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“Yeah, okay.” I snatched the bottle and put it back on the counter, cutting short the lyrical lamentations before they could get off the ground. “Can we go now?”
Nick lifted his head high, surveying the battlefield as the war raged on around him. It really was a gruesome sight, yet the corners of his lips lifted with a hint of pride.
“Yes, Abigail,” he said softly, albeit a bit more formally now. “Things did escalate quite quickly, and it certainly would be bad publicity for us newlyweds. Let’s get out of here.”
“You don’t say?” I snarked. “You, alcohol, and crowds are a potent recipe for disaster, and we both know this would end up on the front page. I can see it now. ‘When Billionaires Attack’ or ‘Billionaire Temper Tantrum’ or ‘Billionaire Completely Loses His Cool’ or ‘Look Out for Little Unsaintly Nick!’ You’ll be on the next episode of Troubled Trust-Funders before you know it.”
“Are you saying that this is my fault?”
“It doesn’t matter. You know how the tabloids would spin it.”
“Yeah. Hell
hath no fury like Nicholas scorned.”
As he said the words, a gigantic man spotted him from the far corner and took off running in our direction. Halfway to us, he lifted an empty beer mug above his head and let out a guttural cry.
Nick’s regal composure left him at once, and he started tugging drunkenly on my arm. “Yeah, definitely time to go!”
Without a second of pause, he and I began scrambling away, tripping over drunken bodies and shattered furniture as we headed down the hall. The front door was effectively blocked, so instead of even trying for it, we sprinted toward the bathrooms. Of course, we didn’t actually pull off sprinting, because Nick had never been so unsteady on his feet. The lights had been knocked out, and the only thing we had to guide us was a neon green Heineken sign flickering on the wall.
“Come on, babe. We’re almost there,” I said, reaching behind me to grab his hand. I was just about to pull him inside when we passed the door to the kitchen and froze in our tracks.
No less than five men were standing there, all of them as wasted as he was and each armed with some sort of cooking paraphernalia. Their heads were bowed together as they engaged in some sort of drunken huddle, but they looked up when they saw us, and in what felt like slow motion, the man standing in the middle raised his finger to point at Nick’s chest.
My brilliant boyfriend, of course, did a drunken who-me? double-take as I slowly backed into the wall.
For a split second, nothing more happened. No one moved or said a word, and in that split second of inaction, I seized the foolish notion that cooler heads might possibly prevail. That was shattered, however, when, with a fearsome cry, the man launched himself toward us, wearing a hateful scowl and wielding a whisk, prepared to turn us into merengue.
Chapter 21
“Nick!” I shrieked.
Somehow, even in his inebriated stupor, Nick was ready to face him. No matter how many quarts and fifths and shot glasses of alcohol were coursing through his veins, he managed to spin easily out of the way with all the grace of a ballerina, then laughed as the man’s own forward momentum sent him crashing into the wall and the whisk clattering to the floor. Nick grabbed the would-be weapon and threw it down the hall. Then, with a violent grace I couldn’t begin to fathom, he leapt into air and spun in a high circle before knocking the man to the ground with a single roundhouse kick.
What the fuck!?
My jaw fell to the floor as my hero landed, shaking out his golden locks like some kind of devastating angel. The four other men in the kitchen were paralyzed, in a similar state of shock to my own, just staring at Nick as if their nightmares had suddenly come to life.
Then Nick tripped on his own shoe and stumbled back into the wall, as if all his prowess and sure-footedness vanished in the wake of the battle.
The men took that clumsy moment to charge toward us, releasing a deafening cry and waving all sorts of utensils as they sought to avenge their fallen friend. One waved a set of tongs, the other wore a colander on his head like a helmet, and the two others had spatulas in both hands. I was just glad none of them had happened upon a meat cleaver, because they looked like they were ready to tear the entire tavern to the ground. Since I was merely a woman, I was unceremoniously shoved out of the way, and two of them grabbed Nick by the shoulders and pressed him up against the wall he’d just stumbled into. As they held him steady, the others walked slowly toward him, cracking their knuckles.
“Come on, you guys!” I exclaimed, terrified and dumbfounded at the same time. “Look, I don’t know what he did or what he said or whatever, but I guarantee you don’t want to do this!”
I might as well have been screaming at a wall, because the liquid courage had a firm grasp on all of them, Nick included. As reasonable as they might have been under normal circumstances, they were men and they were drunk, and they weren’t about to let some things slide.
“Take it back,” one of the men said quietly as he stepped closer. There was a flash of silver as he held what looked like a serving spoon to Nick’s throat. “Take it back right now.”
Nick jutted his chin up defiantly, a rebellious fire burning in his eyes. “Nope. Never.”
The spoon pressed more firmly against his skin, soon joined by a baster.
“Be smart, kid. Don’t make us do something we’ll both regret.”
Nick’s eyes flashed again as his lips curved up into an unrepentant smile. “It’s Joe, isn’t it?”
The man glanced at his friends, then nodded uncertainly.
