“Aubrey?”
She squeezed her eyes shut. Holy god, it was just her name, but the way he said it unzipped her skin, reached into her chest, and rearranged the beat of her heart. The mutinous thing pattered inside her ribs, its rhythm suddenly alien.
“Jesus,” he said. “Is that really you?”
Shit, shit, shit. He sounded exactly the way she remembered, like they’d stood here just yesterday instead of decades ago. His voice was still so husky, still filled with quiet fire, like a match struck against rough stone.
She couldn’t help it. She turned around.
The sight of him hit her like a one-two punch. Nick might have sounded the same, but he didn’t look it, not at all. He was all grown up. Tall enough that he could look down on her now, which made her wish uselessly for her stilettos. Another five inches would have put her on par with his eyes, at least.
Not that anything could have prepared her to meet them. The color there reminded her of something depthless, so black she had trouble distinguishing where his irises ended and his pupils began. And while his eyes still tipped up at the corners, that once-noble upsweep now lent him an air of lethal intensity. He looked so...male. So big. So mature.
Gone was the boy who’d snuck into her heart and ripped it apart with his bare hands. In his place stood a man, his face an opus of sharp lines and hard angles.
She dropped her gaze, trying to escape the sudden flurry of her breathing, but the rest of him only compounded her problems. As a teenager, Nick had been skinny—frighteningly so—but now he’d filled out. And then some. A gray tank top showcased the breadth of his shoulders while the sleeves of his unzipped navy coveralls knotted around a trim, muscular waist.He looked ridiculously fit, like he could punch through a concrete wall, if he wanted.
Knowing him, he probably could.
“Itisyou,” he said softly.
A shiver skimmed down her spine. She searched for something to say. Absolutely anything. “You cut your hair,” she blurted, then winced.
God, of all the things she could’ve come up with after seventeen years—chief among them beinghow can you stand there looking so casual after you destroyedme?—thatwas what emerged.You cut your hair. Fan-freaking-tastic.
“Um. Yeah.” Nick scrubbed a hand across his scalp. His hair was as black as ever, but he’d shorn the unruly curls in favor of a buzz cut no more than a quarter inch long.
She wished it made him ugly. It didn’t. If anything, it only heightened the impact of those angular features, the way they conspired to rob her of breath. Somehow, Nick Thacker was more beautiful—more wildly dangerous—than he’d ever been.
“I get too hot at work, otherwise,” he said.
A long silence unspooled. Aubrey focused on the smudge of ash adorning his sculpted cheekbone. She wanted to break the brittle quiet by screaming—at herself for internally falling to pieces, or maybe at that blackened smear. It looked strategic, as if someone had painted it there, deliberate, for the express purpose of driving home how devastating he’d become.
Why couldn’t he have just gained weight? Or lost his hair, like a normal person?
Whatever. It didn’t matter. She needed to escape the suffocating buzz of the overhead lights.Now.“Well, it was nice seeing you. Or something. But Gallant’s waiting for me outside.”
“Gallant? As in, Gallant Nobel?” His shoulders tensed, the reaction seemingly unconscious, because his eyes never changed.
The impassivity there made her want to throw something. Once, she’d understood every flash within those depths, but now his eyes were a cool dark secret, a word inked in an alphabet she’d once cherished but since forgotten. He could’ve been pondering his grocery list or cursing her existence, and she wouldn’t have known the difference.
“Yeah.” She did her utmost to mirror his composure. “I sprained my ankle, and he’s helping me out.”
“Is he.”
God, she needed out. Away. Mustering all the dignity her injury would allow, she tossed both ACE bandage and brace into her cart and limped off.
Just before she rounded the corner, Nick called out, “Aubrey, wait.”
She looked back. She shouldn’t have, but she seemed just as incapable of ignoring him now as she had been as a teenager.
His raven-dark brows crooked. “Seventeen years, and that’s all you’re going to say to me?”
Her breath caught at the wayseventeen yearsrolled off his tongue as if he’d held the number in his mind already. As if it meant something to him. As if he’d kept track.
But the calculation was straightforward enough: their age now, less their age the last time they’d seen each other. Thirty-five minus eighteen. Her calculator brain could do that in a nanosecond. She knew his could, too.
It meant nothing.
