Hot and Bothered (8 page)

“Of course,” she said. “Black tie.”

It was just relief he felt at knowing he wasn’t going to be on his own at one of those fancy events. No way he was thrilled at the mental picture of Haven in a skimpy cocktail dress and stockings with stiletto heels or at the idea of an evening in her company.

Oh, hell, who was he fooling?

When they’d finished with the shoe shopping, Haven handed over her business credit card on his behalf once again.

“Who’s paying for all this?”

“You are, with the tour money.”

“That’s what I was afraid you were going to say. What’s going to happen if we can’t convince Pete to get on board?”

“Jimmy Jeffers is going to come after you for a lot of money,” Haven said. “But don’t worry about that. We’re going to convince him.”

“I don’t have your faith.”

“Then you don’t know me very well,” she said.

I know you made these little helpless, broken noises when you came,
he thought.
I know you clutched me hard, like you were drowning and I was the only thing that could save you. I know how good it was to see you lose control and how good it feels to see you put back together again. The rest of the world only sees you like this, all polished and primped and presentable, but I saw
you
.

“I guess I don’t,” he said.

She held out the two shopping bags to him.

He took one in each hand. “This doesn’t do much for my masculinity, either.”

“Looks great on you. Very metro.”

The words didn’t matter. It was the sideways tilt of her head as she considered him, the appraisal in her eyes, that made his stomach tighten and his cock grow heavy.

“Come on,” she said.

“Where are we going?” he asked, though he would have followed her anywhere at that point.

“Socks and underwear?”

“I don’t need socks and underwear.”

“Your socks have holes in them.”

“Who cares?”

“I care.”

She was talking about his underclothes, and his stupid heart should know better than to speed up as if she’d made a confession. “I don’t need underwear,” he said. Because he couldn’t bring himself to say,
I didn’t ask you to care.

“Does your underwear have holes in it?”

“If you want to know the answer to that, you’re going to have to do independent research.”

He watched with pleasure as color rose in her cheeks.

“Don’t do that,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Flirt with me.” She hurried ahead of him.

In the men’s accessories department, she was all business, piling pairs of socks and packages of undershirts and T-shirts in his arms. “I don’t wear boxer briefs,” he said.

“Now you do,” she said.

“Why is that?”

She didn’t answer. He decided that if being physical with her was off limits, he was going to cause her to blush a hundred times a day. He was going to make her miss what she’d decided it was impossible for them to have. He was going to go home knowing he’d left her wet and frustrated. If that made him a bad man, he wasn’t the least bit sorry for it right now. “Because
you
like them?”

She turned away. “Don’t wear the ones with holes anymore.”

“I don’t have ones with holes.”

She glared him into submission. Even that was hot. He was losing his mind.

“Okay, maybe a few with holes.”

“Throw them out. And Mark?”

“Yes?”

“I hope you’re being...”

She didn’t seem to be able to finish the sentence and he felt a surge of victorious pleasure. “What, Haven?”

“Discreet in your affairs,” she said.

“Discreet in my affairs,” he repeated, mocking. “Like, what are we talking about here? No fingering women against the doors of their offices while their assistants are just outside?”

She crossed her arms and looked away. That gave him pleasure, too. Unsettling Haven Hoyt seemed to have become his new sport.

Of course, now that he knew how to really unsettle her, how to make her whimper and moan, none of this was nearly as satisfying as it should have been.

“For the time being, in the short term, you should be...”

“Celibate?”

“Careful.”

He had to swallow a smart-ass comment about how she knew from personal experience how quiet he could be. “In short,
celibate
,” he said. “Are you sure this warning comes from professional motives?”

“Jesus, Mark.”

“Just curious. Are you telling me this because it’s important for my image, or because now that you know what you’re missing, you don’t want anyone else to—”

“You’re an asshole,” she said.

“That’s what they say,” he said airily, but he didn’t feel as blithe about it as he sounded. He was beginning to believe that if he hung out with Haven long enough, she’d turn him into who she wanted him to be.

And he wouldn’t hate that, as he’d once thought.

He loved being around her, enjoying not just their sharp chemistry constantly tickling his senses, but how smart she was, how funny, how expressive, how intuitively she seemed to
get
him.

He loved who he was around her. She made him feel more like himself than he had since—

Well, certainly since he’d quit giving music lessons. And maybe than he had since he’d signed his name on the Sliding Up contract’s dotted line.

He had resisted, so hard, the idea of being remade, only to discover that she had somehow remade him into himself.

“Mark?”

She ran her slim fingers down the length of a brown leather dress belt. His brain ran riot with fantasies. Her fingers along the length of him. That belt, around her wrists, around his bedpost, her curvy body laid out for him like a gift on his bed. He could imagine her huge eyes as he crawled across the sheets toward her, her body arching in anticipation, working against the restraints.

His balls drew up, his cock hardening fast
.
He was so screwed.

“Mark?”

For a second he was still inside the fantasy and his name on her lips was a plea. Then he snapped to his senses and clutched the pile of plastic-wrapped boxer briefs before they could slide to the floor.

“Yeah?”

“What happened between you and Pete Sovereign?”

He’d been waiting for this question since Tuesday, and dreading it. “Why?”

“I need to understand because we have to figure out how to make this tour happen. I need to know where the hate comes from, on both your parts, so I can figure out how to get him on board.”

Mark sighed. “This isn’t a good story to tell you in the underwear department.”

“Is there a better place to tell this story?”

He thought about it a moment. “No.”

“Then shoot.” She pulled a studded belt from the rack, held it up, accepted his vehement head shake and replaced it.

God, he didn’t want to get into this with her, and yet he sort of did. Right there you had the way he felt about Haven. Conflicted and backward, all pent up and ready to spill. “There...was this woman.”

“So I gathered,” Haven said dryly.

“Her name was Lyn. She was a super-groupie. You know the type? Came to every show, knew every lyric of every song, had all of our life histories memorized. She had a lot of industry connections. She’d been around with a lot of bands, she was connected with labels, she was totally plugged in. She promised me things. She said she could get me a solo album. She said it was practically a done deal. She said—she said—”

Haven’s eyes were soft, sympathetic, but he just couldn’t get the words out.
She said she was in love with me
. “We were a couple,” he finished instead.

“And Pete?”

“We’d kind of had this jokey thing in the past about trying to see who could get a woman into bed first. But I had it in my head that he would be able to see that Lyn wasn’t one of those women, that she meant something to me. Problem was, he kept pursuing her, so I went to him and said I—I—cared about her—and he had to lay off her.”

“And he slept with her anyway.” It wasn’t a question. She reached out and touched his shoulder.

He had to pull away, because if the warmth of that touch made it past his T-shirt and into his skin, he wouldn’t be able to keep from grabbing her and holding her close.

“I shouldn’t have hit him. It was just fodder for all the stories that came out after that, saying I was the one who broke up the band. The truth was, Lyn got Pete a solo album instead of me, and when he left, that was what broke up the band. Neither Pete nor Lyn ever tried to set the story straight. Neither did I, because—I didn’t want anyone to think I actually gave a shit. I did confront Lyn, but—”

He broke off. Enough. He’d told her the story, he didn’t have to go there, to the deepest store of his humiliation and hurt. “Maybe it’s juvenile for me to still hold a grudge, but I know what he did, and that he did it knowing it would hurt me. He’s not a man I can bring myself to beg for anything. He’s definitely not a man who deserves my respect or even tolerance.”

“God,” she said. “I’m really sorry. That
sucks
.”

She’d stopped browsing through belts. The two of them were just standing there, together in the accessories section, her full attention on him. This was Haven—really hearing him.

“Were you in love with her?”

Trust her to cut through all the bullshit. Trust Haven to ask the one question he least wanted to answer.

Somehow he found himself nodding. “I was naive. An idiot.”

“Or not such an idiot,” she whispered. “I’ve read your life history, too. You were brought up by a single dad, pretty poor, the two of you worked your asses off to get you to Berklee so you could realize your musical dreams, and then, blam, before you even know it, you’re in this manufactured group, touring all over the country, women throwing themselves at you. But you were just a kid. Nineteen, right? So you were naive. It’s not a crime.”

He’d never seen it like that. Back then, from inside the mess, he’d felt like the biggest fool to ever grace the stage. He’d always assumed he deserved every knock his ego got.

Had anyone ever listened to him the way Haven did? He wasn’t sure. Maybe some people went through life without ever feeling
heard
like this.

“What a crappy place for you to be. With Pete and this tour.”

He frowned.

“What?” she asked.

“I got a call from my dad today and he’s thinking about moving to New York.”

“That’s good? Bad?”

“It’s good. It’s great, actually. Like I mentioned earlier, we’ve been talking almost every day, and he tells me what’s going on and I tell him stuff. Like, I filled him in on how you’re doing the image thing and about the barber and the personal shopper.”

But not about what had happened in Haven’s office—the conversation with Pete. That felt too personal. And certainly not what had happened after.

“I’d like to have him around,” Mark said. “I believe in family taking care of family. He doesn’t want to be sick and alone, and who can blame him? But it’ll cost me a fortune to find a place for him. We’re still figuring out if he should move in with me. I mean, it would pretty much be the end of my having any life of my own, given his medical condition and that he has nurses coming in all the time. Or even if I took care of him on my own—I need to find a place for him, or a bigger place for the two of us. But that’s expensive, and so’s the move itself.”

She nodded, sympathy on her face. He wondered that he’d ever, even for a moment, thought she was shallow or cold. Her eyes were full of warmth and understanding. As if she got it, how kowtowing to Pete Sovereign was both the worst and the only thing he could do. “In short, the tour has to happen.”

“Yeah,” he agreed.

“I’ll make it happen.”

For a moment he felt the purest relief, because he
believed
her. He knew if she said she’d do it, she’d do it.

And then he realized what she was saying.

“You’re not going out with him.”

“Just once. I think I can persuade him to cooperate.”

It was like an old-fashioned scale, his feelings held in the balance. On one side, the money. On the other, the pointless, irrational protectiveness he felt for her. No, not protectiveness. Possessiveness. Mark closed his eyes. He could picture the expression on Haven’s face when she came. Unleashed, free.
His
.

How had this happened? How had he let himself feel this much when she was just doing her job? She might be attracted to him, too, but he couldn’t delude himself that there was more to it than that.

“What did Lyn say to you?”

“What?” He’d been so deep in his musings that her question caught him off guard.

“When you confronted her? What did she say to you?”

Compared to all the other things that Lyn and Pete had done to him, the defense she’d made that night was nothing. But for him, those words—

He didn’t want to tell Haven. It would open him even more to her, render him that much more vulnerable when it turned out he was alone in his feelings. And yet, he couldn’t stop himself from answering. Haven made him want to spill everything.

“She apologized. For her mistake.”

“Isn’t that good?”

“She said she’d meant the things she’d said to me, but then she’d realized—that I just didn’t have the talent to make it on my own.”

Even now it stung. He’d seen the regret on Lyn’s face, the sincerity of her sorrow at having misjudged him. His sense of his own talent and possibility had shut down. And part of him waited, now, for Haven to look at him with the same regret, the way you looked at someone you’d broken bad but inevitable news to.
The patient may not make it till morning.

You don’t have the talent...

But Haven was shaking her head. “She’s wrong. She’s just wrong. Maybe she figured out that you’re not cut out to be a pop musician, but you already knew that. I heard you play blues, Mark. God. You
play.
You made me
believe
. I went home and bought, like, three blues albums. But you know? I wanted to buy yours. I wanted to lie on my bed with earbuds in and let you fill up my head. Hell, I wanted to
be
you and know I had that kind of passion in me.”