LITMIR.BIZ

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bar. She inhaled the scents of auto exhaust, sweetly decaying vegetation and fast food, but none of them made her feel as sick as the idea of dancing in there for the wolf-whistling, howling crowd of men.

      “Thank you,” she said to Adam.

      “No, no. Thank you,” he said. Oddly, he seemed to mean it.

      She flushed. “I’m really sorry that I’ve ruined your good time.”

      “You didn’t. I hate those places. Cheap booze, cheap wo—” He broke off, but she knew he’d been about to say cheap women.

      She looked down at her current get-up and couldn’t really argue. Only the vitals were covered, and just to remind her of it a stinging insect bit her on the backside. “Ow!” Nikki exclaimed, slapping at it.

      Behind the cocktail napkins, Adam’s eyes widened slightly, and he swallowed hard, averting them.

      “I’d offer to pay for the, um, other talent and the round of drinks,” she said, “but I’m dead broke, which is why I even considered doing this.”

      “Don’t worry about it,” said Adam.

      She led the way to her car, a powder-blue Volkswagen Beetle. “Where’s the nearest E.R.? Or minor emergency center? Do you know?”

      “I’ll be fine. Really.”

      Nikki looked at him doubtfully. “What if I broke your nose?”

      “I don’t think it’s broken.”

      “But it could be. And I’ve heard of all kinds of freak things that can happen—a bone fragment could pierce something in your brain, and boom! You’d be a vegetable.” She shuddered.

      Adam laughed. The sound was reassuring but also annoying—he wasn’t taking her seriously. He was treating her like the dumb blonde she appeared to be.

      “I’m serious. Look, you’re not a doctor,” she said in reasonable tones.

      He cocked an eyebrow at her but didn’t argue.

      “So why don’t we make sure that you’re okay?” she prodded.

      “Not necessary. They’ll tell me to elevate the nose, keep an ice pack on it and take a couple of ibuprofen for the swelling. If a shard of bone had pierced my brain, I wouldn’t be standing here talking to you. So really, you can drop me at my hotel.”

      Nikki gulped. She owed him a private dance in his hotel room, and she was none too eager to pay up. Any delay was a welcome one. “I’m sorry, but I insist that we get you checked out, if only for my peace of mind.”

      Adam sighed. “Fine,” he said. “But it’s a waste of time.”

      Wasting time sounded very good to her, especially if she could do it clothed. She dug her keys out of her purse and unlocked the Beetle. She opened the driver’s-side door, tossed her things onto the seat and found her shirt. She slid on a bra—red, of course—pulled the shirt over her head and tugged it into place as Adam rounded the car and got into the passenger seat.

      He watched her out of the corner of his eye as she held her white denim miniskirt in front of her, and she could have sworn she heard a swift intake of breath as she raised her leg to step into it. She pulled it up over her hips and buttoned it at the waist.

      There. Now she felt better. She still wore the skyscraper stilettos, but every woman in Miami wore those. Nikki tossed her purse into the backseat and slid behind the wheel. “Should I take you to Jackson Memorial?” she asked.

      Adam shuddered. “No—the E.R. there will be full of gunshot wounds, auto-accident victims, ODs and God only knows what else. We’d wait all night.” After some thought, he gave her the name of a minor emergency center close by, and directed her to it.

      The building, not surprisingly, was regulation stucco with a standard red-tile roof. Adam signed in, and they waited in a shabby but comfortable sitting area done in blues and greens. The only other people there were 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

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