by Skylar Finn
“The spa?”
“Yes, he was booked for an hour massage at eleven o’clock—Miss Star, where are you going?”
I left Krishna looking bewildered at her desk, tore through the lobby, and made a beeline for the door that led to White Oak’s five-star spa. The calming music and soothing scent of lavender essential oil in the waiting room did nothing for me. To the disapproval of the customers seated there, I stormed past the unmanned front desk and into the depths of the spa. Most of the massage rooms were booked, but Jazmin told me the biggest one was at the end of the hall. I chose that one and kicked the door open. Nick, finished with his massage, stood near the table as he adjusted something below.
“Nick, what the hell were you thinking—?”
He spun around, his usually perfect hair disheveled and his expression screwed up in something like pain or embarrassment. “Lucia, get out!”
I stumbled backward, stunned by the malice in his voice. He wore only a White Oak spa-issued robe, and I caught a glimpse of his long pale legs. One was muscular and toned. The other looked as though parasites had eaten through his skin. Angry red and purple scars marred his entire quadricep, and large chunks of the muscle were missing. Nick yanked the robe into place and stormed toward me.
“I’m so sorry,” I stuttered, backing out of the room.
“Get out!”
He slammed the door with such force that the water in the Zen fountain in the hallway rippled with the vibration. A spa attendant peeked his head around the corner and spotted me.
“Miss?” he called, managing to sound assertive and relaxed at the same time. “Are you lost? Do you have an appointment?”
“Uh.” I stared at the door, the image of Nick’s damaged leg burned into my head. “No, I was just looking for someone.”
The attendant checked the door. “Mr. Porter? Would you like me to get him for you?”
“No!” I hastily withdrew as he went to knock on the door of the massage room. “No, it’s fine. I can wait. Thank you.”
The attendant wore a confused expression as I turned away and stumbled out of the spa. Once free of the lavender-scented air, my stomach dipped and turned, but I wasn’t sure if it was from seeing the full extent of Nick’s old injury or from the strange sickness that kept hitting me at random moments. The lobby swam in front of me, like I was looking at it from beneath White Oak’s Olympic-sized indoor pool. I steadied myself against the wall and made my way to the elevators. I needed to lie down.
Upstairs, angry voices emanated from the door of my suite. I swiped my card and stumbled inside to find my mother and Jazmin shouting at each other from opposite ends of the living room. Jazmin held a throw pillow from the couch in either hand while my mother was armed with a piece of decorative glass from the mantel. Something had already shattered on the floor near Jazmin’s bare feet.
“You crazy old woman!” Jazmin belted, stepping gingerly around to avoid the shards on the white tile floor. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“You ruined my daughter!” Mother hollered back. “Do you know what I found her doing just a few minutes ago? Speaking to a therapist! The shame!”
Her arm, the one loaded like a Glock with the glass ornament, cocked. Jazmin raised her pillow like a knight’s shield. I rushed forward and seized my mother’s wrist, preventing her from throwing her makeshift javelin. The ornament dropped from her hand as she turned around in surprise. I lunged to catch it and missed. It hit the floor and broke into fifty different pieces, sending a tidal wave of glass over my boots.
“Great,” I said, shaking shards off my laces. “What the hell is going on in here?”
“You tell me!” Jazmin said from behind her pillow across the room. “How did your mother get a key card?”
“Nick gave her one.”
“She knows Nick?”
“I’m right here,” my mother intoned.
“Yeah, except I don’t want to speak to you,” Jazmin snapped.
“Don’t move,” I ordered Jazmin. I stepped around the glass and into her bedroom to get a pair of shoes. When I returned to the living room, I tossed them to her. “Put those on. The last thing we need is for a chunk of glass to get stuck in your feet.”
She put down the throw pillow and stepped into the shoes as she glared at my mother. “Are you happy now? This place is a wreck. You’re going to have to pay for this.”
“Devil child!” Mother spat at Jazmin. “You’ll never change, will you?”
“Shut up, Mom,” I barked. “You should be thanking Jazmin. Without her, I’d probably be dead in a ditch somewhere by now.”
“Thanking her?” Mother said. “She took you away from me! She convinced you to leave home.”
“Home with you was toxic,” I reminded her. “After Dad died—”
My mother flinched as if someone had reached out and smacked her across the face. It was overdramatic and unnecessary, but every time she did something like that, I could never figure out if the reaction was actually inspired by emotion or just an act to get anyone in the vicinity to feel bad for her. Either way, it didn’t ever have the effect that she wanted on me.
The door beeped, and Riley arrived home. She froze in the doorway, her eyes shifting from me to Jazmin to my mother. Slowly, she took in the broken glass on the floor, the ruined throw pillows, and the tense atmosphere.
“What’s going on?” she asked, edging inside and letting the door drift shut behind her. “Should I call security?”
“Yes,” Jazmin said.
“No,” I replied.
“Which is it?” Riley asked. She wore her borrowed ski jacket again, and her hair was slick with melted snow and sweat. She’d been out on the slopes, despite having spent the entire day in the snow yesterday. I envied her stamina, sitting on one of the kitchen island stools as another headrush took me over.
“Don’t call,” I told Riley. “Mom, go downstairs and tell them to give you another room. If you’re going to stay at White Oak for the whole week, it can’t be in here.”
Mother looked Riley over from head to toe. “Who is this child?”
Riley’s face scrunched up at the classification.
“Mom, meet Riley Watson,” I said, knowing she wouldn’t leave without an explanation. “She’s—I don’t know—my charge, I guess.”
My mother looked from Riley to me and back again. “Someone left you in charge of a child? They obviously didn’t do a background check.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Riley demanded.
“Nothing,” Jazmin said, saving me from answering. She hopped over the broken glass, met Riley at the door, and ushered the preteen down the hallway. “Why don’t you grab a shower, Riles? You look like you’re freezing.”
But Riley stepped beyond Jazmin’s reach. “No, I want to know what’s happening.”
“This is my mother,” I explained. “Nick invited her, but she’s not staying.”
“Yes, I am,” Mom said.
When she lifted a hand to my cheek, I flinched and slipped under it, expecting a smack, but her finger glanced softly across my skin. Her eyes glistened.
“Do you think so little of me, Lucia?” she said in a low voice. “I came here because I was told you almost died in that fire. I already lost you once. I couldn’t lose you again. I understand that you don’t want to see me, but I’m staying at White Oak for the week whether you like it or not to keep an eye on you. You’re still my daughter, after all.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “You don’t have to stay.”
“I’m staying,” she said firmly. She cast another glance at Riley. “At the very least, someone has to make sure the teenager stays alive.”
“She’s twelve,” I said.
“Thirteen,” Riley said. “My birthday was yesterday.”
Jazmin stared at her. “It was? Why didn’t you tell us?”
“When was I supposed to do that?” Riley asked. “When you were being interrogated by the police or when you wer
e chasing down journalists at the Slopes Café?”
I groaned. “You heard about that?”
“Everyone on the mountain heard about it,” Riley said. “Anyway, I don’t need a babysitter. I’ve been roaming around Crimson Basin on my own for years.”
“You had your mom for a while,” I reminded her.
“Only sometimes,” she said.
“Well, I don’t trust Lucia or Jazmin to look after you,” my mother chimed in, walking over to Riley and caressing her cheek. Riley, starved of affection for quite some time now, leaned into my mother’s touch, the complete opposite of what I did. My mother hugged her close. “What happened to you, pobrecita?”
“I don’t know what that means,” said Riley.
A sharp knock interrupted the language lesson. I glanced through the peephole. Nick Porter—freshly showered and dressed—waited outside the room. Though he wore a dress shirt, it was the first time I’d seen him without a tie to complete the outfit. I opened the door tentatively.
“Hi, Nick.”
“Hello, Lucia.” He bowed his head, his shoulders rounding forward. It was a distinct difference from the Nick I was used to, the man who always stood as straight as a curtain rod. “I wanted to apologize for what occurred at the spa earlier. I wasn’t at my best and you startled me. I let my emotions get out of hand—”
“Nick, it’s my fault,” I said. “I shouldn’t have barged in like that. I was in a mood and I wanted to blame something on someone. I blatantly disrespected your privacy.”
He lifted his head, his bright blue eyes catching the hallway lights. “So we agree that we were both in the wrong and we are both now forgiven?”
“Well…” I checked the situation behind me, where my mother, Jazmin, and Riley all listened to my conversation with attentive ears. “Not quite. I kind of have a bone to pick with you.”
“Excellent choice of words,” Nick said with a smile. “Because I was hoping you might accompany me to dinner tonight at Porter’s as an apology.”
I had read through enough of White Oak’s brochures to know that Porter’s Restaurant was the most expensive place to eat in the entire resort and probably all of Crimson Basin. It was the type of place you couldn’t set foot in unless you were familiar with black tie affairs and limitless credit cards. I both envied and pitied the people who could afford to eat there. On one hand, I loved the idea of wearing a designer gown and drinking thirty dollar martinis at one of the candlelit tables. On the other, I knew I’d feel wildly out of place at Porter’s. Then again, if I went with Nick—who literally owned the restaurant—it was a whole different story.
“I don’t have anything to wear,” I said.
“I’ll have something brought up to you.” He smiled again, this time more confidently. “Is that a yes?”
“Yes. That’s a yes.”
With Jazmin’s help, I outmaneuvered my mother and Riley to get ready for dinner, but that meant answering Jazmin’s probing questions as she helped me do my hair and makeup. When the dress arrived in a gleaming white box, she carried it in and set it on the bed with a dazed look on her face.
“What?” I asked from the bathroom, in the middle of applying mascara.
She draped herself over the box. “It’s Dolce.”
I peeked around the corner to see for myself. “You’re kidding.”
She tilted the box up to show me the label. “I’m not.”
“I can’t wear that!”
“You can and you will.” She lifted the lid and gasped. “My God, I’m in love. Can you marry a dress?”
She extracted the dress from its home and held it up for me to see. My jaw dropped. It was a gorgeous floor-length piece, dark blue with black lace accents. Somehow, it was both Regular Lucia’s and Madame Lucia’s style at the same time. Jazmin brought it over, and I ran the flawless fabric through my fingers.
“What exactly does it mean when a man sends you a five-thousand dollar dress to wear on a date to his own restaurant?” Jazmin said.
“Stop. It’s not like that.”
She unzipped the dress and slipped it over my head, carefully placing it so that it wouldn’t disrupt the perfect curls in my hair. “Isn’t it though?”
“I’m not interested in Nick Porter,” I said. “First of all, he’s way older. Second, he’s Nick freaking Porter. You think I want all of this?”
Jazmin glanced around the enormous bathroom. “You don’t? Say you marry Nick—”
“Jaz!”
“Hear me out,” she insisted. “You would never have to be Madame Lucia again, and you would have a great guy to rely on. You’d always be taken care of.”
“I like taking care of myself,” I reminded her. “You know that.”
“Yeah, I do,” she said. “And usually I wouldn’t suggest that any woman, especially you, should rely on a man, but in this case, it might be nice for you to have someone who’s entirely capable of taking care of you. You deserve it.”
“Well, I don’t want it,” I said as she zipped the back of the dress up for me. “I have you, remember? Besides, we’re getting way too far ahead of ourselves. This isn’t even a date. It’s a pity offer.”
“Shut up,” said Jazmin. She fluffed my curls then spun me around so I could look at myself in the floor-length mirror. “Look at yourself. It’s a date.”
I didn’t look like me—all dressed up and ready for a night at Porter’s—but I looked like someone who could afford to visit White Oak on a regular basis.
Jazmin rested her chin on my shoulder and hugged me from behind. “Do me a favor. Just for tonight, pretend that you belong here. Don’t worry about Riley or your mother or King and Queens or any of that crap. Just focus on yourself and have a good time. Promise?”
“I’ll do my best.”
“I guess that’s all I can ask for.”
Nick met me in the lobby, right where the elevator doors opened up. When I arrived on the ground floor, he was surrounded by a small group of admirers, mostly women my age who fawned over his suit—the same color blue as my dress—as he smiled politely and answered all of their questions. When he saw me come out, he stepped away from his fan club.
“Excuse me, everyone,” he said. “I have a prior commitment.”
As he walked up to me, I received a number of dirty looks for garnering Nick’s attention, but one of the women winked and gave me a thumbs-up.
“The dress fits,” Nick said, looking me over. “Good. You look great.”
“This isn’t really my thing,” I said. “Fancy restaurants and designer gowns, you know? I’m more of a barbeque kind of girl.”
“Lucky for you, we have barbeque on the menu.”
“Regular barbeque?” I asked as he offered me his arm.
He laughed and led me across the lobby toward the restaurant. “What exactly is the definition of regular barbeque?”
“If you have to ask, you don’t know.”
“Well, I suggest you order a steak then,” Nick said. “Because I am completely confident in my declaration that Porter’s has the best steak in the States.”
“It better, considering your last name.”
Porter’s was nestled in one of the far corners of the resort, which was a bit of a walk from the lobby. We crossed through a glass bridge connecting one wing of the resort to the next. It was dark and snowy outside, but the sky was clear enough to see all of the stars. I gazed upward through the glass ceiling, trusting Nick to guide me along.
“It’s a beautiful night,” he commented. “Nicest one I’ve seen in a while, what with all the snowstorms.”
“Yeah, it’s kind of hard to believe we were stuck at King and Queens just a few days ago,” I said.
He fell quiet, his eyes and mouth turning down. I’d broken the unspoken rule. Don’t talk about King and Queens. A layer of guilt and sadness draped itself over our conversation. Luckily, it wasn’t much farther to Porter’s. The sounds of a busy restaurant floated toward us as we drew closer. The
restaurant, like all the best spots at White Oak, had an unimpeded view of the mountain. Most of the people seated at the dark booths were well-dressed couples, quietly laughing and talking. The aroma of steak spices wafted out to meet us as we reached the host’s desk. When the host saw Nick, he squared his shoulders and saluted.
“Mr. Porter!” he said, gathering two menus. “Welcome back. Everyone’s so happy to see you home again.”
“Thank you, William,” Nick said to the young man. “I’m happy to be back.”
“Your usual table?”
“Yes, please.”
William led us through the busy restaurant to a large circular booth in the back, centered between the bar and the door to the kitchen. Nick gestured for me to slide in first before unbuttoning his suit jacket and sitting next to me. William handed us our menus.
“Our special tonight is Duck Confit,” William told me, “but Mr. Porter knows all of the best things that aren’t included on the menu. You should ask him for a suggestion.”
“I’ll do that,” I said, smiling up at the host.
William beamed. “Have a good evening. Let me know if you need anything.”
I opened the menu and glanced over the top of it at Nick as William sped away. “Are all of your employees so accommodating? They practically worship you.”
He unraveled his napkin, which had been folded in the shape of a swan, and placed it in his lap. “My goal at White Oak is to make my employees feel like part of the family. There are so many businesses that preach about having a good work community but don’t follow through. Here, I’d like to think my employees are happy and content to work for me.”
“I don’t think I’ve met anyone who seems unhappy to be here,” I agreed. “Including myself. I should thank you again for letting us stay here.”
“It’s the least I can do,” Nick said. “How are you holding up? What you said on the way here—you’re right. It’s hard to believe what happened to us just a few days ago. We all experienced trauma at King and Queens, but I’m not sure any of us are quite ready to deal with it emotionally yet. I know I’ve been avoiding it.”
I set aside my menu. It was all in French anyway, a language I never got the gist of. “Are you sure you want to talk about it?”
