Chapter 24
24
HANNAH
I woke up to the sensation of being slow-roasted alive. Sunlight streamed through the curtains, illuminating every inch of the room in a relentless golden blaze. My eyelids felt like sandpaper, but it wasn’t just the light that had me disoriented—it was the arm draped over my waist.
Nikko.
I glanced down at his tattooed arm, still solidly wrapped around me, then turned to see his face pressed into the pillow, his hair an absolute disaster. Memories of the night before rushed in. The deep conversations, the vulnerability, the everything . My chest squeezed in a way that was both thrilling and terrifying.
If Tara knew about this, she would fly down here just to knock some sense into me. “Hannah,” she’d say, “you are a career woman. You don’t fall for tattooed bad boys with smoldering eyes. You conquer advertising campaigns. It’s a revenge plot. You’re ruining everything!”
I was mentally composing my excuses for Tara when my phone began blaring its obnoxious ringtone from somewhere in the room. Half-asleep, I sat up, disentangling myself from Nikko’s heavy arm in the process. He groaned in protest. I blindly reached out, remembering I put my phone on the charger on the nightstand.
“Hello?” I answered, voice hoarse, not bothering to check the caller ID.
“Hannah!” Clarke’s clipped, exasperated voice stabbed through my eardrum. “Where the hell are you? You’re supposed to be presenting to the client right now !”
“Oh my god.”
I launched out of bed like someone had lit it on fire. My ankle caught on the edge of the blanket. I reached out trying to catch my fall and accidentally slapped Nikko’s chest before I crashed to the floor. My phone slipped out of my hand and flew onto the balcony.
“Dammit!”
I had left the door open so I could hear the sound of the ocean last night.
“What the hell?” Nikko bolted upright, wide-eyed and already scanning the room like a bouncer ready to eject trouble.
“I’m late!” I gasped, crawling after my phone on all fours. “I’m so late!”
“For what?” Nikko got to his feet, his hair sticking up in every direction, eyes darting around like he expected an intruder to leap from the curtains. “What’s wrong? Did something happen? Did someone die?”
“No one’s dead!” I snapped, clutching the phone. “But my career might be!”
Clarke’s voice crackled from the receiver. “Who do I hear in the background? What are you saying?”
“Uh, nobody.” My brain scrambled for an excuse. “Radio? TV.”
“Bullshit. Listen, I handled your pitch over the phone for you. You’re lucky you uploaded your files to the shared drive, otherwise I’d have been talking out of my ass and we’d have lost this client. Speaking of files, yours were practically an incoherent mess and unfinished. I had to improvise.” Clarke paused to draw a deep breath, sounding like a disappointed father scolding his daughter on her Spring Break trip. I had a feeling he was saving the worst of it for when we were face to face. “The client still wants to move forward, but I need you to commit to giving this your full attention. This is your last chance. No distractions. Do you understand?”
I stared at Nikko, who was now scratching his head, still looking very much like a man who’d just woken up in chaos. “I understand,” I said quietly.
“Good,” Clarke said curtly. “I’m booking your flight back to Idaho. I don’t think the ocean air is doing you any favors. I’ll send the itinerary in the morning. And Hannah?”
“Yes?”
“No more screw-ups.”
The line went dead.
I stared at my phone. My stomach rolled as the weight of what had just happened settled over me. I pinched my arm. “Ow!”
“Why’d you do that?” Nikko asked, rubbing a hand over his belly.
“Clarke, my boss, delivered the pitch I’d spent days preparing.”
“That’s bad?”
“Yes. Very bad. He saved me and the account, but he just stripped me of the chance to prove myself.”
“That’s bad,” Nikko said with a nod.
I could tell he was still half asleep. We had been up late. We had ordered another bottle of wine after finishing the first. While I didn’t think either of us had been drunk, we were not firing on all cylinders.
“It’s fine,” I lied, tossing my phone onto the dresser.
Nikko was still standing there, clearly trying to make heads or tails of things. I paused to consider his reaction. He panicked when I startled him awake. I was sure that had a little something to do with his past life.
I walked around the bed and put my hands on his chest. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said, but his voice lacked its usual conviction. He glanced around the room as if to reassure himself of where he was. “Just not used to waking up to crisis mode, you know?”
I nodded, understanding more than he realized. He wasn’t the type to let anyone see him flustered. “I know,” I replied, squeezing his wrists gently. “Sorry for the commotion. It’s just, well, I really fucked up. I missed the presentation. I’ve spent nearly a full week trying to perfect this thing and I screwed up. It’s the whole reason I’m in town.”
He reached up and cupped my cheek. “Hannah, are you okay?”
It was my turn to hesitate. Clarke’s call had shaken me more than I wanted to admit. Not just the near-miss on the presentation but how quickly everything seemed to be slipping through my fingers—the job I valued, the respect I craved in my field, even my own grip on this unexpected, improbable thing with him.
I dug down and found the part of me that was all about goals.
“I need to work,” I said. “Just because Clarke saved my ass once does not mean he’s going to let me off easy. I have to hit the ground running.”
He nodded. “I can order breakfast.”
“I don’t have time for breakfast! Did you not hear what I said? I should be in a meeting right now. I messed up.”
“Yeah, I got that.” His tone was carefully neutral, but his expression betrayed his disappointment. He ran a hand through his hair. “Look, I’m sorry for taking up all your time. When you’re done, call me. You can come by the shop. I’ll fix your tattoo. Like I should’ve done from the start.”
I froze, my fingers gripping the hem of my shirt. The way he said it—quiet, resigned—made me feel like the worst person in the world. “Nikko, I?—”
“It’s fine,” he cut me off with a small, tight smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Go do what you need to do, Hannah.”
He started to dress.
“Nikko, I’m not sorry about the time we spent together. I’m just saying, this account is really important.”
He paused as he buttoned his jeans and met my gaze. “I get it, Hannah. Really, I do. You don’t have to explain yourself or apologize. Your job is a big part of who you are.”
I nodded, grateful for his understanding but still feeling a knot of regret tightening in my stomach. “Thank you, Nikko,” I said quietly.
He finished dressing and turned to grab his leather jacket from the back of a chair. He said the right things, but I could tell there was something off.
“Will you be okay?” I asked, not just about him and his work drama but about us, about whatever this was turning into.
“I’m fine, Hannah. I’ll see you later.”
I watched him walk out without another word or a kiss or anything else. The door clicked shut behind him. Guilt gnawed at me as I sank onto the bed. I told myself I’d call him later, that this wasn’t the end of anything. But as I looked around the room, papers scattered everywhere as an angry reminder of what I’d neglected, I knew I had to focus.
Nikko was a fling in Miami. My whole life was in Idaho. I couldn’t just throw everything away to have a little fun with a man that would probably get tired of me in a week or two.
I started the process of organizing my paperwork. My mind raced with what might happen when I got back home. Clarke was a man of few words. I knew he was pissed. Of course, he was.
As I began to sort through the stacks of documents and notes, my phone vibrated with a new message. It was from Clarke. “Sent the flight information. Don’t be late.” No pleasantries, no “safe travels,” just straight to the point. That was Clarke, always business, always terse.
I sighed, pressing the phone against my forehead for a moment before setting it back down. The room felt colder now, emptier without Nikko’s presence. His quick departure left a hollow space that I couldn’t quite explain. I shook off the melancholy thoughts and focused on the papers in front of me.
Each page I reviewed was a stark reminder of the presentation I had missed. The graphs, the statistics, the meticulously crafted arguments—all meant for my voice, not Clarke’s. I winced at each highlighted section, knowing how long I had spent polishing them.
When I finally leaned back in my chair, my brain fried and my stomach growling, I glanced at my inbox. Clarke’s email sat at the top with my flight information.
I opened it with a sigh. Three days. Clarke’s accompanying message stated that I’d have been on an earlier flight, but everything was booked, and he wasn’t going to pay triple the airfare to put me in first class. I read it in his tone and knew he wanted me to squirm for three days, awaiting my impending fate back in Idaho.
The weight of it all settled heavily on my chest. My career—the thing I’d built so carefully over the years—demanded my full attention. But Nikko? He wasn’t just a distraction. He was something else. Something I couldn’t quite define but couldn’t ignore either.
I closed my laptop and stared at the ceiling. For the first time in years, I wasn’t sure which path to take. My career had been my sole focus for the last ten years. I rarely dated. I never allowed myself to be distracted.
And that was exactly what Nikko was. A huge distraction.
But beneath that distraction, there was something more. I felt a connection that couldn’t simply be dismissed or rationalized away. Nikko had seen parts of me I hadn’t shown anyone in a long time, perhaps ever. That thought alone made the decision all the more complicated.
I felt a weariness from more than just the lack of sleep. It was the weight of having to choose between two paths that seemed equally essential to my happiness. I stood up, stretching out the stiffness in my limbs, and walked over to the balcony. Somewhere out there was Nikko. Was he still thinking of me? Did he feel the same or was this just me?