Page 5 of One More Time
‘Okay, have fun!’ Lucy yelled back.
‘Don’t wait up for me!’
‘I won’t!’
Lucy had her own Vegas craziness to deal with. And his name was Nicky Broome.
CHAPTER FOUR
LUCY
The knock came at exactly 7:30, like he’d been waiting outside the door for the precise time they’d arranged before making his move. Lucy knew it was exactly 7:30, because she had been sitting on the sofa nervously tapping her foot while staring at her phone as the 29 had switched to 30.
She thought she was ready. She was dressed, that much was true, but as she opened the door and saw Nicky Broome waiting for her, Lucy knew with one-hundred-percent certainty that she was notready.
Nicky Broome just casually standing in a doorway was a damn marvel. It was an expensive cologne ad. A work of art. A fucking Times Square billboard.
He was tall and broad, but not in a gym-rat way. He was lean, elegant. He wore a black Henley, sleeves pushed up to his elbows. Dark jeans. Simple, really. Nothing special. Except the walls of the Lusso’s penthouse floor were gold-leafed and the light from the sconces was warm and dim. It made his skin seem lit from within.
The colorful tattoos on his arms rippled with the movement of muscles and sinew beneath as he shoved his hands in his pockets. And for a second – less time than it took her to exhale a wistful sigh – he looked like himself. His old self. The boy Lucy used to know. She had to close her eyes against the slap of pure nostalgia that threatened to knock her over.
When she opened her eyes again, Nicky’s artfully messy brown hair had flopped over his forehead. He smiled and she noticed that he was freshly shaven. The idea that he might have shaved for her made her heart skip and her cheeks heat.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘You look great.’
‘You too,’ Lucy replied.
Nicky leaned forward just as Lucy was pulling the door open. Maybe he was moving to kiss her cheek? Or maybe it was some sort of famous-guy air-kiss situation? Either way, with Lucy backing up to open the door, it ended up being more of a stumble over the threshold.
Instinctively, Lucy grabbed his shoulder to keep him from falling.
It took about a nanosecond for her brain to catch up, which was when she transitioned from a protective grab to an epically awkward half-hug of his bicep.
Wow, killing it so far.
‘Still up for drinks?’ Nicky half-chuckled, with a sweet smile that told her he was going to ignore her graceless bumbling.
‘Sure,’ she replied, dropping his arm like it was radioactive and trying to keep her cringe strictly internal.
Lucy took her clutch from the entry table, closed the door behind her, and fell into step at Nicky’s side.
As they started down the hallway, the damn thing seemed to elongate. Like a horror movie. The elevator somehow got farther away the more they progressed. Maybe it was a function of the implacable silence stretching between them. Or perhaps it was the constant refrain of ‘what is happening to my life right now?’ that was pounding in her skull like bad techno at a rave. Either way, by the time they finally reached the elevator and Nicky pushed the down button, the tension between them had expanded and sucked up all the oxygen in Las Vegas.
The silence was a weight pressing on Lucy’s chest. She wouldn’t last ten more minutes like that, let alone however long drinks with a rock star might take. (They were all champion drinkers, weren’t they?)
She turned to him. ‘If it’s going to be too weird—’
Only to catch the end of whatever he was saying at the same time, something like ‘… don’t want it to be awkward.’
They laughed at their overlap.
‘You first,’ he said.
Lucy grimaced. ‘It feels weird, right? Does it feel weird?’
He sighed. ‘I wouldn’t say weird. It’s just been a long time.’
Twenty-eight years. It had beentwenty-eightyears.
