Affronted, Vince plants a hand over his heart. “Mean? You’ve got the wrong guy, Mina. I’ve never been mean a day in my life.”
I point a finger at him. “Or stupid jokes. Nothing that’ll make Nick feel . . . embarrassed.” Not that I don’t think he can’t handle any and all smack talk from his employees. I’m sure Nick can dish it with the best of them.
“Now you’re just taking away my fun.”
“You missed your opportunity,” I say with a loose shrug. “The position has already been filled.”
Vince’s espresso-coffee eyes glimmer with humor. “Yeah? By who?”
“This girl.” I flash him a quick grin, then circle my finger in the air in a let’s go gesture. “Remember, no trash-talking of any kind. Bring me Mr. Stamos and not only will you three be eating more pizza than you can handle this week, but I’ll also throw in a free haircut. You can thank me later when I make you look like the rock star you were born to be.”
Bribery, my friends. It’s a game-changer.
Bill slips me a proper side-eye. “All I want to know is if any of the pointy bits got stuck in his—”
Mark playfully swats him over the head. “Pizza, dude. Shut up and walk.”
Holding back a laugh, I follow the trio to the stairwell where we can hear Nick cursing loud enough for his mother to overhear from the other side of town. Four-letter words. Accented words. He gives them all his devout attention, and I holler, “Your rescuers have arrived!”
Vince leads the pack, Mark and Bill flanking him.
Within twenty minutes, after a fair bit of sawing and more than a handful of colorful phrases I’ll never be able to bleach from my memory, Nick is extracted and doing a poor job of disguising a limp as he takes to the stairs.
When I stare a little too long at his roughed-up leg, he irritably grumbles, “I look worse than I feel.”
I’m sure he’s telling the truth. Even so, guilt sloshes around in my belly like I’ve downed one too many shots of Tito’s as I touch a finger to his ripped jeans. They hang open from his right hip, exposing his navy briefs and the tiny scratches that are now etched into his muscled thigh. Most are pink but a few bleed red, and I force Nick to sit down while I rush out in the cold to the Stamos Restoration company van. It doesn’t take me long to find the First Aid kit tucked away in the spare duffel bag he mentioned would be behind the driver’s seat.
Back in Agape, I stomp the snow from my shoes and shake the flakes from my hair. After announcing, “You should go to the doctor,” I drop the duffel at his feet. It hits the concrete flooring with a dull thud.
Nick spares me an inscrutable glance before unzipping the bag and riffling through its contents. “And you need to find somewhere else to stay while we fix that stairway to hell.”
My lips purse at his unintended play on Led Zeppelin’s infamous “Stairway to Heaven” song. Focus, Mina. Right, right. Under my breath, I can’t help but hum along to the melody.
Pulling out a fresh pair of jeans from the duffel bag, Nick drops them to the floor and flicks open the medical kit. Only when he’s stripped off his tattered jeans does he say anything else—and, truth be told, I’m too busy admiring him in a pair of tight briefs to do anything but gawk.
The man is seriously blessed in more ways than one.
A masculine hand waves in front of my face. “Did you hear anything I just said?”
Cheeks flushing, I jerk my gaze up to safer territories. “Not a word.”
I expect him to reprimand me the way he’s always done, condescension coating each word. Instead, his mouth quirks up and he throws me a look like he doesn’t know what to do with me. Under normal circumstances—you know, with him being surly and uncommunicative—that glance would leave me feeling chilled all over. Instead, I feel indescribably toasty which is insane considering I’ve still got snowflakes melting into my hair and clothes.
“Let me repeat from the top.” Bending over, Nick grabs the medical wipes and proceeds to wipe away the beads of blood on his thigh. “You aren’t staying here.”
This time, I hear him perfectly. “Of course I am.”
“Not a chance in hell.”
Watching the rough way he deals with his injured skin, I bat his hands away and sink to my knees. “You would have gotten your point across better if you’d said, ‘over my dead body.’” With the chill of the concrete flooring seeping through the thin layer of leggings, I crane my head back to look Nick in the face. “At least that would be reasonably appropriate given the situation.”
He lifts one brow coolly. “Over my dead body.”
“Great.” I poke him in his uninjured shin. “Now lay down and play the part. You’re bleeding all over the place.”
“Better do what she says, boss,” remarks Bill with a hearty chuckle. “She sounds like she means business.”
Though I’m sure it grates on his nerves to play the part of damsel in distress, Nick maneuvers his big body onto the ground. While he doesn’t lie back as ordered—and I don’t blame him because this floor is filthy with sawdust and debris—he nevertheless reclines back on his palms and leaves his bare legs to my ministrations.
Even sitting, the muscles in his thighs are tight and incredibly firm. They clench when I hold a square piece of sterile gauze to the deepest gash. Pressing down with my thumb to stem the blood, I rearrange my legs so that I’m mostly seated on my butt. It’s more comfortable this way, and I have a sneaking suspicion we’ll be here for a while yet. No matter what he says, I can’t just stay elsewhere until the stairs are restructured.
Hell, it’s not even a matter of can’t but a matter of won’t.
“Let the guys go home for the day.”
Tensing beneath my fingers, Nick shakes his head. “Can’t. We need to stay on schedule. Drywall by Wednesday and floors put in by Friday. We keep this pace up, and you’ll be ready to go by the middle of the following week.”
I strip off another piece of gauze and apply it to one of his deeper wounds. Already the blood is drying. Growing up, First Aid kits weren’t a thing in our house. My mom loved concocting creams and herbal remedies, allegedly all passed down through our family. One time, Dimitri sprained his ankle, and instead of painkillers and a set of crutches, my mom whipped up a poultice and slathered it all over his foot. My younger brother gagged from the noxious smell, and even I watched on with my fingers plugging my nose shut as my mom bandaged his ankle with plastic wrap from the kitchen.
Crazily enough, it worked.
Without my mom’s magic, I settle for more hydrogen peroxide from the kit.
With a hasty look thrown over my shoulder, I spot the guys back at work. Rock music blares from the Bluetooth speakers as they nail another frame into place, and I find small comfort in all the noise. Hopefully it’s loud enough they won’t pay us any attention.
Nick’s fingers brush my arm. “Get it off your chest,” he murmurs, tracing those long, nimble fingers down to my wrist. “I can see the worry all over your face.”
I keep my gaze on the task at hand, cleaning each scratch like it’s a life or death situation. “I can’t stay anywhere else.”
“What about with Effie?”
Baby wisps of my hair fall into my face when I shake my head, and I shove them behind my ear with the back of my hand. “Not an option. She and Sarah are stressed enough without adding me as the unwanted third party to their twosome.”
“You could stay with me.”
He says it so simply, so matter-of-factly, that I laugh. Except—except that he doesn’t laugh along with me. Lifting my chin, I meet his somber gaze and . . . oh. Oh. He was being serious. My heart performs a strange flip in my chest, like a beached whale moored on shore. “A fake relationship and moving into your house?” I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth to hold back a startled giggle. “What are we? The leads in a Hallmark movie?”
His broad shoulder lifts, even as his gray eyes shine with amusement. “You’d be helping the I’m-over-Savannah storyline. Consider it payment compensated for that hydrotherapy room.”
“Now that’s a shameless plug if I’ve ever heard one. We’re not doing the hydrotherapy room.”
“It’s only shameless because you’re considering it.”
My hands pause over his leg. “Nick, I’m not—”
“Kidding,” he says with one of his customary tight smiles, “I’m kidding. Though it probably would help with the media.”
“We don’t need to move in together for that.” It’s only when he gives me nothing but a blank stare that I realize he doesn’t know anything about Celebrity Tea. Oh, boy. Dating TV show or not, privacy is Nick’s jam. And he has no idea someone followed us last night. Wishing I had some water to quench my suddenly dry throat, I motion between us. “Well, you know.”
His lips press together. “No, I don’t.”
Ugh, great. Couldn’t Effie have been the messenger for him too? “How do I even put this?” Struggling for the correct words, I drop the hydrogen peroxide bottle back in the kit and flip the lid closed. “You . . . we were tailed last night.” Immediately his expression turns hard and I hastily add, “I mean, maybe not tailed. That might not be the right term. But obviously someone did their research and found out where your parents lived, so they—”
“Stalked me.” His voice is pure grit. “They stalked me and caught us instead.”
I fumble for the right thing to say. Words have never been my expertise. “Nick, this is . . . this is what you wanted, right? Out of the deal?” Pushing the kit to the side, I tuck my feet beneath me, sitting cross-legged. Wanting to calm his frayed nerves, I touch my fingers to his knee. “The gossip rags are reporting that you’re seeing someone new, so it looks like we’re in business.”