Accounting for Cole (Natural Beauty) (6 page)

“You’re not boring, Cole.”

“Neither are you. You’re perfect.”

I opened my mouth to call him a liar, but before I could get the words out, he bobbed his head toward the hedges and whispered, “Look.”

I looked through the gap between the hedges and saw Beth squeezed onto a tiny bench with a female impersonator in a tiny red dress. He’d removed his wig, but left his large hoop earrings in place, rendering them especially noticeable with his very conservative haircut. They looked like they were in a contest to see how much of each other’s face they could vacuum off with their mouths, which was interesting given the amount of make-up they were both wearing. They were in for one hell of an aftertaste.

“That’s Dom,” Cole whispered. “Picks up a chick in every town we visit just to prove he can. He thinks he deserves bonus points when he lures girls in the Bible Belt.”

“That’s perverse,” I said, straightening up a bit and straining my neck to see over the bushes. Where was Gretchen? I hoped she hadn’t gone off and done something stupid.

“You want me to go rescue her?” he asked.

I was about to tell him to let her dig her own hole, but I took too long considering it. A forceful push at the small of my back propelled me forward. My face met the pool’s surface, and reflexively I inhaled, but it was a moment too late. I submerged, coughing underwater and struggling within the confines of my skirt to scramble to the top.

Blurry figures hovered just beyond the surface, and I aimed for them. As I reached the top, a strong pair of hands grabbled the collar of my borrowed shirt, yanking me to the edge, and then Cole tugged me to the steps.

I grabbed hold of the handrail, coughing, and he pulled me up by the waist, pressing me against him.

“You all right?”

I rubbed my eyes, hoping my contact lenses didn’t lose suction, and coughed the remnant water out of my lungs. “Yeah, just stunned.”

“Just keep coughing. Get it all out.”

I nodded and opened my eyes to find my attacker, and tormentor, the Brick Shithouse standing nearby with her wig cocked at an unseemly angle.

Freda clenched and unclenched her fists, spoiling for a fight. “Little skank bitch,” she said.

The chlorine burning in my sinuses prevented me from formulating a suitably snarky response, but I did give her one hell of a stare. Scary accountant lady.
Boo
and stuff.

“I think you should leave,” Cole said, voice gone flat and unfriendly for the first time all evening. He held me closer, chafing my back with both hands. I pressed my nose against his chest and savored his sweetly cloying scent. Mixed with his natural musk, it was downright edible. The compulsion to climb him like a tree was an unusual one for me, and suddenly I understood why Beth was so fond of that expression.

“I don’t
think
so!” she barked. “I should be at the party!”

“Look, Arthur. You didn’t make the cut with the troupe and I’m sorry for that. But you’ve got to stop showing up like this whenever we’re in town. You’ve got to stop antagonizing our guests. You want to party?” He sighed. “Go on. Tell them I said it was okay.”

Arthur/Freda blinked a few times, shrugged, and straightened her wig before squeezing through the shrubbery to the courtyard.

“Are you kidding me?” I scoffed. “That was
it
? I endured poolside assault for something that could have been resolved with a simple
Go on?
”

Cole enfolded one of my shivering hands inside one of his warm ones and pulled me toward the door. “Let’s get you dry, Miss Macy.”

I followed. What else was I going to do?

* * *

On the way up in the elevator, Cole stood behind me, rubbing his hands up and down my arms to warm me through the wet fabric of my shirt, and pulled strands of dripping hair back from my face.

When the door dinged open on the fourth floor I said, “You know, I could just go to my room and dry off there.”

He raised one of those pristine eyebrows and pushed me clear of the closing doors. “You’ve got spare clothes? You seem to be going through them at quite a clip tonight.”

“No, I figured I’d just wrap up in a couple of towels and stay under the covers.”

He rolled his eyes. “Come on. I’ve got an endless supply of T-shirts. I can spare one.”

I stared at him for a moment, realizing that although I’d become comfortable enough over the past couple of hours to endure looking upon his beauty without turning into a pillar of salt, getting completely naked in his suite was upping the ante a bit.

He must have correctly interpreted the hesitation in my expression.

“What, you don’t trust me?”

“I don’t want to inconvenience you.”

“Oh please. I told you I wanted the company, didn’t I? Come on. I have the perfect shirt for you.” He smiled so his dimples deepened.

I melted into the hallway carpet just a wee bit and nodded. With those dimples he could have asked me for my credit card number, expiration date, and security code and I would have recited them while standing on my head.

He let the door close behind us and immediately riffled through a large duffel bag atop the luggage stand. I shuffled into the bathroom and stripped down to my bra and underwear, wrapping one of the hotel towels around my body and a second one around my hair. I felt a bit silly and a lot uncomfortable in the wet underwear, so my patented Macy practicality won out over any shame I might have felt. I was stepping out of my panties, thinking I’d let them dry in the shower, when Cole walked in with a soft gray shirt draped over his arm.

He quickly averted his eyes.

I flicked the panties into the tub and cringed when I heard them splat.

“Sorry.”

“No, I should have closed the door.”

“Well, here.” He handed me the shirt and I used one arm to hold my towel up and the other to examine the print on the tee. It said “Carolina Girls Do It Best” and had a picture of a slightly-too-masculine pin-up girl in a little polka dot bikini. The words on the bottom indicated the shirt came from Johnny Tuesday’s Cabaret in Charlotte. I giggled.

“That was the first show I did in North Carolina,” he said, smiling wistfully. “It was a good night.”

I squinted at him. “Do I want to know why?”

That made him laugh outright. “My son drove down from school. It was the first time he got to see his old man in heels and hose.”

“How’d he react?”

“He couldn’t stop laughing. Really gave me a complex for a while.” He grinned at me again, and then left me to dress.

When I exited, Cole was sitting on the edge of the bed holding a very fancy blow-dryer in his hands. It had more buttons than my work calculator.

Well, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but there were a lot.

“May I?” he asked, pointing to my head with the diffuser end. I nodded and knelt in front of the bed with my back to him. He tipped my head forward and started drying front to back, pushing aside dry sections as he worked.

“Why do you straighten it?” he asked while pulling hair back from my face. “Must take a lot of effort as wavy as it is.”

“I’m just used to it. I’ve had this haircut for ages, even since I was a little girl. My hair didn’t start getting wavy until I was a teenager. I had to start blow-drying it straight to keep the style.”

“Maybe you should change the style.”

I didn’t respond, but it didn’t matter because he was finished anyway. He pulled out his own hair elastic and pulled my dry hair back into a low ponytail.

“There. No wet pillows now,” he said, reaching over to unplug the machine.

I got up using the dresser for leverage and patted my hair in the mirror. Shiny. I gave an appreciative grunt. I found my purse and keycard and was about to bid him goodbye and thanks until the morning when I’d come back and fetch my wet stuff, but he’d stopped paying attention to me.

He stood beside the bed, extended the remote toward the wide-screen television, and scanned robotically, hardly assessing each channel before he clicked to the next. Finally, he stopped and a gleeful grin spanned his face. He put the remote on the right nightstand and looked at me. “I’ve found that no matter where I am in the country, and no matter what time of day, I can always find one of these.” He pulled back the bed’s heavy comforter and sheets on the left side and patted the cozy space he’d made. “My favorite crime drama show. I think it’s a weekend marathon.” He locked his eyes on the screen again.

I spent about fifteen seconds deliberating on the propriety of the situation. Get into a stranger’s bed, or head back to my room? If I stayed, would he think I was brazen? Desperate?

“Macy?” He pointed to the bed.

I swallowed. Quietly, I set my belongings back on the dresser and skirted around Cole.

He turned when I lifted my legs up to the bed, and didn’t address me again until the covers were up to my waist.

“I’m sure I’ve seen this episode before, but I’ve seen so many of them that I can’t remember what happens,” he said.

He walked around to the other side of the bed and sat next to me, but with his legs on top of the covers while I was beneath them. When a commercial break came on he looked at me and squeezed one of my knees I’d pulled up to my chest. “Warmer now?”

“I am, thanks.”

“Good.” He looped an arm around my back against the headboard and I snuggled into it without thinking. He didn’t seem to mind, so I leaned the side of my head against his chest, too.

He toyed with the end of my ponytail. “Macy?”

“Hmm?”

“You know…if the situation were different and I wasn’t such a rolling stone, I’d ask you out on a proper date.”

I could feel my eyes going wide as I turned to face him. “
Me
?”

“Yes, you. Why
not
you?”

I tried to sit up, but he pulled me back into him. “I…I don’t know. You could do better. Someone more glamorous. More worldly.”

“You seem to have me pegged wrong.”

“Meaning what, exactly?”

“I like brainy women.”

“Oh? Am I brainy, or simply cerebral?”

“Quit it.”

My heart pounded, and if he could feel the burn of my cheek against his chest, he didn’t comment on it. “I think maybe the beer has gone to your head.”

“Nope. I’m stone-cold sober.”

“Then you’re insane. You could have any girl. Any woman out in that courtyard would throw herself at you.”

“What’s wrong with the one I’m holding?” He squeezed me tighter, and rubbed his chin across the top of my head.

I let out a little pleasurable whimper I hoped he didn’t hear, and then sighed. “I’m thirty. Boring. Plain. Frumpy.”

“Add insane to that list. Maybe you need a new mirror and a long weekend of self-reflection. The pretty is just a bonus.”

“Whatever.” I whispered it, but really—hearing him suggest that I was pretty made me
feel
pretty…at least for the moment.

“Bradley has been trying to introduce me to his English composition instructor, but we’ve really only exchanged emails. She goes to all of his performances and brags on him. I’m worried she might be some sort of cougar.” He chuckled, but instead of laughing, I ground my teeth, feeling instantly murderous. Odd sensation, that.

“Maybe Bradley needs a new hobby,” I said.

Cole chuckled. “He worries about his old man. Thinks he needs an anchor somewhere.”

“Well, does he?”

He gave my little ponytail a tug and let it go. “I think…maybe he does.”

CHAPTER FIVE

I was sleeping soundly—the kind of sleep that’s so deep and good that you could pee yourself and think it was part of the dream—when I figured out that the banging I was hearing wasn’t a part of my dreamland Nirvana.

In my dream, I was in a magical place where there was not guilt about taking a day off from consultations, computers, and numbers. I lounged on the beach—no doors to be found to knock on. That’s why I opened my eyes, and when I did, the room was dark except for the glow of the muted television. I shifted my gaze at the bed’s movement to find Cole tipping himself off the edge.

I ogled, slack-jawed.

At some point in the hour or so I’d been asleep, he’d stripped down to his boxer briefs and had been laying on top of the bedclothes under one flimsy blanket from the armoire.

I ogled his muscular back and firm rear as he padded to the door and paused in front of it. He wore his years really damn well, and that tree-climbing thought came to mind again. He was all smooth, lean muscle. Gorgeously fit without all the bulk.

He pressed his hands against the door and squinted through the peephole. “Shit.” With a grunt of frustration, he pulled the knob, opening the door just a crack.

Trying to preserve my modesty, I guess. I could see the door, so it made sense that whoever was on the other side of it could see me, too, if they looked in.

“What’s up, Dom?” Cole leaned against the doorframe, thereby obstructing Dom’s view into the room.

A familiar giggle in the hallway made me sit up straighter. “Shit,” I whispered.

“He’s
hot
!” the feminine voice said between little girly laughs.

I cringed. Just my luck, I’d get caught.

“That’s the same guy from your group?” she asked.

Dom cleared his throat and said in what was supposed to be a whisper, “You got any condoms? You know, big ones?”

Beth giggled again and I slumped, easing beneath the covers and pulling them over my head. God.

“Why would I have condoms?” Cole asked.

“Oh yeah, I forgot. You’re a monk.” Dom cackled and Beth joined in.

I stole a look over the blanket edge and saw Cole casting Dom a dirty glower. I could see just a sliver of Dom from where I lay, and saw that he’d pushed the top of his spandex dress down so his chest was nude. The rest of his dress rode his narrow hips like some sort of odd, sparkly kilt. “Come on, give them up. I know you keep an emergency supply kit for the rest of us hussies.”

Cole backed a bit away from the door, intending to push it closed, but Dom jutted his foot into the crack before it could close all the way. Cole trekked to his overstuffed duffel, ferreted out a leather toiletry case, and as he unzipped it Dom poked his head into the door crack.