Chapter One
Pointless but It’s Somethin’
I was standing in the corner.
I didn’t want to be there, I hadn’t wanted to be there for a while and I was considering making a move not to be there anymore when he walked in.
But these thoughts flew from my head, in fact, every thought flew from my head as I caught sight of him and blinked.
Then I stared.
He was tall. I had no idea how to describe how tall he was but the only word I could think of was “very”. Very tall. He was wearing a nice, tailored, black wool overcoat. With the lighting, all I could see was that he had on trousers, not their color or style, just that they weren’t jeans or cords. I could also see he had on nice shoes. Those could also be described as the “very” variety of nice. They were shiny and clearly expensive. Other than that, with his side to me, I couldn’t take anything else in.
And I really didn’t try.
I was fascinated by it all but my attention was taken by his face. His features, even mostly in profile, were striking. Not perfection but so intensely masculine I’d never seen anything like it. It was almost unreal.
But his hair surprised me. He had on an expensive overcoat, expensive shoes and he was here, at this party, in this lavish apartment in a way that I knew, unlike me, he belonged here. But his very dark, thick, slightly wavy hair needed a cut. It wasn’t long and unkempt, it was simply longish and unruly. Like he had better things to do than to get regular haircuts and those things weren’t clubbing, hanging with his crew and taking fastidious care of his body, clothing and all other parts of his physical being so that he could play and then nail every female who threw herself at him.
Then again, if he did that, he’d never come up for air.
His height, his clothes, his looks, his hair were not all that fascinated me.
He was angry. It was not only etched in the hard line of his strong jaw, his lips pressed together in unconcealed annoyance or his gaze sharp on the scene that lay before him.
It was physical. A swell of vibrating heat that filled the room.
I wasn’t the only one who noticed. With some effort, tearing my eyes away from him, I saw those closest to him had turned to look at him, some were even taking a few steps away to retreat.
I didn’t blame them. I was all the way across the room in the corner and I still felt it. But if I was close, I, too, would shift away.
It was terrifying. Utterly.
I wondered if Nick had a roommate and my guess was, he did. My other guess was, he had no idea Nick was having a party.
My eyes swept the space. The sunken living room and the elevated areas surrounding it were cluttered with bodies. There was a bottle of champagne that had overturned on the coffee table and it clearly had been at least half full considering the wet stain on the carpet and the puddle on the table. I knew two people had broken glasses, I heard them. One, some girl cleaned up. The other, the pieces had been kicked around and likely smushed into the kickass furry carpet or ground into the dark wood floors luckily not causing any injuries (yet). There were beer bottles, liquor bottles and glasses everywhere, even sitting on the floor or having rolled under tables. There were overfull ashtrays, ashes on the floor, even butts. The music wasn’t ear-splitting loud but considering it was after one in the morning, it was still too loud. The neighbors in this swank building definitely could hear it not to mention the noisy buzz of conversation and they probably wouldn’t like it.
I knew I wouldn’t and I didn’t.
And neither did Nick’s roommate.
My eyes went back to where he was standing and they did this hesitantly. Part of me wanted to see him again. I was a woman and he was the kind of man a woman would look at. Any woman. No matter what their tastes ran to. He just attracted female attention and any woman would want a second look. Part of me was scared to look mostly because he was pretty scary. This was because a man who could walk into a room wearing an overcoat, be there a moment and fill the room with a searing, angry vibe was pretty scary.
But when I looked back, he was gone.
And I took this as my cue to be gone.
I didn’t want to come anyway but Sandrine had her sights set on Nick for a while now. Viv and I had told her time and again he was a player and we knew this because we knew a number of girls he’d played. But Sandrine saw him as the golden goose. She spent a goodly amount of time on the hunt for the golden goose and the minute she laid eyes on the handsome Nick Sebring, she decided he was The One.
The minute I laid eyes on him, my stomach turned. He was good-looking, this was fact. He was also a jerk. This was impossible to miss. And he was something else, something I couldn’t put my finger on, something I didn’t like. Not at all.
But to Sandrine, he had it all. Flash, dash, beauty…
And money.
Yes, my friend was a gold digger.
Still, call me crazy, and I called myself that more than once over my years of knowing her, I loved her. She was a pain in the behind a lot of the time and I had to say her single-minded pursuit of The One, just as long as The One was gorgeous, built and loaded, kind of freaked me out sometimes, alarmed me others and flat out scared me on occasion. But at least she knew who she was and what she wanted.
And this, I thought, surveying the scene, was what she wanted. She wanted to reign as queen at exactly this kind of scene. Free-flowing booze and champagne. Well-dressed lackeys. Sumptuous apartments with sunken living rooms, state-of-the-art kitchens and wraparound balconies. And we’d put our coats in Nick’s bedroom so I’d had a quick look. Seriously, one look at Nick’s bedroom and even I nearly reconsidered his jerk status, it was that gorgeous.
Then, approximately a half a second later, I remembered nothing was worth putting up with a jerk. Not even a beyond gorgeous bedroom. Especially not a jerk like Nick.
I put my mostly unconsumed drink on the black marble countertop that adorned the long bar that separated the kitchen from the living room and started to make my way to the balcony.
I didn’t want to do this and this was the reason why I was hiding in a dark corner. I’d tried mingling but this wasn’t my scene and the people there knew it just as well as me. Sandrine told me I should buy a dress and keep the tags on, just tuck them in to hide them. She also told me to buy a pair of shoes and she’d go with me to make a scene if they wouldn’t accept the return because they were scuffed. But I thought this was uncool so I refused like I did all the other times Sandrine suggested this.
She didn’t mind doing this and did it all the time. Sweat stains, martini stains, it didn’t matter. Once she’d even returned a pair of shoes whose strap broke while she was dancing. And it was the fourth time she’d worn them.