Chapter Four
LUCY
She thought she was ready. She was dressed, that much was true, but as she opened the door and saw Nicky Broome waiting for her, Lucy knew with one-hundred-percent certainty that she was not ready .
Nicky Broome just casually standing in a doorway was a damn marvel. It was an expensive cologne ad. A work of art. A fucking Times Square billboard.
He was tall and broad, but not in a gym-rat way.
He was lean, elegant. He wore a black Henley, sleeves pushed up to his elbows.
Dark jeans. Simple, really. Nothing special.
Except the walls of the Lusso’s penthouse floor were gold- leafed and the light from the sconces was warm and dim. It made his skin seem lit from within.
The colorful tattoos on his arms rippled with the movement of muscles and sinew beneath as he shoved his hands in his pockets.
And for a second – less time than it took her to exhale a wistful sigh – he looked like himself.
His old self. The boy Lucy used to know.
She had to close her eyes against the slap of pure nostalgia that threatened to knock her over.
When she opened her eyes again, Nicky’s artfully messy brown hair had flopped over his forehead. He smiled and she noticed that he was freshly shaven. The idea that he might have shaved for her made her heart skip and her cheeks heat.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘You look great.’
‘You too,’ Lucy replied.
Nicky leaned forward just as Lucy was pulling the door open. Maybe he was moving to kiss her cheek? Or maybe it was some sort of famous-guy air-kiss situation? Either way, with Lucy backing up to open the door, it ended up being more of a stumble over the threshold.
Instinctively, Lucy grabbed his shoulder to keep him from falling.
It took about a nanosecond for her brain to catch up, which was when she transitioned from a protective grab to an epically awkward half-hug of his bicep.
Wow, killing it so far.
‘Still up for drinks?’ Nicky half-chuckled, with a sweet smile that told her he was going to ignore her graceless bumbling.
‘Sure,’ she replied, dropping his arm like it was radioactive and trying to keep her cringe strictly internal.
Lucy took her clutch from the entry table, closed the door behind her, and fell into step at Nicky’s side.
As they started down the hallway, the damn thing seemed to elongate.
Like a horror movie. The elevator somehow got farther away the more they progressed.
Maybe it was a function of the implacable silence stretching between them.
Or perhaps it was the constant refrain of ‘what is happening to my life right now?’ that was pounding in her skull like bad techno at a rave.
Either way, by the time they finally reached the elevator and Nicky pushed the down button, the tension between them had expanded and sucked up all the oxygen in Las Vegas.
The silence was a weight pressing on Lucy’s chest. She wouldn’t last ten more minutes like that, let alone however long drinks with a rock star might take. (They were all champion drinkers, weren’t they?)
She turned to him. ‘If it’s going to be too weird—’
Only to catch the end of whatever he was saying at the same time, something like ‘… don’t want it to be awkward.’
They laughed at their overlap.
‘You first,’ he said.
Lucy grimaced. ‘It feels weird, right? Does it feel weird?’
He sighed. ‘I wouldn’t say weird. It’s just been a long time.’
Twenty-eight years. It had been twenty-eight years.
The elevator doors opened before them. Nicky stuck his hand in the door to keep them open.
He blurted, ‘It’s me. I’m nervous. I need to not be so nervous.’
Excuse me?
‘ You’re nervous?’ Lucy grumbled. ‘Are you kidding? I’m standing here with the lead singer of Super. How do you think I feel?’
‘Okay, right,’ he said, taking a deep breath. ‘Let’s pretend like we’re just a couple of people who knew each other in high school.’
‘Yeah, okay. But I was a hundred-percent nervous around you in high school, too.’
‘You were not,’ he rebuffed, incredulous.
‘Seriously? Everybody was nervous around you. You were Nicky-fucking-Broome, hottest guy in high school, probably the hottest guy in the state. And you were so ridiculously cool .’
‘Me?’ he asked, as though truly shocked.
Lucy looked to the heavens for assistance, but found only a garish exit sign. ‘Oh, my God. Yes, you .’
Nicky stepped into the elevator and held the open button until Lucy had safely followed.
‘I would not have called myself the hottest guy in school,’ Nicky grumbled. ‘Definitely not the coolest.’
‘Nicky Broome,’ Lucy admonished, ‘you brought a twenty-one-year-old girl – sorry, woman – to prom.’
He shrugged. ‘I knew her from work.’
‘She had tattoos.’
‘Well—’
‘And a tongue piercing.’
‘I mean—’
Lucy could not be stopped. ‘And rocked that pink leather minidress like she was on MTV. It was so much like Molly Ringwald’s prom dress from Pretty in Pink and yet was so damn tight. She wasn’t wearing anything under it, right? God, I’ve always wondered about that. I’m right, aren’t I?’
Nicky looked at the floor, trying but failing to hold back a smirk. That answer was good enough for Lucy.
‘I knew it! Ugh, that dress was the perfect level of subversive. I was so jealous of that dress. What was her name? She was a legend.’
Nicky laughed. ‘Her name was Heather.’
‘Of course, her name was Heather. The perfect name for her.’
‘What about you?’ Nicky asked as the elevator descended.
‘What about me?’
‘You were the cool one,’ he said without a trace of sarcasm.
Lucy was dumfounded. ‘Uh, no. I was a complete nerd in high school. Utterly forgettable.’
‘Lies,’ Nicky said plainly. ‘With all those cut-up concert tees and the Doc Martens and those fucking hair buns? What do they call those things by the way?’
‘Space buns,’ Lucy offered.
Nicky groaned like they had driven him crazy – in a good way. ‘ Space buns ,’ he mused softly.
Lucy laughed. ‘Yep, add some time at Comic-Con and you’ve just spelled out the FBI’s 1994 guide to identifying a geek.’
‘Bullshit.’
Lucy snort-laughed. ‘Well, I definitely call bullshit on you. You had to know. You had to! Girls actually stopped midstride in the hallways to gawk at you.’ She knew. She had occasionally been one of them.
‘Is that what they were doing?’ he asked.
God, teenagers were stupid. If proof were ever necessary, here it was.
‘Wow,’ Lucy mused. ‘You have just completely altered everything I thought I knew about high school.’
He shrugged. ‘I always felt like an outsider.’
Nicky looked at her then with a sort of vulnerability, a kind of tenderness that made her skin prickle.
‘Same,’ Lucy breathed.
The elevator doors opened and broke the moment. Nicky made a point to pull the sleeves of his Henley down to his wrists.
‘This way,’ Nicky said. He guided her forward with the mere hint of a touch at her lower back. It was a graze. A whisper. Barely there. Still, Lucy’s body lit up like the Strip – all blinking neon and blinding incandescence.
Holy shit.
Nicky led her through a busy atrium, then a bank of slot machines lined up like soldiers awaiting inspection.
Only one was occupied. By a woman wearing heavy eyeliner and a shirt with daisies printed all over it.
Her head turned from the flashing dollar signs on the screen in front of her.
As soon as her eyes landed on Nicky, she did a double take.
An actual double take, with a confused furrow forming over her brow as her jaw hit the floor.
Same, honey. Same.
Nicky stopped them at a restaurant called Gioco situated between the poker room and poker slots room.
He stepped to the hostess stand, where no name was asked, and none was given.
Instead, the bespectacled hostess greeted them with: ‘Welcome. Please follow me, Mr. Broome.’
The hostess guided them through a large dining area dripping in coffee-colored velvet and bronze lighting. To her credit, the young woman gaped slack-jawed at Nicky only three times on the short trip. Lucy admired the girl’s self-control.
She left them at a rounded banquette nestled in a private nook. It was more velvet, more bronze, more opulence. Shielded from the rest of the space by a thick curtain, the room felt close, comfortable, and seductive. Impossibly sexy.
Lucy slid herself into the booth and picked up her menu. No prices, just detailed descriptions, and a bunch of liquor brands she’d never heard of.
Almost immediately, their server appeared. Just as quickly, the man tried not to choke when he recognized Nicky.
‘What can I get for you, miss?’
The ‘miss’ was a nice touch, since she most certainly qualified as ‘ma’am.’
‘I’ll have an Old Fashioned, please. Heavy on the cherries,’ Lucy said.
‘Certainly,’ the server replied.
‘And you know what?’ Lucy added. ‘Make it a double.’
‘Of course.’
Nicky said, ‘Modelo, draft. Please.’
‘It would be my pleasure,’ the man replied before disappearing.
As silence once again stretched out between them, Nicky’s eyes bounced around Lucy’s face.
She suddenly felt acutely self-conscious, as though every one of the twenty-eight years since she’d last sat across from him had dropped on her face all at once.
She knew that there were lines where there hadn’t been before, freckles and marks that remained stubbornly unresponsive to decades of dedication to anti-aging creams and potions.
She was closer to fifty than forty. She knew this.
It wasn’t a secret or anything she was usually bothered by.
‘So,’ Lucy said, privately reaching deep to find the self-confidence she’d somehow mislaid between her hotel room and the restaurant.
‘So,’ Nicky parroted.
Lucy couldn’t find the patience required for small talk. Instead, she blurted, ‘So, this international rock-star thing. What’s that like?’