One Hit Wonderful (10 page)

“It’s really great,” she told him, and then with a sly grin, “It’s a long way from Boys Will Be Boys,” she said.

Nate tossed his head back and howled with laughter, and Beau took advantage of his distraction to snatch the pizza off his plate.

“How long have you been waiting to say that?” he asked, still chuckling.

“Not that long,” she told him. “I actually didn’t put it together, but when I told Bridget what your name was, she knew right away.”

“Bridget’s your old roommate?” he asked then blinked as he stared at his empty plate. “Where’s my pizza?”

“I must’ve eaten it by mistake.”

“Uh-huh.” He shot Beau a quelling look and rose to get another slice.

“So, what do you want to know?” he called from the kitchen.

“About what?” she asked, and fed her pizza crust to Beau.

“About Boys Will Be Boys.” He sat back down, fixed Beau with a look that had the dog dropping his head with a whimper, and bit into his new slice.

“Well, now that you mention it…” She leaned over the ottoman and lowered her voice to a conspirator’s whisper. “You didn’t write ‘Launched By Love’, did you?”

He grinned and leaned in. “No,” he whispered back, and winked. “But I thought it was really sexy to sing.”

Lily didn’t say anything. She couldn’t. They’d been having such an easy, low-key evening she’d relaxed, forgetting all about the butterflies that showed up in her belly whenever he smiled at her. Well, almost forgot. But they were back now, with jumping, jig-dancing frogs for company, and she suddenly realized how close they were.

He stayed there for a moment, mere inches away with those extraordinary eyes staring into hers. Breathing became an effort, and just when she thought he might make a move—
Yes, please Yes God let him make a move
—he eased back.

“What can I say, I was young.”

“We all were,” she managed, and took a swig of beer to cover her confusion and cool her suddenly warming-up libido.

“Thankfully, my musical ability has evolved since then,” he told her.

“Do you miss it?” she asked.

“What, fame and fortune?” He shrugged and sipped his beer. “It had its moments. I was young, it was all fun and girls and parties—”

“What girls?” she demanded, and he grinned again.

“Ah, ah,” he said, wagging his finger. “I never kiss and tell.”

“Spoilsport,” she teased, and he laughed.

“It was fun, but it got old after a while. You start to realize everything you’re missing. Simple things like going to football games, homecoming dances. Playing tricks on the math teacher or building a stink bomb in chemistry class. Stuff you can’t do because you’re on a tour bus eight months of the year, in the studio the other four, with no one but tutors and band mates for company. High school would’ve been a refreshing change.”

She grimaced. “I hated high school. I’d have given anything to be able to skip it.”

“You think that, but it’s tough being out of step with your peers. By the time I was college age, I was ready for it to be over.” He set his empty beer bottle on the ottoman and reached over to scratch Beau behind the ears. “Thankfully, the boy band craze was just about over, so the timing was right to get out.”

“Did you go to college?” she asked. Her pulse was nearly back to normal, but still, she fixed her gaze on his collarbone, just in case he grinned at her again.

“Juilliard,” he said.

“Wow, the artistic ivy league.” She looked up, forgetting all about avoiding his dimples. “Did you take a lot of flack for the pop-star thing?”

“In the beginning,” he said. “Almost everyone who studies there is classically trained, and here I was, fresh off the cover of
Teen Beat
.” He chuckled. “It was pretty ugly for a while.”

“I bet,” she muttered.

“But it got better. I can hold my own in a concert hall, and that’s where I discovered my talent for composing.”

Intrigued, she started to ask how he got started composing for movies and television, but a jaw-cracking yawn caught her by surprise.

Nate chuckled, and she peered at him with watering eyes. “You’re exhausted,” he said. He stood and started gathering up plates and empty beer bottles. “Beau and I should let you get to sleep.”

She opened her mouth to protest only to be taken over by another yawn, and he laughed.

“Okay, I’m beat,” she admitted, and started to lever herself to her feet. Nate reached out a helping hand and without thinking, she took it.

Sparks, she thought, and shivered as he pulled her up. She had tingles on her fingertips, on her palm, racing up her arm to dance across her chest. She resisted the urge to cross her arms across her suddenly very awake nipples as she followed him to the kitchen.

She watched him tidy up, brushing aside her protests as he put the trash in the bin under the sink and gathered up the leftover pizza. “You’ve got half a pie left here,” he told her. “Want to keep it?”

“Sure,” she said. “You can just pop it in the fridge in the box, and I’ll have it for breakfast tomorrow.”

“A woman after my own heart,” he said, and slid the box into the Sub Zero. He put the beer in beside it, telling her to when she protested to consider it a housewarming gift.

“Thanks for dinner,” she said as she walked him to the door with Beau dancing on their heels, eyes trained on the pizza box in Nate’s hand. “I just realized you paid, and I was supposed to treat you.”

“The company more than made up for it,” he told her, and started the frogs to jumping again.

“Still,” she said after a steadying breath, “next time I’ll buy.”

“It’s a date.” He said it with a slow smile, barely a hint of dimple, but her heart thudded heavy in her chest anyway. “Good night, Lily Michaels.”

“Night,” she managed, and closed the door behind them with a sigh.

“Well,” she told herself as she turned off the lights and headed down the hall to the bedroom, “at least I know what I’ll be dreaming about tonight.”

Chapter Six

Over the next few days, Lily settled into her new apartment. She bought sweeping, gauzy curtains for the windows, fabric designed to allow the natural light to burst through while still keeping a measure of privacy. She stocked the kitchen with goodies from her favorite gourmet grocery and pork rinds and beef jerky from the gas station on the corner. She found the perfect knotted rag rug for the small dining area, and began prepping the bathroom to be painted a happy periwinkle.

What she didn’t do was see her landlord. She heard him, occasionally, calling to the dog outside as they went on their daily runs or plinking away on the piano downstairs when she came in from work. But their paths didn’t cross, and she’d all but convinced herself that the interest and sexual tension she’d felt the day she’d moved in was a figment of her imagination.

“You’re an idiot,” Bridget told her during one of her check-in calls from Hawaii. “What, you don’t see the guys for a few days and you figure that’s it?”

“It’s been a week, Bridge.” Lily shifted her cell phone to her left hand as the clerk at Paints ’N’ Moore rang up her freshly mixed gallon of Periwinkle Dream. “If he was interested, don’t you think he’d have asked me out by now? Or at least stopped by to say hi?”

“You know, it’s not 1957,” Bridget drawled, her voice partially obscured by the tiki bar music playing in the background. “Women are allowed to ask men out in these modern times.”

Lily grimaced as she dug out her wallet. “Don’t start with me on that again. You know I’m weird about that.”

“Yeah, well, you need to get over it. Borrow a cup of sugar from the guy, for God’s sake. Take him a plant, tell him it’s a housewarming present.”

Lily rolled her eyes. “I’m the one who just moved in, why would I be bringing him a housewarming gift?” She shifted the phone, signed the credit slip, and gathered up her paint with a mouthed
Thank you
to the clerk.

“So? It’d be cute.”

“It’d be obvious.”

“Cutely obvious,” Bridget countered.

“I’m not taking him a plant.”

Bridget’s heavy sign came over the line loud and clear. “Fine, be a stubborn git,” she muttered.

Lily laughed as she dashed through a light rain to her car. “I miss you. When are you coming home?”

“Not for a while yet,” Bridget said, and even though her voice was easy, the words light, something in the tone made Lily pause.

“Is everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine,” Bridget assured her. “I’m just so relaxed here, so at peace. I don’t really want to come back to all that mess.”

Lily frowned, juggling phone and paint as she climbed into the car. “All what mess? There’s no mess.”

“Oh, you know what I mean,” Bridget said, and the odd tone was back in her voice. “What with cancelling the wedding and everything…”

“Honey, nobody blames you for that,” Lily slid the key into the ignition but didn’t turn it. “They understand why you did what you did.”

“I know,” Bridget said, and Lily could picture her shuffling her feet as she spoke. “It’s just so humiliating, you know? Such a cliché, the groom running off with someone else. The wedding planner, and I never saw it. I feel so dumb.”

“Nobody thinks you’re dumb,” Lily said firmly. “No one who knows you, anyway. And if anyone does, they’re not worth the spit it takes to lick a stamp.”

“You don’t lick stamps anymore, Lily.” There was laughter in Bridget’s voice now, and the tightness in Lily’s chest eased slightly. “You peel and stick, or buy postage on the internet.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I know. And I love you for being so loyal. But with the talk about the wedding, I’d just as soon stay away for a while. And now with Max—”

Lily straightened in her seat. “Max? What about him?”

“Nothing,” Bridget said. “I just meant the talk about Max and the wedding.”

“Bullshit. He’s been calling you, hasn’t he?”

Bridget sighed. “He’s left a few messages on my mobile.”

“Asshole,” Lily muttered. “What’d he say?”

“Some crap about needing to talk to me, wanting to get together to talk things out. He wasn’t making a lot of sense, really, just kept saying we needed to talk.”

“Did you call him back?”

“Hell no.” The derision in her voice practically crackled over the line. “I’ve got luaus to go to and surfing lessons to take, I’ve got no time for cheating assholes.”

“Good for you,” Lily told her. The rain was getting worse, pounding on the roof of the car, but she ignored it as she waged a brief internal debate.

“He came by to see me.”

“What? Max did? Where, when?”

“About a week and a half ago, at the hotel. He told me he needed to speak with you, that the two of you had things to work out.”

“Asshole. What’d you tell him?”

“That he was an asshole,” Lily said, and listened to Bridget’s trilling laugh with relief.

“He really is. God, I never thought I’d be so happy that my fiancé was cheating on me.”

That startled a laugh out of Lily. “What?”

“Well, if he hadn’t, I’d have married him. Then I’d be married to an asshole, and nobody needs that.”

Lily rested her head back on the seat. “I love you, Bridget.”

“I love you too. Now will you go home and borrow a damn cup of sugar?”

Lily laughed and straightened up to turn the key in the ignition. “No.”

“Stubborn,” Bridget muttered, and clicked off.

The rain was coming down hard now, and the storm had knocked out a few traffic lights, snarling traffic and stretching the normal ten-minute drive into nearly twenty. Lily let her mind wander as she made her way around the campus toward Ivy Lane.

She knew she was hopelessly old-fashioned about some things, but she really just couldn’t bring herself to seek Nate out. She kept hoping to run into him randomly, in some fashion that wouldn’t feel too awkward or feel forced. After a week, she’d pretty much accepted that wasn’t going to happen.

“Maybe I could steal his mail,” she muttered as she pulled up the drive and around the back of the carriage house to the small carport Nate had built back there. She continued muttering to herself, running through possibilities as she gathered her paint and purse. “Then I could knock on his door, and say, ‘Hey, I got some of your mail by mistake, how weird is that?’”

She paused in the act of opening the car door then shook her head. “No, that’s lame.”

She climbed out of the car and nudged the door shut. She walked to the edge of the carport, and judging the rain to be of the cats-and-dogs variety, took a firm grip on her packages and made a mad dash for the door.

The sprint from carport to door took only seconds, but by the time she managed to fit the key into the lock and lurch inside, she was soaked to the skin.

She nudged the door shut with her foot and dripped her way up the stairs. Inside the apartment, she dropped purse and paint onto the granite countertop and walked down the hall to the bathroom. There she stripped off the sodden tank top and yoga pants she’d worn to the gym that morning and turned on the shower.