Nick LeBeck

Nick LeBeck
Nick LeBeck
Occupation	Composer; formerly a member of a teenage street gang
First appearance	''Falling for Rachel''
Series	[[The Stanislaskis]]
Books	Falling for Rachel, Waiting for Nick, Considering Kate (mentioned)
Family	Zackary "Zack" Muldoon (stepbrother), Yuri Stanislaski (informally adopted father figure), Nadia Stanislaski (informally adopted mother figure), Kelsey LeBeck (daughter)

Nick LeBeck is a character in Nora Roberts' The Stanislaskis. Introduced as a troubled teenage gang member, he is informally adopted into the Stanislaski family and goes on to become a successful Broadway composer and the hero of Waiting for Nick, the fifth book in the series.

Overview

Nick begins the series as a kid trapped by circumstance — a member of a street gang called the Cobras who sees no way out of the life he's been handed. His arc across the series is one of the most dramatic of any Stanislaski-adjacent character: from defendant to found family member to romantic lead, as he grows from a frightened teenager into an acclaimed Broadway composer, a husband, and eventually a father.

Background

Nick is the stepbrother of Zackary "Zack" Muldoon — the two share no blood relation, but Nick's mother married Zack's father when Nick was a boy. Nick was raised largely by his mother alone before that marriage, and the household improved for a time once she and Zack's father were together, with Zack himself, years older, showing the younger boy real if rough-edged kindness, teaching him to play ball and giving him his first piano.

That stability didn't last. Zack joined the navy as soon as he was old enough, leaving Nick alone again with his mother and Zack's father, a hard, unyielding man. When Nick's mother died, things fell apart quickly; Nick replaced the family he'd lost with the loyalty of a street gang, the Cobras, and ended up in trouble with the law. At the time of Falling for Rachel, Nick is caught participating in a robbery and assigned Rachel Stanislaski as his public defender. Zack, returned from the navy, comes back to try to pull his stepbrother out of the gang — a fight neither Zack nor the Stanislaski family gives up on, even when Nick makes it as hard on them as possible.

Recognizing in Nick the same vulnerability and need for a stable home that they themselves once needed as refugees building a new life, Yuri and Nadia take him in informally, and by adulthood he is treated as fully and completely a Stanislaski son in every way but blood — Nadia counts him without hesitation among "all my children," and Nick calls Yuri "Papa."

Personality

As a teenager, Nick is defensive, frightened, and loyal to the only "family" — the Cobras — he believes he has, even as that loyalty endangers him. As he matures under the Stanislaskis' influence, he grows into someone steadier and more hopeful, channeling his early hardship into his music rather than letting it define him. As an adult he is talented, a little overprotective of the people he loves (a trait he turns, half-joking, on Freddie when she first arrives in New York), and quietly aware of how far he's come from the boy Zack and the Stanislaskis pulled off the street.

Story Arc

Falling for Rachel

Nick is the public-defense client at the center of the plot, his case bringing his stepbrother Zack into direct, combative contact with Rachel Stanislaski. Though the book's central romance belongs to Rachel and Zack, Nick's situation — and the family's growing investment in his future — sets up his own story.

Waiting for Nick

Nick's book. By now an up-and-coming composer with one well-reviewed Broadway score (Last Stop) behind him, Nick is approached by family friend Frederica "Freddie" Kimball, who has moved to New York determined to become his lyricist — and, not incidentally, to finally make him fall in love with her after a decade of carrying a torch. The two become writing partners on a new musical, First, Last and Always, commissioned for star Maddy O'Hurley, and the close-quarters collaboration forces Nick to stop seeing Freddie as the kid cousin from West Virginia and start seeing her as the woman she's become. The book includes an extended visit to the O'Hurley family — Maddy, her siblings Trace, Chantel, and Abby, and their large, boisterous next generation — old friends of the Stanislaskis from a separate corner of the Nora Roberts canon. The book ends with Nick and Freddie newly married and the triumphant opening night of First, Last and Always.

Later Books

By Considering Kate, Nick and Freddie are established as a married songwriting team with a daughter, Kelsey, and Nick is fully woven into the Stanislaski family's enormous gatherings, indistinguishable in the family's eyes from a blood relation.

Relationships

Frederica "Freddie" Kimball

Nick's wife and songwriting partner. The two grow up adjacent to each other through the Stanislaski and Kimball families' closeness — Freddie has loved Nick since she was a teenager — and their long friendship turns romantic, and professional, in Waiting for Nick. Their marriage produces a daughter, Kelsey.

Zackary "Zack" Muldoon

Nick's stepbrother, the son of the man his mother married. Zack's rough-edged but genuine kindness gave Nick some of the only stability he had as a child, and Zack's return from the navy after their parents' deaths is what eventually pulls Nick out of the Cobras and into the Stanislaski family's orbit.

Yuri and Nadia Stanislaski

Nick's informally adopted parents. Their willingness to take in a troubled teenager with no blood connection to the family reflects the Stanislaskis' core belief that family is built as much as it is born.

Physical Description

As a teenager, Nick has the wary, watchful eyes of someone used to looking for trouble before it finds him — a trait that softens, but never entirely disappears, as he grows older. As an adult he is described as having sea-green eyes and a cool, sculpted face.

Trivia

Nick is the only major Stanislaski-family figure in the series who joins the family entirely outside of marriage or blood — he is taken in as a teenager and treated as a son from then on.
His case in Falling for Rachel indirectly causes both his own romance in Waiting for Nick and his stepbrother Zack's romance with Rachel.
Waiting for Nick is the series' direct crossover point with Nora Roberts' separate O'Hurley family series, bringing Maddy, Trace, Chantel, and Abby O'Hurley into the Stanislaski orbit.
Nick and Freddie are professionally branded "LeBeck and Kimball" by the press following the success of First, Last and Always.