Page 65 of Scarred Crown

He rubs the top of his head and avoids meeting my gaze. Then he sits up, his arms hanging over his knees. “Yeah.”

“But you—” The words get stuck in my throat, and I don’t know if I can say them without crying. “But you kissed me.”

He laces his fingers and puts them behind his neck, focused on the pile of blankets around him. When he meets my gaze, his expression is blank. “I wanted to see what it would be like. Now that I know, I don’t ever have to do it again. It won’t happen again.”

His comments are arrows to my heart. They cut so deep and so quick, tears spring to my eyes. “What?” I whisper.

“I shouldn’t have done it,” Nick slurs. “I’m sorry. Can we just forget it? Can we just forget this night happened?”

“You want to forget it?” I have to squeeze out the words around the lump in my throat. The intensity of the ache festering in my chest makes it hard to breathe. I can’t quite catch my breath. What is happening?

He rises and almost tips over when he tries to grab his shirt off the floor.

Normally I’d laugh at him, but I’m too stunned by his request. How do I reel in these feelings? The alcohol we drank together earlier is making this whole exchange surreal, dream-like.

Can I wake up now?

On his third attempt, he bunches his dress shirt into his hand, making a fist, and his jaw is tight with tension. Another discarded bottle of champagne lies on the floor beside the blankets.

“Nick?” I choke back a sob. Tiny cracks spider across my heart. This can’t be happening.

“We just need to forget it.” He glances at me over his shoulder, but when we make eye contact he doesn’t even seem like the same person he was a few hours ago.

“Julia!” Posey calls for me out the door. “Julia! We’re leaving.”

“You should go, Julia.” His gaze slides away from mine, and he stares at the bunched-up shirt in his hand.

“Nick.” I try again, but I’m not sure what I want to say. My throat and chest are so tight, I don’t know if I could get any more words out even if he wanted to hear them. I want to collapse in a puddle at his feet, beg him to tell me something different, to retract his words. He’s back together with Vicky? Nothing makes sense to me.

Before I walked in here, everything made so much sense.

“Julia!” Posey pops her head into the barn. “We have to go. Are you coming home with us or is Nick—” Her eyes widen at the sight of him, disheveled and partially dressed. “Oh.”

I clear my throat, but it’s painful to move the lump. “Take me home.” Turning on my heel, I loop my arm with hers and drag her out into the night.

“Oh, my God. You and Nick?” Posey says in a fierce whisper. “I always thought—”

“No.” I shake my head. Unshed tears burn my throat. “He wasn’t with me.” The stupid lump that keeps rising appears again and strangles my voice.

When I get home, I’ll curl on my bed and let the tears come. I just have to make it home. No one can ever know what happened, and then I can forget this night. We’ll forget it.

My heart is cracking and cracking and cracking.

I press the heel of my hand into my chest. Why won’t this stop hurting?

“He’s not with me,” I whisper.

He’ll never be with me.

Julia

Nick is sleeping beside me in our first-class seats at the tail end of our twenty-four-hour journey to reach Las Vegas. If I was smart, I would also be sleeping. When we arrive, he’ll be refreshed, and I’ll be bleary from lack of sleep. My judgment will be at my lowest while he’ll be in peak party mode. It’s been years since I’ve had a front-row seat to Nick on a binge, but I have a feeling I’ll be bearing witness to that event in a few hours.

Then he’ll be flying back to Bellerive with a hangover, and I’ll be crossing my fingers no Nick scandals hit the media while we’re in the air.

A hangover isn’t exactly the prime condition to have the news outlets break his father’s illness. King George told me on the phone he negotiated seventy-two hours to get all his kids back in Bellerive and tell them the terrible news before it’s splashed across the internet. I wanted to have Nick on a plane home today instead of going to Las Vegas. Why cut the timeline close?

Instead, Nick took the timeframe as a personal challenge. What could he squeeze into three days?