Accounting for Cole (Natural Beauty) (8 page)
Read Accounting for Cole (Natural Beauty) Online
Authors: Holley Trent
Tags: #humorous romance, #romantic comedy, #north carolina, #geek, #first person, #Chick Lit, #Contemporary Romance
Cole held me back a bit from him, brow furrowed and face serious. “What does she mean? You’re quitting? If you had quit one day sooner I wouldn’t have found you, Miss Macy
Vickers
. All Dom could tell me was to look in the yellow pages.”
I grimaced and shrugged, realizing I hadn’t even told him my last name that night. It honestly hadn’t come up. “Come on.” We walked back into the office and I picked up the last of the boxes. Cole picked up my computer monitor and wireless keyboard and we made the trek back to the car. With the trunk loaded, we got inside the car and I started it up and steered toward the downtown waterfront.
I turned off the engine in the playground parking lot and we walked over to the gazebo, seagulls crowding our path and darting away at the last moment as we stepped. We sat.
“I suppose I had a bit of a personal self-crisis after we met. I kept thinking about the choices you made to take care of your son and wondered if I was making the right sacrifices to be where I want to be.”
“And?”
“And I figured out that I don’t really
know
where I want to be. I’ve been an accountant for six years. All I know is numbers, but I’m not sure if this is what I want to be doing forever. There’s no room for advancement from here, and I have to admit it can be a pretty lonely job.” I chewed my bottom lip for a moment while I stared out at the Albemarle Sound, and confessed in a quiet voice, “I’m tired of being lonely.”
Cole put his long legs up on the bench and slid me in closer to his side. “Are you leaving? Going somewhere?”
“Sort of. I’m going to try something different for a while. In the fall I’m going to teach a couple of accounting courses at the community college here in Edenton, but between now and then I’m going to take a bit of a sabbatical.”
He perked up a bit and turned his olive gaze to me. “Where are you going?”
“Dublin. I have some family there who’ve been begging to take me in for a few years. I figured now’s a good time.”
“Nice. We’re doing Paris next month, you know. It’s a bit of an exchange. A club there is sending their cast here to plug in some dates on our tour and we’ll be stationary there for about a fortnight.”
I scoffed. “That sounds conveniently serendipitous.”
“Yeah.” He pulled his phone out of his back pocket, looked at the clock, and then grimaced. “I’ve got to head off to make sure those hags make it onto the stage tonight.” He leaned forward and drew me in for another kiss. When he let go and I’d gotten control of my breathing again I said, “Call me when you get to Paris? Maybe we can meet up in London.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No, Macy. Bradley’s right about one thing. I do need an anchor. Some smart lady who makes me grin like a teenager and not a thirty-seven-year-old. Someone who’ll ground me even after I do stupid shit like sign contracts to appear on reality shows.”
My eyes went wide. “You didn’t.”
He cringed and nudged my gaping jaw back to its usual place. “I did. This is bad timing. Such bad timing, because I’m so private, but—”
“Yeah.” I caught the drift. He was saying there was a whole new level of difficulty to accessing him, as if it wasn’t hard enough before.
He shook his head. “No, you don’t understand. Hear me out. The moment you bumped into me at Club Sapphire, I knew what you were.”
“A klutz?”
“Quit it.” He planted a kiss on my forehead. “No, Macy, I could tell were salt of the earth.”
“Dull.”
“Stop.
No
. Someone grounded. Rational.”
“Me? The woman who just closed her business because it didn’t feel right anymore?”
“Even because of that. There’s nothing aimless about you, you just have to allow yourself to find some passion. You’re not used to that, are you?”
There he went again, reading me like a newspaper.
I shook my head.
“No regrets. You don’t want to be seventy, regretting the things you did and didn’t do at thirty…or thirty-seven. And I regret letting you leave that morning without making you promise to come back.”
I regretted that, too.
“Listen…” He grazed his lips over my forehead, planting kisses here and there and holding me tighter. “I’ll call you tonight the moment I get those rascals off the stage, and you’ll answer no matter what time it is.”
I chuckled. “Oh, will I, now? What about Bradley’s English teacher?”
“Yeah you will, because if you’ve been thinking about me even half as much as I’ve been thinking about you, you haven’t been sleeping. I want you to get some sleep, hon.” He ran the pad of his thumb lightly against my jaw. “I’ll even unplug the alarm clock so we can have extra uninterrupted cuddle time.”
I laughed.
“Don’t worry about the teacher. She’s got
nothing
on you. She can’t even calculate a tip.” He kissed me again, winding his thumbs into my hair and tipping my chin back so he could flutter his lips along the line of my jaw. “Besides, if you don’t answer the phone, I’ll drive back down here and make you watch police dramas with me all night.”
He grabbed the lobe of my ear with his teeth and gently pulled.
“Maybe I won’t answer then,” I managed breathlessly.
“Then maybe you should give me your house keys. I should get used to parking in your driveway, anyway.”
“Or maybe I’ll just wait at your hotel. You probably shouldn’t leave your post. Dom might need an aspirin or something.”
“Damned Dom,” Cole said. He slipped his keycard into the back pocket of my shorts and helped himself to a squeeze. “God, I love your body. Hips and curves…” He squeezed again.
I didn’t mind one little bit. I couldn’t very well expect him to
always
be a gentleman.
…or is that
lady
?
The End
The Natural Beauty Series
Look out for the three Natural Beauty novels in print and digital formats in August 2013:
1.
SHAKE WELL
- Nikki and Charlie’s story
2.
POLISHED SLICK
- Trinity and Jerry’s story
3.
CLEAN SLATE
- Daisy and Ben’s story
Other Contemporary Romances by Holley Trent
Calliope Romance/Musa Publishing
[Erotic short story]
Crimson Romance
[novel ~ extra-sensual]
[novelette ~ sensual]
Calliope Romance/Musa Publishing
[novelette ~ sweet]
Crimson Romance
[novel ~ extra-sensual]
About the Author
Holley Trent is a Carolina girl gone west. Raised in rural coastal North Carolina, she has Southern sensibilities but her adventurous spirit drove her to Colorado for new experiences.
Holley writes sassy contemporary romances threaded with oodles of conversational humor, and fantasy/paranormal romances set in her home state.
Her protagonists regularly fall victim to her odd sense of humor and find themselves in improbable situations (with happily-every-after outcomes). Holley's cast of characters tends to swear, drink and do a fair amount of carousing, but they're generally well intentioned and obey all laws and ordinances. Usually.
She’s a member of Romance Writers of America as well as Colorado Romance Writers and CIM-RWA: the Cultural Interracial and Multicultural special interest RWA chapter.
For Holley’s complete backlist, including titles from Calliope Romance/Musa Publishing, Crimson Romance, and Lyrical Press please visit her website at http://www.holleytrent.com or her blog at http://www.holleytrent.com/blog.
Want to chat about
Accounting for Cole
or another Holley Trent title? Catch her online on Twitter where she tweets under the handle @holleytrent or fan
her Facebook page
.
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