There was a sharp tap on my shoulder, and I turned around only to come face to face with the most severe looking mustache I had ever seen. It took everything I had not to reach out and touch it with the tip of my finger—see if I would bleed. The mustache had a face to match.
“Excuse me—but are you responsible for this man?” A heavy French accent, and a spray of spit. “Ms. Wilder?”
He sneered my name with the kind of disdain you only heard from villains in children’s TV shows. The veins in his neck throbbing with every vowel.
My face melted into a charming smile. The kind I should have been using on my date.
“That’s me. What seems to be the problem?”
There was a drunken splash behind me, and the smile tightened painfully.
For fuck’s sake, Nick. Could you make this any harder?
The man’s face darkened to an ugly shade of puce. An aneurysm was not too far behind.
“We were pleased to welcome Monsieur Hunter into our establishment today. As ever, his family’s patronage is greatly appreciated. But halfway through the cheese course, he took it upon himself to attempt to free the collection of lobsters we keep in the kitchen. My security man, Harold, found him frolicking in the tank.”
A hulking colossus beside him nodded obediently in my direction, his one contribution and a solemn one at that. Yeah...I could imagine Harold not taking that very well.
The manager’s voice lowered a fraction of an inch, straining the limits of professional decorum as the tale progressed into an aquatic chase.
“Normally we offer a degree of leniency to guests such as this, however...unconventional their antics might be. If it were not for the fact that we had planned on serving—”
“—planned on murdering,” Nick interrupted.
The manager’s nostrils flared like a bull. “The lobster cost five hundred a piece. Even though Monsieur Hunter offered to pay—they were already promised. When we refused to comply, he proceeded to enact what he loudly proclaimed as vigilante justice—”
My eyes snapped shut and I held up a hand for silence. I had a pretty good idea of where the story went from there. I was well familiar with Nick’s vigilante justice myself.
Five seconds...
“I’ll handle this,” I said sweetly, before turning back to the fountain.
Nick was still clinging to the center statue for support, a ten thousand dollar Armani suit dripping down his tall frame. His golden-brown hair was soaked and curling, and what looked like several claw-sized abrasions were crisscrossing his hands.
“Abby, don’t let him come in here,” he whispered loudly, streams of water dripping down his perfect, chiseled face. “You know how fascists frighten me.”
I rolled my eyes and took a step closer, hyper aware of the outrageously over-priced gown that I was still planning on returning the next day as I stepped forward on the wet tile.
“What are you doing, Nick?” I asked softly, looking him up and down in a practiced sort of way. There was a chance we were going to have to make a run for it—I needed to know how capable he was of doing something like that, and how much had been lost to the alcohol.
“I’m doing exactly what you told me to,” he said with a note of loyalty.
I blinked, trying very hard to maintain my composure.
“I told you to stage a crustacean rebellion?”
“No—you told me not to get arrested on your one night off.”
It took me a second to understand the unfathomable thought processes of his mind. Then, piece by piece, I started to string it together.
“Which is why you got into the fount
ain...a place where the cops wouldn’t follow.”
He winked. “Genius, right?” Sure enough, a trio of baffled-looking police were hovering just outside the splash zone. This did nothing to dissuade Nick, of course, who was looking rather proud of himself. “See Abby, I do listen when you tell me to stay out of trouble.”
I shook my head, eyes darting around as I tried to come up with a plan. “Seventeen nannies, you had. How is it that not one of them took the time to strangle you as a child?”