by Kira Graham
And then passed out on the sidewalk. And woke up with some old guy licking his pills while he stared at me. I still don’t know what happened, but my mouth tasted really weird.
Shut up!
“Because Rose shoved him into her car, drove him all the way out of town to a deserted road, and dumped him. At gunpoint. After threatening to kill him if he didn’t get to stepping,” Sin crows, snorting when Rose preens and pats her own shoulder.
She should be in prison by now. We all should.
“You didn’t!”
“Oh, I most certainly did. And I would do it again. Look, Cleo, we’ve all been trying to let you keep your illusions about who you are, but the truth is, you’re the soft one here. Sin had one bad experience with a guy she couldn’t shake because he was Lee’s best friend, and she didn’t want to mess up their friendship, but you…you just don’t know how to say no. Because you’re nice. And that’s a good thing. Until it starts affecting your life.”
I guess that’s true, a little. Or maybe a lot. I don’t know. It’s just that, I don’t like to hurt people, and sometimes the thought of saying no makes me break out in a cold sweat. Like last week, for instance. This lady came in and asked if I’d sponsor her daughter’s soccer game with some free candy, and I couldn’t say no. I told myself it was free advertising for the store, but I knew I was just lying to myself. Not one person came in for more candy or chocolate after I gave away all that stuff. Not one.
I’m a putz.
“Ouch!” Tee yells, the sound of glass breaking and flesh thudding to the floor breaking me out of my musings so that I rush into the bathroom without a thought.
“Shit! Don’t move!” I warn, taking in the broken shower door, the pieces of shattered glass everywhere, and Tee’s sheepish smile as she blinks up at me from the floor.
There’s no blood, so she isn’t hurt, but she has wrecked the bathroom, which for Tee is just another day in the life of the Sweet family klutz. She’s so clumsy that even I’ve asked her not to come over to my place unless I want to deal with breakage or bloodstains.
“I’ll pay for it!” she yells when I run for the first aid kit, just in case, while Sin goes for the broom and dustpan that we all keep in our rooms or homes for just these occasions.
In ten minutes, we clean the bathroom as well as we can, considering that Tee somehow found a way to decimate a bottle of shampoo, and clear out my shower. I also have her elbow bandaged, even if it is only a tiny scratch that hardly bled.
Well, then, I guess it’s time to get this show on the road, I think when I check my watch and catch sight of the time.
“Now, remember. You don’t like this guy, and saying no is not a crime,” Sin assures me, her hard blue eyes taking on a challenging light.
“I will say no. I will.”
******************************************************************
“No.” I mutter over and over again as I follow the hostess towards a table where a god of a man is rising, his brows drawn into a frown of what I can only call confusion.
My hair is a frazzled mess, with short blonde strands sticking up everywhere because Tee managed to hit the sunroof button and somehow locked all the windows, creating a tornado-like effect in the car that completely ruined both our hair.
Since it’s a hundred degrees outside, and I couldn’t undo my safety belt to remove my cardigan, I ended up sweating like a miner, and half my makeup melted off before we even got here. I look awful, but since that’s the aim here, I didn’t freak out about it. Not that I have time to do anything about this because I’m already ten minutes late, thanks to construction on the roads and a little old lady who mistook the speed limit for what I can only guess is ten miles an hour.
But, whatever, right? I’m here now, and I’m praying like hell that my date isn’t the guy getting to his feet because, sweet Jesus, he’s hot. Like Joe Mangienello hot. Like, I finally want to sleep with a man and not have to pretend he’s good-looking hot!
Gulping, I attempt, futilely, to smooth my hair and realize only after I’ve raised my arm that I’m flashing a pit puddle and a hole where I ripped my sleeve trying to remove the cardigan in a desperate attempt to live.
I hear a choked gasp from behind me, where the girls are seated at a table to my right, as planned, and try to ignore Rose’s scream of, “Oh no, he’s fucking hot!”
“Cleo?” the guy-slash-god-slash-man-of-my-dreams asks, his frowning gaze moving down my body in a practiced way that makes me think he not only knows the female form, but has also just assessed mine and found it lacking.
Oh no!
Mom finally got it right, and instead of looking somewhat presentable, I look like—
“Emma Thompson in that movie where she’s playing a spinster who never gets laid,” Sin says, way too loudly for comfort. My comfort.
“Uh, yes, that’s me. Ahem, I mean, you must be…”
“Hart,” he fills in, shaking my hand and helping me into a chair while the hostess stands around, gaping and flashing her perfectly smooth hair and killer body.
To be honest, even if I hadn’t “done” myself up this way, I still wouldn’t be anywhere near as put-together as this bitch—not even close. And that sucks, because man, oh man…
He’s hot. I’ve said that. Move on, I scream silently, shaking like a leaf when he seats me and moves around the table to retake his chair. Why, Jesus? Why didn’t you tell me he was good-looking and smelled nice and had teeth that could blind an angel? I whine, my face attempting to crumple when it dawns on me that he’s probably going to pull a runner and leave me to cry into my dessert.
Oh, come on. You don’t want a boyfriend, remember?
Yes, I do. I remember. But this guy is all man—
“Lovely to meet you,” the man—I mean, Hart—says, my mind tuning back in when he pauses and stares at me as if waiting for an answer.
Was there a question? What was the question? I think hysterically, swallowing thickly when Hart raises his perfect eyebrow and narrows his eyes.
I should have stayed home, pretended to be sick—anything instead of being here, looking like I have no tits, no waist, and a pair of legs that require thick stockings the color of a bad spray tan!
“Uh, you, too. I mean, it’s nice to meet you, too. Thanks for, uh, meeting me,” I say lamely, my voice stuttering to a gasp when he smiles.
Sun. Light. Magical, my mind screams when that smile breaks over his face, turning handsome into downright lickable. Shit. Don’t panic. Don’t go sloppy-brained, Cleo. He’s just a man. Talk. Be normal. Do not pant, and do not beg him to marry you and give you babies…
Now, wait just a damn minute. I am not getting married or having babies.
The thought is like a splash of cold water to the senses, so eye-opening that I feel my nerves turn to steel and my mind reassemble impossibly fast. Suddenly, I’m not a ball of nerves seeing a man so beautiful that my panties are singed to rags. I see a man who is virile and probably has super sperm that will rip through a condom and swim right to the end zone, where my eggs are.
Noooo. No way. Not happening.
“It’s my pleasure. Uh, so, I usually start these dates by getting the awkward part out of the way. My name is Hart, I run my own company called Hart Inc., and no, I don’t model,” he says, grinning so widely that I should feel my pulse leap.
Instead, I have to stop from rolling my eyes and telling him that I wasn’t wondering anything of the sort. Even if it’s a lie. Vain much? I scoff silently, tipping my mouth into what I hope is a smile instead of the sneer I want to toss his way. I don’t like vain men, and I don’t like men who look at me as if I’m some pitiable little woman with no prospects. Heck, he probably thinks he’s doing me a favor by letting me sit here and stare at his mug.
Which he is, but that’s not the point. I’ve had a bad day, my ovaries are throbbing with a screaming protest against my mind’s about-face, and I’m having trouble keeping myself hard when he grins bec
ause, holy moly, he is pretty to look at.
“Ha ha ha. That’s, uh, great? What does your company do?” I ask, not at all interested but ready to play this out for as long as I need to.
A part of me, the stupid hussy who’s staring at Hart and drooling, hopes for dessert and some miraculous transformation of my frumpy self so that this guy will like me. Not that I look much different on any given day. The glasses I’m wearing like armor tonight aren’t usually that far from my face because I’m either reading a recipe or writing down a new one. My hair is always in a messy bun on top of my head to keep it out of the way while I work, and I’m usually dressed in a pair of old, holey jeans and some baggy shirt or plaid mess covered in chocolate or batter.
So really, even if I hadn’t done all this to make him not want me, I can’t lie and say that it would have gone all that differently if I’d just come as me and not the Doubtfire grandchild.
“Oh, everything, really. I mostly work in development. Property and that sort of thing, but I’ve been expanding things lately under my pop’s direction. Nothing special as of yet, unless you count the circus my brother’s been trying to convince me to buy for the last month and a half,” he chuckles, causing two dimples to pop out.
Ovaries! Don’t you dare.
Oh, Lord in heaven. Lord, save me. I like dimples. I have dimples! I want babies with—no! Bad Cleo. Bad, bad Cleo.
“Circus,” I parrot, my brain still stuck on a gray-eyed baby that I definitely don’t want.
I don’t want babies. Or marriage. My dream boards are very clear. I’ll get CandyCane’s running smoothly and be a successful chocolatier, like Willy Wonka, my idol, and then I’ll hit thirty-six or thirty-seven and finally cave and have a geriatric pregnancy that is preceded by a small—very small—wedding because Mom won’t want too many wedding photos of me with only a tolerably okay-looking groom at my side. By forty, I’ll have exactly two kids that I’ll sort of raise, if Mom gives me a chance, and my sex life will include a vibrator named Elvis and a fortnightly romp with my husband.
Don’t you judge me! I hear Mom and Dad at night. I’m terrified that I’ll be fifty and still have to wax my vagina. So much work, guys.
“Yeah! I mean, I thought about it, of course I did—I mean, who doesn’t love clowns—but I passed when I found out that the elephants were being mistreated,” he mutters, his confession followed by an unholy shriek from two tables back, where I would bet my life that Alex is throwing a tantrum.
God bless her animal-loving heart.
“That’s awful.”
What else can I say? I’m trying to keep my mouth shut so that I don’t drool, while my vagina is drenching my granny panties and—
“It was,” he agrees, before going into a speech about his donations to PETA and rambling on about God knows what.
I’m still stuck on the way he’s grinning with every word, his eyes still raking over my body in a way that makes me clench my thighs as I remind myself that I don’t want him.
Ever.
I really don’t.
Chapter Four
Adonis
I want to laugh myself sick as I keep rambling and watch Cleo Sweet’s eye go glassy, her lack of attention or interest so clear that I want to fist-pump the air and yell out my victory. She doesn’t like me, and I know this because she keeps muttering something that sounds suspiciously like, “He’s ugly on the inside,” and she refuses to look at my face.
Normally, I’d be offended—I mean, I’m a good-looking SOB—but with every narrow-eyed glare in my direction, I find myself actually enjoying the hell out of this date. I just can’t quite say why. She’s cute, in a frumpy, old lady meets hot librarian way, and if I squint my eyes just right to blur out her hot orange eyebrows, all I see is crystal blue eyes that remind me of the Aegean Sea. And she stays even after I start talking about failed dates and sexual encounters, my go-to topic when I want to end things quickly. Instead of jumping up and running out, or, as I was hoping, crawling through the window in the ladies’ room, she stays and doesn’t stop glaring at me. Unless she’s eating, which, let me just say, is hilarious. She treats food like something precious, and she hasn’t stopped moaning with every bite.
Cleo Sweet is nothing like the kind of women I’m into, and, as sick as this sounds, I find that incredibly attractive. So attractive that I keep talking as the meal progresses and start to sweat when the waiter comes around for dessert orders. I don’t want this date to be over, and not because I plan to take her home or make this into anything more than one date, but because I think I actually like Cleo. She’s smart and sarcastic, and she snorts when she laughs. Mostly at my expense. She also doesn’t preen, and she calls me on my bullshit, her orange eyebrows dancing comically when I say something she doesn’t quite believe.
“Wait, wait, wait. That can’t be right,” she mutters, holding up a surprisingly small hand that bears several calluses.
Narrowing my eyes, I stare at them, ignoring her grumbles. Huh. Usually when I’m out with women, their hands feel like silk.
“It is. I swear,” I lie, grinning unashamedly when she snorts.
“Let me get this straight. You dated a woman for exactly an hour—”
“We weren’t dating,” I remind her, my grin turning into a chuckle when she snorts.
“Oh, right, I forgot. You’re a man-whore.”
“That’s not nice, Cleo. I told you, I don’t go anywhere I’m not invited,” I muse, my eyes winging down to her tits.
I can’t see them, and instead of being elated that nothing about her seems like my deal, I look harder and try to get some sort of view.
“Invited. Huh. I bet with your pretty-boy looks and those dimples, no one has to invite anything. Their legs just fall open,” she scoffs, a smile breaking out when the waiter arrives with dessert.
I blink as she softly thanks the man and don’t hear a word she’s saying because I’m spellbound by her face—the slightly off-color makeup, the ugly lipstick, and the beetled orange brows fading away into the background and leaving behind a beauty that shocks the hell out of me. Cleo Sweet is beautiful, I think, my throat going tight with lust when a dimple pops up on her right cheek and her soft lips curve, showing just a hint of teeth.
It takes me a full minute to realize she’s saying something, and another to shake myself back to reality when she frowns and calls my name again.
“Hart. You still in there?” she asks, snorting when I nod blankly, my mind filled with a horrifying thought that took shape when she was smiling at the waiter, her eyes sparkling like blue gems behind those hideous glasses.
“Do you usually dress this way?” I croak, for once taking a real look at Cleo, without my eyes trying to catalogue every fault.
Now I really look and take in her appearance, and, for the first time, it strikes me that her shabby, frumpy, melted makeup look is too perfect to be real. The orange eyebrows are out of whack now that I’ve noticed the rich honey-gold of her hair. The makeup is blatantly unattractive and three shades too white for the skin tone on her upper chest and arms. And the eyeliner is too pink to be just her eyeliner.
“What? Of course! What’s wrong with it?” she asks, her voice a high-pitched, nasal whine that sets off alarm bells ringing in my ears.
It can’t be, I think, blinking dumbly when she licks her lips, the action removing a small corner of her nude lip to reveal a pink hue that reminds me of melted cotton candy. She’s playing me, I realize, my heart more quickly stuttering to a dull thud the harder I stare and take note of everything.
Cleo Sweet isn’t ugly or plain or mousy or some spinster with really bad fashion sense, I think, my mind latching on to the way she’s trying to surreptitiously scratch at her chest where the dress is obviously chafing her delicate skin. She’s playing me. Jesus. Hell, I’m being duped, I think, unaccountably angry when it strikes me that she’s…trying to get me to bail on this date. Me. Adonis Hart, the bachelor of the year for two years running.
Narrowing my eyes even harder, I feel a sick suspicion form as I watch her inhale dessert, the chocolate on her spoon scraping off the rest of her lipstick when she licks at her lips to collect every drop. Lips I want to suck, I think, my mind blanking altogether when she moans around the spoon and tongues it like a popsicle.
I almost laugh—hell, I want to laugh at the absurdity of it. I even start to feel a grudging respect for the lengths she’s gone to, until I have a thought that startles me. She doesn’t want me. This woman, a siren beneath layers of theatrics and subterfuge, came here tonight in costume to shake me off. Me. The guy who only has to smile at a woman to have her sauntering over, ready to play. The man who hires hotel rooms so that I don’t have to be rude and get rid of the women I fuck when I want it to be over.
This woman doesn’t want me, and she came here tonight probably hoping that I’d take one look at her and run.
It’s so absurd that I can hardly understand what’s happening until she finishes up her dessert, smiles with chocolate-drenched teeth, and seems victorious when I gape and struggle for words. Gone is our conversation, and whereas before I would have laughed and patted myself on the back for shocking someone speechless, to the point that she wanted to leave, now I see Cleo giving me the very same smile that I’ve given countless blind dates in the past. And I don’t fucking like it.
Some of the night comes back to me, and whereas before I was preening and walking on a cloud of success as I regaled her with tales of my great achievements and my stable of women, charming her with my purposely sick wit, I now recall her own contributions that I overlooked and largely ignored before. No one has seventeen cats! Unless they’re sick and run some sort of chop shop out of their apartment. And I’d bet a nut that this woman hasn’t ever seen the inside of a VD clinic, either, I mutter silently, my brows sinking lower and lower the more I think things over.
“So, this was great, but as we’ve already established, we’re just not a match. I’ll tell Mom that you were great but that we just didn’t hit it off,” she says serenely, smiling sweetly when all I can do is gape at her and rise when she stands, her huge purse clutched to her front so that all I see are her hideous stockings and the drop of chocolate that has somehow made it to her crotch and gone unseen until now. “Thanks for the food, Hart. Happy whoring.”