Anyone But Nick

by Bloom, Penelope

  We could’ve had all of it, and I knew it. But instead of comforting me, the thought had made me feel suffocated.

  “Miranda,” Robbie said. He shot Iris and Kira a look that clearly implied he’d prefer to speak to me in private. Kira started to stand up, but Iris grabbed her wrist with a sinister little grin and made sure she didn’t go anywhere.

  “Hey, Robbie,” I said. It hadn’t been an ugly breakup, so I gave a smile I hoped was friendly. I didn’t have any reason to think we wouldn’t be able to transition to being friends, but we also hadn’t talked much since it had happened a couple of days ago. I’d explained my reasoning, and he’d done exactly what I’d expected. He’d understood. Robbie always understood.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. About us.”

  “Robbie . . .” I blew out a long breath. “I know this is weird, but I think we—”

  “She dumped you,” Cade said. I hadn’t even seen him coming, which was unusual, considering all the King brothers were ridiculously tall. He was standing on the bleachers below us now. “She’s just too nice to say she never wants to see you again. She doesn’t want you marinating in her friend zone. Because we all know you’d go home every night you thought she might’ve flirted with you and have a depressing little wank. Emphasis on little.”

  “Cade,” I said. “Please, I can—”

  Robbie’s lips tightened into a thin line. He had never been the confrontational type, so I wasn’t surprised when all he did was give me one subtle, questioning look.

  “It’s not like that,” I said to Cade. “Since you don’t really know anything about what is going on, it’d be best if you kept out of it.”

  “It would’ve also been best if nobody ever invented those big-ass spiders the size of your hand that hide under toilet seats,” Cade said. “But take a look at Australia. It’s hot as the world’s butthole, and that steamy taint is chock full of huge spiders, giant snakes, and kangaroos. I mean, what is the point of a kangaroo, even? Why have arms at all? Didn’t we learn anything from the T. rex, like—”

  Iris gave me a quick smile and then pressed her palms into Cade’s chest. She started leading him down the bleachers like she was trying to move a massive boulder, which wasn’t too far from the truth—both in terms of the physical similarities and the mental deficiencies. Cade sighed and let the tiny woman move him away from us.

  Kira looked like she didn’t know what to do now that Iris was gone. She started walking backward so slowly I almost couldn’t tell if she was moving.

  I tried to mouth “Don’t you leave me too” without letting Robbie see.

  Kira hated awkward situations, and I could see from the look in her eyes that she didn’t want to be witness to this. A moment later, she had scurried off too. Great.

  I turned my attention back to Robbie and forced a smile. “So . . .”

  “I was trying to say that I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, since . . .” His eyebrows creased together, as if the thought of the word breakup was causing him physical pain.

  If I still needed reassurance that I’d done the right thing, all I needed to do was study that look on his face. I didn’t feel any of the emotional sting of losing him. Staying in a relationship like that wouldn’t have been fair, even if it seemed like everyone else thought we were so perfect for each other. “Robbie,” I said as gently as I could, “I should’ve realized we had different goals earlier than I did. But that’s all there is to it. I have a vision for where I want to be, and I can’t let anything get in the way of that.”

  “Where you want to be?” Robbie asked. Anger flashed in his eyes. “Alone and sitting on the top floor of a skyscraper in New York? Is that it? Diving in your piles of gold coins at night and sleeping on megayachts?”

  I shook my head. I knew he was only being cruel because he felt embarrassed, but it still stung. “I don’t care about the money. You would know that if you’d really listened. I want to—” I stopped and pursed my lips. “You know what? No. I don’t need to explain it to you again. Maybe if you’d cared more, this wouldn’t be so confusing to you.”

  “There’s nothing complicated about it. We’re good together. Everybody thought so. And I don’t want to sound crude, but what do you think will happen once the grace period is over?”

  I frowned. “The grace period? Do I even want to know what that means?”

  “I didn’t really want to have to spell it out. But think about it. How long do you think women are going to wait now that I’m single?”

  I couldn’t help laughing out loud at that. Sure, he was right, but I was finally seeing just how much Robbie had been putting on a show while we dated. This was the real him. Nasty, ugly, and overconfident. “Well, don’t let me stop you from putting out the memo. Actually, if you want, I can have some copies laminated for you. How do you want it worded exactly?”

  “I’m not kidding, Miranda. I won’t wait around for you to change your mind. So, what’s it going to be?”

  “I made up my mind. I’m sorry, but that’s it.”

  Robbie’s lips twitched, and for a moment I thought he might actually shout something. Instead, he released all his tension with a soft laugh. “No. It’s fine. I’ll give you a few more days to realize this is a mistake. We’ll talk soon.”

  I watched him go, suspecting there was something threatening in his words.

  “That seemed to go poorly,” said a familiar voice from behind me.

  I was still sitting, but I nearly toppled over when I saw Nick King was right behind me.

  “Okay,” I said suddenly. I turned completely around to face him and held up my palms. “What is going on with you? You’ve acted like I didn’t exist ever since you and your brothers came back to West Valley, and now I can’t seem to stop running into you?”

  Nick watched me in that way I was surprised to remember so well—like a bomb could go off without shaking his focus. It was the kind of look that could undo a thousand cruel words—the kind of look that could even start chipping at seven years of built-up anger. I wondered what was going through that clever mind of his as he watched me.

  “I haven’t been avoiding you,” Nick said. “I’ve been giving you space.”

  “Space,” I said. “Yeah, in the sense that I might as well have been in orbit the past few months as far as you were concerned?”

  He smirked. “That’s an oddly appropriate metaphor, considering you’ve always felt way out of reach.”

  “If you were ever reaching for me, you weren’t putting much effort into it.”

  “Or maybe you weren’t looking hard enough. Like now.”

  Even though my chest was tight with nervous excitement, I didn’t have to try hard to feel the old, familiar resentment bubble up. “Last time I looked, you were dating my best friend.”

  Nick’s expression hardened. His eyes flicked to something behind me. “Cade,” he said coldly.

  The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I turned and saw Iris and Cade both watching from a few feet away. Iris at least had the decency to look embarrassed to be caught eavesdropping.

  “What the hell?” I asked. “Is it possible to have a conversation without somebody secretly leaning over my shoulder tonight?”

  “I don’t know,” Cade said. “Maybe try not being such a source of drama, and it wouldn’t be so fun to spy on you. Besides, I thoroughly enjoyed listening to you shut Nick down.”

  “For once, could you not?” Nick asked Cade.

  “Sorry, my specialty is kind of doing. Not doing has never been a strong suit,” Cade said. “Anyway, I was going to ask you what your plans were if Little Miss Perfect here hadn’t turned you down? I mean, how did you expect to keep your head in the game when you were daydreaming about bumping uglies on the copier every chance you got?”

  “I can’t believe I’m agreeing with Nick on something, but, yeah, could you not?” I asked.

  “Hey,” Cade said, completely ignoring my question. He ran his thumb across Ir
is’s jaw and grinned wickedly. “That actually sounds kind of fun. Want to go buy a copier and do a little role-play? I’ll be your boss, except in our scenario, I didn’t fail at seducing you, so we’re absolutely blasting each other every chance we get.”

  “Seriously?” Nick asked. “You think you can just walk into a store and buy a commercial copier?”

  “The practicality of buying a copier is the part of this you have a problem with?” I asked. I shot Iris an incredulous look, but she seemed above being ashamed.

  Ugh. New love was disgusting. I’d had to watch Kira and Rich and how they were hardly able to keep their hands off each other when they’d finally gotten together, and now it was Cade and Iris. Somehow, it all made me more angry with Nick.

  “Hey,” Cade said. “You left the keys to the new biz in your car, right?”

  “No,” Nick snapped. “You will not—”

  “Sorry!” Cade called. He was already pulling Iris by the hand and leading her away. “You know my policy. Never waste a good boner!”

  Nick got up with a disgusted look. “See you in the morning, Collins. Oh, and it’s nice to have you back from orbit.”

  Traitorous goose bumps tingled across my arms and legs. I had to clear my throat, but my voice still sounded quiet and a little scratchy. “I’ll see you in the morning. Yep.”

  Chapter 4

  NICK

  Today was Miranda’s first day at Bark Bites, and I guessed it was mine too.

  I fidgeted with a paperweight on what used to be Dan’s desk while I waited for Miranda to arrive. The paperweight was shaped like a neat pile of dog poop, and once I realized I’d been idly running my fingers over it, I pulled them back and sighed.

  I would normally be diving into the work by now. Instead, I was sitting here tapping my fingers because I was anxious to talk to her again.

  She knocked softly at my door.

  “Come in,” I called.

  As soon as Miranda looked at me, her back seemed to straighten, as if I could literally see the stick inserting itself up her ass. Distantly, I could hear the scratching paws of Thug scurrying around as he banged into things in Miranda’s office across the hall.

  I had become so used to seeing Miranda look like she was in control. The way her eyes slid uneasily from mine to the floor wasn’t like her, and I couldn’t help feeling responsible for it. Ever since she’d walked into the interview yesterday, she had seemed off balance. Sure, there had been flashes of the old Miranda, but it seemed like she was teetering. I admittedly knew I had something to do with that by giving her the job of taking care of Thug, but perfectionism was like a phobia. And what did you do to cure someone of a phobia? You exposed them to the thing they were most afraid of, little by little.

  I’d felt an odd, hard-to-describe bubble in my throat from the moment Miranda had stepped back into my life. Until now, I’d assumed it was just anticipation. After all, she was the Mount Everest of challenges for me. But I was starting to realize the truth was something else. The strange feeling wasn’t there because I wanted to sleep with her so badly—though, admittedly, that thought wasn’t far from my mind.

  For as long as I’d known her, Miranda had always been put into a box by everybody. They all saw how intelligent she was and how driven she could be, so they naturally assumed she’d basically conquer the world one day. In high school, it had driven her to study more and spread herself impossibly thin with extracurricular activities that would look good to colleges. Now I could see she still wasn’t free of those expectations. They’d shaped her into the woman she was today, and I suspected there was only one way she could ever put it all to rest. She needed to “win.” Somewhere along the line, she had clearly decided that conquering the business world was her definition of a win, and that was all that mattered.

  She sat down, swallowed, and then looked up at me with those big blue eyes of hers. God, she was so distractingly beautiful.

  “Tell me something,” I said suddenly.

  “Okay . . .”

  “What is it you want out of this job?”

  A few heartbeats passed before she responded. “Am I interviewing again?”

  “No. I’m just trying to understand something.” I shook my head. “To understand you, I mean.”

  “I want to be useful,” she said slowly. “To be needed and to live up to expectations.”

  “And where does that desire come from?” I asked.

  “Why does it have to come from somewhere? Can’t that just be what I want?”

  I studied her body language, noticing the way her fingertips had gone white on the armrests of the chair. Clearly, I was close to touching a nerve. It meant I was near the answer I wanted, but I’d need to tread carefully to get it. “You know, my parents expected my brothers and I to do something like this. Once they squandered the family fortune, I mean. They were so used to things just lining up perfectly to take care of them, so why wouldn’t my brothers and I find a way to save their cushy lifestyle, right?”

  “They must be proud of what you guys have accomplished, then,” she said.

  I chuckled. “No. I don’t think so. Pride is for when people do things you thought they couldn’t do. What happens when everybody already assumes you’ll do it all?”

  “Then all you have is the fear of letting everyone down,” she said. She opened her mouth to say something, then shook her head and looked down with a sad little smile.

  “Is that what this job is for you?” I asked.

  “No. Maybe part of it, I guess. But it’s important to me. Ever since high school, people figured I’d go on to do something important. My parents always joked about how I was going to be a doctor or a CEO. It was like a foregone conclusion. But all that matters to them is the title. That’s their expectation. For me, I want more than that. I want to get the job they thought I’d get, but then I want to crush it. It’s not just getting there. It’s getting there and then doing it well.” She looked down again and licked her lips. “And I’m oversharing,” she said quietly.

  “No,” I said. “It’s okay.” I sounded calm, but my thoughts were racing through everything she’d just said. A slowly forming realization was settling around me like a cloud of icy air. Miranda’s dream was in my hands. If I gave her the opportunity to earn the job I’d be leaving behind when I went back to Sion, she could have everything she ever wanted. If anyone so much as suspected we were romantically involved, on the other hand, I’d be destroying that same dream. It’d look like she got the job because of favoritism, and then everything she’d already accomplished would be called into question too.

  If I cared about her, I had to make her think I didn’t. I had to strictly be her boss.

  I’d thought the Mount Everest challenge was winning Miranda over, but now I saw that it was going to be holding my real feelings in check. I wanted her to have her victory, and I wanted to give her the chance to earn it, because I knew that was the only way it would matter for her.

  “Well,” I said, letting out a big breath. I tried to inject some cheeriness into my voice. “I guess this is really the first day for both of us.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Sort of.”

  “I asked you to meet me this morning because I’m putting on a bit of a party tonight, and I’ll need you to be there.” As much as I tried, I couldn’t stop my eyes from wandering across her smooth, tanned skin and trailing down her neck to the hint of cleavage her blouse showed. I gripped the armrest of my chair tighter and willed myself to focus.

  Her eyebrows twitched up. “A party?”

  “It’s a professional event, and several key investors will be there. I’ve also invited all of the Bark Bites management because—”

  Miranda leaned forward with slightly narrowed eyes. “You’re looking for problems, aren’t you?”

  I laughed softly in surprise. I’d gone through this routine with dozens of companies, and nobody had ever seen through to my intentions so quickly, if at all. They’d always though
t I just wanted to make a nice gesture and get familiar with the staff. I was instantly reminded of why I’d been so interested in Miranda all those years ago. I’d always felt like I moved through life on a different frequency than everyone else. It made it nearly impossible to connect with anyone, but Miranda was different.

  “Yeah,” she said, nodding her confirmation after something she must’ve seen in my face. “I was trying to puzzle out how you must do what you do. I bet you start with the most likely problems and work your way down to the least likely. So people problems are the most common causes of a failing business, huh? Or maybe they are just the easiest ones to rule out first.”

  I had to make an effort not to smile like a teacher who had just witnessed their student pass a test with flying colors. Miranda wasn’t my student, but I felt alive just talking to somebody who thought about these things the way I did. Again. I remembered bitterly that it had always been like this between us. Only now I had seven years of experience to show me that I couldn’t find that kind of connection with anyone else, no matter how hard I might try.

  I made sure my voice didn’t betray any of what was going on in my head when I finally spoke. I needed to draw a line in the sand now, before it got too tempting to let things between us develop. “Interesting theory, but maybe you should leave the planning to me. Your role as my VP is to execute my orders, not to analyze or understand them.”

  Miranda sat back in her chair. The small spark of something I’d seen in her face vanished, and all that was left was the same cold neutral I’d seen when she’d first arrived.

  Sitting there and watching the tentative trust she’d been building with me melt away was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. It felt like the air itself was thickening between us, like her walls were coming back up.

  I gripped the armrest of my chair until my knuckles cracked. This would get easier. Any mutual feelings she might have for me were surely going to dry up soon.