Kiss And Makeup
Kiss And Makeup
Taryn Leigh Taylor
A hot shade of lipstick calls for a hot, sexy guy…Makeup artist Chloe Masterson has a look for every occasion. Flying home for your sister's wedding and family torture? Easy. Bring out the sarcastic wit and black eyeliner. Bonus—the look catches the eye of the corporate hottie sitting beside her on the plane. Turns out Ben has the exact same last name, and everyone assumes they're married.When they get stuck in a hotel room together, Chloe decides to accept the gift the Fates have bestowed upon her. (Tip: a bold lip color does wonders for seduction.) But as their lies begin to snowball, Chloe and Ben find it harder and harder to distinguish between what's real and what's all just smoky eyes and mirrors.
A hot shade of lipstick calls for a hot, sexy guy...
Makeup artist Chloe Masterson has a look for every occasion. Flying home for your sister’s wedding and family torture? Easy. Bring out the sarcastic wit and black eyeliner. Bonus—the look catches the eye of the corporate hottie sitting beside her on the plane. Turns out Ben has the exact same last name, and everyone assumes they’re married.
When they get stuck in a hotel room together, Chloe decides to accept the gift the Fates have bestowed upon her. (Tip: a bold lip color does wonders for seduction.) But as their lies begin to snowball, Chloe and Ben find it harder and harder to distinguish between what’s real and what’s all just smoky eyes and mirrors.
“I can do torrid...”
Ben’s expression darkened seconds before he caught her mouth in a scorching, wet kiss that convinced her they were both wearing way too many clothes.
She reached for the buttons on his dress shirt, and when she’d finally popped the last one, he rewarded her with a shift of his hips that brought their bodies into perfect alignment, and the pleasure that streaked through her made her gasp.
Damn, he felt good. Hot and hard. Her fingers curled against his skin, and her hips bucked to get closer. She wanted Ben, naked and panting, thrusting inside her until she couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe.
She couldn’t care less about her sister’s wedding, or her exile in Chicago.
She felt alive. And sexy.
And desperate for more...
Dear Reader (#ulink_bdc17a55-badf-5886-9d50-d1697e76eea8),
You know that little smidgen of hope that hits when it’s just you, an in-flight magazine and the empty airplane seat next to you? Then the hot guy you were scoping out at the gate boards the plane, and your tummy flips with anticipation as he starts down the aisle? That uncomfortable chair beside you is suddenly chock-full of possibilities. Sexy, sultry, X-rated possibilities.
Yeah, that never works out in real life. Hottie McHotterson always walks right on by. But what good is writing fiction if you can’t fix that type of karmic unfairness and see what kind of sparks will fly between strangers on a plane?
Ben and Chloe were the perfect pair to explore the notion of instant attraction and whether a one-night stand has a shot of surviving once real life intrudes. And boy, does it intrude! Because you never really know if you’re right for each other until you’ve survived a snowstorm, a fake engagement, a wedding, a business dinner and your own mother, amirite?
Oh, and since this internet thing doesn’t seem as if it’s going to die down anytime soon, I’ve carved out a cyber-niche at tarynleightaylor.com (http://www.tarynleightaylor.com/), facebook.com/tarynltaylor1 (https://www.facebook.com/tarynltaylor1) and twitter.com/tarynltaylor (https://twitter.com/tarynltaylor), so stop by sometime. I’d love to virtually meet you!
Keep on dreaming out loud,
Taryn Leigh Taylor
Kiss and Makeup
Taryn Leigh Taylor
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
TARYN LEIGH TAYLOR likes dinosaurs, bridges and space, both personal and of the final-frontier variety. She shamelessly indulges in clichés, most notably her Starbucks addiction (grande-six-pump-whole-milk-no-water chai tea latte, aka: the usual), her shoe hoard (I can stop anytime I...ooh! These are pretty!), and her penchant for falling in lust with fictional men with great abs (Roarke, Harvey Specter, Kid Chaos, Dean Winchester and so on, ad infinitum.) She also really loves books, which is what sent her down the crazy path of writing one in the first place.
To my family—
Mom, for keeping me sane (and for believing in me always, no matter what),
Dad, for inspiring me (“You should add a kid with glasses. And a dragon.”),
and Logan, for keeping me honest (“Are you writing? Because that doesn’t look like writing.”).
And to my friends—
Crystal, you know I couldn’t do this without you, right? We brainstorm together, we split...70–30, plus you get the benefit of reading the stories no charge (that’s very fair);
Michele, this story is published because of you and I’m forever grateful;
and Michelle, thank you for teaching me to never ever give up on a dream. Ever.
Contents
Cover (#u07fede1f-2351-5912-87c8-308f0e738941)
Back Cover Text (#u743cf344-7784-5bef-84fd-df382818c833)
Introduction (#uc41a41df-472b-5aa3-97e6-eaf9f81ea61c)
Dear Reader (#u24cdd2f7-b31b-5cb2-a83f-5f9a2f66e6e8)
Title Page (#u0922c0ce-493f-59bb-ad5d-32d339562307)
About the Author (#u1230b41e-48a2-5f4e-8f66-086cd5591493)
Dedication (#u5e9d2d58-bf58-5678-8823-04ea7e350e08)
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Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
1 (#u0d14a43b-fbe8-521a-8f21-f2a7101e22f1)
“DOYOUWANT me to kick the crap out of that seat back and tray table for you?”
Chloe Masterson looked over at Window Guy, the man that the Goddess of Economy Airline Seating had seen fit to plaster against her right side. The upper-arm contact had started in Seattle and lasted until Chicago. Thanks to bad weather, their scheduled forty-five-minute layover in the Windy City was now pushing two hours, and had featured a long wait in the plane deicing line and then a “that didn’t sound good” thunk. The plane was now sitting motionless on a vast expanse of snowy tarmac and they’d officially hit the six-hour mark of their touching-a-stranger marathon fifteen minutes ago.
It wasn’t his fault, really. Window Guy had broad shoulders, so the contact was incidental and, in a weird way, kind of comforting. She liked that the sleeve of his gray wool suit was soft and warm against her skin.
And okay, maybe she was leaning against him a little more than was strictly necessary. Not because he smelled of spicy soap and warm man—which was a pretty wicked combination—but because he smelled better than the guy to her left. The gag-inducing aroma of stale sweat, onions and something else she couldn’t quite place but preferred to leave a mystery had worn her down about twenty minutes after boarding. That’s when Chloe had decided that the comfort of her left elbow wasn’t worth permanent olfactory damage and had conceded the battle of the joint armrest to him.
Damn middle seat.
“Sorry?”
Despite their close confines, she and Window Guy hadn’t exchanged more than the official “that’s-my-seat” gesture of air travelers the world over before he’d awkwardly shuffled past her to sit down. After that, he’d pulled his laptop out and tapped away at the keys like a good little company automaton while she’d worked her way through a few chapters of a gently-used Stephen King novel. She’d been so engrossed in her book, she hadn’t noticed that at some point he’d put the laptop away and moved on to reading the offerings from the seat pocket in front of him.
And that wasn’t all she hadn’t noticed.
Now that she was actually looking at him, his breach of their companionable silence was even more surprising. Because Window Guy was kind of sexy. Bedroom eyes the color of whiskey and twice as potent. A strong jaw and a straight nose. His brown hair was short enough to be business-appropriate, but long enough to get mussed up under the right circumstances. And that mouth! As she took her fill of him, it pulled slightly up at the right corner in an easy smirk that was hot as hell. He was the clean-cut kind of handsome that came with no visible neck tattoos and an expertly-knotted blue silk tie that bespoke gainful employment.
Men like him didn’t talk to women like her. He was way too...corporate. And she was...not.
At her question, he raised his chin at the worn gray vinyl seat back in front of her. “You’ve been giving that chair dirty looks for the last twenty minutes, and then you sighed,” he explained.
“I did?”
Window Guy nodded. “The sigh was pretty loud, actually. It disturbed my reading.”
“Oh. Well. I’m sorry that my sigh threw off your concentration.” Chloe sent a meaningful glance toward the airline safety pamphlet on his lap.
“The damage is done.” He picked up the tri-fold piece of card stock. “It was just getting good, too. After the cabin depressurized, the plane crashed and the passengers were proceeding in an orderly fashion for their lives!”
Huh. She hadn’t expected funny. Hot guys rarely had to develop such plebeian talents. “Sounds intense.”
“You’re telling me. I was really enjoying it until the author got all kinky and made the heroine take off her high heels before she used the inflatable slide. I think he might be a foot fetishist.” He shoved the pamphlet back in the seat pocket in front of him before he met her gaze with a teasing glint in his amber eyes. “Wow. Spoiler alert. I hope I didn’t give too much away.”
“No, I appreciate the recommendation. I’ll be sure to tell my book club about it.”
His grin was practiced, but appealing. “I’m Ben.”
Uh-oh. Time to nip this in the bud. “Well, Ben. You’re a very handsome guy, and I appreciate the effort, because I’m sure that maneuvering a sober pickup with only a safety card, an in-flight magazine, and an airsickness bag as props is a challenge that few men could meet. But don’t waste all your sweet, panty-dropping material on me. Save some of that A-game for Stewardess Barbie over there.”
They both looked at the perky blonde flight attendant who’d been making doe eyes at Ben since he’d boarded. Right on cue, she twirled her ponytail and glanced away coyly.
Ben shifted, trying to arrange his large frame more comfortably in the tiny chair—a futile cause. “Let’s get one thing straight here, if this had been a pickup, we’d already be—” he eyed his Rolex—so cliché “—three minutes into you becoming an airplane-bathroom sex convert. Let the record show that we are both still safely buckled into our designated seats, ipso facto, I clearly wasn’t flirting with you.”
Ignoring the frisson down her spine—legal jargon always had that effect on her—Chloe raised a skeptical eyebrow.
“Okay, I was kinda flirting. But, it was completely recreational. Minor league stuff.”
“Oh, please! Foot fetish references? That is gateway flirting. If I hadn’t called you out, you’d have escalated to the hard stuff—asking me my astrological sign and telling me how beautiful my eyes are.”
He laughed, and Chloe ignored the flare of pride at having elicited the sexy, rumbling sound. Not that she was flirting, either, mind you.
“Well, it’s hardly my fault that your eyes really are beautiful. Emerald green, with golden flecks that sparkle when you roll them like that because you think I’m being cheesy.”
“Oh. Well that’s probably because you are being cheesy. At least the safety pamphlet pickup was original.”
“Original enough to get your name?”
“Chloe,” she relented.
“Nice to meet you, Chloe.” He offered his hand again, and this time she accepted it.
His palm was wide and his fingers were long. He didn’t molest her hand; it was just an acceptable, firm shake between new acquaintances. Even so, a phantom warmth lingered after he’d relinquished his grip, the kind that buzzed up her arm and sort of made her wish he had molested her hand, at least a little. Chloe rubbed her tingling palm against the thigh of her jeans.
His gaze held steady on hers and his focus was flattering, almost seductive. If you went for that whole slick-successful-businessman-in-a-five-thousand-dollar-suit look. Which, she reminded herself, she didn’t. Not anymore.
For the most part, her tiny diamond nose stud and purple highlights were enough to warn corporate wunderkinds that they had nothing in common with her.
But then she remembered that she no longer had purple highlights. She’d dyed her piecey, deconstructed bob for her sister’s wedding. Right now it was a respectable, boring, normal shade of mahogany that skimmed her jaw before angling a bit lower in the front. The dye job was her attempt at a peace offering to her family. She just hoped it would be enough.
“...so if you look at it that way, cheese could be considered a high form of flattery, you know?”
Ben’s voice snapped her out of a flashback of the most recent guilt-laden, middle-name-invoking phone call with her mother.
“What? Sorry. I wasn’t listening.”
Ben’s grin was endearingly self-deprecating. “Tough crowd.”
“It’s not you.” Chloe shoved her offensively monotone hair behind her ears. “Going back to Buffalo has put me in a rotten mood.”
“That doesn’t seem fair. What’s Buffalo ever done to you?”
The derisive laugh slipped out before Chloe could stop it. “Now there’s a loaded question.”
Ben cocked a questioning eyebrow.
“I’m going to see my family.” She didn’t add “for the first time in four years,” because that was the scary part, the part that turned her stomach into a churning pit of nerves and dread. “My little sister’s getting m-married,” she said, forcing the word out. Man, was it hot in here? She reached up and twisted the overhead air vent open.
“Oh! Well, that should be...” Ben paused in a way that let Chloe know she hadn’t managed to hide her true feelings on the matter. He corrected midcourse, “no fun at all. Rings are like tiny shackles. Screw love. That’s what I say.”
It was a sweet attempt at a save, but Chloe was too far down the well to grab the rope.
“Weddings...” Suck. Wreck relationships. Ruin lives. She flipped through her mental thesaurus before going with, “aren’t really my thing.” She tugged at the front of her black T-shirt, but couldn’t quite shake the sudden sensation of a phantom Swarovski-crystal-encrusted, sweetheart-necklined noose tightening around her rib cage.
Oblivious to her cold sweat and racing heart, Ben continued to aim for small talk. “It’s a good thing you decided to fly in to Buffalo a few days early. This storm is really wreaking havoc on our arrival time.”
Chloe shook her head. “I’m not early. She’s getting married tomorrow.”
Instead of the nauseating cheer that announcement had been garnering since her sister had started flashing her showy, four-carat diamond engagement ring around social media, Ben had the decency to look puzzled. Chloe appreciated that.
“Your sister’s getting married on a Thursday in January?”
“You are only surprised by that fact because you’ve never met her,” she informed him. “Anyone who knows my sister would expect nothing less from her than to inconvenience her entire network of family and friends by making them take a day off of work. Can’t let a petty thing like the schedules of four hundred people interfere with her narcissistic, lifelong fantasy of having a winter wonderland-themed wedding on her birthday.”
Ben nodded. “So you and your sister are close, then?” he deadpanned.
Chloe’s smile caught her by surprise, but at least she could breathe again. He’d talked her down without even being aware of it. “You’re a funny guy, Ben.”
“It’s a gift.” He shrugged with faux modesty and loosened his sapphire-colored silk necktie. The hint of dishevelment made Chloe’s breath hitch, but this time it wasn’t the result of a chest full of anxiety. This feeling was warmer, and a little bit tingly.
She hadn’t dated a man in a suit since Patrick—hadn’t even looked at one. She preferred bad boys, the disreputable kind that parents didn’t approve of. So why was Mr. Future Businessman of America giving her a serious case of the wobblies?
She didn’t get a chance to scrutinize her odd reaction further. They both glanced up as an electronic chime sounded from the speaker above Chloe’s head.
“Good evening, passengers. This is your captain speaking. Due to a mechanical issue and the impending storm, our scheduled flight has been canceled.”
A collective groan filled the plane.
“Your flight crew will be handing out discount cards valid for a stay at any Value Inn location, a proud partner of Jetopia. Your boarding pass will be valid for tomorrow’s rescheduled flight to Buffalo, weather permitting. If you have further questions or are unable to make the 8:00 a.m. flight, please speak with a member of your flight crew. Again, we thank you for choosing Jetopia, and we apologize for the inconvenience.”
“What does he mean, tomorrow?” There was a definite note of panic in her voice, but Chloe was proud she’d managed not to shriek.
“I’m going to go out on a limb and guess he means the day after today.”
“Hey, Ben?”
“Yeah?”
“That thing I said about you being funny? I take it back.”
He waved it off. “As long as handsome panty-dropper still stands.”
She couldn’t even appreciate the joke—reality was seeping in. “I can’t be stuck in Chicago. I need to get to Buffalo. Tonight.” The wedding rehearsal and dinner were this evening. Her family would be expecting her.
Ben directed her gaze to the small oval window behind his head, and Chloe caught an ominous glimpse of the snow flying outside. “Better start walking then.”
Chloe took a deep breath of musty cabin air tinged with eau de Aisle Guy’s pits. Trapped. She glanced over as Ben liberated his iPhone from the breast pocket of his suit, thumbs flying over the screen as he, like so many other passengers, shared the details of this latest development with whoever was on the other end of the text message.
Chloe couldn’t bring herself to do the same. She hadn’t even arrived yet and she’d already failed to meet her family’s expectations. Not an auspicious start to her big reunion tour.
With another sigh, she flopped back in her chair, glaring once again at the seat in front of her.
She was stuck in Chicago.
With boring hair.
And an angry clan of Mastersons ready to pounce on her for the latest example of how she was ruining the hallowed family name.
This day could not possibly get any worse.
“You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?” she asked, her eyes never wavering from the cracked vinyl seat back.
“Sighing maniacally,” Ben explained.
“You seem awfully intent on the emotional health of complete strangers.” She slanted him a look that bordered on caustic. “You’re not a shrink, are you? Because my talking to a shrink would make my mother ridiculously happy.”
“And how does that make you feel?”
In a defensive maneuver, Chloe crossed her arms over her chest. “Okay, fine. You’re a little funny.”
Ben pumped his fist in silent victory.
“And for the record, I was thinking about how Neil Diamond has ruined my life.”
He shot her a surprised glance. “Really? I was wondering what he was up to these days.”
She tipped her head in Ben’s direction without breaking contact with the headrest. “It’s a very sad story about a crappy alarm clock, a pathological hatred of ‘Sweet Caroline’, and an unfortunate mix-up involving the buttons marked off and snooze.”
Ben leaned back in his own chair. “Fucking Neil Diamond,” he said, and it was so understated, so unexpectedly perfect, that she laughed.
“You’re pretty calm about this.”
“About taking Neil Diamond’s name in vain? Don’t let the suit fool you. I’m surprisingly controversial.”
Chloe shook her head, refusing to admit she was charmed. “Can’t you just be pissed off about the flight being canceled? Like a normal person?”
His shrug was philosophical. “We’re not getting to Buffalo tonight. Not worth getting worked up about if it’s out of your control.”
“That’s very Zen of you,” she said, though it wasn’t a compliment.
“Fortune cookies,” Ben sermonized, “are not only delicious, but full of extremely practical wisdom.”
At that moment, Stewardess Barbie appeared beside Aisle Guy and her massive breasts exerted a gravitational pull on the eyes of the entire row, Chloe’s included.
How did anything that top-heavy stay upright?
The flight attendant glanced down at her clipboard and Chloe couldn’t help but notice that her glittery pink eye shadow was creased and caking.
Chloe fought the urge to tell her about the new eye shadow primer that Titanium Beauty had just come out with. It was oil-free and did an incredible job of keeping shadow in its place all day. And that glitter was best saved for evening events because mattes and neutral shimmers worked best in daylight or fluorescent light. Also that with her skin tone, peachier shades would be much more flattering than pinks..
“Gordon Hinky?”
Aisle Guy’s gaze was stuck in the general vicinity of their messenger’s more...pneumatic assets. Rolling her eyes at the predictability of testosterone, Chloe held her breath as he raised his arm.
Barbie sped through the “sorry for the inconvenience” script in a bored monotone before flicking her gaze to more promising territory. “And that must make you Benjamin.”
Gak.
At least Ben had enough class to meet her eyes when he confirmed the obvious. “It’s just Ben.”
“Well, Just Ben, here’s your Value Inn voucher.”
Ben reached past her to accept the glossy slip of paper and Chloe caught the clean, masculine scent of him.
“It’s good for fifteen percent off. There’s a map on the back detailing the closest locations to the airport. Someone will be at the gate to direct you to the taxi and shuttle stands, but if you need any help finding your way or, you know, with anything, just say the word. I’d be more than happy to help you.”
The breathy offer was very Marilyn Monroe.
“Jetopia apologizes for the delay, but we hope you’ll give us the chance to make it up to you. We’d love to have you fly with us again.” After a long moment, she tore her gaze away from Ben and focused on Chloe.
“And you’re...” She glanced back at the list and her face fell like she’d just seen someone kick a puppy. “Oh.” Her eyes darted between Chloe and Ben for a moment. Finally she said in a normal tone, “I hope you enjoy your stay.”
“I’ll need my voucher,” Chloe reminded her.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Masterson, but there’s only one voucher per couple.”
“Oh, I’m not a couple. And it’s Miz. There’s no Mr. Masterson.”
“Actually...” Ben interrupted.
She twisted in her seat to find her handsome seatmate looking amused.
“I’m Mr. Masterson.”
“What?”
“My name is Ben Masterson.”
She stared at him for a long moment before turning back to the flight attendant. “I think there’s been a huge misunderstanding.”
Ben chuckled. “More like a Mrs.-understanding.”
“Are you kidding me?” Chloe exclaimed. “A pun? Now?”
“Just trying to keep my sense of humor intact,” he returned, unperturbed. After a beat, he added, “Dear.”
“We just met,” she pleaded, not trying to hide the anxiety in her voice. Chloe figured that an early-twenties poster girl for enhancement surgery probably understood a little something about desperation. “There’s no way we’re staying in the same room.”
“My goodness!” Chesty McLookatmyboobs’ attention focused on Ben with the precision of a heat-seeking missile, and her smile was one of renewed hope.
So much for girl power.
“I’m terribly sorry for the mix-up. I saw Ben Masterson and Chloe Masterson seated together on the passenger manifest and assumed... Well, let me find out what I can do for you.”
“Give me a voucher of my own and we’ll call it even,” Chloe suggested.
“I’m afraid I can’t just hand them out. For tracking purposes, I’ll have to assign one to you in our system. It’ll just take a second. I’m really sorry for the mix-up,” she said again, more in Ben’s direction, and sounding anything but sorry.
Chloe watched the flight attendant sashay down the aisle and disappear behind the first-class curtain before she swiveled to face her last-namesake.
“This is your fault, you know.”
He smiled apologetically. “I did set my weather machine to blizzard before I left Seattle.”
“You’re the one who rejected business class and deigned to sit with the common folk. No one would have assumed we were married if you and your Gucci suit had just stayed where you belong in the land of complimentary champagne and leg room.”
“Hey, statistically, the seats in the back of the plane are safer than the first seven rows. And how did you know this suit is Gucci?”
Chloe ignored him and his designer suit, unaware that she was nibbling at her right thumbnail.
Her mother would not be pleased when she found out Chloe wouldn’t be arriving until the day of the wedding. It was customary for the bride’s family to present a united front at the rehearsal dinner. Especially if a certain daughter’s absence would be duly noted and gossiped about.
She took a deep breath. Ben’s fortune cookies were right. Dwelling on the disaster wouldn’t change anything. Accepting that fact didn’t change her mood, though. “So your last name’s Masterson, huh?”
He nodded.
Crossing her arms, Chloe thunked her head against the headrest and closed her eyes. “Fucking Neil Diamond,” she said.
* * *
ASITTURNEDOUT, issuing another voucher did not “just take a second”. The conspiracy theorist in her was convinced Boobzilla had purposefully slowed the process to make sure Ben was miles away by the time Chloe entered the terminal. Not, Chloe was embarrassed to admit, that she hadn’t looked for him at the baggage claim when she finally made it there twenty minutes later, voucher in hand.
After grabbing her suitcase, she’d braved the icy roads in a crowded shuttle and was currently occupying the coveted “next in line” position in one of seven queues in the lobby of the Value Inn. Being this close to a shower and a bed had gone a long way toward taming her impatience. At least until the family of six ahead of her was told there was no room at the inn.
Chloe did a quick mental tally. Judging by the number of weary travelers still clogging the reception area, there were going to be a lot more disappointed people heading out into the snow tonight in search of shelter.
Chloe’s grip tightened on the strap of her purse.
Please don’t make me one of them.
When the balding desk clerk smiled at her, she stepped up to the counter.
“Welcome to the Value Inn. How can I help you tonight?” His voice was shockingly pleasant for a man dealing with a bunch of crabby, stranded nomads.
“Hi. Do you have a room for me?” They had to have a room left. She wasn’t picky. She’d even settle for access to a sink and a cot in the hallway.
“Let me check what I’ve got. What’s your name?”
“Chloe Masterson.”
The clickety-clack sound of his typing stretched her nerves taut, reminding her of a countdown clock on a bomb. “Here we go. And that’s for one night, correct?”
“Yes.” The word came out like a sigh, heavy on the s, and Chloe’s shoulders dropped to their normal position. She hadn’t realized how tense she’d been.
“Okay, we’ve got you in room 224. Do you want a swipe key?”
Chloe raised her eyebrows. “I’ll probably need one to get in the room.”
Her sarcasm was lost on him. Nonplussed, he ran a plastic key through the card reader and handed it over with a smile. “Your room is on the second floor. Turn right when you exit the elevator.”
Chloe paused in the act of unzipping her purse. “You don’t need my credit card? Or my voucher?” She pulled the crumpled slip of paper from her coat pocket and held it out to him. “Because I went through a lot to get this.”
“That won’t be necessary. Your bill will be issued when you check out in the morning.”
Unbelievable. “Oh, okay.” Cursing Boobzilla’s name, she shoved it back in her pocket. “Great. Thanks, then.”
“Enjoy your stay.”
She’d no sooner stepped away from the counter when the inevitable happened.
“Excuse me, folks,” the clerk announced to the crowd. “I’m afraid we are all out of rooms for tonight.”
Finally, something had gone right for her today. She hurried away from the outraged mob and into the elevator. The door slid closed behind her, and she was in such a good mood that she didn’t even mind that the Muzak version of “Song Sung Blue” was playing during the short trip.
The room was as easy to find as Mr. Sunshine had made it sound, and she shoved the card in the door, ready for a shower and a bed, in that order.
Instead, she opened the door to find a hot guy pulling a white T-shirt over the most spectacularly muscled back Chloe had had the privilege to see this side of a movie screen.
Oh, yum.
The forgotten door banged shut behind her.
He turned and she caught a glimpse of six-pack abs before the white cotton swallowed them up. Then she raised her eyes to his face.
Her suitcase slipped from her fingers and landed with a muted thud on the carpet. They stared at each other for an infinite moment—both the longest and shortest seconds of her life.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said.
A full-fledged grin spread across Ben’s face. “Honey, you’re home!”
* * *
“I SHOULDHAVEKNOWN! The second that clerk didn’t want my credit card or the stupid voucher I should have known.” She stomped into the room like she owned the place, abandoning her suitcase where it had fallen, and then her purse and coat beside it. “Why does today suck so much?” she asked before flopping onto his bed, her feet still flat on the floor as she stared up at the ceiling.
Ben was pretty sure she wasn’t talking to him. Which was fine. He was content just to look at her. To be honest, he’d hung around the baggage claim area for ten minutes after he’d grabbed his luggage, just in case she showed.
Ben had to admit, the pinup-girl-with-an-edge thing Chloe had going on—like some twenty-first-century Bettie Page—was working for him in a big way. Goth-rockers were not usually his type. As a general rule, he dated women who were soft and positive, not really the adjectives that came to mind when he stared at the pissed-off pixie glowering up at him.
“Your airplane girlfriend kept me in voucher limbo for so long that my suitcase was the lone bag circling the conveyer belt by the time I got to baggage claim. Then I almost missed the shuttle, and now this? There’s not even a comforter on this bed.”
“Oh. I took it off. Have you seen what happens when they shine a black light on hotel quilts?”
“That is gross and disturbing. But it’s still weird you got rid of it.”
What was he going to do with her?
He’d only struck up a conversation with Chloe on the plane to pass some time. And then she’d hit him with those liquid-lined, green-and-gold eyes and a bad attitude and he’d been all in. Kinda made him wish he didn’t have so much work to get done tonight.
But if his meeting in Buffalo went the right way, he was going to be the new account director at Carson and McLeod. And a promotion meant a raise, and a raise meant the cabin on the lake would be his.
Still, he couldn’t just throw her out. She wasn’t plastic pretty, like the cookie-cutter blonde flight attendant she’d just alluded to. Chloe was sharp and smart-mouthed and real. She gave as good as she got, and he liked that about her. He also liked that, sprawled across his bed sheets in something as innocuous as a black T-shirt and jeans, she somehow managed to look provocative as hell. His body hummed with testosterone-fueled appreciation.
Jesus, Masterson. Get a grip!
You’d think he hadn’t been laid in years, when it had actually only been—a depressing calculation revealed that it had been almost a year since his rebound fling after he and Melanie had imploded. He’d been so focused on work that he hadn’t noticed how long it had been. Which was pathetic on many levels.
“What the hell am I going to do?” Chloe fumed. “They don’t have any other rooms.”
“You can stay here.” The words were out before his brain had registered the consequences, but he didn’t regret them. It wasn’t even the testosterone talking. By all accounts, Chloe had had a rough day. She deserved a win. For once, work could wait.
Those amazing green eyes widened in surprise as she bolted upright on the bed. “What?”
“I mean, you’re already here. I’m sure all of the airport hotels are in the same boat, so there’s no sense heading back out into the snow. Besides, we’re married, right?”
Her death glare was adorable. And just a front. She was considering it. She had a horrible poker face.
Chloe managed to hold out for seventeen seconds before she exhaled contemptuously. “If you snore, I will smother you in your sleep. Just so you’re warned.”
Ben did his best to tamp down the wattage of his smile. It was cute that she still thought she was keeping up her tough-girl facade.
“Excellent choice, Masterson.” He grabbed his wallet from inside his suitcase. “You settle in here, and I’ll go see if I can get us a cot and some food.” Ben headed for the door. “If I’m not back by midnight, check the ice machine for my corpse.”
Chloe might be having a really bad day, but his was turning out pretty well.
2 (#u0d14a43b-fbe8-521a-8f21-f2a7101e22f1)
BENMAYHAVEneutralized the no-shelter problem for her, but he couldn’t help her with the Dragon Queen—her mother. She was going to have to slay that beast herself.
Chloe cast a covert glance at her purse, which was sitting on the floor where she’d abandoned it, about four feet away. Just do it, she lectured herself. Woman up and stop putting off the inevitable.
She heaved herself off the bed to retrieve her purse, grabbing her coat off the floor, as well. After she’d wasted a couple more seconds arranging her coat on the back of the desk chair and applying some ChapStick, there were no more stalling tactics left in her arsenal. With a resigned breath, she pulled out her cell phone and dialed the number she’d been dreading calling since the moment she’d realized she’d be spending the night in Chicago.
“Hello.” The frigidity of the word let Chloe know that caller ID had already announced her identity.
She exhaled. “Hey, Mom.”
“‘Hey, Mom’? You’re calling me during the rehearsal dinner where everyone is staring at the gaping hole where the bride’s sister is supposed to sit and all you have to say is ‘Hey, Mom’?” Fiona Masterson’s voice was eerily calm. Which meant her mother was furious. “Everyone is wondering where you are.”
She had no doubt that was true. Her sister’s big day might be the main event, but more than a few of the attendees were waiting with gossipy glee to see the sideshow—Chloe’s return.
“My flight got canceled. There’s a really bad storm here in Chicago. I’m really sorry.” Chloe paced the short length of the hotel room.
“This is why we wanted to buy you the first class ticket that would have gotten you here days ago, if you’ll recall. To avoid just such a situation. You know winter weather is completely unpredictable. Never mind the fact that you’ve missed your sister’s stagette, her bridal shower, her lingerie party, the family brunch, the luncheon for out-of-town guests, the—”
“I told you I couldn’t get that much time off work. I’m really sorry I missed...all those things, but it’s not as if I’m a bridesmaid or anything.” Thank God.
Some people might have felt slighted by the oversight, but Chloe had been all kinds of relieved. Standing up at the altar in front of all those people... Just the thought of it was enough to give her PTSD. “And I’ll be there for the wedding. I promise. Even if I have to hitchhike, I’ll be there.”
Her mother sighed, and Chloe hoped she’d sounded much less melodramatic when Ben had called her out for the same thing on the plane earlier.
“So help me, Chloe Marie, if you do not arrive in time for your sister’s wedding...”
“Mom, I gotta go. I’ll be there tomorrow around ten.”
Chloe disconnected the call and sat heavily on the side of the bed.
What was it about talking to her mother that made her feel like she was sixteen years old again? She’d moved across the country to escape the phenomenon. Yet all it took was a phone call to bring back all the feelings of being less than.
The tears caught her by surprise. They were followed closely by sobs that made her shoulders lurch. The more she cursed and fought the show of weakness, the more torrentially it manifested itself. After a while, she just gave in.
The sound of the door opening couldn’t have startled her more if it had been a gunshot.
Shit. She wiped desperately at her puffy, tear-swollen face, trying to erase the evidence of her breakdown. The man had the worst timing of anyone she’d ever met.
“Chloe? You should have seen the lineup for the restaurant. It’s a madhouse down there, so I had to improvise. Also, I added my name to the cot waiting list. Which is hilarious because— Hey, what’s wrong?”
“I’m fine,” she lied, willing him to turn around and give her a minute so she could pull it together.
He came closer. Chloe kept her eyes down and her body still, but he wasn’t deterred by her attempts to ignore him. She hiccupped as he set an ice bucket on the nightstand and then sat on the bed beside her.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” She shot him a watery smile, with every intention of leaving it at that. But when she saw the genuine concern on his face, felt the warmth of the reassuring hand he’d placed on her back, she spilled her guts.
“It’s just, today has sucked,” she said with a sniffle. “I’m talking monumental amounts of suckage, and I’m tired, and moody, and people have really been getting on my nerves. All I want is to go home, but I’m stuck sharing a hotel room with a complete stranger who must think I’m mentally unbalanced. And you’ve been really nice to me anyway. And now I’m crying again. I hate crying,” she finished on a shaky sob.
Ben reached past her to the nightstand and snagged a tissue, handing it to her.
“You see? You barely know me, you have every reason to believe I’m deranged, and still you have the decency to hand me a Kleenex.”
“It’s really not that big a deal.”
“Yes, it is, Ben. You’re nice. And you’re tall. You’re very tall.” She wiped her nose with the tissue. “How tall are you, anyway?”
“Six-three.”
“That is very tall.” Chloe shook her head, looking down at her hands. She picked resolutely at the flaking black nail polish on her right thumbnail. She must have been chewing on it—she did that when she was stressed.
She expected him to bail then, distance himself from his sobbing lunatic of a roommate with some teasing remark about how tall guys are known for their big wangs or something equally ridiculous. She’d laugh, and he’d laugh, and they’d get back to the superficial banter that befitted two strangers stuck in a hotel room together.
But he didn’t.
He just sat beside her, respecting the silence. And her thoughts slipped out. “Honestly, Ben. How is it possible for one person to mess up her life so monumentally?”
“Hey, I’m sure it’s not as bad as it seems right now.” He rubbed her back, his big hand hot against her T-shirt. “You’ll figure it out. You’ll fix it.”
Tears brimmed in her eyes with a vengeance. They burned like acid. “No. I won’t. And do you know why?”
Ben shook his head.
“Me, neither! I mean, do you see this? Do you see my hair?” She grabbed a handful and held it in his direction.
“Yeah...”
“I did this for them!” she exclaimed, dropping the strands back into place. “I colored it boring old brown so they wouldn’t be embarrassed by me, but it didn’t work! I’m not even at the wedding yet, and I’ve already disappointed them. Nothing I try ever works, Ben. I don’t know what to do.” She’d never said that to anyone before and admitting the truth hurt so badly she thought her ribs might crack.
Chloe dropped her face into her hands. Ben’s arms came around her, pulling her close, tucking her cheek to his chest. She gave in and greedily took what he was offering. Wrapping her arms around his waist, she leaned into him and let herself cry.
She wasn’t sure if it was minutes or hours, but he held her until she had no more tears.
“You know what, Chloe?” His voice was soft and deep, breaking the silence she’d been measuring with the rise and fall of his chest beneath her cheek. “Maybe there’s nothing to do. I mean, I realize I just met you, but you seem okay to me.”
That tiny reassurance allowed Chloe to muster enough gumption to reach up and wipe the wet tracks from her face. She couldn’t quite bring herself to lift her head off his shoulder, though.
“And they’ll see it. One day, they’ll see it. You just gotta give them some time.”
Her lip trembled, and she bit it, fighting the sadness. “They’ve had twenty-six years, Ben.”
She felt him exhale. “It’s a really hard thing, you know, not taking the people we love for granted.” She looked up at him then and he smiled, a sad-but-reassuring little half smile that made her believe there was a chance that the despair she felt in that moment might not be insurmountable.
Chloe pulled away with a final sniff. She was trying desperately to hold onto that moment of comfort even as the embarrassment of her epic cry-fest in front of a virtual stranger began seeping in at the edges.
She exhaled shakily. “Sorry I got mascara and snot on your fancy shirt.”
“It’s just a T-shirt,” he averred as he pulled the black-smeared wet patch away from his chest. He even managed not to look horrified.
“Yeah, but I bet it cost, like, fifty bucks.”
“Seventy-five,” he corrected. “But I’ll accept it as punishment for being douchebaggy enough to have spent that much money on a plain white T-shirt in the first place.”
Chloe’s chuckle was waterlogged.
“C’mere,” he said, tucking his thumb in the hem of his shirt. She leaned ever so slightly forward and let him rub the cotton-covered pad of his thumb under her right eye, then her left. She’d be surprised if she had any makeup on at all at this point. Some warrior, she thought, choking in battle and crying off her armor.
“There,” he said, showing her the black smudges on the fabric. “All cleaned up.”
She frowned, letting him know she wasn’t buying his bullshit.
“Okay, you should probably go wash your face before we have dinner,” he admitted. “Unless the raccoon look is a thing now.”
Grateful for the reprieve, Chloe headed for the bathroom, pulling her suitcase into the tiny room with her. She groaned when she caught sight of herself in the mirror.
Apparently in addition to being an all-around good guy and world-class hugger, Ben Masterson was also the King of Understatement. She looked like a comic-book villain whose face was melting off. Chloe shut the door and set her suitcase on the toilet, rifling through it for her toiletries case.
A couple of swipes of a makeup remover pad later, her cheeks were clear of black streaks, and her eyes were bare, if a little puffier than they had been this morning. She’d have liked to take all her makeup off and start again, but snotting all over Ben had been all the weakness she could handle. No way was she going to be bare-faced in front of him. She didn’t even start the makeup videos on her YouTube channel that way.
“Hurry up in there, Chloe. I’m starving!”
“Almost done! Don’t eat everything!” She ran a brush through her hair, topped up her deodorant, and rooted around in her suitcase in search of her pajamas.
* * *
WELL, TONIGHTHAD certainly not been the typical room-service-and-work type of night that tended to dominate his business trips.
Chuckling to himself, Ben pulled off his T-shirt, wiping his shoulder with it before folding it up and placing it in the dirty laundry bag he kept in his suitcase. He’d say one thing about Chloe Masterson, she was the antithesis of boring.
A woman who couldn’t decide whether to smile at him or punch him in the face. A woman who was super tough one moment, and vulnerable the next. A woman who had no idea her expressive face betrayed her, even in her most badass moments.
He tugged the white button-down he’d worn on the plane back on—she’d walked in on him before he’d gotten around to changing out of his suit pants, so it wasn’t like he’d be overdressed—but he left the hem untucked and the buttons at his throat open anyway.
She was such a nice change from the women who’d inundated his world lately. As he’d moved up the corporate ladder, everything had gotten more proper and refined. So serious. He’d met a lot of very pretty women with very pretty plans for their future. The few dates he’d been on in the past year had felt more like job interviews, and they’d fizzled accordingly.
But Chloe didn’t look at him as if he was a steak on display at a butcher shop. She wasn’t angling for marriage, sizing up his earning potential or evaluating his parenting qualities. Which was good, because marriage was not high on his list of priorities anymore. She was the kind of woman who understood that a date should be fun and flirty, two people trying each other on. No expectations, just opportunity.
Not that this was a date.
In fact, he wasn’t sure what this was, but he kind of liked it. Tonight he got to hang out with a flawed, stressed-out, hot-then-cold-then-hot-again woman with a kick-ass body, a pierced nose and a star tattoo on her right arm. And he couldn’t wait.
He moved her abandoned phone to the nightstand so he could prop the pillow upright against the headboard, and sat down against it. He’d just stretched his long legs out in front of him when he heard the bathroom door open.
She appeared from around the corner a moment later.
Ben let his gaze slip from her berry lips down to her bare shoulders, then to her arms—that star tattoo was going to be the death of him, he was sure of it—lingering a moment on the way she filled out her tank top before sliding past her black boxer shorts to take in her truly spectacular thighs, her shapely calves and the shiny black polish on her toenai—
“Oh, my God, are you walking on hotel carpeting in bare feet?” he asked, lunging forward. “Do you have any idea how gross hotel carpet is?”
He was half expecting another sardonic smile, but apparently the panic in his voice had registered, because her eyes widened in response to his alarm.
“How gross?” she asked, scrunching up her nose in preparation.
“My grandma was a nurse, and she once had this patient who ended up with cellulitis from walking barefoot on hotel carpeting—”
“Are you kidding me?”
“—and he didn’t get it checked right away, so by the time he went to the emergency room his whole leg was full of pus—”
“Ew, ew, ew!” She was hopping from foot to foot by this point.
“—and he had to stay in the hospital for three days so they could give him antibiotics intravenously.”
“Okay, enough, enough!” She jumped onto the bed beside him, scrambling into a sitting position and staring down at her feet. “Oh, God! My feet are itchy. Is itchy a symptom of cellulitis?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes went wide.
“Well, probably.” He didn’t remember all the details of the story...just the gross ones. “Do they feel swollen? Like there’s a bunch of pus accumulating under your skin, getting ready to erupt and—”
Chloe recovered enough to sock him in the arm. “Shut up with the gory details, wouldja?”
Ben rubbed his arm where her punch had landed. Chloe crawled over to the end of the bed. She braced one hand on the very edge of the mattress and reached toward her coat, which was hanging on the back of a chair that was just out of reach. Her fingertips brushed the thick material, but she didn’t quite get purchase on it. He watched in fascination as she set herself up for another attempt.
“What are you doing?”
“I left my suitcase in the bathroom, and if you think I’m setting one bare toe on that hideous, infested carpet then you’re way dumber than you look,” she said over her shoulder.
He shot her a tight smile. Ha, ha.
“So I’m going to stand on my jacket, slide my way over to the bathroom, and get myself some socks.”
“Or you could just ask me to get your suitcase,” he pointed out, getting to his feet.
She gazed up at him with such wonder that he honestly believed the idea had never occurred to her. “I... You don’t have to. I mean, I can do it myself.”
“I’m sure you could, eventually. But I’m happy to help, because if you slip and contract cellulitis, the amputation would ruin your sister’s big day.” Ben smiled angelically and dodged when she chucked a pillow at him.
Her ugly suitcase was sitting on the toilet. “You should really have a lock on this when you’re flying,” he advised, grabbing the scratched-up plastic case and heading back into the bedroom. He dropped it on the suitcase stand and set it down beside her. She threw open the lid to reveal bedlam inside.
“You know, most people fold stuff before they put it in the suitcase, just FYI.” Ben resumed his position on the bed beside her.
“Thanks for the packing tips.” Her voice sounded less than sincere as she hunted through the chaos. She rescued a ratty sock from inside the suitcase and jammed a foot into it. “Wow. That looks sexy.” She stuck her foot in the air so Ben, too, could admire the purple, elastic-challenged sock that was slouched around her ankle.
“Yeah, well, it’s sexier than athlete’s foot.”
“Amen, brother.” She reached out to give him a high-five before quickly pulling on the other sock. She closed up her suitcase. “Okay, now that that’s taken care of, on to more important things, like food.”
He reached over to the nightstand and dumped the contents of the plastic ice bucket on the bed between them. An avalanche of candy spilled across the sheet. “Dinner is served.”
“Whoa. What’d you do? Knock over a vending machine?”
“I wasn’t sure what you’d be in the mood for—salty, sweet, stale,” he offered, rapping a rock-hard, prepackaged Danish against the headboard with a disconcerting tap, tap, tap, “or all of the above—so I got one of everything.” He lobbed the Danish at the trash bin on the floor beside the television stand. It landed inside the plastic container with a heavy thud.
She did that cute nose-scrunch thing again as she deliberated over the colorfully-wrapped mound of sucrose and diabetes. “SunChips, Skittles, Aero Peppermint. And I’m taking the cherry Life Savers,” she decided, grabbing each of her picks from the junk-food dog pile as she named them. “You know, in case of emergency.”
Ben nodded contemplatively, undoing the buttons at his wrists. “Those are some bold choices, Masterson.” He rolled up his shirtsleeves in preparation for his own selection process. “Personally, I’m more of a traditionalist. I’m going for the Doritos with a side of Mike and Ike, Jolly Ranchers to cleanse my palate, and Twix for dessert. You want to split the pretzels as an appetizer?” he asked, ripping into them and holding the miniature bag in her direction.
“Why not?” Instead of taking one pretzel, though, she took a handful, and Ben liked that about her. She balanced them in a precise stack on her knee. “So does the wife know you leave the ring off while you’re away on business so you can lure pajama-clad strangers into sharing hotel-bed dinners?” she asked, crunching into a pretzel.
Ben shook his head. “Single and loving it.”
Chloe’s laugh was smug. “There’s a shocker.”
“So what about you?” he asked.
“What about me?”
“Well, I know you’re a Masterson by birth because on the plane you said there was no Mr., but that still leaves plenty of options.”
She shook her head as she started on the SunChips. “Also single. Mostly loving it, except when I’m on the phone with my mother, dodging the grandkid discussion. I did, though. Have a boyfriend. We broke up about five months ago. He cheated on me,” she explained, answering his unspoken question. “A couple of times, actually. It was all very cliché. I have horrible taste in men. Spider and I were a mistake right from the beginning.”
Ben choked on his pretzel. “You dated a guy named Spider?”
Chloe nodded.
“Wow. Was he a professional wrestler?”
“No.”
“Did he have superpowers?”
Chloe rolled her eyes. “He owned a tattoo parlor.”
“That was going to be my next guess.” The chip she hurled in his direction bounced off his chest and landed on the sheets. “So where did you meet Spider? Intermission at La Bohème? Church book club?”
“I met him when he gave me these.” She set her chips on the pillow and reclined, tugging the waistband of her shorts down enough to reveal a pair of small birds etched just inside her hip bones, one on either side of her abdomen.
Ben almost swallowed his tongue. Christ, he ached to touch her. His hands flexed involuntarily, resulting in the decapitation of several pretzels unfortunate enough to be left in the bag he was holding. He set it on the mattress beside him and took a deep, steadying breath. And he’d thought the star on her arm was haunting him.
“Which is kind of ironic when you think about it,” she continued, oblivious to his slack-jawed appreciation of her body, “because swallows mate for life.” She snapped the elastic back into place and, instead of resuming her sitting position, she rolled onto her tummy.
Is she commando under those shorts?
“Anyway,” said Chloe, reaching toward the pillow to retrieve her dinner as though her extreme hotness hadn’t just evaporated every speck of moisture in his mouth, “I finally kicked his ass to the curb when I walked in on him and his latest conquest christening the kitchen table I paid for. And the rest, as they say, is history. How about you?”
Ben managed to work up enough spit to moisten his tongue. “I have never dated a guy named Spider.”
“C’mon, Ben. I showed you mine.” Chloe fished the last chip from the bag, crumpled the empty packaging in her fist and tossed it awkwardly over her shoulder in the direction of the garbage can. It hit the end of the bed and rolled onto the navy carpet. “Spill it. How did your last relationship go down in flames?”
Melanie’s face flashed in front of his eyes. He felt like a dick for giving Chloe a hard time. He was the king of clichés.
The boss’s daughter. The heirloom ring. The proposal eclipsed soon after by her announcement that she was leaving him. For some douchebag lawyer who was her father’s age and had enough money to keep her in the style to which she was accustomed. They’d walked down the aisle six months after she’d ditched his ass. They’d recently celebrated a year’s worth of wedded bliss.
Ben shook off the humiliating memory.
“Nothing to tell.” Ben poured some M&M’s into the palm of his hand and held them in Chloe’s direction.
“Love ’em and leave ’em, huh?” she ventured, selecting the three red ones from the mix and eating them simultaneously.
Ben transferred the remaining candies from his palm to his mouth and gave her a “whatcha gonna do?” shrug. “What can I say, Chloe? I’m a lone wolf. I don’t play by society’s rules.”
Smiling, Chloe tore open her Skittles. “Perfect. Then you can be the one to spike the punchbowl at the next family reunion. I’m tired of being the black sheep of the Masterson family.”
He grinned. “Much as I’d like to be in on your diabolical plots, I probably won’t be scoring an invite to the party. Grandpa and Grandma Masterson couldn’t have children. My dad was adopted.” He selected a blue M&M’s from the package and tossed it in the air, catching it in his mouth.
She froze, sexy green eyes wide. “We’re not twelfth cousins twice removed?”
The idea hadn’t even occurred to him, but he realized now it had been dominating her thoughts. And why wouldn’t it be? Unlike him, she couldn’t have been sure they weren’t related.
Something had shifted in the way she looked at him. It was a slight change, almost indiscernible, but he felt it in his gut. And a little south of his gut.
She took a deep breath and Ben was treated to an eyeful of cleavage. God, her breasts were amazing. His hands flexed again.
His pulse raced and Chloe’s breathing grew shallower. Her lips parted.
The piercing cry of the hotel telephone jerked him out of the moment.
He fumbled with the bulky receiver before bringing it to his ear. “Hello? Yes, this is Ben. No, I only requested one cot. Yes, I realize the room has a queen-size bed.”
His prey—or had she been the hunter?—took the opportunity to retreat, mouthing the word shower at him before grabbing her suitcase and disappearing.
* * *
SHEWASINBIG, big trouble.
Chloe tipped her head back and let the warm spray of the shower wash the remnants of the day and the smell of chemically-approximated flowers—courtesy of the Value Inn’s complimentary two-in-one shampoo—from her hair.
This wedding stuff had been stressing her out since the day she’d received the meticulously calligraphed invitation requesting her presence at her little sister’s nuptials. Throw in a couple of icy phone calls with her mother and a return-airfare-from-Seattle-to-Buffalo-shaped dent in her savings, and, well, Chloe was on the edge.
And people on the edge did stupid things, such as blubber in front of a complete stranger, and then think dirty, filthy thoughts about him. And while she’d found Ben handsome from the start, something warm and wicked was bubbling up to the surface now, waking parts of her that had been dormant for...well, quite a while.
If not for the ring of the phone, she’d be letting Ben indulge a few of those parts right now. Suddenly the water sluicing over her body felt hotter. She ran her soapy hands over her breasts and across her stomach, the utilitarian washing of her body growing sensual. She would love to explore Ben’s abs, to see if her brain had Photoshopped them in hindsight, or if they were truly as spectacular as she remembered. Her mind drifted lower and so did her hands.
Oh, God.
She knew how long it had been since a man had touched her—going on five months now—but how long had it been since she’d touched herself? She couldn’t remember the last time she’d indulged in the best stress relief available to womankind.
Sure, nothing beat a willing partner, but there was something to be said for being the one in control...of getting exactly what you wanted...right when you needed it.
Yes. Oh, yes.
Chloe reached out to brace her hand on the wall but overshot and knocked the entire line of Value Inn mini bath products off the built-in shelf. They rained down to the tub with a series of bangs that jerked her out of the moment. Her heartbeat, already revving from her sexy daydreams, revved even higher with a shot of adrenaline.
Seriously? First the phone, and now this?
Chloe knew when she was beat. With a sigh, she turned off the shower. She reached past the curtain to pull one of the white hotel towels off the metal rack above the toilet. Like all mass-laundered hotel towels, it was scratchy and barely reached the tops of her thighs when she wrapped it around herself.
The TV went silent as she stepped out of the tub. There were some muffled noises she couldn’t quite place, and then the squeaky floor betrayed Ben’s presence.
Chloe froze.
He was walking toward the bathroom.
Her hand flew to her chest, gripping the tiny towel in a tight fist. Her skin buzzed. Her heartbeat picked up. The light seeping under the bathroom door was interrupted by his shadow. There were only two inches of ramshackle door and a threadbare towel separating them. He was right...there...
“Chloe? You okay?”
Oh, man. His deep voice hit her right in the estrogen and her body picked up where it had left off in the shower. All that delicious heat flared back up. “Fine. Dropped something.” The ability to form full sentences had deserted her.
“Okay. Well, good news. According to the weather forecast, the storm’s moving quicker than they thought. It’s already stopped snowing out there. We should get out of here on time tomorrow.”
“Great.” She hoped the word didn’t come out as breathy as it had sounded to her own ears.
“I’m going to head downstairs and see a man about a cot. Or a woman. I’m not picky. Judging by the ominous ‘no one’s available to take your call’ message I just got when I phoned the front desk, it might take a while. Wish me luck.”
“Good luck.” Yep, pretty breathy. Now she felt guilty for forming such a dark opinion of Stewardess Barbie. Maybe the poor girl couldn’t help it. Maybe it had been Ben’s fault the whole time.
Then the hotel room door shrieked open and banged shut.
Chloe exhaled a shaky, disappointed breath.
What had she expected him to do? Bust open the door, profess their chemistry was undeniable, and ravish her like the hero in some old romance novel her grandma kept hidden at the back of her bookshelf? Well, kind of. But dudes got arrested for that kind of stuff nowadays.
With a sigh, Chloe wiped the steam from the mirror and stared at her blurry image.
Barefaced. Plain brown hair.
Maybe it was for the best that Ben hadn’t broken down the door after all.
She barely recognized herself. She wasn’t even in Buffalo yet and she was already reverting to the old Chloe. The one who’d been so desperate to escape. It was as if the closer she got to home, the more of her identity she was losing.
Her mother always said she wore too much makeup. It didn’t matter how many strangers complimented her, or how many friends asked for a quick lesson. Her mother wouldn’t be impressed that she’d worked her way from sales associate to manager of her local Titanium Beauty store in less than two years. Or that customers loved her makeup recommendations, and that the job afforded her a decent apartment and a means to pay her bills. To Fiona Masterson, it would never be more than a menial labor job at a makeup store in the mall.
And sure, her life wasn’t as posh as her childhood had been, but she had a position in an industry she loved, and it was a great learning experience that was going to help her when she finally launched her own business and became a full-fledged makeup artist. She’d even started a YouTube channel where dozens of people thanked her for her tips and tricks on a weekly basis. It wasn’t netting her much money yet, but she’d broken the five-hundred-dollar mark two months in a row. Not bad for a fledgling channel that relied on word of mouth.
Besides, making money wasn’t the reason she had a YouTube channel. Mostly, it was a place for her to indulge her passion for makeup, for teaching women how to apply it, for investigating and reviewing products. Makeup wasn’t just about vanity, it was about confidence, and she loved reading the comments of her subscribers as they discovered their best selves.
She grabbed the tiny blow-dryer that hung on the bathroom wall and attacked her wet hair with the renewed resolve of a woman with a plan. She was done feeling crappy about herself. She had a video to make for her regular Sunday night upload, anyway, so why not kill two birds with one stone?
First she was going to do her makeup.
Then she was going to do Ben.
3 (#u0d14a43b-fbe8-521a-8f21-f2a7101e22f1)
ONCEHERHAIR was under control, Chloe pulled on some sexy underwear—a black satin push-up bra with matching panties—and added a black T-shirt for modesty’s sake. And socks.
Then she grabbed the cosmetic case and headed back into the room. She set her bag on the desk and liberated her laptop from her giant purse.
While it whirred to life at the touch of a button, Chloe took a seat and turned on the lamp beside her. She rummaged in her bag through the familiar jumble of eye shadow pots, Q-tips, brushes, eyeliners and mascara, making her selections as her computer booted up.
Once she’d settled on her makeup choices, she set to work, using the mirror hanging on the wall to make sure her concealer, foundation and powder were blended flawlessly into her skin. A little blush finished off her base, and she was ready for the fun stuff.
She went for a relatively simple daytime-appropriate look of blue-grays and soft purples.
Once she was happy with how her left eye had turned out, she pulled the laptop in front of her and opened the programs she needed. With the press of a button, her image appeared on the computer screen. She tucked her hair behind her ears and clicked Record.
“Hi, guys, Chloe here. I’m on the road this week, and as you can see,” she motioned at the disheveled bed behind her, “my accommodations are not the most glamorous. But that’s no reason not to look like a million bucks! So here’s a quick makeup tutorial for all you jet-setters out there. A lot of you have been asking me for tips on what to bring with you on a trip. So my first recommendation is to pack a great eye shadow palette. With a palette, you get a lot of variety without taking up a lot of space, plus, all the colors are guaranteed to go together.” She flipped the case full of blues and purples open and angled it toward the camera. “I’m going to be using this eye shadow palette by Jeweled Web—it’s called Suburban Storm.
“For this look, I’m also going to be using an eyelash curler, my trusty brow gel, my favorite drugstore liquid liner, and the Lashes for Days mascara from Titanium Beauty.” Chloe held each product up to the camera as she named it, and the routine of it all calmed her.
“As always, I’ve already done the left side, so you have an example of what we’re aiming for.” She turned her head a little and closed her eye. “So now that we’ve amassed the troops, I’ll show you how to recreate this effect, and then we’ll amp it up so you can see how an eye shadow palette can take you from business meeting to nightclub, even when you’re away from home.”
She fell easily into the rhythm of her makeup routine, chatting confidently at the camera, noticing from the corner of her eye that she was just approaching the five-minute mark as she finished up with her mascara wand. Perfect. Her under-six-minute videos always seemed to pull more views than the longer ones.
“So that’s it.” Chloe angled her head to the side, closed her eyes, opened them and leaned toward the laptop screen. “A dramatic look for a night out, or if you’re like me, any given weekday. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments. Thanks for watching. I’m Chloe and as I always say, ‘makeup, not war’. Until next time.”
Chloe clicked a few settings in the program, saved the video file, and set her laptop aside. Her weekly makeup tutorial was ready to post to her YouTube channel on Sunday night, as scheduled.
And she was ready for Ben.
* * *
BENSTOPPEDINfront of the door and liberated the key card from his pocket, taking a moment to notice that his Prada dress shoes had fallen victim to the weather. The snow and salt had left streaks on the usually-gleaming black leather. He’d need to clean them before the big meeting tomorrow. The day he’d bought them, the salesgirl at the Bellevue Neiman Marcus had oohed and aahed over them, assuring him they were top-of-the-line, as comfortable as they were stylish, but if he was being honest, he still preferred the beat-up Converse shoes he used to wear.
Dress for the job you want, he reminded himself. It would all be worth it when he was hanging out at his cabin. He might even enforce a strict Chucks or bare-feet-only policy there.
He unlocked the door and strode inside. “Chloe, they’re out of cots, so...”
He stopped. Blinked. Tried to process the delectable sight before him.
“That’s okay. I don’t think we’re going to need the cot, do you?”
“You’re not wearing pants.” It was an inane thing to say, but in his defense the blood was rushing away from his brain at an alarmingly fast rate.
Chloe’s laugh was low and sexy. “You’re a real charmer, Masterson, but your powers of observation are a little off,” she chided, glancing down at herself, “because I’m— Oh, shit!” When she looked back at him, his seductress was frowning. “I meant to take the T-shirt off before you got back.”
She reached for the hem and tugged her black shirt over her head, dropping it to the ground. Ben didn’t think he’d ever been as deeply in lust with someone as he was with this woman in her sexy black-satin lingerie and a serviceable pair of black socks.
He wasn’t sure if she’d awakened some weird sock fetish he’d never known he had, or if it was just damn adorable that she’d heeded his warning about cellulitis, but her brand of sensible sexuality had made him so hard it was a wonder his fly was still intact.
And that was before she walked over, grabbed him by the front of his shirt and kissed him like she’d been thinking about it at least as long as he had.
His arms came around her, pulling her closer. They both groaned at the full-body contact.
He kissed her again, licking into her mouth until he drew a sigh from her sweet pink lips. “You changed your makeup,” he said, and the pleased expression on her face made him glad he’d mentioned it.
“I’m surprised you noticed.”
“Well, in my defense, I’m a guy, so no pants trumps purple eye shadow every time. But that doesn’t mean I won’t get around to noticing how soft and pretty and touchable you look.” He reached up and tucked her hair behind her ear. “So different than the badass green and black from earlier.”
She tightened her grip on his neck, pulling him down for another kiss, and they were both panting when their lips parted again.
“I’ve wanted this since the moment we shook hands on the plane,” he confessed, kissing her jaw and running his fingers over smooth, warm skin and cool black satin.
“That’s pretty presumptuous, Masterson.” Despite her words, she tipped her head back so he could continue trailing kisses down her neck. He walked her backward to the bed.
“How is it presumptuous?”
“I just decided this was going to happen while I was in the shower. Sex definitely wasn’t on the table before that.”
“Sure it was,” he countered, placing her on the mattress. “Ask Spider.”
Chloe’s laugh was full and rich as she scooted up on the bed so she could recline on the pillows. “I can’t believe you just said that! I share my tragic past with you and you use it against me?”
He pulled off her socks. “Face it, Chloe. This was meant to be. The plane? The hotel mix-up? Fate’s practically begging us to have sex.”
Her smile was decadent. “I think you may have misunderstood the difference between fate and hormones.”
“No way. This is definitely fate.” Ben joined her on the bed. “I mean they don’t call it a layover for nothing.”
“Stop that,” she said with a breathy giggle that drove him wild. Ben was enchanted, no doubt about it. And very turned on. “Stop what?”
“Stop making me laugh.”
He kissed her collarbone. “Why?”
“Because one-night stands aren’t supposed to be funny, they’re supposed to be torrid and sexy and raw.”
“Oh, I can do torrid.”
* * *
COULDHEEVER.
His expression darkened seconds before he caught her mouth in a scorching, wet kiss that convinced her they were both wearing way too many clothes.
She reached for the buttons on his dress shirt, fumbling them open with lust-clumsy fingers. When she’d finally popped the last one, he rewarded her with a shift of his hips that brought their bodies into perfect alignment, and the pleasure that streaked through her made her gasp.
Damn he felt good. Hot and hard. Her fingers curled against his skin, and her hips bucked to get closer. He groaned, grinding harder against her, squeezing her breast with a large, warm hand. She wanted Ben, naked and panting, thrusting inside her until she couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe.
She couldn’t care less about her mother’s disappointment, or her sister’s wedding, or her exile in Chicago.
She felt alive. And sexy. And desperate for more.
She ran her palms across his beautiful shoulders and down his back. When she reached the waistband of his pants, she let her fingers follow the material around to his stomach and traced the reverse path, up his ridged abdomen and hair-roughened chest.
“Oh, God,” he rasped, pulling away a little, but she rose up, catching his mouth as she ran a thumb across his nipple, delighting in the shudder that quaked through him at her touch. “Chloe, stop for a second.”
“Make me,” she growled playfully, nipping his bottom lip, loving the way his muscles jumped at her touch. He groaned. “Jesus, you feel so good.” He kissed her back, hot and frantic, before tearing his mouth away again.
“Chloe, are you sure about this?”
Ben was staring down at her, hair mussed, eyes dark, looking like the answer to all her sexual frustrations. “I need this, Ben.” She was desperate to experience more of the buzzing current running between them, to block out the shitty stuff and lose herself with this man.
She might as well have said abracadabra, her words had such a magical effect on him. That last little bit of concern that had lingered disappeared in a wolfish grin. “I meant are you sure about the bed,” he lied. “Because I’d be happy to move this over to the table if you want to be able to tell a better story at the stagette.”
“I already missed the stagette,” she responded, pressing a kiss against his jaw, “and the family brunch,” she kissed his neck, “the reception for out-of-town guests,” the hollow of his throat, “the rehearsal,” his collarbone, “the rehearsal dinner—”
“Oh, okay, now who’s being funny? This bed is a joke-free zone, Masterson. Your rule, not mine.”
“You’re right,” she conceded. She leaned back and raised an eyebrow. “You’d better take off your clothes and get me on track again.”
His mouth hitched up at the corner in a devilish half smile. “Yeah, baby. I got your torrid right here,” he said, and her laughter betrayed her change of heart. Maybe funny did have its place in the bedroom after all.
Ben got to his feet and pulled his shirt the rest of the way off.
She’d never been into male strippers—way too cheesy for her taste—but watching Ben strip was a study in seduction. There was no teasing or coyness, just a man taking off his clothes.
And then, finally, he stood naked and aroused in front of her. All sinewy muscle and powerful limbs. And she wanted him. All of him.
“Your turn,” he said, his voice so low and raspy that she shivered.
Chloe pushed onto her knees, reaching behind her back to unhook her bra. She peeled the material away slowly and air rushed against her skin, doing nothing to cool the heat that raged inside her.
Then there was nothing left between them but her underwear. She tucked her thumbs into the waistband, inching them down her thighs. It was one of the sexiest moments of her life, revealing herself to him this way, and his predatory stare raised goose bumps on her skin.
“You’re so beautiful.”
And she believed him in that moment because she felt beautiful. Powerful. Tonight she was daring and sexy, an erotic fantasy. With a grin that was pure siren, she slipped her panties off the rest of the way and tossed them to the floor. “So what are you going to do about it?”
“Oh, I’ve got a couple of ideas,” he promised with a wicked smile. He grabbed protection from somewhere inside his suitcase. Chloe kept her eyes on him as he ripped into the package. She was surprised by how sexy it was, watching him handle himself, roll the condom down the length of his shaft.
She’d never really paid much attention to this part of the process before. She was usually too far inside her own head—How did she look? How did he think she looked? How could she make her boobs seem bigger and her stomach seem flatter?—to pay much attention.
She was paying attention now.
He was big, deliciously so.
She was all damp heat and wanting. When she licked her lips, he practically pounced on her, pressing her back into the mattress. Then he shifted and his erection was between her legs and it was so perfect having him there, just where she wanted him.
When he started circling his hips, applying more pressure, Chloe nearly cried out. “Deeper,” she whispered, burying her head in the crook of his neck. “Please.”
He was inside her with a single thrust, a fast, hard invasion of her body that knocked the wind from her in the best possible way.
“I want you so much, Chloe,” he growled, proving it with every flex of his hips, until she was wild beneath him—panting, sweating, clinging.
Her body was on fire for him. She pulled her knees up, trying to get closer, and the slight change in position must’ve felt just as good to him as it did to her, because he swore and upped his pace. Her entire world had narrowed to the pressure building inside her.
Suddenly, he pushed himself up on one elbow, but before Chloe had a chance to mourn the loss of his chest against her breasts, he moved his hand between them and rubbed his thumb roughly against the most sensitive part of her, startling a cry from her throat. Her brain short-circuited as a sharp shock of white-hot heat rolled through her, swamping her with pleasure a moment before he joined her in nirvana.
4 (#u0d14a43b-fbe8-521a-8f21-f2a7101e22f1)
BEN STEPPED FROM the jet bridge onto the plane, stifling a yawn. He was definitely feeling the lack of sleep. Not that he was complaining. The mere memory of Chloe writhing beneath him, his hands on her skin, her tongue in his mouth... Ben shifted with discomfort as his dick stirred at the erotic recollection.
What he planned to complain about when he saw Chloe again was the fact that he’d woken up alone this morning. But first he had to make it to his seat. He shuffled farther into the plane, waiting as the gentleman in front of him hoisted his suitcase into the overhead compartment.
Jesus, he could still smell her. It was an unfortunate by-product of an overactive imagination and this morning’s shower. He’d used what she’d left in the tiny bottle of complimentary hotel shampoo, and now the achingly familiar perfume of flowers lingered around him. Normally it would have made him nauseous, but thanks to the wrestling match on the bed last night, it was making him horny.
Ben pushed a hand through his Chloe-scented hair and continued to sidestep down the narrow aisle until he arrived at row G and the object of his lust-filled fantasies came into view.
She was wearing faded jeans and a white T-shirt with a zombified Audrey Hepburn on it. Her lips were stained a deep shade of berry; her eyeliner was back with gothic vengeance. And if his cock had been mildly interested at the memory of her, the reality of Chloe had its full attention.
Her attention, though, was studiously focused on the in-flight magazine in her lap.
“Is this seat taken?”
She glanced up as he shoved his carry-on into the overhead bin. She might have sighed as he brushed past her to sit down, but he couldn’t be sure.
“Guess I should have thought this through a little better. I was trying for a dramatic and mysterious exit after a single night of passion.” She flipped a glossy page with her index finger.
“Yeah, assigned seating really messes with drama.”
She flipped another page. “Worst one-night-stand exit ever.”
“On the contrary. You were very quiet when you left—I didn’t wake up at all. Nothing was drawn on my face in permanent marker, and I still have my watch, my wallet and my credit cards,” Ben countered charitably. “As far as I’m concerned, this ranks very high on the scale.”
His joke earned him a withering glare.
“I meant that we’re stuck in forced proximity and tight confines, with no choice but to ignore each other awkwardly and try to keep our arms from touching until we can finally go our separate ways. Which reminds me, I’m claiming this now.” She laid her right arm on the armrest from elbow to wrist, completely covering it from view.
“Or...we could defy the expected and skip the awkward silence. Just keep on living life as though I didn’t ruin you for other men last night.”
She raised an unimpressed eyebrow.
“Look, Chloe. We’ve got about an hour of forced proximity left to go here. So what do you say we move on, start over?”
* * *
“STARTOVER?” she asked speculatively. Like I’m not completely and utterly mortified that I jumped you in the hotel room last night? “As in we do that lame handshake thing in all the girly movies and reintroduce ourselves?”
Ben laughed, and the rumbling sound put a dent in her defenses. “Yeah, that.”
With a shrug of acquiescence, Chloe held her hand out. “I’m Latoya.”
Ben smirked at her as they shook. “Julio.”
“Hmm. Sexy name. So tell me, Julio, what do you do for a living?”
She was expecting a smart-ass comment, like “romance novel cover model,” but instead she got: “What do you think I do?”
She arched her right eyebrow. “Honestly?”
He nodded.
“Sales.” She didn’t even hesitate. “Ad exec, maybe? That or hocking used cars.”
“Wow. Don’t take a second to think about it or anything.” Ben’s voice was light, jokey, but his forehead was a bit furrowed, and there was a gravitas to his next words. “How come?”
“Are you kidding me?”
His silence said he was not.
She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I don’t know. The way you dress is part of it.” She eyed his attire.
“Lots of men wear suits. Newscasters. Athletes. Mob bosses. The alter-egos of superheroes.”
She remained unmoved. “Am I right?”
Ben shrugged. “I can neither confirm nor deny this line of questioning until you tell me what you do.”
“What do you think I do?” she mimicked.
He turned in his seat to look at her, really look at her, and Chloe squirmed a little under the inspection. She was this close to blushing. To counteract the uncomfortable feeling, she forced herself to square her shoulders and raise her chin a notch.
“Well, I’m gonna strike flight attendant and used car salesman from the list of possibilities, considering your obvious scorn for those professions.”
Chloe flashed him a tight smile. Ha, ha.
“Um, okay. You’re not a dentist. You’re not the vice president of anything.” His eyes darted to the zombie on her T-shirt. “And you’re not a kindergarten teacher.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Why do I suddenly feel like this game is going to be less than flattering?”
“What do you mean, suddenly? Did you hear
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Taryn Leigh Taylor
A hot shade of lipstick calls for a hot, sexy guy…Makeup artist Chloe Masterson has a look for every occasion. Flying home for your sister's wedding and family torture? Easy. Bring out the sarcastic wit and black eyeliner. Bonus—the look catches the eye of the corporate hottie sitting beside her on the plane. Turns out Ben has the exact same last name, and everyone assumes they're married.When they get stuck in a hotel room together, Chloe decides to accept the gift the Fates have bestowed upon her. (Tip: a bold lip color does wonders for seduction.) But as their lies begin to snowball, Chloe and Ben find it harder and harder to distinguish between what's real and what's all just smoky eyes and mirrors.
A hot shade of lipstick calls for a hot, sexy guy...
Makeup artist Chloe Masterson has a look for every occasion. Flying home for your sister’s wedding and family torture? Easy. Bring out the sarcastic wit and black eyeliner. Bonus—the look catches the eye of the corporate hottie sitting beside her on the plane. Turns out Ben has the exact same last name, and everyone assumes they’re married.
When they get stuck in a hotel room together, Chloe decides to accept the gift the Fates have bestowed upon her. (Tip: a bold lip color does wonders for seduction.) But as their lies begin to snowball, Chloe and Ben find it harder and harder to distinguish between what’s real and what’s all just smoky eyes and mirrors.
“I can do torrid...”
Ben’s expression darkened seconds before he caught her mouth in a scorching, wet kiss that convinced her they were both wearing way too many clothes.
She reached for the buttons on his dress shirt, and when she’d finally popped the last one, he rewarded her with a shift of his hips that brought their bodies into perfect alignment, and the pleasure that streaked through her made her gasp.
Damn, he felt good. Hot and hard. Her fingers curled against his skin, and her hips bucked to get closer. She wanted Ben, naked and panting, thrusting inside her until she couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe.
She couldn’t care less about her sister’s wedding, or her exile in Chicago.
She felt alive. And sexy.
And desperate for more...
Dear Reader (#ulink_bdc17a55-badf-5886-9d50-d1697e76eea8),
You know that little smidgen of hope that hits when it’s just you, an in-flight magazine and the empty airplane seat next to you? Then the hot guy you were scoping out at the gate boards the plane, and your tummy flips with anticipation as he starts down the aisle? That uncomfortable chair beside you is suddenly chock-full of possibilities. Sexy, sultry, X-rated possibilities.
Yeah, that never works out in real life. Hottie McHotterson always walks right on by. But what good is writing fiction if you can’t fix that type of karmic unfairness and see what kind of sparks will fly between strangers on a plane?
Ben and Chloe were the perfect pair to explore the notion of instant attraction and whether a one-night stand has a shot of surviving once real life intrudes. And boy, does it intrude! Because you never really know if you’re right for each other until you’ve survived a snowstorm, a fake engagement, a wedding, a business dinner and your own mother, amirite?
Oh, and since this internet thing doesn’t seem as if it’s going to die down anytime soon, I’ve carved out a cyber-niche at tarynleightaylor.com (http://www.tarynleightaylor.com/), facebook.com/tarynltaylor1 (https://www.facebook.com/tarynltaylor1) and twitter.com/tarynltaylor (https://twitter.com/tarynltaylor), so stop by sometime. I’d love to virtually meet you!
Keep on dreaming out loud,
Taryn Leigh Taylor
Kiss and Makeup
Taryn Leigh Taylor
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
TARYN LEIGH TAYLOR likes dinosaurs, bridges and space, both personal and of the final-frontier variety. She shamelessly indulges in clichés, most notably her Starbucks addiction (grande-six-pump-whole-milk-no-water chai tea latte, aka: the usual), her shoe hoard (I can stop anytime I...ooh! These are pretty!), and her penchant for falling in lust with fictional men with great abs (Roarke, Harvey Specter, Kid Chaos, Dean Winchester and so on, ad infinitum.) She also really loves books, which is what sent her down the crazy path of writing one in the first place.
To my family—
Mom, for keeping me sane (and for believing in me always, no matter what),
Dad, for inspiring me (“You should add a kid with glasses. And a dragon.”),
and Logan, for keeping me honest (“Are you writing? Because that doesn’t look like writing.”).
And to my friends—
Crystal, you know I couldn’t do this without you, right? We brainstorm together, we split...70–30, plus you get the benefit of reading the stories no charge (that’s very fair);
Michele, this story is published because of you and I’m forever grateful;
and Michelle, thank you for teaching me to never ever give up on a dream. Ever.
Contents
Cover (#u07fede1f-2351-5912-87c8-308f0e738941)
Back Cover Text (#u743cf344-7784-5bef-84fd-df382818c833)
Introduction (#uc41a41df-472b-5aa3-97e6-eaf9f81ea61c)
Dear Reader (#u24cdd2f7-b31b-5cb2-a83f-5f9a2f66e6e8)
Title Page (#u0922c0ce-493f-59bb-ad5d-32d339562307)
About the Author (#u1230b41e-48a2-5f4e-8f66-086cd5591493)
Dedication (#u5e9d2d58-bf58-5678-8823-04ea7e350e08)
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Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
1 (#u0d14a43b-fbe8-521a-8f21-f2a7101e22f1)
“DOYOUWANT me to kick the crap out of that seat back and tray table for you?”
Chloe Masterson looked over at Window Guy, the man that the Goddess of Economy Airline Seating had seen fit to plaster against her right side. The upper-arm contact had started in Seattle and lasted until Chicago. Thanks to bad weather, their scheduled forty-five-minute layover in the Windy City was now pushing two hours, and had featured a long wait in the plane deicing line and then a “that didn’t sound good” thunk. The plane was now sitting motionless on a vast expanse of snowy tarmac and they’d officially hit the six-hour mark of their touching-a-stranger marathon fifteen minutes ago.
It wasn’t his fault, really. Window Guy had broad shoulders, so the contact was incidental and, in a weird way, kind of comforting. She liked that the sleeve of his gray wool suit was soft and warm against her skin.
And okay, maybe she was leaning against him a little more than was strictly necessary. Not because he smelled of spicy soap and warm man—which was a pretty wicked combination—but because he smelled better than the guy to her left. The gag-inducing aroma of stale sweat, onions and something else she couldn’t quite place but preferred to leave a mystery had worn her down about twenty minutes after boarding. That’s when Chloe had decided that the comfort of her left elbow wasn’t worth permanent olfactory damage and had conceded the battle of the joint armrest to him.
Damn middle seat.
“Sorry?”
Despite their close confines, she and Window Guy hadn’t exchanged more than the official “that’s-my-seat” gesture of air travelers the world over before he’d awkwardly shuffled past her to sit down. After that, he’d pulled his laptop out and tapped away at the keys like a good little company automaton while she’d worked her way through a few chapters of a gently-used Stephen King novel. She’d been so engrossed in her book, she hadn’t noticed that at some point he’d put the laptop away and moved on to reading the offerings from the seat pocket in front of him.
And that wasn’t all she hadn’t noticed.
Now that she was actually looking at him, his breach of their companionable silence was even more surprising. Because Window Guy was kind of sexy. Bedroom eyes the color of whiskey and twice as potent. A strong jaw and a straight nose. His brown hair was short enough to be business-appropriate, but long enough to get mussed up under the right circumstances. And that mouth! As she took her fill of him, it pulled slightly up at the right corner in an easy smirk that was hot as hell. He was the clean-cut kind of handsome that came with no visible neck tattoos and an expertly-knotted blue silk tie that bespoke gainful employment.
Men like him didn’t talk to women like her. He was way too...corporate. And she was...not.
At her question, he raised his chin at the worn gray vinyl seat back in front of her. “You’ve been giving that chair dirty looks for the last twenty minutes, and then you sighed,” he explained.
“I did?”
Window Guy nodded. “The sigh was pretty loud, actually. It disturbed my reading.”
“Oh. Well. I’m sorry that my sigh threw off your concentration.” Chloe sent a meaningful glance toward the airline safety pamphlet on his lap.
“The damage is done.” He picked up the tri-fold piece of card stock. “It was just getting good, too. After the cabin depressurized, the plane crashed and the passengers were proceeding in an orderly fashion for their lives!”
Huh. She hadn’t expected funny. Hot guys rarely had to develop such plebeian talents. “Sounds intense.”
“You’re telling me. I was really enjoying it until the author got all kinky and made the heroine take off her high heels before she used the inflatable slide. I think he might be a foot fetishist.” He shoved the pamphlet back in the seat pocket in front of him before he met her gaze with a teasing glint in his amber eyes. “Wow. Spoiler alert. I hope I didn’t give too much away.”
“No, I appreciate the recommendation. I’ll be sure to tell my book club about it.”
His grin was practiced, but appealing. “I’m Ben.”
Uh-oh. Time to nip this in the bud. “Well, Ben. You’re a very handsome guy, and I appreciate the effort, because I’m sure that maneuvering a sober pickup with only a safety card, an in-flight magazine, and an airsickness bag as props is a challenge that few men could meet. But don’t waste all your sweet, panty-dropping material on me. Save some of that A-game for Stewardess Barbie over there.”
They both looked at the perky blonde flight attendant who’d been making doe eyes at Ben since he’d boarded. Right on cue, she twirled her ponytail and glanced away coyly.
Ben shifted, trying to arrange his large frame more comfortably in the tiny chair—a futile cause. “Let’s get one thing straight here, if this had been a pickup, we’d already be—” he eyed his Rolex—so cliché “—three minutes into you becoming an airplane-bathroom sex convert. Let the record show that we are both still safely buckled into our designated seats, ipso facto, I clearly wasn’t flirting with you.”
Ignoring the frisson down her spine—legal jargon always had that effect on her—Chloe raised a skeptical eyebrow.
“Okay, I was kinda flirting. But, it was completely recreational. Minor league stuff.”
“Oh, please! Foot fetish references? That is gateway flirting. If I hadn’t called you out, you’d have escalated to the hard stuff—asking me my astrological sign and telling me how beautiful my eyes are.”
He laughed, and Chloe ignored the flare of pride at having elicited the sexy, rumbling sound. Not that she was flirting, either, mind you.
“Well, it’s hardly my fault that your eyes really are beautiful. Emerald green, with golden flecks that sparkle when you roll them like that because you think I’m being cheesy.”
“Oh. Well that’s probably because you are being cheesy. At least the safety pamphlet pickup was original.”
“Original enough to get your name?”
“Chloe,” she relented.
“Nice to meet you, Chloe.” He offered his hand again, and this time she accepted it.
His palm was wide and his fingers were long. He didn’t molest her hand; it was just an acceptable, firm shake between new acquaintances. Even so, a phantom warmth lingered after he’d relinquished his grip, the kind that buzzed up her arm and sort of made her wish he had molested her hand, at least a little. Chloe rubbed her tingling palm against the thigh of her jeans.
His gaze held steady on hers and his focus was flattering, almost seductive. If you went for that whole slick-successful-businessman-in-a-five-thousand-dollar-suit look. Which, she reminded herself, she didn’t. Not anymore.
For the most part, her tiny diamond nose stud and purple highlights were enough to warn corporate wunderkinds that they had nothing in common with her.
But then she remembered that she no longer had purple highlights. She’d dyed her piecey, deconstructed bob for her sister’s wedding. Right now it was a respectable, boring, normal shade of mahogany that skimmed her jaw before angling a bit lower in the front. The dye job was her attempt at a peace offering to her family. She just hoped it would be enough.
“...so if you look at it that way, cheese could be considered a high form of flattery, you know?”
Ben’s voice snapped her out of a flashback of the most recent guilt-laden, middle-name-invoking phone call with her mother.
“What? Sorry. I wasn’t listening.”
Ben’s grin was endearingly self-deprecating. “Tough crowd.”
“It’s not you.” Chloe shoved her offensively monotone hair behind her ears. “Going back to Buffalo has put me in a rotten mood.”
“That doesn’t seem fair. What’s Buffalo ever done to you?”
The derisive laugh slipped out before Chloe could stop it. “Now there’s a loaded question.”
Ben cocked a questioning eyebrow.
“I’m going to see my family.” She didn’t add “for the first time in four years,” because that was the scary part, the part that turned her stomach into a churning pit of nerves and dread. “My little sister’s getting m-married,” she said, forcing the word out. Man, was it hot in here? She reached up and twisted the overhead air vent open.
“Oh! Well, that should be...” Ben paused in a way that let Chloe know she hadn’t managed to hide her true feelings on the matter. He corrected midcourse, “no fun at all. Rings are like tiny shackles. Screw love. That’s what I say.”
It was a sweet attempt at a save, but Chloe was too far down the well to grab the rope.
“Weddings...” Suck. Wreck relationships. Ruin lives. She flipped through her mental thesaurus before going with, “aren’t really my thing.” She tugged at the front of her black T-shirt, but couldn’t quite shake the sudden sensation of a phantom Swarovski-crystal-encrusted, sweetheart-necklined noose tightening around her rib cage.
Oblivious to her cold sweat and racing heart, Ben continued to aim for small talk. “It’s a good thing you decided to fly in to Buffalo a few days early. This storm is really wreaking havoc on our arrival time.”
Chloe shook her head. “I’m not early. She’s getting married tomorrow.”
Instead of the nauseating cheer that announcement had been garnering since her sister had started flashing her showy, four-carat diamond engagement ring around social media, Ben had the decency to look puzzled. Chloe appreciated that.
“Your sister’s getting married on a Thursday in January?”
“You are only surprised by that fact because you’ve never met her,” she informed him. “Anyone who knows my sister would expect nothing less from her than to inconvenience her entire network of family and friends by making them take a day off of work. Can’t let a petty thing like the schedules of four hundred people interfere with her narcissistic, lifelong fantasy of having a winter wonderland-themed wedding on her birthday.”
Ben nodded. “So you and your sister are close, then?” he deadpanned.
Chloe’s smile caught her by surprise, but at least she could breathe again. He’d talked her down without even being aware of it. “You’re a funny guy, Ben.”
“It’s a gift.” He shrugged with faux modesty and loosened his sapphire-colored silk necktie. The hint of dishevelment made Chloe’s breath hitch, but this time it wasn’t the result of a chest full of anxiety. This feeling was warmer, and a little bit tingly.
She hadn’t dated a man in a suit since Patrick—hadn’t even looked at one. She preferred bad boys, the disreputable kind that parents didn’t approve of. So why was Mr. Future Businessman of America giving her a serious case of the wobblies?
She didn’t get a chance to scrutinize her odd reaction further. They both glanced up as an electronic chime sounded from the speaker above Chloe’s head.
“Good evening, passengers. This is your captain speaking. Due to a mechanical issue and the impending storm, our scheduled flight has been canceled.”
A collective groan filled the plane.
“Your flight crew will be handing out discount cards valid for a stay at any Value Inn location, a proud partner of Jetopia. Your boarding pass will be valid for tomorrow’s rescheduled flight to Buffalo, weather permitting. If you have further questions or are unable to make the 8:00 a.m. flight, please speak with a member of your flight crew. Again, we thank you for choosing Jetopia, and we apologize for the inconvenience.”
“What does he mean, tomorrow?” There was a definite note of panic in her voice, but Chloe was proud she’d managed not to shriek.
“I’m going to go out on a limb and guess he means the day after today.”
“Hey, Ben?”
“Yeah?”
“That thing I said about you being funny? I take it back.”
He waved it off. “As long as handsome panty-dropper still stands.”
She couldn’t even appreciate the joke—reality was seeping in. “I can’t be stuck in Chicago. I need to get to Buffalo. Tonight.” The wedding rehearsal and dinner were this evening. Her family would be expecting her.
Ben directed her gaze to the small oval window behind his head, and Chloe caught an ominous glimpse of the snow flying outside. “Better start walking then.”
Chloe took a deep breath of musty cabin air tinged with eau de Aisle Guy’s pits. Trapped. She glanced over as Ben liberated his iPhone from the breast pocket of his suit, thumbs flying over the screen as he, like so many other passengers, shared the details of this latest development with whoever was on the other end of the text message.
Chloe couldn’t bring herself to do the same. She hadn’t even arrived yet and she’d already failed to meet her family’s expectations. Not an auspicious start to her big reunion tour.
With another sigh, she flopped back in her chair, glaring once again at the seat in front of her.
She was stuck in Chicago.
With boring hair.
And an angry clan of Mastersons ready to pounce on her for the latest example of how she was ruining the hallowed family name.
This day could not possibly get any worse.
“You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?” she asked, her eyes never wavering from the cracked vinyl seat back.
“Sighing maniacally,” Ben explained.
“You seem awfully intent on the emotional health of complete strangers.” She slanted him a look that bordered on caustic. “You’re not a shrink, are you? Because my talking to a shrink would make my mother ridiculously happy.”
“And how does that make you feel?”
In a defensive maneuver, Chloe crossed her arms over her chest. “Okay, fine. You’re a little funny.”
Ben pumped his fist in silent victory.
“And for the record, I was thinking about how Neil Diamond has ruined my life.”
He shot her a surprised glance. “Really? I was wondering what he was up to these days.”
She tipped her head in Ben’s direction without breaking contact with the headrest. “It’s a very sad story about a crappy alarm clock, a pathological hatred of ‘Sweet Caroline’, and an unfortunate mix-up involving the buttons marked off and snooze.”
Ben leaned back in his own chair. “Fucking Neil Diamond,” he said, and it was so understated, so unexpectedly perfect, that she laughed.
“You’re pretty calm about this.”
“About taking Neil Diamond’s name in vain? Don’t let the suit fool you. I’m surprisingly controversial.”
Chloe shook her head, refusing to admit she was charmed. “Can’t you just be pissed off about the flight being canceled? Like a normal person?”
His shrug was philosophical. “We’re not getting to Buffalo tonight. Not worth getting worked up about if it’s out of your control.”
“That’s very Zen of you,” she said, though it wasn’t a compliment.
“Fortune cookies,” Ben sermonized, “are not only delicious, but full of extremely practical wisdom.”
At that moment, Stewardess Barbie appeared beside Aisle Guy and her massive breasts exerted a gravitational pull on the eyes of the entire row, Chloe’s included.
How did anything that top-heavy stay upright?
The flight attendant glanced down at her clipboard and Chloe couldn’t help but notice that her glittery pink eye shadow was creased and caking.
Chloe fought the urge to tell her about the new eye shadow primer that Titanium Beauty had just come out with. It was oil-free and did an incredible job of keeping shadow in its place all day. And that glitter was best saved for evening events because mattes and neutral shimmers worked best in daylight or fluorescent light. Also that with her skin tone, peachier shades would be much more flattering than pinks..
“Gordon Hinky?”
Aisle Guy’s gaze was stuck in the general vicinity of their messenger’s more...pneumatic assets. Rolling her eyes at the predictability of testosterone, Chloe held her breath as he raised his arm.
Barbie sped through the “sorry for the inconvenience” script in a bored monotone before flicking her gaze to more promising territory. “And that must make you Benjamin.”
Gak.
At least Ben had enough class to meet her eyes when he confirmed the obvious. “It’s just Ben.”
“Well, Just Ben, here’s your Value Inn voucher.”
Ben reached past her to accept the glossy slip of paper and Chloe caught the clean, masculine scent of him.
“It’s good for fifteen percent off. There’s a map on the back detailing the closest locations to the airport. Someone will be at the gate to direct you to the taxi and shuttle stands, but if you need any help finding your way or, you know, with anything, just say the word. I’d be more than happy to help you.”
The breathy offer was very Marilyn Monroe.
“Jetopia apologizes for the delay, but we hope you’ll give us the chance to make it up to you. We’d love to have you fly with us again.” After a long moment, she tore her gaze away from Ben and focused on Chloe.
“And you’re...” She glanced back at the list and her face fell like she’d just seen someone kick a puppy. “Oh.” Her eyes darted between Chloe and Ben for a moment. Finally she said in a normal tone, “I hope you enjoy your stay.”
“I’ll need my voucher,” Chloe reminded her.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Masterson, but there’s only one voucher per couple.”
“Oh, I’m not a couple. And it’s Miz. There’s no Mr. Masterson.”
“Actually...” Ben interrupted.
She twisted in her seat to find her handsome seatmate looking amused.
“I’m Mr. Masterson.”
“What?”
“My name is Ben Masterson.”
She stared at him for a long moment before turning back to the flight attendant. “I think there’s been a huge misunderstanding.”
Ben chuckled. “More like a Mrs.-understanding.”
“Are you kidding me?” Chloe exclaimed. “A pun? Now?”
“Just trying to keep my sense of humor intact,” he returned, unperturbed. After a beat, he added, “Dear.”
“We just met,” she pleaded, not trying to hide the anxiety in her voice. Chloe figured that an early-twenties poster girl for enhancement surgery probably understood a little something about desperation. “There’s no way we’re staying in the same room.”
“My goodness!” Chesty McLookatmyboobs’ attention focused on Ben with the precision of a heat-seeking missile, and her smile was one of renewed hope.
So much for girl power.
“I’m terribly sorry for the mix-up. I saw Ben Masterson and Chloe Masterson seated together on the passenger manifest and assumed... Well, let me find out what I can do for you.”
“Give me a voucher of my own and we’ll call it even,” Chloe suggested.
“I’m afraid I can’t just hand them out. For tracking purposes, I’ll have to assign one to you in our system. It’ll just take a second. I’m really sorry for the mix-up,” she said again, more in Ben’s direction, and sounding anything but sorry.
Chloe watched the flight attendant sashay down the aisle and disappear behind the first-class curtain before she swiveled to face her last-namesake.
“This is your fault, you know.”
He smiled apologetically. “I did set my weather machine to blizzard before I left Seattle.”
“You’re the one who rejected business class and deigned to sit with the common folk. No one would have assumed we were married if you and your Gucci suit had just stayed where you belong in the land of complimentary champagne and leg room.”
“Hey, statistically, the seats in the back of the plane are safer than the first seven rows. And how did you know this suit is Gucci?”
Chloe ignored him and his designer suit, unaware that she was nibbling at her right thumbnail.
Her mother would not be pleased when she found out Chloe wouldn’t be arriving until the day of the wedding. It was customary for the bride’s family to present a united front at the rehearsal dinner. Especially if a certain daughter’s absence would be duly noted and gossiped about.
She took a deep breath. Ben’s fortune cookies were right. Dwelling on the disaster wouldn’t change anything. Accepting that fact didn’t change her mood, though. “So your last name’s Masterson, huh?”
He nodded.
Crossing her arms, Chloe thunked her head against the headrest and closed her eyes. “Fucking Neil Diamond,” she said.
* * *
ASITTURNEDOUT, issuing another voucher did not “just take a second”. The conspiracy theorist in her was convinced Boobzilla had purposefully slowed the process to make sure Ben was miles away by the time Chloe entered the terminal. Not, Chloe was embarrassed to admit, that she hadn’t looked for him at the baggage claim when she finally made it there twenty minutes later, voucher in hand.
After grabbing her suitcase, she’d braved the icy roads in a crowded shuttle and was currently occupying the coveted “next in line” position in one of seven queues in the lobby of the Value Inn. Being this close to a shower and a bed had gone a long way toward taming her impatience. At least until the family of six ahead of her was told there was no room at the inn.
Chloe did a quick mental tally. Judging by the number of weary travelers still clogging the reception area, there were going to be a lot more disappointed people heading out into the snow tonight in search of shelter.
Chloe’s grip tightened on the strap of her purse.
Please don’t make me one of them.
When the balding desk clerk smiled at her, she stepped up to the counter.
“Welcome to the Value Inn. How can I help you tonight?” His voice was shockingly pleasant for a man dealing with a bunch of crabby, stranded nomads.
“Hi. Do you have a room for me?” They had to have a room left. She wasn’t picky. She’d even settle for access to a sink and a cot in the hallway.
“Let me check what I’ve got. What’s your name?”
“Chloe Masterson.”
The clickety-clack sound of his typing stretched her nerves taut, reminding her of a countdown clock on a bomb. “Here we go. And that’s for one night, correct?”
“Yes.” The word came out like a sigh, heavy on the s, and Chloe’s shoulders dropped to their normal position. She hadn’t realized how tense she’d been.
“Okay, we’ve got you in room 224. Do you want a swipe key?”
Chloe raised her eyebrows. “I’ll probably need one to get in the room.”
Her sarcasm was lost on him. Nonplussed, he ran a plastic key through the card reader and handed it over with a smile. “Your room is on the second floor. Turn right when you exit the elevator.”
Chloe paused in the act of unzipping her purse. “You don’t need my credit card? Or my voucher?” She pulled the crumpled slip of paper from her coat pocket and held it out to him. “Because I went through a lot to get this.”
“That won’t be necessary. Your bill will be issued when you check out in the morning.”
Unbelievable. “Oh, okay.” Cursing Boobzilla’s name, she shoved it back in her pocket. “Great. Thanks, then.”
“Enjoy your stay.”
She’d no sooner stepped away from the counter when the inevitable happened.
“Excuse me, folks,” the clerk announced to the crowd. “I’m afraid we are all out of rooms for tonight.”
Finally, something had gone right for her today. She hurried away from the outraged mob and into the elevator. The door slid closed behind her, and she was in such a good mood that she didn’t even mind that the Muzak version of “Song Sung Blue” was playing during the short trip.
The room was as easy to find as Mr. Sunshine had made it sound, and she shoved the card in the door, ready for a shower and a bed, in that order.
Instead, she opened the door to find a hot guy pulling a white T-shirt over the most spectacularly muscled back Chloe had had the privilege to see this side of a movie screen.
Oh, yum.
The forgotten door banged shut behind her.
He turned and she caught a glimpse of six-pack abs before the white cotton swallowed them up. Then she raised her eyes to his face.
Her suitcase slipped from her fingers and landed with a muted thud on the carpet. They stared at each other for an infinite moment—both the longest and shortest seconds of her life.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said.
A full-fledged grin spread across Ben’s face. “Honey, you’re home!”
* * *
“I SHOULDHAVEKNOWN! The second that clerk didn’t want my credit card or the stupid voucher I should have known.” She stomped into the room like she owned the place, abandoning her suitcase where it had fallen, and then her purse and coat beside it. “Why does today suck so much?” she asked before flopping onto his bed, her feet still flat on the floor as she stared up at the ceiling.
Ben was pretty sure she wasn’t talking to him. Which was fine. He was content just to look at her. To be honest, he’d hung around the baggage claim area for ten minutes after he’d grabbed his luggage, just in case she showed.
Ben had to admit, the pinup-girl-with-an-edge thing Chloe had going on—like some twenty-first-century Bettie Page—was working for him in a big way. Goth-rockers were not usually his type. As a general rule, he dated women who were soft and positive, not really the adjectives that came to mind when he stared at the pissed-off pixie glowering up at him.
“Your airplane girlfriend kept me in voucher limbo for so long that my suitcase was the lone bag circling the conveyer belt by the time I got to baggage claim. Then I almost missed the shuttle, and now this? There’s not even a comforter on this bed.”
“Oh. I took it off. Have you seen what happens when they shine a black light on hotel quilts?”
“That is gross and disturbing. But it’s still weird you got rid of it.”
What was he going to do with her?
He’d only struck up a conversation with Chloe on the plane to pass some time. And then she’d hit him with those liquid-lined, green-and-gold eyes and a bad attitude and he’d been all in. Kinda made him wish he didn’t have so much work to get done tonight.
But if his meeting in Buffalo went the right way, he was going to be the new account director at Carson and McLeod. And a promotion meant a raise, and a raise meant the cabin on the lake would be his.
Still, he couldn’t just throw her out. She wasn’t plastic pretty, like the cookie-cutter blonde flight attendant she’d just alluded to. Chloe was sharp and smart-mouthed and real. She gave as good as she got, and he liked that about her. He also liked that, sprawled across his bed sheets in something as innocuous as a black T-shirt and jeans, she somehow managed to look provocative as hell. His body hummed with testosterone-fueled appreciation.
Jesus, Masterson. Get a grip!
You’d think he hadn’t been laid in years, when it had actually only been—a depressing calculation revealed that it had been almost a year since his rebound fling after he and Melanie had imploded. He’d been so focused on work that he hadn’t noticed how long it had been. Which was pathetic on many levels.
“What the hell am I going to do?” Chloe fumed. “They don’t have any other rooms.”
“You can stay here.” The words were out before his brain had registered the consequences, but he didn’t regret them. It wasn’t even the testosterone talking. By all accounts, Chloe had had a rough day. She deserved a win. For once, work could wait.
Those amazing green eyes widened in surprise as she bolted upright on the bed. “What?”
“I mean, you’re already here. I’m sure all of the airport hotels are in the same boat, so there’s no sense heading back out into the snow. Besides, we’re married, right?”
Her death glare was adorable. And just a front. She was considering it. She had a horrible poker face.
Chloe managed to hold out for seventeen seconds before she exhaled contemptuously. “If you snore, I will smother you in your sleep. Just so you’re warned.”
Ben did his best to tamp down the wattage of his smile. It was cute that she still thought she was keeping up her tough-girl facade.
“Excellent choice, Masterson.” He grabbed his wallet from inside his suitcase. “You settle in here, and I’ll go see if I can get us a cot and some food.” Ben headed for the door. “If I’m not back by midnight, check the ice machine for my corpse.”
Chloe might be having a really bad day, but his was turning out pretty well.
2 (#u0d14a43b-fbe8-521a-8f21-f2a7101e22f1)
BENMAYHAVEneutralized the no-shelter problem for her, but he couldn’t help her with the Dragon Queen—her mother. She was going to have to slay that beast herself.
Chloe cast a covert glance at her purse, which was sitting on the floor where she’d abandoned it, about four feet away. Just do it, she lectured herself. Woman up and stop putting off the inevitable.
She heaved herself off the bed to retrieve her purse, grabbing her coat off the floor, as well. After she’d wasted a couple more seconds arranging her coat on the back of the desk chair and applying some ChapStick, there were no more stalling tactics left in her arsenal. With a resigned breath, she pulled out her cell phone and dialed the number she’d been dreading calling since the moment she’d realized she’d be spending the night in Chicago.
“Hello.” The frigidity of the word let Chloe know that caller ID had already announced her identity.
She exhaled. “Hey, Mom.”
“‘Hey, Mom’? You’re calling me during the rehearsal dinner where everyone is staring at the gaping hole where the bride’s sister is supposed to sit and all you have to say is ‘Hey, Mom’?” Fiona Masterson’s voice was eerily calm. Which meant her mother was furious. “Everyone is wondering where you are.”
She had no doubt that was true. Her sister’s big day might be the main event, but more than a few of the attendees were waiting with gossipy glee to see the sideshow—Chloe’s return.
“My flight got canceled. There’s a really bad storm here in Chicago. I’m really sorry.” Chloe paced the short length of the hotel room.
“This is why we wanted to buy you the first class ticket that would have gotten you here days ago, if you’ll recall. To avoid just such a situation. You know winter weather is completely unpredictable. Never mind the fact that you’ve missed your sister’s stagette, her bridal shower, her lingerie party, the family brunch, the luncheon for out-of-town guests, the—”
“I told you I couldn’t get that much time off work. I’m really sorry I missed...all those things, but it’s not as if I’m a bridesmaid or anything.” Thank God.
Some people might have felt slighted by the oversight, but Chloe had been all kinds of relieved. Standing up at the altar in front of all those people... Just the thought of it was enough to give her PTSD. “And I’ll be there for the wedding. I promise. Even if I have to hitchhike, I’ll be there.”
Her mother sighed, and Chloe hoped she’d sounded much less melodramatic when Ben had called her out for the same thing on the plane earlier.
“So help me, Chloe Marie, if you do not arrive in time for your sister’s wedding...”
“Mom, I gotta go. I’ll be there tomorrow around ten.”
Chloe disconnected the call and sat heavily on the side of the bed.
What was it about talking to her mother that made her feel like she was sixteen years old again? She’d moved across the country to escape the phenomenon. Yet all it took was a phone call to bring back all the feelings of being less than.
The tears caught her by surprise. They were followed closely by sobs that made her shoulders lurch. The more she cursed and fought the show of weakness, the more torrentially it manifested itself. After a while, she just gave in.
The sound of the door opening couldn’t have startled her more if it had been a gunshot.
Shit. She wiped desperately at her puffy, tear-swollen face, trying to erase the evidence of her breakdown. The man had the worst timing of anyone she’d ever met.
“Chloe? You should have seen the lineup for the restaurant. It’s a madhouse down there, so I had to improvise. Also, I added my name to the cot waiting list. Which is hilarious because— Hey, what’s wrong?”
“I’m fine,” she lied, willing him to turn around and give her a minute so she could pull it together.
He came closer. Chloe kept her eyes down and her body still, but he wasn’t deterred by her attempts to ignore him. She hiccupped as he set an ice bucket on the nightstand and then sat on the bed beside her.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” She shot him a watery smile, with every intention of leaving it at that. But when she saw the genuine concern on his face, felt the warmth of the reassuring hand he’d placed on her back, she spilled her guts.
“It’s just, today has sucked,” she said with a sniffle. “I’m talking monumental amounts of suckage, and I’m tired, and moody, and people have really been getting on my nerves. All I want is to go home, but I’m stuck sharing a hotel room with a complete stranger who must think I’m mentally unbalanced. And you’ve been really nice to me anyway. And now I’m crying again. I hate crying,” she finished on a shaky sob.
Ben reached past her to the nightstand and snagged a tissue, handing it to her.
“You see? You barely know me, you have every reason to believe I’m deranged, and still you have the decency to hand me a Kleenex.”
“It’s really not that big a deal.”
“Yes, it is, Ben. You’re nice. And you’re tall. You’re very tall.” She wiped her nose with the tissue. “How tall are you, anyway?”
“Six-three.”
“That is very tall.” Chloe shook her head, looking down at her hands. She picked resolutely at the flaking black nail polish on her right thumbnail. She must have been chewing on it—she did that when she was stressed.
She expected him to bail then, distance himself from his sobbing lunatic of a roommate with some teasing remark about how tall guys are known for their big wangs or something equally ridiculous. She’d laugh, and he’d laugh, and they’d get back to the superficial banter that befitted two strangers stuck in a hotel room together.
But he didn’t.
He just sat beside her, respecting the silence. And her thoughts slipped out. “Honestly, Ben. How is it possible for one person to mess up her life so monumentally?”
“Hey, I’m sure it’s not as bad as it seems right now.” He rubbed her back, his big hand hot against her T-shirt. “You’ll figure it out. You’ll fix it.”
Tears brimmed in her eyes with a vengeance. They burned like acid. “No. I won’t. And do you know why?”
Ben shook his head.
“Me, neither! I mean, do you see this? Do you see my hair?” She grabbed a handful and held it in his direction.
“Yeah...”
“I did this for them!” she exclaimed, dropping the strands back into place. “I colored it boring old brown so they wouldn’t be embarrassed by me, but it didn’t work! I’m not even at the wedding yet, and I’ve already disappointed them. Nothing I try ever works, Ben. I don’t know what to do.” She’d never said that to anyone before and admitting the truth hurt so badly she thought her ribs might crack.
Chloe dropped her face into her hands. Ben’s arms came around her, pulling her close, tucking her cheek to his chest. She gave in and greedily took what he was offering. Wrapping her arms around his waist, she leaned into him and let herself cry.
She wasn’t sure if it was minutes or hours, but he held her until she had no more tears.
“You know what, Chloe?” His voice was soft and deep, breaking the silence she’d been measuring with the rise and fall of his chest beneath her cheek. “Maybe there’s nothing to do. I mean, I realize I just met you, but you seem okay to me.”
That tiny reassurance allowed Chloe to muster enough gumption to reach up and wipe the wet tracks from her face. She couldn’t quite bring herself to lift her head off his shoulder, though.
“And they’ll see it. One day, they’ll see it. You just gotta give them some time.”
Her lip trembled, and she bit it, fighting the sadness. “They’ve had twenty-six years, Ben.”
She felt him exhale. “It’s a really hard thing, you know, not taking the people we love for granted.” She looked up at him then and he smiled, a sad-but-reassuring little half smile that made her believe there was a chance that the despair she felt in that moment might not be insurmountable.
Chloe pulled away with a final sniff. She was trying desperately to hold onto that moment of comfort even as the embarrassment of her epic cry-fest in front of a virtual stranger began seeping in at the edges.
She exhaled shakily. “Sorry I got mascara and snot on your fancy shirt.”
“It’s just a T-shirt,” he averred as he pulled the black-smeared wet patch away from his chest. He even managed not to look horrified.
“Yeah, but I bet it cost, like, fifty bucks.”
“Seventy-five,” he corrected. “But I’ll accept it as punishment for being douchebaggy enough to have spent that much money on a plain white T-shirt in the first place.”
Chloe’s chuckle was waterlogged.
“C’mere,” he said, tucking his thumb in the hem of his shirt. She leaned ever so slightly forward and let him rub the cotton-covered pad of his thumb under her right eye, then her left. She’d be surprised if she had any makeup on at all at this point. Some warrior, she thought, choking in battle and crying off her armor.
“There,” he said, showing her the black smudges on the fabric. “All cleaned up.”
She frowned, letting him know she wasn’t buying his bullshit.
“Okay, you should probably go wash your face before we have dinner,” he admitted. “Unless the raccoon look is a thing now.”
Grateful for the reprieve, Chloe headed for the bathroom, pulling her suitcase into the tiny room with her. She groaned when she caught sight of herself in the mirror.
Apparently in addition to being an all-around good guy and world-class hugger, Ben Masterson was also the King of Understatement. She looked like a comic-book villain whose face was melting off. Chloe shut the door and set her suitcase on the toilet, rifling through it for her toiletries case.
A couple of swipes of a makeup remover pad later, her cheeks were clear of black streaks, and her eyes were bare, if a little puffier than they had been this morning. She’d have liked to take all her makeup off and start again, but snotting all over Ben had been all the weakness she could handle. No way was she going to be bare-faced in front of him. She didn’t even start the makeup videos on her YouTube channel that way.
“Hurry up in there, Chloe. I’m starving!”
“Almost done! Don’t eat everything!” She ran a brush through her hair, topped up her deodorant, and rooted around in her suitcase in search of her pajamas.
* * *
WELL, TONIGHTHAD certainly not been the typical room-service-and-work type of night that tended to dominate his business trips.
Chuckling to himself, Ben pulled off his T-shirt, wiping his shoulder with it before folding it up and placing it in the dirty laundry bag he kept in his suitcase. He’d say one thing about Chloe Masterson, she was the antithesis of boring.
A woman who couldn’t decide whether to smile at him or punch him in the face. A woman who was super tough one moment, and vulnerable the next. A woman who had no idea her expressive face betrayed her, even in her most badass moments.
He tugged the white button-down he’d worn on the plane back on—she’d walked in on him before he’d gotten around to changing out of his suit pants, so it wasn’t like he’d be overdressed—but he left the hem untucked and the buttons at his throat open anyway.
She was such a nice change from the women who’d inundated his world lately. As he’d moved up the corporate ladder, everything had gotten more proper and refined. So serious. He’d met a lot of very pretty women with very pretty plans for their future. The few dates he’d been on in the past year had felt more like job interviews, and they’d fizzled accordingly.
But Chloe didn’t look at him as if he was a steak on display at a butcher shop. She wasn’t angling for marriage, sizing up his earning potential or evaluating his parenting qualities. Which was good, because marriage was not high on his list of priorities anymore. She was the kind of woman who understood that a date should be fun and flirty, two people trying each other on. No expectations, just opportunity.
Not that this was a date.
In fact, he wasn’t sure what this was, but he kind of liked it. Tonight he got to hang out with a flawed, stressed-out, hot-then-cold-then-hot-again woman with a kick-ass body, a pierced nose and a star tattoo on her right arm. And he couldn’t wait.
He moved her abandoned phone to the nightstand so he could prop the pillow upright against the headboard, and sat down against it. He’d just stretched his long legs out in front of him when he heard the bathroom door open.
She appeared from around the corner a moment later.
Ben let his gaze slip from her berry lips down to her bare shoulders, then to her arms—that star tattoo was going to be the death of him, he was sure of it—lingering a moment on the way she filled out her tank top before sliding past her black boxer shorts to take in her truly spectacular thighs, her shapely calves and the shiny black polish on her toenai—
“Oh, my God, are you walking on hotel carpeting in bare feet?” he asked, lunging forward. “Do you have any idea how gross hotel carpet is?”
He was half expecting another sardonic smile, but apparently the panic in his voice had registered, because her eyes widened in response to his alarm.
“How gross?” she asked, scrunching up her nose in preparation.
“My grandma was a nurse, and she once had this patient who ended up with cellulitis from walking barefoot on hotel carpeting—”
“Are you kidding me?”
“—and he didn’t get it checked right away, so by the time he went to the emergency room his whole leg was full of pus—”
“Ew, ew, ew!” She was hopping from foot to foot by this point.
“—and he had to stay in the hospital for three days so they could give him antibiotics intravenously.”
“Okay, enough, enough!” She jumped onto the bed beside him, scrambling into a sitting position and staring down at her feet. “Oh, God! My feet are itchy. Is itchy a symptom of cellulitis?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes went wide.
“Well, probably.” He didn’t remember all the details of the story...just the gross ones. “Do they feel swollen? Like there’s a bunch of pus accumulating under your skin, getting ready to erupt and—”
Chloe recovered enough to sock him in the arm. “Shut up with the gory details, wouldja?”
Ben rubbed his arm where her punch had landed. Chloe crawled over to the end of the bed. She braced one hand on the very edge of the mattress and reached toward her coat, which was hanging on the back of a chair that was just out of reach. Her fingertips brushed the thick material, but she didn’t quite get purchase on it. He watched in fascination as she set herself up for another attempt.
“What are you doing?”
“I left my suitcase in the bathroom, and if you think I’m setting one bare toe on that hideous, infested carpet then you’re way dumber than you look,” she said over her shoulder.
He shot her a tight smile. Ha, ha.
“So I’m going to stand on my jacket, slide my way over to the bathroom, and get myself some socks.”
“Or you could just ask me to get your suitcase,” he pointed out, getting to his feet.
She gazed up at him with such wonder that he honestly believed the idea had never occurred to her. “I... You don’t have to. I mean, I can do it myself.”
“I’m sure you could, eventually. But I’m happy to help, because if you slip and contract cellulitis, the amputation would ruin your sister’s big day.” Ben smiled angelically and dodged when she chucked a pillow at him.
Her ugly suitcase was sitting on the toilet. “You should really have a lock on this when you’re flying,” he advised, grabbing the scratched-up plastic case and heading back into the bedroom. He dropped it on the suitcase stand and set it down beside her. She threw open the lid to reveal bedlam inside.
“You know, most people fold stuff before they put it in the suitcase, just FYI.” Ben resumed his position on the bed beside her.
“Thanks for the packing tips.” Her voice sounded less than sincere as she hunted through the chaos. She rescued a ratty sock from inside the suitcase and jammed a foot into it. “Wow. That looks sexy.” She stuck her foot in the air so Ben, too, could admire the purple, elastic-challenged sock that was slouched around her ankle.
“Yeah, well, it’s sexier than athlete’s foot.”
“Amen, brother.” She reached out to give him a high-five before quickly pulling on the other sock. She closed up her suitcase. “Okay, now that that’s taken care of, on to more important things, like food.”
He reached over to the nightstand and dumped the contents of the plastic ice bucket on the bed between them. An avalanche of candy spilled across the sheet. “Dinner is served.”
“Whoa. What’d you do? Knock over a vending machine?”
“I wasn’t sure what you’d be in the mood for—salty, sweet, stale,” he offered, rapping a rock-hard, prepackaged Danish against the headboard with a disconcerting tap, tap, tap, “or all of the above—so I got one of everything.” He lobbed the Danish at the trash bin on the floor beside the television stand. It landed inside the plastic container with a heavy thud.
She did that cute nose-scrunch thing again as she deliberated over the colorfully-wrapped mound of sucrose and diabetes. “SunChips, Skittles, Aero Peppermint. And I’m taking the cherry Life Savers,” she decided, grabbing each of her picks from the junk-food dog pile as she named them. “You know, in case of emergency.”
Ben nodded contemplatively, undoing the buttons at his wrists. “Those are some bold choices, Masterson.” He rolled up his shirtsleeves in preparation for his own selection process. “Personally, I’m more of a traditionalist. I’m going for the Doritos with a side of Mike and Ike, Jolly Ranchers to cleanse my palate, and Twix for dessert. You want to split the pretzels as an appetizer?” he asked, ripping into them and holding the miniature bag in her direction.
“Why not?” Instead of taking one pretzel, though, she took a handful, and Ben liked that about her. She balanced them in a precise stack on her knee. “So does the wife know you leave the ring off while you’re away on business so you can lure pajama-clad strangers into sharing hotel-bed dinners?” she asked, crunching into a pretzel.
Ben shook his head. “Single and loving it.”
Chloe’s laugh was smug. “There’s a shocker.”
“So what about you?” he asked.
“What about me?”
“Well, I know you’re a Masterson by birth because on the plane you said there was no Mr., but that still leaves plenty of options.”
She shook her head as she started on the SunChips. “Also single. Mostly loving it, except when I’m on the phone with my mother, dodging the grandkid discussion. I did, though. Have a boyfriend. We broke up about five months ago. He cheated on me,” she explained, answering his unspoken question. “A couple of times, actually. It was all very cliché. I have horrible taste in men. Spider and I were a mistake right from the beginning.”
Ben choked on his pretzel. “You dated a guy named Spider?”
Chloe nodded.
“Wow. Was he a professional wrestler?”
“No.”
“Did he have superpowers?”
Chloe rolled her eyes. “He owned a tattoo parlor.”
“That was going to be my next guess.” The chip she hurled in his direction bounced off his chest and landed on the sheets. “So where did you meet Spider? Intermission at La Bohème? Church book club?”
“I met him when he gave me these.” She set her chips on the pillow and reclined, tugging the waistband of her shorts down enough to reveal a pair of small birds etched just inside her hip bones, one on either side of her abdomen.
Ben almost swallowed his tongue. Christ, he ached to touch her. His hands flexed involuntarily, resulting in the decapitation of several pretzels unfortunate enough to be left in the bag he was holding. He set it on the mattress beside him and took a deep, steadying breath. And he’d thought the star on her arm was haunting him.
“Which is kind of ironic when you think about it,” she continued, oblivious to his slack-jawed appreciation of her body, “because swallows mate for life.” She snapped the elastic back into place and, instead of resuming her sitting position, she rolled onto her tummy.
Is she commando under those shorts?
“Anyway,” said Chloe, reaching toward the pillow to retrieve her dinner as though her extreme hotness hadn’t just evaporated every speck of moisture in his mouth, “I finally kicked his ass to the curb when I walked in on him and his latest conquest christening the kitchen table I paid for. And the rest, as they say, is history. How about you?”
Ben managed to work up enough spit to moisten his tongue. “I have never dated a guy named Spider.”
“C’mon, Ben. I showed you mine.” Chloe fished the last chip from the bag, crumpled the empty packaging in her fist and tossed it awkwardly over her shoulder in the direction of the garbage can. It hit the end of the bed and rolled onto the navy carpet. “Spill it. How did your last relationship go down in flames?”
Melanie’s face flashed in front of his eyes. He felt like a dick for giving Chloe a hard time. He was the king of clichés.
The boss’s daughter. The heirloom ring. The proposal eclipsed soon after by her announcement that she was leaving him. For some douchebag lawyer who was her father’s age and had enough money to keep her in the style to which she was accustomed. They’d walked down the aisle six months after she’d ditched his ass. They’d recently celebrated a year’s worth of wedded bliss.
Ben shook off the humiliating memory.
“Nothing to tell.” Ben poured some M&M’s into the palm of his hand and held them in Chloe’s direction.
“Love ’em and leave ’em, huh?” she ventured, selecting the three red ones from the mix and eating them simultaneously.
Ben transferred the remaining candies from his palm to his mouth and gave her a “whatcha gonna do?” shrug. “What can I say, Chloe? I’m a lone wolf. I don’t play by society’s rules.”
Smiling, Chloe tore open her Skittles. “Perfect. Then you can be the one to spike the punchbowl at the next family reunion. I’m tired of being the black sheep of the Masterson family.”
He grinned. “Much as I’d like to be in on your diabolical plots, I probably won’t be scoring an invite to the party. Grandpa and Grandma Masterson couldn’t have children. My dad was adopted.” He selected a blue M&M’s from the package and tossed it in the air, catching it in his mouth.
She froze, sexy green eyes wide. “We’re not twelfth cousins twice removed?”
The idea hadn’t even occurred to him, but he realized now it had been dominating her thoughts. And why wouldn’t it be? Unlike him, she couldn’t have been sure they weren’t related.
Something had shifted in the way she looked at him. It was a slight change, almost indiscernible, but he felt it in his gut. And a little south of his gut.
She took a deep breath and Ben was treated to an eyeful of cleavage. God, her breasts were amazing. His hands flexed again.
His pulse raced and Chloe’s breathing grew shallower. Her lips parted.
The piercing cry of the hotel telephone jerked him out of the moment.
He fumbled with the bulky receiver before bringing it to his ear. “Hello? Yes, this is Ben. No, I only requested one cot. Yes, I realize the room has a queen-size bed.”
His prey—or had she been the hunter?—took the opportunity to retreat, mouthing the word shower at him before grabbing her suitcase and disappearing.
* * *
SHEWASINBIG, big trouble.
Chloe tipped her head back and let the warm spray of the shower wash the remnants of the day and the smell of chemically-approximated flowers—courtesy of the Value Inn’s complimentary two-in-one shampoo—from her hair.
This wedding stuff had been stressing her out since the day she’d received the meticulously calligraphed invitation requesting her presence at her little sister’s nuptials. Throw in a couple of icy phone calls with her mother and a return-airfare-from-Seattle-to-Buffalo-shaped dent in her savings, and, well, Chloe was on the edge.
And people on the edge did stupid things, such as blubber in front of a complete stranger, and then think dirty, filthy thoughts about him. And while she’d found Ben handsome from the start, something warm and wicked was bubbling up to the surface now, waking parts of her that had been dormant for...well, quite a while.
If not for the ring of the phone, she’d be letting Ben indulge a few of those parts right now. Suddenly the water sluicing over her body felt hotter. She ran her soapy hands over her breasts and across her stomach, the utilitarian washing of her body growing sensual. She would love to explore Ben’s abs, to see if her brain had Photoshopped them in hindsight, or if they were truly as spectacular as she remembered. Her mind drifted lower and so did her hands.
Oh, God.
She knew how long it had been since a man had touched her—going on five months now—but how long had it been since she’d touched herself? She couldn’t remember the last time she’d indulged in the best stress relief available to womankind.
Sure, nothing beat a willing partner, but there was something to be said for being the one in control...of getting exactly what you wanted...right when you needed it.
Yes. Oh, yes.
Chloe reached out to brace her hand on the wall but overshot and knocked the entire line of Value Inn mini bath products off the built-in shelf. They rained down to the tub with a series of bangs that jerked her out of the moment. Her heartbeat, already revving from her sexy daydreams, revved even higher with a shot of adrenaline.
Seriously? First the phone, and now this?
Chloe knew when she was beat. With a sigh, she turned off the shower. She reached past the curtain to pull one of the white hotel towels off the metal rack above the toilet. Like all mass-laundered hotel towels, it was scratchy and barely reached the tops of her thighs when she wrapped it around herself.
The TV went silent as she stepped out of the tub. There were some muffled noises she couldn’t quite place, and then the squeaky floor betrayed Ben’s presence.
Chloe froze.
He was walking toward the bathroom.
Her hand flew to her chest, gripping the tiny towel in a tight fist. Her skin buzzed. Her heartbeat picked up. The light seeping under the bathroom door was interrupted by his shadow. There were only two inches of ramshackle door and a threadbare towel separating them. He was right...there...
“Chloe? You okay?”
Oh, man. His deep voice hit her right in the estrogen and her body picked up where it had left off in the shower. All that delicious heat flared back up. “Fine. Dropped something.” The ability to form full sentences had deserted her.
“Okay. Well, good news. According to the weather forecast, the storm’s moving quicker than they thought. It’s already stopped snowing out there. We should get out of here on time tomorrow.”
“Great.” She hoped the word didn’t come out as breathy as it had sounded to her own ears.
“I’m going to head downstairs and see a man about a cot. Or a woman. I’m not picky. Judging by the ominous ‘no one’s available to take your call’ message I just got when I phoned the front desk, it might take a while. Wish me luck.”
“Good luck.” Yep, pretty breathy. Now she felt guilty for forming such a dark opinion of Stewardess Barbie. Maybe the poor girl couldn’t help it. Maybe it had been Ben’s fault the whole time.
Then the hotel room door shrieked open and banged shut.
Chloe exhaled a shaky, disappointed breath.
What had she expected him to do? Bust open the door, profess their chemistry was undeniable, and ravish her like the hero in some old romance novel her grandma kept hidden at the back of her bookshelf? Well, kind of. But dudes got arrested for that kind of stuff nowadays.
With a sigh, Chloe wiped the steam from the mirror and stared at her blurry image.
Barefaced. Plain brown hair.
Maybe it was for the best that Ben hadn’t broken down the door after all.
She barely recognized herself. She wasn’t even in Buffalo yet and she was already reverting to the old Chloe. The one who’d been so desperate to escape. It was as if the closer she got to home, the more of her identity she was losing.
Her mother always said she wore too much makeup. It didn’t matter how many strangers complimented her, or how many friends asked for a quick lesson. Her mother wouldn’t be impressed that she’d worked her way from sales associate to manager of her local Titanium Beauty store in less than two years. Or that customers loved her makeup recommendations, and that the job afforded her a decent apartment and a means to pay her bills. To Fiona Masterson, it would never be more than a menial labor job at a makeup store in the mall.
And sure, her life wasn’t as posh as her childhood had been, but she had a position in an industry she loved, and it was a great learning experience that was going to help her when she finally launched her own business and became a full-fledged makeup artist. She’d even started a YouTube channel where dozens of people thanked her for her tips and tricks on a weekly basis. It wasn’t netting her much money yet, but she’d broken the five-hundred-dollar mark two months in a row. Not bad for a fledgling channel that relied on word of mouth.
Besides, making money wasn’t the reason she had a YouTube channel. Mostly, it was a place for her to indulge her passion for makeup, for teaching women how to apply it, for investigating and reviewing products. Makeup wasn’t just about vanity, it was about confidence, and she loved reading the comments of her subscribers as they discovered their best selves.
She grabbed the tiny blow-dryer that hung on the bathroom wall and attacked her wet hair with the renewed resolve of a woman with a plan. She was done feeling crappy about herself. She had a video to make for her regular Sunday night upload, anyway, so why not kill two birds with one stone?
First she was going to do her makeup.
Then she was going to do Ben.
3 (#u0d14a43b-fbe8-521a-8f21-f2a7101e22f1)
ONCEHERHAIR was under control, Chloe pulled on some sexy underwear—a black satin push-up bra with matching panties—and added a black T-shirt for modesty’s sake. And socks.
Then she grabbed the cosmetic case and headed back into the room. She set her bag on the desk and liberated her laptop from her giant purse.
While it whirred to life at the touch of a button, Chloe took a seat and turned on the lamp beside her. She rummaged in her bag through the familiar jumble of eye shadow pots, Q-tips, brushes, eyeliners and mascara, making her selections as her computer booted up.
Once she’d settled on her makeup choices, she set to work, using the mirror hanging on the wall to make sure her concealer, foundation and powder were blended flawlessly into her skin. A little blush finished off her base, and she was ready for the fun stuff.
She went for a relatively simple daytime-appropriate look of blue-grays and soft purples.
Once she was happy with how her left eye had turned out, she pulled the laptop in front of her and opened the programs she needed. With the press of a button, her image appeared on the computer screen. She tucked her hair behind her ears and clicked Record.
“Hi, guys, Chloe here. I’m on the road this week, and as you can see,” she motioned at the disheveled bed behind her, “my accommodations are not the most glamorous. But that’s no reason not to look like a million bucks! So here’s a quick makeup tutorial for all you jet-setters out there. A lot of you have been asking me for tips on what to bring with you on a trip. So my first recommendation is to pack a great eye shadow palette. With a palette, you get a lot of variety without taking up a lot of space, plus, all the colors are guaranteed to go together.” She flipped the case full of blues and purples open and angled it toward the camera. “I’m going to be using this eye shadow palette by Jeweled Web—it’s called Suburban Storm.
“For this look, I’m also going to be using an eyelash curler, my trusty brow gel, my favorite drugstore liquid liner, and the Lashes for Days mascara from Titanium Beauty.” Chloe held each product up to the camera as she named it, and the routine of it all calmed her.
“As always, I’ve already done the left side, so you have an example of what we’re aiming for.” She turned her head a little and closed her eye. “So now that we’ve amassed the troops, I’ll show you how to recreate this effect, and then we’ll amp it up so you can see how an eye shadow palette can take you from business meeting to nightclub, even when you’re away from home.”
She fell easily into the rhythm of her makeup routine, chatting confidently at the camera, noticing from the corner of her eye that she was just approaching the five-minute mark as she finished up with her mascara wand. Perfect. Her under-six-minute videos always seemed to pull more views than the longer ones.
“So that’s it.” Chloe angled her head to the side, closed her eyes, opened them and leaned toward the laptop screen. “A dramatic look for a night out, or if you’re like me, any given weekday. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments. Thanks for watching. I’m Chloe and as I always say, ‘makeup, not war’. Until next time.”
Chloe clicked a few settings in the program, saved the video file, and set her laptop aside. Her weekly makeup tutorial was ready to post to her YouTube channel on Sunday night, as scheduled.
And she was ready for Ben.
* * *
BENSTOPPEDINfront of the door and liberated the key card from his pocket, taking a moment to notice that his Prada dress shoes had fallen victim to the weather. The snow and salt had left streaks on the usually-gleaming black leather. He’d need to clean them before the big meeting tomorrow. The day he’d bought them, the salesgirl at the Bellevue Neiman Marcus had oohed and aahed over them, assuring him they were top-of-the-line, as comfortable as they were stylish, but if he was being honest, he still preferred the beat-up Converse shoes he used to wear.
Dress for the job you want, he reminded himself. It would all be worth it when he was hanging out at his cabin. He might even enforce a strict Chucks or bare-feet-only policy there.
He unlocked the door and strode inside. “Chloe, they’re out of cots, so...”
He stopped. Blinked. Tried to process the delectable sight before him.
“That’s okay. I don’t think we’re going to need the cot, do you?”
“You’re not wearing pants.” It was an inane thing to say, but in his defense the blood was rushing away from his brain at an alarmingly fast rate.
Chloe’s laugh was low and sexy. “You’re a real charmer, Masterson, but your powers of observation are a little off,” she chided, glancing down at herself, “because I’m— Oh, shit!” When she looked back at him, his seductress was frowning. “I meant to take the T-shirt off before you got back.”
She reached for the hem and tugged her black shirt over her head, dropping it to the ground. Ben didn’t think he’d ever been as deeply in lust with someone as he was with this woman in her sexy black-satin lingerie and a serviceable pair of black socks.
He wasn’t sure if she’d awakened some weird sock fetish he’d never known he had, or if it was just damn adorable that she’d heeded his warning about cellulitis, but her brand of sensible sexuality had made him so hard it was a wonder his fly was still intact.
And that was before she walked over, grabbed him by the front of his shirt and kissed him like she’d been thinking about it at least as long as he had.
His arms came around her, pulling her closer. They both groaned at the full-body contact.
He kissed her again, licking into her mouth until he drew a sigh from her sweet pink lips. “You changed your makeup,” he said, and the pleased expression on her face made him glad he’d mentioned it.
“I’m surprised you noticed.”
“Well, in my defense, I’m a guy, so no pants trumps purple eye shadow every time. But that doesn’t mean I won’t get around to noticing how soft and pretty and touchable you look.” He reached up and tucked her hair behind her ear. “So different than the badass green and black from earlier.”
She tightened her grip on his neck, pulling him down for another kiss, and they were both panting when their lips parted again.
“I’ve wanted this since the moment we shook hands on the plane,” he confessed, kissing her jaw and running his fingers over smooth, warm skin and cool black satin.
“That’s pretty presumptuous, Masterson.” Despite her words, she tipped her head back so he could continue trailing kisses down her neck. He walked her backward to the bed.
“How is it presumptuous?”
“I just decided this was going to happen while I was in the shower. Sex definitely wasn’t on the table before that.”
“Sure it was,” he countered, placing her on the mattress. “Ask Spider.”
Chloe’s laugh was full and rich as she scooted up on the bed so she could recline on the pillows. “I can’t believe you just said that! I share my tragic past with you and you use it against me?”
He pulled off her socks. “Face it, Chloe. This was meant to be. The plane? The hotel mix-up? Fate’s practically begging us to have sex.”
Her smile was decadent. “I think you may have misunderstood the difference between fate and hormones.”
“No way. This is definitely fate.” Ben joined her on the bed. “I mean they don’t call it a layover for nothing.”
“Stop that,” she said with a breathy giggle that drove him wild. Ben was enchanted, no doubt about it. And very turned on. “Stop what?”
“Stop making me laugh.”
He kissed her collarbone. “Why?”
“Because one-night stands aren’t supposed to be funny, they’re supposed to be torrid and sexy and raw.”
“Oh, I can do torrid.”
* * *
COULDHEEVER.
His expression darkened seconds before he caught her mouth in a scorching, wet kiss that convinced her they were both wearing way too many clothes.
She reached for the buttons on his dress shirt, fumbling them open with lust-clumsy fingers. When she’d finally popped the last one, he rewarded her with a shift of his hips that brought their bodies into perfect alignment, and the pleasure that streaked through her made her gasp.
Damn he felt good. Hot and hard. Her fingers curled against his skin, and her hips bucked to get closer. He groaned, grinding harder against her, squeezing her breast with a large, warm hand. She wanted Ben, naked and panting, thrusting inside her until she couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe.
She couldn’t care less about her mother’s disappointment, or her sister’s wedding, or her exile in Chicago.
She felt alive. And sexy. And desperate for more.
She ran her palms across his beautiful shoulders and down his back. When she reached the waistband of his pants, she let her fingers follow the material around to his stomach and traced the reverse path, up his ridged abdomen and hair-roughened chest.
“Oh, God,” he rasped, pulling away a little, but she rose up, catching his mouth as she ran a thumb across his nipple, delighting in the shudder that quaked through him at her touch. “Chloe, stop for a second.”
“Make me,” she growled playfully, nipping his bottom lip, loving the way his muscles jumped at her touch. He groaned. “Jesus, you feel so good.” He kissed her back, hot and frantic, before tearing his mouth away again.
“Chloe, are you sure about this?”
Ben was staring down at her, hair mussed, eyes dark, looking like the answer to all her sexual frustrations. “I need this, Ben.” She was desperate to experience more of the buzzing current running between them, to block out the shitty stuff and lose herself with this man.
She might as well have said abracadabra, her words had such a magical effect on him. That last little bit of concern that had lingered disappeared in a wolfish grin. “I meant are you sure about the bed,” he lied. “Because I’d be happy to move this over to the table if you want to be able to tell a better story at the stagette.”
“I already missed the stagette,” she responded, pressing a kiss against his jaw, “and the family brunch,” she kissed his neck, “the reception for out-of-town guests,” the hollow of his throat, “the rehearsal,” his collarbone, “the rehearsal dinner—”
“Oh, okay, now who’s being funny? This bed is a joke-free zone, Masterson. Your rule, not mine.”
“You’re right,” she conceded. She leaned back and raised an eyebrow. “You’d better take off your clothes and get me on track again.”
His mouth hitched up at the corner in a devilish half smile. “Yeah, baby. I got your torrid right here,” he said, and her laughter betrayed her change of heart. Maybe funny did have its place in the bedroom after all.
Ben got to his feet and pulled his shirt the rest of the way off.
She’d never been into male strippers—way too cheesy for her taste—but watching Ben strip was a study in seduction. There was no teasing or coyness, just a man taking off his clothes.
And then, finally, he stood naked and aroused in front of her. All sinewy muscle and powerful limbs. And she wanted him. All of him.
“Your turn,” he said, his voice so low and raspy that she shivered.
Chloe pushed onto her knees, reaching behind her back to unhook her bra. She peeled the material away slowly and air rushed against her skin, doing nothing to cool the heat that raged inside her.
Then there was nothing left between them but her underwear. She tucked her thumbs into the waistband, inching them down her thighs. It was one of the sexiest moments of her life, revealing herself to him this way, and his predatory stare raised goose bumps on her skin.
“You’re so beautiful.”
And she believed him in that moment because she felt beautiful. Powerful. Tonight she was daring and sexy, an erotic fantasy. With a grin that was pure siren, she slipped her panties off the rest of the way and tossed them to the floor. “So what are you going to do about it?”
“Oh, I’ve got a couple of ideas,” he promised with a wicked smile. He grabbed protection from somewhere inside his suitcase. Chloe kept her eyes on him as he ripped into the package. She was surprised by how sexy it was, watching him handle himself, roll the condom down the length of his shaft.
She’d never really paid much attention to this part of the process before. She was usually too far inside her own head—How did she look? How did he think she looked? How could she make her boobs seem bigger and her stomach seem flatter?—to pay much attention.
She was paying attention now.
He was big, deliciously so.
She was all damp heat and wanting. When she licked her lips, he practically pounced on her, pressing her back into the mattress. Then he shifted and his erection was between her legs and it was so perfect having him there, just where she wanted him.
When he started circling his hips, applying more pressure, Chloe nearly cried out. “Deeper,” she whispered, burying her head in the crook of his neck. “Please.”
He was inside her with a single thrust, a fast, hard invasion of her body that knocked the wind from her in the best possible way.
“I want you so much, Chloe,” he growled, proving it with every flex of his hips, until she was wild beneath him—panting, sweating, clinging.
Her body was on fire for him. She pulled her knees up, trying to get closer, and the slight change in position must’ve felt just as good to him as it did to her, because he swore and upped his pace. Her entire world had narrowed to the pressure building inside her.
Suddenly, he pushed himself up on one elbow, but before Chloe had a chance to mourn the loss of his chest against her breasts, he moved his hand between them and rubbed his thumb roughly against the most sensitive part of her, startling a cry from her throat. Her brain short-circuited as a sharp shock of white-hot heat rolled through her, swamping her with pleasure a moment before he joined her in nirvana.
4 (#u0d14a43b-fbe8-521a-8f21-f2a7101e22f1)
BEN STEPPED FROM the jet bridge onto the plane, stifling a yawn. He was definitely feeling the lack of sleep. Not that he was complaining. The mere memory of Chloe writhing beneath him, his hands on her skin, her tongue in his mouth... Ben shifted with discomfort as his dick stirred at the erotic recollection.
What he planned to complain about when he saw Chloe again was the fact that he’d woken up alone this morning. But first he had to make it to his seat. He shuffled farther into the plane, waiting as the gentleman in front of him hoisted his suitcase into the overhead compartment.
Jesus, he could still smell her. It was an unfortunate by-product of an overactive imagination and this morning’s shower. He’d used what she’d left in the tiny bottle of complimentary hotel shampoo, and now the achingly familiar perfume of flowers lingered around him. Normally it would have made him nauseous, but thanks to the wrestling match on the bed last night, it was making him horny.
Ben pushed a hand through his Chloe-scented hair and continued to sidestep down the narrow aisle until he arrived at row G and the object of his lust-filled fantasies came into view.
She was wearing faded jeans and a white T-shirt with a zombified Audrey Hepburn on it. Her lips were stained a deep shade of berry; her eyeliner was back with gothic vengeance. And if his cock had been mildly interested at the memory of her, the reality of Chloe had its full attention.
Her attention, though, was studiously focused on the in-flight magazine in her lap.
“Is this seat taken?”
She glanced up as he shoved his carry-on into the overhead bin. She might have sighed as he brushed past her to sit down, but he couldn’t be sure.
“Guess I should have thought this through a little better. I was trying for a dramatic and mysterious exit after a single night of passion.” She flipped a glossy page with her index finger.
“Yeah, assigned seating really messes with drama.”
She flipped another page. “Worst one-night-stand exit ever.”
“On the contrary. You were very quiet when you left—I didn’t wake up at all. Nothing was drawn on my face in permanent marker, and I still have my watch, my wallet and my credit cards,” Ben countered charitably. “As far as I’m concerned, this ranks very high on the scale.”
His joke earned him a withering glare.
“I meant that we’re stuck in forced proximity and tight confines, with no choice but to ignore each other awkwardly and try to keep our arms from touching until we can finally go our separate ways. Which reminds me, I’m claiming this now.” She laid her right arm on the armrest from elbow to wrist, completely covering it from view.
“Or...we could defy the expected and skip the awkward silence. Just keep on living life as though I didn’t ruin you for other men last night.”
She raised an unimpressed eyebrow.
“Look, Chloe. We’ve got about an hour of forced proximity left to go here. So what do you say we move on, start over?”
* * *
“STARTOVER?” she asked speculatively. Like I’m not completely and utterly mortified that I jumped you in the hotel room last night? “As in we do that lame handshake thing in all the girly movies and reintroduce ourselves?”
Ben laughed, and the rumbling sound put a dent in her defenses. “Yeah, that.”
With a shrug of acquiescence, Chloe held her hand out. “I’m Latoya.”
Ben smirked at her as they shook. “Julio.”
“Hmm. Sexy name. So tell me, Julio, what do you do for a living?”
She was expecting a smart-ass comment, like “romance novel cover model,” but instead she got: “What do you think I do?”
She arched her right eyebrow. “Honestly?”
He nodded.
“Sales.” She didn’t even hesitate. “Ad exec, maybe? That or hocking used cars.”
“Wow. Don’t take a second to think about it or anything.” Ben’s voice was light, jokey, but his forehead was a bit furrowed, and there was a gravitas to his next words. “How come?”
“Are you kidding me?”
His silence said he was not.
She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I don’t know. The way you dress is part of it.” She eyed his attire.
“Lots of men wear suits. Newscasters. Athletes. Mob bosses. The alter-egos of superheroes.”
She remained unmoved. “Am I right?”
Ben shrugged. “I can neither confirm nor deny this line of questioning until you tell me what you do.”
“What do you think I do?” she mimicked.
He turned in his seat to look at her, really look at her, and Chloe squirmed a little under the inspection. She was this close to blushing. To counteract the uncomfortable feeling, she forced herself to square her shoulders and raise her chin a notch.
“Well, I’m gonna strike flight attendant and used car salesman from the list of possibilities, considering your obvious scorn for those professions.”
Chloe flashed him a tight smile. Ha, ha.
“Um, okay. You’re not a dentist. You’re not the vice president of anything.” His eyes darted to the zombie on her T-shirt. “And you’re not a kindergarten teacher.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Why do I suddenly feel like this game is going to be less than flattering?”
“What do you mean, suddenly? Did you hear
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Taryn Taylor
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A hot shade of lipstick calls for a hot, sexy guy…Makeup artist Chloe Masterson has a look for every occasion. Flying home for your sister′s wedding and family torture? Easy. Bring out the sarcastic wit and black eyeliner. Bonus—the look catches the eye of the corporate hottie sitting beside her on the plane. Turns out Ben has the exact same last name, and everyone assumes they′re married.When they get stuck in a hotel room together, Chloe decides to accept the gift the Fates have bestowed upon her. (Tip: a bold lip color does wonders for seduction.) But as their lies begin to snowball, Chloe and Ben find it harder and harder to distinguish between what′s real and what′s all just smoky eyes and mirrors.