Accounting for Cole (Natural Beauty)
Page 6
I smiled and shook my head no, and it pained me to do it. I wanted to see him again. Maybe more than once. I just couldn’t relive the club nightmare to do it. Further, I didn’t need to have Beth’s worldliness to guess that if I came back, when he left—my heart would break. I couldn’t do that to myself. Better to just be grateful for the one special night, and move on.
“I don’t think so, but thank you.”
His smile drooped at the corners, but he recovered and held out his hand to shake. “Thank you for keeping me company, Miss Macy.”
I put my hand in his and let him give it a gentle caress. “Thank you for being a gentleman.”
“I’m always a gentleman. Except when I’m a lady.” He pressed soft, warm lips to mine so briefly I hardly had time to respond. Then he closed the door.
CHAPTER SIX
The drive home that morning was rather sobering for all three of us ladies, although for me in a different way than my still-inebriated companions. I couldn’t stop thinking about Cole’s wish for a real date, and the smell of him on his shirt was a constant reminder of what wasn’t going to happen. Further, what he’d said about me changing my style was haunting me. He’d meant my hair, but I couldn’t help but to feel like it was a metaphor for other things in my life, too. Hadn’t I asked him why he’d given up on pursuing an acting career as if it was the most natural and obvious thing in the world for him? What was natural for me? I wasn’t even sure anymore.
Well, sometimes uncertainty is enough. It’s all you need to make a change, even if you don’t know where you’re going to end up. I knew I was unhappy with my day-to-day monotony, even if I couldn’t pinpoint why. I figured it was time for a shake-up.
So, several weeks later, I stood in my office packing up files and shoving long stretches of computer cords into open cardboard boxes.
Mercedes stood in the doorway scowling with her arms crossed over her chest, glowering at me. “You sure you won’t change your mind?”
“Positive.” I shoved the old lady cardigan I usually kept on my chair back into one of the boxes. That cardigan had probably been acting as the strongest form of birth control available over the years. Nobody would touch me with a twenty-foot pole when I was wearing it.
“I don’t like that Ryan guy,” she said, watching me toss my nameplate into the trashcan.
“He’s annoying, I’ll give you that, but he’ll pay his rent on time. He’s the only drug-prescribing psychiatrist in the county. He’s probably rolling in the dough.”
“I don’t like the way he looks at me.”
“Yeah, he’s probably judging you.”
We stood in silence staring at each other for a while. Mercedes broke first and flicked her hair towel at me. “You know, your forehead looks really big without the bang.”
My hand automatically went to the headband I wore to keep my hair out of my eyes. No one warned me how much growing out bangs sucked.
Mercedes reached across the desk and pushed my hand away. “No, it’s good. You should feel lucky. Some people think a high forehead is a sign of wisdom.”
“Really? And what do you think?”
“I think you get wise by falling on your ass and fucking up a lot, but the forehead can’t hurt.”
She gave me one last wave and then left me alone to tend to whomever it was up front calling out her name.
I sighed in relief that there wasn’t going to be a tearful goodbye and picked up one of the boxes to carry out to my car. Apparently I was staring down into the box instead of out to the parking lot, because immediately after I pushed the door out, I walked smack into a column of man whose frozen drink, which had been held at chest-height, smashed into the bit of my chest exposed above the box’s rim.
“You’re a bit sticky, sweetheart,” Cole said, extricating the cup of remaining slushy drink from my box and flicking the bits of sugary slush off his hand.
I put down my box, and shook out the front of my tee shirt. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” I said.
“True enough. That was once my favorite shirt, by the way.”
“Mine now. Not to sound rude,” I said, taking the cup from him and tossing it into the trash can inside my office, “but, what are you doing here?”
He didn’t look offended. He just bent down to pick up my box and made a “Where’s this go?” shrug. “Would you believe I need tax advice?”
I shook my head, smiled, and gestured to my open car trunk.
He set the carton in and helped himself to a few sheets from the roll of paper towels I kept in the emergency box in my trunk. He kept one for himself to wipe his hands and handed the rest to me.
“We had a show in Norfolk. Dom must have been really taken with your friend Beth because he got her number last month before you left. Called her last night and they met up in Elizabeth City.”
I dabbed at the red drink dye on my shirt and chewed my lip pensively. “Beth must have been pretty taken with Dom, too, because she never gives out her real number. Odd for her. He’s not really her type.”
“Well, Dom doesn’t have a type.”
“That I could guess.”
He chuckled. “Uh. Anyway, when he stumbled back into our hotel at breakfast this morning I interrogated him on his whereabouts and he told me where he’d been. You see, our stage manager quit so when he left I took his job. I still put on a mini-skirt a few times per week, but I have a bit more free time now. I didn’t know you were so close or I would have tried to see you.”
I stopped dabbing my shirt and looked up at him with a bit of suspicion and probably a lot of hopefulness. “Why?”
“Well, I forgot to finish something before you left my room.”
I must have looked confused, because Cole lifted my chin and crushed my lips beneath his. I felt my eyes go a bit wide with shock, but he pulled me closer, sticky shirt and all, and kissed me harder, sliding his tongue between my lips and urging me to kiss back. I didn’t need more prompting. I just gave myself over to him and chewed at his lips, pulling his polo shirt out of the waist of his shorts and slipping my hands up to feel his familiar back.
When the back door slammed we both pulled apart and turned to look at Mercedes holding a bag of trash from the shop and poised to throw it into the dumpster. “Shit, that why you quitting? I’d quit, too. I’d stay home barefoot with no panties on all the time, just waiting.” She went back in, mumbling something in Spanish I couldn’t quite translate but with my high school-level language education I thought it sounded a lot like “fine-ass motherfucker” although I may have just been projecting.
Cole held me back a bit from him, brow furrowed and face serious. “What does she mean? You’re quitting? If you had quit one day sooner I wouldn’t have found you, Miss Macy Vickers. All Dom could tell me was to look in the yellow pages.”
I grimaced and shrugged, realizing I hadn’t even told him my last name that night. It honestly hadn’t come up. “Come on.” We walked back into the office and I picked up the last of the boxes. Cole picked up my computer monitor and wireless keyboard and we made the trek back to the car. With the trunk loaded, we got inside the car and I started it up and steered toward the downtown waterfront.
I turned off the engine in the playground parking lot and we walked over to the gazebo, seagulls crowding our path and darting away at the last moment as we stepped. We sat.
“I suppose I had a bit of a personal self-crisis after we met. I kept thinking about the choices you made to take care of your son and wondered if I was making the right sacrifices to be where I want to be.”
“And?”
“And I figured out that I don’t really know where I want to be. I’ve been an accountant for six years. All I know is numbers, but I’m not sure if this is what I want to be doing forever. There’s no room for advancement from here, and I have to admit it can be a pretty lonely job.” I chewed my bottom lip for a moment while I stared out at the Albemarle Sound, and confessed in a quiet voice, “I’m ti
red of being lonely.”
Cole put his long legs up on the bench and slid me in closer to his side. “Are you leaving? Going somewhere?”
“Sort of. I’m going to try something different for a while. In the fall I’m going to teach a couple of accounting courses at the community college here in Edenton, but between now and then I’m going to take a bit of a sabbatical.”
He perked up a bit and turned his olive gaze to me. “Where are you going?”
“Dublin. I have some family there who’ve been begging to take me in for a few years. I figured now’s a good time.”
“Nice. We’re doing Paris next month, you know. It’s a bit of an exchange. A club there is sending their cast here to plug in some dates on our tour and we’ll be stationary there for about a fortnight.”
I scoffed. “That sounds conveniently serendipitous.”
“Yeah.” He pulled his phone out of his back pocket, looked at the clock, and then grimaced. “I’ve got to head off to make sure those hags make it onto the stage tonight.” He leaned forward and drew me in for another kiss. When he let go and I’d gotten control of my breathing again I said, “Call me when you get to Paris? Maybe we can meet up in London.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No, Macy. Bradley’s right about one thing. I do need an anchor. Some smart lady who makes me grin like a teenager and not a thirty-seven-year-old. Someone who’ll ground me even after I do stupid shit like sign contracts to appear on reality shows.”
My eyes went wide. “You didn’t.”
He cringed and nudged my gaping jaw back to its usual place. “I did. This is bad timing. Such bad timing, because I’m so private, but—”
“Yeah.” I caught the drift. He was saying there was a whole new level of difficulty to accessing him, as if it wasn’t hard enough before.
He shook his head. “No, you don’t understand. Hear me out. The moment you bumped into me at Club Sapphire, I knew what you were.”
“A klutz?”
“Quit it.” He planted a kiss on my forehead. “No, Macy, I could tell were salt of the earth.”
“Dull.”
“Stop. No. Someone grounded. Rational.”
“Me? The woman who just closed her business because it didn’t feel right anymore?”
“Even because of that. There’s nothing aimless about you, you just have to allow yourself to find some passion. You’re not used to that, are you?”
There he went again, reading me like a newspaper.
I shook my head.
“No regrets. You don’t want to be seventy, regretting the things you did and didn’t do at thirty…or thirty-seven. And I regret letting you leave that morning without making you promise to come back.”
I regretted that, too.
“Listen…” He grazed his lips over my forehead, planting kisses here and there and holding me tighter. “I’ll call you tonight the moment I get those rascals off the stage, and you’ll answer no matter what time it is.”
I chuckled. “Oh, will I, now? What about Bradley’s English teacher?”
“Yeah you will, because if you’ve been thinking about me even half as much as I’ve been thinking about you, you haven’t been sleeping. I want you to get some sleep, hon.” He ran the pad of his thumb lightly against my jaw. “I’ll even unplug the alarm clock so we can have extra uninterrupted cuddle time.”
I laughed.
“Don’t worry about the teacher. She’s got nothing on you. She can’t even calculate a tip.” He kissed me again, winding his thumbs into my hair and tipping my chin back so he could flutter his lips along the line of my jaw. “Besides, if you don’t answer the phone, I’ll drive back down here and make you watch police dramas with me all night.”
He grabbed the lobe of my ear with his teeth and gently pulled.
“Maybe I won’t answer then,” I managed breathlessly.
“Then maybe you should give me your house keys. I should get used to parking in your driveway, anyway.”
“Or maybe I’ll just wait at your hotel. You probably shouldn’t leave your post. Dom might need an aspirin or something.”
“Damned Dom,” Cole said. He slipped his keycard into the back pocket of my shorts and helped himself to a squeeze. “God, I love your body. Hips and curves…” He squeezed again.
I didn’t mind one little bit. I couldn’t very well expect him to always be a gentleman.
…or is that lady?
The End
The Natural Beauty Series
Look out for the three Natural Beauty novels in print and digital formats in August 2013:
1. SHAKE WELL - Nikki and Charlie’s story
2. POLISHED SLICK - Trinity and Jerry’s story
3. CLEAN SLATE - Daisy and Ben’s story
Other Contemporary Romances by Holley Trent
Executive Decision
Calliope Romance/Musa Publishing
[Erotic short story]
My Nora
Crimson Romance
[novel ~ extra-sensual]
Reinstated Bond
[novelette ~ sensual]
Her Resident Jester
Calliope Romance/Musa Publishing
[novelette ~ sweet]
Sold As Is
Crimson Romance
[novel ~ extra-sensual]
About the Author
Holley Trent is a Carolina girl gone west. Raised in rural coastal North Carolina, she has Southern sensibilities but her adventurous spirit drove her to Colorado for new experiences.
Holley writes sassy contemporary romances threaded with oodles of conversational humor, and fantasy/paranormal romances set in her home state.
Her protagonists regularly fall victim to her odd sense of humor and find themselves in improbable situations (with happily-every-after outcomes). Holley's cast of characters tends to swear, drink and do a fair amount of carousing, but they're generally well intentioned and obey all laws and ordinances. Usually.
She’s a member of Romance Writers of America as well as Colorado Romance Writers and CIM-RWA: the Cultural Interracial and Multicultural special interest RWA chapter.
For Holley’s complete backlist, including titles from Calliope Romance/Musa Publishing, Crimson Romance, and Lyrical Press please visit her website at http://www.holleytrent.com or her blog at http://www.holleytrent.com/blog.
Want to chat about Accounting for Cole or another Holley Trent title? Catch her online on Twitter where she tweets under the handle @holleytrent or fan her Facebook page.
Table of Contents
Prologue
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
The Natural Beauty Series
Other Contemporary Romances by Holley Trent
About the Author