When It's Right (8 page)

“Cass. Cass, I don’t…I don’t know what’s going on in that head of yours.” He massaged her temples with his fingertips, and the gesture warmed her to her toes. A flash of pain interrupted his words. “Because you won’t tell me.”

“I’m sorry—”

He cut her off with the slightest shake of his head. “But I can’t…I can’t.”

She braced herself as if for impact. Her fear of rejection was a hole opening under her feet.

But he didn’t let her fall. His whole expression softened. “Cass, I can’t spend the whole night wondering.” His gaze dropped to her mouth, and the yawning chasm beneath her began to fill. “I can’t spend the whole night wondering if I’m going to get to kiss you at midnight.”

Oh, God. Not only was she not falling. She was soaring. In a dirty subway tunnel, outside the flow of so many people, it was just the two of them. Just them.

Her vision blurred, and she reached up a hand of her own to touch his face. He had five-o’clock stubble, but the skin was so warm. And she’d been wanting to do this for so, so long. Still, she had to be sure. “Is that something you want?”

“Yes.”

How could one word change so much?

Her face felt like it would break with the force of her smile, and she closed her eyes.

He didn’t seem to recognize it for the acceptance it was, though. Because he was still going, that nervous fast-talking thing he did when he was trying to cover up precisely how vulnerable he felt. “I know I’m not good at relationships. I know I don’t let people in and I choose the wrong women. I’ve never been in love the way you’re
supposed
to love, but I think I could. I think…”

“Nate.” She opened her eyes. All those fears and whatever misconception he was operating under… She had to set him right. “I want—”

Before she could even begin to find the words for all the things she wanted with him, before she could get to the fears that had kept her silent all day, she was bumped from behind. All at once, the crush of people around them registered. As did the tug on her arm.

“Hey!” she cried out. And then she recognized what was going on. The lack of weight on her shoulder. “My purse!”

She turned back to Nate, panic in her gaze. But all she could see was his back. The long strides of his legs as he ran.

Before she could even call out his name, he was gone.

Chapter Nine

Nate didn’t even think. The second they were jostled, his gaze shot up, fixed on a man in black. Black hat and black coat, and trailing from his hand, the brown strap of Cassie’s purse. The telltale purple pom-pom that symbolized her school’s girls’ basketball team.

“My purse!” she shouted, and he was in motion.

And God, but it was stupid. It was the stupidest, most reckless thing he’d done yet, and that was saying something. But it wasn’t about being a hero or about emulating that scene in every movie where the guy ran down the purse thief. It wasn’t about proving he was a man or about proving himself to Cassie.

He’d told her how he felt, told her he wanted to kiss her at midnight, and damn it all if she hadn’t been about to tell him she wanted the exact same thing. They’d been in Times Square, a scant two hours to midnight, and this whole fiasco of a trip had finally been turning around, and he was not—was not was not was not was
not—
going to spend the last hours of it with Cassie trying to replace everything in her wallet. Hell, she probably had the keys to the rental car in there.

No way. No how.

He was rescuing this fiasco of a trip from the jaws of abject defeat if it killed him. And it damn well might.

Legs burning, Nate pushed his way through the station, paying no attention to where he was or where he was going. All he could see was that black coat and that purple pom-pom. He shoved through the press of the crowd, saw the guy dart his way up the stairs, and Nate didn’t even care. He elbowed and fought his way between and over people, climbed the escalator with such speed that by the time he got to the top, he was only a half-dozen feet behind.

They emerged out into the street and hit another wall of people. For a second, Nate lost sight of his prize, but then—
there.
He spotted the asshole, and it was a block and then a turn, another length of street spent forcing his way through the crowd. The guy squeezed his way through a particularly dense throng. Nate’s chest clenched with desperation and despair.

“Stop him!” He screamed it over the music and the voices. “Stop that man. Fucking…purse thief. Stop him!”

And then, to his absolute shock, someone actually did.

The bottle came down on the purse-snatcher’s head with a crack, and Nate winced and skidded to a halt. The guy dropped like a sack of potatoes. Incredulous, Nate flitted his gaze up to see a woman with blue hair sticking out from underneath a…was that a witch’s hat? Her black lips curled up into a wicked smile.

Pointing down at the heap of felled criminal at her feet, she met Nate’s gaze. “That your guy?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

Still shaking his head, struggling to catch his breath and calm his racing heart, he staggered forward. He nodded his thanks to the woman with the bottle and prayed she didn’t use it on him. Sinking to one knee, he rolled the man over. His chest was still rising and falling, and his eyes were open if unfocused. That was good. Scumbag that he was, homicide was another thing pretty high on Nate’s dwindling list of things that would
not
happen. Not this trip.

Nate wrenched Cassie’s purse from the guy’s limp fist. And he didn’t have to. He didn’t.

He did it anyway.

His whole fist burst with pain as he connected it with the man’s cheek. There was a satisfying
crack
, and it didn’t seem to be coming from Nate’s own bones. Cradling his hand to his chest, Nate spat. Heaved out a deep breath.

“That’s for trying to fuck up my weekend.”

And with that he rose. He’d taken a few unsteady steps back in the direction he was pretty sure he had come from, Cassie’s purse tucked securely under his arm, when a voice called after him. “Hey! You wanna press charges or something?”

Nate paused. Turning back around, he found the woman with the blue hair staring after him, bottle held high in the air. He smirked and shook his head. “Nah. Gotta get back to my girl.”

Grinning with the triumph he most certainly did
not
feel on account of being a hero and running down the purse-snatcher, just like they did in the movies, he dug in his pocket for his phone. He hardly had to even look to pull up Cassie’s number and dial.

Two seconds later, his ribcage buzzed. And again.

Fuck
.

Dread filling him, he took the strap of Cass’s purse between his teeth and somehow managed to tug the zipper open without dropping his own phone. Sure enough, right on top of the mess of her keys and wallet and some girly compact thing, was her phone. But that was okay. Surely that was fine. He’d just go back to where he’d left her. She was smart. She’d stay there and wait for him. Wouldn’t she?

He got about half a block before he realized the flaw in his plan. He looked around at the sea of faces and at the street signs and the awnings. But it was all to no avail. He’d been so focused, so singularly intent on chasing that asshole, he hadn’t been watching where he was going.

Back on the subway, it had been cute, his naïveté. Cassie had seemed to find it cute. He’d been mortified to know so little about how to get around in a big city like this, but now…now…

In a different world, he would have cried. As it was, he stopped, right there in the middle of the street. All around him, people were having the time of their lives. And he was lost. Completely, hopelessly lost.

That was his biggest problem. He knew it was. But as he stood there, boggling at faces and streets he didn’t recognize, with no way out and no clear path home, all he could think was that he was missing his chance.

He wasn’t going to get to kiss Cassie.

His chest ached. When had that become so important? Two days ago, he’d said he wanted a change. And now, he wanted exactly what he’d always had.

He just wanted it differently. And he wanted it more than anything he ever had before.

Nate had no idea how much time had passed until suddenly, all the people around him seemed to shed their random drunkenness in favor of…purposeful drunkenness. The chorus of voices surged. He followed a couple people’s gazes to a digital display on the side of a building. Saw a clear image of the ball at the top of its spire. For a second, he thought the worst—that it was time and he’d missed it. That he’d fucked up so completely. But his misery wasn’t quite finished. Not yet.

He checked his watch. Ten minutes. He had ten minutes.

With a sickening mixture of renewed purpose and abject misery, he pressed forward through the crowd again. He’d been wandering for hours now, searching a million faces for just one. For sandy blond hair and a red knit cap. A smile that could turn his insides to liquid.

Thanks to yet more kindness from strangers, he’d eventually found his way back to 57th Street and its subway station, only nothing there had been right. It had taken a while to realize there was more than one entrance to the station, and by the time he’d gotten himself back above ground and across the street to where he’d been going, more than an hour had passed since he’d gotten lost. The place where she’d been standing was empty.

And it was so pointless, trying to find her amidst a throng like this. But what else could he do?

His heart heavy and aching, he crossed another street, eyes seeing but unseeing as he searched. He checked his watch. Five minutes. He swallowed hard.

Someone bumped into him, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up as he grasped Cassie’s purse tighter to his body. He was not going to lose it again. He met the glazed eyes of a man who had clearly had about five drinks too many. Heard his apologies.

Turning his gaze skyward in frustration, Nate let out a breath that shook his lungs. He lowered his eyes.

Then raised them again to read the neon words on an awning two stories above the ground. He read them one more time.

His heart felt like it skipped a beat.

And he was in motion.

Like everything in his relationship with Cass, it seemed, he didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before.

Cassie was
not
going to cry. For what had to be the hundredth time in the space of two hours, she glanced at her watch. Blinked hard. Her cheeks hurt from the force of the cold, and her eyes prickled with a pain of anticipated disappointment that ran so much deeper.

After Nate had run off after her purse-snatcher, Cassie had stayed right where he’d left her, waiting in the dark and dank of the subway station until the nervous restlessness had finally become too much. Without any way of getting in touch with him and without an ounce of faith in his ability to navigate the Midtown streets, she’d wiped her eyes that were
not
leaking and ascended to the surface of the city.

And then with a sudden fit of vertigo, she’d remembered what he’d said to her, clinging to a strap in a lurching subway car: that there was a restaurant named after her, here, and that they should go there someday. Together. It had felt right—so much better than standing still where he had left her.

So she’d gone there, and she’d waited, just like she’d waited for all these years. She was waiting there still.

There were just a few minutes left to go ’til midnight, though, and her heart twisted harder. It wasn’t their last chance, of course it wasn’t, but he’d said he wanted to kiss her. At midnight. And she hadn’t had a chance to tell him she wanted that, too.

Yet again, she let her gaze move back across the crowd as she stood against the brick wall of Cassandra’s restaurant. Alone amidst the crowd, she worked to put on her very best fake smile.

Only then it wasn’t fake. It wasn’t fake at all. It was blindingly, blissfully, impossibly real.

The sob that hadn’t been a sob, damn it, morphed and twisted in her lungs until the laughter bubbled up, hot and full of too much relief for her to contain. She brought her hands to her mouth and clasped them tight.

For the second time in as many days, the very instant she’d been ready to give up on him, Nate was there. Smiling and slow but catching up, late to the party but
there
. And hers.

For the first time, she let herself believe that he was hers.

He parted the crowd, a grin splitting his face the way it felt like her smile was breaking hers. With his hat sitting crooked on his head, his coat askew and her purse slung over his shoulder, he made his way toward her. And he looked so beautiful, so familiar. There in the midst of so much strangeness, he looked like home.

And he’d come for her. He’d come for
her.

It wasn’t until he was just a foot away from her that she saw the flicker of doubt marring the brightness of his eyes. The uncertainty she had sensed in him all day. She straightened her spine. She had put that look there. And she was going to take it away.

His grin shifted to become a wry, raw thing, and he stopped short, even though his arms were open. He dropped them to his sides, speaking before she could. “Fancy seeing you here.”