by Sarina Bowen
“Damn it. Touch me.”
The spark that leaped from Nick’s eyes had her bracing herself for an assault. Her entire body tensed.
The sudden buzzing that radiated from across the room drew her eyes to the dresser. Her phone skittered across the top. It stopped. A second later it buzzed again, so loud in the silence that Nick looked, too, the screen lighting up for a moment before falling dark, a signal it repeated until the call went to voice mail.
Nick quirked a brow when she turned back to him, then tilted his head toward the dresser.
“Ignore it. If it’s an emergency, they’ll call back.” Everything could wait.
He reached out and set his hands on her hips, tugging her forward until they touched. She could feel him against her belly, hard and thick and hot, radiating heat and want. She lifted her mouth.
The beeping ring of Nick’s phone erupted from where he’d draped his pants over the back of the Queen Anne chair by the writing desk. There wasn’t a person alive, at least no one she knew, who wouldn’t recognize those tones anywhere.
“You never personalized your ring?” She hung onto his hips when he twitched and took a half step as if he was thinking about answering it. “They’ll call back.”
“To what? Some goofy pop song?” His eyes looking down at her were darker in the bright light of the room than should have been possible for a blue-eyed man. “No thanks. I only changed it for my mother, so I don’t accidentally answer if I’m trying to avoid her. ‘You’re So Vain.’” He grinned.
She laughed. Then shivered when the tips of her breasts brushed his chest with the motion.
Nick dipped his head and licked a stripe up the side of her neck. She tipped her head to the side and pressed her hips against his.
Her phone buzzed and bounced on the dresser top again. She groaned against Nick’s mouth and debated whether or not it would be less disruptive to stop and flush the damn thing down the toilet.
A moment later, Carly Simon was singing.
“You probably think this song is about you.”
Grand Central Station on their phones tonight.
“Maybe we should—” She gestured toward their phones.
Dropping his grip, slowly, Nick pressed his lips to her forehead and smiled. “Then we can turn them off.”
“Hell to the yeah.”
She strode over to the dresser and scooped up her phone. Every alert in the universe was flashing on it. Texts, voice mail, email, Twitter, Facebook. Was the world ending?
She heard Nick talking to someone, Alfie she assumed, but her heart was already in her throat because she’d caught sight of the first text on her incoming messages list. It was from Ruben.
Police are here. Call me.
Shit. Shit. Shit. Was it arson? Was that what they’d found in their investigation? This was bad. Her stomach flip-flopped at the thought of how much this could cost her if her warehouse was treated as a crime scene past tomorrow. She punched at the screen and bounced on the balls of her feet, waiting for Ruben to pick up.
“Where the hell are you?”
This was bad. She and Ruben were close, but he had very specific ideas of the boss-employee relationship…and that would never include cursing his employer out, no matter how long they’d known each other or how much they might tease each other.
“What’s going on? Is it arson?”
“They don’t give a fuck about the arson, Maxie. There are a lot of very polite but extremely focused police officers crawling up my ass about the arsenal they found in your office. What’s going on? They want me to go downtown.”
Nick’s voice on the other side of the room suddenly got a lot louder. She stuck a finger in her ear and focused on Ruben. This was bad. This was a screw-up of major proportions on her part. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought to tell the firefighters or police on Friday night about the guns she’d locked up in the storage cabinet in her office. Shit. What had she been thinking?
Obviously, she hadn’t been thinking. And the next day all she’d thought about was Nick. Guilt twisted in her gut, but she kept her voice calm.
“Ruben, I need you to find the officer in charge and tell him I want to speak to him. I’m on my way back to Chicago right now and I can explain everything.”
“Okay, but hurry, all right? This is really scary, Maxie.” His voice wobbled. She heard him ask someone in the room to get the sergeant. A strong voice corrected him, saying she’d see if the lieutenant was free. Maxie stepped over to the edge of the bed and sank into it, hunching over so she could put her elbows on her knees and hold her head in her hands. She repeated to herself, over and over, You can fix this. It’s going to be okay.
Ruben was back on the phone with her. “They’re gonna get him. Shit, Maxie. I tried to tell them that someone had to have put them there, I don’t know, framing you or something, because I know you wouldn’t have a bunch of real guns just lying around.” The background noise over the line dimmed. She could picture Ruben cupping a hand around his mouth and the phone. “They said there were bullets in some of them. They’re going to run serial numbers or something and see if any of them match weapons used to commit crimes, for Christ’s sake.”
She was actually getting dizzy with light-headedness. Oh, my god. What if it turned out that one of them had? Or worse, more than one? It probably wouldn’t be better for her if it turned out that all the serial numbers had been filed off. For someone who prided herself on nailing down every detail, of being in control of every loose end, this was totally unacceptable. She wouldn’t blink before firing someone who had done this if they worked for her.
What on earth was she doing here in Lake Geneva on a booty-call weekend, for crying out loud? How had she let herself be talked into leaving town when everything was hanging on the line with this show?
She knew she wasn’t being fair. Nick hadn’t drugged her coffee, locked her in his trunk and sneaked out of town on back roads. She could have said no and stayed where she belonged, focused on her business.
But it did feel like a drug haze easing out of her blood stream as she sat on the edge of the bed, suddenly cold and naked and shivering, while she waited for the police to come to the phone.
This was what happened when you lost your focus. When you started letting yourself think that something temporary and meaningless might last.
She ignored the voice inside that reminded her of how well Nick seemed to know her sometimes. Of him calling what they had a love affair.
It was an affair, pure and simple. And it should never have taken higher priority than her work. She knew better.
Nick had fallen silent behind her. He came around the end of the bed to stand in front of her, but she didn’t look up. She raised her free hand and shook her head. I can’t talk right now. She didn’t want to say anything she couldn’t take back when she was still so freaked out. His bare feet stayed planted on the thick cream rug that ran along the edge of the bed for another minute before he stepped away and she heard the door close to the bathroom.
She was pulling her pants back on—staying naked felt too vulnerable—when Ruben told her he was passing the phone to the officer and a high-pitched male voice introduced itself as belonging to a Lieutenant O’Donnell. The lieutenant let her start talking and didn’t say a word until her explanation trailed off into silence.
By the time Nick finished in the bathroom, she was dressed and stuffing clothes into her overnight bag, not caring if it everything was balled up and wrinkled. She had an appointment to meet the lieutenant at the station first thing in the morning and she needed to get her shit together before then.
Of course, she still couldn’t set foot in her warehouse, which was definitely under lockdown as an active crime scene, or at least a potential one, until this entire catastrophe was straightened out.
She tried to take it as a good sign that she hadn’t been instructed to turn herself in for arrest the moment she got back into town.
The bathr
oom door opened but Nick didn’t enter the room. He just leaned against the doorjamb, arms crossed over his chest.
She looked up from shoving her flip-flops into her bag. A woman needed real shoes on her feet during a crisis this big. Nick’s face was blank. She thought of it as his “this deal has gone south” poker face and didn’t like seeing it turned toward her.
Pushing her shoulders back, she stood up straight. Clearly his phone call hadn’t been a thriller, either. She should have tried to eavesdrop.
“You first.” Might as well get it out of the way.
“You got your pants on?”
She flashed back to their conversation about him grilling her pre-coffee this morning. This was gonna be bad.
“My mother just got a call from my favorite reporter asking her if she thought Smith was running a gun-smuggling operation from backstage using her money.”
She blanched, feeling the color drain from her face.
“Yikes.”
“Yikes? That’s all you have to say?” His voice was flat like paper.
Stress and fear and the guilt of knowing she had well and truly fucked up rose inside her. “Smith isn’t smart enough to run a gun-smuggling operation, for Christ’s sake.”
“No, he’s not. But you are.” He stood up and crossed to his own leather weekender and opened it. He’d gotten dressed at some point, too. Looked like he was ready to go.
She jerked her head back and shook it. “You don’t think I’m—”
“Don’t be stupid. Of course not.” He stared at her over his shoulder for a moment and his gaze burned her. “But that’s exactly what this guy is going to suggest once he starts digging into this story. It won’t go anywhere, of course, but he’s got enough of a grudge against me to insinuate shit for ages. You got a plan for handling this one, Maxie? I know how much you like those.”
Oh, pissed off she could do, if that’s how he wanted to play this. “How about we start with you not calling me stupid, okay?”
He was shoving items into his bag so forcefully it looked as if he wanted to punch through the bottom panel.
“You want me to apologize for that? Fine. I’m sorry. Forgive me for being frustrated that my mother is being questioned by reporters and maybe even the police.”
“I can explain everything to them.”
“You can explain it to me first.”
No way was she going to sit here and defend herself like a child caught drawing on the walls with crayon.
“You know what? I don’t have to explain myself to you. Just get me back to Chicago. I’ll send you a text when everything is cleared up with the police.”
Nick ran a hand through his hair until it stood on end. “This is every nightmare I have coming true. Do you have any idea how long a story like this is going to linger? People will be cracking jokes about this for years.”
“Can you even hear yourself? Cracking jokes never killed anybody.” She was having a hard time sympathizing when there was still the possibility that she might be hearing those stories from the inside of a jail cell. She slung her bag over her shoulder and stood by the door, hand on the light switch.
“No, but one of those guns might have.”
He yanked open the door and left the room.
Letting him have the last word burned, but there wasn’t any kind of comeback she could make.
He was right.
One of those guns could have killed someone. Or robbed someone. Or been used to threaten someone who was being raped. And it didn’t matter that she had no intention of keeping them or of protecting anyone connected with them. She hadn’t taken care of it. Instead she’d let herself get caught up in some kind of sexual fantasy with this hot tycoon—god, this wouldn’t even make a good romance novel, I’m the Too-Stupid-To-Live girl—and dropped the ball on the rest of her responsibilities.
If she ended up in jail or losing her business, she well and truly deserved it.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Nick was going to have her fired from Smith’s show. She tried to be pissed at him for that, but couldn’t get past the knowledge that she would do exactly the same thing in his place. Maybe she could salvage something out of the situation for the rest of her staff. Suggest one of the stage managers she knew as a replacement for herself.
Shit.
She trudged down the hall after Nick, moving past him when he stopped at the reception desk and rang the bell for the night manager. A brief urge to insist on paying her half of the bill stirred, but one look at the rigid set of Nick’s back dissolved that feeling. It would just be another thing to argue over and she was going to be tired enough by the time she got home. Let the man with the money pay and think worse of her for not offering. She didn’t have the energy to care.
She waited outside his locked car, and when he emerged from the hotel he opened the door without a word. She settled in for the long ride home and hoped they could do it in silence.
On the highway, the red taillights of tractor-trailer trucks dotted the otherwise empty stretch of asphalt. Maxie leaned her head against the cool glass of the window and tried to sleep. When it became clear that sleep was a lost cause, she started writing emails, hoping Ruben and Marcus kept their phones on silent mode late at night. She didn’t want to make this any worse by waking anyone up. Although, if she thought about it, the chances that either of them were asleep right now were slim. Marcus would have been Ruben’s second call after talking to her. For all she knew, Marcus had been pulled in by the police, even though the money, decision-making, and crime-scene ownership were all hers. At least he could back up her story.
Sure enough, they pinged back answers to her questions within minutes of her pressing send. She kept the conversation going for a while, sending out more questions and answers.
She said her first words to Nick two hours into the drive.
“I assume I’m fired.”
“As we’ve said more than once—” he turned his head for a moment to look at her “—you don’t work for me.”
She took that as a yes. No doubt he’d be on the phone to his mother and Heitman at the earliest decent hour in the morning, leaning hard on them to replace her. Fine. Her reputation would take a hit. Especially if she couldn’t figure out how to work damage control on that reporter, but she’d manage somehow.
Not getting arrested for illegal firearm possession was definitely at the top of her list right now.
Thank god there was a lawyer in the family.
She sent a text to Spencer, her sister Addy’s husband, and ignored her phone when it rang thirty seconds later. She wasn’t about to have this conversation with Nick right next to her. When texts from both Addy and Spencer came pouring into her phone, demanding to know what was wrong and how they could help, her throat closed up and she blinked fast. Her nose started to run and she needed to sniff, but she didn’t want Nick to hear, so she inhaled slowly. She knew he noticed anyway.
God, she couldn’t wait to get out of this car. She willed the miles to go by faster and cracked her window when she caught herself inhaling too deeply, trying to suck in the scent of Nick, which seemed to have filled the car over the course of their drive.
Closer to the city, traffic started to build. Two o’clock in the morning on the Saturday to Sunday transition was still peak party time and she appreciated that Nick was steering the car carefully enough to avoid the drunk drivers weaving through traffic at drag-race speeds.
Thirty minutes. Thirty minutes. Okay, forty, tops. And then I’m home and we’ll never ever speak again.
Or kiss. Or touch. Or fuck, which made her ache at the idea of losing this already. Just thinking about Nick and naked touching had heat pooling in her belly. Even when she was mad at him and didn’t want to say one word to him, she still wanted him. Wanted him with a bone-deep yearning.
Bang!
The explosion made her flinch and duck.
The sports car bounced along as if it was driving over a
hundred tiny speed bumps. Maxie braced her arm against the door to keep her seat.
“Shit.” Nick wrestled with the car as it fought him. Turning his head to check for approaching traffic, he forced the car onto the narrow shoulder and slammed the breaks. He dropped his forehead to the steering wheel for a moment. “Jesus.”
She wanted to reach over and put her hand on his arm but didn’t. “Was that a flat?”
“I don’t know. It sounded like something exploded.” He unbuckled his seat belt and reached for his door handle.
“Wait!”
He paused with the door cracked. “What?”
“Don’t you watch the news?” She unbuckled herself and opened her door. “Do you know how many people get killed on the highway trying to change a tire? At least get out on my side so you don’t get run over. Idiot.” She muttered that last comment as she squeezed between the side of the car and the concrete embankment, checking out the tires as Nick crawled awkwardly over the gearshift inside the car.
Both tires on the passenger side were fine. She scooted around the trunk corner of the car. Traffic was zipping by at high speeds just a few feet away. She couldn’t see anything, but the trunk did seem to be leaning drunkenly toward the road.
“Watch it!” Nick had to be out of the car by now.
“Don’t worry,” she called without looking over her shoulder. “I’m not going anywhere near it.” She kept close to the embankment and crouched down on one knee to peer under the car.
Damn.
Shreds of black rubber clung to the rim of the tire, which was all that remained of it. The tire hadn’t gone flat. It had been vaporized by the force of whatever had happened to it. She glanced at the road to her left. A scattering of tire shreds were being whipped into the air by every passing car.
“Can you see anything? Is it a flat?”
She stood up and rubbed her hands on her pants to wipe the gravel off her palms. “You could say that. Sort of.”
“Sort of? What does that mean?”
“Well, if by ‘flat’ you mean vaporized like Alderaan getting blown up by the Death Star, then, yes. It’s flat.”
“What?” His voice was right behind her now. A shiver pushed at her spine. She locked every muscle in place against it.
