a shrunken old man with a severe cough and a young couple. The wife rocked back and forth, clutching her stomach.
Nikki shot her a sympathetic glance, but the woman closed her eyes and wiped perspiration from her forehead with a paper towel.
After inspecting the faux wood tables, the utterly uninteresting plants and the dog-eared magazines perched haphazardly in a small rack, Nikki had nowhere to look but at Adam.
“Heh,” she said idiotically.
He raised his eyebrows at her over the wad of blood-saturated cocktail napkins. “Did you say something?”
“No,” she supplied, even more idiotically.
Silence fell between them again.
Nikki fidgeted. “So…what do you do?” she blurted, to make conversation.
“I’m a student.”
“Of what?”
He dodged the question. “What do you do, Nikki? Besides, er…dancing?”
She felt a blush climbing her neck and then suffusing her face. “I told you—”
“Right. You’ve never done it before.” His tone was polite, but the inflection of his voice indicated that the jury was still out on whether he believed her or not.
“I’m starting a new job on Monday,” she announced defensively. “I’m an administrative assistant.”
He nodded and adjusted the napkins slightly, peering at her from behind them. His glasses were smudged, which wasn’t surprising. Lucky she hadn’t broken them when she’d whacked him. “Do you like office work?”
Was he trying to reconcile the image of her filing with the image of her popping out of the cake wearing a G-string? She sighed. “It’s okay. It’s not what I want to do for the rest of my life, but it pays the bills and it gives me medical insurance.” She’d never before realized what a crucial thing that was, even to a twenty-four-year-old in “perfect” health.
“Besides,” she added, “I got appendicitis out of the clear blue, and had to have emergency surgery when I didn’t have medical insurance. So I have huge debt from that.”
He made a sympathetic noise. “What do you really want to do?”
She felt suddenly defensive. He was clearly a brainy type, a grad student going to school for something special, something focused, while she… Nikki wrapped her arms around herself and hunched her shoulders.
What she wanted most in the long run was a husband and a family, but it seemed so unhip to say that. Yet, given her childhood with a single mom and the fact that she’d never known her father, that was her dream: domestic bliss.
She pictured rabid feminists chasing her with pitchforks and cringed. “I don’t know what I want to do, exactly…except that it involves having my own business.” And she’d love to somehow help single moms like her own mother.
She pictured a small business that gave her plenty of time to spend with her children. She wouldn’t be like her mom, who spent her days on her feet in a bakery and covered in flour, at the beck and call of other people.
But first, Nikki had to find and date the right guy. Meanwhile, she had to pay off her medical debt—and then there was the fact that her mom needed a new roof and had no way to pay for it. Meanwhile, Nikki’s own rent and monthly bills didn’t go away. How did anyone manage to save money, except rich doctor and lawyer types? It seemed impossible.
A nurse appeared and called Adam’s name. He got up and went with her through a door to the back, while unaccountably Nikki fixed her gaze on his buns. Granted, his pants were damp and stained, so he did look a little as though he’d messed himself.
But she happened to know that the stains were her fault, that they’d come from the floor of the bar…and the wet fabric clung provocatively to the shape of his rear end.
It was an exceptional one. Sitting on it and studying a lot hadn’t flattened it out at all.
“Nikki?”
In fact, it looked pretty muscular… especially as it turned to the side…
“Nikki.”
“Huh?” She pulled her gaze upward, and realized that Adam had turned, along with his butt, and was saying her name.
Mortification was becoming her constant companion.
3
AS HER CHEEKS CAUGHT on fire, Adam eyed her quizzically from behind the paper napkins. “I said that I should be right out.”
“Great!” Nikki said brightly, and quickly picked up one of the magazines, spreading it open and holding it in front of her face.
Idiot! Idiot, idiot, idiot…
She dared to peek over the top of the magazine.
Adam’s mouth had quirked, and his eyebrows had lifted at her choice of reading material.
It wasn’t until he’d disappeared again that she looked at the cover: Forbes. Was he amused because he’d caught her staring at his ass, or because of her choice of magazine?
Why shouldn’t she read Forbes? Okay, it was a dry financial publication, but for all he knew, she could be passionately interested not only in his buns—she squirmed with embarrassment—but in money. In fact, she was passionate about money, as far as making some went. Immediately.
Her gaze fell on one of the topics highlighted on the cover: Securities and the Single Mom. Hmm… To take her mind off the fact that she still felt like a moron, she began to read.
By the time Adam came out with a blue-fabric, medically issued ice bag across his nose, Nikki had devoured the whole article and learned quite a bit in the process. There were all kinds of organizations and websites out there devoted to helping single moms not only with their finances, but with furthering their education—and she had the germ of a business idea.
The sight of her strip-assault victim brought her back to reality, though. “Are you okay?”
“Fine.” He nodded. “It’s not broken.”
“Oh, thank goodness.” She put down the magazine.
He walked over to the little window to pay what he owed for the visit, and Nikki jumped up. Did she have enough space free on her MasterCard to pay?
Oh, God. She wasn’t sure. But she should make the offer. It was her moral obligation.
“Adam, let me take care of that. It’s the least I can do.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I will worry about it,” Nikki insisted, muttering a prayer to the credit gods under her breath. She gently nudged Adam aside. “Excuse me,”
