Hot and Bothered

It didn’t matter how she answered, because she couldn’t not meet the ferocity of his unblinking challenge in the mirror. So he knew. He knew he looked good, and he knew he was having an effect on her.

Derek very politely did not roll his eyes at them.

She wrenched her gaze away, but she couldn’t stop herself from putting her fingers to her wrist to feel the way her pulse raced under the hot skin there, and when she looked up again, Mark’s eyes were on her.

* * *

JUDY, HAVEN’S FAVORITE personal shopper, kept touching Mark.

She brushed her fingertips briskly over his collarbone, tapped them thoughtfully on his muscled shoulders. “Hmm. Too tight through here. You’re nice and broad.”

He was nice and broad. Haven’s fingers tingled sympathetically as Judy’s moved. Haven wanted to check out exactly where that seam fell on those excellent shoulders, but she sat on her hands instead, lest they start dancing through the air with vicarious excitement.

They were in the large fitting area in the personal shoppers’ suite, and Mark stood on a carpeted platform facing a three-way mirror. Today had included altogether too many mirrors, and she wished she didn’t have to see Mark’s reflection or her own flushed face anymore. He kept looking above the button of the suit jacket that restrained her breasts and meeting her glances with his intense gray-blue stare.

Her own clothes felt limp with heat and damp. Strands of her hair had come loose from her updo and now clung to her forehead and cheeks.

Haven Hoyt was not feeling very put together at the moment.

Judy tugged on the shirt to check the fit over Mark’s pecs, brushing the cotton-silk blend across his chest as if there were a speck of dust she needed to remove. “Tough to fit you for a shirt when you’re so big through here. That’s a good thing.” Judy looked up at Mark through her eyelashes.

Haven had never really thought about it before today, but Judy was attractive, for an older woman. She had platinum-blond hair and strong bones, and she looked great in her silver tunic, indigo jeggings and knee-high black boots. She seemed to be having fun.

Of course she was having fun, because she had her hands on Mark’s chest. Haven had noticed his size the other day at lunch, but there was something about this particular blue dress shirt that emphasized his strength and bulk. Maybe it was just Haven’s fond feelings for dress shirts, but more likely it was Mark. Judy kept messing with the buttons, as if making adjustments, but Haven was pretty sure her motives were baser.

Still, if Mark needed his buttons checked, Haven would be willing to help out. In fact, she might be willing to go to the mud pit with Judy for the privilege. And Haven didn’t do muddy, any more than she did outdoorsy or sleep-in-a-big-T-shirt or just have a few people over and I’m sorry I didn’t have time to clean the house.

Judy shamelessly ran her hand over Mark’s butt—was that really necessary?—to emphasize the clean fit of the charcoal-gray dress pants. That butt was a mighty fine specimen, Haven mused, giving up on not having an opinion. It was firm and high and tight and round and she bet he knew how to use it to great advantage as leverage for—

“Nice line in front, too.” All three of them stared at Mark’s crotch in the mirror. Whatever Mark was packing under there was evident even under the “nice line” of expensive dress slacks. She briefly wondered whether it was arousing to have them both staring at his endowment like that. It would be pretty embarrassing to get an erection right now. Wouldn’t it?

She raised her gaze from the front of his pants and found herself staring into Mark’s eyes. He raised an eyebrow at her, and she watched her own face turn the same flaming pink as her nail polish. Heat swept through her, tightening her nipples and pooling between her legs. Mark’s dimples deepened, even though his mouth didn’t quite break into a full smile.

She wasn’t going to make it. She was going to die of frustrated desire before the shopping session was over.

As much as she wanted to deny it, her body had decided this was foreplay.

She’d never been attracted to a client before. Never. She’d done image makeovers on male clients, and she’d sat in Judy’s upholstered seat while Judy ran her hands over different sets of equally impressive shoulders, pecs and abs. Mark Webster should not have been any different, should not have been turning Haven’s excellent brain to mush.

“I’m going to get some water,” she said, and for that, she got a full-on Mark grin. It was a startling, marvelous thing, bright and white and all the way into his eyes, and she ran the hell out of that dressing area.

For the rest of the fitting, she stood at the far edge of the room, out of his sight in the mirror. He went through plain white T-shirts, a new, unscuffed leather bomber and several blazers and jackets. He tried on baseball jerseys and printed T’s, fine-gauge sweaters and casual button-down shirts, ties, a pair of suspenders, new gym clothes.

He looked good in all of them. He looked as though they’d been made for him, as though he’d been sculpted to fill them perfectly.

Haven was fatigued from the effort of watching as Judy checked the fit of a raglan sleeve over Mark’s substantial biceps, knelt at his feet to make sure the trousers broke over expensive Italian leather shoes the way she wanted them to and—this was the final insult—ruffled his hair as she placed a fedora in a ridiculously sexy tilt over one gray-blue eye.

Haven’s only hope was that Saturday night with Jewelry Marketing Guy would turn out better than the last six or eight dates. Maybe Jewelry Marketing Guy would be so smart, so thoughtful, so interesting, so brimming with pheromones that she would want to sleep with him on the first date. Then she wouldn’t need to imagine stripping Mark out of his formfitting new wardrobe, thrusting her fingers into his thick, scrumptious hair and pressing her mouth—actually, her whole freaking naked body—against his.

“Do I have to wear this stuff all the time?” Mark turned to ask her the question. Sullenly.

It was probably a good thing that he was still a pain in the ass. A hot, trouble-making, pain in the ass.

“Not when you’re locked in your own apartment.”

He sighed. “I hate you.”

His eyes told her he didn’t.

“I’ll wear this home,” he told Judy. He was in a gorgeous fine-knit striped V-neck sweater and butt-snugging jeans. Haven wanted to beg him not to wear those clothes out of the store. To have mercy.

He went to the men’s room while Haven paid for his things. She’d bill the whole lot back to Jimmy, and Jimmy would take it out of Mark’s tour earnings. God forbid Mark screw up again, because Haven had no idea who’d foot the bill if he torpedoed his chance to be part of the tour.

Judy handed Haven Mark’s shopping bags, plus an unmarked plastic bag. “The clothes he wore in here,” Judy said. “Unless you want me to just throw them in the trash right now. Or burn them.”

Haven took the bags. She felt a peculiar tenderness for the ratty jeans and the tortured jacket, and on top of that she had a totally perverted desire to pull out the T-shirt and see if she could detect Mark’s scent in it. Not the expensive hair-care products and fabric sizing from today, but the real Mark smell of coconut, leather and clean male sweat.

“Nah,” she told Judy. “I’ll give it to Goodwill.”

“They might not want it. That jacket—”

“I know,” Haven said fervently.

While she waited for Mark, she tucked the plastic bag of his clothes into one of the shopping bags, where it couldn’t tempt her.

4 (#uead9df67-9e20-5c82-b160-fc184bf89a8d)

HAVEN DIDN’T HAVE a thing for celebrities. She liked to think that was a good trait in an image consultant, because she didn’t freeze up or go all fangirl around them. She didn’t fetishize fame or worship actors or read about British royalty with stars in her eyes. They were people just like anyone else, who had to do their jobs plus manage all of that expectation and public scrutiny.

Just people.

And, Haven would also have said about herself, Haven had believed about herself, that she didn’t have a thing for musicians. As a teenager, she’d never screamed or launched herself onto a stage or pulled off her top because some hot musician had thrust his pelvis in her direction.

However, she was reconsidering her position, watching Mark Webster play the guitar at Village Blues.

She’d tried to get Elisa to come out with her, but Elisa had muttered something smug about a night in with her boyfriend who’d been on the road too much. So here Haven was, sitting by herself at a little table in a dark club that was lit by a meandering string of white Christmas lights. She was sipping a glass of decent red wine and trying hard not to make eye contact with the motley assortment of men who made pre-makeover Mark look like a fashion plate.

Now she was glad she was here by herself, because she wanted to be able to ogle him without a perceptive female friend catching her at it. She didn’t want to share the experience with anyone else, or process it out loud—she just wanted to watch him do what he was doing.

There was, of course, something inherently sexy about the guitar, about all that strumming and stroking, about the grip he had around its neck, sliding up and down while his other fingers worked in well-coordinated harmony. You couldn’t help thinking about other things. Especially when the guitarist in question was Mark, with the jaw and the cheekbones, with the biceps that bunched and forearms that corded as his fingers clutched string to wood. He wore a form-hugging old T-shirt and ripped-up jeans—they’d bought them pre-ripped during the shopping spree, a compromise between his desire for well-worn and comfy, and her need for him to look like he hadn’t dug his clothes from a Dumpster.

So, yeah, she was thinking about other things, but that was before he’d begun his solo.

She didn’t know the tune, and she didn’t know much about blues, but she knew passion. And the look on Mark’s face, the rush of synchronized motion that came from his big, beautiful hands, the way his whole body contracted and arched, rocked and swayed—that was passion. He could coax the guitar to make sounds she didn’t even know how to describe, crisp dots, sharp clenches, long wails of music. She bet he could make it say anything he wanted it to. She bet he could make it deliver a whole Shakespearean monologue.

Her mom and her sisters would love this guy, and she was sure he’d love them. Mark was a guy who lived big, lived out loud. Her mom gave whole workshops on this kind of thing—the authentic life, the artist’s life.