I want You Deeper

Nicholas had attended a fair share of boring cocktail parties in his time. This one ranked up there with the absolute worst of the worst.

They stood in the corner, holding a plate of hors d’oeuvres. Charlie hadn’t touched hers after filling her plate a full twenty minutes earlier. Nicholas had devoured his, then tried to go back for more. Charlie had asked him to stay.

“Charlie McLaughlin!” A guy wearing glasses and a bad suit walked up to Charlie, looking at her like she was a long-lost friend. One glance at Charlie, though, told him she had no idea who this guy was.

“Hi!” she said, her voice dripping with false enthusiasm. “Bobby

Johnson. I haven’t seen you since graduation.”

He laughed. “I haven’t seen anyone since graduation.”

Bobby’s full name was written in black marker on his name tag. It took Nicholas a few seconds to realize that was how Charlie had “remembered” the guy’s name.

“Is this your husband?” Bobby asked, looking over at Nicholas.

“Fiance,” Charlie said. “Nicholas.”

“Nicholas. Nice to meet you. You have a good one here. We made some great memories.”

“Excuse me.” Nicholas stepped away. “I’ll be right back.”

This was his chance to get more food. He gave it a millisecond, then, when Charlie didn’t give him a pleading look, rushed off to the buffet table. It wasn’t really a full buffet. It was a dessert and finger food buffet. He wasn’t sure what the technical term for that would be. All he knew was that it was getting so late, nobody was really lining up for food anymore, which left it wide open for him to stack his plate with everything he’d wanted to try earlier.

“Chocolate. You can’t beat that.”

The voice of a woman to his left pulled Nicholas’s attention from a tower of some sort of fudge concoction. It looked messy. The woman was eyeing him, not the food. The way she looked at him was similar to the way he’d looked at the Swedish meatballs he’d just plopped on his plate.

“I’m Jamie Quinn.” She held out her hand, giving him a big smile that emphasized the dimples on either side of her mouth.

To shake her hand, Nicholas had to shift his plate to his left hand, which annoyed him. But he needed to be friendly. “Nicholas Shaw. I’m here with Charlie McLaughlin.”

The woman’s smile faltered slightly as she shook his hand. She tilted her head slightly, dropped her hand to her side, and turned to face the food again. “Well.”

Nicholas frowned. He had no idea what that meant. The head tilt was unreadable, too. Did she recognize the name or was she trying to place Charlie McLaughlin?

“So you and Charlie…?”

The question left it for him to fill in the blank. They could be married, dating, just friends, pretending to be married… What it didn’t do, though, was tell him whether she even knew who Charlie was.

“Engaged,” he said without looking away from the food he was loading onto the small plate. He knew this conversation would be important to Charlie, but he hadn’t eaten since lunch, and that had just been a quick sandwich he’d choked down between video calls.

“Oh, wow. Congratulations. That’s awesome! I didn’t know Charlie was engaged.”

Nicholas turned and smiled at her. “She’s right over there if you’d like to congratulate her in person.”

“I’ll do just that. Let me grab one of these pieces of fudge. They look delicious.”

She reached around him and put her body fully against him, looking up at him as she did so. Nicholas flashed her an awkward smile and moved forward, grabbing an egg roll he didn’t even want as an excuse to put some distance between the two of them.

As she walked away, she gave him a flirtatious wave. “See you over there.”

The whole thing put Nicholas in an awkward position. He didn’t want to reject one of Charlie’s classmates and give them a reason to ostracize Charlie. But flirting back would be even more disastrous. Never mind the fact that he had no desire to flirt with anyone but Charlie at this point…

Grabbing a fork and napkin, he headed back toward Charlie, shoving a meatball into his mouth. Halfway there, he realized he was supposed to be putting on the successful billionaire act. No matter how much money he had, no matter how much he’d achieved with his business or his investments-all that mattered this weekend was how it looked to her classmates. She could have hired an actor and probably gotten better results.

The good news was Charlie was surrounded by people when he approached. There was the guy who had been standing there when Nicholas walked away-Bobby Johnson, Nicholas finally recalled. Then there was the flirtatious woman from the buffet. But there were four other women and two men standing there, as well, and Charlie was smiling and laughing.

“Nicholas! Come and meet Shellie.”

At Charlie’s invitation, Nicholas’s eyes widened slightly. A woman stood next to her, but that couldn’t be Charlie’s rival. She wasn’t even close to the glamorous, poised person he’d pictured. In fact, she shrank in comparison to Charlie.

Nicholas quickly swallowed the rest of the meatball, then dabbed at his mouth with a napkin. The last thing he needed right now was a big gob of food on the side of his mouth. He just hoped he hadn’t dropped anything on his suit.

“We met at the buffet line.” Jamie, who stood next to the woman Nicholas had decided couldn’t possibly be Shellie, beamed at Nicholas.

“Yes. Hi, again.” Nicholas nodded at Jamie, then looked at the woman, whose nametag did, indeed, read “Shellie.” “Nice to meet you.”

“Charlie was just telling us you’re getting married in the South of France.”

There it was. That voice. Shellie spoke exactly as he would have pictured, even if she didn’t look the part. Now that she’d spoken, though, he saw the chill in her eyes as she assessed him, running her gaze over his suit.

He would swear she was expecting to find that it came up short somehow, but he knew where he’d gotten this suit and how much he’d paid for it. If she thought this was substandard, she knew absolutely nothing about male designer fashion.

“We are planning that, yes.”

Everyone turned their attention to him, making him feel incredibly selfconscious. Was this the point where he was supposed to brag about his private plane? That felt a bit on the tool side, and Charlie didn’t want him to come across that way.

“Nicholas is a pioneer in application development,” Charlie said. “He’s also head of Talkspar.”

Nicholas winced. At least people weren’t looking at him anymore. They’d turned back to Charlie.

“Talk Spar?” Shellie asked, dividing the brand name of his company into two words. Somehow she made it sound tacky, like it was something a commoner would say.This content © Nôv/elDr(a)m/a.Org.

“We just had a meeting on that at work!” Bobby Johnson said, turning his starstruck stare from Charlie to Nicholas. He squeezed through the crowd and stepped to the outside of the circle, making it clear he wanted this conversation to be one-on-one.

Meanwhile, Shellie and Jamie took over the conversation in the group behind him. Shellie looked like just about every other woman he met when he visited the suburbs. She wore a black dress with sequins and her hair was short and curly. Had she been anyone else, he wouldn’t have scrutinized her, but knowing she’d been mean to Charlie, he felt the need to find her flaws.

He needed to get over that. This wasn’t his fight.

As Bobby pounded him with questions, Nicholas divided his attention between the overeager man in front of him and the conversation happening behind him. He heard Shellie hammer Charlie with questions. Wedding colors, caterers, honeymoon destinations. Charlie was surprisingly quick with her answers, which made Nicholas wonder if she’d rehearsed this in advance.

Sounded like it.

In fact, he liked the picture she was painting. A beautiful, but fairly small, wedding in the South of France, followed by a honeymoon on the French Riviera. The idea of spending a week at a waterfront resort with Charlie McLaughlin sounded far more appealing than anything he’d done recently.

“-next conference. Would you be up for that?”

Bobby’s question snapped Nicholas back to the conversation in front of him, making him realize he’d completely switched his attention to what was going on behind him. Problem was, he didn’t want this guy to know he’d tuned him out.

“Would I be up for your next conference?”

It was a trick Justin had taught him back in college. If a teacher in class called him out when Justin wasn’t paying attention, he’d just repeat as much as he could of what he’d heard. It didn’t work every time, but it was surprising how often it did work. Especially when you were talking to someone who wanted to believe you were paying attention.

“I know it’s a lot to ask,” Bobby rushed to add. “And I’ll certainly understand if you say no. No pressure. Just think about it. Here’s my card.”

Nicholas was left, once again, trying to juggle his plate of food-this time to take Bobby’s outstretched business card and slide it into his jacket pocket. He had to hand it to the guy-he certainly was a quick draw with that business card. Nicholas wasn’t even sure how it had materialized so quickly.

“Certainly.” Nicholas took a big bite of shrimp, doing his best to try to look like a billionaire while chewing, even though he had no idea what that meant. “I’ll be in touch.”

With a polite nod meant to put an end to the conversation, Nicholas turned back to face the group. His gaze immediately landed on Charlie, who seemed to be communicating help me with her eyes.

“Private plane, huh?” a man standing next to Shellie commented. “What kind of plane do you own?”

Like he knew that. He thought back to the last plane he’d chartered.

“Cessna,” Nicholas said.

Silence followed. Nicholas realized pretty much right away that the stranger had expected a little more detail. Was he supposed to be an expert in every inch of the plane he owned? If he wasn’t the pilot, wouldn’t he just leave it parked somewhere between uses?

“You’re taking a Cessna to Europe? I don’t know, man.”

Shellie spoke up. “What’s the inside like? Does it have a shower?” Whatever was happening here, it was getting him out of this pop quiz this man next to Shellie seemed to be giving him. Nicholas was fine with that.

He definitely knew the answer to Shellie’s question. “The plane? Yes. It’s only slightly better than the lavatory on a regular plane, though.”

“I imagine.” Shellie looked over at the man standing next to her adoringly. “We spent a weekend at a campground in our friend’s RV. That shower was definitely not up to par.”

“The shower was nicer than the one in this hotel,” Pop Quiz Man said, shaking his head. “Anyway, I’d love to talk planes. Maybe tomorrow at brunch. You are coming to the brunch, I hope?”

Nicholas looked over at Charlie, who was staring at him. This was definitely up to her to answer, but for some reason, she seemed to be tossing it to him.

“Sure,” Charlie said. “But I think we’re going to make this an early night. Nicholas was talking about trying out that pool. Ready?”

After a quick glance down at his empty plate, then a look around at the group now staring at Charlie, Nicholas nodded. “Let’s go.”