One Hit Wonderful (6 page)

“Well, with the wedding being cancelled.” He shook his head as if to lament the tragedy of it all. “I know how much she was looking forward to it.”

“Yes, that was very troubling,” Lily agreed, and watched Max’s eyes light up at the thought. “But I have to say, breaking your nose did wonders for her morale.” She let her professional smile turn just a bit feral. “It looks as though most of the swelling’s gone down, but you missed some of the bruising.” She tapped a finger under her own eye. “Try an oil-based concealer next time.” She leaned forward to whisper, “Works wonders.”

Max lost his look of patronizing concern and fury flared in his eyes for a brief moment. It warmed Lily’s heart. She watched with undisguised amusement as he smoothed a hand down the lapel of his silk suit and struggled to find his dignity.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he ground out. “Now, where might I find Bridget?”

Lily frowned inwardly but kept her expression neutral. “Why?”

“I’d say that’s between her and me,” he began, but she just shook her head.

“Sorry. You involved me in this when you decided to have us evicted.”

She watched his face turn to stone. “You were behind on the rent,” he said, and she nearly tossed her professionalism out the window.

“Spin it however you want to for the sheriff,” she told him, holding on to her temper by the barest of threads. “But we both know that charge is bogus.” She
tsked
at him. “Childish of you.”

“It was childish of her to break my nose,” he protested, and her lip curled in distaste at the hint of whine in his voice.

“Maybe,” she said, “but considering the circumstances, I think she was remarkably restrained. If it’d been me, I’d have cut off your balls and fed them to the pigeons.”

He huffed out a breath. “I can see you’re unwilling to be reasonable.”

She smiled fully for the first time since he’d strolled in. “How very astute of you, Max.”

He glowered at her, his dark good looks turning sinister. “Tell Bridget I’m looking for her,” he growled, and turned on his hand-tooled leather heel.

“What an asshole,” she muttered.

“I’ll second that,” said a voice to her right, and she spun around with a shriek.

Nate grinned. “Hi.”

Lily closed her eyes briefly as the breath rushed out of her lungs then opened them to glare at him. “Don’t sneak up on me like that! You almost gave me a heart attack.”

His eyebrow quirked at that, and he eyed the hand she had pressed to her breast. “You look like you’re in pretty good shape to me. I doubt a little startle’s going to do you any harm.”

“It might,” she muttered, and frowned at him. He looked way too good in faded jeans and an old Harvard T-shirt. Too good for her peace of mind. He’d shaved too, and her fingertips itched to stroke over the smooth plane of his jaw.

That surprisingly strong urge snapped her back into focus. She straightened and pulled her professionalism around her like a cloak of armor. “Is there something I can do for you, Mr. MacIntyre?”

He grinned, a flash of teeth and dimples that might’ve made a lesser woman’s knees go weak. She locked hers just in case.

“That’s a loaded question if I’ve ever heard one, Ms. Michaels.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out an envelope. “But as it happens, I’m just dropping this off.”

She automatically held out a hand, noting it hadn’t been sealed. “What is it?”

“The lease.”

“The lease.” She blinked at him. “I thought you were going to email it to me.”

He shrugged. “This was easy enough. And now you won’t have to send it back to me.”

“What, you think I’m just going to sign it right now and hand it back?” She choked back the bark of laughter. “I need time to read it, go over the details.”

“Any reason you can’t do that right now?”

“I’m at work.”

He looked around at the deserted lobby. “And you’re so busy.”

She huffed out a breath and pulled the papers out of the envelope. “I hope you don’t think I’m going to rush through this just because you’re waiting.”

“I don’t.”

“I’m going to read every word,” she warned.

“I wouldn’t expect anything less,” he assured her, and leaned against the counter as if he had all the time in the world.

Lily tamped down the spurt of annoyance and turned her attention to the lease.

Reading every word took less than two minutes. “This is it?” she asked, looking up.

“Should there be more?” he asked. “It’s got amount of rent and security deposit, length of lease. What else do we need?”

“A lot,” she retorted. “What about a termination clause?”

He looked thoughtful. “If you need to get out of the lease early, just give me thirty days’ notice.”

She picked up a pen and made a notation in the blank bottom half of page two. “What if you want to terminate the lease early?”

He shook his head and looked absurdly confident. “I won’t.”

“Okay,” she muttered, and made another note. “Utilities.”

“All paid. What?” he asked when her head snapped up.

“All paid?”

He shrugged. “Everything’s tied into the workspace on the first floor, and I didn’t feel like putting in another meter and hassling with the city over it. I did put in a phone line, so if you need a land line you can get that hooked up.”

“I usually just use my cell phone, but I’ll need a land line for internet access,” she began then stopped when he shook his head. “I won’t need a land line for internet access?”

He shrugged again. “Not unless you need a proprietary line or something. I’ve got a secure wireless connection set up, you’re welcome to tap into that.”

“Cable TV?”

“Satellite,” he said. “I’ve already got an extra receiver.”

She put down her pen. “So let me get this straight. You’re including water, electric, internet access and satellite television in the six-hundred-dollar-a-month rent.”

“And gas.”

“Gas.”

He nodded. “The stove is gas, so is the heat, it’s more efficient. And trash removal.”

“Okay, I just have to ask. Are you on some kind of medication?”

“No.”

“Have you recently undergone a frontal lobotomy or are suffering from some incurable disease that robs you of logical thought?”

He chuckled. “No.”

She threw up her hands. “Then what’s the deal? You could get three times that in rent for the apartment, and you know it. Now you’re including utilities? Something’s wrong with the place. It’s haunted, right?”

“Not that I know of. Are you always this suspicious?” he asked curiously.

“It’s been my experience that when something looks too good to be true, it usually is.”

He nodded. “Fair enough. But in this case, it doesn’t apply.”

She picked up the pen again, running it through her fingers as she considered him. “Tell me why.”

He didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “I built the apartment on a dare.”

“You built it?” she asked. He nodded, and she looked at him with amazement. That gorgeous place, he’d built it himself. Then the second part of his statement hit her.

“What do you mean, on a dare?”

Nate shifted his weight, leaning his elbows on the reception desk as he faced her fully. “Last year I had about a six-month spell where I didn’t have any projects pending, and I was going stir crazy. One of my friends knew I’d always planned to do something with the top half of the carriage house, turn it into an apartment, and in a desperate attempt to get me to stop calling him to do something at midnight, bet me I couldn’t do all the work myself.”

“So technically, you built it on a bet,” she said, and he grinned.

“Yeah. Anyway, somewhere in the middle of it I realized I had no need for the apartment. The studio I get plenty of use out of, but…I could use it as a guest house, but my family all lives in town, and when my agent comes to visit, he actually stays at this hotel. So I don’t have a need for a guest house either.” He shrugged, a move she was coming to think of as his signature gesture. “And since I don’t need the rental income, I figured it would just add resale value to the property and sit empty.”

“But you decided to rent it out for pennies instead?”

He laughed, a low, rough sound that forced her to lock her knees again. “My agent threw such a fit when he found out what I was doing. He was terrified I’d hurt my hands, and in turn, his twenty percent.”

“Sounds charming,” she said dryly.

“Frank’s okay,” he said. “He’s just very focused on business. Anyway, he insisted since I’d jeopardized my livelihood for the sake of a bet, I get something out of it. So I promised him I’d rent it out.”

“For pennies,” she repeated, and shook her head. “Fine by me.” She scribbled on the bottom of the lease for a few moments, the only sound in the hushed lobby the scratch of her pen over the paper. She shoved the pages at him, along with the pen. “Initial each of those,” she said, pointing to the notes she’d made at the bottom, outlining the new provisions. She watched as he added his initials next to hers, took the pages back and added her signature to them.

“Your turn,” she said, and passed them back again. As soon as he’d finished signing, she gathered them up again. “Be right back,” she promised, and turned back into the office.

She picked up the phone, punching in Charles’ number as she fed the pages through the copy machine. “Charles, it’s Lil.”

“What’s up, doll?”

“I’m signing the lease on the apartment on Ivy, but listen to this.” She quickly outlined the provisions they’d just agreed on. “Do you think that’s crazy?”

“Hell yes it’s crazy. And you’re crazy if you don’t jump all over it with both feet!”

“I just don’t want to wind up screwed on this deal.”

“There’s a double entendre just begging to be played on there, but I’m going to leave it alone,” Charles said. “Look, you’ve got a lease, you’re the one with the out clause, and you won’t find a better deal unless you can time travel back to the seventies. If you don’t take it, I will.”

“I’m taking it,” she assured him. “And you’re helping me move on Wednesday.”

“The price of friendship,” he said easily. “Maybe Tall, Dark and Sexy will be working in the yard without a shirt and it’ll all be worth it.”

“Hope springs,” she said dryly, as though the thought didn’t tingle her toes one bit, and hung up.

When she stepped back out into the desk area, he was lounging against the desk much as she’d left him, his body angled to the side so he could see into the tea room to the left of the lobby. His mouth was quirked in obvious amusement, and curious to see what he found so entertaining, she craned her head to look.

“Ah. I see the debs have returned from their spa day.”

He flicked a glance at her. “Debs?”

“Debutantes,” she elaborated, “from Savannah, Georgia. It’s their fifteen-year reunion.”

“You’re kidding.”

She shook her head and grinned as a round of giggles broke out in the tea room. “Nope. They’ve been here since Wednesday afternoon, flirting with the waiters and driving housekeeping insane.”

He looked a little shell-shocked at the thought. “What are a bunch of Southern-belle debutantes doing at a hotel in the foothills of the Rockies?”

“They said they wanted to be able to cut loose away from their mamas and their husbands.” Lily winced as one particularly enthusiastic redhead took a handful of a waiter’s tush. She looked over at Nate’s chuckle. “Thankfully,” she said dryly, “they’re excellent tippers.”

He turned, still chuckling. He nodded at the papers in her hands. “Are we all set?”

“Yeah, we’re all set.” She handed the papers over, watching him fold them casually and tuck them back into his hip pocket. She resisted the urge to pull them back out and straighten the creases.

He dug into his front pocket and pulled out a key ring. “Keys,” he told her. “The outside door and your front door are keyed differently, but this is a master that will get you into both. Also, there’s a storage area you can use if you need to, the smaller key fits the padlock on that.”

She blinked at the keys in her hand. “This is a Hooters keychain.”

“Yeah. The locksmith gave it to me for free.”

“You’re giving me my keys on a Hooters keychain.”

His mouth began to curve into a grin. “I’ve got a Betty Paige one, if you’d prefer.”

“I would, as a matter of fact,” she muttered. “But I’ll just put them on my plain old silver key chain.”

The grin got bigger. “Whatever works, honey.” He watched her slide the keys off the loop, accepting the offending keychain when she held it out.

“So.” She cleared her throat, suddenly at a loss for conversation. “Moving in Wednesday is okay?”

Nate gave the keychain a little toss. “Wednesday’s fine. Are you moving yourself?”

“Hmm? Oh. No,” she said. “My friend’s going to help me. Charles. You met him the other day.”

“Right, I remember. What kind of car do you drive?”