Chapter Five
NICKY
Drinks turned into dinner. A leisurely thing involving a bottle of wine and steaks for savoring slowly. One tiny, minute-dragging nibble at a time.
Nicky had watched transfixed through the first course as the wine had warmed Lucy’s skin and exaggerated her expressions. Not that she was sloppy, just more . A concentrated, lit-up Lucy.
She wore a silk tank top something-or-other that looked like it would slide down her arms and spill to the floor with a mere flick of his wrist. She kept tucking her hair behind her ear and running her tongue across her bottom lip.
He tried to memorize it, so he could play it back later, over and over again.
‘So, Las Vegas,’ she said, cutting her steak. ‘Are you here for business or pleasure?’
Both, now. He hoped.
She added hastily, ‘Or, wait … do you live here?’
‘In the hotel?’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Rock stars can be eccentric and peculiar.’
He hated how she kept calling him a rock star. The way she said it hit him like an insult. She made it sound like he was from another planet or something.
‘I’m here for business.’
‘Concert? Recording?’
‘I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to say,’ he replied.
Shit, maybe he was from another planet.
‘Ooh, mysterious.’
Nicky leaned over the table and whispered, ‘Super’s doing a residency here in eighteen months or so. We haven’t announced it yet.’
‘That’s exciting! Like Wayne Newton!’ she exclaimed with that damn mischievous twinkle in her eye that made his heart thump hard.
‘Uh,’ he played along, ‘more like Elvis.’
‘Or maybe Engelbert Humperdinck?’ she asked, trying really hard not to giggle.
‘Aerosmith.’
‘Liberace?’
‘Maybe, Elton John.’
She tilted her head and squinted her eyes as though assessing him, ‘Oh, so more like The Osmonds, you’re saying?’
‘You’re killing me, Lucy Rollins,’ Nicky said, grinning like a damn fool.
‘Man, I haven’t been called that in ages,’ she said wistfully, staring down at her plate.
‘What are you now?’
‘McManis. After I divorced my first husband, I kept it so that my daughter and I would have the same last name.’
Finally, they were getting to the good stuff.
‘What’s your daughter like?’ he asked.
‘Chloe is twenty-one, beautiful. Funny. Brilliant. Madly in love. I’m here for her wedding. After the honeymoon they’re moving to Boston where she’ll start a program in clinical psychology at BU.’
‘Wow,’ Nicky marveled.
‘Do you have any kids?’ Lucy asked, before taking a bite of teeny fancy carrots.
‘Two. Twins, with my first wife. Wade and Conner. They’re twenty-five. Wade’s in New York, an architect. Conner’s a musician. In LA.’
‘Wow,’ she echoed.
They gazed at each other, and Nicky knew what she was feeling. He could feel it, too. So much time had passed. Time enough for children to be born and grow and become adults. Was it too much time? Were there too many minutes between them? Between what had been and what could have been?
Nicky took a deep breath trying to steady his thoughts and bring them back to the moment.
‘So, you said first husband …’
‘Shit,’ she replied with a grimace. ‘I was sort of hoping you might not catch that.’
‘Come on, how many?’ he joked.
She sheepishly held up three fingers.
‘Same for me,’ he said.
‘Really?’
‘Yeah,’ said Nicky. ‘Currently none, for the record.’
She nodded. ‘Same.’ Thank God.
He added, ‘There were two that were official. Then another one that … Well, let’s just say there were NDAs involved and technically – according to the law – it didn’t actually happen. But don’t ask, I can’t tell you who. She’s famous.’ Man, he enjoyed playing with her.
‘Oh, now you have to tell me!’
‘NDAs, remember?’ he taunted, unable to withhold his grin.
‘Twenty questions? Very vague?’
He shook his head.
‘I’ll get it out of you. I can be very persuasive when I want to be,’ she teased.
He had no doubt of that. None at all.
After Nicky paid and they left the restaurant, he still hadn’t had enough. There were still questions he hadn’t figured out how to ask her. Things he’d wanted to say for decades that he still didn’t have the courage to voice. He needed more time.
In a bid to keep people at bay, Nicky yanked the sleeves of his shirt back down over his wrists and pulled a black ballcap from his back pocket. He pulled it down low over his eyes. The tats and the face tended to give him away.
‘What’s this?’ Lucy said, looking him over. Then her ridiculously blue eyes flashed with understanding. ‘Ah, incognito mode.’ She smiled.
Nicky rolled his eyes. ‘Yeah, something like that.’ Jesus, he really was from a different planet. Thing was, normal was always just right there. On the other side of his ballcap. On the other side of the cameras everybody had in their pockets these days. So close, but always just out of reach.
As they walked on, Nicky leaned into her, both to be heard over the jangling and bleeping of the ever-present slot machines, and to get a better dose of her.
He took a moment to inhale deeply, like a creeper.
He was so close that he could smell the dessert coffee on her breath, and beyond it to something spicy and floral, skin-warmed and deep.
‘Want to take a walk?’ he asked finally.
‘Outside?’
‘Inside? Around the resort?’
She leaned into him, resting a hand on his forearm. He felt her breath on his ear, trailing down his neck. It sent a shiver of pure pleasure straight to his cock.
Jesus.
Nicky couldn’t remember the last time he’d had such a strong reaction to a woman. Maybe never?
‘Sure,’ she breathed.
They ambled around the casino floor, people watching. He only caught three or four people staring at him then turning excitedly to the person beside them. There would probably be some fuzzy pictures floating around the internet after this, but he didn’t care. As long as people didn’t intrude.
Nicky took Lucy’s hand to guide her around a drunk guy who was very excited about winning a hand of blackjack and then just never let it go.
Their walk was just as silent as the one they’d taken earlier. This time, though, the heaviness between them wasn’t awkwardness, it was only the weight of their intertwined hands. The quiet wasn’t a burden, more like potential than apprehension. It wasn’t much, but he’d take it.
They meandered without any real direction for a length of time Nicky couldn’t quantify. He had no desire to look at his phone, felt no urge to measure the experience.
Eventually they settled into idle chatter, then to conversation. They walked and they talked. He made her laugh a few times.
She was still so damn smart and quick, and so fucking pretty. And she was really there . Lucy. The girl who had lived for so long in his memory and his dreams.
Somehow, in the formless haze that is casino time, they landed at Lucy’s end of the fortieth floor. At her door, she pulled the hotel keycard from her clutch with a flourish.
‘I’ve got it now,’ she said, as a triumphant smile tried to make it to her eyes.
She held the card over the keypad, and the lock clicked open with a sound that echoed in Nicky’s brain.
He braced his hands on either side of the doorframe to keep himself from reaching for her body, her curves, those infuriatingly silky little straps that held her top up.
She turned to face him and exhaled a ragged breath. ‘You want to come in?’
‘So much,’ he moaned. ‘But I try not to make the same mistakes twice.’
A flash of confusion and hurt passed over her blue eyes. ‘Okay.’ She turned quickly back to the door.
Nicky scrambled, ‘No, shit! That’s not what I meant.’
Lucy turned back to face him, and a wisp of hair slipped over her mouth. He dragged his index finger slowly across her lips and pushed her hair back over her ear. ‘I don’t want it to be like last time. I don’t want to … rush with you.’
Her eyes searched his face, her cheek tilting ever so slightly toward the hand that he couldn’t bring himself to move from her jaw.
Nicky leaned in close, brushing his lips against her ear. Her body shivered, and he felt it everywhere. ‘Let’s do this again. Tomorrow.’
‘I’m busy,’ she whispered.
Nicky groaned and rested his forehead against hers.
She finished, ‘Until five.’
‘I’ll be here at five-oh-five.’
She chuckled.
‘Five-fifteen?’ he begged.
‘Five-fifteen,’ she echoed.
Nicky pressed a kiss to Lucy’s cheek, soft and slow. He breathed her in one more time and then, with a level of self-control he’d never employed before in his entire life, he backed away.
‘Thank you for dinner,’ she said, gripping the door handle with white-knuckled intensity.
‘Thank you for joining me. See you tomorrow?’ He really had to practice saying that so it didn’t sound like an open-ended question.
‘Five-fifteen,’ she replied.
Lucy slipped inside her suite, and the door snapped closed.
Almost immediately, Nicky regretted his newfound discipline and the chivalrous nonsense that had generated it.
He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans to keep from knocking on the door and taking it all back, from blurting all the questions that had formed over the previous hours.
And then kissing her senseless. Maybe not in that order.
But it would be better this way. What was left of his higher reasoning knew it was true. He’d completely fucked things up the first time around with Lucy and really didn’t want to do that again. Didn’t make it any easier, though.
As he shuffled back down the hallway, Nicky’s mind turned back to the one thing that had grated at him that night. Her damn Spotify. It had been a kick to the gut.
Her playlists were good. He respected them. She seemed to be into the blues and soul now. There were some all-girl bands he didn’t listen to enough. The only problem was that his own music was conspicuously absent.
There had been plenty of Pearl Jam. An ungodly amount of Foo Fighters. Nirvana, Queens of the Stone Age, Rage Against the Machine, The Black Keys, Pixies, The Hives, even Maroon-Fucking-5. Not a single Super song. Not even ‘The Breathing Room.’
Nicky knew for a fact that it alone had something like eight-hundred-million streams on the platform. Was it possible that not even one of those had been her? The idea made his fists clench.
If he could just think of a way to ask her about it that didn’t make him sound like an asshat. Unfortunately, ‘hey, what’d you think of that big hit I wrote?’ was flat-out douchey no matter how many winks and smiles you added. (Ask him how he knew.)
What Nicky really wanted was for her to bring it up. He needed her to. Maybe she didn’t realize? Maybe she didn’t know about ‘The Breathing Room’? Didn’t understand?
What if she just hated Super? What if his whole life’s work was just an annoying aside to her? Maybe she was one of those people who heard his songs on the radio and thought ‘not these jokers again’ before changing the station? Would it matter?
He was disgusted with himself, but he had to admit – it would.