Hot and Bothered

“If that’s what it takes.”

“You really want this gig. You begged Jimmy Jeffers. You came all the way out here and—” He wasn’t sure what to call what she’d done to him. Bossed. Pleaded. Unleashed something he wished she’d left pent up.

She didn’t quite meet his eyes. “Yes.” She scuffed the toe of her shoe lightly along the floor, and his eye followed the line of her leg. Today’s skirt was more standard issue, black and midthigh length. Nice, lean, strong thighs he’d like wrapped around his waist.

“I like a good challenge, and you want to do this because you love your dad. And maybe because you’ve done nothing for the last ten years but play wedding gigs and make cameo appearances for screaming groupies. I can’t imagine you find that very satisfying.”

You forgot something, he wanted to say, with the same fervor that urged him to put his hands in her hair. I want to do it because you’re going to follow me around for the next six months. And even though I shouldn’t want that, even though it’s suicidally stupid for me to want that, even though you will never mean those looks you give me, I do. I want that.

“No,” he said instead, because she was right. “It’s not very satisfying.”

“So let me help you apologize to Pete Sovereign, okay?”

He understood defeat well. It was his friend. “Okay.”

“And let me help you clean up your act, okay?”

“Okay.”

She eyed him suspiciously. Smart woman. His motives were about as impure as it was possible for them to be. They were dirty and male and all about the dark secrets her body was keeping from him, the ones he wanted to unfurl, one sweet mystery at a time.

“Why are you suddenly so agreeable?”

You.

“Free haircut,” he said, and she laughed, a real, open, musical laugh, and his heart pounded almost out of his chest.

* * *

HUNKS OF MARK WEBSTER’S hair were hitting the floor, and Haven wasn’t feeling as satisfied by that as she’d expected to.

They were in Caruso’s, a high-end barbershop where Haven liked to take straight male clients. The chairs were covered in black leather, the rest of the furniture espresso and ebony. The sage-green walls displayed vintage photos of female movie stars, classy and sexy at the same time. These were the women Haven had modeled herself after when she’d realized that, as much as she admired them, she didn’t want to be like her mother or her sisters.

Actually, she hated the way Mark’s hair looked on the wide-plank wood floor, the softness of the pieces curled around nothing. The shorn look he had now revealed a pretty-boy quality he’d been hiding from the world for a long time. She wanted it to go back into hiding, because clean-cut Mark was doing something to her insides she didn’t like at all.

The barber, Derek, had shaved Mark first. She’d watched the straight razor scrape over his skin. The blade moved like a caress, highlighting the strength of his jaw, his high cheekbones. Crazy-deep dimples flashed now when he smiled at her in the mirror, just often enough to keep her attention. She was standing there waiting for him to smile at her again. That couldn’t be good, right?

“My hair hasn’t been this short in, like, a decade. I didn’t cut it for almost two years after the breakup.”

Now the look he shot her in the mirror was more the usual Mark. Hard jaw, angry eyes. A little easier to take. She caught her breath, which made her realize she’d lost it, somewhere along the line.

“What made you cut it after two years?”

Just a flick of the smile, one corner. “I decided it was probably time to get laid again.”

His eyes held hers. Too long. She looked away. She was uncomfortably hot in the pale blue suit jacket, but if she took it off, he’d see the sweat stains under her arms.

Her panties were damp, too, and she couldn’t blame that on overdressing for the superheated barbershop.

“Did it work?”

Wait, why had she said that? She was flirting with him, prolonging the conversation. But she shouldn’t. He was her client. He was—

Mark Webster, C.D. Certified Disaster.

He laughed, a rough, lovely sound, like something rusty from disuse. “Yup. The haircut worked the way it was supposed to. All the parts worked, too.”

She didn’t want to ask any more questions. Talking to Mark Webster about sex, with his eyes so big, long-lashed and luminous, his teeth so starkly white, was a bad idea. Removing all that hair should have made him more vulnerable, but she was the one rocked back on her heels.

She cast about for another topic. “I made an appointment for Pete to come see me next Tuesday morning in my office at ten.”

He looked down at his lap, and she was sorry she’d gone there. Bad enough she was making him grovel without making him think about it today.

“It’s not going to be so bad,” she said. “Wham, bam—”

Whoops, that sounded like sex again, and the one-sided quirk of his mouth told her he hadn’t missed that.

“I’ll do most of the talking. You just deliver the line.”

“I regret any lasting damage my temper has caused you,” Mark intoned.

She was proud of the non-apology she’d crafted for him.

He frowned. “I don’t think he’s going to let me get away with it.”

“Trust me.”

Their eyes met in the mirror again, and he gave a short, hard laugh. “If I didn’t trust you, do you think I’d let this guy put a straight razor on my throat? And cut my hair off? I feel like—Samson, right? Don’t you sap my strength or something?”

He didn’t look sapped. He looked...potent. She had to turn away from the mirror because his gaze kept catching hers and not letting go properly.

Mark Webster had a reputation in the media for saying and doing the wrong things, but he seemed to know the right way to get under Haven’s skin. She was having a difficult time remembering why she shouldn’t exchange smiles, meaningful glances and double entendres with him.

Right. Right.

Mark Webster was her client, and her job was not to land them both in the press as a seedy example of how to become his next castoff. He was a serial womanizer. By definition, that meant he was not interested in anything serious with her. And her job was to clean him up, not let herself be dragged into the mud.

“What do you think?” Derek asked her, warming some kind of expensive styling product between his palms and smoothing it through Mark’s hair, which was now short enough to be “not long,” but still had a lot of wave. He had really great hair, thick and coppery brown with streaks of lighter and darker colors. Women paid fortunes for hair like that.

She was not secretly envying Derek for being allowed to run his fingers through Mark’s hair. Not at all.

Oh, she was such a liar.

“It looks great,” she said.

That, at least, was the truth.

“What do you think of the new, improved Mark Webster?”