Chapter 1
For the last two years, my life had not been my own. Every minute, every phone call, every holiday and party had all been in the service of someone else. I’d learned to eat quicker, so I’d be ready to pick up the phone at a moment’s notice. I carried my passport constantly in my purse. My emergency contact was Louise-the-Bavarian-housekeeper.
The very essence of me had been temporarily shanghaied by another. All personal growth and development put on hold so I could make someone else my focus. A person whose quirks and dreams I knew even better than my own. The same person I’d spent the last two years of my life chasing around the globe as he indulged whim after whim.
But something changed that night in Spain. An irrevocable and permanent shift. One with so many rippled implications, it would take a lifetime to sort them all out. All I knew at the time, was that for the first time in two years, the tables had suddenly turned.
For the first time in two years...Nicholas Hunter was the one chasing after me.
“Abby!”
The two of us careened out into the night, one after the other. Dodging cars, tripping on cobblestones, blurring past a midnight portrait of Barcelona. For the first time since we’d arrived, the exquisite moonlit streets held no allure for me. As spellbinding as the city was, I was temporarily immune to its charms. My only thought was to escape. I had to get to the airport.
“Abby—please! Wait!”
He was catching up. Although I didn’t dare turn around as I sprinted down the cold streets toward the main thoroughfare that led back to the airstrip, his footfalls were getting steadily louder. It was only a matter of seconds before he was right in front of me, and then what? What the hell was I supposed to do once the two of us were standing face to face?
Thinking fast, I slipped through a tiny gap between two cars stuck in traffic—a gap too small for Nick to follow. A feeling of momentarily relief washed over me, until I glanced back to see him simply jump over the hood of the second car—sliding across it like some kind of secret agent, hardly even breaking his stride.
What the hell do they teach those kids at boarding school?!
I picked up the pace again, but even as I rounded a corner and saw the bright lights of the airport flickering in the distance, I knew it was too late. A sudden paralysis came over me, and I stopped dead in my tracks—gazing numbly out toward the horizon.
A second later, Nick skidded to a stop at my side.
Unlike me, he wasn’t even out of breath. If anything, the impromptu dash seemed to have revitalized him. Tousling his hair and flushing his cheeks with fresh color.
He was, however, looking uncharacteristically cautious. His muscles tensed and his eyes were alert. As if at any moment, I might sprint back out into traffic and the chase would be on.
“Abby?”
I stayed put, but I refused to look up into those eyes. Not even for a moment. They would only derail me, and this was one argument I could not afford to lose.
It wasn’t just that he’d asked me to replace Ella. To pretend to be his girlfriend in the eyes of the world for three more months until the merger. It wasn’t just that he was drunk, and I was drunk. It wasn’t just that we’d been grinding up against each other in a nightclub in Spain. It wasn’t even that he’d been about to kiss me. (Although...what the fuck?!)
It was that I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he wasn’t going to back down.
It simply wasn’t in his nature. He would do whatever it took, say whatever he needed to, hold out for however long was required until he got his way.
And that...was career suicide.
“You know I can’t do that, Nick.” My breath came out shallow and quick, the taste of sugared tequila was hanging on my tongue. “I could never do that.”
He folded his arms across his chest.
“Why not? You asked me to do it. Why won’t you?”
The words fired out sharp and precise. Not an ounce of hesitation or leniency. It was that damn Oxford debate team again. Why couldn’t he have picked up a less useful skill?
“I didn’t ask you to do it,” I countered quickly, knowing all the while that it wasn’t entirely true. “Your father asked you to do it. For the company. For the board—”
“But you know I don’t care about any of those things,” he replied evenly. “You were the one who asked me. I did it, because the request came from you.”
“Nick—”
“And now I’m asking.” In one swift movement, he tilted up my chin. Forced me to look into those impossible eyes after all. “I’m asking you to do this for me.”
An involuntary shiver tingled down my spine, and I took a deliberate step back, creating a well-needed barrier of space between the two of us.
“That’s not fair,” I said quietly.
For the first time, he smiled—incredulous as it was.
“How is it not fair? I’m literally asking exactly the same thing you asked of me—”