Heat Up the Fall: New Adult Boxed Set (6 Book Bundle)

by Gennifer Albin

  His boldness sent shivers running over my exposed skin and my grin widened. I loved a good-natured power struggle; maybe Liam would be a match in more ways than one. Without hesitating, I spun around and planted my hands on my hips, lifting my chin to him, intent on offering a smart remark.

  There wasn’t time, as it turned out, before he wrapped his hands around my upper arms tight enough to hold me still, then bent and pressed his lips against mine. It wasn’t gentle or hesitant, but then again, we’d done this before—just with more clothes and an audience.

  I pushed onto my tiptoes, shoving my hands into his thick hair and tugging on the shaggy mop. The feeling of my chest pressed against his set off tactile shivers that only made me want to get closer. Maria would never have been so bold, but this afternoon I wasn’t her. Our tongues tangled, pushing and trying to outmaneuver each other as our breathing grew ragged.

  His hands ran down my sides until they wrapped around my back, pulling me forward so my stomach pressed against the proof that I hadn’t imagined his attraction to me all of these weeks. The months of celibacy made not undoing his pants and taking care of things here and now a monumental task, but I didn’t want to screw him once in a makeshift dressing room and then have things go back to the way they were.

  I might not have been willing to put my heart out there again, but I’d figured out pretty quickly after Michael that one night stands were a waste of energy. It took time to find a rhythm in any kind of relationship, and I’d settled on flings—a nice middle ground that allowed me distance but didn’t require entering a nunnery until graduation.

  Choosing the guy had become an art. It had to be someone easy to walk away from.

  I couldn’t resist a little further exploration through his costume khakis, and the hard outline in my palm made my stomach heat to an unbearable degree. Liam groaned against my lips, sliding his hands up to play with the clasp on my bra. I broke the kiss then, letting him go and taking a slight step away, as much to stop myself as him.

  He raised an eyebrow at me. “What’s wrong?”

  “Not a thing. I just…” I motioned to the surroundings. “Not exactly the place.”

  “Well, Ruby Cotton. I had you pegged as an adventurous sort.”

  “Play your cards right and you’ll have the chance to find out.”

  Lust crawled back into his eyes, burning as he raked my still mostly naked form. My skin tingled as his gaze traveled head to toe.

  “Let it never be said Liam Greene doesn’t do his duty when you ask for help out of your clothes. I’d love to help you out of the rest of them.”

  “I can see that.” I smiled playfully, then reached over and grabbed my shorts, sliding them easily over my hips. “Go get dressed. We should do something.”

  “Like?” A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth.

  Liam had a strong jaw and a nose with a little bend in the bridge, giving him a bit of a rough appearance. Handsome in a way that could make teenaged girls swoon at magazine covers, and more masculine than movie star Flynn. Out of all the actors and actresses I’d worked with over the years, Liam was one that wouldn’t surprise me if he made it big.

  But that didn’t mean I’d cut him any slack. Hot or not, he needed to man up and take charge. Where was the enterprising guy who had dropped my dress without a word?

  “Seriously, Liam. We’ve been dancing around this for months and then you finally make a move for whatever reason…you’re the man. Ask me out.”

  I sure as hell wasn’t going to beg him, but I wasn’t going to bang him right here and then never talk about it again, either. We still had to work together.

  “Are you busy tonight? We could grab some food and hang out at my place. It’s Bogie month on TCM and I kind of wanted to catch Maltese Falcon.”

  “Sure. That sounds fun, but I have a thing first. I’ll call you after.” He stared at me while I pulled on my tank top, until I shoved him backward. “Show’s over, guy. Go change.”

  Chapter Four

  The Coterie Theatre was small but cozy, with a box office and lobby area stuffed with tables and comfortable couches, the walls painted bright colors and spotted with vibrant posters depicting various stage plays. The chatter and laughter of children floated through the closed wooden doors leading into the theatre, and it grew louder when I pulled them open.

  Coterie wasn’t an afterschool program or a way to rehab troubled youth. The kids here had a genuine interest in acting and performance—or their parents insisted they had one, anyway.

  Not that it looked that way at the moment.

  I was a little jealous of the fifteen or twenty fifth-graders racing around the glossy wooden stage, laughing and shrieking. Acting hadn’t come into my life until high school, and then only in the high school play variety. My parents had been too busy by then to help me figure out what acting meant or how I could do more of it.

  A harried-looking woman attempted to corral the students playing tag along the stage apron, probably so she wouldn’t be sued when they fell off and cracked their little skulls. Her hair slumped to the side of her head in a messy ponytail secured with a couple of ink pens, and she wore ripped jeans and a Whitman t-shirt.

  I was surprised to recognize her as I drew closer—she was one of my theatre profs. Her eyes met mine the same moment, and relief flooded her face as she smiled. “Ruby, wonderful. We’re ready to get started, as soon as the changelings morph back into human children.”

  Seeing professors outside of campus never got less weird. Doctor Paladino never appeared this relaxed at the front of a classroom; she favored tailored suits, five-hundred-dollar heels, and fancy French twists. She looked almost normal today.

  “Hi, Doctor Paladino. What do you want me to do?”

  “First, the kids call me Miss Amy, so you’d better go with that, or just Amy. Second, get up on stage and get their attention.”

  Being an only child, I didn’t know that much about talking to kids, never mind getting them to listen when they looked like a massive, writhing tornado. I half expected a cow or Myra Gulch to go flying past.

  The fear turned out to be unfounded, because as soon as I hopped up and sat on the apron, legs dangling toward the floor, they all paused to inspect the new blood. The ones in the auditorium settled into chairs, and the ones that had been running dropped to their butts, scooting closer and looking between Doctor Paladino—Amy—and me for information.

  She clapped her hands, grinning at her students. “Everyone, we have a very special guest for the next two weeks. This is Miss Ruby, and she’s a very talented actress. She’s in a play that Mister Geoff is directing right now.”

  “Hi, Miss Ruby,” the kids intoned, curiosity shining in their eyes.

  “Hi,” I said, feeling awkward. Being addressed en masse was freaky.

  “Today starts our lesson on a man named William Shakespeare. How many of you have heard of him? Raise your hands.”

  Most of the hands went up, and Amy raised her eyebrows in surprise. The girl sitting next to me, who had two missing teeth and dark blonde hair that reached past her waist, spoke up.

  “Come on, Miss Amy. We watch movies.” Her sarcastic tone made even me envious. She might as well have just said duh.

  “Thank you for the clarification, as always, Caroline.”

  I bit back a giggle. If the kids were like Caroline, maybe this would be fun.

  “We’re going to start with a scene from Romeo and Juliet, which is one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, but since it hasn’t been made into a movie since before most of you were born, you probably haven’t heard of it.” She crossed her eyes at Caroline, who giggled. “We’re going to do a scene from the end, where Juliet dies, and then we’ll discuss what tragedy means. Tomorrow we’ll do a comedy.” She looked at me. “Ruby, would you please take Juliet’s role?”

  I nodded and stood, brushing stage dust off the butt of my shorts, and looked around. A fainting couch stood in the center of the stage and
I headed for it, knowing Juliet had pretty much nothing to do in this scene except look pretty and dead.

  “Do you need a script, Ruby?”

  “No, I’ve got it.”

  One of the boys stared at me from under thick black lashes, his brown skin shining under the lights. “You know all the words?”

  “This is my favorite play.”

  Caroline made a face. “Shakespeare words are weird.”

  “Only at first. Once you say them like they came out of your heart, they make sense.” I sat down on the couch and surveyed the group. There were eighteen kids, and only six of them were boys. “Who will be my Romeo, then?”

  “I’m going to have to do it, I’m afraid,” Amy said, climbing the steps. “Sometimes Evan helps out, but he couldn’t make it today.”

  Evan Price was another junior theatre major at Whitman. Decent actor but a total ass.

  I lay back on the couch and closed my eyes, assuming we were starting at the part where Romeo comes into the tomb and verifies that his young wife has supposedly expired.

  “Miss Amy, you can’t be a boy!”

  I peeked to see a freckled girl next to Caroline, short strawberry hair tucked behind her ears, hands on her hips.

  “When Shakespeare was alive, there were no girls in his plays. The boys played all of the girl parts,” I said, trying to help.

  A cacophony of ew and gross and shrieked protestations about never wearing dresses from the boys made me laugh.

  Amy quieted them with a wave of her hand. “You’ll have to use your imaginations.”

  We ran through the lines, no argument from anyone in our small audience until the mention of kissing came up, at which chaos erupted. I knew my catching the giggles wasn’t helping, but they were cracking me up with their adorable tiny gender definitions.

  Then the redhead’s voice rang out above the rest, shrill and impossible to miss. “Mister Cole!”

  She vaulted off the front of the stage, giving me a heart attack even though she landed in a graceful crouch, and streaked into the shadows at the back of the theatre. She launched herself into the arms of a tall, built guy who looked a little too familiar.

  When Cole Stuart stepped into the house lights, my body felt hot. He held the girl against his side with a tanned arm, hugging her and smiling into her face, and those dimples killed me. His jacket and tie didn’t fit with the casual dress of everyone else in the room, and I wondered what he was doing here.

  “Well, if it isn’t my little Ginger.”

  “My name isn’t Ginger, Mister Cole. It’s Noelle.”

  “My mistake,” he replied, trying not to laugh as he ruffled her hair.

  He looked up and saw me sitting on the stage staring at him, and I wondered if he could feel my body respond to him from way over there. He was probably used to it—a guy with those dimples and that face didn’t want for female attention.

  Surprise lit his light eyes and he smiled. “I’m sorry to interrupt, Miss Amy. We have a board meeting in ten minutes and I thought I’d take a peek. I see you’ve snared yourself an excellent Shakespeare performer.”

  Miss Amy’s eyes flicked between us. “Yes. You two know each other?”

  “We have class together,” I explained, for some reason wanting to make it clear nothing else was going on.

  “Okay, well, Mister Cole can take a seat so we can finish this scene.” She nodded at Cole, who sat down like he’d been chastised.

  I reclined again, closing my eyes and hoping Miss Amy wasn’t really going to kiss me. I mean, I’d had a wild night or two with way too much Boone’s Farm on the bayou in high school, but girls didn’t do it for me. The look on Miss Amy’s face said she felt the same way.

  Maybe not exactly the same way, with the Boone’s Farm and everything, but in general.

  “Wait!” Noelle’s shrill voice opened my eyes. “Mister Cole can do the kissing, since he’s a boy!”

  Every defense mechanism in my brain screamed the need to avoid getting any closer to Cole. The way I felt connected to him was trouble, pure and simple, and even if he had good ratings, he wouldn’t meet my criteria. He wasn’t the kind of guy that girls walked away from willingly.

  I opened my mouth to protest, and so did he, but Caroline’s sassy self beat us both to the punch. “Yes, oh please, Mister Cole, please. We want to see the part and really understand the play, and we can’t imagine with Miss Amy being a boy. This would be such a help.”

  Master manipulator, thy name is Caroline. That girl was my hero and she was ten.

  “I, well…I’m not an actor. You guys are way better than me, and Miss Ruby and Miss Amy know what they’re doing. I’m sure they don’t want me showing you wrong.”

  Amy stood from the edge of my fainting couch looking, if I wasn’t mistaken, relieved. “It’s actually fine, Cole, if you wouldn’t mind. I think it will be easier for them to visualize the tragedy if they can believe Romeo and Juliet are in love.”

  My heart pounded and words of protest gagged me as I choked them back. I was a professional, and a quasi-adult. It was a stupid scene from a play, nothing to freak out about. I did this shit all the time. Just because Cole had asked me out the first day we met and I spent way too much time wondering what he looked like naked didn’t mean I couldn’t handle this.

  “Well…if it’s okay with Miss Ruby.”

  “Is it okay, Miss Ruby?” Caroline turned her big, pleading blue eyes on me as a chorus of please and oh please filled the room.

  I shrugged, hoping I looked way cooler than I felt.

  The kids settled quickly onto their butts as Cole climbed the steps to the stage. He rubbed a hand over his shaven hair, an apologetic expression in his mossy green eyes. He waved away the script Amy tried to give him, then sat on the edge of the fainting couch.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make such an entrance.” He kept his voice low.

  “They certainly like you,” I murmured.

  “They’re good kids.”

  “You’re on the board?”

  “Yes. It’s actually the same board that runs the Shakespeare Festival you starred in last summer. That’s why I saw the performance so many times.”

  “How many times?” I asked, feeling strangely hot at the idea he’d watched me perform night after night from the cover of darkness.

  “I was there most nights. You really were brilliant.”

  “If you two are done getting to know each other well enough to kiss for a half a second, can we get on with it? We’ve only got twenty minutes left,” Miss Amy raised an eyebrow at me.

  I nodded and lay back, closing my eyes and trying to sort out how I felt about Cole being a fan of my acting. It made me like him more, and not just because I loved people loving me. Even if he sat on these boards because of his family or something, he seemed to have a genuine love of theatre.

  The fact he was about to recite Romeo and Juliet from memory made him too perfect.

  It all added up to a pounding heart and dry mouth. Basically the reaction of a girl who wanted a boy to kiss her for the first time, not one pretending to be a girl who had already had married sex with said boy.

  Juliet. You’re Juliet, and you don’t feel anything because you’re unconscious.

  “Depart again: here, here will I remain, with worms that are thy chamber-maids. Oh, here will I set up my everlasting rest and shake the yoke of inauspicious stars from this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last! Arms, take your last embrace. And lips, oh you, the doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss.”

  The passion in his voice buzzed in my head like too much frat party punch. If Cole thought he couldn’t act, he was wrong.

  That was my last thought before his soft lips touched mine, hesitant at first, but lingering longer than necessary for a perfunctory performance. Even though I was dead, my body betrayed me, reacting to the sparks that lit between our mouths and searching for more.

  Electricity shot down my spine. I forced my limbs to
stay prone and tried to convince my lips to let go, but it took several moments before Cole broke away. He pretended to drink poison, spouting Romeo’s final lines before slumping next to me on the couch.

  His body was warm, chest heaving, like he’d just taken a standing ovation in front of a packed house. His form blocked my view of the students, and our eyes locked and held. Neither of us spoke. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was thinking the same thing I was. Which was, that for a rather chaste, dry kiss, that had been a doozy.

  Cole might suck in the bedroom, but he had some kind of heady effect on me like nothing I’d ever experienced. The heat in his gaze said maybe it was mutual, and that was why I needed to stay the fuck away from him.

  The kids started clapping, and Cole smiled, his dimples appearing and laugh lines crinkling around his eyes. “I can see the appeal of being onstage. I feel like a hero.”

  “I’m sure you’re used to it.”

  The retort had been meant to tease him, but it missed the mark somehow. His eyes darkened, storm clouds obscuring his good humor. “I’m no hero.”

  He sat up and pulled me with him. I tried to shake off the strange tension from the nerve I accidentally hit. We weren’t here to make out or get to know each other better, we were here to teach little kids about Shakespeare. They all looked pretty enthralled at the moment, though, so I guess our demonstration was a hit.

  Cole returned to his seat in the auditorium and I sat on the stage apron with the kids, Caroline’s sneaky little ass on one side and the boy with the enviable lashes on the other. We all waited for Miss Amy to take control of the conversation.

  “Shakespeare wrote mostly two kinds of plays, tragedies and comedies. Who can tell me the difference?”

  The boy next to me shot up a hand.