* * *
Five minutes later, I was racing back down the service elevator. From what I was able to pull up on my phone, the crowd was already mostly dispersed. In fact, if that taxi I’d requested still happened to be waiting outside, I might be able to sneak Nick out of the...
The doors opened and I looked around a deserted lobby.
Oh no! No, no, no, no, no!
A smiling building attendant caught my eye, and I hurried forward—my high heels clattering over the marble tile as I ran.
“Excuse me—have you seen Nicholas Hunter? He was supposed to be here—I asked him to wait for me?”
The man nodded calmly.
“And he did, miss. He waited for exactly one minute, and then he left.”
Of course he did.
“Okay,” I looked around breathlessly, “well, do you have any idea where he went? Is it a favorite bar, or maybe that gym downtown? The one with the boxing ring—”
“I don’t have to guess.” The man smiled good-naturedly. “When I called for his car, I asked where he was going to go, and he told me.”
That brought me up short.
“He...he did?” The list of possibilities I was scrolling through faded immediately from my mind, as I focused all my attention on this one man. “Well, where was it? Where did he go?”
He patted me cheerfully on the shoulder...then drastically changed my day.
“He went to Spain.”
Chapter 22
Spain. Nick got pissed off, so instead of waiting one more minute, he went to Spain.
...to be fair, I should have seen it coming.
The first day he and I ever met—the day his father showed up unannounced at his penthouse with the news he now had a publicist—that day had been a little rocky to say the least.
After Mitchell left, he and I had stared at each other for a good five minutes. Neither one of us moving, neither one of us talking. Just looking. Appraising. Deciding.
Then, with a skill and a charm I hadn’t yet learned to fear, he smiled and told me that he was going to grab a water from the kitchen. When he got back, we’d set up in the living room, he promised, and start going over a game plan for the next few months.
He hadn’t gone to the kitchen. He’d gone to Rome.
It was kind of his thing.
Some people drank when they got upset. Some people called up their best friend in a fit of tears. Some people (like me) buried themselves in a tub of ice cream watching old Sex in the City reruns until four in the morning.
Nick bought the first random airplane ticket he could find.
His girlfriend dumped him for cheating—he went to Iceland. He got back together and then re-dumped that same girlfriend for cheating—Bulgaria. His father screams at him for frivolous spending—it’s off to Argentina. His soccer team loses the game—Minsk.
Worst by far was the day he found out his favorite bike messenger had fallen in love and married the woman of his dreams (inadvertently moving him away to California). That time, Nick had vanished to Lebanese sheep farm for a month and threatened to never return.
In other words...I guess I was lucky it was just Spain.
By the time I landed in Barcelona (according to the travel itinerary I hacked into, I at least knew where he was going t
o touch down), it was coming up on ten at night. My Spanish was broken, at best, but I got into a cab and managed to have him drop me at the closest of three locations from which I’d start my search. You see, as unpredictable as Nick could be, in some ways, he was actually quite traditional.