Alison Kent - Kiss & Makeup

Quentin looked like sex

Living breathing sex. From the glint in his eyes that reminded Shandi of what they’d done last night, to the way his hair appeared to have been styled by a lover while she writhed beneath him.

Living breathing sex… As much as Shandi tried to focus on something else, she finally had to back away and sit down. And try not to drool.

Okay, it wasn’t that bad. She tried her best to remain analytical, almost critical. Like a spectator watching a show.

Nothing. It wasn’t working. All she could think about was getting her hands on Quentin, kissing him, tearing off his clothes. That and the way he made her laugh and hope, the way he teased her…

He was a good man and he cared about her future, her happiness. About her.

And seeing him now, straddling the bar chair in reverse, his arms braced along the top, his feet hooked on the rungs, the fit of his clothes revealing the body beneath…

Oh, but she was in such serious trouble here.

Dear Reader,

One of the things I most love about writing for Harlequin Blaze is the chance to work on miniseries with other authors. I first did it with Jo Leigh and Isabel Sharpe on MEN TO DO. This time, for DO NOT DISTURB, we’ve shared the good fun with Nancy Warren, Debbi Rawlins and Jill Shalvis. It’s amazing what can happen when the pot of imagination is stirred by so many creative minds.

Kiss & Makeup, my contribution profiling the erotic boutique hotel Hush, tells the story of bartender Shandi Fossey, who’s come to New York for a career as a makeup artist. She’s excited, optimistic and she runs smack-dab into the cynical Quentin Marks.

Yes, that Quentin Marks. The same one you met in my 1999 fifteenth anniversary Harlequin Temptation, Four Men & a Lady. Quentin is older, wiser and much more pessimistic than any man should be. And he’s ready to go home to Austin, to leave the limelight of his Grammy-winning career behind. Except now that means leaving Shandi, as well.

I hope you enjoy their story, and that you’ll visit all of us at www.hush-hotel.com for an inside peek at Hush. And don’t forget to check out my special linked online story at eHarlequin.com. Finally, look for the next DO NOT DISTURB story, Private Relations by Nancy Warren, available in October.

Best,

Alison Kent

With great fondness and respect to the hardworking, hard brainstorming, hard-to-beat friends who made this project so much fun: Jo Leigh, Isabel Sharpe, Nancy Warren, Debbi Rawlins and Jill Shalvis. Uh, let’s not do it again any time soon! Also to Birgit Davis-Todd for helping to pull the project together. I’ll call Hush and make reservations for seven, k?

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

TO SHANDI FOSSEY, THE SKY was the limit. And if there was one thing she missed about Round-Up, Oklahoma, that was it. The sky. Pinpoints of white light twinkling in an inky black bowl. Cotton-ball clouds scooped high on a pale blue plate. Butter spreading at dawn. Orange Julius at sunset.

The sky above Manhattan was about wedges cut between buildings, streetlights reflected in windowpanes and flashing neon colors—or so it seemed, sitting as she was, cross-legged and lights-off in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows of her sixth-floor West Village apartment at three-thirty in the morning.

But that was okay. The wedges thing. Really. Because there were lights a whole lot brighter and much more meaningful here in the Big Apple than found anywhere in the sky over Oklahoma.

And that was why she was here, wasn’t it? For the lights on Broadway as well as those off. The theaters and cabarets, sets and stages and clubs. All of those myriad places offering canvases for her work.

Eyelids and lashes and lips. Brows and cheekbones. The slope of a nose. The line of a jaw. These were the landscapes she transformed, shaping and coloring and creating, turning the ordinary into the fantastic with her brushes and sponges, her pots and tubes and jars of colors and creams.

She leaned her upper body to the left, stretching dozens of muscles as she draped her right arm as far as she could over her head and down toward the floor. Her shift as bartender at Erotique in the hotel Hush meant long hours on her feet at least five nights a week, many times six.

Afterward, unwinding beneath her own personal wedge of what sky she could see had become her routine. She enjoyed the silence, the dark, the sense of so much life teeming around her—even though what life she could see from here was so very, very still.

She imagined patrons talking long into the night, discussing and arguing over the shows they’d seen. She pictured the ushers, hostesses and attendants waiting for the venues to empty so they could kick off their shoes, along with their frozen smiles.

She thought of the actors easing out of their roles much as she eased from hers when she sat here each night, leaving behind the Shandi who mixed martinis and margaritas for Erotique’s sophisticated clientele and slipping—reluctantly? regretfully? naturally?—back into the role she’d lived so long.

That of a long-legged, willowy cat’s tail of a filly from Oklahoma—the description she’d been tagged with by the beer-and-whiskey crowd at the Thirsty Rattler, her family’s bar in the small town of Round-Up.

One of these days she would figure out which of the two women she was, whether she needed to make a choice between them or combine them. Had she left Oklahoma to encouraging farewells instead of predictions that she’d return in six months, her tail tucked between her legs, she might find that integration a whole lot easier.

As it was, there was a big part of her that just couldn’t let go of the doubts planted by her family when she’d announced her decision to leave Round-Up for a life in New York City.

For the last year she’d been pursuing a bachelor of science degree in cosmetics and fragrance marketing at the Fashion Institute of Technology. During that time she temped for a living—most recently at the law firm of Winslow, Reynolds and Forster—until hearing whispers around the office about the opening of Hush.

And for the same very long year she’d been satisfied with the status quo of her studies, her work schedule and her friends, needing nothing more. Or so she had thought.

Until tonight, when he had sat down at the bar.

She realigned her body to stretch her left side, her fingertips hovering over the hardwood floor at her right hip. Oh, but if he hadn’t been the most gorgeous thing she’d ever seen. Better even than the actor from that television show about Navy investigators, who had stayed at Hush during the hotel’s grand opening.

Only this guy was real, not an elusive Hollywood fantasy. One who’d wanted to talk to her. Thankfully Erotique had been busy beyond belief, giving her a legitimate excuse to walk away and catch her breath when their flirtation took on a sexually dangerous edge, as it had so quickly.

At least walking away had worked tonight.

But he was a guest at Hush, meaning the odds were that she would be seeing him again. And the bar wouldn’t always be as hopping as it had been this evening. He was going to lose interest if she couldn’t get her act together and keep her mind—and her ever-wavering sense of self-worth—out of Round-Up.