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In the land of public relations, they called it the twenty second rule. It meant that from the moment you set foot on hostile territory, you had twenty seconds to make a game plan. Twenty short seconds to assess the situation, create your spin, plot your escape, and make your move.
Normally, twenty seconds was more than enough time. I had once snuck a wealthy client down a fourteen-story fire escape, dressed in nothing but a poncho, in less than ten.
But this wasn’t your average client. The Reverie wasn’t your average establishment. And right now...? Right now, I’d give anything for a fire escape.
Alright, Abby—you’re on. Twenty seconds starts...now!
I slipped through the crowd like an otter cutting through foamy surf, my layers of chiffon clouding up behind me. The timer was on, and I didn’t have the luxury of being either polite or delicate. Fortunately, my thirty-inch heels provided a great incentive to get out of my way. The last set of stockbrokers parted in front of me, and all at once, I skidded to a stop.
There you are.
International sex idol. Whimsical philanthropist. Playboy extraordinaire. Heir to the largest fortune in the Western Hemisphere. And the bane of my existence.
Nicholas Hunter.
At fourteen, he had been named one of the five most beautiful people on the planet. The Belgian royal family had tried to adopt. He’d opened the Olympics twice—performed in them as a last-minute pole-vaulting addition once. He’d backpacked through every country where you could still find espresso. Literally orbited the earth’s atmosphere on a dare. Destroyed a priceless Egyptian artifact when he tried to take an ill-timed selfie. And on three separate occasions, he had turned an official state dinner into an impromptu rave.
At present, he was standing in the center of the fountain. Dripping wet. Drunk as hell. His hand wrapped around the breast of one of the statuesque angels in an unintentional grope.
“Abby!” he cried the second he saw me.
He was the only one who called me Abby. Even my mother was not so bold. To everyone else, it was Abigail. Abigail Wilder. PR maven extraordinaire. A credit to her industry. A savior to her clients. A razor-tongued blessing to those who employed her, and a curse to those who stood in her way. (This was all printed on my business cards. In so many words.)
But to him, I was Abby. And to me, he was Nick.
We’d dropped the formalities about the third time I’d had to stash him naked in the back of my car. Hiding under a pashmina as I smuggled him through security.
Fifteen seconds. Make them count.
“What are we into this time, Nick?”
Every rescue started the exact same way. A simple question, followed by a lengthy explanation—so convoluted and self-righteous, it defied rational comprehension.
Sure enough, he was ready for me.
“Lobsters,” he answered promptly.
This one actually threw me for a second. A second I didn’t have.
“...lobsters?”
Instinctively, I looked down into the water below—half expecting him to be standing in the middle of a small colony, teaching them how to unionize.
“What did you...” A flashbulb went off behind me, and my voice lowered sharply. “What do you mean—lobsters? What did you do?”
He tilted his head defiantly to the side, still holding onto the angel for balance.
“Why do you automatically assume this is my fault?”
My eyes made a slow journey from the top of his dripping head, to the bottom of his submerged four hundred dollar shoes. Even he had the decency to blush.
Ten seconds...
There was a sharp tap on my shoulder, and I turned around only to come face to face with the most severe looking mustache I had ever seen. It took everything I had not to reach out and touch it with the tip of my finger—see if I would bleed. The mustache had a face to match.
“Excuse me—but are you responsible for this man?” A heavy French accent, and a spray of spit. “Ms. Wilder?”
He sneered my name with the kind of disdain you only heard from villains in children’s TV shows. The veins in his neck throbbing with every vowel.
My face melted into a charming smile. The kind I should have been using on my date.
“That’s me. What seems to be the problem?”
There was a drunken splash behind me, and the smile tightened painfully.
For fuck’s sake, Nick. Could you make this any harder?
The man’s face darkened to an ugly shade of puce. An aneurysm was not too far behind.
“We were pleased to welcome Monsieur Hunter into our establishment today. As ever, his family’s patronage is greatly appreciated. But halfway through the cheese course, he took it upon himself to attempt to free the collection of lobsters we keep in the kitchen. My security man, Harold, found him frolicking in the tank.”
A hulking colossus beside him nodded obediently in my direction, his one contribution and a solemn one at that. Yeah...I could imagine Harold not taking that very well.
The manager’s voice lowered a fraction of an inch, straining the limits of professional decorum as the tale progressed into an aquatic chase.
“Normally we offer a degree of leniency to guests such as this, however...unconventional their antics might be. If it were not for the fact that we had planned on serving—”
“—planned on murdering,” Nick interrupted.
The manager’s nostrils flared like a bull. “The lobster cost five hundred a piece. Even though Monsieur Hunter offered to pay—they were already promised. When we refused to comply, he proceeded to enact what he loudly proclaimed as vigilante justice—”
My eyes snapped shut and I held up a hand for silence. I had a pretty good idea of where the story went from there. I was well familiar with Nick’s vigilante justice myself.
Five seconds...
“I’ll handle this,” I said sweetly, before turning back to the fountain.
Nick was still clinging to the center statue for support, a ten thousand dollar Armani suit dripping down his tall frame. His golden-brown hair was soaked and curling, and what looked like several claw-sized abrasions were crisscrossing his hands.
“Abby, don’t let him come in here,” he whispered loudly, streams of water dripping down his perfect, chiseled face. “You know how fascists frighten me.”
I rolled my eyes and took a step closer, hyper aware of the outrageously over-priced gown that I was still planning on returning the next day as I stepped forward on the wet tile.
“What are you doing, Nick?” I asked softly, looking him up and down in a practiced sort of way. There was a chance we were going to have to make a run for it—I needed to know how capable he was of doing something like that, and how much had been lost to the alcohol.
“I’m doing exactly what you told me to,” he said with a note of loyalty.
I blinked, trying very hard to maintain my composure.
“I told you to stage a crustacean rebellion?”
“No—you told me not to get arrested on your one night off.”
It took me a second to understand the unfathomable thought processes of his mind. Then, piece by piece, I started to string it together.
“Which is why you got into the fountain...a place where the cops wouldn’t follow.”
He winked. “Genius, right?” Sure enough, a trio of baffled-looking police were hovering just outside the splash zone. This did nothing to dissuade Nick, of course, who was looking rather proud of himself. “See Abby, I do listen when you tell me to stay out of trouble.”
I shook my head, eyes darting around as I tried to come up with a plan. “Seventeen nannies, you had. How is it that not one of them took the time to strangle you as a child?”
He shrugged carelessly, noticing the breast on the angel for the first time.
“I tend to live...”
The title of his future memoir.
Alright—time’s up, Wilder. What’cha got?
“What’s that?” I leaned back with a look of theatric surprise and raised my voice to be heard by the crowd. “You were raising awareness for environmental groups protesting inhumane practices inherent in the commercialization of shellfish?”
Not my greatest story, but he hadn’t left me many options.
The manager shook a fist towards the heavens, but Nick flashed me a secret grin and nodded sagely—discreetly angling his ‘good side’ towards the cameras.
“As many of you know, the passionate advocacy for mollusks and other forms of sea life is a cause very near and dear to my heart.”
“Don’t over-sell it,” I muttered, clenching my teeth together in a perfect smile.
“At any rate, I think tonight has taught us all a valuable lesson.” He levelled the long-suffering manager in his gaze, holding him hilariously accountable. “Isn’t that right, Marcel?”
...don’t push it.
Marcel turned with a vengeful glare to the police.
“Fire at will.”
There was a split-second pause, during which nobody moved.
Then I threw back my head with the loudest laugh I could possible manage. A second later, the rest of the patrons joined in. Then the press. Laughter gave way to applause, as if the entire debacle was some kind of aquatic performance art. Only Marcel the manager looked supremely disappointed, as the cops holstered their tasers and headed home.
“There’s a car waiting out front,” I muttered under the cover of applause. “Get your ass out of the fountain, Nick. I’m taking you home.”
He waved to his adoring fans, tilting precariously as the water sloshed up around his ankles. “That might be a little difficult, as I’m not entirely sure I can stand.” His eyes flickered guiltily to the four empty bottles of champagne sitting on his abandoned table. “You’re going to have to come in here and get me.”
Go in there?!
“Nick,” I hissed between my teeth, “I’m wearing new shoes.”
“So take off your shoes.”
“And a new dress.”
His eyes sparkled with a devilish wink.
“Well, you know what I’m going to say to that.”
My blood boiled as I gauged my rather limited options. The applause was already starting to die down, and the police were only a stone’s throw away. It also had to be said, that Nick didn’t look very capable of supporting his own weight right now.
He looked handsome. And wet. And very, very drunk.
“You’re serious right now?” I stalled. “You’re really going to make me come in there?”
He didn’t answer. Just blinked at me and stepped further into the fountain.
Of for the love of—
A bitter sigh slipped past my teeth as I kicked off my shoes, hiked up my designer dress, and waded tentatively into the fountain.
“You might be worried about the cops, but you should know that I’m going strangle you myself in the car on the way home,” I warned, stepping carefully over a hundred well-wishers’ coins. “I’m going to do what the nannies couldn’t.”
“Abby—you came!” he exclaimed, delighted that I’d joined him.
I rolled my eyes and draped his arm heavily over my shoulder.
Get a job in public relations, they said. It will be easy, they said.
Remind me to hunt those people down and choke them with a lobster.
“Just don’t get met wet,” I commanded, as we navigated our way slowly to the rim. “If I’m really lucky, I think I can still salvage this—”
FUCK!
His foot caught on the edge of a statue, and the two of us went down—landing on our backs in the freezing water, drawing yet another round of delighted cheering from the crowd.
I closed my eyes in complete mortification, feeling as the clouds of billowing chiffon filled slowly with water and sank like designer kelp to the bottom of the pool. The miniature crystals sewn into the skirt were soon to follow—loosening themselves one by one and sinking down to a watery grave.
A burst of sparkling laughter brought me back to the present.
“Abby!” Nick yanked the soggy slip of paper off my dress with a drunken grin, “you left the price tag on!”
* * *
“No—it’s not funny! It’s actually not funny at all! And if you keep laughing, I’m going to shank you with my stiletto!” I shoved him into the town car and clambered in behind—my wet dress clinging to my legs. “Straight home—Bobby.”
The driver glanced back with a professionally restrained smile, and pulled away from the curb. When Nick started talking again, he discreetly rolled up the partition.
“You’re going to shank me?!” he asked with a dripping smile.
“I’m from Brooklyn,” I replied flatly. “Why? What do they do at boarding school?”
“We stab, Abby. We stab.”
I shot him a withering look.
“Well not everyone can be as pretentiously poetic as you.”
With another word, I swiveled away from him, looking down in dismay at my once-perfect ensemble. Not only had my princess dress become some kind of body-suit, hugging onto me like a second skin, but my perfectly coifed curls hung in limp tendrils down my chest. I was Cinderella alright. If Cinderella had gotten dunked in a mountain stream.
“Sorry about the car, Bobby,” I called through the partition. “I’ll get it serviced for you in the morning.” My voice dropped several accusatory octaves. “Right after I write the Reverie a rather exorbitant check...”
“You can just say it, Abby.” Nick took off each of his shoes and emptied them into the car with a look of supreme patience. “No need to be passive aggressive.”
Oh yeah? Then I’d show him ACTUALLY aggressive!
“You EAT lobster!” I cried. “You eat lobster ALL THE TIME!”
“But I never had to actually SEE them before, Abby!” Nick’s voice rose with self-righteous indignation to be just as loud as mine. “Not their FACES!”
His eyes grew wide as he remembered. A drunken shudder ran through his body.
“It was like they were screaming,” he concluded darkly. A look of absurd seriousness shadowing his face. “And only I could hear the screams.”
I glared at him for a moment, before crossing my arms and turning back to the window in a sulk. “You could not hear the screams.”
“I could hear them.”
On the other side of the car, Nick was glaring out his own window—just like me.
“Oh yeah?” I countered petulantly. “What did they sound like?”
“...you wouldn’t understand.”