by Sarina Bowen
Ah-ha.
So, her intern’s panicked look meant, “the insanely hot and wealthy guy whose mom is bank-rolling this entire operation has just walked up behind you so please don’t say something incredibly stupid.”
Clearly she and Clarissa needed to work out a better signal.
Of course Nick was there. Nick, with his steel-gray suit and snow-white shirt, his dark red tie in a knot that hadn’t been loosened an inch for comfort even though it was after six o’clock and the business day was over. Nick, with his hands slung casually in his pockets as if he owned the room, hell, as if he owned the entire building, was standing close enough to invade her personal space.
With her luck, he probably did own the entire building.
She took a step back.
He frowned and took another step toward her.
Maxie narrowed her eyes at him. Back off, buddy. She stiff-armed him away from her with the hand holding the box, then cursed under her breath as he glanced down at it.
Shitballs.
He raised an eyebrow at her.
“Anything you want to tell me?”
She supposed that at some point she would find this funny. But with the heat of a blush racing across her cheeks, she was just irritated. Frigging fair complexion.
“Don’t be stupid.”
“You’ve been ducking me for days.”
She scowled. “Do I look like someone who’d be too chicken to tell the guy who knocked her up that he’s about to be a baby daddy?”
He barked out a laugh. “So why have you been avoiding me?”
Clarissa was still hovering at Maxie’s shoulder, pointedly staring at anything except for the two of them. If asked, she could probably report exactly how many ceiling tiles were cracked. Maxie thrust the troublesome pregnancy-test box in her intern’s general direction.
“Go give this to Miss Thing. Tell her to come find me if the rabbit died.”
Clarissa sputtered. “What?”
“Told you this job was gonna be weird. Just hold her hand while she’s waiting, okay?”
Her intern shook her head as she walked off. “You know I don’t even know who I’m looking for, right?” she threw over her shoulder.
“Bleached blonde with bad roots. Aggressive lip liner. Mascara running down her cheeks. You can’t miss her!”
Maxie sighed as she turned back to, oh yes, Nick.
Nicholas Drake.
Huh.
She looked up at him, still looming over her, his almost-too-long hair slicked back with something that looked soft and touchable, not hard and shiny, and started humming “Pink Moon” under her breath.
“Hey, you know you’ve got the same name as—”
He rolled his eyes just a little, as much as a carefully controlled man would allow himself.
“Yes, I know. I went through a phase in college where I tried to learn all of his songs on the guitar.” He grinned. “Thought it’d help me get girls.”
She laughed a little at the idea of Nick needing help to get girls. Then she imagined him with longer hair, curved around an acoustic guitar as he sang softly about “pink moon’s gonna get ye all,” and her heart stuttered in her chest. Maybe wearing a flannel shirt and ripped jeans. He’d have calluses on his fingertips from spending so many hours trying to learn the chords and his voice would be soft because he didn’t really believe he could sing, but he’d play his guitar at backstage parties or dorm rooms. She shook her head. That was a boy she would have fallen head over heels in love with in between the set changes of a show.
And gotten her heart stomped on, no doubt, when the show ended and he moved on to the next girl who swooned over his crooning.
Been there, done that.
She didn’t like thinking about the guy—the kid, really—who’d cured her of her last, lingering romantic notions back when they crewed a show together at Columbia College eight years ago. She’d spotted Damian with his guitar—the chick magnet, she later learned he called it—chilling during a break in rehearsal while she worked with a couple of new kids on their stage-combat techniques so they could make the action in Romeo and Juliet look real without actually concussing each other.
She had taught them not to bring the points of their weapons near their partners’ faces. Damian had taught her how the risk of discovery during backstage sex could make her shake with pleasure until he had to clap a hand over her mouth to silence her.
Before Damian, she’d had sex with exactly one person: a high-school boyfriend whose fumbling efforts to please her had been well intentioned but less than effective.
The first time Damian fucked her, she’d thought, Wow, it’s as if he’s had a hundred rehearsals.
Theater analogies were so prescient.
She shook off the bad memories of how disastrously that relationship had ended. Letting Damian claim even a square foot of the real estate in her brain was an exercise in self-doubt and recrimination. Which was why she even shut her sisters down when they mentioned his name.
Present-day Nick stepped into her personal space again, kicking the edge of her Dr. Marten boots with his wingtips. Thank goodness she wasn’t in any danger of falling for this one, with his GQ suits and the smartphone permanently welded to his hand, right?
Right.
His fingers were tapping on the screen of his phone even as he stared down at her. So. Not. Her. Type. Never mind the heat she felt radiating off his body as he crowded her. Or the smell of him, lemony and sharp.
“So?”
“What?” She was conscious of people trickling past them back into the room. Break must be almost over.
“You’ve been avoiding me because?”
“I haven’t been avoiding you.” Deny. Deny. Deny. Who said that? Someone who was clearly better at bullshitting than she was.
He ticked off items on his fingers. “You aren’t answering your phone. You haven’t been at the office for three days. That very helpful young woman delivering the pregnancy test covered for you nicely, but a man can take a hint.”
Christ. She didn’t have time for this. No matter how good he smelled. She started across the room.
A hard hand on her wrist yanked her back.
Oh, no, he didn’t.
She raised her arm slowly in between them, eyes locked on his. She flicked her gaze to the hand that was manacling her wrist and then back to his eyes. He cocked his head and looked right back at her.
“My Trixie clothes are at the cleaners,” she snapped out, before twisting her wrist, trying to break his hold by rolling over the weaker joint of his thumb and index finger. She cursed when it didn’t work. Her pulse was racing, damn the man. His gaze scraped her body, taking in her black nylon cargo pants, long-sleeve skinny black T-shirt and hair pulled back in a ruthless bun. The paramilitary look had seemed like a good choice for trying to whip this new cast into order.
Nick tugged her closer, sliding one foot in between hers. The hard muscle of his thigh pressed against her. She widened her stance a little and planted her boots beneath her, but didn’t try to pull her hand away again. Leaning in close, he whispered into her ear, his breath hot on her skin.
“The Trixie clothes were fine. The S.W.A.T. team clothes are fine.” One of his fingers must have hooked into her belt loop and tugged her closer. Her crotch was pressed against his hip. She had a hard time resisting the urge to lean into him farther. She was working tonight, damn it. “I’m not coming after your clothes, creative as they are. I’m coming after you, Maxie.”
Jesus. She couldn’t breathe.
She’d managed to keep her eyes from falling shut, though, so she had a perfect view when her director stepped out into the hall and caught her straddling Nick’s leg.
So much for keeping things professional.
Chapter Six
“Oh, shit.” It took her a split second to yank her hand free. “Break’s over,” she said brightly and tried for a chipper thumbs up. Heitman just lifted his brow and jerked his head
toward the conference room. Time to gather anyone who’d wandered off. “I gotta get these people back in gear, Drake. Nice seeing you.”
Even before she took two steps, she knew her effort at blasé had been wasted. When Nick snagged her elbow and stopped her from leaving the hallway, she just sighed.
This is what she got for mixing business and pleasure one time. One time.
Stupid girl. You’ve done this before…and it never works out.
“I don’t get any reports other than rumors. But all this news of delays sounds like money flushed down the toilet. I am this close.” His fingertips were a centimeter apart, waving back and forth in front of her face like she was blind. “This. Close. To auditing this entire production. And so help me, if I don’t get the right answers, I will shut the entire thing down.”
She rolled her eyes.
She knew she was crossing a line. She knew it. Drake was the money. The backer. Even if technically his mother was the one bankrolling this gig, he was the man who could pull the plug at a moment’s notice. She didn’t doubt for one second that his influence over his mother—mother? who says mother? everyone else has a mom—was such that he could convince her, or browbeat her into believing that the show “couldn’t go on.” But she couldn’t help herself.
Yes, it looked like chaos. And no, she didn’t expect it to get significantly better over the next six weeks.
But this was the mess she lived in. And she knew every inch of it. No matter what the crisis, no matter how impossible a solution, she had backup plans for her backup plans. Knew the closest place to buy an early pregnancy test and the number for the only liquor store downtown that delivered. She could stock a WWII battlefield ambulance with her first-aid kit or staple an unexpectedly expanding waistline into a nineteenth-century ball gown in an instant.
“Look, this isn’t going to look like one of your Gold Coast business deals, where everything’s all pretty and neat and tied up with a red ribbon and all the i’s dotted and the t’s double-crossed.” She saw him narrow his eyes and open his mouth, getting ready to say something that would without question piss her off even more, so she steamrollered right over his words. “‘Cause I’ll dot i’s and cross t’s until the parking-meter lease ends, but then someone will get norovirus the night before we open and thirty-seven people will be vomiting backstage. Or we’ll find the headliner on a fourteenth-story balcony with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey and no parachute because he got caught with a teenager. Or a dude. Or a teenage dude. Because that is just. What. Happens. And I will deal with it.”
“You’ll deal with it.” His flat voice made it a statement, not a question.
“Yes.” She wasn’t trying to browbeat him, but jeez. The noise level from the conference room was rising. The natives were getting restless. She needed to wrap this up, pronto. “I’ll deal. Because that’s what I do. It’s why I’m the best. Until they burn the theater down to the ground and haul the cast away in handcuffs, I will deal with it.” She thought about it for a second. “And probably even that wouldn’t stop me.”
Her gaze flitted from person to person as the last stragglers drifted back to the room. She needed to continue logging the actors’ measurements in her book, creating a database for the costumes. There wasn’t time for a yuppie having a case of the vapors.
“Now. Seriously. I need to get back to work. This is what you are paying me for. Let me do my job.” She laid one palm flat against his chest and gave a little push, steering him toward the exit. Got distracted for a moment by the firm strength of his chest and resisted the temptation to dig her fingernails in just a little bit to see if he noticed. “I promise to call you if anything goes wrong.”
At his raised eyebrow, she had to laugh.
She corrected herself. “I promise to call you if anything that I would consider a problem goes wrong.” She waved off his protests. “Yes, it’s a short list. I will only call you in the event of an actual emergency. You’re just going to have to trust me here, Drake.”
His eyes darkened and a slight grin hovered at the corners of his mouth. “And you? Do you trust me?”
Never insult the money.
She prevaricated. “To do what?” Seriously. She had to go now. “Look, can we have this discussion later? Duty calls.”
Literally. Heitman leaned out the open doorway and shouted down the hall, “Break’s over, kids!”
“Fine. But you’ll be hearing from me.”
She nodded. Anything to get him out the door faster.
“Okay, sailor.”
She waved him off and then shook her head as he started tap, tap, tapping on his smartphone before he even made it out the door. Businessmen.
“Ease up on the OCD smartphone use, buddy,” she muttered to herself. Somebody laughed, and when she looked up, she caught Clarissa giggling at her. Clearly the pregnancy test debacle had been dealt with. If Clarissa was laughing, the actress clearly wasn’t weeping in a bathroom stall somewhere.
“You’re not that bad. Although they’ll probably bury you with that thing.” She pointed to the iPhone in Maxie’s hand.
“Hey! I wasn’t talking about… Oh, never mind.”
Hooking two fingers in her mouth, she blasted a piercing whistle that drew all eyes to her in an instant.
“Okay, people! If you don’t have lines in the next scene, line up against the wall for costume measurements. Everyone who’s reading, grab a seat at the table and settle down. Let’s get moving.”
She sent Clarissa off to distribute drinks. No need to give anyone an excuse to get out of their seats.
“On second thought, bring Heitman a sandwich, too.” The director was across the room, talking to a small group of the principal actors. “The man never eats. Tell him if he doesn’t finish the whole thing, I’ll hunt him down and feed him to the dogs.”
“Right. Threaten the boss with dogs. Sure.”
“He’s not your boss. I am. He’s just the director.”
“Should I tell him that, too?”
“Shit, no. You wanna get me fired? Always let the director believe they’re in charge.” Her phone buzzed in her hand, a tingling against her fingertips. “Be there in a mo’.”
New text message. Hopefully it wouldn’t be the building manager complaining about the noise.
It was from Nick.
Heads up. You’re about to get a delivery.
She scanned the room. About a dozen men and women hunched over scripts around the conference table. The rest of the cast was lining up for measurements. Check. A busboy with a gray plastic tub of dirty dishes balanced on his hip was heading right toward her, though. Now that was perhaps unexpected.
“You the stuff lady?”
“Excuse me?”
“You the lady in charge of all the stuff?”
She snorted. Close enough. “How’d you guess?”
“That man, he told me. Find the one that looks like a SEAL.” She stared at him blankly. He was shorter than her and had a handlebar mustache. “You know, like those dudes who took out Osama.”
She gritted her teeth together.
“You have something for me?”
“Oh, yeah.” He dug a hand deep into a front pocket, pulled out a green plastic rectangle and handed it to her. “There you go.”
“What’s this?” She took it from his hands, praying that it wouldn’t feel sticky.
He leveled a look at her that she was sure he usually reserved for the mentally deficient.
“It’s a room key. Duh.” Shaking his head, he hitched the dishpan a little higher and pushed past her. She caught a muttered reference to her mother, but opted to let it slide.
Her phone buzzed again.
Room 1137.
What’s in room 1137? she texted back.
I am.
Are you hard of hearing? What part of I’m WORKING do you not understand?
Easy, Rambo. I’m working, too. Got a room with a desk and Wi-Fi and everything. Come up when you can.
I want a complete rundown of the production before the end of the day.
Or?
Or my dinner meeting tomorrow will be with my mother instead of my broker & we start monitoring this show with a microscope.
Take it easy, Captain Industry. I’m on my way.
She grabbed Heitman and her intern when the actors reached the end of the scene and there was a pause in the read-through.
“Just keep on doing what you’re doing,” she said to Clarissa, handing her the preliminary costuming notes. “Keep filling in the measurements. I’m gonna run upstairs and have a chat with the money. Calm his nerves.” She and Heitman exchanged matching grimaces, her director politely ignoring the near clinch he’d broken up in the hall. He trusted her professionalism. This was what happened when amateurs got involved in Broadway theater. “Knowing him and his need to poke his financially pointy nose into every goddamn detail, I could be up there for a while.”
Heitman nodded and stepped away, leaving her alone with Clarissa.
“You know, you and Mr. Drake are a lot alike,” her intern said.
Maxie’s jaw dropped. Speechless, she flung her hands out to her sides, then pointed back at herself with all ten fingers spread wide before flinging her hands out again. Excuse me? Do you see me?
Clarissa threw her hands up in a mea culpa. “Other than your total superiority in matters of sartorial awesomesauce, of course.”
“Obviously.”
“But, hello? Attention to detail much? Power trips?”
“Shut up. Or I’ll tell your mother you switched your major to theater.”
Her intern’s eyes narrowed. “You play dirty.”
Parents were almost never happy to hear that kind of news from their kids, especially if their kids had been headed to law school.
“Go deal with your McHottie tycoon.” Clarissa waggled her eyebrows. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“Ha. It’s straitlaced girls like you who are the real troublemakers. I’ll be reviewing Excel spreadsheets and QuickBooks for the win. Nothing but business.”
“Kinky.”
“I wish.” She gave a little shiver. Hmm, she did kind of wish. And she had been thrown for a minute when that bus boy handed her the room key. She shook her head to clear her brain. Sex on the concrete floor aside, Mr. “I earn more money before 10:00 a.m. than you do all year” was unlikely to be so overcome by her feminine wiles that he jumped her in the hotel room.
