of the night to make sure there weren’t any hidden hot spots waiting to break out into flame again. They said the damage was minimal, but she didn’t know what minimal meant to a firefighter. Then the captain came back and pulled her aside.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” She was still muttering when she marched over to Nick, who was leaning up against the side of the Town Car, a few moments later. “He says there are signs of an accelerant, which means it might have been arson. It wasn’t. That’s frigging dry-cleaning fluid. We have tons of it for the costumes. But they have to report anything suspicious, which makes this a crime scene. So now I have to wait for the arson investigator to pick through every scrap of material in there. Says it’s going to take a couple days at least. Fuck.”
“Can you work around it? For my mother’s show, at least? Not that I’m making light of the difficulty for you and your people all around. But…rehearse without props or…whatever?” It was almost cute, how Nick didn’t have the vocabulary for this conversation. If she hadn’t been so stressed out about not knowing what was salvageable and what was not, she would have taken him somewhere private and whispered about flats and gels and greasepaint while doing wicked things to his body until he couldn’t remember his own name.
“It’ll set us back, but yeah, we’re not using any of this stuff right now anyway. It’s early days and Smith’s play is our big show. Everything else is small, and props have already been delivered. Problem is, we were going to hold read-throughs here for the next week until we get access to the theater. Shit. Maybe I can talk Hector into—” She was off in her own world, muttering to herself and figuring out who could be bribed or blackmailed into giving her enough space for thirty people to rehearse.
A tug on her sleeve brought her back to the present. Nick was standing next to the car door, which he’d opened. “Any reason for you to stay here?”
She looked back at her warehouse, torn by conflicting urges. She wanted to stay, to stand guard like a mama bear over a wounded cub. But the scene was swarming with people, and according to the captain, she wouldn’t be able to get inside for at least another day. At the same time, every muscle in her body felt as if it had been pounded with a meat tenderizer. She realized she had no idea what time it was.
She looked from Nick and the car to the warehouse. Back to Nick. Curled her fingers around the too-long cuffs of his jacket. Scraped her bare feet back and forth over the rough concrete of the sidewalk.
Paralyzed.
What to do? She couldn’t think.
Staying was stupid when there was nothing she could do. She’d sent Ruben and Marcus home an hour ago.
But what if she left and something happened?
She felt dizzy with indecision. What was wrong with her? She never didn’t know what to do next. Even in a disaster, she always had backup plans for her backup plans. Or a hundred ideas for creative solutions to any problem.
Nick was looking at her with real concern now as she swayed a little while standing in place.
“I don’t know.” She whispered the words, a flush of shame creeping over her until she was moments away from crying again. Jesus, what the hell was wrong with her?
Everything spun, but before she could cry out, Nick braced an arm behind her shoulders and pulled most of her weight against him.
“Baby, when’s the last time you ate something?” His arm was strong, holding her up as she sagged against him, light-headed and out of it.
“Missed lunch.”
“And dinner, remember? All you ate was a scallop. It’s almost two now. Your blood sugar’s probably rock-bottom.” He bent, slipped an arm under her knees, and lifted her easily against his chest. “Time to go home.”
“No, wait—”
Nick ignored her protests, bundling her into the backseat of the car and shutting the door behind her. She leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. So tired. She just needed a minute, and then she’d figure out what to do next.
When she woke up, they were speeding through the nearly deserted streets of the Loop. She recognized the buildings of Streeterville and knew they were almost at Nick’s place.
Nick’s place. Nick. Who’d put her in the back of his car and taken her away from everything she needed to control. Somehow.
She realized she was leaning against him, practically draped across his lap. Bracing her hands on his thighs, ignoring the way his quadriceps tightened at her grip, she pushed herself away.
“I didn’t say I was ready to leave.” She was pissed, pissed at the fire and the firefighters and her staff and herself, and Nick was the only available target. “The whole dominant-caveman thing only turns my crank in bed, buddy. So knock it off in real life.”
He didn’t even flinch. Or apologize.
“You’re exhausted. You’re hungry. You almost concussed yourself by fainting.”
“I don’t faint,” she protested hotly, hating the idea that she might have done something so very girly.
“After you fainted, I made an executive decision to get you some rest.” She opened her mouth to lay into him, but he pressed his palm gently over her lips. “Now, I can tell that you’re mad and you want to say some really shitty things. I get it. But you’re just going to feel like a jerk later, so why don’t you eat something instead. Then you can yell at me all you want. Quarter Pounder?”
He didn’t even have a chance to pull the McDonald’s bag up onto the seat before she was digging in with both hands, trying not to drool on the leather seat as she tore the wrapper off a sandwich, the smells of salt and fat and cheap grilled meat making her mouth water.
Two cheeseburgers and a large order of fries later, she came up for air. Nick was holding a waxed paper cup out to her. She took a long pull off the straw, sucking down the Sprite—and she knew he’d picked a caffeine-free soda because this goddamn man never stopped thinking, not for a minute—and felt almost human again. She heaved a sigh.
“Ready to get out?” He sounded almost amused. They were parked at the entrance to his high rise. Hmm. Embarrassing. She decided not to ask how long they’d been there.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
She couldn’t look him in the eye. She’d been seconds from saying the meanest things she could think of to this man who’d done nothing but give her nonstop backup all night long.
When he wasn’t screwing her senseless, that was.
She didn’t like what that said about her as a person. You had to be a pretty shitty human being to want to take your rage out on a person who was trying their best to help you.
She just wasn’t sure how to apologize for something she’d only almost done.
“Backup, remember?” The corner of his mouth quirked up in a smile. Nick got out of the car and she slid across the seat after him. As she exited feet first, she remembered her missing heels.
“Hey, got my shoes?” She gasped as he reached in and pulled her out, hoisting her into his arms again. “Whoa! Hey, caveman!”
He dug his chin into the top of her head and gave her a squeeze. “Admit it. It gets you hot.”
“Dude, no way.”
Maybe a little. Muscles weren’t normally her thing. She was a theater geek. The guys she typically went after were skinny and pale and more likely to drop a monologue at a moment’s notice than to carry her ass through a building lobby.
Which was, she had to admit, kind of hot.
Even if she ducked her head against Nick’s chest when they passed the security guard’s desk, hoping he couldn’t s
ee her face.
When they got off the elevator on Nick’s floor, she squirmed to get down, but he held her tighter.
“Have you seen your feet? Straight to the shower for you.”
She tried to kick up a foot so she could see the bottom and managed to get a glimpse of black filth before he shook her in his arms. She squeaked like a mouse at the sensation of almost being dropped.
“Stop squirming. We’re almost there.”
Unlocking the door was tricky. When he finally put her down in the bathroom and she saw herself in the mirror, she shrieked.
“Oh, my god!” Curly black hair straggled out of pins like a drunken octopus. The flame-colored dress was drooping away from her breasts under the battered, wrinkled placket of Nick’s dinner jacket. She took a step and then looked behind her.
Yup. She was leaving actual footprints of filth. A wail erupted out of her mouth.
“I’m filthy!”
Nick laughed and cranked the hot water on in the shower until steam started billowing in the glass-brick enclosed cube. He stripped his jacket off her and then pushed the dress to the floor, leaving her standing in a thong in front of the mirrored wall above the matched sinks in a long stretch of marble. Stepping behind her, he slid his hands under the strings over her hips and dragged the miniscule underwear down her hips until she stepped out of them.
Even exhausted and nearing a coma from her need to sleep, Maxie expected him to push. To run his hands over her and say something filthy and low in her ear. And he did put his hands on her. But they were impersonal and brisk, bundling her into the shower and holding her hair back as she lifted her face under the hot water. He’d stripped off, too, at some point and she was aware of his nakedness, a warm body under hot water, brushing up against her as he soaped her up and rinsed her off, kneeling down at one point to carefully wash her feet.
By the time Nick turned the water off, she was halfway unconscious, eyes drooping heavily as he toweled her dry and pulled a soft T-shirt over her head. He walked her into the bedroom and helped her onto the bed, dragging a sheet over her butt as she rolled onto her side. Eyes closed, she heard him moving around the room. She was hanging on to consciousness with a fingernail when the mattress dipped a little at her back.