Hot and Bothered

by Serena Bell

  “How would we do that?”

  “I will go to the bathroom and fix my hair and makeup,” she said. “And we will go inside Charme and claim our table and eat. And then I will take you on your date.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Where are we going on my date?”

  “It’s a surprise,” she said.

  * * *

  HE DIDN’T MIND Charme tonight. He didn’t mind the pretentiousness of the decor or the schmoofiness of the food or the overbearing waitstaff. He sat across from Haven and looked into her big dark eyes and tried not to let his gaze get stuck in her cleavage, out of respect, even though it took a lot of willpower because that cleavage was a work of goddamned art.

  She was telling him about her revelation, moments before the phone conversation he’d overheard, about not wanting to be with anyone but him. About the fact that he wanted her to “come as she was”—

  “Hell, yeah,” he said, huskily, and her eyes got darker and smokier, and her lips parted just enough to make his mouth go dry. Under the table, her leg slipped between his. The table was just big enough that they couldn’t really get up to any mischief, which was okay with him, for now, because he had such a big, joyful sense of possibility. She was his tonight and tomorrow night and all the nights after that, in private and in public and wherever they went. He’d have plenty of time to get her messy.

  “So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, too,” she continued. “I never felt like I fit in my family, growing up. They were women of substance—my mom and my sisters. They called me their princess, and I think maybe they even meant it affectionately, but I never took it that way. When I finally left home and started to be okay with who I was, I fell in love with this guy, this poet. He seemed like the kind of guy who would go for one of my sisters. Only he didn’t, he went for me. And I thought, he thinks I have hidden depths. He thinks I’m not just a princess. But when he broke up with me, he said he’d never been able to get past my shell because there was nothing to get past. There was just more of the same, surface all the way down.”

  Oh, hell no, he hadn’t said that to her. Mark wasn’t sure what to feel right now, pain for the woman who’d listened to that bullshit and heard truth, or rage at the man who’d said those words to her. “Haven, no,” he said. “He was wrong. Just plain wrong.”

  She smiled at him, a brave smile, the sweetest smile he’d ever seen, and the wonder of that swept away the other emotions and took root.

  “What he said—it broke my heart. And I decided that I wasn’t going to go after any more men who would hate that about me. I would find men like me, who wouldn’t want to crack me open and then be angry when they didn’t find what they were looking for.”

  “So that’s why you dated all those—really boring guys?”

  She laughed. “They would probably not be boring to everyone. They were just boring to me. And that’s also why I never stayed with anyone long enough for him to get disappointed in me. When I heard you play music—God, you got straight under my skin. Into my blood. I admired it so much, the way you had all that passion and talent inside you. But I was pretty sure after a while you’d figure out there was nothing in me to match. I was pretty sure if I gave you long enough, you’d realize there was no substance to me.”

  He’d mistaken her hesitation for something to do with him, when all along it had been her, fighting herself.

  She reached across the table and took his hand. For a moment she turned it palm up, as if she could read something there. Something about him, something about their future together. “When I was with you, I forgot that I was supposed to be guarding myself. And it was—well, to be honest, it was terrifying. And the deeper I got in, the more scared I was that you’d see the truth and run. That’s what I was holding at bay. Not you. Not Mark Webster, blues musician, music teacher, all-around hottie, seriously smokin’ lover. But I’m done. No more holding back.”

  “Haven Hoyt,” he said. “You are not shallow. You are one of the least shallow women I know. Believe me. I’ve been peeling layers for weeks and I feel like I’m only starting to learn about the woman you are. You’re intense. And loving. And passionate. Incredibly passionate. You see the world—and me—in a way no one else ever has. Not that I’m complaining about your surface,” he said, giving her a heated look. He tried to fill that look with everything he planned to do with her later. Hopefully those activities would involve a certain pair of high-heeled sandals and a good leather belt. And the certainty that she’d be there when he woke up in the morning.

  He watched her face flush and her pupils dilate and felt a deep sense of satisfaction—and peace.

  There was a question he really wanted to know the answer to. Needed to know the answer to. “Did you mean what you said?” he asked. “What you told Elisa?”

  She nodded. “I love you,” she said.

  It was strange. He’d known that truth already, known it intuitively, but hearing her say it out loud made such an overwhelming difference. Those words could awaken and transform, making him feel like a new man even when he already thought he’d done all the hard work of understanding who he was and who he wanted to be. His heart hurt, but a blissful kind of wide-open, broken-down, re-rendered pain. Glorious. “I love you, too,” he said.

  She smiled at him. Not her neat, tight, public smile, but a big, crooked smile, just for him.

  It was easy after that. Easy to be with her, to listen as she told him she thought she’d get trained and maybe even certified in life coaching so she could help her clients do more of what she’d helped him do, to find his way beyond his image. He found it easy to fill her in on what he’d decided, where he would go from here. He’d do more music lessons, try to make that pay the bills. He’d play music, but just blues, no more wedding gigs, no more reunion tours once this one was over and the money banked to help his father with the move to New York. That should leave a sizable portion in savings, so even though being a music teacher wasn’t the most lucrative job on Earth, he’d be able to support himself more than comfortably.

  “Myself and—” He looked at her levelly. “Whoever else wants to tie their fortunes to mine.”

  “I might know someone who does.”

  “She might be a very welcome addition to my household.”

  “She might be very happy about that arrangement.”

  Her hands gripped his tight, and even though their words were casual, her eyes told him everything he needed to know. That there was nothing casual in her feelings, as there was nothing casual in his.

  When they’d finished eating and paid their check, he said, “My turn, right?”

  “Right,” she said. “But you’re overdressed for my date.”

  “I don’t have anything else to wear.”

  “Come with me.”

  She made him walk with her back to her apartment and told him to wait while she ran upstairs. When she re-emerged into the lobby, she handed him a shopping bag from the department store where they’d made most of his clothing purchases the first day they’d shopped together.

  He opened the bag and pulled out his old clothes—his ripped jeans, his grubby gray T-shirt, his bomber jacket.

  “I was going to toss them,” she said. “But I couldn’t make myself do it. I loved them too much. I kept taking them out and...” She blushed. “I smelled them.”

  “Oh, yikes,” he said. “Sorry about that.”

  “No,” she said. “They smelled good. Like you. Leather and denim and soap and deodorant and okay, maybe a little bit of sweat.”

  “The sweat was because of the way you were looking at me in the mirror at the barbershop,” he told her, which was totally true. “It’s a miracle I didn’t go up in flames.”

  “It’s a miracle I didn’t,” she said.

  “Where are you taking me?” he asked.

 
“On a messy date,” she said.

  And away they went, for ice cream that dripped on her dress, sticky cinnamon buns she had to lick off his fingers, and later, all the mess either of them could want, in Haven’s apartment, which could use a cleaning, certainly, but neither of them could care less.

  Epilogue

  Eighteen months later

  “HAND ME MY BRA.”

  “This is torture, you know.”

  “Just hand it over.”

  Mark reached down and found the lace bra where she’d tossed it on the floor of the limo. She stuffed it into her handbag, straightened her scoop-neck T-shirt, and asked, “How do I look?”

  “Like you always look,” he said. “Hot.”

  He was working fast, smoothing the pieces of his tux into the suit bag he’d spread out on the seat between them. Right now, he had his shirt off, and she took a moment to admire the view, lean muscle and just the right amount of hair.

  “You know what we’re like?” she asked. “We’re like one of those movies, you know, something Bond, or True Lies or Mr. & Mrs. Smith, where they have the secret identities, and they’re always changing fast in the back of some moving vehicle to become their other selves.”

  They were on their way from a celebrity’s thirtieth birthday party—black tie—to a gig that Mark was playing at Village Blues. They’d both had to effect a complete costume change in the back of the car they’d hired to get them from one event to the other on time. And this wasn’t the first time they’d done it.

  “Except that everybody in New York City knows both of our identities,” Mark said. Since they’d begun publicly dating, and since Sliding Up had officially announced its tour last year, the press hadn’t given either of them much of a break. There had been photographs in the weeklies and online of the two of them together, at parties, at auctions, at fund-raisers, in blues clubs, backstage after Sliding Up concerts and emerging sweaty and red-faced from cabs, limos, department-store dressing rooms, back alleys and anywhere else they could grab a moment together.

  There had also been some ugliness, yes, in the early days after the revelation that Mark Webster and Haven Hoyt were an item, plenty of speculation about whether Haven would destroy Mark the way Lyn had and how many of her clients Haven was intimate with. Also whether, perhaps, Mark and Pete were sharing Haven. When that gem had appeared in one of the weeklies, Haven had brought the magazine straight to Mark, because she knew they had to confront it, not hide from it. He’d taken the magazine from her, torn it into shreds, and then growled, “I don’t share.”

  He’d provided a demo of how strongly he felt about that.

  And then the buzz in the press had died down, and Haven’s business had survived unscathed. In fact, her client list had grown as word got out that Haven offered life coaching to supplement her image consulting. The tour had only benefitted, as predicted, from the media madness.

  Of course the media hadn’t been remotely interested in the good news. No one reported on the fact that Mark’s dad’s move had gone smoothly, or that his health was improving more rapidly than predicted. It didn’t make any front pages that he and Mark spent a lot of time shooting pool and even, occasionally, a basket or two. No one Tweeted that Mark was giving regular music lessons and helping Noteworthy with its fund-raising on an ongoing basis. And while Mark’s band had been playing gigs sometimes four nights a week and had a solid following, it wasn’t exactly a national story that he had been doing well enough that he’d turned down all the weddings they’d been asked to play.

  Haven surveyed Mark, now clad in a clinging black T-shirt and his staple chewed-up jeans. “You know,” she said. “I think I like you better this way.”

  “It’s the holes in the jeans,” he said, laughing. This particular pair, it was true, had some very attractive wear and tear. Haven privately thought Mark did it on purpose, but it was possible that his physique just put more than an average amount of strain on the denim.

  The car pulled up in front of Village Blues, and they emerged from the car, smoothly transformed into their blues-club selves. “Nice work,” Haven said.

  “One of these days,” Mark said, his voice growly, “I’m going to jump you when your clothes are off, and we’re never going to make it to the next stop at all.”

  “Is that a promise or threat?” Haven inquired.

  “A threat,” Mark confirmed, and Haven felt her heart speed up as it always did when Mark displayed his alpha side.

  In the club, she found a table for four. She watched Mark get ready and begin warming up. Warming her up, that was. His hand slid up and down the neck of the guitar and she planned what, exactly, she was going to do to him later that night.

  She heard her name called out, and looked up to see Elisa and Brett hurrying toward her. Elisa gave her a huge hug, and Brett kissed her on the cheek, and the four of them settled down and ordered drinks. And enormous slices of chocolate cake, in Elisa’s and Haven’s cases. The only thing hungrier than Elisa’s eyes when her cake arrived were Brett’s, watching Elisa put the cake away. He’d been on a business trip the past week, Elisa had told Haven, so they couldn’t promise to stay till the end of the night.

  Haven took a bite of her cake. “Oh, my God, this is good.”

  Mark’s gravelly voice crackled through the mic. “Thanks so much for coming out tonight. Most of you guys know this is my new band, Mark and the Real Men. I want to start out with a special song tonight. Those of you who know me at all know I don’t write music and I don’t sing, but I made an exception in this case.”

  Haven’s face got hot.

  “I wrote this song for a woman who taught me how to put it on, how to take it off and, most of all, how to be real.”

  She was going to cry. She was going to sit here with tears streaming down her face in front of everyone and—

  And she didn’t care at all. Maybe she even liked it a little. Because this was what it felt like to have your insides on the outside. It hurt in exactly this beautiful way.

  “Haven, sweetheart, I love you so much.”

  She wrapped her arms around herself, hugging, and he smiled and pointed at her and blew her a kiss.

  Mark used that mysterious brand of hand signals that looked like magic to Haven, getting the band playing, slow and sexy. And then he sang his song to her.

  She knew the blues now, the way the meaning hid in the coarse words. She knew there was often no romance, no prettiness. Sometimes it was all sex on the surface, and sometimes it was something else completely on the surface and sex all the way down. She was okay with that—with all of it. Because she knew how sex was sometimes the first way you could say what you needed to say, sometimes before you even knew what it was you wanted to say. As if your heart spoke a language that was somewhere between body and soul, and the only way to bridge the gap was to acknowledge the messy reality of being human.

  Baby put away your broom

  And put away your wet mop

  No need to clean up or look your best

  I like when you’re a hot mess

  Baby put away the pricy shoes

  And forget the fancy hairdo

  No need to buy that thousand dollar dress

  I like when you’re a hot mess

  Floor’s clean enough to eat off of

  You look good enough to eat, too

  No need to pass any kind of test

  I like when you’re a hot mess

  When he was done, when the last note
faded away and the room flooded with applause, she ran up on stage and let him enfold her in his arms, let them take their pictures, run their video cameras, capture the moment. They would see what was on the outside, and inside—she was alight, alive, in love.

  * * * * *

  Keep reading for an excerpt from AFTER MIDNIGHT by Katherine Garbera

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  1

  “HELLO, GORGEOUS.”

  Carter Shaw.

  Bad boy, snowboarder and Lindsey Collins’ worst nightmare. Carter was everything she wasn’t, and if she was being totally honest, everything she sort of wished she could be.

  “Hello, trouble.”

  He laughed in that husky deep-throated way of his.

  She tried to ignore the fact that his eyes were a kind of blue-gray that reminded her of early mornings on the slope just after the sun came up. His dark hair was thick and curly on the top, but at this moment cut short on the back of his neck. She’d seen him wear it a lot longer, but this sportier cut called even more attention to his handsome, gorgeous face. He had that sexy stubble that made her fingers tingle with the urge to touch it each time she saw him. And it didn’t help her libido that the guy had that relaxed vibe of someone who’d grown up in California. To her, he’d always looked as if he should be on a surfboard instead of a snowboard.