Now Or Never by Stella Rhys

14

IAIN

For the past five years, the Victorian Hotel had been a staple of mine for conducting business.

I held late-night meetings here, threw parties here. Entertained clients at the ever-trendy rooftop bar. I reserved rooms for athletes and colleagues, and whenever I did, I called personally to ensure that this “very good friend of mine” would be fully taken care of by the staff and made to feel like a fucking billionaire. Anytime I stepped foot in this building, it was entirely to do with work.

Yet for the second night in a row, I was here solely for my own debauchery.

And judging by the bedroom eyes and flirty lilting, the women at the front desk were keenly aware of that.

“Good to see you here for a second night, Mr. Thorn.”

“Finally found some time to play as hard as you work?” purred Blair, the brunette at the front desk with whom I generally spoke to secure reservations. I offered something of a smile as I took the room key from her hand.

“Just a little,” I replied before stepping around the corner to take a call from Drew.

And for the next two-and-a-half minutes, I let him rant about everything from pre-school applications and how surprisingly early you had to start to electronic sign-stealing in baseball and how I should drop any client who’d ever done that against him.

By the three-minute mark, I’d detected the lack of an actual emergency in the call, so I drifted back to the lobby, my eye immediately catching on a glimmer of blonde by the bar.

Holland.

She was leaning over a menu stand to read the menu, and I felt the corners of my lips curve up in a smile as I took a moment to simply look at her.

Her hair was neatly wound at the top of her head, save for two pieces that fell down to frame her face, and she was wearing a pale blue sundress—tight on the top with a flared skirt and thin straps that tied in bows at her tanned shoulders.

She looked so mesmerizing that I had Drew fully tuned out till he asked, “Are you even listening to me?”

“I stopped several minutes ago,” I said. “Are we still on for tomorrow evening?”

“Yeah, but dude… I was fucking pouring my heart out to you just now.”

I snorted. “You were spiraling into sign-stealing paranoia out of boredom because it’s your off day but you’re in Boston and Evie’s in New York, and my guess is you can’t call her right now because she’s putting Kai down for a nap. Which is why I got the honor.”

As Drew took a long pause, I watched Holland go up on her toes, craning her neck in search of the hostess.

“I don’t think I like how well you know me,” he finally said.

“Well, it’s entirely your doing considering how often you insist on calling me.”

“Oh, excuse me for valuing our friendship after you set me up with the mother of my child,” Drew said as I drifted across the lobby toward Holland, laughing to myself as I watched her frown deeply while flipping the menu front to back several times, as if a second side of options would magically appear if she looked hard enough. “Dude,” Drew groaned when I ignored his last few pleas for attention. “I’m so bored. Boston is boring. What are you even doing right now?”

“Work,” I said distractedly, though my peripherals could spot Blair waving to me from the desk.

“Mr. Thorn! I apologize, I never gave you your second room key.”

Drew stopped mid-sentence to boom into the phone.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, motherfucker! Why are you checking into a hotel in the middle of the—”

Removing the phone from my ear, I hung up, giving a wave of my hand to decline Blair’s offer of a second key. I’d half-expected Holland to turn around at the sound of Blair saying my name, but she was studying the menu so curiously she didn’t even seem to notice.

DREW:Dude. Tell me you’re not meeting Keira

DREW:If you get back together with Keira we’re breaking up

Eyeing Drew’s texts, I suppressed a snort and my need to assure him that I was not in fact meeting my ex.

A continued barrage of his questions buzzed into my phone, but I silenced the thing and slid it into my pocket once I found myself standing behind Holland.

As if sensing me, she peeked over her shoulder then jumped in surprise.

“Oh! Hey,” she breathed out, eyes wide as she smoothed nervous hands over her skirt.

“Sorry to interrupt. You looked pretty engrossed in your reading.”

She laughed. “Yeah, probably because a burger here is twenty dollars. Isn’t that crazy?”

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

She blinked. “No.”

Lie.

I could read her easily. I hadn’t lost that ability. For better or worse, a part of my body was still tuned in to reading Holland Maxwell’s emotions, since it seemed nobody else had developed that skill for her when she was growing up.

They probably weren’t quite as sharp anymore, but I still had the skills to gauge how she was feeling at a given moment. Though I barely has to use those now to know that she was lying.

And hungry.

“What did you eat today?” I asked.

“Eggs over easy and toast,” she supplied merrily.

I smirked, remembering the daily breakfast I’d see her eating back at the Maxwell house in Jersey. “As usual,” I remarked, making her smile. “And for lunch?”

She paused.

“Did you eat lunch, Holland?” I questioned.

She was quiet for another second before heaving a sigh. “So I got randomly pulled into a meeting at noon, but I’m actually not that hungry right now ‘cause—”

“You need to eat,” I said, firm enough to make her mouth snap shut mid-explanation.

“Okay,” she said slowly, looking off to the side as she stretched the word out. When she looked back at me, her eyebrows quirked up, and she was wearing a deliberately awkward little smile. “Like… now?”

I eyed her. I knew what she was asking—if I would be joining her, because a meal didn’t exactly fall in line with a night of only sex. And if I knew what was best for me, I’d call room service and eat her pussy till her food arrived.

But against my better judgment, I gave a nod out the door.

“I know a good spot that’s not too far,” I said, watching her eyes light up. “Let’s go.”

* * *

The spotI chose was a New American tavern in Soho—upscale yet laid-back like its owner. Or at least one of them.

Drew and our upscale yet laid-back friend Emmett were the owners of The Oxford Social, and I probably should have know better than to bring Holland there considering it was the go-to spot of our heavily-intertwined social circle. But the place was close, it was good, and most importantly, they had sweet potato fries.

Crispy ones.

So after informing Holland of the fact, and getting—as predicted—a sharp gasp followed by the declaration “I love sweet potato fries!” I called in her order and made sure they’d have both her food and our table ready within ten minutes.

And thankfully they did, because the house was packed by the time we arrived.

“Wow. I’m glad you know Drew Maddox,” Holland said as I ushered her through the crowd with a hand on her lower back.

Well. That makes one of us, I thought wryly, wondering just how many dozen missed texts I currently had from Drew. There was no doubt in my mind that by now, he was firing off the names of every woman he suspected I might be with tonight.

Yeah, something tells me you won’t guess, I thought while taking in my view of Holland as she followed the maitre’d to our table.

Her pale sundress and white sneakers stood out among the sea of grey suits and leather loafers. Like the lone sunflower in a field. It drew more eyes than I wanted in our direction, but I still found myself wearing a half-smile I couldn’t suppress, because as out of place as she was, Holland was still the sexiest woman in the room by so many miles it would be worthless to try and count.

“Oh, wow, that was fast.” Her eyes lit up when a server appeared table-side with her food and my usual drink just as we were getting seated.

She was in the middle of saying thank you to him just as another figure appeared next to our table.

“Iain,” the familiar voice to my left said. “Thought that was you.”

I looked up.

“Lukas. How are you?”

I smiled as I got up to shake the hand of Lukas Hendricks, owner of the real estate agency The Hendricks Group and best friend to Emmett’s brother, Julian Hoult. Julian, in turn, was owner of not only the New York Empires, the team that employed Drew Maddox, but Hoult Tower, where both Lukas and my company were located.

Like I said, we were all intertwined.

“I’m great. Can’t complain,” he said, smiling politely at Holland and giving a quick introduction before turning back to me and talking about the one person we had in common—Emmett. “Yeah, we’re actually heading up to Mount Hood this weekend,” he said, getting a genuine look of surprise from me.

“This time of year, huh?”

“Yeah, Lia and the kids are already tired of the heat, and that’s one of the few spots that still has snow in July, so we’re heading out there to do some cooling off, some summer riding. Like I said, Emmett’s coming if you wanna join,” he offered. “I know you're not a snowboarding guy, but I’d be happy to show you the ropes. You'd probably be out-riding me within twenty minutes.”

I smiled despite the palpable shift I felt from Holland without even looking in her direction.

“That sounds great, but I can’t swing a trip in the middle of the season,” I said.

“Shit, right. You got baseball,” Lukas snapped his fingers, shaking his head at himself. “I don’t know how I forgot that. Maybe during the actual winter then, yeah?”

“Maybe,” I laughed, exchanging a few more words with him before saying goodbye and taking my seat once again.

I prioritized taking a drink from my glass before lifting my eyes to the fully incredulous look I could already feel Holland giving me.

“What?” I said when I finally looked up.

She stared. "Why… didn't you correct him?"

I stared back. “About what?"

“You're not a snowboarding guy? You and Adam are like, the best snowboarders I've ever seen. You are literally the first person I think of when I hear that word.”

I took another drink from my glass. “Huh,” I said, willing her to pick up on my lack of interest and change the topic. But it was too late. I could tell from the faraway look in her eyes that she was already going full-speed down memory lane.

“I swear I remember you and Adam would go all the time. You had that one season where you flew to Wyoming literally every weekend. I still can’t pronounce the name of that place you were obsessed with,” she said rapid-fire, getting excitedly lost in all her recollections.

“It’s just Jackson Hole,” I said tersely.

“No, it’s something more specific. French-sounding. Corbet… Corbet something?”

I was quiet for a moment.

“Corbet’s Couloir,” I finally said.

“Yes.” Holland snapped triumphantly. “Corbet’s Couloir. La Grave. Christmas Chute. Why else would I remember the names of all these random mountains? Because my dad forced me to Google all of them for him–extensively. He was so convinced you guys were going to die on one of them.”

She was laughing now, making fun of her dad, and a part of me wished I could join in her enjoyment, but I couldn’t.

On a day-to-day basis, I was stellar at keeping certain memories buried. Faking as though they never happened, and doing it so well that were it not for Holland right now, I could’ve had that conversation with Lukas without thinking twice about how it was based entirely on a lie.

As if suddenly recognizing the silence, Holland caught herself.

“I’m sorry,” she said abruptly, her big smile fading into a small frown. “I feel like I just… hit a sore spot or something.”

“You didn’t,” I said. Lie. “I just don’t have the time for these things anymore.”

She nodded but frowned. “What about weekends?”

“I don’t take those.”

Her eyebrows went up. “I mean I know you run a pretty big company, but… ever?”

I said nothing in reply and Holland’s frown deepened. She was still holding the same fry that had been in her hand for about a minute now, and I could see that she found my sentiment to be genuinely insane, but she did her best to hide it, trying to pass her reaction off as something playful.

“That’s not healthy,” she teased gently. “Me time is a thing, Iain, and it’s important,” she said without a hint of irony. “I mean when was the last time you took a weekend?”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

She was silent for awhile, just studying me. Then I saw something flicker in her eye.

“Do you still have Bonnie and Clyde?”

I tensed at the mention of them.

I hadn’t thought about either of them in awhile.

Bonnie was my custom Triumph Bonneville. Clyde was my Hellcat Challenger. Once upon a time, they were prized possessions, but I had a lot of once upon a times.

None of which I cared to think about anymore.

“I sold them,” I said, watching Holland’s eyes go wide.

I could see her genuinely processing this, wondering who Iain Thorn was without his motorcycle, his car. His snowboard. His weekends. They had been the four loves of my life.

Once upon a time.

“So…” she trailed off, and from the way she did, I suspected she knew she was treading in a direction I might prefer not to be, and I could see her curiosity fighting her instincts to be perfectly nice, polite and deferential. All the good girl things her mommy had taught her to be.

But as it had lately, her curiosity won.

“How do you satisfy Speed Demon?” she asked.

I looked at her, keeping a blank expression despite something furiously twisting in my stomach.

A natural reaction to that particular reference from my past.

Speed Demon was the tongue-in-cheek nickname Adam and I had given our need to do things like fight or drive fast or free-fall thirty feet off a mountain with both feet strapped to a snowboard. According to us, we couldn’t help making these decisions. It was all the fault of the restless, rabid creature living inside us that frothed at the mouth and pinballed in our chests, bouncing off the walls and swinging on chandeliers till we placated it with some kind of adrenaline rush. The bigger the rush, the longer he stayed at bay.

We had adopted the nickname because it put a comedic spin on all the thoughtless asshole things we did. Adam’s arrest for reckless driving was funnier when he phrased it as making a sacrifice to the speed demon. Same went for my bi-annual trips to the ER for stitches, breaks or what-have-you. Our law school friends used to love debating over whose little shit of a demon was worse—Adam’s or mine—but there was rarely ever a clear verdict.

Adam’s struck more often. Mine did more damage.

I could feel my gaze growing unfairly frosty on Holland as I thought about this, but I didn’t break our stare as I took my time to answer the question.

“I don’t,” I finally said, and crisply enough to make her eyebrows go up a little bit.

But in case my tone didn’t convey that we were done with this topic, a new voice sounded to my left, interrupting us as if on cue.

“Omigod—Iain! I thought that was you!”