Barbara Daly - You Call This Romance!? - You Call This Romance!? / Are You For Real

Faith fanned herself. Joey rushed forward with a powder puff and plunged it onto her nose. Faith sneezed. Chelsea rushed forward with a tissue. A spotlight rocked on its tripod just behind her, and she tossed the tissue to Faith with one hand and rescued the light with the other.

“Oh, for…” Raff said disgustedly. “Can we just get a shot or two here?”

“The sooner the better,” Cabot said, and before Faith had a chance to register his grim tone, he tightened his hold around her shoulders, tilted her chin up, which made her grab for her hat, gave her an intimate smile and settled his mouth over hers.

That was when the real trouble began. At the first touch of Cabot’s lips, Faith made a firm, if unilateral, decision that she would go on kissing him for a year or so, continuously, no breaks, maybe win some kind of kissing contest. Her mouth melted into his, velvet against velvet, as her insides bubbled like a hot spring.

Her body relaxed into his, seeking him as if it had its own script, her breasts brushing his chest. She sensed his tongue searching for hers, then retreating, holding back. Why would he be holding back? Tentatively she met him halfway, jolted by the electrifying surge of first contact.

“Hold it!” Raff barked.

Of course she would hold it. Hadn’t she already promised herself to hold it forever and ever and ever?

“Cut!” she heard above the pleasant buzzing in her ears, and Cabot dropped her as if she were a hot saucepan.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered into her ear. “I don’t know what happened there.”

“No, it was my fault,” Faith murmured back. “I—” I what? “I was trying to seem taller by, ah, reaching up like that.” Murmuring was a good idea anyway, since she was having trouble talking.

“No, I overstepped…”

“No, I overacted…”

“No, I…”

“Help her into the car next,” Raff said. “Great job, you two. But next time, Miss…ah…”

“Her name,” Cabot said through his teeth, “is Faith. Surely you can master one name. This is my final warning, all three of you. Her name is Faith. She is not ‘she’ or ‘her’ or ‘Miss Whatever.’ Faith. Got it?”

And while he issued his ultimatum, Faith thought, Next time? Omigosh, can I survive a next time?

DAZED FROM KISSING FAITH, which had been the surprise of his life and had shaken him to his jaded core, Cabot wasn’t sure what to do next. One thing he did observe was that they got plenty of attention on the way to LAX in the garish limo. Tourists lifted their cameras and snapped pictures when they pulled up to the terminal, and they’d do the same thing in July, not even knowing that Tippy Temple was about to step out of the car. When you were in his line of business, attention was a good thing.

Once he’d gotten his little party settled in first-class, with Faith beside him in the window seat and the video crew scattered out in front of him where he could keep an eye on them, it seemed time for small talk. Any kind of talk would do except talk about that kiss and its impact, and since the kiss was all he could think about, he didn’t have a clue how to begin. “Nice suit” wouldn’t work, because she hadn’t had anything to do with choosing it.

Joey and Tippy had chosen it, had chosen the entire trousseau. Tippy loved shopping with Joey. Cabot wished he’d thought to ask Joey if he’d like to marry Tippy, since it was only for show.

Modern Day Pygmalion Story: Stylist Marries His Creation. Cabot could see the headline in his mind’s eye, and wished he could see it on the cover of Variety. And People. And Vanity Fair. If Tippy were marrying Joey, he, Cabot, could spend this weekend profitably, which in his addled state meant kissing Faith numerous additional times. And doing more than kissing, if she wanted to.

He wondered if Faith’s mental processes felt like his did right this minute—electrical impulses leaping from right brain to left, from front to back and skittering off on the diagonal. If so, he felt sorry for her.

“…and I’m finally figuring out what my sister Charity has been going through as a model,” Faith was saying, “except that her shoes never fit. Maybe that’s why she’s so determined to be a scientist instead. Comfortable shoes.”

Since she’d come to his rescue, effortlessly supplying the small talk he couldn’t seem to dredge up, Cabot thought he’d better help. “Let me guess,” he said. “You have another sister and her name is Hope.”

“Yes. How about you?”

He gave her a sidelong glance to find that she wasn’t even smiling, when that lovely, surprisingly wide mouth seemed to smile so easily. She seemed nervous. Fear of flying? I don’t think so. Fear of me is more like it.

“One sister, which I thought was one too many when I was a kid. She’s married, now, with two kids. She’s an artist, he’s a stockbroker. I don’t know what they talk about.”

“I told you about Charity,” Faith rattled on after her brief interest in Cabot’s family. “Hope’s a big businesswoman in New York. We’re all so different. Hope and Charity got all the brains, though.”

She sounded so glum that Cabot found himself wanting to make her feel better. “Being brainy doesn’t necessarily make you successful,” he suggested, “and being successful doesn’t mean you’re brainy.” It sounded good, but he wasn’t sure he’d said anything meaningful. “You’re a good travel agent, and that’s not easy.”

She suddenly whipped an earnest gaze around to him and he felt himself melting under it, or at least some of him was melting and some of him was impersonating a stalagmite.

“Do you really think I could be a good travel agent?” she asked him.

He shifted uneasily in the upholstered seat that would magically become his life jacket if he needed one.

“Because it’s practically my last chance to succeed,” she said mournfully. Her mouth tilted down at the corners. Cabot wanted to settle his fingers right there and tilt it back up. “I’m thirty years old and my résumé reads like a terrorist’s dossier.”

“Now I can’t believe you ever…”

“I haven’t caused any actual explosions—well, a fire or two—but disaster strikes on every job I’ve ever held. First there was the Marrakesh caper.”

“That sounds…”

“Yes. Very exciting, doesn’t it? And I thought it would be. A very famous author—you’d recognize his name if I dared to say it aloud even now—hired me right out of college to be his research assistant. He was writing a thriller set in Marrakesh.”

Cabot settled in. It seemed he was going to hear the story of her life, which was better than discussing the fact that he hadn’t acted very professional when he kissed her. “He sent you to Marrakesh?”

“He sent me to the library. He wasn’t about to let go of enough money to send me to Marrakesh. Unlike you. You’ve spent a fortune already researching your own wedding! And I think that’s wonderful. Tippy deserves that kind of thoughtfulness.”

She was gazing earnestly at him again, but there at the end he thought her gaze slid off to the right a little. “It’s tax deductible,” he said without thinking, because what he was thinking about was Faith’s full pink mouth. Forget the mouth! “I’m charging the dry run to my firm,” he added, improvising rapidly, “because I can apply the kind of information we’ll be gathering to my other clients.”

“Would have been for him, too,” Faith said. “Tax deductible, I mean. Anyway, I was slaving away in the M stacks and files, and then—” she paused, and a dreamy look came over her face “—one day when I was doing an online search for ‘Moroccan Meteorological Trends’, I noticed a book called Explore Madagascar, and then another one, The Romance of Mozambique, and Don’t Miss Macao. So of course I had to find out what those places were like.”