Borrowing a Bachelor (8 page)

Only fifty-two dollars and ninety-three cents left unused on your debit card.

What were the chances that her rate was—he did more math—under ninety-five dollars and ninety-three cents?

Nada. Nil. Zilch.

She was a babe.

He chewed the corner of his mouth as he wondered exactly how much she charged and how in the hell he was going to come up with it. Then, worse, he wondered if she’d faked all three orgasms.

“Is something wrong?” Nikki inquired.

“No, no. Not at all.” Adam wanted to crawl under the bed. His only option was to call Devon, and he really, really didn’t want to do that. Not even a little bit. Shit! How had he gotten himself into this situation?

He rubbed the back of his neck and stared at her hopelessly. Could you put a trick on layaway?

No. He’d already taken delivery of it, so to speak.

Could he get on some kind of payment plan with her?

“Well,” she said. “This is awkward.”

He produced a feeble smile.
Oh, honey. You have no idea.

“I think I’ll, um, go home, now.”

“Sure. I’ll walk you to your car.” He shot off the bed and into his jeans. He fished around on the floor for his shirt and shrugged into it.

“You’ve got that on backward,” she told him.

So he did. Adam found that he didn’t care, though. He really wanted to get this awful explanation over with. He sat on the bed again and ducked his head down on the pretext of putting on his boat shoes, which he could have slipped into easily. “Ah, Nikki. I don’t, you know—as a student—have much, ah, money.” He risked a peek upward.

She’d drawn her eyebrows together. “I know the feeling. Neither do I.”

Great. She wasn’t going to give him an inch, was she?

“Yeah. Well, the thing is that I may have, ah, misunderstood the situation, here. I don’t know what you normally charge—”

She stared at him, clearly perplexed. Then her face cleared. “Oh, I see what you’re getting at. Adam, the dance was free. It was me making things up to you for hurting your nose. I told you that.”

“Well,” he said, feeling his face flame, “that’s very generous, but I know I need to, um, take care of you, so could you give me an indication of…?” His voice trailed off. Jesus, Joseph and Mary,
how
did you ask a woman what price her pussy was?

“Take care of me?”

Oh, come on. The girl couldn’t possibly be this stupid. He screwed up his courage and tried to make a joke out of it. “You know. For the rest. I mean, maybe you’ll give me a discount since I made you pretty happy, too, but what do I owe you for tonight?”

All color drained out of her face, her mouth dropped open and her eyes went stormy.

Adam cringed.
Oh, shit. Is she not— Oh, shit upon shit upon shit.

“I’m not a whore, you disgusting creep!”

Not
a hooker.

Her face flashed ruddy-red now.

Not a hooker, not a hooker, not a hooker. So what do you do now, Captain Brains?
Adam’s mouth worked, but no sound came out. Probably because he had no words to get himself out of this colossal catastrophe.

“S-sorry,” he croaked.

“Yes, you are. You’re one sorry excuse for a man!” She whirled around and started for the door like a defensive end bull-rushing the quarterback.

“Wait!” Adam said. “Where are you—”

The door slammed on his verb.

“—going?”

He cursed. Regardless of his personal mortification, he could not let the girl go running around this neighborhood naked under a robe. Burke men made sure that women got home—or to their cars—safely, under any circumstances. His dad and his grandfather—not to mention his uncle—had drummed that into his head well before the age of twelve.

Adam grabbed his thin wallet, her stilettos, skirt, tiny top and microscopic panties, then tore after her. “Nikki! Nikki, stop.”

He caught up with her halfway across the parking lot.

“Get away from me,” she snapped at him.

As she spoke, a car came flying into the lot and they both had to jump aside.

Nikki huddled into the bathrobe as if she were cold, even in the moist, hot evening air. She kept walking toward where she’d parked her car, under the scarce shelter of a pineapple palm.

“Look, I humbly and sincerely apologize for insulting you. I didn’t think you were a hooker at first, but then you seemed to be waiting for something, and it hit me that maybe the something was money, and then I didn’t know what to do because I have less than a hundred bucks to my name—”

Nikki raised her arm, keeping it straight, palm out. “Don’t talk to me.”

He sighed and slipped his wallet into his back pocket. Then he extended his index finger, upon which was hung her lingerie and her high-heeled sandals. “You may want these.”

She snatched them without a word, then the skirt and top, and stalked barefoot next to him as he loped along next to her like a jackass. “Why are you still here?
Go away.
”

“I’m walking you to your car.”

“Yeah? What a freakin’
gentleman
you are. Turn around and walk straight to hell, buddy.”

Adam sighed.

“And for your information, the only reason I was in that stupid cake tonight is that I got laid off from my job and I haven’t started my new one yet.”

They arrived at her car and she was evidently so angry that once again, she had trouble getting her key into the lock. Adam started to reach around her to help, but she smacked his arm.

O-kay.
He let her scratch up her paint.

“Nikki,” he said. “I really am sorry. And in the interest of keeping the facts straight, I wouldn’t have…you know…if I thought you were a hooker.”

“Go tell your lies to someone else.” She finally got the door unlocked and wrenched it open.

“I would actually really like your number,” he said, even though he knew the request was futile.

She froze and then turned to him with an expression of incredulity. “I
know
you didn’t just say that.”

Adam shoved his hands into his pockets. “Yeah. I did. And I’m serious.” And, inexplicably, he was. Something about her sweetness and her outrage—especially now that he’d gotten his head out of his ass and could see
her
clearly—appealed to him. The fact that she was crazy sexy, and
obviously
was not a stripper—or a hooker—didn’t hurt.

She leaned her face close to his. “No, you’re
insane.
Not to mention brain-dead. You can’t possibly be in school—unless you’re studying
fiction.
” She threw herself into the car and slammed the door.

Adam opened and then closed his mouth. He fought the urge to tell her that he was in the top ten percent of his class in medical school, and eventually planned to specialize in oncology.

It was completely alien, this urge, because he spent most of his time deliberately
not
telling women that he was in medical school.

Why? Because, unfortunately, that information tended to create instant dollar signs in their eyes. They didn’t understand that after four years of med school, he’d do years of residency for worse pay than a lot of office managers received. And after
that,
he’d start at a lousy base physician’s rate, also crippled by close to a decade of student loans. On top of which was medical malpractice insurance.

But most women didn’t have an inkling of any of this. They stuck to him like glue and began to try to do his laundry and bake him cookies and weird shit like that. Then they got resentful when he had no time for them because he had to study.

So Adam kept his mouth clamped shut and stolidly accepted Nikki’s rage. He supposed he deserved it.

Nikki turned the key and revved the engine.

Gloomily, he wished for Dev’s delight and expertise in the fine art of insults. What would Dev have said to the fiction comment?

Dev would have leaned in close to her and probably blown a ring of smelly cigar smoke around her head, letting it settle like a lasso around that long, sexy neck of hers. Then, the clever asshole would have come up with something brilliant and roped her back in like a baby calf.

“Darlin’,” Dev would have drawled, “how right you are. I’m studying fiction and you’re the smart, sassy heroine of my dreams.”

Then, once Nikki had made gagging noises, Dev would wink and add, “Now, what say you take off your clothes and give this villain a kiss before I tie you to those railroad tracks?”

This might provoke a slap, whereupon—Adam had actually
seen
him do this successfully in a bar—Dev would commandeer the hand committing the violence, twirl Nikki into his arms, and smooch her soundly.

Granted, he’d once gotten a stiletto heel stabbed through his instep after pulling this, but Dev being Dev, he’d claimed that it was worth it.

Adam was so caught up in the extremely disturbing image of Dev kissing Nikki—and he, Adam, wanting to punch him in the nose for it—that he failed to notice that her VW Bug was poised to run him right over as he stood in the glare of its headlights.

She rolled down the window. “Move or become a pancake,” she growled. “And don’t think I’ll take you to the E.R. this time, either. I wouldn’t even drag you by the back bumper.”

Adam decided, especially given the polite nature of her request, to get the hell out of the way.

7

DESPITE HER ANGER, Nikki was dead asleep at 2:17 a.m., when someone started pounding on her door. Someone who didn’t care if this was rude and obnoxious. Someone who was, despite Nikki’s attempts to ignore the noise, relentless.

She had a bad feeling about who it might be. She crawled out of bed and pulled on a pair of shorts under the oversize Miami Dolphins T-shirt she’d worn to bed. Then wearily, blearily, she stumbled toward the door and put her eye to the peephole. She winced when she saw Yvonne standing outside.

“Nikki, you open this door! I know you’re in there because your car’s in the parking lot. So open up.” Yvonne didn’t look happy. In fact, the brassy-red highlights in her black hair seemed to vibrate with rage.

Nikki also noted the dark circles under her neighbor’s eyes, the smeared black eyeliner accentuating them, and the rusty-red lip gloss she wore. Her neighbor looked like nothing so much as a zombie ready to sink her teeth into Nikki’s flesh.

It seemed a
very
bad idea to open the door to Yvonne of the Dead.

But she started pounding on the painted metal again, and this time added screaming and cursing to her repertoire. The gist of the message, studded with F-bombs galore, was that Nikki had really screwed up and that she was going to answer for it.

“Now open this door!”

Nikki sighed. She was wide-awake anyway, and they might as well get this over with. It wasn’t going to be any more pleasant tomorrow or the next day.

She reluctantly unfastened the security chain and slid back the bolt. Within seconds, Yvonne’s index finger was stabbing her in the chest.

“Ow—”

“What the
hell
were you doing back there at the bar? You freakin’
coldcock
a guy and then
leave?
Do you know how bad you made me look?
Do
you?”