“Oh, you would have loved Nanny Sylvie,” Carly said, as she scanned the storefronts on either side of the traffic-clogged road. “She was even more uptight than—Oh, there it is!” she exclaimed, pointing at a small sign in a second floor window that read UNIVERSITYPRINTERS.
Nick gasped and slammed on the breaks. Their bodies lurched forward, and her seatbelt caught her hard in the stomach.
“Shit, could you not scream in the car? You’re going to cause an accident,” he chastised her, once he’d straightened up. “Anotheraccident.”
Rubbing her stomach, she stared at him and wondered, for the hundredth time since she’d met him barely a day ago, what the fuck this man’s problem was.
“I was just trying to help,” she repeated, unable to keep some of her hurt out of her voice. And she had helped, by the way. She’d found the damn place, so now they could go pick up the menu cards and table numbers Heather and Marcus had ordered.
“Thanks for yourhelp,” he gritted out, turning on the blinker, on the first go this time, and turning down a side street in search of a parking spot.
She seethed in silence as he pulled into a spot and they climbed out of the car. Around the corner and back toward the storefront on bustling King Street, he walked a few paces in front of her, as if he were leading her to the place she had found. The street was lined with stores and cafés, and Carly spotted a cute-looking vintage shop next to a bubble tea place. If she hadn’t been in the company of a prickly, judgmental ass, she would have asked if they could take a detour into both. Instead, she followed him up the stairs to the second floor of the building in the middle of the block and into the office of University Printers, taking care to keep her eyes on the stairs in front of her. She’d already been caught staring at Nick’s ass once today, and she couldn’t bear for it to happen again.
At the top of the stairs, they were met by an empty desk in a small, dimly lit reception area. The walls were hung with posters for performances by bands she didn’t know at venues she’d never heard of, some of which looked like they were from the 1970s and 1980s. Carly could hear whirring activity in a nearby room, but this one was almost silent.
“Anyone here?” they called at the exact same time.
They looked at each other, and she felt her own face crumple in a scowl that mirrored his. There was no reply, so they stood there for a few seconds, staring each other down in rippling silence.
“Maybe everyone’s left for the day, because it took us so long to get here,” she said.
“Maybe they saw you coming and decided to save themselves,” he shot back.
They glared at each other for a moment, and then she turned her back on him and examined a poster featuring a group of musicians with impressively big hair. She could almost feel his eyes boring disdainfully into the back of her head.
The whirring continued from the other room. Impatient, she looked over at the front desk and noticed a small bell next to a cup of pens. With a sigh, she strode across the room just as Nick started moving, but she reached the desk before he did, tapping the bell hastily before he could beat her to it. As a high-pitched ding reverberated around the room, his hand landed on top of hers, large and warm. Her stomach jolted, and a thousand hot, fizzling sparks radiated from where he touched her, up her arm and into her chest. She met his eyes, noticing that in the low light of this room they looked almost gray. For a moment, he looked down at her—no, she reminded herself, downonher, the ballet brat he’d been saddled with—and she watched a few tiny beads of sweat glittering over his top lip.
She snatched her hand away, knocking the bell off the desk as she did. She’d just stooped to pick it up when someone rushed into the room.
“So sorry to keep you waiting,” the newcomer said, with one hand on her chest. She was tall and muscular and looked like she couldn’t have been more than a few years out of high school. Her hair was cut in an enviable pixie, and her long blue dress revealed a tattoo sleeve on each pale arm. “I didn’t hear you come in!”
“Sorry,” Carly said, returning the bell to the desk. “We should have called out louder. We’re here to pick up some wedding materials.”
“Oh, sure,” the woman said, turning to the computer in front of her and scrolling the mouse. “What’s the name?”
“Heather Hays and Marcus Campbell.”
The woman’s face lit up. “Of course, the ballet dancers! I love the New York theme you went with, and it looks so good on paper, especially the table numbers.” She looked over at Nick, beaming. “It’s so nice to meet you both in person! You make a gorgeous couple. Only a few weeks to go now, are you so excited?”
“Oh, no,” Nick started to say, “we’re not—”
“We’re not the bride and groom,” Carly cut in. “We’re just the wedding party, running some errands for them.”
The woman’s face fell. “Whoops! Sorry about that. It’s just I love this stuff, and I thought, with the American accent …”
“It’s fine,” Carly shrugged. It was hardly an insult to be mistaken for Heather.
“You do make a gorgeous couple, though,” the woman said, looking hopefully from Carly to Nick and back again.
“We’re not a couple,” Nick snapped from behind her. Carly turned around and gave him a deathly glare, then turned back to see that the poor woman looked very flustered.
“I’ll just go get the order, it’s in the back,” she muttered, and she stood and hurried out of the room.
Carly whipped around as soon as she was gone.
“What the fuck is your problem?” she asked him, trying to keep her voice quiet and steady. “It’s one thing to be an asshole to me, but you can’t talk to other people like that.”
He flushed and ducked his head.
