“Oh,me too,” Carly said. She was really laying it on thick now. If she wasn’t careful, Marcus and Heather were going to start wondering if she was attracted to him. He nearly laughed out loud at the thought.
“Good,” Heather smiled. “And while you’re at it you can get to know the city a bit. Nick’s a local; he can show you around. You don’t mind, do you, Nick?”
Nick felt his fake smile falter. He wanted to correct her, but Carly’s intense gaze and his stung pride stopped him. Heather was one hundred percent wrong, though. He did mind, actually. And he wasn’t a local anymore, either.
Half the cafés and shops he remembered from when he last lived here, from his childhood, were probably gone now. Neighbourhoods had changed all over the city. Freshwater Beach used to feel low-key and hidden away, an overlooked and pleasantly rundown neighbour to the tourist-friendly Manly Beach, and now it felt kind of upscale and glam. The little hole-in-the-wall café inside the surf club, which used to only serve packaged ice creams in summer and hot chocolate from a machine in winter, was now advertising sourdough avocado toast with microgreens, and poached eggs with roasted heirloom tomatoes. He didn’t really know this city at all anymore.
But he wasn’t about to say any of this to Marcus and Heather, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to reveal it to Carly.
“I don’t mind at all,” he lied. “Carly and I will make a great team.” Heather gave him a grateful smile, and she and Marcus turned back to her list. Nick chanced a look at Carly, whose gaze had turned into a sharp glare. Her full lips were pursed, and her eyes slightly narrowed, as though she were wishing for the ability to shoot white-hot fire from her pupils. But he was just giving her what she’d asked for. He was playing nice. And if she could lay it on thick, so could he.
“I know Carly’s decided she’s going to be the greatest maid of honour the world has ever seen,” he said through his wide smile, “and I’ll do whatever I can to help.”
The glare went from white-hot to blue fire at his words. She looked like she was mentally dismembering him.
That glare probably cowed other people, but Nick wasn’t afraid of Carly Montgomery. She might be a spoiled, brash human hurricane, but for the next three weeks, she needed him. And it felt good to be needed for a change. Even if it was by someone who clearly despised him.
Chapter 4
When Carly woke the next morning, a pale yellow light was pressing itself against the shades of her bedroom window. It had been too hot the previous evening to sleep under anything more than a cotton sheet, but now the air in her bedroom had cooled, and she pulled the sheet up over her shoulders and her knees into her chest. She shut her eyes and listened hard to the sounds of Freshwater at dawn. A cyclist whizzing along the street. A garbage truck trundling down the block. Some kind of bird squawking in the frangipani tree in the front yard.
Under the sheet, she stretched her limbs out and groaned to herself. She was getting old. She woke up most mornings with her joints stiff and creaking now, even when she hadn’t spent most of the previous day sitting in a coach plane seat.
You could have asked your parents to fund an upgrade, a voice in her head said. They’d have been only too happy, seeing how they had adored Heather since the first time she’d come to their home for a sleepover. Sometimes Carly wondered if her mother wished her own daughter could be more like Heather. So serious and focused, even at age eleven. Quiet. Carly wasn’t quiet, had never known how to keep quiet. Heather had once said that when she was trying to be brave, she tried to be more like Carly. Well, when Carly was trying to be sensible for once, she tried to be more like Heather. And the sensible thing to do had been to pay her own way.
She’d saved up money for her ticket to Sydney, money she’d earned herself. Yes, she came from a wealthy family, even by New York standards. Edward Montgomery and Marlene Parker-Montgomery were both from old-money WASP families and had once taken Carly to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to show her all four of her grandparents’ names engraved in stone on the list of the museum’s major donors. And yes, her childhood had been one of privilege and ease.
But since she graduated from the NYB school and got her first paycheck from the company, she’d made a point of not asking her parents for financial help. When she and Heather had graduated from the company school and moved out of the dorms, they’d found a dingy little apartment near the Canal Street 1 stop and split the rent until Heather had moved uptown to live with her shithead ex-fiancé. Carly had stayed. She loved that apartment. She didn’t love the lack of light in the bathroom, or the five flights of stairs up to her door. But she loved that it was her place. She paid the rent, made sure the landlord repaired the A/C unit when it broke down, and furnished the living room with secondhand furniture. Not vintage or antique furniture, of the kind her parents collected, but secondhand. She’d never deluded herself into believing that she’d made it all on her own—plenty of families couldn’t afford the kind of ballet training she’d had as a kid, and without that training, she’d never have been able to join NYB. But now that she was an adult, she was determined to prove that she could fend for herself.
That said, there had been moments in the last decade when she’d been tempted to ask her parents for help. Just a little bit, to help smooth the way. Corps dancers were barely paid enough to get by in New York City. Two years ago, when Carly had been briefly unemployed, she’d been tempted to ask her parents for a loan, just enough to tide her over before she figured out what the hell she was going to do next. It would be so easy, she’d thought, and they’d be so happy to help. They’d never understood why she refused their money. “At least let us find you a place closer to the theater, honey,” her dad had said, looking around in horror the first time he’d visited the apartment. She’d never been able to explain it in a way that made sense to them. And before she’d had the chance to give in to the temptation to go running to them, Heather had swooped in and saved her job.
Outside, the mystery bird squawked louder, and Carly opened her eyes. The clock on the bedside table (covered in seashells, of course) told her it was just past 5AM. Heather had warned her that she probably wouldn’t sleep through the night for a few days but that sunshine and time outside would help her body clock adjust. In other words, she should probably go to the beach. For medicinal reasons, of course.
Ten minutes later, she was padding down the sandy dune track to the beach. She’d pulled her hair into a low bun and slipped on yesterday’s shorts and her favorite old NYB sweatshirt, which had a hole in the armpit but had been washed and tumble dried to soft, gray perfection over the years. The sand was loose and cool beneath her feet as she walked toward the water where, past the break, a handful of surfers were already out on their longboards.
She stopped halfway down the beach and sat down, breathing in deeply and feeling her body sink gently into the sand. Shit, it was beautiful here. None of the photos Heather had sent her had done this place justice. And how could they? A photo could capture the morning sky, all delicate mauves and watery blues, and it could show her the way the golden morning light made the water sparkle like a sumptuous costume under stage lights. But it couldn’t capture the sounds of seagulls cawing overhead, or the fresh, salty scent of the water. Or the steady, comforting sound of the waves as they rolled endlessly in. Carly closed her eyes and listened to the water pound the sand, inhaling as it fizzed and receded, and exhaling with every crash. The soundtrack on her meditation app didn’t do that sound justice, either. Love of her life aside, she thought, opening her eyes, it was no wonder Heather wanted to stay over here.
Out in the water, she watched two surfers preparing to catch a wave, looking over their shoulders as they paddled their hands over the sides of their boards. The wave took them, and one of them hoisted himself onto the board, angling his body along the wave and keeping his balance as the board twisted beneath him. The other surfer stayed on his stomach, and she watched his board come zooming into shore at an impressive clip, as the first surfer toppled off his board and landed with an unceremonious splash amid the breaking wave.
The second surfer climbed off his board and hoisted it under his arm, lifting his feet high to clear the shallow waves as he walked out of the water. Water streamed out of his hair and down onto his lean shoulders, drawing her eyes down to his broad and muscular chest, where more droplets caught in his chest hair and sparkled.
“Good morning,” she muttered to herself, as he made his way out of the water, his clearly defined obliques shifting under his glistening skin with every step. A few moments ago, she’d been wondering what time the closest café opened, hoping she could get some caffeine into her system soon. Now, though, she was wide awake, and her mouth was watering slightly. She couldn’t make out his face, but she ran her eyes down his body, shamelessly following the sharp V of his abs down until it disappeared into his small black bathing suit shorts. Wet and clinging as they were, they didn’t leave much to the imagination, and she swallowed an appreciative groan as she let her eyes linger shamelessly on his crotch, then on his quads, which were flexing and releasing as he walked.
He stopped walking about fifteen feet away from her, and then, because apparently the Beach Gods had decided to smile on her this morning, he set his board down on the sand and turned around to watch the surfers who were still out in the water.
“Correction: best morning,” she muttered, swallowing again as she traced the curves of his ass with her eyes and took in the deep vertical line of his spine, flanked by yet more lean muscle. He was cut like a dancer, but he looked like he was born and raised on the beach. She hoped he stayed there all morning watching the surfers so she could stay here all morning enjoying this view. Well, not all morning; in a few hours she’d have to go run wedding errands with Nick Asshat Jacobs. But she could endure his company as long as she had this breathtaking mental image to work with. She’d just pull this memory up every time Nick started talking, and it would be easy to smile vacantly into his stupid handsome face.
She was so busy committing every ridge of this hot stranger’s muscled back and every inch of his wet, shining skin to memory that she didn’t notice that he was turning away from the water. Before she could avert her eyes and pretend that she hadn’t been gawking at him like the sex-starved weirdo that she was, he had turned around and looked at her. It was only then that she lifted her eyes above his shoulders and saw his face. His stupid, handsome face.
In addition to everything else she was—loud, impulsive, chaotic, and a danger to everyone around her—Carly Montgomery was fuckingeverywhere. Inescapable. It was bad enough that he had to spend today with her, but Nick couldn’t even go for a surf with Marcus without running into her. A force of nature, Marcus had said. More like Cyclone Carly.
He watched as she scrambled to her feet, spraying sand into the quiet morning air, still staring at him. Her eyes were wide and her mouth had fallen open into a large, mortified-looking O. After one more second of staring, she seemed to snap out of her frozen state, and she turned over her shoulder and hurried up the beach towards the dunes. She moved so quickly that she slipped a little on the loose sand, but she seemed determined to get as far away from him as she could, as fast as she possibly could. Except—
“You forgot your shoes,” he called. She stopped dead, then whipped around to face him, her eyebrows scrunched into a frown. From this distance he couldn’t be sure, but something told him she was clenching her jaw. She marched back down the beach towards the abandoned sandals, her bun bouncing at her neck, and yanked the shoes up off the sand. God, those fluoro pink nails were obnoxious.
“You could just say thank you,” he said, just loud enough for her to hear over the waves, and she stood up and met his eyes, and even from here he could see the irritation and disgust etched all over her freckled face as he repeated her own words back to her.
He waited for her to snark back at him, but instead she simply turned and walked away again, her sandals swinging furiously from her hand. The prickled aliveness that had momentarily swirled in his chest faded as he watched her storm back up the beach and over the dunes. It snuffed out as she stalked out of sight.
