Chapter 5
“We’ve circled this block three times already,” Carly growled murderously, keeping her eyes straight ahead. “Do you even know where we’re going?”
She gripped the seat and stared at the back of the car in front of them, determined not to let her gaze stray toward the driver’s seat. It was bad enough that she was stuck spending her long-awaited vacation with Nick Jacobs, an insufferable snob who knew her biggest and most mortifying secrets. But this morning had made them enemies for life. First, she’d accidentally spent a good five minutes cataloging every mouthwatering detail of his mostly naked body, and he’d caught her doing it. And then, while she’d been waiting for the barista at the surf club café to make her coffee, she’d overheard him talking to Marcus.
I’ve met some ballet brats, but she’s on another level.
Carly hated that b-word even more than she hated the other b-word. She’d spent the last decade of her life saving and budgeting and having the same argument with her parents every six months, all so she wouldn’t be what Nick had called her. A ballet brat. An entitled princess who didn’t live in the real world, who always relied on Edward and Marlene to buy her way into anything—or out of anything. Okay, so she sometimes lost her temper. But she was working on that, too. She was trying to be better. But of course Nick had seen none of that. All he’d seen was a brat.
“I know where we’re going,” Nick said through gritted teeth, accidentally turning on the windshield wipers instead of the blinker. He sighed with frustration. “We’re going to the printer.”
“I meant do you know where the printer is,” Carly replied, although she already knew the answer.
“I know what you meant,” he said, “and yes, I know where the printer is. It’s on King Street, near the train station. That’s what Marcus said.”
“Do you want me to pull up a map? Google can solve this problem for us, you know.”
“I don’t need a map, I just need to find this place,” he snapped, turning the windshield wipers on again.
Carly rolled her eyes. She’d always thought the whole men-don’task-for-directions thing was an old-fashioned cliché. Or was she simply a brat for not wanting to spend her day circling the same block?
“If only there were some kind of visual aid that could help you do that, perhaps guided by some kind of global positioning system?”
“Putain de merde, je vais la tuer,” he muttered.
“I wouldn’t if I were you. I’m pretty sure Australia frowns on murder.” There was a long silence as Nick stared out at the traffic, his jaw clenched. She watched him in satisfaction as realization dawned on him. “Faut faire attention, Nick, on ne sait jamais qui parle fran?ais.” There was another tense silence. Maybe she shouldn’t have rubbed it in, but it was just so satisfying to watch the muscle in his jaw tick like that.
They inched forward through the traffic, through the same traffic lights she was quite sure they’d already waited at several times. “Since when do you speak French?” he finally gritted out.
“Since my least favorite nanny was Belgian. I learned it just to spite her. She used to mutter about killing me, too.”
“Can’t say I blame her,” he shot back.
“Oh, you would have loved Nanny Sylvie,” Carly said, as she scanned the storefronts on either side of the traffic-clogged road. “She was even more uptight than—Oh, there it is!” she exclaimed, pointing at a small sign in a second floor window that read UNIVERSITY PRINTERS.
Nick gasped and slammed on the breaks. Their bodies lurched forward, and her seatbelt caught her hard in the stomach.
“Shit, could you not scream in the car? You’re going to cause an accident,” he chastised her, once he’d straightened up. “Another accident.”
Rubbing her stomach, she stared at him and wondered, for the hundredth time since she’d met him barely a day ago, what the fuck this man’s problem was.
“I was just trying to help,” she repeated, unable to keep some of her hurt out of her voice. And she had helped, by the way. She’d found the damn place, so now they could go pick up the menu cards and table numbers Heather and Marcus had ordered.
“Thanks for your help,” he gritted out, turning on the blinker, on the first go this time, and turning down a side street in search of a parking spot.
She seethed in silence as he pulled into a spot and they climbed out of the car. Around the corner and back toward the storefront on bustling King Street, he walked a few paces in front of her, as if he were leading her to the place she had found. The street was lined with stores and cafés, and Carly spotted a cute-looking vintage shop next to a bubble tea place. If she hadn’t been in the company of a prickly, judgmental ass, she would have asked if they could take a detour into both. Instead, she followed him up the stairs to the second floor of the building in the middle of the block and into the office of University Printers, taking care to keep her eyes on the stairs in front of her. She’d already been caught staring at Nick’s ass once today, and she couldn’t bear for it to happen again.
At the top of the stairs, they were met by an empty desk in a small, dimly lit reception area. The walls were hung with posters for performances by bands she didn’t know at venues she’d never heard of, some of which looked like they were from the 1970s and 1980s. Carly could hear whirring activity in a nearby room, but this one was almost silent.
“Anyone here?” they called at the exact same time.
They looked at each other, and she felt her own face crumple in a scowl that mirrored his. There was no reply, so they stood there for a few seconds, staring each other down in rippling silence.
“Maybe everyone’s left for the day, because it took us so long to get here,” she said.
“Maybe they saw you coming and decided to save themselves,” he shot back.
They glared at each other for a moment, and then she turned her back on him and examined a poster featuring a group of musicians with impressively big hair. She could almost feel his eyes boring disdainfully into the back of her head.
The whirring continued from the other room. Impatient, she looked over at the front desk and noticed a small bell next to a cup of pens. With a sigh, she strode across the room just as Nick started moving, but she reached the desk before he did, tapping the bell hastily before he could beat her to it. As a high-pitched ding reverberated around the room, his hand landed on top of hers, large and warm. Her stomach jolted, and a thousand hot, fizzling sparks radiated from where he touched her, up her arm and into her chest. She met his eyes, noticing that in the low light of this room they looked almost gray. For a moment, he looked down at her—no, she reminded herself, down on her, the ballet brat he’d been saddled with—and she watched a few tiny beads of sweat glittering over his top lip.
She snatched her hand away, knocking the bell off the desk as she did. She’d just stooped to pick it up when someone rushed into the room.
“So sorry to keep you waiting,” the newcomer said, with one hand on her chest. She was tall and muscular and looked like she couldn’t have been more than a few years out of high school. Her hair was cut in an enviable pixie, and her long blue dress revealed a tattoo sleeve on each pale arm. “I didn’t hear you come in!”
“Sorry,” Carly said, returning the bell to the desk. “We should have called out louder. We’re here to pick up some wedding materials.”
“Oh, sure,” the woman said, turning to the computer in front of her and scrolling the mouse. “What’s the name?”
“Heather Hays and Marcus Campbell.”
The woman’s face lit up. “Of course, the ballet dancers! I love the New York theme you went with, and it looks so good on paper, especially the table numbers.” She looked over at Nick, beaming. “It’s so nice to meet you both in person! You make a gorgeous couple. Only a few weeks to go now, are you so excited?”
“Oh, no,” Nick started to say, “we’re not—”
“We’re not the bride and groom,” Carly cut in. “We’re just the wedding party, running some errands for them.”
The woman’s face fell. “Whoops! Sorry about that. It’s just I love this stuff, and I thought, with the American accent …”
“It’s fine,” Carly shrugged. It was hardly an insult to be mistaken for Heather.
“You do make a gorgeous couple, though,” the woman said, looking hopefully from Carly to Nick and back again.
“We’re not a couple,” Nick snapped from behind her. Carly turned around and gave him a deathly glare, then turned back to see that the poor woman looked very flustered.
“I’ll just go get the order, it’s in the back,” she muttered, and she stood and hurried out of the room.
Carly whipped around as soon as she was gone.
“What the fuck is your problem?” she asked him, trying to keep her voice quiet and steady. “It’s one thing to be an asshole to me, but you can’t talk to other people like that.”
He flushed and ducked his head.
“Sorry,” he muttered. “I just didn’t want her to think—”
“That you’d ever deign to date a next level ballet brat like me,” Carly said. She saw his mouth drop open a little in what looked like shock and shame as she repeated his words back to him, but she was too annoyed to care. “That would be so embarrassing for you. You’re lucky they’ve already printed all the stuff, or she’d probably put some obscene typo on it as revenge. ‘Welcome to the wedding of Heather and Mucus,’ or something. You’d better apologize to her when she gets back.”
He nodded, avoiding her eyes. His cheeks were still pink. They stood in unfriendly silence for a few minutes, and then the woman returned from the back room holding a large box with HAYS + CAMPBELL scrawled on the side in black marker. She placed it on the desk.
“Here you go,” she said quietly to Carly. “Do you want to take a look and make sure it’s all correct and accounted for?”
“No, thanks, um, what’s your name?” Carly asked.
“Geraldine,” the woman said uneasily, keeping her eyes on Carly, as if she wasn’t very eager for Nick to know her name. Carly couldn’t blame her.
“I trust you, Geraldine. And I’m sure it all looks great. I helped Heather pick the New York theme, you know,” she said proudly. “The street sign table names were my idea.”
Instead of numbered tables, each table would be named for a different place in New York City, like Lincoln Center or Washington Square Park. It would be a little taste of Heather’s home here in Sydney, surrounded mostly by Australian guests. Carly had joked that anyone Heather and Marcus didn’t like could be assigned a seat at Port Authority Bus Terminal, or at A 4 Train Car Full of Drunk Yankees Fans. Heather had rejected the suggestion, saying that last one would be hard to fit on a mocked-up street sign. But now Carly wished there was a table called Fifth Avenue at Christmastime When You’re Running Late for Something Important, so they could seat Nick there.
Geraldine pushed the box aside so she could check something on her computer. “It’s already paid in full, so you’re all set,” she said.
“Thank you,” Carly said, lifting the box and holding it against her hip. She waited for a moment, then cleared her throat and glanced over her shoulder, giving Nick a pointed look.
He ducked his head again, then took a few steps toward the desk until he was almost level with her.
“Euh, I’m very sorry,” he said to Geraldine. “I was rude, and I’m sorry. It was an easy mistake to make.”
She looked up and nodded at him warily. “No worries,” she said quietly. Carly gave a small, satisfied nod—and then decided that actually, no, she wasn’t satisfied.
“Nick actually doesn’t date at all. He’s never had a girlfriend,” she stage-whispered to Geraldine, ignoring Nick’s glower. “He’s got a rare congenital condition. You see, he was tragically born without a personality, and it makes life very difficult for him. Doctors have tried everything, but it’s incurable. There’s a foundation named after him and everything.”
Carly gave Geraldine a sly smile and arched one eyebrow, and Geraldine pressed her lips together, suppressing a smile. Carly could practically feel Nick’s irritation raking down her back, but it was worth it. She hoisted the box against her hip and turned, feeling the heat of his gaze between her shoulders all the way down the stairs.