Kiss & Makeup

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.

2

Attention: EVERYONE!

The cocktail napkins are NOT to be used to clean up spills or for handkerchiefs, makeup cloths or whatever picnics you have going on in the bar’s back room.

BRING YOUR OWN BOUNTY OR BRAWNY!

Armand & Shandi

QUENTIN IMPATIENTLY WAITED for Shandi to begin the evening shift at the bar.

It had been midafternoon before he’d finished the second of his scheduled meetings and accompanied his business advisor and the bank’s trio of officers from the basement conference center to the lobby.

The group had lingered long enough sharing financial war stories that Quentin had finally suggested a drink—a multipurpose suggestion. He’d felt like a fool paying more attention to the comings and goings in the bar than to the conversation.

At least in the bar his distraction wouldn’t be as obvious, his obsession as apparent. By the time the others had left an hour later, however, Shandi still hadn’t put in an appearance. Quentin then decided on an early and solitary dinner.

He’d convinced the hostess in the hotel restaurant, Amuse Bouche, to seat him where he had a clear view of Erotique. He finally caught sight of Shandi, of course, the minute his server walked away after placing his salad of seared Norwegian salmon, mixed greens, cucumbers and yellow-pepper vinaigrette on the table.

His first instinct was to rush through his meal and hurry into the bar. But then he realized how very much he enjoyed simply looking at her, watching her and doing it while she remained unaware. He usually didn’t have the benefit of flying under the radar and he took full advantage.

She looked completely at ease, dodging the other bartender, weaving in and out and around as they both filled orders, mixed drinks, poured, served and chatted up patrons. She smiled and laughed, her face expressive and engaged, fresh. She enjoyed herself as she worked. It showed. He liked it. And he found himself relaxing while he ate.

He took his time and let his anticipation build. He tasted little of the food on his plate and didn’t touch the complimentary wine a female diner sent over. It wasn’t food or drink his appetite required. And he didn’t want to feel obligated because of the gift and get caught up by a conversation in which he had zero interest.

His only interest was Shandi. Thing was, he wanted more from her than sex. He wanted to see her smile for him, at him, because of him. He wanted to share her optimism, her outlook, her disposition. And then he wanted it all so suddenly that the distance between them was too much, the wait unnecessary.

He signaled for his server, paid for his meal and headed for Erotique.

“How did your meetings go?” Shandi asked as he hoisted himself up onto one of the funky black chairs at the half-moon-shaped bar and leaned against the inverted-triangle back.

The lights above, a strangely cool pink shining down from nested fixtures, turned her blond hair nearly white. Until she cocked her head. And then all he could think about was cotton candy.

He wrapped his hand around the highball glass she set in front of him, focusing on the drink she was pouring instead of her sweetness and the way he wanted her. “Well enough, I suppose. As meetings go.”

She laughed lightly, a soft lyrical sound of crystal and bells. “Doesn’t sound like meetings are much your thing.”

He shrugged. “Depends on the topic.”

“And this one was?” she asked, nodding toward another customer who signaled for a drink.

“Money,” Quentin said, ice clinking on glass. She gazed at him quizzically before stepping away to deliver the bourbon-and-rocks.

He studied her as she moved, as she talked, taking care of her customer, appearing to give the man her full attention yet all the while aware of the needs of the other bar patrons.

He wondered how long she’d been serving drinks, if it was experience tending bar or her natural ease with people that made her efforts seem effortless.

Then he wondered why Hush had her wearing pants when the business of the hotel was eroticism and the length of her legs defined the word.

He could not get enough of the way she walked, of the sway of her hips, the curves of her ass in motion. He’d settled into this particular seat two nights in a row now for that very reason.

From here he had a clear view of the length of the bar and beyond. And watching her was quickly becoming his favorite pastime.

When she returned to where he was sitting, she picked up their conversation right where she’d left it, asking, “You don’t like money?”

“If it’s mine, sure. If it’s not…” He left the sentence hanging and shrugged. “I don’t like being obligated.” He also didn’t like talking business when he wanted to get to know her.

“Ah, you don’t like being in debt, you mean.”

This time he shook his head and laughed as much to himself as for her. “A necessary evil, unfortunately.”

“Tell me about it.” She waved over his head at a cute Gwyneth Paltrow look-alike walking through the lobby. Her eyes danced as she smiled. When he asked, she answered, “That’s Kit.”

“A friend?”

“She’s the director of public relations. We’re forever comparing our student loans that rival the national debt. And I’ll probably be paying mine off with my retirement fund since I waited so late to get up the guts to start school.”

Hmm. “Why did you need guts to start school?”

“If you want that story, you’ll be here all night,” she replied, a teasing lilt to her voice, a suggestion—one that seemed to be an invitation he do just that. That he insist she tell him. That he stay with her all night.

He wanted to. He just didn’t want to do it here. Not with an audience. Not when his room upstairs put a sheikh’s palace to shame. So he simply lifted a brow and tapped his fingers on the side of his glass.

Shandi rolled her eyes, her grin charming him, her reluctance intriguing him, her coy flutter of lashes too cute to be anything but real. “You’re going to stick around until I tell all, aren’t you?”

“I don’t have a single place to go or another person to see.” She might be teasing him, but the reservation in her voice convinced him not to press any button that would send her skittering away. “I’d say you’re stuck with me.”

She shook her head slowly, leaned into the corner. Leaned close to him. Still not quite comfortable, but near enough that he knew she wanted to stay.

One dark blond brow arched upward. “Okay, but consider yourself warned. Because when you fall out of your chair from boredom and need stitches on the back of your head, I won’t be held responsible.”

“Got it,” he said and fought back a grin.

She took a deep breath. “It wasn’t so much starting school that required the guts as it was moving here against my family’s wishes to go. I already had an associate’s degree, which I wasn’t using, by the way—”

“Why not?”

She stared at the bar’s surface, rubbed away a water spot instead of looking at him when she spoke. “Because my parents claimed to need my help at work.” She shrugged, gestured with one hand. “They own a bar. Though compared to Erotique, the Rattler’s really more of a saloon.”

“The Rattler?”

“The Thirsty Rattler.” Her grin returned, though almost reluctantly, a shy self-deprecation. “Yeah. If you can believe it.”

He believed it and he pictured it and had no problem doing either. “Your accent’s not quite Texas….”

“Oklahoma,” she provided. “Round-Up, Oklahoma.”

“We’re almost neighbors then. Except Oklahoma’s still a long day’s drive from Austin.”

“And I don’t live in Oklahoma anymore.”

He nodded his touché, wondering what about Oklahoma had driven her away, because he was certain that’s what had happened. “So your parents wanted you to stay and work. You wanted to leave and study. Either way, someone was going to end up being unhappy.”

“That about covers it.” She curled her fingers into her palm and considered her nails. “Though I’m not sure unhappy is the word I would use.”

He sat back in his chair, crossed his hands behind his head. “What word would you use?”

She laughed then. “Depends on who I’m describing.”

“Then describe yourself.” He was interested in Shandi, not her family. Especially considering her reluctance to talk about herself.

That trait made him all the more curious; most women wanted to tell him every detail of their lives, more than he cared or wanted to know.

He prodded her to go on. “If you’d stayed in Oklahoma, you’d be…what? Bitter? Resentful?”

Nodding, she smoothed a hand back over the hair she wore in a long French braid. “And guilty for feeling either one.”

“Because they’re your family.”

She smiled, the lift of her lips seeming to be more for her own benefit than his. “They may not have my best interests at heart, but I gotta love them anyway. They are who they are, ya know?”

Then she continued, the rush of words making him wonder how long she’d been holding in what came out as frustration. “And it’s not even about my interests. They don’t think that way. The family has always been one entity. The Fosseys. We’re not individuals. No one is expected to think outside that communal box. The fact that I did…”

She didn’t pick up the trailing sentence right away, so Quentin leaned forward again, one forearm on the sleek ebony bar as if he could close the distance between them. He hated having this conversation here.

The room was growing crowded; he wasn’t going to have her to himself much longer. He was enjoying her too much to forgive the interruptions, yet the ugly head of his impatience hardly thrilled him.

What he wanted was to take her downstairs into the basement, where the partitioned banquettes in Exhibit A—the underground bar set up for erotic performance art—offered the privacy Erotique did not.

Except, it would be a privacy swathed in blue lights and smoky darkness and an aura of intimacy more conducive to sex than to talk. He wasn’t quite sure either of them was ready to go there.

Sure, sex with Shandi would rock his world. It was her world he worried about. Her world that upped the ante. That made the wait worthwhile.

He cleared his throat and returned to the conversation just as she tossed back her head and glanced up toward the ceiling. “Wow, I have no idea where that came from. It’s the customer who’s supposed to pour out his heartache. And the bartender who’s supposed to offer the shoulder or the ear.”

“Are you always this hard on yourself?” he asked softly, because he wondered why she was. Why she didn’t want to let go. Didn’t want to talk about herself.

“Only most of the time.” She shrugged, then brushed some loose hair back from her forehead. “Fallout from my overachiever syndrome.”

“Something that runs in the family?”

She stepped away from the bar and laughed. “You are just not giving up, are you?”

“I never do. Not when there’s something I want.”

She stood there for a moment staring at him, her pulse quickening at the base of her throat. When she smiled, when she tilted her head to the side and grinned, he swore he felt the glass he was holding threaten to crack in his hand.

“Quentin,” she started, then paused. “Are you coming on to me?”

He couldn’t help the way his mouth crooked up on one side. “I’m doing my best.”

“Okay then.” She nodded. “I just wanted to make sure.”

“And now that you have?”

“I don’t know.” She gestured toward the other end of the bar. “I’m thinking about getting back to work. Quitting while I’m ahead and all that.”

Interesting. “How are you ahead?”

“Well, I haven’t had to mention anything about my three older brothers and how a year later I’m still waiting for one of them to come and drag me home by the hair.”

He thought of her hair loosened and draped over his skin, thought of her courage in the face of her family’s expectations, thought of the long, hard career road down which she wanted to travel.

And then he wondered why he was thinking about more than bedding her.

“You remind me a lot of a girl I knew in high school.” He shifted to sit more comfortably in his chair. “Her situation was different, her family nothing like yours. But she still had to make her way on her own.”

“And did she succeed?”

He smiled, thinking of his two friends from Johnson High in Austin, of Heidi Malone from the wrong side of the tracks who’d played sax and become the fifth member of his band, who was now an attorney defending women’s rights, thinking of her married now for six years to Ben Tannen.

“Oh, yeah.” Quentin’s smile widened. “She’s come a long way from the waif I knew her as then.”

“Really. So you have a thing for waifish schoolgirls, do you?”

He laughed aloud, the sound unfamiliar to his ears. He started to speak, was stopped by the movement of the chair beside his.

“I certainly hope he doesn’t, considering the wealth of experienced fish in the sea he has to choose from.”

Quentin turned into a cloud of perfume. The woman who’d sat beside him was gorgeous in that way of starlets, with perfect makeup and perfect hair, nails as bright as jewels and jewels as subtle as her plunging neckline.

She was most definitely on the make. And these days Quentin much preferred the thought of bedding tousled bartenders.

“Sweetie, would you get me a Cosmopolitan? Light on the cranberry.” The woman gave her order to Shandi, then dismissed her and turned his way. “You are buying tonight, aren’t you, hon? Or did I get all dressed up for nothing?”

Nothing was just about it. Not a twinge in his body. But he smiled because that’s what he did, and when Shandi returned with the woman’s Cosmo, he said, “Put it on my tab.”

YOU HAVE A THING FOR WAIFISH schoolgirls, do you?

Gah, had she actually asked him that? What was wrong with her? What was she thinking? Oh, wait. She wasn’t thinking. A big, fat problem that seemed to be worsening as the night grew long.

Show her a gorgeous man and for some ridiculous reason she lost every bit of her mind.

Here she was, telling Quentin all the things she didn’t want him to know—especially where she’d come from—giving him the ammunition he needed to deduce who she was. Who she wasn’t. Who she didn’t ever want to be.

And once he figured out all of that…

In the back room of the bar, Shandi rested against the wall next to the telephone and bulletin board, then beat her head against the surface almost hard enough to leave a dent.

Uh, a dent in the wall, not in her head. Her head was thick and indestructible, or so was the obvious conclusion, what with the way none of her lectures on what to say and what not to say had managed to sink in.

The phone rang in her ear. She jerked up the receiver more to kill the noise than because it was her job while Armand covered the bar. “Erotique. Shandi Fossey.”

“Shan, will you kill me if I bail on tomorrow night’s movie? Daddy called and insists I come for dinner, and there’s no way I can get back by eight. I’m going to spend the night and return Wednesday morning.”

Well, crud. Once again, April’s priorities and unbreakable family ties meant Shandi would be spending her night off scrambling to find a last-minute date. “Depends. Are you taking Evan with you?”

“Don’t be nuts. It’s a command performance. Family only. Some ridiculous emergency about Trevor being seen in public with Stefan Navarro.”

Shandi rolled her eyes. “I was wondering about that.”

“About what? My brother’s sexuality?”

“No. About whether or not you really considered Evan family.”

“Jeez, Shan. Give it a break, will you? Evan and I are fine. And I rather like having him here all to myself.”

Right. As long as you have him that way fully clothed, Shandi mused, then took it back.

Evan and April’s relationship was none of her business—even though they were her two very best friends and had been since that first day after classes last year when, bleary-eyed and suffering from information overload, she and April had shared a table in the Starbucks where Evan worked as a barista.

“Fine,” she grumbled. “I’ll go to the show by myself.”

“Well, yeah, you could.” April paused strategically. “But you don’t have to.”

“You’re not fixing me up, April. You’re not, you’re not, you’re not. Never again in this lifetime. Understand?” Life was too short to suffer through bad blind dates.

“Trust me. I know better. Besides, I don’t have to.” April paused. “Evan says you’ve got some guy at the hotel who’s dishy.”

Ah, yes. The 3:30 a.m. sacred hour of confession. “He is dishy, but I don’t have him. In fact, he’s currently at the bar being had by a Bambi in serious need of paint thinner. You should see the layers she’s troweled on.”

April snorted. “Not everyone can manage the fresh-faced farm-girl look, you know. You’ve pretty much cornered that market.”

“Uh-huh. And thanks for rubbing it in.” The reminder was hardly what Shandi needed when she was doing all she could to wipe away every trace of the farm.

She wanted to fit in, not stand out. To gain attention because of her skills, not her accent and the fact that, yes, she really had ridden in barrel-racing competitions.

To prove to her family that she damn well could make it on her own. To prove the same to herself.

This time April sighed. “You know, sweetie, you really do need to get over where you come from.”

“Oh, and you don’t let where you come from dictate your relationship with Evan?”

“Why? Has he said something to you? Is that why you’re all over us all of a sudden? What did he say? Is he complaining that I won’t take him to Connecticut?”

“Evan hasn’t said a word.” She leaned forward to stretch out her taut and tired back. “I’m just feeling out of my league here.”

“Well, stop it. You have no reason to.”

“Did I tell you he’s from Texas?”

“The dishy guy?”

“Yeah, he’s from Austin.” She straightened, then slid down the wall and sat on her heels.

“Wouldn’t that be a plus in his favor? Having that similar-regional-outlook thing going on?”

“No, it’s not a plus, you goon. I live here and he doesn’t.” What kind of plus was that? “And who said we shared any regional outlook anyhow?”

“Hmm,” April hummed before saying, “So? Have fun with him here.”

“Right. The kind of fun that involves not wearing anything.”

April sighed, and this time with more force. “Hey, it’s only a thought. It’s one of many that prove you think about sex too much.”

“That coming from someone who doesn’t think about it at all,” Shandi said, immediately wishing she could bite off her tongue. Especially when she couldn’t even hear breathing on the other end of the line.

She waited one heartbeat, two. “April? Are you still there?”

“I’m here. And now I’m pissed as hell. You said Evan hadn’t been talking.”

“He hasn’t. Not really.” How much more trouble was she going to get into with her mouth? “I was talking to him about Dishy Guy, and we got into a discussion about the girls guys sleep with versus the ones they take home.”

When April stayed silent, Shandi stood and went back to pounding her head on the wall. “Listen, April, my break’s up. I’ve got to get back. Can we talk about this later?”

“I love him, Shandi. More than I knew I could love anyone.” April’s voice broke. “He’s everything to me, and I’m scared to death I’m going to do something major to screw it up.”

The noises from the bar faded into the background until Shandi heard only the hum of the back room’s cooler. Guilt swelled in her chest that she’d even inadvertently betrayed a confidence.

She had a hard time swallowing around the lump of emotion clogging her throat. “You’re not. Oh, April, you’re not. He feels the same about you. You know that.”

“Does he? I mean, I know he does, but with all this family stuff…”

Eyes closed, Shandi drew in a deep breath. “We’ll talk when you get back from Connecticut, okay? After class on Wednesday. We’ll come grab something fabulous at Amuse Bouche. I’m broke, and this way it’s all free.”

April laughed. “Sounds good. Besides, I’m sure I’ll be stressed from the Daddy-Trevor-Stefan triangle and need to unload.”

April rang off then, and Shandi hung up the phone, glancing briefly at the bulletin board and the huge pink pushpin tacking up a scrawled note that said:

Mrs. Mulholland told Mrs. Delancey her doctor says her BP is up, up, up!

Go light salting her margaritas!

Hopefully Shandi would be better at watching Mrs. M’s salt than she’d been thus far at watching the words that came out of her own mouth. Honesty being the best policy had never before seemed like such a bad idea.

And when she stepped out of the back room and into the bar, into the conversations and the laughter and the music with the low throbbing beat, she really had to remind herself how much trouble she’d generated already today simply by speaking her mind.

Especially because right now her mind wanted to rip the arms off the painted Bambi draped all over Quentin.