Chapter 4
BY THE TIME WE GOT back to Nick’s penthouse on the Upper East Side, he was passed out on my lap. He’d tried several times to undress himself—seized with the sudden intoxicated fear that he’d ‘catch his death of cold’ in the heated luxury vehicle. But thankfully (and with a little impromptu help from our driver), those fears had been put to bed.
I played absentmindedly with his wet curls as we pulled up against the curb.
This was another place that had shocked me the first time I saw it. Yet another glimpse into the world of the rich and powerful that had stopped me in my tracks.
Now? I knew the name of every bell-boy and receptionist. I knew which days to get the mail so that Nick wouldn’t have to see the more disparaging headlines about himself. I knew which things he was allergic to, and which chefs he preferred in the kitchen. I even knew the employee passcode to the service elevator to sneak out his various overnight guests so they wouldn’t run into one another on the stairs.
Yes—this place no longer had any secrets from me.
In a strange way, it almost felt like home.
“Max,” I rolled down the window a crack when I spotted Nick’s bodyguard, “can you help me over here?”
The man hurried over. Tall. Italian. And concerned.
We had discovered Max on a last-minute trip to Rome. Nick had promised some barista he’d met online that he would pick her up at the end of her shift (at the time, he may have also been pretending to be Italian). At any rate, it was a good thing we were in Germany at the time, because against all the odds, we actually made it to the café where she worked just as it reached closing. Unfortunately, we had not counted on the presence of her body-building Italian husband.
Max had swooped in to save the day. He’d been sitting outside, drinking with friends, and had taken pity on Nick’s half-hearted attempts to explain himself in broken Italian. Educated in the States, Max understood his English perfectly—whereas the husband did not—and stepped in just in time to stop him from getting his ass kicked by a band of Italian thugs.
He’d been an indispensable member of our team ever since. Ironically, his daily tasks hadn’t varied much from that first day.
“I thought you were supposed to be on your big date tonight,” he ventured, as he opened the door and helped me lift Nick out of the car.
The guy was class act—didn’t look once at my increasingly revealing ensemble. Didn’t even mention the fact that we were both soaking wet.
“Yeah,” I gritted my teeth as we stumbled towards the revolving door, “so did I.”
Together, we managed to get Nick to the penthouse elevator and lower him down to the floor. Insisting on a private elevator for Nick’s exclusive use, was one of the first changes I made when appointed head of his PR team. There were simpl
y too many wild variables in his life to risk mixing him with the rest of the population.
The doors dinged opon on the top floor, and Max offered me a sympathetic smile.
“You want me to carry him the rest of the way in?”
Nick snored obliviously on the ground beneath us—his face pressed up against a piece of Ethiopian marble that cost more than my whole apartment.
I nudged him tentatively with my shoe and shook my head.
“Naw—we’ll manage. Thanks, Max.”
With the practiced skill of someone who had done it far too many times, I draped Nick’s arm once more over my shoulder and half-carried him into the foyer. As the door dinged shut behind us, Max bid me a typical goodnight.
“Sorry about your date.”
I waved over my head with a quiet sigh.
“Me too.”
The door closed, and the two of us limped across the tile towards the bedroom.
Nick was in that hazy drunken state between consciousness and sleep, and although he tried his best to help me, it was an arduous journey at best. When we finally made it inside, he made a bee-line for the bed—only to get stopped by me.
“Not so fast.”
He stood there obediently as I took off first his suit jacket, then the white collared shirt just below. Both of them peeled off his skin, before landing in a wet pile on the floor.