Nash

To say my evening wasn’t going as planned would be an understatement.

Nash Knight didn’t rescue damsels in distress, and he sure as hell didn’t play nursemaid.

In business I was ruthless. The Black Knight of Wall Street, or so I’d been called. And in the ring I was downright vicious.

But this particular damsel had somehow gotten beneath my armor, under my skin. Was it because Nixie’s skin was so damn perfect, that dusting of freckles across her pert nose so enticing? Or the suspicion radiating from her like a magnetic force field, pressing against my lungs?

Maybe.

But if I had to guess, it was the fear that flashed in her eyes for the briefest of moments, a display of vulnerability so quick I almost missed it, before she put on a false show of bravado.

Nixie wasn’t scared of me, not physically anyway. She was hiding something. Something she didn’t want anyone to know. Even the stranger that had saved her life. Or at least, her wallet.

What was it?

The reason I was so good at what I did—the best, actually—was my innate ability to spot weaknesses and exploit them for my own benefit. Staring at the now closed door of the bathroom, I wondered something else. Why the fuck did I care? Nixie was a woman, not a company. There was no potential for profit here.

What was it about this girl that had kept me up half the night, my ears on alert for the slightest change in her breathing? Needing to know that she was okay. Safe.

A minute ago I’d been close enough to smell the citrus notes of Nixie’s shampoo wafting up from her sleep-mussed mane. My arm had been wrapped around her tiny waist, my palm pressed to her ribs, registering every breath, every tremble. And all I’d wanted was to bring my lips down to hers and find out if she tasted as sweet as she smelled.

I didn’t, and not just because she was obviously in pain and off-kilter from pills.

I’d been honest when I said my Google search pulled up nothing. Until a year ago, Nixie Rowland hadn’t existed. Prior to that, I couldn’t find a single link to anything that Nixie Rowland had ever said or done. “You didn’t fall from the damned sky,” I’d grumbled, clicking through site after site.

In this day and age, such invisibility was impossible. Local papers published the names of athletes, high school graduates, and the winners of contests and awards from spelling bee champions to prize-winning animals. And, of course, there was always the police blotter.

There was no record of Nixie Rowland scoring a soccer goal, graduating high school, or enrolling in college. She hadn’t won a spelling bee or raised a prize hog. And she wasn’t a criminal. Online, Nixie Rowland didn’t exist.

Her ID was from The Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, a small sticker indicating she was a graduate student. Did she even live in Manhattan? Then again, with the September 11 memorial service earlier in the day, the city had been overflowing with those affected by the tragedy. Tourists, politicians, and business leaders had jammed into already crowded streets, sidewalks, and restaurants with those who lived or worked in Manhattan’s financial district every day.

You would think that the actual date of my brother’s death would be worse than September 11. Maybe if he’d been killed on American soil, it would be. But he died on the other side of the world, in another time zone, and we weren’t even notified until several days later, after they had recovered what was left of his body.

So I attended the gut-wrenching memorial service this morning, just as I’d done every year since 2002. It was one of the very few days of the year I played hooky. Afterward, I headed directly to the gym for a three-hour workout, including a brutal sparring session.

Although my brother didn’t die in one of the towers, he may as well have. For years I’d walked by the giant mess of debris, rage spiraling with each lungful of air that stank of sulphur and rot. I watched as the field was cleared, beginning my career in a building that gave me a view of the enormous hole in the ground. Intense and driven, with a head for numbers and a heart that was just numb, I was the ideal employee. Fury fueled grueling eighty, ninety, one hundred hour work weeks, my star rising with each floor of the Freedom Tower.

This chunk of Manhattan was a permanent reminder of what I had lost and what I was still fighting for. And I fought, hard.

Which was why I stayed in Manhattan after the attack. My own parents fled the city as soon as I left for college, and I bought them an oceanfront condo in Florida with my first million. For selfish reasons, it was easier having them a thousand miles away. They didn’t particularly like the person I’d become, not that I could blame them, and their disappointment didn’t sting quite as much from a distance. Since Wyatt’s death, heartbreak was written all over their faces. They were like walking warning signs. Love hurts.

We had been a close-knit family once, and they’d encouraged Wyatt and me to be friendly and well-mannered. To be conscientious about other people’s time and ideas. With two tiny exceptions, I was none of those things anymore. Life was so much simpler if I didn’t care about anyone else but myself. Not when I spent my days ripping apart companies that had taken years of dedication and commitment to create. Not when firing hundreds or even thousands of people took little more than a signature on a page.

For the past sixteen years, I’d focused on three things: sharpening my mind, strengthening my body, and making money. And two people: my niece and nephew.

I wasn’t blind. I could see the results of my time in the gym. Women threw themselves at me on a regular basis, and I enjoyed playing with them. Could appreciate the softness of their bodies and the lushness of their curves. Wasn’t immune to their full lips and husky laughs. But they were interchangeable. Easily forgettable.

There were people I respected in my life. Most of whom now worked for me. If they were smart, they ignored my impatience. If they weren’t . . . well, I fired them.

And if I had any doubts that I was on the right track, all I had to do was look at my bank balance. There, in black and white, or maybe I should say green, was proof of my success. For those who called me a coldhearted bastard, I’d say the Arctic was treating me pretty damn well.

What was it about Nixie that was raising the temperature? At the twinge in my pants, I looked down. Jesus Christ. She was raising something else as well. If she didn’t get out of the bathroom soon, I was going to embarrass myself. Not that there was any reason to rush. She’d made it perfectly clear she wasn’t interested in my joining her, and it wasn’t just because of the slice in her side. Nixie wasn’t interested in me. She was counting the minutes until daylight, until she could make an escape.

Which brought me back to my original question. I’d seen two emotions on Nixie’s face, besides her obviously false show of confidence. Fear, at first. And then sadness.

God help me, I wanted to grab hold of a sword and slay whatever dragons dared turn their fire on her.

And afterward, I wanted to ride triumphantly through gates she opened just for me and see what lay inside.

Why? No idea. This was new territory for me. Sure, she was beautiful. But so was every woman I’d ever slept with, and the list was long. She was unimpressed by me, and wanted to be anywhere but here, in my apartment.

I shouldn’t care. But I did. I wanted her to want me as much as I wanted her. Even though that would be a disaster. I had too much on my plate right now. My business, family obligations. The last thing I needed was to fuck it all up by getting involved with a flame-haired art student.

I was completely out of my element, even though I was standing in the middle of my own damn bedroom. I preferred women who wanted the same things I wanted, women who enjoyed a fun night here and there but didn’t expect any more from me than a series of mind-blowing orgasms. Which I delivered.

This one, though, she had baggage. I could feel the weight of her expectations through the closed door separating us.

This one, I needed to leave the fuck alone.

Nixie

As I pushed into the bathroom, my shuddering sigh of relief got caught in the back of my throat. The walls were covered with silver octagonal tiles, each about three inches from end to end, so shiny they might as well have been mirrors. Everywhere I looked, my eyes bounced off my reflection. Hundreds of them. I caught glimpses of my face in pieces. Mouth. Eye. Nose. Ear. Without the full picture, each individual component was magnified. A slight tremble in my lower lip. The fluttering of my eyelashes. The pulsing vein at my temple.

These small glimpses were unsettling.

Above the sink was another mirror, a real one. Staring at my entire face, I whispered the name on my driver’s license. Nixie Rowland.

It wasn’t my real name.

My birth certificate would tell you that my name is Noelle, but no one has called me that for the past year. Nixie is a nickname, a blend of Noelle and Pixie that only my parents have ever called me.

Of course, it’s been years since I heard my mother whisper my name as she soothed a Band-Aid over a scraped knee. Or my father calling for me to come down the slide at the neighborhood playground. What I wouldn’t give to hear them say it one last time.

Becoming Nixie again wouldn’t bring them back, I knew that. But hopefully it would keep me from being found.

Rowland was the last name of my favorite teacher from elementary school. It didn’t mean anything to me, but was a smarter choice than using something that would be easy to look up, like my mother’s maiden name.

Turning the knobs of the faucet, I blew out a short breath and forced a smile onto my lips. It trembled there for a minute, looking as fake as it was. The painkiller had kicked in, and so I stood up straight, squared my shoulders and tried again. This time it floated onto my mouth like a fallen leaf. Natural. But not quite casual enough. I softened my eyes a little, tilting my head to the side so that a wisp of hair fell forward and curled beneath my jaw. There. That was it. Pretty, but not interesting. The face of a girl with nothing to hide. A face a guy like Nash should look past.

In front of a mirror, if I concentrated, I could make my expression as opaque as a shallow lake on a dark day. The problem was that I wasn’t always standing in front of a mirror. When I opened the door, I’d have to face a man as perceptive as the one whose quick thinking had saved me from a bad situation.

I just needed to get through the next few hours. With any luck, I’d be sleeping for most of them. After that, I’d never have to see Nash again.

On the bright side, it was September 12 now. I had another three hundred and sixty four days until my most hated day of the year came around again.

That hadn’t always been the case. Until 2001, September 11 had been my favorite day. My birthday.

But that year, it became the day of my parents’ death. The day I became an orphan.

My mother was a trading assistant, working in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. My father worked down the block. He saw the plane hit the North Tower. When my mother’s boss wouldn’t let her leave, he ran down the street to get her out, making it inside her building . . . just in time for the second plane to hit the South Tower.

How do I know all this? Because my father’s business partner—his name was Paul but I called him Pappi, even before he became my legal guardian—told me, right after he brought me home to live with him and his son, Derrick.

For the first few years, Derrick treated me like an annoying little sister. But eventually things changed. His voice deepened. I grew breasts. All my friends had crushes on Derrick, and I began to see why. Derrick told his friends that if they touched me he’d kill them. An awkwardness sprung up between us that wasn’t broken until the first time he kissed me. From that moment on, our love was all-consuming.

Really. It consumed me.

It’s Derrick I’m hiding from now.

I left Long Island behind and came to New York City. Brooklyn, to be exact. Just twenty miles away, it may as well have been a different planet than the suburb where I’d spent most of my life.

Paying Manhattan rent was out of the question, and besides, I was more of a Williamsburg girl. To be perfectly honest, I hated coming to Manhattan and avoided it like the plague every other day of the year, but there was nowhere else I could possibly be on September eleventh. I spent most of the morning at the memorial service, and the rest of the day touring the museum. The memorial service was intense, as it was every year, but the museum was downright agonizing. The Survivor Stairs. The Survivor Tree. And from all those who didn’t survive, so many tiny details of life on display—prescription bottles, wallets, jewelry.

Afterward, I’d walked along the perimeter of the reflecting pools, wondering how many it would take to hold all the tears that had been shed for the men and women memorialized on the seventy-six bronze plaques attached to the wall’s parapets. It was at the sight of my own parents’ names that the sadness in my soul expanded to the point I couldn’t contain it anymore. The pressure built until I rushed off, needing to get away from the physical reminder of their loss.

Directly across the street from the memorial was St. Paul’s Chapel, also known as “The Little Chapel That Stood,” because it emerged from 9/11 without even a broken window. Pappi brought me to the church often growing up, especially around the holidays. Usually I found solace in the 250-year-old house of worship, but today I was just jealous that a place so close to the towers could get through that awful day without any scars to show for it.

My scars were internal, which allowed everyone to pretend I was fine. Healed.

But some cuts never close.

Instead of entering the sanctuary, I had rushed past it. Setting off toward the subway, my eyes blurry from tears, I’d gotten lost. Unlike the organized grid system of midtown, the lower tip of Manhattan was filled with short, narrow streets haphazardly crossing much longer, wider ones. Modern steel skyscrapers towered majestically beside dilapidated three-story relics of a different age, and intermittent alleys were an unavoidable byproduct of three centuries of uneven urban development. They were also a shortcut when navigating crowded sidewalks. I just wanted to get back to Brooklyn and had ducked into the alley without a second thought, not hearing the footsteps behind me.

Once again, I cursed myself for letting my guard down. I’d spent the past year looking over my shoulder, and should have known better than to be so stupid. But of course, it was September 11. That damned day had a way of ruining everything.

A knock on the door pulled me out of my reverie. “Are you okay?” Was that genuine concern in Nash’s voice, or was he worried I was snooping through his cabinets?

“Yeah, fine.” I turned off the water and dried my hands, reaching for the detached expression that was having a hard time staying put.

“Come on, let me help you back to bed.”

I opened the door, watching as his eyes dragged over my body, faltering slightly where the hem of his shirt met my bare thighs. His mouth was tight, though, keeping his thoughts to himself as he wrapped his arm around me. An unwelcome thrill moved through me at his touch and I averted my eyes. Maybe it was the meds, but feigning disinterest in this man was not coming easy.

After twenty feet that could have been a mile, I slipped into bed—Nash’s bed—and yanked the covers up to my chin. His low chuckle echoed in the room as he crossed to the chair in the corner, turning the light off. My skin still tingled from our contact. “Are you really going to sit there all night?” I asked, my voice skating hoarsely through my dry throat.

“There’s only a few hours left before morning.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Go to sleep, Nixie.”

Nash’s voice pooled in my ear like warm honey, slipping inside, trickling down deep. Warming me. If he wanted to sit there all night, so be it. He had the kind of voice that should record audiobooks, or host long podcasts. A voice I could listen to for hours. But voices like his—they shouldn’t belong to men who looked like Nash. It simply wasn’t fair. His voice should belong to a sweaty, overweight man with stubby limbs and hairy ears. Like a consolation prize for being dealt a bad hand. This guy . . . what’s the best hand you could be dealt? Full House? Royal Flush? Four of a Kind? Nash was all of them, combined. He didn’t need to sound as good as he looked, too.

I was grateful for the darkness, shielding my thoughts from his view. Nash got an ego boost every time he looked in a mirror, he definitely didn’t need one from me.

But I wanted to hear his voice again. “Nash?”

“Yes?”

“How did you know the guys that followed me were up to no good?”

The weight of his silence was another layer pressing on my chest, and I couldn’t take a deep breath until he answered. “Instinct. Proximity, maybe.”

“Are your impressions of people always so spot-on?”

“Usually.”

“Have you always been able to do that?”

“I don’t know. I never thought about it.”

“I bet it saves you a lot of trouble. You know, spending time and effort getting to know people. Thinking they’re one way when really, deep down, they’re the complete opposite.” I was babbling, my words slightly slurred. Damn pain meds.

“I guess it would, if I wanted to get to know people.”

I sniffed. “Oh, I get it. You’re the type who feels like they have all the friends they need.” Like I should talk. Derrick had always discouraged me from getting close to anyone but him. I had acquaintances, but no true friends.

“And you’re pretty quick to make assumptions.”

I blew out a sigh. “Sorry. Shouldn’t do that. Not very good at it.”

Suppressed laughter buoyed his voice. “What were you running from?”

Even on drugs, my muscles immediately tensed. “I wasn’t running.”

“Maybe not literally. But it looked like something was chasing you into that alley.”

Fear. Regret. Grief. “Those two guys.”

“No. You didn’t notice them. You were completely unaware of your surroundings.”

I twitched at the derision that had crept into his voice. “You know, for someone I’ve never met, you were paying pretty close attention to me.” A frightening possibility occurred to me and I gasped, kicking my legs out from under the covers as I struggled to sit up. “Oh my god—is this some kind of trap? Did he send you? Are you going to take me back to him?”

Nash was out of his chair and across the room in a flash, his hand sliding across my bare thigh. Stopping when his fingertips brushed against lace. Shock spiraled up from deep in my stomach, mixing with something else even more potent. Not fear. No, I was accustomed to that emotion. Something different. Something I hadn’t felt much of in the past couple of years. Desire.

“Take you? Where?” His roar was that of a lion guarding his pride, and I immediately realized my mistake. Nash was not a man who would do another’s bidding.

I struggled to clear my head. “No—nowhere. S’fine.” His thumb swept along my hipbone, sending goose bumps racing across my skin.

“I’m not taking you anywhere. And I’m not going to do anything to you.” Nash’s hand lifted and he stood. “You should really go to sleep now, Nixie.”

Disappointment took the place of his touch and I closed my eyes. “Nash?”

“Yes?”

“Why did you do it?”

“What?”

“Come after me.”

I heard him suck in a breath as he walked back to the chair in the corner. Good. Maybe his instincts weren’t so finely attuned that I couldn’t surprise him at all. There was a rustle as he sat back down. “I don’t know.”

Sleep was pulling at me, but I held on tight. Not yet. “Yes, you do.”

This time, his tone was heavier. Cutting through the darkness with ease. “Whatever story you’re spinning, don’t make me the hero. It’s not who I am.”

The edge of his voice dragged along my spine, and I shivered. “Good night, Nash.” I didn’t need a hero. Didn’t believe in them anymore. But even tired and drug addled, I was shocked to realize that I felt more safe now than I had in . . . years. At least.

And for tonight, that was enough.