Home > Hold Me Today (Put A Ring On It #1)(9)

Hold Me Today (Put A Ring On It #1)(9)
Author: Maria Luis

Unfortunately, “oh shit” isn’t a viable option—and I’m prepared to push a hard bargain.

Before he can protest, I dig into my shoulder bag and pull out a manila folder with my budget plan. A budget plan that took me longer than it should have to draw up. Maybe if I had more in the budget, I could hire a financial analyst to help me move all the puzzle pieces into place.

But I don’t have money to spare, so it’s as good as it’ll ever get.

One by one, I move the papers around on Nick’s desk, angling them so the writing is upside down for me but clear as day for him.

I need this to work.

I can’t—can’t—fail. I won’t let that happen to me, to my dream.

“I have enough money to cover the remaining material costs. Maybe not as many of the high-end features I’ve been eyeing but Agape will look beautiful no matter what.” I’ll cry over my lack of slate floors another day. And the hydrotherapy room I’ve been dying to put in. Ugh. Floors can be replaced. Fixtures can be updated. Rooms can be altered later on. But I’ll never have another opportunity to get the ball rolling like I do now. “I can purchase the necessities—the sinks and the laminate flooring and mirrors and all that.”

And if my personal finances squeeze a little too tight over the next few months, then that’s just fine.

The dream makes it all worth it.

My chest tightens, heart skedaddling into an uncoordinated two-step, and I risk a glance up at Nick.

He’s as rigid as stone.

Keep talking!

The heel of my hand lightly taps on the desk, and I focus on my research. On my plans. And pointedly ignore the fact that Effie’s older brother looks like he’s planning to expedite my death just so I’ll get out of his hair.

His curly hair.

Hair I’ve cut only once—the day before his wedding.

Ruthlessly, I shove the thought aside and take a deep, steadying breath. “I was told the renovations wouldn’t last any longer than a month. Maybe less if longer hours are put in.” The expected timeline I printed out over the weekend mocks me with its set-in-stone punctuality. I’m already behind schedule. Yay. “I don’t know how to say this exactly, but I . . . I wouldn’t be here if there was an alternative.”

There isn’t one.

No other options that I can foresee except for Nick, a man I’ve known for decades, coming in to save the day.

It wouldn’t be the first time he’s gone out of his way to help me, but overhauling Agape is a heck of a lot more time-consuming than a single dance spun around his mother’s living room on prom night. No one asked me to the dance, and he . . . well, Nick had made me feel special. That one dance spurred fantasies of the two of us for months after, each one rawer and more sexual than the last. Or as sexually explicit as any virgin eighteen-year-old knows how to get, at any rate.

“What’s in it for me?”

My chin jerks up, tongue pressing flat to the roof of my mouth to keep myself from asking what he means. Think before you speak, my tutor in school reminded me whenever I grew flustered in class, allow yourself the moment to truly think about what’s been said.

I do that now, acutely aware of the fact that sweat beads on my brow and my spine has never been straighter in my life. What does he mean? What does he mean? Logic tells me that the romance novels I always listen to are misleading—he’s not asking for me, the woman, but something else.

I just don’t know what.

I drum my fingers on the desk and summon vague words to my tongue. “I have enough cash in the bank to buy anything we might need.” Leaning forward, I tap on the upper corner of one sheet, and wait for Nick’s gaze to drop to where I point. “I took out a bank loan to buy the place. The chances of them giving me another so soon is unlikely.” A hard swallow that feels like I’ve downed a sharp-edged boulder. God, it rankles to have to come crawling, metaphorically on my hands and knees, and ask this of him. Especially because . . . “I can’t pay you, Nick.”

I’d planned to bust in here with the reminder that he owes me for letting my reputation swirl down the drain of misrepresentation. After his wedding night, everyone assumed I slept with an almost-married man—and I let them believe what they wanted.

Because Nick needed me that night. He needed a friend, someone to sit beside him and offer comfort while he grieved the loss of the woman of his dreams . . .

And I’d hoped, in the deepest, most secret parts of my soul, that moment would be the one when he realized Mina Pappas—that I—was the girl he’d been searching for all along.

We didn’t kiss. Didn’t hold hands.

He slept atop the covers in his wedding tux. I burrowed beneath the sheets in my pajamas, pretending the warmth that surrounded me wasn’t 100% Egyptian cotton but the heavy weight of his muscular arms tugging me in close.

Hope dwindled to resigned acceptance as the little and big hands on the hotel’s grandfather clock mixed and mingled, signaling the passage of time.

When his yiayia burst into the room the next morning to check on her poor, heartbroken grandson, everything went straight to the shitter.

Did you hear how Mina Pappas snuck into his bed? the elderly women at church whispered the following Sunday. She’s so bad. Poor Nick, having to suffer through all that.

He’d suffered the nightmare experience of bad, naughty Mina, and I lived and breathed the afterlife of seducing good, nice guy Nick.

The damage was done, no matter what he or I said to anyone. And, boy, did Nick throw a fuss. Good, old Saint Nick, martyring himself to the fight of proving to all that I did nothing wrong. If he could have posted a bulletin that announced, WE DID NOT HAVE SEX, he would have. It wasn’t the first time (and certainly won’t be the last) that a woman felt the brunt of the fall.

I don’t blame Nick, especially knowing how much it bothered him that no one paid him any mind. I don’t blame him, no, but that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten the one get-out-of-jail-free card I’ve carried with me all these years.

Except here I am, desperate for his help, and I can’t even bring myself to rake him over the coals and bring up the old hurt. His hurt at being left at the altar; my hurt at realizing that my youthful fascination for my best friend’s older brother would never amount to anything more. At the end of the day, I’m nothing but big talk. Nick could backstab me tomorrow and I’d never do anything to make him feel the same pain inflicted on me.

That’s how friendships, how family should be, even if it’s a lesson not yet learned by all in the Pappas household.

I let out one long exhale that rattles in my chest.

Rock bottom, how we meet again.

Instead of answering, Nick rouses his sleeping desktop with a shake of the mouse, then adjusts the monitor so I can see the screen too. Curiosity has me literally sitting on the edge of my seat as he opens a new internet tab and taps away on the keyboard.

I wait, heart in my throat, for him to make the next move.

Or at least clue me in to whatever it is he’s thinking.

Like that’s ever going to happen.

When the page finally loads, I find my voice. “TMZ, Nick?” I try not to laugh at the thought of him scouring celebrity tabloid sites late at night before bed. “I never would have pictured you as—holy crap.”

I blink.

Then blink again.

Lift my butt clear off the chair and lean across the wide desk to grip the computer monitor and twist it so that I can get a better look.

“Oh, my God, CT wasn’t high.”

Yup, that right there is one-hundred percent Nick Stamos down on one knee. He’s dressed in the most godawful Hawaiian T-shirt I’ve ever seen, and the shorts he’s wearing aren’t much better. All he needs is a frat-boy visor on his head and he’d look like every other American tourist who used to crowd the Greek beaches in my family’s village.

I feel a swift kick of something right in the gut when I fix my attention on the woman he’s kneeling before. She’s stunning. The sort of stunning I used to see, and stare at in awe, while bingeing America’s Next Top Model episodes.

Back when the dream hadn’t taken form quite yet.

But this girl . . . she looks as though she knows her place in the world.

I envy her that.

“CT?” says Nick in a tone that suggests it’s not the first time he’s asked.

I don’t bother elaborating. Not when there’s more important matters to discuss, like, “Are you engaged?”

“No.”

I can’t look away from the very obvious proposal that’s going down in the picture TMZ uploaded. “She turned you down?” Emotion I’d rather not name blooms in my chest. Don’t ask, don’t ask, don’t ask. I ask because, clearly, I’m a glutton for punishment. “Do you love her?”

Silence.

It steals into the room like an unwanted visitor and turns my skin to ice.

“What do you think?”

The words aren’t voiced in English, and it takes me a solid ten seconds to work through his flawless Greek and translate it all in my head. I jerk my gaze from the screen to Nick’s face. He looks as surly, as unapproachable, as always.

I hate that it’s such a good look on him.

“Ermione?”

At his quiet, but adamant push for me to answer, I plop back down in my abandoned chair with a swallowed sigh. “You look about as thrilled as the time I stole your swimming trunks and replaced them with a flamingo-pink speedo.”

He’d been sixteen to my fourteen, and I’m only a little ashamed to admit that that day, of all days, is when I learned the definition of a “dick print.” Thank you, horrible hotel Wi-Fi. Thank you, Google. Thank you, sixteen-year-old Nick who was already hung like a horse.

The last bit of gratitude has me shifting in my seat and crossing my legs at my ankles.

Nick chokes out a rough laugh. “It was a bikini bottom, not a speedo.”

I give a little what-can-you-do shrug. “I’m resourceful, what can I say?”

   
Most Popular
» Nothing But Trouble (Malibu University #1)
» Kill Switch (Devil's Night #3)
» Hold Me Today (Put A Ring On It #1)
» Spinning Silver
» Birthday Girl
» A Nordic King (Royal Romance #3)
» The Wild Heir (Royal Romance #2)
» The Swedish Prince (Royal Romance #1)
» Nothing Personal (Karina Halle)
» My Life in Shambles
» The Warrior Queen (The Hundredth Queen #4)
» The Rogue Queen (The Hundredth Queen #3)
romance.readsbookonline.com Copyright 2016 - 2024