With an exaggerated sigh, I obeyed. “Better?”
He didn’t answer, just stared at me with those gypsy eyes, and I looked right back. Twelve years’ distance, a career spent in court, staring down idiot lying spouses… Don’t mess with me, Nick. He seemed to sense it, because he looked away abruptly, back in the direction of the shambling bear. “Drinks later? For the sake of the kids?”
Do not be alone with him.
It was a line I often said to my clients. Seeing him alone would muddy the waters, stir up emotions best left untouched, possibly make you agree to things you shouldn’t.
I replaced my sunglasses. “Sure. Are you staying at the lodge?”
“Yes.” He had a way of saying yes, Nick did. Fast and sure and disproportionately hot, like he knew exactly what you were going to say and couldn’t wait to give you an affirmative. I’d forgotten about that. Crotch.
“Okay, then,” I said, and my voice sounded nice and normal. “I’m sure we can find a bar or something.”
It wasn’t until about a mile or two later, when I was sitting in the car next to Dennis, clutching his hand, that I was able to take a normal breath. That electric hum was downright painful now.
This was a horrible idea. Every aspect of this whole situation was wrong, wrong, wrong.
CHAPTER FOUR
LOOKING BACK AT MY LIFE thus far, I can’t say I exactly regret marrying Nicholas Sebastian Lowery. That being said, I knew he was trouble the very first day I met him. The very first second, even.
I didn’t regret it because I learned a lot. Well, my time with Nick confirmed a lot that I’d already believed. But when a man comes up to you in a bar and tells you you’re the woman he’ll marry, it’s a little…overwhelming. Plus, it’s not the usual come-on line often employed by college students. Even grad students.
I was a junior at Amherst, it was my twentieth birthday, my roomies had gotten me a fake ID, and we were breaking it in. The pub was crowded, hot and noisy. Music thumped, people shouted to be heard…and then I turned and saw a guy staring at me.
Just staring. Steady, unabashed, completely focused. Time seemed to stop for a second, and all those other people, they just faded away, as the dark-haired man…boy…just looked at me.
“You okay?” asked Tina, my closest college chum.
“Sure,” I said, and the spell was broken.
But the guy came over and sat at the table next to us and just kept looking at me, and—forgive the nauseating cliché—it felt as if he really saw me, because his concentration was so singular.
“What are you looking at, idiot?” I asked, giving him the sneer that had served me so well.
“My future wife. The mother of my children.” One corner of his mouth pulled up, and every female part I had squeezed warm and hard.
“Bite me,” I said, just about to turn away.
“Anything you want,” he answered, and then he grinned, that lightning-flash smile that said, Sure, I’m a jerk, but we both know I can get away with murder…and it was hard not to smile back. So I didn’t turn away. And I did smile.
“So when should we get married?” he asked, pulling his chair closer.
I checked him out discreetly. Nice hands. Beautiful eyes. Shiny dark hair—I was a sucker for dark-haired men. “I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on earth, bub.”
“Yet you’re ogling me,” he answered. “What are you drinking, wife?”
I laughed and said, “Crikey, the nerve. Sam Adams Octoberfest.”
I didn’t love my birthday, given my history with the date, but Tina had dragged me out with two other friends. All of us were in our junior year at Amherst, all of us receiving a stellar education at an extremely feminist-slanted college, all of us absolutely confident that the world held no boundaries, all of us planning to Do Important Things. And yet, those three friends took a respectful and almost envious step back. Look at Harper! Some guy is hitting on her! And he even used the M-word! Give her some space! Don’t blow it!
And though I now cringe to admit, I was swept off my feet, which came as quite a surprise to me. I guess that’s sort of the point of being swept.
Nick Lowery was unlike any of the pale, vague boyfriends I’d had up to this point (and I’d had many and loved none). He was, despite being only twenty-three, a grown-up. In school at UMass, getting his master’s in architecture. He already had a job lined up in June—a real job, not an internship, but as a practicing architect in New York City at a place that made huge buildings all over the world. He knew what he wanted, he had a plan to get it, and the plan was working. In a world of vaguely ambitious, overeducated, not-very-employable college students, he was rather thrilling.
We talked for hours that night. He drank without getting drunk and didn’t try to get me drunk, either. He listened when I spoke, his eyes intent. And such eyes! Too beautiful and tragic somehow, with a secret pain (cough), a gentle torment only an old soul could feel…well, it was clear I had a little too much to drink. Nick had grown up in Brooklyn, couldn’t wait to move back to the city, loved the New York Yankees, which resulted in some very fun trash talk (I won, somehow making the Sox sound noble and superior, despite the sorry season they were having). He asked me questions about what I wanted to do, what I loved learning, where I was from. He didn’t seem to grow bored, even when I waxed rhapsodic about environmental law, and he didn’t stare at my boobs. He just seemed to really…like me.
We were both a little shocked when the busboy asked us to leave, as it was now 2:30 a.m. Nick offered to walk me home, and as we crossed the lovely, still campus, he held my hand. That was a first for me—a boy who took my hand. That was a public statement of romantic intentions, and the boys I’d dated (and they were definitely all boys) tended more toward the shoulder bump. Hand-holding, I discovered, was quite the turn-on, though I pretended not to notice.
“Can I take you out sometime?” he asked in front of my dorm.
“Is that code for ‘Can I come in and have sex with you?’” I returned.
The answer came almost before I’d finished the question. “No.”
Another first.
I blinked. “Seriously? Because I probably would sleep with you.” Actually, at that moment, I wouldn’t have. At least I didn’t think so. But those eyes…that rather beautiful hand holding mine so firmly…“Are you asking me out on a date?”
“Yes.” That fast, certain yes. “Yes, I want to take you on a date. No, I don’t want to have sex with you. Not tonight, anyway.”
“Why? Are you a Mormon? Suffer from ED? Are you gay?”
He grinned, his gypsy eyes transformed. “No, no and no. Because, Harper Elizabeth James”—crap, I’d told him my entire name (and he remembered, oh sigh!)—“that would be…disrespectful.”
I blinked. “Well, now you have indeed rendered me speechless. I can state with absolute certainty that I have never before heard that particular line.” Prelaw. What can I say? We all sounded like pompous idiots. Plus, I’d had three whole beers, which made me sound even more idiotic and pompous.
But Nick seemed to think I was cute. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Now that one I’ve heard before. Full of sound and bullshit, signifying nothing.”
He called me nine hours later, having hacked into the college website to find my cell number. “It’s Nick.”
“Nick who?” I asked, blushing for perhaps the