Hitman's Hookup: A Bad Boy Romance (23 page)

CHAPTER ONE

OLIVIA

The hiss of the espresso maker was enthralling. I stood behind the counter of the Java Bean coffee shop watching the foamy milk steam into the air as it filled up the white ceramic mug.

"Are you going to serve me or are you just going to stand there?" asked the shaggy-haired college boy standing on the other side of the counter.

I felt a frisson of anger rise up in my body. I gripped the edge of the counter. This was hour five of my nine-hour closing shift. I'd skipped lunch because we were understaffed. I was in no mood to play games with this guy.

"Seriously? You
see
that I'm making your drink.” I shook my head in exasperating and leveled him with a single look. “I would suggest a small bit of humility and patience for the person who is so kindly assisting you."

The boy tapped his fingers on the countertop impatiently. "I will not be treated like that from a work-study student," he retorted, his tone biting. He looked back at his friends and smirked as if hoping they were watching him.

I yanked the white cup out from under the espresso machine and slammed it angrily onto the countertop, bits of white foam flying onto the counter. "Here's your drink," I spat with a forced, sarcastic smile. "That is, if you can manage to stomach drinking something that a financial aid girl touched with her own hands."

The boy leaned forward on the counter, resting his chin in his hands, his elbows burnishing the shiny wood. "Aren't you going to draw a heart in it?" he asked.

"I don't know how to do that. I spend most of my time working instead of studying. It's almost like I don't even have a brain." I picked up a slightly dirty bar towel and wiped the foam bits off of the wood. "I suggest you drink up before your daddy's money goes cold on the counter."

I was delighted to see that I had struck a nerve with this asshole. "Have a nice day!" I added with more than a dash of faux cheer.

The guy grabbed his coffee and stormed over to the front table where his friends were waiting, apparently oblivious to the interaction that had just taken place.

I patted myself on the back in a self-congratulatory way.

"If you talk that way again to the son of the largest donor to this school's endowment fund, I'm going to have to give you a raise." I turned around to see my boss, Lorna, standing there with a smile on her face. She held a wet dishtowel in her hand with her hip cocked. "I wasn't aware you could stand up for yourself so easily," Lorna said proudly, looking at me in a motherly way.

"Then you didn't see me during pledge week last year," I replied, turning back to my task of shining up the countertop. A shiny wet ring of condensation had been left behind by the cappuccino mug.

Lorna laughed. "Well I guess I'll have to take your word for it." Lorna stood on her tip toes to try to reach the top shelf where the Italian soda flavoring rested, the sunlight of late evening casting a beam of light that twinkled through the rich, liquid color contained within each bottle.

"Here, let me get that for you," I offered. One of my few physical strengths was my height. I usually didn’t have to stand on my tiptoes to reach items that most people would need a ladder for.

"Boy, am I going to miss you when you graduate next month," Lorna said, gratefully taking the glass bottle from me and twisting the cap off of it. She opened up one of the drawers and took out a metal top that she expertly screwed onto the now-open bottle.

I smiled at her kindly. "I'll miss you too, Lorna. Though I can't say that I'll miss working here too much." My eyes darted over to the table where the asshole cappuccino guy was laughing it up with his asshole friends.

Lorna set the bottle onto the countertop. She balled up the towel that she had been holding and set it on the counter gently. I knew what must be coming next. "Olivia, there's something I need for you to do over the next four weeks."

I leaned against the countertop with my hip. "I'm listening, mom," I said jokingly.

"I want you to have some
fun.
You've worked here since the end of freshman year. I know you go home and study. I want your last four weeks of college to be enjoyable, not a rush of final classes and applying for jobs."

I sighed and smiled. "I
have
fun. It's just a different kind of fun."

"Really? What are your plans after work today?"

My mind flashed to the paper script that was sitting on my cozy, warm bed. I'd bought a bottle of wine and was going to drink it while I memorized lines for tomorrow's audition. Except I'd told nobody that I was auditioning for the May term production of
Romeo and Juliet
. I hadn't even told my roommate Lydia, who was the stage manager and costume designer for it.

"Uh, I was planning on going out to the quad with some wine and laying out in the nice weather," I replied slightly evasively.

"Okay, fun is the wrong word then.
Spontaneous
might be the word that I'm looking for. I want you to do something that you never in a million years would have considered doing." She sighed and reached over to brush a thin layer of dust off of the top of the espresso machine. "Believe me, Olivia. If I could go back to my final few weeks of college? If I'd looked like you? I wouldn't have been spending it alone with a glass of wine. You'll have plenty of time for that when you're older."

I blushed at her compliment. "I highly doubt you were a bridge troll when you were in college."

Lorna flipped her dark hair over her shoulder. "Did I say that? I just said I never looked like
you
look. So that's your assignment. Spontaneity."

I laughed. "Don't you think that
assigning
spontaneity is sort of against the very concept?"

Lorna reached out and put both of her hands on my shoulders. "This is what I'm talking about. You
think
too much. Don't think. Just
do
." Lorna reached behind her thick waist and untied her dingy white apron strings carefully. Then she hung the apron on hooks on the back of the door into the food preparation area. "And on that note, I am finished for tonight." Lorna crouched below the counter and grabbed her worn faux-leather purse, fishing inside of it for her keys.

"Do you have the grandkids tonight?" I asked.

Lorna nodded. "Yes indeed. And it will be boxed macaroni and cheese and cut up hotdogs if I have my way." Lorna smiled broadly. "And you know that I always have my way."

"Yes, you sure do," I replied, laughing.

"I
would
tell you to be careful with these guys here," Lorna said, motioning her head over to the front table where the knot of boys was now taking plastic straws and shoving them up their nose. One of them was imitating a walrus noise. "But something tells me you will be just fine." On that note, Lorna took her purse, and waved goodbye to me, stepping through the wood and glass coffee shop door, the rusty metal bells tinkling as she left.

I looked up at the clock on the wall. Only three more hours and I would be back in my dorm room. Lydia would no doubt be asleep with her headphones blaring.

Three more hours.
Then I would be free to sneak into bed with the copy of the audition script held tightly in my hands.

CHAPTER TWO

WILDER

I stood onstage, breathing in the waxy-smelling air. The auditorium always smelled like slightly melted crayons. I felt something like nostalgia creeping over me. The sound of hammering behind me was, for once, not driving me up a fucking wall. It almost sounded like the soundtrack to the last four years. I couldn't believe that this was going to be the final play that I performed here. A huge part of me couldn't believe it had gone by so quickly.

I suddenly realized that the hammering had stopped. Diane's raspy voice screeched out. "Romeo? Hello!"

I started and looked around me. Everyone was standing there watching me, including the people working on set. "Sorry," I mumbled.

"Let's try that again," Diane said from the front row, leaning back into her seat with the tall stack of dog-eared papers she always carried settled into her lap.

"From the top?" Josh, my best friend, asked. He sounded annoyed.

"From the top of the scene, yeah," Diane replied. "Hopefully this time Romeo can keep it together."

Josh sighed and cleared his throat, ready as always to deliver his lines. "See, where he comes: so please you, step aside; I'll know his grievance, or be much denied."

Ricardo spoke next, his lines coming easily. "I would thou wert so happy by thy stay, to hear true shrift. Come, madam, let's away."

He took Julie's arm and they walked off the stage.

Josh turned to face me. "Good-morrow, cousin," he said jauntily.

I opened my mouth and felt the lines fly out of my head. "Hello," I replied lamely. A few of the people working on the set laughed. I put my hands up to my eyes and groaned.

Raucous applause clanged out from Diane's hands, her silver hair and dark framed glasses bouncing as she shook her head, a sarcastic smile across her face. She set down her papers and stood up, putting her wrinkled hands to her mouth.

"Encore! Encore!" she called out. This time I groaned internally. When Diane went full sarcasm, it never meant anything good for me. She took her glasses off and put a well-worn stem into her mouth. "I'm telling you, if Shakespeare had simply thought to have his characters just say 'Hello' and to hell with iambic pentameter, he could have saved himself a lot of heartache."

I opened my mouth to apologize but she held up a hand to stop me from speaking. It felt like everyone's eyes were on me. "Nicholas, I've said this before, and I will say it again. If you spent half the time learning your lines as you did on doing your hair, you might actually be worth something." She tucked the stack of curly-edged papers underneath her elbow and marched up the aisle toward the doors of the auditorium. "As it stands you are underwhelming me with your display of mediocrity."

I felt my heart beating wildly in my chest. I knew that I had completely butchered the lines. But the beautiful late spring day was beckoning to me as it had been all day. I hadn't even bothered studying for my spring exams before taking them earlier in the week, much less memorizing my lines to a throwaway play that most of the school wouldn't even bother coming to see. "Oh, Diane," I called out in my most charming voice. I tried to gather my fucking dignity. "You know that you love me."

Diane raised one wrinkled, spot covered hand and waved in standoffish recognition of my words. The metal doors clanged as she made her angry exit. The noise echoed across the perfect acoustics of the auditorium.

I clapped my hands and looked around at my fellow cast mates. "Well," I said with a smile. "Who wants drinks?"

Josh shook his head. "Come on man." Josh had a look of deep concern on his face that I recognized all too well. He'd worn it for most of our friendship, which had started when we were still in diapers. "Don't you think that we need to be taking this a little bit more seriously? I mean, the rest of the cast is working really hard on this. You seem to be the only one who doesn't seem to care. Which is an issue, since you
are
playing Romeo. And he is sort of an important character in the Shakespeare play. Or so I've heard," Josh added sarcastically.

"It's a little bit hard to get into this role when I am not sure who is going to play Juliet," I replied.

Lydia, our stage manager and costume designer came marching across the stage. Her heavy, unlaced combat boots punctuated her obvious anger and irritation. "If you hadn't just fucked and discarded the first Juliet along with her understudy," Lydia said, pushing her purple glasses up her nose and flicking her matching purple hair off of her face, "Maybe I would have more empathy for your situation. I don't think you have a lot of room to criticize the rest of us for what is
once again
your mistake."

I cocked my head to the side and applied what I hoped was the charming grin that had gotten me out of nearly every bad situation in my life. "I never said that I was exclusive with either one of them," I explained cockily, reaching into my pocket and pulling out a stick of gum. I peeled off the silver, soft wrapper and removed a chalky, mint green stick. "Gum?" I asked her.

Lydia rolled her eyes. "I want you to know your lines, Wilder."

I crumpled up the silver wrapper and held it out in my hand. "Do you mind?" I asked her, dropping the silver wrapper and forcing her to dive to catch it. "Thanks so much," I said. "You're a doll." Then I clapped my hands together once more and looked around at the cast. "Drinks! I'm buying so you can't say no."

CHAPTER THREE

WILDER

"Shots!" I called out into the noisy bar. A Whitesnake cover band was playing on the makeshift stage several feet to my left. I pounded my fist onto the bar. "Now where is that gorgeous bartender?" The liquor I'd already downed pulsed through my body. I always loved the warm glow that flooded my body after drinking. I put my hands around my mouth and howled like a coyote into the air.

The bartender wandered over and flashed me a smile. "Shots for everyone?" she asked.

Josh grabbed my arm to get me to stop talking. "He's probably had enough to drink tonight, actually."

I put my arm around Josh and beamed. "This guy right here is my best friend in the entire fucking world. Seriously. He saves me from all of my fuck-ups. But he's being ridiculous right now. Shots for everybody."

"Except for him," Josh said. The bartender laughed and nodded.

"You," I said, poking Josh in the chest with an unsteady finger. "Are no fucking fun, man."

Josh pulled my arm off of him. "I know, man. You remind me all the time." Josh pulled his phone out and looked at the time. "I really think we should head out."

I shook my head. "We only have four weeks left of college. And you are telling me that I need to leave my own party? That I started? Right here? Right now? DUDE!" I felt giggles coming over me. It registered in my mind that I was two drinks past drunk. The next stage was me taking my clothes off and dancing.