Kiss & Makeup

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.