Anyone But Nick

by Bloom, Penelope

  I decided to head to the outdoor pool in hopes of relaxing some of my stress away. The view really was beautiful. A hill behind the pool sloped away to give breathtaking views of mountains that went so far back I couldn’t tell where the clouds started and the mountains ended. I ordered a plate of french fries from the little restaurant attached to the pool and kicked off my shoes to lounge and admire the view.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” a familiar voice asked.

  Cade sat down in the chair beside me and grabbed a fry, popping it into his mouth. “Did you know there are two helipads here? Pretty badass. Although I wouldn’t have had to crash your party via helicopter if you’d booked me a room like a normal, loving brother might have.”

  I groaned. “Please tell me you’re just visiting.”

  “What? This is a company retreat, right? I’m part of the company.”

  “It’s a Bark Bites retreat.”

  “And you invited people from the corporate office as well as the chain locations. I’m a corporate employee. Deal with it, bitch.”

  I chuckled. “Will you at least try to avoid sowing mayhem and carnage while you’re here?”

  “I will do what I always do. I’ll be myself as aggressively as possible.”

  I couldn’t stop from grinning a little. To be honest, I would’ve been worried if he’d said anything else. “Then maybe just aggressively be yourself out of my way, whenever possible. And if you see Miranda around, just—” I shook my head. “No. Forget I said that.”

  “Oh my.” Cade sat up straighter. Somehow, he’d taken his shirt off without me noticing. He also produced a bottle of sunscreen and was liberally applying it to his chest and abs. He winked at me as he ran a finger down his stomach and made a sizzling noise.

  “You’re such an idiot,” I said.

  “And even an idiot can see through your little game, Nicholas.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Saint Nick, it’s clear as day. You want to play hide the hot dog with Miranda. If you bottle something like that up, it’s going to explode on you. It’s like blue balls for your brain. Like . . .” He paused, obviously thinking very deeply. “It’s like balls brain.”

  “Balls brain . . . wouldn’t blue brain make more sense?”

  “See?” He punched my shoulder. “That’s why you’re the smart one. So, anyway. You’re going to give yourself brain balls if you keep holding this back. It’s going to build up and build up, and before you know it, you’ll be a hopeless mess around her. All you’ll be able to think about is how badly you want to do the deed with her.”

  “Your problem is you can’t understand that not everybody operates with the same mental deficiencies you do. Even if you were right about how I feel—which you’re not—I could control my emotions. I can be an adult and put the business first.”

  “Right. Because being an adult is so great. Except, wait a second! I almost forgot that having billions of dollars practically exempts us from needing to be adults. You know what an adult is? It’s a slave to the system. It’s those poor people who have to spend more time working than they do sleeping, eating, fucking, and enjoying life. And you know why they do that? Because they have to. Because adults have responsibilities, but responsibilities are just code for bills.”

  “You don’t think your child counts as a responsibility?”

  “Bear is a privilege. And he’s a well-trained privilege. You train them right, and they practically operate themselves. He can wipe his own ass now,” Cade added, as if that was a completely reasonable and interesting bit of knowledge I’d need.

  “Okay, but you do realize I enjoy the work. Right? We obviously don’t need the money anymore, but I still work because it’s important to me.”

  Cade blew a raspberry and flopped back into his chair. “To be young again,” he said wistfully. “So young and so innocent to the world. It’s cute, really. But you know, when you grow older and wiser, you’ll realize that people don’t exist to work. We exist to make a minimum of one baby. But really two is ideal. And if you have genetics as good as mine—and yours, to a lesser extent—you’re honestly obligated to make as many babies as you can. That is your divine purpose. Not feeding dogs under the table.”

  I shook my head as I stared off toward the mountains. “You do know the world is heading toward overpopulation, right? If everybody keeps making babies like there’s no tomorrow, we’re all going to starve in a century.”

  “I plan to be happily dead in a century, thank you very much. And I didn’t say everybody should make babies. I said people like me who won the genetic lottery are obligated to.”

  “Sometimes, I can’t tell if you’re actually being serious or if you’re just trying to get a rise out of me.”

  “Why can’t it be both?” Cade asked.

  Once I realized relaxation was not going to happen with my brother within fifty yards, I headed back to my cabin. It was situated on top of one of the many rolling, grassy hills in the resort and part of a line of maybe twenty other nearly identical cabins in a row. I stopped at the foot of the hill when I saw who was getting out of a car beside the row of cabins up above. Miranda carried a small handbag down the path to her cabin. An athletic-looking guy, maybe in his thirties, followed behind her. He was pulling a big cream-and-gold suitcase I had to imagine wasn’t his own.

  I clenched my fists. I thought back to the voice I’d heard in the background when I called her and how short she’d been with me. I didn’t get it, though. Miranda had hardly left the office since I’d hired her a few days ago. I couldn’t figure out how she would’ve had time to meet somebody. I also couldn’t figure out how she’d managed to get him in, considering I’d paid a great deal of money to keep the resort exclusive to only Bark Bites employees.

  Logistics aside, I didn’t understand why. The timing made no sense. Yeah, sure I’d let her go on thinking what she’d seen between Laine and me was whatever she’d assumed, but . . . shit. I had to stop letting myself go down that line of thinking. What was I going to hope for? That she’d been secretly saving herself for me, even while I was busy going out of my way to make her think I wasn’t interested?

  If I was strictly following the whole boss first, friend second, boyfriend never plan, I would’ve patiently waited for her and the guy to go inside. I’d stay right where I was and keep my mouth shut.

  But there was another angle to this whole thing, and it was one I planned to exploit. “Hey!” I shouted. I started climbing up the hill but immediately regretted not walking the short distance to the side, where there were perfectly good stairs cutting up the steep incline. Instead, I was forced to duckwalk upward with both Miranda and the mystery guy staring down at me. “This is an employee-only retreat,” I said. I’d made it halfway up the hill and was starting to breathe heavily.

  Miranda and the guy waited patiently until I got to the top. I fought the urge to rest my hands on my knees. I was in perfectly good shape, but that was a steep-ass hill, and I was too pissed to be breathing properly.

  “This is Max Frost,” Miranda said.

  I tried and failed not to laugh out loud. I calmed myself, closed my eyes, and straightened my features. Then I broke into another burst of laughter.

  Max watched me with a look that said I wasn’t the first person to laugh at his name.

  “Sorry. Sorry,” I said again. “It’s just that I was pretty sure there was an old Arnold Schwarzenegger movie with a bad guy who shared your name. But he wore spandex and shot ice out of his hands.” I felt my lips quivering and threatening to break into another smile, but I finally held it back.

  Miranda was glaring openly at me. “Max is a news anchor. He heard about Sion’s acquisition of Bark Bites and thought I’d be a great starting point to research the story.”

  “The story?” I asked.

  Max stepped forward and reached to shake my hand. I took his hand in mine, and we both tried to squeeze as hard as we could. I locked eyes with him and squeezed
a little harder. He squeezed back until I was sure either my knuckles or his were going to pop out of our hands any second. His thick black eyebrows drew together as we locked eyes.

  Miranda cleared her throat. Max’s eyes darted to her, and then he let go of my hand.

  I stood a little straighter. That’s right, dick. Then I felt like a child a moment later. Since when did I get into masculine pissing matches? Since you started trying to deny your feelings for Miranda Collins.

  Max Frost—I still could hardly even think the name without wanting to laugh—looked exactly like a news anchor. He had a thick, well-groomed beard, masculine features, and bright-blue eyes. He looked like he probably liked to wear turtlenecks and drink eggnog when it got cold out, and he was also probably the type of guy who could get into a passionate argument about the merits of charcoal grilling versus propane or natural gas. I immediately hated him, and I didn’t think it was just because he was obviously trying to move in on Miranda.

  “The story,” Max said. He had a deep, ridiculous voice too. “Like it or not, when a billion-dollar company headed by three of the country’s most well-known faces does something out of the ordinary, it’s a story.”

  “This is hardly out of the ordinary,” I said, even though I knew exactly what made him curious about this. I wanted to disagree with him just because agreeing with him would’ve left a sour taste in my mouth.

  “Bark Bites was valued at just over a million when you acquired it,” Max said. “Prior to Bark Bites, the smallest company Sion has acquired in the past four years was valued at more than fifty million.”

  “That’s all very interesting,” I said in a bored voice. “But this is also an employee-only retreat. So if you don’t mind, you could drop off my vice president’s bags, collect your tip, and head back to wherever you came from, because there are no available rooms for you here.”

  Miranda’s glare was practically molten now, and it took a serious effort not to flinch away from the heat of it. “Do you mind giving us just a second, Max?” she asked.

  Even the sweet way she spoke to him made me want to break something.

  “Sure,” he said, smiling.

  Miranda took me by the arm and pulled me a few feet away from him. I was painfully aware of how good she looked and even smelled standing this close. “Why did you give me this job?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Did you give me the job because we have a past, or because you believe I can help you turn this company around? And don’t give me some bullshit answer. Tell the truth.”

  I stared right back at her. The full truth was complicated, but I knew the truth I had decided on—the one I was going to operate based on moving forward. That truth was going to have to be good enough, because I did believe it, even if my feelings for her might have influenced my decision too. “I believe in what you can do,” I said.

  “Then let me be helpful. Max is going to give us publicity. He brought a drone and a camera crew. This whole thing is going to be a great look for Bark Bites, okay? All you have to do is stop looking at him like you want to kill him. Can you do that?”

  “Yes,” I said through gritted teeth. “But I can’t promise I’ll stop thinking about killing him.”

  Miranda looked incredulous. “What is your problem, anyway?”

  “My problem is that I went out of my way to make this an employee-only event, and you brought some reporter. I also don’t trust the way he went about this. What did he do, flag you down on your way out of the airport?”

  “Sometimes you have to make the best of unexpected circumstances.”

  “Did you read that on a fortune cookie?”

  “No. I learned it firsthand. So, do you want to trust me on this or not?”

  I sighed. “Fine. But if he does anything creepy, you—”

  “I am a big girl, Nick. And I certainly don’t need my boss trying to police my personal life.”

  “Wait. Personal life? When did Max Frost and his stupid-ass name stop being a business opportunity and start being part of your personal life?”

  Miranda took a step back and raised her voice again so Max could hear. “You said my cabin actually had two bedrooms, didn’t you?”

  “No,” I said quickly. “Completely out of the question. As an employee, you—”

  “You can crash in the other bedroom.” She was ignoring me now and talking to Max like I’d spontaneously puffed out of existence. “I think it’s the kind that is separated by doors with locks, so we can each have our own space.”

  I was going to kill him, especially when I saw the brief, smug glance he threw my way. He thought he was winning. I wondered how smug he’d look if I accidentally knocked him down the hill.

  Calm. Down.

  I was losing my goddamn mind over this. Max Frost was a distraction—a stupid one with an appropriately stupid name. He’d caught me off guard, but I still knew my plan, and he wasn’t going to change it. That was all I needed to focus on.

  “You’re both adults,” I said, inserting calm into my words that I didn’t feel. “If you don’t mind cutting the size of your cabin in half, then go for it.”

  Miranda shot me a look I couldn’t quite decipher before heading into her cabin with Max right behind her. A few moments later, the driver I’d assigned her was doing his best to keep hold of the leash as Bone Thug half dragged him down the path toward Miranda’s cabin.

  “Did anything happen in the car between the two of them?” I asked the driver.

  “Sorry, sir. I was just looking at the road.”

  I sighed.

  This was fine. No, it was good. It was all completely great, as long as I looked at it from the right perspective. Max Frost might have been a joke of a news anchor who had to change his last name—I assumed—to make himself sound like a video game character, but he was also going to make it easier for me to do what I’d set out to do. Forget about my feelings for Miranda. Let her live her life. Get the hell out of her way, and above all stop acting like a jealous child.

  It was the out I’d been looking for. I may not have felt like I was able to date anyone without being an asshole, but this was the solution. All I’d needed was to wait for Miranda to get in a relationship of her own. It was the perfect solution I’d always been looking for. The catch was this one tasted entirely bitter and not the least bit sweet.

  Chapter 11

  MIRANDA

  To his credit, Max was a gentleman about our living arrangement. I’d been bracing myself for the potential of a few awkward minutes of boundary definition, but he’d just smiled and taken his things through the partition separating our halves of the cabin, leaving the door open a hair. It probably helped that we’d both just finished a long day of traveling and wanted nothing more than a shower and a night’s rest.

  Thug set to the task of investigating the cabin, and for once, I didn’t have to stress about him destroying anything. If he did, it would be on Nick’s dime. Maybe that was petty of me, but I could live with the guilt, just like I was sure Mr. Billionaire could live with the financial burden of the bullheaded dog he’d forced on me.

  In what I was coming to realize was typical Bone Thug fashion, he found his way into the weirdest spot in the room to curl up and take a nap. In this case, it was the bathtub, and his entry was far from graceful. Once he was done slipping his awkward, long legs into the tub and circling while grunting for several minutes, he finally curled up and fell asleep almost instantly.

  Idiot dog. At least he was almost cute when he was sleeping. Actually, cute was pushing it too far. He was less hideous and a little less annoying, but that was all I was willing to give the brute.

  I stuck my head in Max’s room to let him know I was going to lock up for the night a few minutes later.

  Max was standing in front of his TV with his shirt off and a muscular torso on display. I covered my eyes and backed out, slamming the door behind me. “God, sorry!” I shouted through the door. “I was just going to let
you know I was locking up and getting ready for bed,” I said, resting my forehead on the wall and squeezing my eyes shut.

  “No worries,” he called through the door. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I could hear the smug smile in his voice.

  I sat down on the edge of my bed and stared at the wall. Why was this so confusing? Nick had made himself about as clear as he could. We were colleagues. Nothing more, nothing less. Our past was where it belonged—seven years behind us—and we were both going to do the adult thing: move on.

  So why was there an oily little ball of guilt rolling around in my stomach? I should’ve been giddy at this made-for-television setup between Max and me. He was the handsome reporter, and I was the young, successful businesswoman. I could already imagine TV audiences rooting for us to hook up, especially if they got to see how Nick had turned me down before I’d even decided if I wanted to make something of my feelings with him.

  Max Frost, who admittedly did have an incredibly stupid name, seemed like a great guy. He was handsome and successful, and he had made no secret of the fact that he was interested in me.

  I should’ve been biting my lip and letting my mind wander to all the dirty little scenarios that might follow after walking in on Max with his shirt off. He’d knock on my door and confess that he didn’t think it was fair to have such a one-sided exchange. He’d say he was going to need to see mine, too, in the interest of fair-and-balanced journalism.

  Except I was forcing it. And every scenario I imagined ended with Nick King kicking down the door and carrying me away like a misbehaving child. The worst part was that I felt the strongest emotional response to the idea of Nick carrying me off, even if half of it was outrage.

  Max was making it unfortunately clear for me. I wasn’t done harboring feelings for Nick. Worse, those feelings I’d been telling myself were anger for so long had miraculously turned into something a lot more like longing, especially when I’d learned the truth about my dumb poem.