Читать книгу Kiss & Makeup - Alison Kent - Страница 8

TO SHANDI FOSSEY, THE SKY was the limit. And if there was one thing she missed about Round-Up, Oklahoma, that was it. The sky. Pinpoints of white light twinkling in an inky black bowl. Cotton-ball clouds scooped high on a pale blue plate. Butter spreading at dawn. Orange Julius at sunset.

The sky above Manhattan was about wedges cut between buildings, streetlights reflected in windowpanes and flashing neon colors—or so it seemed, sitting as she was, cross-legged and lights-off in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows of her sixth-floor West Village apartment at three-thirty in the morning.

But that was okay. The wedges thing. Really. Because there were lights a whole lot brighter and much more meaningful here in the Big Apple than found anywhere in the sky over Oklahoma.

And that was why she was here, wasn’t it? For the lights on Broadway as well as those off. The theaters and cabarets, sets and stages and clubs. All of those myriad places offering canvases for her work.

Eyelids and lashes and lips. Brows and cheekbones. The slope of a nose. The line of a jaw. These were the landscapes she transformed, shaping and coloring and creating, turning the ordinary into the fantastic with her brushes and sponges, her pots and tubes and jars of colors and creams.

She leaned her upper body to the left, stretching dozens of muscles as she draped her right arm as far as she could over her head and down toward the floor. Her shift as bartender at Erotique in the hotel Hush meant long hours on her feet at least five nights a week, many times six.

Afterward, unwinding beneath her own personal wedge of what sky she could see had become her routine. She enjoyed the silence, the dark, the sense of so much life teeming around her—even though what life she could see from here was so very, very still.

She imagined patrons talking long into the night, discussing and arguing over the shows they’d seen. She pictured the ushers, hostesses and attendants waiting for the venues to empty so they could kick off their shoes, along with their frozen smiles.

She thought of the actors easing out of their roles much as she eased from hers when she sat here each night, leaving behind the Shandi who mixed martinis and margaritas for Erotique’s sophisticated clientele and slipping—reluctantly? regretfully? naturally?—back into the role she’d lived so long.

That of a long-legged, willowy cat’s tail of a filly from Oklahoma—the description she’d been tagged with by the beer-and-whiskey crowd at the Thirsty Rattler, her family’s bar in the small town of Round-Up.

One of these days she would figure out which of the two women she was, whether she needed to make a choice between them or combine them. Had she left Oklahoma to encouraging farewells instead of predictions that she’d return in six months, her tail tucked between her legs, she might find that integration a whole lot easier.

As it was, there was a big part of her that just couldn’t let go of the doubts planted by her family when she’d announced her decision to leave Round-Up for a life in New York City.

For the last year she’d been pursuing a bachelor of science degree in cosmetics and fragrance marketing at the Fashion Institute of Technology. During that time she temped for a living—most recently at the law firm of Winslow, Reynolds and Forster—until hearing whispers around the office about the opening of Hush.

And for the same very long year she’d been satisfied with the status quo of her studies, her work schedule and her friends, needing nothing more. Or so she had thought.

Until tonight, when he had sat down at the bar.

She realigned her body to stretch her left side, her fingertips hovering over the hardwood floor at her right hip. Oh, but if he hadn’t been the most gorgeous thing she’d ever seen. Better even than the actor from that television show about Navy investigators, who had stayed at Hush during the hotel’s grand opening.

Only this guy was real, not an elusive Hollywood fantasy. One who’d wanted to talk to her. Thankfully Erotique had been busy beyond belief, giving her a legitimate excuse to walk away and catch her breath when their flirtation took on a sexually dangerous edge, as it had so quickly.

At least walking away had worked tonight.

But he was a guest at Hush, meaning the odds were that she would be seeing him again. And the bar wouldn’t always be as hopping as it had been this evening. He was going to lose interest if she couldn’t get her act together and keep her mind—and her ever-wavering sense of self-worth—out of Round-Up.

Keeping her mind out of the bedroom was an entirely separate matter. It was hard to talk to the man when she couldn’t stop herself from thinking about getting him out of his clothes, but that’s exactly how she’d spent a large chunk of the night’s long shift.

His hair was blond, or had been when he was younger. It had darkened, leaving him with lo-lights instead of high. And it was long, a bit wavy—a leonine mane. He wore it pulled back and wore a goatee and soul patch, as well.

His smile twinkled. His eyes twinkled. His personality, too. She’d had the best time exchanging bantering quips and innuendo. She’d appreciated his wit. Appreciated, too, calls from the other patrons allowing her to step away and gather her thoughts while mixing drinks and serving.

She’d asked him what had brought him to the city and to the hotel. He’d told her it was a business trip—the business of money, music and women. She’d teased back that she wasn’t much for helping him with the first two, but the third….

For a long moment then he’d held her gaze, and she’d imagined his fingers that were slowly stroking his glass stroking her instead. Her body had responded, her filmy bra beneath her sleeveless black tuxedo shirt doing little good to keep her private thoughts private. He’d noticed. He’d lifted his drink, his eyes on her as he’d swallowed, his throat working, his jaw taut, the vein at his temple pulsing.

Blood had pulsed through her body, too. It did the same now as she remembered the way he’d looked at her. As if he wanted to strip her bare, to eat her up, to discover how well their bodies fit together, to devour her once he had.

And then she wondered if he truly understood where it was he was staying. How perfect a setting Hush made for a steamy affair.

She smiled as she thought of the words the media had used to describe the hotel when it had initially opened. The brainchild of heiress Piper Devon, Hush had been called the place for the young, the rich and the horny. Shandi, of course, knew it was much more than that—no matter the truth to the adage that sex sells. The business of Hush wasn’t as much sex, however, as it was sensuality.

Rich perfumes were found in each room’s candles, bath salts, shower gels and massage oils. Private video cameras, video collections and boxes of stimulating toys encouraged tactile intimacy. Whether enjoying a midnight swim by moonlight in the rooftop pool or the basement sofa bar’s music and erotic performance art, guests were guaranteed privacy, discretion and the freedom to explore.

Then there was the pure visually artistic appeal of the place. The hotel’s vintage and original artwork made for the perfect complement to the 1920s art-deco theme done in black, pink, gray and sea-foam green. What Hush was could only be described as a luxurious feast for the senses.

And at that, Shandi’s thoughts returned to the man she’d met tonight at the bar. Yeah, she mused, sighing deeply as she stretched out both legs in front of her, leaning forward to grab her toes. Another very long shift lay ahead. And she was already anxious to get back to work, to see him again. And for a simple reason, really.

He was the first man since her arrival in New York to have her thinking beyond work and school to the physical things that occurred between a man and a woman. Those things she wanted. Those things she missed. Those things she hadn’t taken time to pursue since moving here and settling in and scheduling every hour of every day of her way-too-busy life.

When she heard a key in the front door behind her, she screwed up her mouth and shook her head. Speaking of busy, at least she didn’t have class tomorrow until noon. Evan Harcourt, her roommate, who was in FIT’s master’s program in illustration, having switched gears after years spent in photography, had to be on campus at eight.

Silly man, keeping the working and dating schedule he did, even now at the beginning of September’s new term. She waited until he’d closed and locked the door before speaking.

“The things men do for love.”

Evan jumped, cursed swiftly and under his breath. “I swear, Shandi, if I end up dead from a heart attack, I’m going to kick your ass.”

She listened to his steps as he crossed the room. “That’ll be hard to do from the grave. Unless you come back as Angel or Spike.”

“Smart-ass,” he mumbled, dropping to his haunches behind her and massaging her shoulders, as was his routine when finding her here after work. “I’ll get April to do it for me then. Vengeance and all that.”

“Hmm,” Shandi murmured, halfway pondering Evan’s shaky romance, halfway out of her mind with a pleasure that was purely platonic.

April Carter, Evan’s girlfriend for a year now who was majoring at FIT in jewelry design, had definitely lucked out, snagging a man with amazingly talented hands.

And that thought had Shandi’s mind returning again to Erotique and picturing the way he had used his hands tonight, holding his glass, stroking the crystal tumbler the way she’d wanted him to hold and stroke her.

With a sigh she returned to the moment. “What makes you think April would lift a finger on your say-so? Your dead say-so at that? You can’t even get her to introduce you to her parents.”

At her prodding of a sore spot that was none of her business, Evan backed off and away. “What’s that? Your shoulders aren’t aching tonight as usual?”

Grr. “That dead ass-kicking you’re threatening me with? You’re about to see the real-life version if you don’t bring those hands back over here now.”

“Oh, well, when you ask so nicely…” The sentence trailed, but he did scoot in behind her and resume the massage for which a licensed masseuse would charge a night’s worth of Shandi’s tips, if not more.

She supposed she really shouldn’t rag on Evan about his romance with April. On the one hand, the couple had everything going for them—and had ever since the night a year ago when they’d met at the Starbucks where Evan still worked, though he’d since moved up into management.

Shared interests, similar goals, amazingly compatible personalities. An attraction undeniable by anyone who spent time in the same room with the two—even if they stood on opposite sides.

On the other hand, April’s family weighed down the scales until even Shandi doubted that Evan and April’s romance could weather the storm brought on by the Carters’ expectations as to what made an appropriate marriage match.

Sometimes love just wasn’t enough—a truth that strangely brought her thoughts back to him one more time. And for the first time to a subject other than sex.

He was obviously high powered enough, wealthy enough, well enough connected to be staying at Hush. And that meant what? He’d take one look at Shandi Fossey from Round-Up, Oklahoma—only one, in his rearview mirror—and that would be that? The end of her own fantasy fling?

And why was she even going there? What did it matter what he thought? Especially when she wasn’t looking to do anything more than get him out of his designer duds and into her bed.

You can take the girl out of Oklahoma, Shandi, but Oklahoma stays forever in the girl.

“Yes, Daddy,” she grumbled under her breath. “I hear you loud and clear.”

“Talking to yourself again?” Evan asked.

Her head bobbed with the motion of his hands when he kneaded the base of her skull. “Thinking about you and April.”

“Funny. I could’ve sworn you were calling me Daddy.”

She couldn’t help but grin. “If I were going to call anyone Daddy, it would be this guy tonight who spent most of my shift sitting at the bar.”

“Hmm. A sugar daddy with one foot on a banana peel and one foot in the grave?”

Shandi swung around and swatted Evan’s shoulder. “Hey, that’s so not funny.”

He shifted to face her, one wrist draped over one raised knee as he sat. “No, but you and I are in the same broke-as-a-beggar boat.” He grinned, his smile bright in the room’s low light. “Why do you think I’m dating April?”

“If you say for her money, I’m going to hit you again, buddy.” Shandi did her best schoolteacher finger shake. “Besides, you’re not exactly a pauper.”

“My grandmother’s not a pauper, you mean. I’m poorer than dirt.”

And Shandi knew that really he was. That his grandmother let him—and by association let her—live rent-free in this, one of several apartments she owned in the city. As long as he paid his own way through school.

And as long as he didn’t live with April in sin.

No grandson of Ellen Harcourt’s was going to take up with a girl who’d never had to work for a thing in her life.

“Do you think it matters?” Shandi asked him. “Being attracted to someone totally out of your league?”

“Are you talking about me and April? Or you and banana man?” When she glared, he went on. “Being attracted, no. Who can help it?”

“Those of us not thinking with a penis?”

“That’s bull, Shandi. A woman’s just as likely to make a move because she wants in a guy’s pants as a guy is. Uh, as a guy is who wants in a woman’s pants. Whatever. You know what I mean.”

Shandi chuckled. Then sobered, thinking more about her mystery man’s eyes, more about his hungry, burning look, the devastating way she’d found herself wanting to help him get her naked.

Dear Lord, she was losing her mind. “Is that a bad thing? Wanting in a guy’s pants?”

Evan blew out a breath heavy with his reluctance to talk. Had she been prying about baseball, he’d be animated and all up in her face yammering on about the Yankees.

Instead he pulled up his other knee and rolled down to lie on his back, feet flat on the floor, his head pillowed on his wrists, his dark hair sweeping the cherry wood planks.

“I’m waiting over here,” she finally said, once again sitting cross-legged.

“It’s still a double standard, Shandi—the women a guy takes to bed and the one he takes home.”

That particular truth really sucked, yet in this case it was more the reverse of the situation that she couldn’t let go. She shouldn’t be so hung up, but with Evan and April both her very best friends, it was hard to think of either hurting the other. Or either getting hurt.

Her concern was strictly that of a friend in the middle. A sucky place to be. “So why doesn’t April take you home? She doesn’t want her parents to know she has a lover?”

He waited a long time before answering, clearing the hesitation from his throat before he did. “April and I aren’t lovers. And if you tell her I told you that, the ass-kicking switches into high gear.”

What? Speechless. She was absolutely speechless, her mouth as dry as a bone. April hadn’t once hinted that she wasn’t sleeping with Evan. She’d hinted at quite the opposite, in fact.

“I don’t get it. You’ve spent the night over there—”

“On the couch.”

Unbelievable. “Not in her bed?”

“Nope.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

“Huh.” Shandi didn’t even know what to say. “Has she said why? I mean, I’m assuming you’ve tried or told her you want to.” And then a pause as she thought. “You do want to, right? Or is this more of that double-standard thing?”

“Do we have to talk about this? I’ve got class in four hours.”

“Drawing? Skip it.” He wouldn’t, and she ought to let him off the hook, but he was her only window into the male psyche.

The only one whose brain she could pick about what to do with her crush on tonight’s customer. “I need to know what men think.”

“Why?” He turned his head sharply. “Are you planning to hit on banana man?”

She shoved at his closest knee, rocking both of his legs. “Would you stop calling him that?”

“What’s his name?”

“Quentin.”

“And you want to sleep with him.”

“I don’t know.” She did, of course, hating how these ridiculous double standards men embraced labeled her because of that want. “He intrigues me. That’s all.”

“Right.” A snort. “It’s not like you want to do him because he’s hot.”

Okay, yes, there was that. An attitude she’d always shared with April. Or so she’d thought. But if April wasn’t even sleeping with Evan, the man she loved…

This complicated love and sex and lust business was for the birds. Shandi wanted things plain and simple, to act on her attraction to Quentin without having him think less of her for doing so.

Because what he thought of her mattered just as much as having him want her. “Okay. I admit it. I’m obviously a hopeless slut.”

“Sluts are good.”

She groaned with frustration, then lay back beside Evan. “Good when I’m the slut in question. Just not when it’s April.”

“Shandi, this conversation is putting me to sleep.”

She ignored him. “You know I’m going to have to rag on April for not telling me the truth.”

“What?” Evan perked up. “She told you we were having sex?”

Good. The reaction she’d wanted. “No, but she let me think so. Heck, you let me think so. I mean, I don’t get it, but if her not sleeping with you makes her a better catch—”

“It’s not about her being a better catch.” He sighed. “It’s just that by the time we realized we were more than friends, we were such good friends we didn’t want to ruin it by sleeping together. Not until we were sure it was more.”

“It is more, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. It’s more.” This time his sigh was pure poetry.

And hers pure envy. She wanted that same more. She really, truly wanted that very same more. “So this guy at the hotel. Quentin. I shouldn’t sleep with him then.”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether you’re interested in more than his banana.”

QUENTIN MARKS STOOD STARING out the window of his sixteenth-floor suite. He had a meeting at nine. He needed to be in bed. Check that. He needed to be asleep.

Except, being in bed made him think of being there for sex and being there with Shandi Fossey.

He had never met a woman with legs like those of Erotique’s bartender. And that was saying a lot considering the legs he’d seen in his lifetime.

A man didn’t get to be a Grammy-winning record producer without being subjected to a hell of a lot of exposure—perpetrated by women—and more than a few men—wanting his attention, looking to gain an industry in. Using him. Willing to do anything, give him anything, promise him the sexual moon if he would simply listen to their demo, make an introduction, reveal the secrets to success he was a greedy bastard for keeping to himself.

Yeah. He was a bastard all right. A bastard because he looked out for himself, he mused, stepping from the corner room’s window to the balcony overlooking Madison Avenue and pulling open the French doors. The night air was muggy, the lights muted, the noise level low enough that he had no trouble hearing his thoughts.

He wasn’t sure if that was good or bad considering lately his thoughts were all about getting back to Austin. And until he took care of business here, made his deals, got what he wanted, he couldn’t go back. He couldn’t go home.

Home.

He sighed, drained the rest of the brandy that room service had delivered, compliments of management. Quentin had to admit the rumors were true. Hush was the place to stay—even if he’d originally planned to stay elsewhere.

It was the hotel’s name that had drawn him. It had drawn his assistant’s attention, as well; she’d been the one to show him its promotional material. Later she’d shown him the write-up in the New Yorker profiling the Devon hotel empire and this newest venture that was run—quite successfully—by the daughter, Piper, whose wild-child reputation was one those in the business knew well.

He’d flipped through both the brochure and the magazine, curious, not as interested in the amenities as much as the privacy said amenities obviously entailed. He wanted his visit to the city to be a quiet one. He wanted to get in, get his business done and get out without a lot of fanfare. He was winding down that part of his life, the one that kept him in the limelight.

He’d reserved the hotel’s basement conference center for two separate meetings tomorrow—uh, make that today—as well as more later in the week. In the past he’d never had reason to be as involved with the industry’s money men as he was now.

But now he had to be. Now was all about his own studio. The Marks label: Markin’ It Up. Finally setting himself up in Austin and going home to stay. Making that dream happen was why he was here. Getting the backing he needed wasn’t going to be the problem. Deciding who he wanted behind him was.

Right now, however, the thought forefront in his mind wasn’t about financing but about sex. As strange as it sounded, as strange as it felt, his studio plans had kept him too busy these last months to do more than mentally indulge.

Now he wanted more. Now he wanted Shandi. A woman he shouldn’t have wanted at all. They hadn’t talked much in the way of specifics; no real getting-to-know-you conversation had found its way into their back-and-forth.

But what she had told him was enough to have made him want to push back from the bar and do his drinking elsewhere. In a quiet corner. At a dark table. Away from her smile and her big blue eyes. But he hadn’t. He’d stayed there with her and drunk her up, too.

She was majoring in cosmetics and marketing, headed for a career—she hoped, the marketing was a fall-back plan— in the theater, in film, in music videos. Wherever she could find work as a makeup artist in the entertainment industry. The marketing was a fall-back plan.

His industry.

An industry that crushed dreams daily.

He’d been lucky to live his. Others weren’t so lucky. Most weren’t so.

She was a clichéd breath of fresh air when he was used to inhaling lungfuls of jaded cynicism.

Hell, these days he didn’t even like listening to himself think, what with the way his own thoughts were so polluted. He didn’t blame Shandi for not sticking around for more conversation beyond the flirting they’d done. He knew he’d been nowhere near as entertaining as her animated responses had made him out to be.

Then again, he wasn’t blind, deaf or dumb to where her attention tended to drift when she’d thought him not looking, when she’d feigned interest in the other bar patrons.

That interest was what was keeping him up, keeping him awake, keeping him from listening to his years of experience and the common sense that came with it.

He was hard-bitten; she was exuberantly optimistic. He was turning his back on the bright lights of the big city she so openly embraced.

He was weary of witnessing the implosion of dreams. She wore hope with the same authority, the same familiar comfort with which she wore her uniform of tuxedo pants and shirt.

And all he could think about was getting her out of the one without damaging the other.