Serena Bell - Hot and Bothered

“You know the band’s history?” he asked Haven.

She nodded. Her hair was up in some kind of fancy twist thing. He wondered how many hairpins it took to keep it there, how much hair spray. She was so flawlessly put together, the kind of woman he didn’t waste his time pursuing. Different worlds, different values. But Haven wasn’t looking through him. She was looking at him with sharp, knowing, memorizing regard.

“What that history doesn’t say is that I never should have been in Sliding Up in the first place. I’m not pop-star material, and anyone could have seen that by looking at me. I was going to school at Berklee, playing blues and rock and roots, and I let myself get snowed by a producer, which is what happens to a lot of musicians. Labels go after young guys in crappy circumstances who can’t say no. I should have had the balls to refuse, because I had other options.”

“So why did you eventually say yes to the reunion?”

“My dad had a stroke. A few weeks ago.”

Her face softened. She’d been pretty before, but now looking at him as though she cared—

It pissed him off that he still had this weakness in him. He hadn’t learned that women could do this at will—listen raptly, make you think you were the only man in the world. He hardened his heart and plowed on.

“He’s got months of physical rehabilitation ahead of him and a nurse taking care of him in his house. The bills are a bitch and his crappy insurance barely makes a dent. I’m his only kid. My mom’s dead. I told him I’d take care of it.”

“That was kind. You’re a good son.”

He waved it off. “I’m not, really. He and I hadn’t spoken for years. He raked me over the coals for being a screwup and—I lost my appetite for getting reamed out every time I had a conversation with him. But when this happened, I realized he’s not going to be around forever. I want a chance to have a father-son relationship with him. And it’s the right thing to do.”

Her eyes softened a little more, and he tried not to like it.

“So you agreed to do the tour.”

“Jimmy didn’t tell you all this?”

She shook her head.

“Did he tell you they were holding a replacement over my head? Someone who looks like me, plays the guitar, can lip sync a hell of a lot better than I can and doesn’t need you to dress him in the morning?”

She bit her lip, another partial smile. “I don’t think you need me to dress you.”

She stopped right there, perfectly innocent, but his dirty brain knew exactly what it wanted to say back.

Nah. I’d rather have you undress me.

The thought got a grip on his dick. Nice work, schmo. Make this even worse on yourself.

“So, they can replace you. That must be weird.” She leaned across the table. Keep your eyes on her face . And it was no hardship. Her nose was long and elegant with a slight upturn at the very tip. Her eyes were greenish, her skin pale and creamy. He wanted to taste it. His tongue tingled.

He needed another beer as soon as humanly possible, but the waiter was nowhere in sight.

He’d lost the thread of their conversation. “What’d you say?”

“I said it must be weird to feel like you’re replaceable.”

Now she sounded like a shrink again.

The truth was, it pissed him off how easily they could drop another man into his slot. Which was stupid because he’d known that pop groups like Sliding Up were just pretty illusions that presented the music some producer dreamed up. And there was nothing— nothing —about the job that he wanted, except the money.

Or so he told himself. But if he didn’t want the job, why was he so pissed? He hated to think he still had the same old craving for fame and fortune that had gotten him in trouble in the first place. The desire to have an arena full of people telling him with their applause and their screaming that his music was worth something...when he knew all too well it wasn’t.

“Whatever,” he said, because she was too much—too pretty, too sympathetic, too easy to talk to. Because he had this feeling that she wouldn’t want to stop with messing with his hair, his clothes, his nightlife. She’d want to open him up and make him over from the inside out. And there was no way she was getting in there. “It’s fine. I need the money, I’ll do the tour, I’ll live with their stipulations.”

He would let the exquisite Haven Hoyt put her hands all over him (metaphorically) and turn him—but only the external him—into some version of himself he wouldn’t recognize.

She was still looking at him as if she could see right through him. He wondered what the hell she saw.

Maybe the truth. How much it sucked that he needed the tour, sucked that the only way to help his dad was to sell himself out—again.

Or maybe she saw what he saw most of the time when he looked inside.

Failure.

2

“NO MORE HEDGE-FUND MANAGERS.”

Haven leaned over Elisa Henderson’s broad desk and smacked its surface for emphasis. She had to find a blank space between all the photos Elisa kept of the couples she’d match-made over the years. Brides in white, husbands and wives romping across tropical beaches on their honeymoons and even a few couples mooning over swaddled-up newborns and fat-cheeked infants. Haven had plenty of satisfied clients, but even she had to admit that you couldn’t beat Elisa’s job for visible results.

Her dating coach frowned at her. “You’ve already said no more lawyers, no more surgeons and no one who’s involved in any way in film. You stipulated up front you wanted a successful, independent, professional man who dresses well. That right there makes the field pretty narrow. You can’t keep eliminating whole categories of men. Next you’ll be saying no chest hair.”

The thought had crossed Haven’s mind, but she kept her mouth shut. She did like things smooth, metaphorically and literally.

She had a quick flash of Mark Webster’s decidedly un-smooth face. Probably only because she’d spent so much time staring at it, trying to picture how it would look clean shaven. The last time he’d been photographed without stubble, he’d been considerably younger.

“Haven.”

“Sorry, just thinking about work.”

“Can we agree? No more eliminating whole categories of men?”

“No one in finance,” Haven amended.

“That’s even worse. That’s half the professional, well-dressed men in the city.”

“And no musicians,” Haven said, thinking of Mark again. He was not going to be an easy project. He hated the idea of the tour. Money was forcing his hand, and that never made for a good situation.

“I’d already eliminated musicians. They don’t tend to be well dressed, at least not according to your vision of what well dressed entails.”

For Haven, that involved a suit, or at least pressed slacks and a dress shirt hanging on broad shoulders. An expensive leather belt around a narrow waist. It was possible she was salivating slightly at the thought. She’d been sex deprived too long for her own good.

Haven had hired Elisa after Elisa had pulled a surprise two-match victory out of a tricky dating–boot camp weekend. Both Haven and Elisa had briefly looked like fools as their shared client, Celine Carr, tromped all over a Caribbean island sucking face with a paparazzo, while her two handlers chased after her and failed to catch up. But just when it had seemed that nothing good could come out of the weekend, Elisa had realized that Celine and her paparazzo, Steve Flynn, were head over heels for each other, and she’d managed to make a splash of it on national television. On top of that, she’d found true love herself with a former friend-turned-lover on the trip.