Read The Boys Are Back in Town for Free Online

it had struck him, his hair was sticky. He shot a glance over at the bar and could only laugh.
    “Hang on,” he told Danny.
    He marched over to the bar, where Nick Acosta was pouring glasses of wine for a pair of women who were obviously spouses. Neither of them looked familiar to him at all. When the spouses departed, Will rapped on the bar.
    “Barkeep. Captain Morgan and Coke, please.”
    Nick shuddered with revulsion and shot him a look that wrinkled the thin white scar that trailed down from his scalp across his forehead and through his left eyebrow. The sight of it triggered a memory in Will, images of freshman year, when Nick had lost his footing playing basketball in the schoolyard and careened into a tree, a broken limb peeling his skin back far enough that when he looked up, blood veiling his features, the other guys gathered there had been able to see bone. Even now, all these years later, with his black hair, a mass of curls and cowlicks, and deep olive skin, the scar was like a magnet to the eye, forcing anyone talking to Nick to glance at it at least once.
    “Spiced rum. You still drinking that crap?” Nick asked. “Don't know how you don't sick it up.”
    Will gave him a blank look. “I do. Is that not supposed to happen?”
    Nick chuckled and started to fix the drink as he regarded Will. “How you doing, man? Been way too long.”
    “Doing great. Can't complain, though it usually doesn't stop me.”
    “Any love in your life?” Nick asked, raising that same scarred eyebrow. He was tall enough that he seemed to loom over Will from behind the bar.
    “Comes and goes,” Will replied, and though their banter was light, there was a truth to it, just as there had always been in these conversations with Nick. He was the sage of the group. Whenever anybody had a problem, Nick was the one they talked to.
    “It always does,” Nick replied. “Then again, who knows what fate might have in store for you this weekend? For instance, have you taken a look at her?”
    He gestured across the room.
    Will turned.
    On a raised platform a woman sat on a stool with an electric acoustic guitar and a microphone. Since he had walked in Will had been enjoying her raspy, smoky voice and the way she played. Old Tori Amos songs side by side with The Corrs and Nelly Furtado. But only now did he get a good look at her.
    She was slender, with an exotic bronze complexion that was set off by the green silk shirt she wore with plain blue jeans. Her black hair was lush and draped in a sensual curtain across her face when she bent over her guitar to play a break.
    “You have got to be kidding me,” Will whispered. “Stacy?”
    Nick laughed. “Gives you a funny tingle, doesn't she?”
    Will glanced at him. “She always did,” he admitted. But Nick already knew that. Nick knew the whole story, in fact, for he had gone with Will on the ski trip the senior class had taken to Mount Orford in Canada. On the bus ride north Will had spent more than two hours locked in conversation with Stacy Shipman, the girl with the sweetest, most suggestive smile he had ever seen. Party girl. Pothead. Double trouble. Stacy had been all of those things, but mysterious as well, for she had never really hung out with her classmates. Though there had been a couple of exceptions—mostly tough guys who did too many drugs and didn't graduate anyway.
    Caitlyn had been his girlfriend, but Will had always been fascinated by Stacy. All of the guys were. And on that bus ride, for the first time, he had gotten to know her and discovered that she was bright and funny and ambitious, all of the things her reputation said she could not possibly be.
    They had never hung out again after that, but at graduation Stacy had written a very long note in his yearbook, thanking him for that talk on the bus, for being “real” with her. He had never forgotten it, or her.
    Will thanked Nick for the drink, promised his friends he'd be back to the table in just a minute, and