Chapter 5

"Nicki, I really don't know about this."

Nicki kept her head beneath an enormous bath towel for a second more, schooling her expression. By the time she emerged, she was ready to face the three scowling women who sat around her suite, all of them girded for battle.

Well, girded might be overstating it. Lauren, the one who spoke, was standing by a chair, as if sitting was out of the question during such an important conversation. Lauren Grant was the heiress to an international hotelier fortune, and had grown up used to running the show. She and Nicki got along because Nicki usually let her—or ignored her if her opinions were inconvenient.

But Lauren was serious this morning, and Nicki knew why. She'd confided in Lauren about her possible heart condition a week ago, when Lauren had questioned her usage of beta-blockers. It would have been foolish not to disclose the worst possible scenario—that Nicki might possibly have a slowly dying heart—but she'd told Lauren not to worry, that there'd be lots of notice if anything was truly wrong.

This wasn't exactly true of course, but Lauren hadn't pressed before. She did now.

She'd clearly told the others too.

Emmaline sat with her hands earnestly folded in her lap. Earnest was what Emmaline did best. Nicki couldn't help thawing a bit as she caught her best friend's eye and smiled, watching her brighten with the strength of the connection. Across the room, Fran also caught her attention. She tilted her head and Nicki held up a hand to forestall whatever she was going to say.

"No need to shrink me, Fran. I know what you're thinking—what you're all thinking. And you're right. This is a simple trip but it could turn crazy at any moment. And not even for any grand reason, but the simple reality of going to a foreign country and running into all the problems that could entail. But seriously, this is not that big of a deal. It's not like we're going to have people chasing us with guns."

"You could," interjected Lauren darkly.

"I won't," Nicki shook her head. "Have you seen the royal yacht? It's practically a cruise ship. We're going to sail down to Ala?ati big as life, and give our validation to the windsurfing expo they've got going on. It's good PR for O?ros, a nice goodwill gesture for Turkey, and the guards they're sending along are going to ask all the questions they need to ask while Stefan squires me around as if I'm some sort of VIP. Which is hilarious, but that's beside the point."

Emmaline bit her lip. "He's not especially happy about you going, you should know."

Nicki snorted. "I think the ‘No, absolutely not, she can't go,' to Jasen at lunch was a good indicator of that. But honestly, that's for them to figure out." She gave her best "I don't really care" shrug, honed to a fine point after years of being denied opportunities by her hypochondriac mother, who'd perfected the art of the flop sweat years before anyone in the family had actually fallen ill.

Once Nicki had reached her senior year in high school, she'd shed a lot of those restrictions, but then her father's heart attack and brother's later diagnosis had threatened to close her in once more. She couldn't live the way her brother and father did. Wouldn't. And she wouldn't back down from this opportunity.

Still, that didn't mean she couldn't throw her friends a bone. "If they decide it's too dangerous, then of course I'll abide by that. With Stefan out of the country and no longer up in my grill, I'll be able to explore some of the mountain trails he's constantly warning me about." She grinned. "So it's a win for me either way."

"You know, he could be warning you about those trails because of wild animals," Fran observed wryly. "Not simply because he wants to be a pain in the ass."

"Mostly, though, he wants to be a pain in the ass," Lauren said, and the tension in the room finally broke as everyone laughed. "I heard from Dimitri that you two were totally making out on the beach. Truth?"

"We were not making out." Nicki hesitated. "Well, okay. I was. But I honest to God think Stefan was trying to seduce me to keep from running down the beach. Like this was some sort of super new diplomacy technique he wanted to practice on me."

"And how did that practice go?" Emmaline asked. Her expression had also lightened, brimming with curiosity and the possibility of new romance. She among all of them was the most in love with being in love.

"For me—pretty damn well," Nicki said. "I think he might have been going through the motions, but trust me, it's been so long since I've been anywhere close to those kind of motions, I'll take it."

"I keep trying to fix you up, and you keep rejecting me." Lauren protested. "How are you supposed to date if you never go out?"

"I'm too busy to mess with all of that." Somewhat true, actually. She'd been a one-woman unstoppable force in college. Too small to play in most organized sports at any sort of elite level, and too worried about her possible heart condition, she'd known she'd needed to find something she could do solo.

To give herself a competitive chance, she'd set her heart on the outlier sports—windsurfing, adventure running, climbing. There she'd met an entirely new group of friends who knew nothing about her past, nothing about her possible heart disease. They only knew she sometimes got a little dizzy if she didn't stay hydrated…and that despite said dizziness, she was usually the first to jump off the cliff into the water below, no matter how deep that water was.

But though there were plenty of men in that group Nicki could have pursued—she hadn't. Because, despite the fact that she truly believed that she was okay, it was one thing to get your heart broken by a relationship…

It was something else to walk into a relationship with your heart already broken.

"Okay, well, let's be smart about this." Lauren recalled Nicki's thoughts to the present as she settled into a chair. "What are the risks here? Let's say you get stuck somewhere and you can't take your meds."

"What, my beta-blockers? Those aren't that critical, really." Nicki shook her head. "They're for my migraines, and there's some evidence they help with high blood pressure and all of that, so that's a bonus. But if my heart is really going to go…" she shrugged. "It's going to go."

"And you never got tested for this?" Fran's voice was incredulous. "That seems really reckless to me, I'm sorry."

"Oh, I did once—twice, even, I think," Nicki said, trying to keep her cool. She'd had this fight with her mother too many times. "The odds aren't in my favor, and I know that. But I…couldn't keep going back. Not in the end. I'd rather live with my heart condition as a maybe and actually live—than change my whole life because of some stupid test. I've seen what it's done to my brother. He's become as bad as my mom, sure that every cold is going to kill him. And my dad…" Nicki sighed. "I'm not going to get tested only to find out the worst. I'm not. As long as I don't put anyone else in danger…"

"But what about putting yourself in danger?" Emmaline's voice was soft. "We don't want anything to happen to you."

"It won't. Especially if Stefan is on the boat." She smiled. "If he had to rescue me, I'd never live it down."

Lauren snorted. "Okay, but let's say you have a dizzy spell or your heart starts to react to something scary or intense. Your pulse goes up, right? What happens then?"

"I faint," Nicki shrugged. "That's it, so far. If anything worse ever happened, I'd get tested—really, I would. But it's never gone beyond a momentary blackout, I swear. No one's even cracked out an AED around me."

"That might not work anyway," Fran put in. "A defibrillator is meant to restart a malfunctioning heart, not a dying one."

Nicki let the shiver roll through her at the idea that her heart muscle could possibly be dying, but kept her expression strong and steady—like she needed to be. "There you go. So there's no point in worrying about it. Besides, if Stefan gets a hint that I might not be a hundred percent physically fit, there's no way he'd let me go along on this mission. None."

Emmaline sighed. "And it's that important for you to go?" Her question once more was quiet, but it drew the attention of all the girls to her.

Nicki hesitated. They couldn't understand, she knew. They'd never had a fear that they were…fundamentally different. Fundamentally unreliable. Nicki'd overcome that fear with a college life and new career filled with solo adventures and living on people's couches, never attaching, never committing. But this…

"It is," she finally said, and was surprised to find her words equally soft. "I just…I really want to be a part of this." To be a part of something that mattered. Something that her body couldn't hold her back from.

"Well, then you should go," Fran said, her calm voice easing the tension again. "You'll just have to be smart."

"They're meeting now, you know," Emmaline said, pursing her lips as she glanced at her phone. "I'm sure they'll be talking about you, Nicki. Making their final decisions."

Nicki stood, eager for any reason to move again. "Well, then maybe I should go listen in."