Chapter 3
With her heart in her throat, Nikki watched Riley as he came toward the front door, which she’d unlocked so she could speak to him.
And now, a man she’d met only twice was going to come into the house, where they would be completely alone.
This was not good. It wasn’t good at all.
She didn’t do things like this, didn’t take these sorts of chances. Not anymore.
But he’d been so nice to her last fall. When she’d had a leaking roof and a devastated sister, he’d gone out of his way to help her.
She knew the McCarthy family was well regarded on the island.
Of course, none of the things she told herself in the two minutes it took for him to turn off his car and come into the house meant she was safe with him.
She’d learned that lesson the hard way—seemingly nice guys from good families weren’t always what they appeared to be.
“Hi there,” he said, smiling as he stepped into the vestibule, closing the door behind him.
The sound of the door latching might as well have been a shotgun blast for the effect it had on her. Alone. With a man. In a house on Gansett Island. If this went bad, no one would come to save her.
“Nikki?” He tipped his head in inquiry. “Are you okay?”
“I… I’m a little freaked out by the fact that I barely know you, and you’re in my house.”
“I’ll go,” he said without hesitation. “I didn’t mean to unsettle you. I thought about you after you left, and when I heard you were back… I don’t know what I was thinking, but I’ll go.”
“No,” she said, her anxiety settling at his willingness to leave if that was what she wanted. The bad ones didn’t go when asked to leave. They stayed. “Don’t go. I’m sorry. I’m being ridiculous.”
“No, you’re not. You’re being careful, and I shouldn’t have come here at this hour. I didn’t think it all the way through until I saw you were scared.”
“Jordan says I’m a wimp and need to toughen up.”
“That’s not nice.”
“She’s often not nice to me,” she said with a laugh that did amazing things for her pretty face. “That’s her job as my sister.”
“I have a brother with the same job.”
She gestured for him to follow her into the kitchen, where a large pizza sat cooling on a cutting board. “Want some?”
“I’ll have a slice if you can spare it.”
“I’m certainly not going to eat this whole thing,” she said, laughing again.
“Are you putting up a Christmas tree in January by any chance?” He gestured to the boxes surrounding a large artificial tree in the cozy living room.
“You caught me,” she said with a shy, adorable smile. “Jordan was in no mood for Christmas this year, so we skipped it. I love Christmas, and I figured who would know if I put the tree up.”
“Your secret is safe with me.” He slid onto one of the barstools at the expansive island and took a bite of the pizza she served him, picking off the pepperoni, even though he wasn’t particularly hungry after having eaten at the Beachcomber. “This is delicious.”
She rolled her eyes at his compliment. “Frozen pizza is one of my few culinary specialties. What can I get you to drink? I’ve got iced tea, water and beer.”
“A beer sounds good.” He hadn’t finished the second one at the bar, so one more would be okay.
She fetched two bottles of imported beer that required a bottle opener and put one of them down in front of him.
“Cheers,” he said, holding up his bottle. “Welcome back to Gansett.”
“Thanks.” She touched her bottle to his. “It’s good to be here.”
They enjoyed the pizza and beer in silence for a few minutes before Riley decided to address the elephant in her life.
“Did she really go back to him?” Riley asked, hesitant to bring up what had to be a sore subject but concerned for her nonetheless.
“She really did,” Nikki said with a sigh. “How did you hear?”
“I saw it on one of those entertainment shows. My dad’s fiancée had it on in the bar.”
“That didn’t take long to get out. It must be big news in light of what caused their breakup in the first place.”
“How do you go back to someone who’d do that to you?”
“Beats me, but the exposure from the video added seven million new Twitter followers and three million new Instagram fans, so in Jordan’s mind, that’s a win.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Don’t feel bad. I don’t either.” She met his gaze across the countertop between them. “I quit my job as her assistant.”
“Wow. How did that go?”
“As you might imagine. She pleaded with me to reconsider, and I pleaded with her to do the same when it came to Zane. Neither of us was willing to budge, so here I am. She’s in Nashville with him, or that’s where she was last night.
Who knows where he’s playing tonight? It’s no longer my job to care. ”
“For what it’s worth, I think you did the right thing.”
She gave him a measuring look. “It’s worth a lot. I’ve been doing some second-guessing about walking away from her, but I can’t take the nonstop drama anymore. She loves it. I can’t bear it.”
“Then you’re wise to take a break.”
“This isn’t a break. It’s a breakup. It’s time. We’re twenty-seven. It’s long past time for us to lead separate lives.”
“I’m twenty-eight. Almost twenty-nine, actually, and still living with my brother. The only time we haven’t lived together was my first year of college. He came to the same school. We lived together after that, and we have ever since.”
“That makes me feel a little better about staying with Jordan as long as I did.”
“She was paying you to be there, so there is that. Sometimes I think Finn ought to pay me to live with him. He’s such a slob. We were just fighting about our shithole house tonight.”
Nikki laughed at the face he made. “Would you miss him if you moved out?”
“Yeah, I would, even though I work with him, so I’d still see him every day. Will you miss Jordan?”
“Not right away, but I’m sure I will eventually. Things have really changed between us since she met Zane and got the show.”
“I’ve seen the show a few times,” he confessed.
Her eyebrows lifted. “Is that right? You’re not exactly the target demographic.”
“There was nothing else on.”
She laughed. “Good save.”
“And,” he said, hesitating for a second, “I was curious about what’d become of you after you left last fall.”
“One reason we left was because Jordan was contractually required to return to taping the show. I wanted to stay here, but her lawyer told her to get her ass back to LA or she was going to be sued. Later, I found out she’d been talking to Zane, and he’d been pleading with her to come home so they could work things out. ”
“That explains why you guys disappeared overnight.”
“The network sent a plane for us, so we had to go. I wanted to let you know we were leaving, but I wasn’t sure how to reach you.”
Hearing she’d wanted to talk to him before she left was an antidote to the funk and left him feeling unreasonably elated. “I was bummed when I realized you were gone.”
“You were?”
He nodded.
“How come?”
“I liked talking to you.”
“I liked talking to you, too. I thought of you after we left and hoped that you’d gotten the roof fixed without falling off. My Gran said you did a great job.”
“That’s nice of her to say—and PS, I’m a professional. I don’t fall off.”
She giggled, and the sound did something to him, something strange and unexpected. He wanted to make her laugh again, just so he could listen to the joyful noise. “I didn’t mean to wound your ego.”
“I accept your apology,” he said in a haughty tone.
“But you could make it up to me by having dinner with me tomorrow night.” The words were out of his mouth before he thought through the implications of officially asking her out.
To hell with implications. He liked her.
She seemed to like him. After all, she’d confessed to having thought of him after she left. That meant something, didn’t it?
She looked down at her plate, appearing less than thrilled to have been asked out by him. “Is anything open this time of year?”
“A few places. Domenic’s, for one.”
“That’s my favorite restaurant on the island.”
“Then we’ll go to Domenic’s. If you want to, that is.”
“That would be nice. Thank you.”
She seemed to be forcing herself to say yes, but he chose not to delve deeper into that since she’d agreed to go. “You want some help with the tree?”
“I’d love that. I was just thinking I needed a ladder to get to the higher branches.”
“I’ll do it for you.” He took their plates to the sink, washed them and propped them on a wooden rack to dry. When he turned, he caught her watching him and saw her face flush with embarrassment. “What?” he asked, drying his hands on a dish towel. “Never seen a guy do dishes before?”
“In fact, I haven’t.”
“Then you’ve been hanging out with the wrong guys.”
“That’s a fact.”
There it was again, that same unsettled vibe he’d sensed when he’d asked her to dinner.
Someone had hurt her. Badly. The thought made him want to roar with outrage.
But he suppressed that impulse and followed her into the living room, where she presented him with a Clark Griswold-worthy knot of tangled lights.
“Why do I feel like I’ve just been thoroughly manipulated?” he asked, crooking a brow in amusement.
That little giggle… It did things to him, weird, crazy things that made him want to settle in and get comfortable with her.
Was this what it’d been like for Mac when he met Maddie or Evan when he met Grace?
Had they wanted to settle in and get comfortable with a woman for the first time in their lives?
Thoughts that would’ve unsettled him not that long ago now had him wondering about things he never thought about as he spent forty-five minutes unraveling the lights with her sitting beside him on the sofa, helping in between fits of laughing at his frustration.
“Do we even know if these lights are any good?”
“I haven’t tested them yet.”
He glanced at her, feigning annoyance. “Seriously? Did we just waste an hour we’ll never get back unraveling lights that don’t even work?”
“Possibly?” she said with a smile.
Riley shook his head and looked away from her, even though that was the last thing he wanted to do. “Moment of truth.” He went to an outlet to plug in the lights, which were all connected. “Ready?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
He pushed the plug into the wall and watched the entire strand come to life.
Nikki clapped, her big brown eyes dancing with what could only be called joy. “That’s a relief. I was pretty sure I’d be out of luck if they didn’t work. Something tells me that Christmas lights might be hard to come by around here in January.”
“Everything’s hard to come by around here in January. We had three days around Christmas when the ferries didn’t run because of the blizzard, and we ran out of beer. That was nearly a full-blown crisis in the McCarthy family.”
“God forbid. Three days without beer!”
“You have no idea what we went through. I was afraid there might be a riot if the ferries didn’t start running soon.
I happened to be in town when the first boat arrived after the storm, and three huge pallets of beer were the first thing unloaded.
The villagers went crazy cheering in the streets, and everyone was happy in the land that night. ”
“That’s funny,” she said, feeding him the lights as he wound them around the tree, working from the top down. “I’m picturing parades and parties.”
“You’re not far off. There was a tremendous sense of relief.”
At six-foot-two, he had no trouble reaching the top. With her standing by his side, he realized he was a foot taller than she was.
“How many people live here year-round?”
“The Gansett Gazette had a story this week that reported nine-hundred and forty-nine year-round residents on the island.”
“I’m surprised there’re that many.”
“Seems like far fewer this time of year when everyone hibernates.”
“Am I a weirdo because I love winter?”
“Yes.”
She laughed at his quick reply. “I know! It’s so wrong, but I love the cold and the snow and Christmas and the fireplace and how everyone hunkers down to ride it out.
It’s my favorite time of year, especially here.
In Southern California, we don’t get much of a winter.
But there’s nowhere I’d rather be than here in the winter. ”
Listening to the reasons she loved winter, he decided he could easily become a fan of the season that had always been his least favorite, but only if he got to hunker down with her. “Well, I, for one, am very happy to have you as our nine-hundred and fiftieth resident.”