Kiss & Makeup. Alison Kent

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СКАЧАТЬ “Yeah. If you can believe it.”

      He believed it and he pictured it and had no problem doing either. “Your accent’s not quite Texas….”

      “Oklahoma,” she provided. “Round-Up, Oklahoma.”

      “We’re almost neighbors then. Except Oklahoma’s still a long day’s drive from Austin.”

      “And I don’t live in Oklahoma anymore.”

      He nodded his touché, wondering what about Oklahoma had driven her away, because he was certain that’s what had happened. “So your parents wanted you to stay and work. You wanted to leave and study. Either way, someone was going to end up being unhappy.”

      “That about covers it.” She curled her fingers into her palm and considered her nails. “Though I’m not sure unhappy is the word I would use.”

      He sat back in his chair, crossed his hands behind his head. “What word would you use?”

      She laughed then. “Depends on who I’m describing.”

      “Then describe yourself.” He was interested in Shandi, not her family. Especially considering her reluctance to talk about herself.

      That trait made him all the more curious; most women wanted to tell him every detail of their lives, more than he cared or wanted to know.

      He prodded her to go on. “If you’d stayed in Oklahoma, you’d be…what? Bitter? Resentful?”

      Nodding, she smoothed a hand back over the hair she wore in a long French braid. “And guilty for feeling either one.”

      “Because they’re your family.”

      She smiled, the lift of her lips seeming to be more for her own benefit than his. “They may not have my best interests at heart, but I gotta love them anyway. They are who they are, ya know?”

      Then she continued, the rush of words making him wonder how long she’d been holding in what came out as frustration. “And it’s not even about my interests. They don’t think that way. The family has always been one entity. The Fosseys. We’re not individuals. No one is expected to think outside that communal box. The fact that I did…”

      She didn’t pick up the trailing sentence right away, so Quentin leaned forward again, one forearm on the sleek ebony bar as if he could close the distance between them. He hated having this conversation here.

      The room was growing crowded; he wasn’t going to have her to himself much longer. He was enjoying her too much to forgive the interruptions, yet the ugly head of his impatience hardly thrilled him.

      What he wanted was to take her downstairs into the basement, where the partitioned banquettes in Exhibit A—the underground bar set up for erotic performance art—offered the privacy Erotique did not.

      Except, it would be a privacy swathed in blue lights and smoky darkness and an aura of intimacy more conducive to sex than to talk. He wasn’t quite sure either of them was ready to go there.

      Sure, sex with Shandi would rock his world. It was her world he worried about. Her world that upped the ante. That made the wait worthwhile.

      He cleared his throat and returned to the conversation just as she tossed back her head and glanced up toward the ceiling. “Wow, I have no idea where that came from. It’s the customer who’s supposed to pour out his heartache. And the bartender who’s supposed to offer the shoulder or the ear.”

      “Are you always this hard on yourself?” he asked softly, because he wondered why she was. Why she didn’t want to let go. Didn’t want to talk about herself.

      “Only most of the time.” She shrugged, then brushed some loose hair back from her forehead. “Fallout from my overachiever syndrome.”

      “Something that runs in the family?”

      She stepped away from the bar and laughed. “You are just not giving up, are you?”

      “I never do. Not when there’s something I want.”

      She stood there for a moment staring at him, her pulse quickening at the base of her throat. When she smiled, when she tilted her head to the side and grinned, he swore he felt the glass he was holding threaten to crack in his hand.

      “Quentin,” she started, then paused. “Are you coming on to me?”

      He couldn’t help the way his mouth crooked up on one side. “I’m doing my best.”

      “Okay then.” She nodded. “I just wanted to make sure.”

      “And now that you have?”

      “I don’t know.” She gestured toward the other end of the bar. “I’m thinking about getting back to work. Quitting while I’m ahead and all that.”

      Interesting. “How are you ahead?”

      “Well, I haven’t had to mention anything about my three older brothers and how a year later I’m still waiting for one of them to come and drag me home by the hair.”

      He thought of her hair loosened and draped over his skin, thought of her courage in the face of her family’s expectations, thought of the long, hard career road down which she wanted to travel.

      And then he wondered why he was thinking about more than bedding her.

      “You remind me a lot of a girl I knew in high school.” He shifted to sit more comfortably in his chair. “Her situation was different, her family nothing like yours. But she still had to make her way on her own.”

      “And did she succeed?”

      He smiled, thinking of his two friends from Johnson High in Austin, of Heidi Malone from the wrong side of the tracks who’d played sax and become the fifth member of his band, who was now an attorney defending women’s rights, thinking of her married now for six years to Ben Tannen.

      “Oh, yeah.” Quentin’s smile widened. “She’s come a long way from the waif I knew her as then.”

      “Really. So you have a thing for waifish schoolgirls, do you?”

      He laughed aloud, the sound unfamiliar to his ears. He started to speak, was stopped by the movement of the chair beside his.

      “I certainly hope he doesn’t, considering the wealth of experienced fish in the sea he has to choose from.”

      Quentin turned into a cloud of perfume. The woman who’d sat beside him was gorgeous in that way of starlets, with perfect makeup and perfect hair, nails as bright as jewels and jewels as subtle as her plunging neckline.

      She was most definitely on the make. And these days Quentin much preferred the thought of bedding tousled bartenders.

      “Sweetie, would you get me a Cosmopolitan? Light on the cranberry.” The woman gave her order to Shandi, then dismissed her and turned his way. “You are buying tonight, aren’t you, hon? Or did I get all dressed up for nothing?”

      Nothing was just СКАЧАТЬ