“He passed out,” Abby whispered loudly, pointing at him with her thumb and rolling her eyes.
Oh? Wow. That something is suddenly a lot more interesting!
“Abby, that’s enough,” Nick warned.
She squeezed my arm and let out a lighthearted laugh. “The boy almost drowned.”
Whoa! Even more interesting still!
James glanced between them with an intrigued smile, but Nick looked scandalized.
“Abigail!”
“Max had to drag him out of the pool, and then—”
Nick clapped his hand over her mouth to stop her eyewitness testimony, then pinned her against his chest to silence her. “The exact details of the wager aren’t important. The point is that I lost.”
James folded his arms across his chest, grinning at them with tender affection. “So what were the stakes?”
Nick hesitated, then proceeded with caution. “Well, if I won, we would race across the Great Wall of China on dirt bikes, which I know you said wouldn’t be as fun the second time around, but Abby’s never done it.”
James glanced at Abby as if that was entirely unacceptable, but I pressed, “And if Abby won?”
Abby’s eyes shot up to gaze at her husband’s pained expression as he slowly lowered his hand from her face.
“Since Abby won, we’re going camping. It’s something she always loved doing growing up. And she says we don’t get enough of it.”
James nodded, but I could tell he was unfamiliar with the word, probably because, being of coddled British descent, practically royal and not to prone to roughing it, he only knew it from childhood comic strips and slasher films. “Like...out in the woods, with a tent and everything?”
A little grimace flickered across Nick’s face, but he forced a cheerful smile. “Yep.”
He and James locked eyes again before James looked away and chuckled. “Well, have fun with that. Call me if you get back...and remember, only you can prevent forest fires.”
“Don’t worry, love,” Abby said. “I’ll make sure he properly minds his wood.”
This time, it was Nick and Abby who exchanged a look, and she lifted her eyebrows and cocked her head in our direction, giving him a pointed smile.
“You know,” Nick said brightly, throwing his arm around James’s shoulder as we started moving slowly down the street, “it might be fun...for both of us.”
“Yeah. Well, I didn’t lose a bet, buddy,” James glanced down at his friend’s arm, then quickly extracted himself. “Loads of fun for both of you.”
Nick paused a second, hedging his bets, then flashed his most winning smile. “Maybe...for all four of us.”
Chapter 21
I QUICKLY REALIZED that in the world of billionaires, life could change in the blink of an eye. Nick, James, and Abby were used to it, but I was still trying to reconcile how I’d woken up that morning in a London penthouse, only to end the day in an alpine tent in the middle of the woods.
It certainly wasn’t easy to get there, not by a long shot. While Abby and I were rather excited to spend a week out in the middle of nowhere, our pampered boyfriends were a bit more hesitant.
“I just don’t understand why we have to do this,” James complained for the umpteenth time, throwing things at random into a designer suitcase. “It would be awesome to spend some time together, the four of us, but must we do this? Why can’t we go to Bali? I love Bali this time of year.” It was like listening to a child; the internationally famous sex god emotionally digressed to a whining four-year-old the second he saw his boyhood friend.
“Why are you so resistant to the idea?” Abby shot back, perched beside me on the couch. After all that time, she was immune to their antics and had long since carved out a place for herself beside them. “C’mon! You love the outdoors, James. I thought you were born to be adventurous. You spent an entire year living in a mountaintop hut with that Sherpa. What was his name?”
“His name was Pema...and how dare you pretend you don’t remember?” James shot back with a glare, throwing in a pair of swim trunks, along with a lone fork.
Nick flopped down on the opposite sofa and rolled onto his back like some demoralized invertebrate. “He’s right, Abby. Bali is gorgeous right now. Plus, there could be lions or tigers or bears. Oh my!”
James’s hands froze above his bag. “Wait. Bears?”