About an hour in and not only was I sick of spectacle and showboating, but I was completely bored out of my mind. I had had two glasses of champagne that I’m sure was expensive but tasted terrible and decided to go find a bathroom. No one seemed eager to point me in the right direction, so I went off wandering alone. The town house wasn’t massive, but there were a lot of rooms, and as I was making my way down a hallway I heard high-pitched female laughter coming out of one of them. I was going to stick my head in and ask if I was getting close to my destination, when déjà vu kicked my ass right back to my high school days.
“What is up with that girl Andrew brought? I don’t think she’s said one word all night.”
More laughter and I felt something lodge in my throat and my hands curl into fists at my sides.
“Maybe she’s slow … you know, special. Clearly he only brought her because she’s young and pretty. He wanted to make Heather jealous, I bet, since she got engaged and Tommy gave her that gigantic rock. I don’t think Tommy knows Heather went to Aspen with Andrew a couple weekends ago.”
“Like anyone would be jealous of her. She has the conversational skills and IQ level of a hedgehog. What was he thinking?”
A delicate female snort followed by, “She’s probably easy, so he was thinking it’s New Year’s Eve and he wants to get laid. She’s a sure thing, I bet.”
I couldn’t decide if I was more furious or offended. This wasn’t how grown people were supposed to act. It was juvenile, it was way too akin to what had made me so quiet and reserved in the first place, and if my date had bothered to treat me as a person rather than an accessory, maybe these strangers wouldn’t have any ammunition to lob around like gossipy schoolgirls.
I had reached the end of my tolerance for nonsense. I kept walking down the hall and fished my cell out of my bra, where I had stashed it. Sure, a healthier, more mature response would have been to confront those women, to tell Andrew he was a conceited jackass, but I was just over it. I was not going to let strangers make me feel bad about myself. I did a bang-up job of that all on my own and at least I had real reasons for not cutting myself any slack. I made a call I should have made over a week ago.
The phone rang and rang and I remembered it was a big party holiday and he was probably out. Out with someone who wasn’t me. I held my breath and was about to hang up and call a cab when his deep voice came over the line. He sounded like salvation and temptation all in one word.
“Saint?” He was obviously at a bar or some other place that was loud. There was noise and revelry in the background. Voices screaming, people partying, but the noise was fading as he moved away from it.
“I … I need a ride. Can you come get me?”
He was quiet on the other end of the line. Hell, if I was him I would say no to the crazy lady that had left me high and dry and then ignored me all week, but once again Nash was out to prove what I thought I knew and what was actuality were worlds apart.
“Where are you at?”
“I’m at some awful party filled with awful people in Cherry Creek. I’m sorry, I wouldn’t ask, but I didn’t drive and I’m sort of stuck. I have to get out of here … please.”
He sighed and I could almost see him running his hands over his supershort hair like he did when he was aggravated. His eyes would also be dancing between purple and lilac. I sighed at the mental image involuntarily.
“Text me the address and I’ll be there in fifteen.”
I let out a relieved breath and pushed my hair off of my face.
“Thank you.”
He muttered a dirty word that made me wince and then he sighed again.
“Anything, Saint. Anytime.”
The line went dead and I shot him the address. I fully intended to hide in the bathroom until my rescuer showed up, only my none too brilliant plan was thwarted by a knock on the door and my lackluster date calling my name questioningly through the barrier.
“Saint? Are you in there?”
I guess I had been gone long enough for him to notice, or maybe everyone else had grown tired of his monotonous discourse on how amazing he was and he needed me around to feign interest. What a weasel.
“Uh, yeah, give me a second.” I washed my hands and gave myself a quick once-over in the mirror. I was paler than normal, but there was no missing that my eyes were glittering back at me with anticipation. Shit. I wanted to see Nash. Wanted to be near him, wanted to touch him, and he hadn’t even questioned why I needed him, so I also wanted to hug him out of pure appreciation.
I pulled the door open and met Andrew’s questioning look.
“Everything okay?”
I cleared my throat. “Actually no. I don’t feel so hot. I think I need to go home and get into bed.” Preferably with a darkly hot guy that had eyes the color of the state flower and abs that should be on a billboard for men’s underwear right alongside Beckham.
“What? No way. It’s not even close to midnight yet. We can’t leave.”
I gritted my back teeth.
“You don’t have to leave, Andrew, but I’m not staying.”
His eyes narrowed at me and his demeanor switched from annoyed to slightly threatening.
“What do you expect me to tell my friends? Do you know what that’s going to look like, you leaving and me staying? And what about midnight? These are all couples, Saint. Who am I supposed to kiss at midnight?”
What in the holy hell? I stiffened up and narrowed my eyes back at him. I didn’t like confrontation, hated trying to express what was going on inside my head to another person, but this moron and his elitist friends had shaken something loose. I wasn’t a teenager anymore. I was smart. I was successful and I was entitled to be treated as an equal no matter the situation.
“It’ll look like exactly what it is. I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t like you. I don’t like your friends, and frankly, I don’t care what you tell them. It’s not like they’ll listen anyway. Everyone here is too busy going on and on about how great they are … no one can get a word in edgewise. As for kissing me …” I moved past him and shook his hand off when he tried to grab my wrist. “No way in hell. Not at midnight, not under the mistletoe … not anywhere, ever. Good-bye, Andrew.”
He called my name then swore at me in a really ugly way.
“When the rest of the nursing staff hears about this at work, you’ll never live it down. Do you know how badly most of them wanted to be you tonight?”
That was the last thing I wanted, to be gossiped about, to be talked about behind my back, but that versus spending one more second with him seemed like the lesser of two evils.
I shrugged my shoulders and headed in the direction of the front door.
“I’m used to it.” I grabbed my coat from the hook it was hanging on by the door and gave him a final look. “By the way, tell your friends my IQ is closer to Hawking than hedgehog. I was summa cum laude at Cal State Los Angeles. Maybe if you had taken three seconds and stopped trying to tell me how awesome you were, you would have known that.”
The door clicked closed behind me and I shivered inside my coat as much from adrenaline as from the freezing Colorado air. I had on a knee-length skirt and a pair of knee-high boots that went great with my sparkly tank top. It was appropriate, cute, and not in any way suggestive, but it wasn’t made for pacing up and down the end of the driveway waiting for my getaway ride in the middle of winter.
I heard the car long before I saw it come around the corner. It was loud, distinctive, made my ears ring, and there was no missing the black-and-chrome monster, much like there was no missing the car’s owner. I barely waited until he rolled to a stop before hopping in the passenger seat. My fingers were numb and my cheeks were freezing cold, but the interior of the car was nice and warm and smelled like a mixture of Nash’s cologne, Armor All, and cigarette smoke. I put my fingers in front of the heater vent on the top of the dash as he wheeled around and headed out of the affluent subdivision.
“Thank you. I hope I didn’t pull you away from anything.”
He cast me a look out of the corner of his eye and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. He had the Dropkick Murphys playing low on the radio and I thought it seemed like a fitting musical choice for him.
“Nope. I was just at a friend’s bar. Rule’s out of town and Jet took Ayden to New York with him for a show he was playing. Rome is expecting a baby, so he’s all about acting like a respectable adult, and Rowdy is my only single friend left, so we just hit the bar. Asa—he runs Rome’s bar for him—is the only other unattached member of our little gang and he and Rowdy both set their sights on the same cute little brunette. You called right when they were trying to outhandsome each other. It was getting ridiculous, so I probably would’ve bounced early and headed home anyway.”
He glanced over at me and I saw his gaze skim over my legs where the hem of the skirt had ridden up and my skin was bare between it and the top of my boots.
“You look really nice.”
“You didn’t always think that … I looked nice, I mean.” I hated that my voice cracked and broke. He jerked his head to look at me and the lights from the dash made the dime-sized discs in his earlobes glint at me. I muttered my address when he stopped at a red light while he was still staring at me.
“Seriously? What the f**k are you talking about?”
I looked out the window and used my finger to trace a little stick figure on the condensation on the pane. I gave him a top hat and a bow tie.
“In high school you said ‘someone would need to put a bag over her head if she wants to get laid.’” I turned to face him and he looked astonished and incredulous. “You and a group of guys that you hung out with were smoking when I came around the corner and I heard you. I heard stuff like that all the time because I was fat and had awful skin, but it hurt coming from you because I thought you were different. You said I was a mess and needed to look in a mirror and do some work.”
I closed my eyes and replayed that moment over in my mind. Even now it made my chest hurt and old insecurity rise up.
“And before that … before that, I thought you were so nice. Every time you smiled at me, every time you said hi to me, I thought it made you different. I went to Ashley Maxwell’s birthday party because you asked me if I was going.” I saw it all as clear as if it was happening right in front of me, and if I had bothered to look over at him, I would have seen the stunned confusion on his handsome face as he was trying to pull the puzzle pieces of our history out of his memory.
“It was so stupid of me. I felt like an idiot. You looked right past me and then kissed Ashley like she was something special. You didn’t even know I was alive, and then you had to go and say those awful things about me. I went from thinking you were wonderful to hating you. The way you made me feel …” My voice dropped low and I could hear the old hurt, the old disappointment, in my tone. “It stayed with me for a long time, Nash.”
It was quiet save for the guitars and bagpipes on the stereo and I thought maybe he felt guilty or embarrassed, but when we got to the front of my apartment building and I was turning to tell him thanks for the ride, I was startled when he turned fully in his seat and yelled at me like he was the one who’d been wronged for so long.
“Jesus Christ, woman, you’re out of your ever-loving mind!”
I pulled back a little and frowned at him, alarmed at the vehemence in his tone. “What?”
“I never said anything like that about you. No way in hell, and if I ignored you at some stupid party, it wasn’t on purpose. I was a f**king idiot when I was a teenager, Saint. My priorities were locked firmly in my pants. If a girl was a sure thing back then, you think any eighteen-year-old guy was going to turn her down?”