by Sierra Rose
“Take a closer look.” He downed the rest of his coffee and tossed the empty cup onto my nightstand. “It’s why he kept a hand on my jacket—he was holding me steady.”
I clapped a hand to my chest, overwhelmed by the adorable tragedy of it all.
“...he was holding you steady?”
Nick shrugged dismissively.
“I was six. I got scared.”
Yeah. He was six. Then why was it that right now, I was feeling so protective of him?
“I should have been there,” I murmured without thinking.
Nick’s face lit up with a bemused grin. “What? Four-year-old Abigail Wilder swoops in to the rescue? Pelts the paparazzi with her building blocks?”
I raised my eyebrows knowingly.
“You’d be surprised what damage I could do with those things...”
He chuckled.
“I think the Royal Navy had it covered.”
It was my turn to laugh. But then something he’d said suddenly clicked.
“Wait a minute...you know how old I am?”
For a second, we both just stared. Me—pale as a ghost as my faithful ‘I’m twenty-nine’ cover story blew up in smoke. Nick—with the world’s most inscrutable poker face.
...a face that cracked into a smile.
“Of course I know how old you are.” He shot me a chiding grin, as if I’d been a fool to underestimate him. “I’ve known since the minute we started working together.”
Working together. Not, from the minute you started working for me.
That was one of the things I loved about Nick. To most people—especially the high-caliber clients that filled my day-book—it was a huge distinction. But Nick didn’t think twice.
“I actually happen to like that you’re a little younger than me.” His smile twisted up into a confident smirk. “Makes me want to show you the ropes.”
“I am not that much younger,” I replied with a matching grin.
But a part of me was thrilled to know he was in on the secret. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep up the façade of hovering just a year before thirty. Besides, something about the way he said show you the ropes made me want to know exactly what that meant.
In a moment of rare bravery, I was actually about to summon up the courage to ask, when there was a sudden metallic scrape in the living room. A second later, the front door opened and a man’s voice rang out through the apartment.
“Abigail? Are you home?”
Nick leapt back like he had been burned. Creating an instant distance between himself and the bed. His muscles tensed, and his eyes locked onto mine with a silent accusation.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered in a clipped voice, “I didn’t realize I was interrupting.”
I stared up in shock, as thoroughly taken aback by the situation as he was. As had been previously established, my work life didn’t leave much room for a social one. I couldn’t remember the last time there had been one man in my apartment, let alone two.
...it really made me wish I was wearing pants.
“I don’t...you’re not—”
“Abigail?” the man called again. There was a rustling in the kitchen, followed by the sound of footsteps coming down the hall. “You in here? How come your door isn’t locked?”
Then the voice clicked and I clapped a hand to my forehead.
“Jake?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m in the bedroom.” I then glared at Nick. “I guess it’s not meant for me to sleep in.”
The footsteps paused, then quickened.
I peered at Nick. “Did you forget to lock my door?”
“Sorry. Who is this guy? Are you dating someone?”
“Goodness, no. He’s on my team,” I hissed to Nick. “You’ve met him a dozen times—he’s the one who did your initial interview with Ella.”
Nick remained expressionless as the door pushed open and Jake Harmon spilled inside. In hindsight, I didn’t know why I was surprised to see him. After Nick’s coffee maker walked the plank out the penthouse window, neither one of us had been seen or heard of since.
...until our kiss on live television last night.
He knocked. “Hey, is everything okay? Are you dressed? Just meet me in the living room. We have a lot to talk about.”
“It’s okay. Just come in.”
“Hey—there you are!”
Jake was the kind of guy who would play the cousin, or bumbling big brother if my life was cast as a TV show. A bit too tall. A bit too gangly. And a bit too old to have not mastered the combination by now.
That being said, he was a total sweetheart and damn good at his job. Together, the two of us had single-handedly got my little PR operation off the ground. I handled the clients, and he handled things back on the home front. A perfect combination.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to just burst in on you—it’s just that none of us had any idea where you went, and for the first time since we’ve met, you’re not picking up your phones.”
I glanced guilty at my briefcase, as he shoved his rain-drenched hair out of his eyes and pushed his glasses farther up the bridge of his nose. From the way he was panting, he had literally run all the way from the office. He had yet to notice Nick (which had to be a first for the both of them), and was staring at me like I’d just beamed down from Mars.
“And then I saw the...” He hesitated, as if there was somehow a chance that I hadn’t seen it yet myself. “Abigail...you know that you kissed our only client, right?”
The entire speech had been said in one breathless burst, and by now, poor Jake was so disheveled and out of sorts, that even Nick was beginning to smile. The difference between the two men couldn’t have been more striking, but Nick was nice about it—tilting his head to the side with an infinitely patient expression, waiting for the man to glance over and notice him.
“Yeah, Jake,” I pulled the blankets up higher around me, “about that—”
“And I know you said never to come to your apartment, but at this point, I thought that emergency protocols were in order.” He held up both of this hands in that calming/bracing way that we did sometimes with clients who had ceased to see reason. “So let me start by first asking you this: did you realize that you were doing it?”
Nick pursed his lips with a bemused frown, while my skin blushed scarlet.
“Jake, I really need you to shut up now—”
But Jake was beyond hearing me. Waves of adrenaline were still coursing in his eyes, and he seemed absolutely determined to save his beloved boss from career suicide.
“I mean, you didn’t think he was someone else, did you?” he asked desperately. “Closed your eyes too soon? Or maybe you were just so drunk, you had no idea what you were doing?”
“Jake, please—”
“Allison guessed that you had elevation sickness from the plane, but I thought that was a bit of a stretch. It was probably something much simpler, right? Something that made sense.”
By now, Nick was shaking with silent laughter in the corner. Jake had dripped an entire puddle onto my hardwood floor. And I was beginning to think I was going to have to move to the west coast just to escape the embarrassment of this one, impossible morning.
“Did you just not see him?”
At this point, even I had to take a step back. My head snapped up, and for a moment, I stopped trying to silence him. I simply wanted to understand.
“...I’m sorry?” I shook my head incredulously, trying to follow his convoluted line of thought. “Did I just not see him? Like...did I trip or something and land on his mouth? How, in your deluded little mind, does that possibly make sense?”
Jake threw up his hands.
“Don’t ask me to unravel the impossible reasoning of you women! Maybe in the dark, he looked like someone else. Maybe, you thought you were being kidnapped and were trying to make the best of a bad situation. Maybe you were struck with temporary amnesia and had no earthly clue that you were making the bigg
est mistake of your life!”
His voice had risen in volume with each accusation. So that by the time he got to the last one, he was basically shouting.
Let me be clear: my employees do not get to speak to me this way. There’s a clear pecking order at the office, and I happen to reside at the undisputed top of it.
That being said...Jake kind of had a point.
Nick raised his eyebrows, mouthing the words biggest mistake with a rather delighted look on his face. I rolled my eyes and avoided his gaze.
“Because I can’t possibly believe that the woman I know, the woman who taught me everything I know, would possibly be so foolish. I can’t even begin to comprehend how you could throw everything away just to share a kiss with—”
“Nicholas Hunter.” The little rant came to a screeching halt as Nick stepped forward and offered out his hand. “It’s Jake, right? I think the two of us have met once or twice?”
Jake, for all his previous bluster, was stunned silent. He simply stared at Nick with his mouth hanging open, until a pointed ahem from me, made him reach down and shake.
“Yeah, it’s...Jake, I’m...I mean...” He pulled in shaky breath, trembling all over like a recently deflated balloon. “That’s my name.”
To his extreme credit, Nick didn’t laugh. (It was another thing I loved about him, the fact that despite his social status, he took great care to address everyone he met as an equal.) Instead, he pursed his lips and shook the man’s hand, offering him a kind smile when they were through.
“Well, Jake, please allow me to explain things: you see, Abby here would do it herself, but she’s at the slight disadvantage of not wearing any pants.”
I closed my eyes with a pained grimace, as Nick moved cheerfully onward.
“Things fell rather permanently apart with Ella Campbell, and since I was reluctant to continue on with anyone who I didn’t sincerely know, Abby kindly stepped in to take her place.”
That British accent was coming through again. Clear and strong.
“Which I’m hoping will explain our televised kiss, as well as everything else I’m planning to do with your friend.” His lips twitched up in a faint smile, as a look of pure mischief danced through his eyes. “I’m also hoping it will relieve your obvious concern that Abby was making...how did you phrase it? Ah yes. The biggest mistake of her life.”
Jake paled, glanced helplessly at me, then paled again.
“I meant of...of her professional life,” he tried to amend.
Nick nodded graciously.
“Of course, of course.”
Kill me. Just kill me right now.
With a supreme amount of effort, I straightened up as much as I could and smoothed back my hair with my best business-like smile.
“Well Jake, if that will be all...” I prompted.
He couldn’t get out the door fast enough.
“Yes—right, right!” There was a slight crack as he stepped on a pair of my fallen sunglasses, but all of us were too eager to put the moment behind us to much care. All of us except Nick, of course, who looked like he was rather enjoying himself. “I’ll just...I’ll just call you later from the office, then?”
I closed my eyes and nodded again. The beginnings of a migraine were beginning to take shape—building up a constant, pulsing pressure at the base of my neck.
“Sounds good.”
There was the sound of shuffling footsteps, and a second later, the door closed shut. Jake even managed to lock it behind himself for good measure, before hurrying away—probably off to the nearest bar to purge the entire experience from his memory.
If only all of us could be so lucky.
“So...” Nick walked back across the room and re-perched on the edge of my mattress, looking more and more at home all the while, “he seems a bit high-strung, doesn’t he?”
I ignored this, bringing my hand to the back of my neck with a withering glare.
“You had to tell him that I wasn’t wearing any pants?” I asked flatly. “I’m not even going to ask how you knew that—but you just had to add it into the conversation?”
Nick nodded pragmatically. “Oh yes, I think so.”
My cheeks flushed, but at this point, I was so far beyond embarrassment that it didn’t really register. Instead, I stretched out my legs beneath the comforter—pushing and kicking against him with all my might.
“Well in that case, I think you should probably go too. I’m sure you have a whole list of other people’s lives to ruin. And I’m going to need to get started finding a good therapist to guide me through this damn—”
“Abby?”
I looked up to see that he hadn’t moved an inch from where he’d started. Not only had my feeble attempts to kick him off gone completely unnoticed, but his every attention was now focused one hundred percent on me—freezing me in place again with that x-ray vision of his.
“I want to add on another condition to our arrangement.”
I stared back at him for a second, sure that I’d heard wrong. Then, in the first bout of relief I’d gotten all morning, I threw back my head with a giant laugh.
“You do, do you?” I managed, when I finally resurfaced. “After all the shit you’ve put me through, after this little stunt you pulled this morning...you want to add another condition?”
He didn’t even blink.
“I do.”
His lack of banter made me pause, as did that unflinching, undaunted look simmering in his eyes. Finally, when the silence could go on no longer, I had to ask.
“Okay...what is it?”
He smiled, but when he spoke, his voice was as steady and serious as I’d ever heard it.
“You don’t cheat on me either.”
Chapter 5
It was those last few words that stuck with me when he left shortly after. Haunting me as I got up to get dressed. Plaguing me as I brushed my teeth. Echoing back again and again as I slipped into my work clothes, and made my way to the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee.
Let me start by saying, I had no intention of ‘cheating’ on Nick. None whatsoever. And not only because I currently had no social life to speak of (and thus, no one to cheat with), but because no matter the circumstance, I’d never been the cheating type.
That being said, I was fairly sure it wasn’t possible to ‘cheat’ on someone, when you weren’t technically in a ‘relationship.’
That being said, I didn’t know why Nick would really care either way.
True, I’d asked the same thing of him not long before—it had been one of the conditions I’d insisted on before we left Barcelona. But in my case, it made sense. The entire point of this little dalliance was to keep a positive spotlight on Mitchell Hunter’s son until his company’s grand awakening in three months. Every move Nick made would be scrutinized. The paparazzi fishbowl he already lived in would get even smaller—trapping him under a microscopic lens.
But the same rules didn’t apply to me.
I wasn’t a Hunter. I wasn’t the heir to anything. And even on my best of days, I was pretty damn sure the rest of the world didn’t think of me as an international celebrity.
I was, however, a world class talent at playing with the perceptions of the press. Even if I did happen to have a boyfriend on the side—it wouldn’t be a problem. If anyone knew how to keep a thing like that under wraps, it would be me.
Nick knew that. Of all the people in Manhattan, he knew it best of all.
And yet, he’d expressly forbidden it.
...why?
You don’t cheat on me either.
As if the words weren’t enough, then there was the look on his face. It was a look I had seen many, many times before. He might have been smiling, but there wasn’t an ounce of compromise anywhere in those twinkling blue yes.
It was not a request. It was a command. As simple as that.
I was still mulling it over a few minutes later, when there was a quiet knock on my door.
What the hell is goi
ng on today? Am I having an open house I don’t know about?
Cautious, and after double checking again that I was wearing pants, I padded my way over to the door. “Who is it?” I called through the double dead-bolts.
In Brooklyn, you could never be too careful.
“It’s Stacy.”
Stacy?
To say that Stacy Heathrow was a stylist, was like saying that Michael Phelps liked to play in the pool. The woman was a fashion goddess. A true icon. It was as if all of Manhattan had gotten together and compiled all their beauty standards into this one, bionic woman. A woman who somehow managed to encompass them all.
Tall, gorgeous, and with so little body fat I was amazed she wasn’t seasonally restricted indoors, she stopped the conversation of every room she walked into. Turned every head, unhinged every jaw. It was for this reason that Mitchell Hunter had hired her seven years ago.
That and the fact that she was one of the only women in the world who was impervious to his son’s devilish charms.
“Stacy—hey!” I yanked open the door, terrified to keep her waiting even a second longer than was necessary, “is everything okay? Did you and Lily have a fight?”
She swept inside, drenching me in a cloud of Chanel No. Five. Sure enough, despite the icy sidewalks, she was wearing a miniature cocktail dress paired with eight-inch heels. She had to bend down almost a foot to do her obligatory double-cheek-kiss.
“Lily—gosh no. Everything’s fine. She’s off in France or Spain or something—fighting against corporate interests with the rest of her little friends.”
(Lily’s ‘little friends’ happened to be a United Nations Human Rights Commission.)
“Oh, well that’s—”
“You know, this is actually a cute place.” Her ice blue eyes swept around appraisingly, as she shed her coat on a hook by the door. “Even if it is in Brooklyn...”
Knowing Stacy, that was as much of a compliment as I was ever going to get. At any rate, it was certainly as kind as she was biologically capable of.
“Uh...thanks.”
Now that she mentioned it, it was bizarre seeing her in a place like this. Was this her first time venturing over the bridge? I imagined her circuitry turned off once she left Manhattan. Like a broken robot, leaving her frozen and twitching on the far shore.