Page 5 of Heavy Hitter

Jimmy gapes at her for a moment, the silence stretching out like taffy between them. “What do you want me to say?” he asks finally, feeling caught out and a little embarrassed. “Like, am I attracted to you? Of course I’m attracted to you. Do you even—I mean, everybody is attracted to you.”

He’s trying to couch it in the broadest, most general terms possible, but Lacey’s smile, when it comes, feels decidedly specific. “Okay,” she agrees, like she’s pleased they concur on the terms of the arrangement. “I’m attracted to you, too.”

Jimmy feels a trapdoor open deep inside him, the unmistakable sensation of something tumbling right the hell through. “Okay,” he echoes slowly.

“So, like I was saying,” she continues, folding her hands neatly in her lap, “let’s go somewhere.”

Chapter Three

Lacey

JIMMY DOESN’T SAY ANYTHING FOR A FULL THIRTY SECONDS AFTER she suggests it. Lacey watches as a thousand different expressions skitter across his face: amusement, curiosity, deep and abiding skepticism. A warm flicker, quick but unmistakable, of desire.

“What... would even be the procedure for something like that?” he asks finally, rubbing a speculative hand over his beard. “For you to, like, leave a location? Do you need to call someone?”

“Like who?”

Jimmy shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says. “The Secret Service? Whoever you call.”

“The Secret—” Lacey snorts. “You’re insane.”

“I’m insane?” Jimmy laughs, low and rumbling. “You’re the international superstar who wants to leave this very nice bar with me, some fat fuck you just met.”

“First of all, don’t say it like that.”

“Like what?”

“You know like what.” She pitches her voice low and dopey. “International superstar.”

Jimmy smirks. “What, am I embarrassing you?”

“No, of course not, I just—”

“Because I gotta tell you, you’re pretty successful. It’s a little late for polite modesty about your career.”

Lacey huffs a breath. “Okay,” she says, shaking her head, angling her body away from him. This was a wild hair, that’s all. She was being silly for a minute. “You know what? If you don’t actually want to do this, then—”

“Hold on a second,” he cuts her off, holding a finger up. “I definitely never said I didn’t want to.”

“Really?” she counters. “Because I wouldn’t say you sound particularly enthusiastic about the idea.”

Jimmy fixes her with a look then, long and leveling. “Lacey,” he says, so quietly she almost doesn’t hear him. “Come on.”

Lacey breathes in, the sound of him saying her name briefly but violently rearranging all her organs. She knew who he was before he came over here. Of course she knew who he was, Jimmy Hodges with his beard and his big shoulders and his unfashionable button-down. He was Rookie of the Year back when she was in high school, all shaggy hair and sulky mouth and a million ingenue girlfriends. Lacey had his milk ad taped to the wall above her bed. He’s thirty-seven or thirty-eight now, she calculates, five or six years older than she is. She clocked him as soon as he walked in.

“Wait here,” she instructs, then gets up to go find Javi.

There is a procedure, obviously. The procedure is that she tells Claire where she wants to go and Claire handles it, calling ahead to let them know Lacey’s coming and coordinating with Javi and the rest of the security team. At least, that’s how it used to work. She stopped going to so many places when she was dating Toby, on account of how moody and jealous he always got whenever they went out.

Fuck Toby, Lacey thinks with surprising ferocity. And fuck Claire! Well, no, not fuck Claire, Lacey loves Claire. Claire is arguably the person she is closest to in the entire world, but fuck the procedure. The procedure is how she wound up with Toby in the first place, the two of them set up on a lunch date by their managers in LA three years ago. The procedure feels abruptly absurd.

Javi is standing near the emergency exit, crisp as nine a.m. in his tailored blue suit even though it’s well after midnight. “I want to get out of here,” she tells him. “And I want to travel light.”

Javi nods, his gaze flicking over her shoulder for a fraction of a second. Travel light means one bodyguard and a driver. “All right.”

She finds Jimmy right where she left him, tall and broad and barrel-chested, incongruous in the floral print and neon of the club. “Come on,” she says, and she can hear that she sounds a little breathless. “Let’s go.”

Jimmy considers her for another moment, like he’s gauging something. “Okay,” he agrees finally. “Let’s go.”

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