Читать книгу Tangled Sheets, Tangled Lies - Julie Hogan, Julie Hogan - Страница 10

Lauren sat at her kitchen table, balancing the phone between her shoulder and ear as she stifled a yawn and fiddled with her cup of cooled coffee. Her friend and former agent, Sherry Buchanan, was going into hyper-drive as she told Lauren about the sheer hell that her retirement was putting the Boudoir Lingerie folks through.

Truth be told, Lauren couldn’t have cared less. They’d had her dangling on a string since she was eighteen, standing around in her underwear in bizarre locations, working fifteen-hour days and waking up in the dark for indecently early calls that had made it almost impossible to care for her child. She’d earned a lot of money working as Boudoir’s lead model—enough to sustain her and Jem for a lifetime if she was careful. But she’d done her share by being part of the reason that the catalog could now call itself one of the world’s premiere fashion outlets.

“I told them I’d ask, sweetie,” Sherry was saying over the Monday-morning din of her busy office. “Would you please come back just for the fall season?”

As a cool morning breeze floated in the kitchen window, bringing with it the clean, country scents of the summer morning, Lauren laughed. She wasn’t leaving this small-town paradise for the fall season—or any other season, for that matter. “Jem is loving it here, Sherry. And if you remember, one of the reasons I quit was Boudoir’s habit of making motherhood about as convenient as being an international spy.”

The older woman laughed, making Lauren smile. When Lauren had run away at sixteen, Sherry—who at the time already had two grown children—had discovered her in a shopping mall talent search. And since then, she’d been more of a mother to Lauren than anyone else ever had.

“Okay, honey,” Sherry said. “I’ll tell them you considered it very carefully and that you decline.” The sound of Sherry shuffling through the heaps of head-shots on her desk rustled through the phone before she asked, “Hey, how’s your handyman search going?”

Lauren stared down into the inky-brown liquid in her cup and remembered how Cole had looked last night sitting on her antique settee. With his natural handsomeness and well-muscled frame, he should’ve looked silly there amongst the faded cabbage roses and ornate woodwork. But he hadn’t looked silly at all. He’d been as cool as could be, like he’d spent many an evening chatting in a fancy old parlor.

She pushed the vision out of her mind. “I’ll tell you about it if you stop working and shut your door for two minutes.” She kept her tone deliberately mysterious to tempt her workaholic friend into taking a break.

The rustling stopped abruptly, and then Lauren heard the sound of a door shutting noisily. Sherry, who was a closet devotee of romance novels, sounded breathless when she said, “Do tell.”

Lauren frowned. How could she describe Cole? Gorgeous, charming, good with kids, a drifter? “Well, you’d love him. If he was a model instead of a handyman, you’d have his headshot on your wall in nothing flat. And if he was a few years older, I’m sure you’d be working overtime to get him into your bed.”

“Oh, really? Is he available?”

Lauren realized in that moment that she had no idea if he was available, or even why he’d landed in Valle Verde. The last thing she needed was to get all chummy and personal with him.

“I don’t know if he’s available, Sher. Sounds like he moves around a lot,” she said as she stood and walked across the kitchen and the cool, hard floor under her feet sent a shiver up her bare legs. “I guess he’s available if you don’t mind being a camp follower. Or getting your heart broken.”

“Uh-oh.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I just thought I heard the distinct sound of you emerging from your post-Miles cocoon ahead of schedule.”

Lauren almost dropped her cup. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“I’m saying that it’s high time you ditched your silly rule about avoiding men. And it sounds like your handyman might be just the one to help you celebrate its demise.”

“Not a chance.” And I’ll just keep repeating that mantra every time I see him and those seductive blue eyes of his.

Sherry just laughed. “All right, all right. Have it your way.” She paused for a moment. “And if you do have it your way, don’t spare me the details.”

Lauren laughed. “I miss you, you crazy old broad.”

“Right back atcha, sweetie. Tell Jem his Grandma Sherry misses our Sunday dinners and that I can’t wait to see him. And you, get to work on that handyman!”

“I have no intention of working on my handyman— Hello? Hello?” she said before she realized she was talking to dead air. Shaking her head, she walked to the opposite wall to hang up the phone, then stopped in her tracks. Her heart skipped a few beats, then picked up where it left off in triple time as she stared in utter dismay at her worst nightmare: Cole, standing in the living room not ten feet away from the kitchen door, his big, callused hands easing a pane of glass from her beautiful, rattling old windows. He stopped what he was doing long enough to turn and smile at her, his eyes sparkling with amusement.

Lauren’s mind pumped feverishly as she tried to recall exactly what she’d just said. “How long have you been standing there, Cole?”

His smile grew wide. “A long, long time.”

She felt a furious blush rush straight up to the roots of her hair. Dammit. “That was my agent…I mean, my friend on the phone,” she said, flustered, struggling to find a way to get the hell out of this gracefully. Dammit, dammit.

“Agent? Oh, that’s right, you’re a model,” he said, as he returned to his task, placing the loosened panes on a cloth he’d laid at the base of the window. “Didn’t I read somewhere that you’d retired?”

Lauren stared at his back, dumfounded. Until that moment, she hadn’t been sure he knew who she was. And now, even though most of the western world knew what she looked like in her underwear, the knowledge that he did made her feel strangely exposed—naked even though she was fully clothed. She crossed her arms over her chest guardedly before saying, “Somehow, I can’t imagine you reading the tabloids, Cole, but those are the only publications I can think of that report such useless trivia.”

He turned around, one brow arched. “I believe I read that in the Wall Street Journal, actually. The reporter seemed to think your retirement might affect the stock price of Boudoir’s parent company.”

She’d read that load of tripe, too. “In a year,” she said with a shrug, “no one will remember my name, I assure you.”

“Your name, maybe. But you I think they’ll remember.” As he spoke, his gaze never strayed from her face for a second.

The intensity in his blue topaz eyes sent a wild tribal dance into full swing in her stomach, but she couldn’t seem to look away. The good news was that his attention had been effectively diverted from the phone conversation during which she was horrifyingly sure she’d said something about “working on her handyman.” The bad news was she was beginning to think that something about her handyman was working on her.