Back in the Bedroom ; Kiss and Makeup

by Jill Shalvis

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” She shot him a watery smile, with every intention of leaving it at that. But when she saw the genuine concern on his face, felt the warmth of the reassuring hand he’d placed on her back, she spilled her guts.

  “It’s just, today has sucked,” she said with a sniffle. “I’m talking monumental amounts of suckage, and I’m tired, and moody, and people have really been getting on my nerves. All I want is to go home, but I’m stuck sharing a hotel room with a complete stranger who must think I’m mentally unbalanced. And you’ve been really nice to me anyway. And now I’m crying again. I hate crying,” she finished on a shaky sob.

  Ben reached past her to the nightstand and snagged a tissue, handing it to her.

  “You see? You barely know me, you have every reason to believe I’m deranged, and still you have the decency to hand me a Kleenex.”

  “It’s really not that big a deal.”

  “Yes, it is, Ben. You’re nice. And you’re tall. You’re very tall.” She wiped her nose with the tissue. “How tall are you, anyway?”

  “Six-three.”

  “That is very tall.” Chloe shook her head, looking down at her hands. She picked resolutely at the flaking black nail polish on her right thumbnail. She must have been chewing on it—she did that when she was stressed.

  She expected him to bail then, distance himself from his sobbing lunatic of a roommate with some teasing remark about how tall guys are known for their big wangs or something equally ridiculous. She’d laugh, and he’d laugh, and they’d get back to the superficial banter that befitted two strangers stuck in a hotel room together.

  But he didn’t.

  He just sat beside her, respecting the silence. And her thoughts slipped out. “Honestly, Ben. How is it possible for one person to mess up her life so monumentally?”

  “Hey, I’m sure it’s not as bad as it seems right now.” He rubbed her back, his big hand hot against her T-shirt. “You’ll figure it out. You’ll fix it.”

  Tears brimmed in her eyes with a vengeance. They burned like acid. “No. I won’t. And do you know why?”

  Ben shook his head.

  “Me, neither! I mean, do you see this? Do you see my hair?” She grabbed a handful and held it in his direction.

  “Yeah…”

  “I did this for them!” she exclaimed, dropping the strands back into place. “I colored it boring old brown so they wouldn’t be embarrassed by me, but it didn’t work! I’m not even at the wedding yet, and I’ve already disappointed them. Nothing I try ever works, Ben. I don’t know what to do.” She’d never said that to anyone before and admitting the truth hurt so badly she thought her ribs might crack.

  Chloe dropped her face into her hands. Ben’s arms came around her, pulling her close, tucking her cheek to his chest. She gave in and greedily took what he was offering. Wrapping her arms around his waist, she leaned into him and let herself cry.

  She wasn’t sure if it was minutes or hours, but he held her until she had no more tears.

  “You know what, Chloe?” His voice was soft and deep, breaking the silence she’d been measuring with the rise and fall of his chest beneath her cheek. “Maybe there’s nothing to do. I mean, I realize I just met you, but you seem okay to me.”

  That tiny reassurance allowed Chloe to muster enough gumption to reach up and wipe the wet tracks from her face. She couldn’t quite bring herself to lift her head off his shoulder, though.

  “And they’ll see it. One day, they’ll see it. You just gotta give them some time.”

  Her lip trembled, and she bit it, fighting the sadness. “They’ve had twenty-six years, Ben.”

  She felt him exhale. “It’s a really hard thing, you know, not taking the people we love for granted.” She looked up at him then and he smiled, a sad-but-reassuring little half smile that made her believe there was a chance that the despair she felt in that moment might not be insurmountable.

  Chloe pulled away with a final sniff. She was trying desperately to hold onto that moment of comfort even as the embarrassment of her epic cry-fest in front of a virtual stranger began seeping in at the edges.

  She exhaled shakily. “Sorry I got mascara and snot on your fancy shirt.”

  “It’s just a T-shirt,” he averred as he pulled the black-smeared wet patch away from his chest. He even managed not to look horrified.

  “Yeah, but I bet it cost, like, fifty bucks.”

  “Seventy-five,” he corrected. “But I’ll accept it as punishment for being douchebaggy enough to have spent that much money on a plain white T-shirt in the first place.”

  Chloe’s chuckle was waterlogged.

  “C’mere,” he said, tucking his thumb in the hem of his shirt. She leaned ever so slightly forward and let him rub the cotton-covered pad of his thumb under her right eye, then her left. She’d be surprised if she had any makeup on at all at this point. Some warrior, she thought, choking in battle and crying off her armor.

  “There,” he said, showing her the black smudges on the fabric. “All cleaned up.”

  She frowned, letting him know she wasn’t buying his bullshit.

  “Okay, you should probably go wash your face before we have dinner,” he admitted. “Unless the raccoon look is a thing now.”

  Grateful for the reprieve, Chloe headed for the bathroom, pulling her suitcase into the tiny room with her. She groaned when she caught sight of herself in the mirror.

  Apparently in addition to being an all-around good guy and world-class hugger, Ben Masterson was also the King of Understatement. She looked like a comic-book villain whose face was melting off. Chloe shut the door and set her suitcase on the toilet, rifling through it for her toiletries case.

  A couple of swipes of a makeup remover pad later, her cheeks were clear of black streaks, and her eyes were bare, if a little puffier than they had been this morning. She’d have liked to take all her makeup off and start again, but snotting all over Ben had been all the weakness she could handle. No way was she going to be bare-faced in front of him. She didn’t even start the makeup videos on her YouTube channel that way.

  “Hurry up in there, Chloe. I’m starving!”

  “Almost done! Don’t eat everything!” She ran a brush through her hair, topped up her deodorant, and rooted around in her suitcase in search of her pajamas.

  * * *

  WELL, TONIGHT HAD certainly not been the typical room-service-and-work type of night that tended to dominate his business trips.

  Chuckling to himself, Ben pulled off his T-shirt, wiping his shoulder with it before folding it up and placing it in the dirty laundry bag he kept in his suitcase. He’d say one thing about Chloe Masterson, she was the antithesis of boring.

  A woman who couldn’t decide whether to smile at him or punch him in the face. A woman who was super tough one moment, and vulnerable the next. A woman who had no idea her expressive face betrayed her, even in her most badass moments.

  He tugged the white button-down he’d worn on the plane back on—she’d walked in on him before he’d gotten around to changing out of his suit pants, so it wasn’t like he’d be overdressed—but he left the hem untucked and the buttons at his throat open anyway.

  She was such a nice change from the women who’d inundated his world lately. As he’d moved up the corporate ladder, everything had gotten more proper and refined. So serious. He’d met a lot of very pretty women with very pretty plans for their future. The few dates he’d been on in the past year had felt more like job interviews, and they’d fizzled accordingly.

  But Chloe didn’t look at him as if he was a steak on display at a butcher shop. She wasn’t angling for marriage, sizing up his earning potential or evaluating his parenting qualities. Which was good, because marriage was not high on his list of priorities anymore. She was th
e kind of woman who understood that a date should be fun and flirty, two people trying each other on. No expectations, just opportunity.

  Not that this was a date.

  In fact, he wasn’t sure what this was, but he kind of liked it. Tonight he got to hang out with a flawed, stressed-out, hot-then-cold-then-hot-again woman with a kick-ass body, a pierced nose and a star tattoo on her right arm. And he couldn’t wait.

  He moved her abandoned phone to the nightstand so he could prop the pillow upright against the headboard, and sat down against it. He’d just stretched his long legs out in front of him when he heard the bathroom door open.

  She appeared from around the corner a moment later.

  Ben let his gaze slip from her berry lips down to her bare shoulders, then to her arms—that star tattoo was going to be the death of him, he was sure of it—lingering a moment on the way she filled out her tank top before sliding past her black boxer shorts to take in her truly spectacular thighs, her shapely calves and the shiny black polish on her toenai—

  “Oh, my God, are you walking on hotel carpeting in bare feet?” he asked, lunging forward. “Do you have any idea how gross hotel carpet is?”

  He was half expecting another sardonic smile, but apparently the panic in his voice had registered, because her eyes widened in response to his alarm.

  “How gross?” she asked, scrunching up her nose in preparation.

  “My grandma was a nurse, and she once had this patient who ended up with cellulitis from walking barefoot on hotel carpeting—”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “—and he didn’t get it checked right away, so by the time he went to the emergency room his whole leg was full of pus—”

  “Ew, ew, ew!” She was hopping from foot to foot by this point.

  “—and he had to stay in the hospital for three days so they could give him antibiotics intravenously.”

  “Okay, enough, enough!” She jumped onto the bed beside him, scrambling into a sitting position and staring down at her feet. “Oh, God! My feet are itchy. Is itchy a symptom of cellulitis?”

  “Yes.”

  Her eyes went wide.

  “Well, probably.” He didn’t remember all the details of the story…just the gross ones. “Do they feel swollen? Like there’s a bunch of pus accumulating under your skin, getting ready to erupt and—”

  Chloe recovered enough to sock him in the arm. “Shut up with the gory details, wouldja?”

  Ben rubbed his arm where her punch had landed. Chloe crawled over to the end of the bed. She braced one hand on the very edge of the mattress and reached toward her coat, which was hanging on the back of a chair that was just out of reach. Her fingertips brushed the thick material, but she didn’t quite get purchase on it. He watched in fascination as she set herself up for another attempt.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I left my suitcase in the bathroom, and if you think I’m setting one bare toe on that hideous, infested carpet then you’re way dumber than you look,” she said over her shoulder.

  He shot her a tight smile. Ha, ha.

  “So I’m going to stand on my jacket, slide my way over to the bathroom, and get myself some socks.”

  “Or you could just ask me to get your suitcase,” he pointed out, getting to his feet.

  She gazed up at him with such wonder that he honestly believed the idea had never occurred to her. “I… You don’t have to. I mean, I can do it myself.”

  “I’m sure you could, eventually. But I’m happy to help, because if you slip and contract cellulitis, the amputation would ruin your sister’s big day.” Ben smiled angelically and dodged when she chucked a pillow at him.

  Her ugly suitcase was sitting on the toilet. “You should really have a lock on this when you’re flying,” he advised, grabbing the scratched-up plastic case and heading back into the bedroom. He dropped it on the suitcase stand and set it down beside her. She threw open the lid to reveal bedlam inside.

  “You know, most people fold stuff before they put it in the suitcase, just FYI.” Ben resumed his position on the bed beside her.

  “Thanks for the packing tips.” Her voice sounded less than sincere as she hunted through the chaos. She rescued a ratty sock from inside the suitcase and jammed a foot into it. “Wow. That looks sexy.” She stuck her foot in the air so Ben, too, could admire the purple, elastic-challenged sock that was slouched around her ankle.

  “Yeah, well, it’s sexier than athlete’s foot.”

  “Amen, brother.” She reached out to give him a high-five before quickly pulling on the other sock. She closed up her suitcase. “Okay, now that that’s taken care of, on to more important things, like food.”

  He reached over to the nightstand and dumped the contents of the plastic ice bucket on the bed between them. An avalanche of candy spilled across the sheet. “Dinner is served.”

  “Whoa. What’d you do? Knock over a vending machine?”

  “I wasn’t sure what you’d be in the mood for—salty, sweet, stale,” he offered, rapping a rock-hard, prepackaged Danish against the headboard with a disconcerting tap, tap, tap, “or all of the above—so I got one of everything.” He lobbed the Danish at the trash bin on the floor beside the television stand. It landed inside the plastic container with a heavy thud.

  She did that cute nose-scrunch thing again as she deliberated over the colorfully-wrapped mound of sucrose and diabetes. “SunChips, Skittles, Aero Peppermint. And I’m taking the cherry Life Savers,” she decided, grabbing each of her picks from the junk-food dog pile as she named them. “You know, in case of emergency.”

  Ben nodded contemplatively, undoing the buttons at his wrists. “Those are some bold choices, Masterson.” He rolled up his shirtsleeves in preparation for his own selection process. “Personally, I’m more of a traditionalist. I’m going for the Doritos with a side of Mike and Ike, Jolly Ranchers to cleanse my palate, and Twix for dessert. You want to split the pretzels as an appetizer?” he asked, ripping into them and holding the miniature bag in her direction.

  “Why not?” Instead of taking one pretzel, though, she took a handful, and Ben liked that about her. She balanced them in a precise stack on her knee. “So does the wife know you leave the ring off while you’re away on business so you can lure pajama-clad strangers into sharing hotel-bed dinners?” she asked, crunching into a pretzel.

  Ben shook his head. “Single and loving it.”

  Chloe’s laugh was smug. “There’s a shocker.”

  “So what about you?” he asked.

  “What about me?”

  “Well, I know you’re a Masterson by birth because on the plane you said there was no Mr., but that still leaves plenty of options.”

  She shook her head as she started on the SunChips. “Also single. Mostly loving it, except when I’m on the phone with my mother, dodging the grandkid discussion. I did, though. Have a boyfriend. We broke up about five months ago. He cheated on me,” she explained, answering his unspoken question. “A couple of times, actually. It was all very cliché. I have horrible taste in men. Spider and I were a mistake right from the beginning.”

  Ben choked on his pretzel. “You dated a guy named Spider?”

  Chloe nodded.

  “Wow. Was he a professional wrestler?”

  “No.”

  “Did he have superpowers?”

  Chloe rolled her eyes. “He owned a tattoo parlor.”

  “That was going to be my next guess.” The chip she hurled in his direction bounced off his chest and landed on the sheets. “So where did you meet Spider? Intermission at La Bohème? Church book club?”

  “I met him when he gave me these.” She set her chips on the pillow and reclined, tugging the waistband of her shorts down enough to reveal a pair of small birds etched just inside her hi
p bones, one on either side of her abdomen.

  Ben almost swallowed his tongue. Christ, he ached to touch her. His hands flexed involuntarily, resulting in the decapitation of several pretzels unfortunate enough to be left in the bag he was holding. He set it on the mattress beside him and took a deep, steadying breath. And he’d thought the star on her arm was haunting him.

  “Which is kind of ironic when you think about it,” she continued, oblivious to his slack-jawed appreciation of her body, “because swallows mate for life.” She snapped the elastic back into place and, instead of resuming her sitting position, she rolled onto her tummy.

  Is she commando under those shorts?

  “Anyway,” said Chloe, reaching toward the pillow to retrieve her dinner as though her extreme hotness hadn’t just evaporated every speck of moisture in his mouth, “I finally kicked his ass to the curb when I walked in on him and his latest conquest christening the kitchen table I paid for. And the rest, as they say, is history. How about you?”

  Ben managed to work up enough spit to moisten his tongue. “I have never dated a guy named Spider.”

  “C’mon, Ben. I showed you mine.” Chloe fished the last chip from the bag, crumpled the empty packaging in her fist and tossed it awkwardly over her shoulder in the direction of the garbage can. It hit the end of the bed and rolled onto the navy carpet. “Spill it. How did your last relationship go down in flames?”

  Melanie’s face flashed in front of his eyes. He felt like a dick for giving Chloe a hard time. He was the king of clichés.

  The boss’s daughter. The heirloom ring. The proposal eclipsed soon after by her announcement that she was leaving him. For some douchebag lawyer who was her father’s age and had enough money to keep her in the style to which she was accustomed. They’d walked down the aisle six months after she’d ditched his ass. They’d recently celebrated a year’s worth of wedded bliss.

  Ben shook off the humiliating memory.