Pointe of Pride

Chapter 3

Carly had mostly calmed down by the time she and Heather walked into the ANB building a few hours later. It helped that it was a gorgeous summer day, the sky a saturated turquoise, clear and cloudless. A far cry from the damp gray skies and sleet she’d left behind in New York.

“You weren’t kidding,” Carly said, peering out the window of the empty rehearsal studio. “The water is right there.”

The Australian National Ballet performed at the iconic Opera House, but its studios and administrative buildings were a couple of miles away, Heather had explained, built on what used to be a working wharf. A few decades ago, the high-ceilinged warehouses that lined one long finger wharf had been converted into rehearsal studios and offices, while the wharves that flanked held condos and a hotel. A few feet away from where Carly stood, the harbor glittered in the sun, sloshing around the legs of the wharf. It was spectacular, and so strange. She’d mostly believed Heather when she’d described the studios, but seeing it with her own eyes—hearing it, she could hear the water lapping outside—was something else.

“There’s something magical about dancing on water all day,” Heather smiled. She sat in the center of the sunny studio, pulling a pair of legwarmers over her canvas ballet slippers. “You can see for yourself next week. Peter said you can join company class any time you want.”

Carly turned away from the window and nodded in thanks. She had hoped to finally relax a little on this vacation, but Catherine’s email had changed everything. She couldn’t very well go back to New York out of shape and expect to be promoted. A tiny, treacherous part of her wondered if she should be here at all. Shouldn’t she be back in New York, attending the optional classes the company put on during the break? Showing her face at every opportunity so she could impress Catherine with her commitment?

She banished the thought and looked over at Heather, who had started her usual pre-class warmup sequence of jumping jacks, crunches, and stretches. The same one she’d been doing since they’d joined the company together at eighteen. Carly had spent all of fourth grade begging her parents for a sibling, but once she’d met Heather, she’d stopped. It didn’t matter they were about as different as possible on paper; from the day they’d met in a ballet class at eleven years old, it had felt like they fit together like two feet slotting into a perfect fifth position. Heather was the closest thing she’d ever have to a sister. Carly was right where she needed to be.

“Can I join you?” she asked, as Heather jumped up and down.

“If you want, but aren’t you tired?” Heather lowered herself to the ground and began her crunches sequence.

Carly was tired, and she wasn’t exactly dressed for dancing, but if she was going to stay in shape, she might as well start now. Besides, it had been ages since she’d been able to dance with Heather. Even if it was just jumping jacks and a short barre before the pianist and rehearsal director arrived to run through one of Heather’s solos, Carly wouldn’t pass up a chance for them to dance together.

By the time they’d worked through the sequence—crunches, stretches, and then a series of calf raises, a new addition that ANB apparently mandated to prevent ankle injuries—Carly’s quads felt warm and liquid and her spine loose and long, as if the endless flight from New York had never happened.

“Ready to dance?” Heather asked, panting slightly from the rapid-fire bicycles that rounded out the crunches sequence.

“Ready,” Carly grinned. “Music?”

“I have a playlist I usually use when I give myself barre.”

“Let me guess, it’s all Giselle,” Carly said slyly.

Heather rolled her eyes. “I swear, if I never have to dance that ballet again, it’ll be too soon. No, it’s just standard music for class, piano covers of musicals, the usual.”

“Not today,” Carly shook her head, already pulling her phone out of her back pocket and pulling up the music app. “Today we’re going to mix it up.”

“Ha, of course we are.”

“Today we’re going to mix it up and throw it back,” Carly said, typing and scrolling until she found what she wanted. She hit play, and a second later, Heather was laughing, the sound slightly drowned out by the tinny sound of Usher and Lil Jon coming out of Carly’s phone.

“We cannot do pliés to a song about sweat dripping down someone’s balls!” Heather objected, but she was grinning.

“Excuse me, that’s a totally different song, and we can do pliés to whatever song we want. What’s going to happen, the ghost of George Balanchine is going to haunt us? Swoop around scowling until we turn on Stravinsky?”

“You’re ridiculous,” Heather shook her head.

“You love it. And if you don’t want this song, I’ve got the rest of the hits of the early 2000s all lined up and ready to go.” It was the soundtrack of their years at the NYB school together. The songs they’d played over and over again in their dorm room. “You think Balanchine’s ghost will like ‘Hey Ya’? Or maybe he’s more of a Ciara kind of guy?”

“Ridiculous!” Heather repeated with a laugh, but she peeled off her legwarmers and jogged to the back of the room. Carly followed her, and together they dragged a barre into the middle of the studio. Heather claimed stage right, as she always did, and Carly set herself up on the other side of the barre, turning away from the mirrors lining the front wall of the room. She glanced over her shoulder at Heather and smiled to herself. Right back where she belonged.

She put her hand on the barre, fanned her feet out into first position, and took a deep breath. They began.

As it turned out, they could do pliés to Usher. And “Goodies” turned out to be the perfect tempo for tendus. Alicia Keys was a good fit for ronds de jambe, and “Hey Ya” made for some very fast, very frantic frappés. By the time they got to grand battements—to “Freek-a-leek,” by Petey Pablo, and Heather didn’t even bother pretending to object—they were both sweaty and smiling, and completely unfazed by the prospect of being haunted forever by the ghost of the father of American ballet. Who, to be honest, had been a bit of a creep and probably would have enjoyed spending his afterlife haunting young women.

Glancing in the mirror, Carly saw that her hair had frizzed out from her nape, like it always did when she didn’t wrestle it into a bun and subdue it with hairspray. She was flushed and her upper lip was beaded with sweat, and she hadn’t enjoyed barre this much in ages.

They were just stretching in deep post-battement lunges, throwing in some ports de bras—with some help from Beyoncé—when a woman stuck her head in the door. Heather stood up hastily, her face sobering, and Carly took that as a cue to grab her phone and turn the music off. Judging by the sheet music tucked under her arm, this was the rehearsal pianist. Heather stood up straight and schooled her face into a serious professional expression as the accompanist walked into the room, eyeing them with bemusement.

“Everything all right in here?” she asked. “That’s not music you hear every day at the ballet.”

Right. Australian National Ballet’s artistic director might be a reformer, but ballet still loved its traditions. And “Lean Back” was not exactly traditional barre music.

“Hi, Kimberly,” Heather said. “We were just getting warmed up. Er, I was. I’m ready whenever Marie gets here.” Kimberly nodded but didn’t say anything. She looked over Heather’s shoulder and ran her eyes questioningly over Carly. “And this is my best friend, Carly, visiting from New York.”

“Hi,” Carly waved at Kimberly, who didn’t wave back. Time for Carly to make herself scarce. She pocketed her phone and went to retrieve her bag from the side of the room, while Heather sat down and busied herself with her pointe shoes and ouch pouches. “I’ll go explore the neighborhood and come back in an hour, okay?”

“Sounds good,” Heather said quietly. “Sorry we had to cut the party short.”

“Don’t be, you’ve got stuff to do. And that was hard work. I’m sweating. Like, it’s dripping, all the way down my—”

“Oh my God, stop,” Heather said, fighting a laugh.

Carly stuck her tongue out at her, then hoisted her bag over her shoulder. In the doorway, she stopped. “Hey, Kimberly, what are you rehearsing today?”

Kimberly looked up from her pile of sheet music and spoke over her shoulder. “Firebird,” she said tersely.

Suppressing a grin, Carly met Heather’s eyes. “Oh,” she said, eyes wide and innocent, voice as even as she could keep it. “So, Stravinsky, then?”

The last thing she saw before she ducked out into the hallway was Heather snorting a laugh into her hand.

Nick rang Marcus’s doorbell and smiled at the little golden plaque beside it. The sign was fashioned to look like the ones you saw on grand old-money Sydney houses, except he was fairly sure this one was a joke. The house was a one-storey brick place and one of the last unrenovated homes on the block, and it was called, the sign informed him, Sand Castle. All around it were hulking white concrete compounds and Hamptons-style beach houses in various stages of renovation and expansion, but this little brown house seemed to sit, calm and stoic, amid the madness.

He’d walked to his friend’s place via the beach, kicking off his shoes to pad along the water’s edge and feel the dense sand squish beneath his feet. Freshwater Beach was as beautiful as he’d remembered, the deep turquoise waves rolling in steadily, breaking on the jagged cliffs, and splashing water into the swimming pool cut into the rocks on the north side. He stood between the fluttering red and yellow flags and gazed out towards the Pacific Ocean, thinking about the famous ode to Australia’s dramatic landscapes that he’d had to memorise in Year 4. Nick had loved it so much his mum had found a copy and hung it up in the house. I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea / Her beauty and her terror—the wide brown land for me. He’d thought about that poem a lot in his first few years away, and it always brought a fond, sad smile to his lips. It did again today as he stood on the sand, letting white foam fizz around his ankles. You couldn’t do that on the banks of the Seine. Well, you could, but you’d probably contract some kind of infection.

Marcus’s place was a few blocks from the beach, and Nick had been glad for the chance to stretch his legs a little after such a long flight. But now he was hot and thirsty and eager to get indoors. He was about to ring the bell again when the door swung open and Marcus appeared, a wide grin on his face.

“You made it!” Marcus said, opening his arms and pulling Nick into a hug.

“I made it,” Nick confirmed, squeezing Marcus’s shoulders tightly. He hadn’t been able to come back for Marcus’s dad’s funeral a few years ago, and it had gutted him at the time. Richard had been about as good a ballet dad as a boy could ask for, and Nick had always liked coming to stay at Marcus’s place when he wanted a break from school housing.

He’d dreaded picking up the phone and telling Marcus that he couldn’t be there to support him, especially since Marcus had been badly injured around that time, and Nick knew that being left alone with his brother Davo wouldn’t have made things any easier. But the company had been in the middle of its Paris season, and there was no way they’d let him fly to the other side of the world at such short notice.

Marcus gave him one last pat on the back and then released him. Nick looked him over. Marcus looked more tan than he remembered, and somehow just as lean as he’d been when he was dancing. If Nick had to guess, he’d say Marcus had taken up running or some other outdoor exercise. He didn’t quite look like a dancer any more, but he looked fit as hell.

“You look great, mate. What have you been doing?”

“Surfing, every morning,” Marcus smiled, gesturing Nick down the hallway to the back of the house. “It was the only thing I wanted to do once my Achilles was healed. And living down the road from the best beach in the city, it would be a waste not to.”

Nick looked around the kitchen at the back of the house, which was familiar even under the fresh coat of mint green paint Marcus and Heather had given it. The old pine table still stood in the dining area, scratched and dented and bearing decades’ worth of water marks. Nick had eaten many a meal at that table, when he came home with Marcus for holidays and weekends because it was too far for him to go home to the mountains. The table gleamed in the light that streamed in through the back windows, through which Nick could see the back veranda and the garden where he, Marcus, and Marcus’s brother had fought pitched water gun battles in the summer and camped out under the stars in the winter.

Marcus went to the sink and filled a glass of water, handing it to Nick before throwing himself into one of the chairs. Nick sat down and took a grateful gulp.

“How was your flight?”

“Awful, thanks for asking. I swear, the older I get, the longer those flights are. And I have no idea what time it is in my body.” He yawned.

“Best not to think about it,” Marcus replied, catching the yawn from him. “Sorry, I was up late going over my notes from last semester. The new term kicks off next week. We tried to schedule the wedding around it, but between my classes, the ANB season, and the NYB season, it was all a bit of a nightmare.” When he’d retired from dancing, Marcus had decided to become a physio and was now a few years into a five-year degree. “But we could have picked you up from the airport, you know. Carly’s flight can’t have gotten in much later than yours.”

“That’s the maid of honour?”

“Mmhmm. She got in this morning, then went to the studio to watch Heather rehearse Firebird for a bit. They’ve got Heather in rehearsal basically every day until the week before the wedding, so we need all the help we can get from you and Carly. They’ll be back from the studios in a sec, and the four of us can talk about how to divide up the wedding tasks. Heather’s got the master list around here somewhere, I’m sure.”

“The master list?” Nick asked.

“I’d say planning a wedding is like planning a war,” Marcus chuckled. “But slightly more complicated. After this, Heather will be ready to invade New Zealand.”

“That bad?”

“The spreadsheets I’ve seen I can never unsee,” Marcus deadpanned. “But I’m sure Heather’s takeover of Wellington will be swift and bloodless. And the wedding’s going to go off without a hitch. Especially with you and Carly here to help out. Although, Carly …” he trailed off.

Nick raised an eyebrow. “Not a fan of the best friend?”

“No, she’s great, and she loves Heather to the hilt. So clearly she’s got great taste. But she’s just, sometimes she’s a bit much, you know?”

“Ah,” Nick nodded.

“She comes from some rich New York family, and she’s pretty brash.”

“Noted,” Nick said. He’d dealt with brash rich kids before. Ballet was full of them.

“Heather calls her a force of nature. Don’t get me wrong, she can be a lot of fun, too. She’s just a bit of a live wire, you know? Like this morning when we picked her up, she comes storming out with her suitcase and gives Heather a huge hug, then tells us this story about how she accidentally ran some poor guy over with her luggage trolley and got into a screaming match with him.”

Nick nearly spat out a mouthful of water. He swallowed it fast and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, staring at Marcus, heart racing.

“What?” he said, suppressing a cough. No way. This could not be happening. He could not have burnt through a year’s worth of unwelcome coincidences in one morning. Through his horror, he heard the sound of a key turning in the lock at the other end of the hallway.

“I know, way to make an entrance, right? Anyway, brace yourself.” Marcus craned his neck to glance up the hallway, and Nick heard the front door open.

Muffled chatter filtered down the hallway, and Nick stared at Marcus in shock and disbelief. He kept staring as he heard two people making their way towards the back of the house, unwilling to turn around and confirm his suspicions.

“ … come on, you can admit it, that woman had a stick the size of the Empire State Building up her butt,” came a familiar voice. A very familiar voice. Deeper than you might expect from a woman her size, and a little scratchy, as though she’d spent the night before shouting to make herself heard in a crowded room. Or the morning shouting at complete strangers for no good reason. In any other woman that voice would be intriguing and a little sexy. In this woman it inspired nothing but dread. And, at this moment, it was right behind him.

Nick rose from the chair, more slowly than he’d ever stood in his life, and turned around.

Heather was laughing as she arrived in the kitchen. “We’re here and we brought banh mi! Nick!” she exclaimed, a delighted grin on her pretty face. She stuck out her hand, and he shook it. “I’m so glad to meet you at last. I’m Heather.”

Keeping his eyes on Heather to avoid looking at the woman next to her, who he could already sense was stone faced and furious, Nick managed a jerky nod and did something with his mouth that approximated a smile. Heather didn’t need to introduce herself. The Heather Hays, ex-principal dancer at New York Ballet Theater, formerly one half of “America’s ballet sweethearts,” and the biggest hire Australian National Ballet had ever made? He still kind of couldn’t believe that his best friend from ballet school, the gawky, daggy kid he’d once snuck off to a topless beach with, had managed to pull The Heather Hays. Or that she was even more beautiful in person than she was in publicity stills or on the cover of Barre magazine. Well done, Marcus, he thought, as she gave her fiancé a quick peck on the lips before setting a large brown paper bag on the kitchen table.

“Nick, this is Carly Montgomery, the maid of honour,” Heather said, turning to face them again. She didn’t seem to have noticed that Nick hadn’t spoken since she’d walked in. He didn’t know what would come out of his mouth if he tried. “Carly, meet Nick. Formerly a soloist at Paris Opera Ballet, now a very in-demand dance photographer.”

He forced himself to look at Carly—he sure as hell knew her name now, and something told him he’d never forget it—and saw his own feelings reflected back on her face. Disbelief. Dread. Disdain. And a twinge of regret or shame or some other shadow he couldn’t quite put words to. God, he should have known. With that posture, that carriage? He should have realized she was a dancer, too.

“Nick,” she said stiffly. “Nick Jacobs.” The way she said it, he was fairly sure she wanted to give him a profane middle name.

“Yeah,” Heather said, looking at her friend in surprise. Nick saw Marcus’s eyebrows rise. “Do you two know each other?”

Are you there Beyoncé? It’s me, Carly. Why are you doing this to me? And can you just catapult me into the sun instead?

This was Marcus’s best friend from ballet school? This was the best man she’d be spending the next few weeks with, and who’d be standing at the altar with her as Marcus and Heather said their vows? If she didn’t love Heather as much as she did, she’d seriously consider changing her ticket and marching straight back to the airport this afternoon. Around the world in exactly one day.

She stared at Nick Jacobs—Nick! Fucking! Jacobs! The man she’d spent her entire morning fuming about!—and felt the seconds tick by as Heather’s surprised question hung in the air.

All the elation she’d felt at dancing with Heather drained out of her as he stared back at her, his brow furrowed over those piercing deep sapphire eyes. Carly hoisted the sides of her mouth into a smile that felt distinctly like a grimace.

“No, we haven’t met,” she ground out. At least I wish we hadn’t. She saw surprise and then understanding flicker across his face, and a second later he extended his hand.

“Nice to meet you,” he said, sounding like the pleasantry was costing him as much as it had cost her. Good. He couldn’t dress her down here, couldn’t make her feel like a catastrophic failure for making a simple mistake. Couldn’t reveal to Heather and Marcus how many times she’d screwed up in the barely six hours she’d been on this continent.

But she couldn’t very well snub him here, either. If they’d never met, she didn’t have any reason to be standing here stiffly, staring at him as he waited for her to accept his handshake. Grudgingly she took his hand and gave it one quick, uncommitted pump. His skin was soft and warm, because of course it was. She hated it.

“Nice to meet you, too,” she said, in what she hoped was a convincing impression of politeness, then released his hand as quickly as she dared.

“Well, now that we’re all here, we can get down to business,” Heather said, eyeing Carly curiously. Carly swallowed and hitched her mouth up a little further, hoping Heather would chalk the strange tension in the room up to jetlag and fatigue.

“Let’s get down,” she agreed brightly. She was here for Heather. For Heather’s big day. She didn’t need to ruin this wedding with her new, burning dislike of Nick Fucking Jacobs. She would find a way to make nice with this man even if might pull her cheek muscles doing it. World’s Best Maid of Honor.

“I’m going to go print off a few copies of the master spreadsheet, and then we can get started,” Heather said. “Carly, help yourself to anything. I’ll be back in a second.”

“Okay,” Carly smiled. Yeah, she was definitely going to pull a muscle.

“Just gonna run to the bathroom before we brief you on the invasion plans,” Marcus said, giving Nick a knowing look. Nick replied with a nod and a close-mouthed smile, apparently as committed to this Nothing to See Here act as she was.

A second later, they’d both disappeared down the hall, leaving Carly and Nick alone in the kitchen. Carly glanced over her shoulder, waiting until she heard a door close, shortly followed by the whir of a printer starting up in the office she’d passed on her way in.

“I don’t believe this,” she hissed, just as Nick muttered to himself, “This is a nightmare.”

Well, at least they agreed on one thing.

“I’d be happy to pinch you to make sure you’re not dreaming,” she shot back.

He glowered down at her. “A pinch would be minimal compared to the damage you already inflicted. Do your worst.” He took a step toward her, squaring his shoulders, and once again she inhaled the scent of his cologne, something warm and spicy that on another man would have been tempting but on him was barely tolerable. Fine then, she’d hold her breath for three straight weeks.

God, three whole weeks with this man. Three weeks of pretending like she didn’t want to roll her eyes every time he opened his mouth to talk. She would do it for Heather, because she’d do almost anything for Heather. But if this was going to work, he’d have to play nice, too.

“I swear to God, Nick Jacobs, if you ruin this for Heather, I will hunt you down and make your worst nightmare look like a dream come true,” she growled.

“If I ruin it? I’m not the one you need to be worried about. Have I caused anyone grievous bodily harm today?”

“You seem to be walking and talking just fine,” Carly retorted. “Unfortunately.”

“You—”

“Listen to me,” she said quickly, because Heather and Marcus would be back any second. “As far as they know, we have never met, which means we have no reason to absolutely loathe each other. And after this is over we never have to see each other again. But until that beautiful day, you and I are going to practice our fake smiles and get along when they’re around, because I am making a huge professional sacrifice to be here and because this is meant to be the happiest day of Heather’s life, and I will not let anything or anyone stand in the way of that. Do you understand me?”

He glared down at her, clearly weighing her words, and she willed herself to hold his gaze. If he wanted a staring contest he could have it, but he was going to lose. “You’re right,” he finally said, and it sounded like the words caused him physical pain. Excellent. “We’ve never met. But what a pleasure it is to make your acquaintance, Carly.”

She opened her mouth to reply with any number of choice curse words, but at that moment, she heard footsteps and a toilet flush. Carly seized the back of one of the chairs and threw herself into it, and a second later, Nick seemed to uproot himself from the tiles. He sat down, and by the time Heather walked back into the kitchen, they were both seated, smiling amiably across the table while avoiding each other’s eyes.

World’s best maid of honor, Carly thought. Even if she pulled every muscle in her face.

“All right, I think that’s the whole list,” Heather sighed, leaning back from the table and passing the printed out spreadsheet to Marcus. “I know it’s a lot to get done,” Heather said, gesturing down at the paper in front of her, “but we’re doing this whole thing on the cheap. Our vendors are all over the city, wherever the prices were best, so we’ll have some running around to do. But between the four of us, we can do it. Divide and conquer.”

Marcus studied the page for a few seconds. “Looks about right. Oh, you forgot to add the cocktail thing,” he said to Heather.

“Right, of course. We wanted to have a signature cocktail, but neither of us really drinks cocktails, so we thought you might help us mix those up,” Heather said, taking the spreadsheet back and adding yet another item to the already long list of wedding preparation tasks.

Nick nodded, looking down at the exhaustive spreadsheet Heather had handed him. Each wedding task was listed by chronological order and color-coded to mark who was responsible for it. His and Carly’s initials were next to at least a dozen items. Nick now had full confidence that if Heather wanted to invade New Zealand, she could do it and make it look easy.

“This is Peak Heather,” Carly teased, as she examined the battle plan, and Heather gave her a playful shove. “It’s a compliment!” Carly replied.

This would be good for him, Nick reminded himself. He needed things to do, tasks to take his mind off the shapeless mess that was his life now. As long as he was focused on inventing cocktails and building playlists and picking up table numbers from the printer, he wouldn’t have to think about his plans or lack thereof.

“As for getting around, we’ve got our car and we can borrow Alice’s in a pinch, so we can split up and go wherever we need to,” Marcus added. “Nick, can you still drive on the left?”

“Euhhh, probably,” Nick hedged. Between the Paris Métro and his moped, he hadn’t had much practice driving a car in the last few years, but hopefully the muscle memory would kick in once he sat on the right-hand side of a car.

“Okay, then you can borrow my mum’s car,” Marcus offered. “She’s not using it much these days, and it mostly sits in her garage in Neutral Bay. Carly, I know you don’t drive at all, so you can go with Nick.”

“Sure,” Carly said, throwing him a toothy smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “That sounds like a great plan.”

“Obviously I want you with me for my final dress fitting,” Heather added. “But this way you two can get to know each other a bit.”

“I look forward to that,” Nick lied, returning Carly’s wide smile and watching her nostrils flare in response. She’d said she wanted to play nice, so he’d play nice, but he had no interest in getting to know this woman better. They already knew each other just fine; being yelled at in public by someone, twice in one day, was a great way to get to know them. Especially when one of those yellings included information about their genitals. He felt his cheeks flush at that thought and hoped the other three didn’t notice. He’d gotten to know Carly Montgomery well enough for a lifetime, thanks very much. Even if he didn’t already know that she blew up basically any room she walked into, taking people and property with her, he knew her type. Rich, entitled, hotheaded. They didn’t need to spend more time in each other’s presence than was absolutely necessary.

“Oh, me too,” Carly said. She was really laying it on thick now. If she wasn’t careful, Marcus and Heather were going to start wondering if she was attracted to him. He nearly laughed out loud at the thought.

“Good,” Heather smiled. “And while you’re at it you can get to know the city a bit. Nick’s a local; he can show you around. You don’t mind, do you, Nick?”

Nick felt his fake smile falter. He wanted to correct her, but Carly’s intense gaze and his stung pride stopped him. Heather was one hundred percent wrong, though. He did mind, actually. And he wasn’t a local anymore, either.

Half the cafés and shops he remembered from when he last lived here, from his childhood, were probably gone now. Neighbourhoods had changed all over the city. Freshwater Beach used to feel low-key and hidden away, an overlooked and pleasantly rundown neighbour to the tourist-friendly Manly Beach, and now it felt kind of upscale and glam. The little hole-in-the-wall café inside the surf club, which used to only serve packaged ice creams in summer and hot chocolate from a machine in winter, was now advertising sourdough avocado toast with microgreens, and poached eggs with roasted heirloom tomatoes. He didn’t really know this city at all anymore.

But he wasn’t about to say any of this to Marcus and Heather, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to reveal it to Carly.

“I don’t mind at all,” he lied. “Carly and I will make a great team.” Heather gave him a grateful smile, and she and Marcus turned back to her list. Nick chanced a look at Carly, whose gaze had turned into a sharp glare. Her full lips were pursed, and her eyes slightly narrowed, as though she were wishing for the ability to shoot white-hot fire from her pupils. But he was just giving her what she’d asked for. He was playing nice. And if she could lay it on thick, so could he.

“I know Carly’s decided she’s going to be the greatest maid of honour the world has ever seen,” he said through his wide smile, “and I’ll do whatever I can to help.”

The glare went from white-hot to blue fire at his words. She looked like she was mentally dismembering him.

That glare probably cowed other people, but Nick wasn’t afraid of Carly Montgomery. She might be a spoiled, brash human hurricane, but for the next three weeks, she needed him. And it felt good to be needed for a change. Even if it was by someone who clearly despised him.