Kiss & Makeup

  Welcome to the Hush Hotel!

  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?

  KISS & MAKEUP

  Alison Kent

  Contents

  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

  1

  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.

  Keeping her mind out of the bedroom was an entirely separate matter. It was hard to talk to the man when she couldn’t stop herself from thinking about getting him out of his clothes, but that’s
exactly how she’d spent a large chunk of the night’s long shift.

  His hair was blond, or had been when he was younger. It had darkened, leaving him with lo-lights instead of high. And it was long, a bit wavy—a leonine mane. He wore it pulled back and wore a goatee and soul patch, as well.

  His smile twinkled. His eyes twinkled. His personality, too. She’d had the best time exchanging bantering quips and innuendo. She’d appreciated his wit. Appreciated, too, calls from the other patrons allowing her to step away and gather her thoughts while mixing drinks and serving.

  She’d asked him what had brought him to the city and to the hotel. He’d told her it was a business trip—the business of money, music and women. She’d teased back that she wasn’t much for helping him with the first two, but the third….

  For a long moment then he’d held her gaze, and she’d imagined his fingers that were slowly stroking his glass stroking her instead. Her body had responded, her filmy bra beneath her sleeveless black tuxedo shirt doing little good to keep her private thoughts private. He’d noticed. He’d lifted his drink, his eyes on her as he’d swallowed, his throat working, his jaw taut, the vein at his temple pulsing.

  Blood had pulsed through her body, too. It did the same now as she remembered the way he’d looked at her. As if he wanted to strip her bare, to eat her up, to discover how well their bodies fit together, to devour her once he had.

  And then she wondered if he truly understood where it was he was staying. How perfect a setting Hush made for a steamy affair.

  She smiled as she thought of the words the media had used to describe the hotel when it had initially opened. The brainchild of heiress Piper Devon, Hush had been called the place for the young, the rich and the horny. Shandi, of course, knew it was much more than that—no matter the truth to the adage that sex sells. The business of Hush wasn’t as much sex, however, as it was sensuality.

  Rich perfumes were found in each room’s candles, bath salts, shower gels and massage oils. Private video cameras, video collections and boxes of stimulating toys encouraged tactile intimacy. Whether enjoying a midnight swim by moonlight in the rooftop pool or the basement sofa bar’s music and erotic performance art, guests were guaranteed privacy, discretion and the freedom to explore.

  Then there was the pure visually artistic appeal of the place. The hotel’s vintage and original artwork made for the perfect complement to the 1920s art-deco theme done in black, pink, gray and sea-foam green. What Hush was could only be described as a luxurious feast for the senses.

  And at that, Shandi’s thoughts returned to the man she’d met tonight at the bar. Yeah, she mused, sighing deeply as she stretched out both legs in front of her, leaning forward to grab her toes. Another very long shift lay ahead. And she was already anxious to get back to work, to see him again. And for a simple reason, really.

  He was the first man since her arrival in New York to have her thinking beyond work and school to the physical things that occurred between a man and a woman. Those things she wanted. Those things she missed. Those things she hadn’t taken time to pursue since moving here and settling in and scheduling every hour of every day of her way-too-busy life.

  When she heard a key in the front door behind her, she screwed up her mouth and shook her head. Speaking of busy, at least she didn’t have class tomorrow until noon. Evan Harcourt, her roommate, who was in FIT’s master’s program in illustration, having switched gears after years spent in photography, had to be on campus at eight.

  Silly man, keeping the working and dating schedule he did, even now at the beginning of September’s new term. She waited until he’d closed and locked the door before speaking.

  “The things men do for love.”

  Evan jumped, cursed swiftly and under his breath. “I swear, Shandi, if I end up dead from a heart attack, I’m going to kick your ass.”

  She listened to his steps as he crossed the room. “That’ll be hard to do from the grave. Unless you come back as Angel or Spike.”

  “Smart-ass,” he mumbled, dropping to his haunches behind her and massaging her shoulders, as was his routine when finding her here after work. “I’ll get April to do it for me then. Vengeance and all that.”

  “Hmm,” Shandi murmured, halfway pondering Evan’s shaky romance, halfway out of her mind with a pleasure that was purely platonic.

  April Carter, Evan’s girlfriend for a year now who was majoring at FIT in jewelry design, had definitely lucked out, snagging a man with amazingly talented hands.

  And that thought had Shandi’s mind returning again to Erotique and picturing the way he had used his hands tonight, holding his glass, stroking the crystal tumbler the way she’d wanted him to hold and stroke her.

  With a sigh she returned to the moment. “What makes you think April would lift a finger on your say-so? Your dead say-so at that? You can’t even get her to introduce you to her parents.”

  At her prodding of a sore spot that was none of her business, Evan backed off and away. “What’s that? Your shoulders aren’t aching tonight as usual?”

  Grr. “That dead ass-kicking you’re threatening me with? You’re about to see the real-life version if you don’t bring those hands back over here now.”

  “Oh, well, when you ask so nicely…” The sentence trailed, but he did scoot in behind her and resume the massage for which a licensed masseuse would charge a night’s worth of Shandi’s tips, if not more.

  She supposed she really shouldn’t rag on Evan about his romance with April. On the one hand, the couple had everything going for them—and had ever since the night a year ago when they’d met at the Starbucks where Evan still worked, though he’d since moved up into management.

  Shared interests, similar goals, amazingly compatible personalities. An attraction undeniable by anyone who spent time in the same room with the two—even if they stood on opposite sides.

  On the other hand, April’s family weighed down the scales until even Shandi doubted that Evan and April’s romance could weather the storm brought on by the Carters’ expectations as to what made an appropriate marriage match.

  Sometimes love just wasn’t enough—a truth that strangely brought her thoughts back to him one more time. And for the first time to a subject other than sex.

  He was obviously high powered enough, wealthy enough, well enough connected to be staying at Hush. And that meant what? He’d take one look at Shandi Fossey from Round-Up, Oklahoma—only one, in his rearview mirror—and that would be that? The end of her own fantasy fling?

  And why was she even going there? What did it matter what he thought? Especially when she wasn’t looking to do anything more than get him out of his designer duds and into her bed.

  You can take the girl out of Oklahoma, Shandi, but Oklahoma stays forever in the girl.

  “Yes, Daddy,” she grumbled under her breath. “I hear you loud and clear.”

  “Talking to yourself again?” Evan asked.

  Her head bobbed with the motion of his hands when he kneaded the base of her skull. “Thinking about you and April.”

  “Funny. I could’ve sworn you were calling me Daddy.”

  She couldn’t help but grin. “If I were going to call anyone Daddy, it would be this guy tonight who spent most of my shift sitting at the bar.”

  “Hmm. A sugar daddy with one foot on a banana peel and one foot in the grave?”

  Shandi swung around and swatted Evan’s shoulder. “Hey, that’s so not funny.”

  He shifted to face her, one wrist draped over one raised knee as he sat. “No, but you and I are in the same broke-as-a-beggar boat.” He grinned, his smile bright in the room’s low light. “Why do you think I’m dating April?”

  “If you say for her money, I’m going to hit you again, buddy.” Shandi did her best schoolteacher finger shake. “Besides, you’re not exactly a pauper.”

  “My grandmother’s not a pauper, you mean. I’m poorer than dirt.”

  And Shandi knew that really he was. Th
at his grandmother let him—and by association let her—live rent-free in this, one of several apartments she owned in the city. As long as he paid his own way through school.

  And as long as he didn’t live with April in sin.

  No grandson of Ellen Harcourt’s was going to take up with a girl who’d never had to work for a thing in her life.

  “Do you think it matters?” Shandi asked him. “Being attracted to someone totally out of your league?”

  “Are you talking about me and April? Or you and banana man?” When she glared, he went on. “Being attracted, no. Who can help it?”

  “Those of us not thinking with a penis?”

  “That’s bull, Shandi. A woman’s just as likely to make a move because she wants in a guy’s pants as a guy is. Uh, as a guy is who wants in a woman’s pants. Whatever. You know what I mean.”

  Shandi chuckled. Then sobered, thinking more about her mystery man’s eyes, more about his hungry, burning look, the devastating way she’d found herself wanting to help him get her naked.

  Dear Lord, she was losing her mind. “Is that a bad thing? Wanting in a guy’s pants?”

  Evan blew out a breath heavy with his reluctance to talk. Had she been prying about baseball, he’d be animated and all up in her face yammering on about the Yankees.

  Instead he pulled up his other knee and rolled down to lie on his back, feet flat on the floor, his head pillowed on his wrists, his dark hair sweeping the cherry wood planks.

  “I’m waiting over here,” she finally said, once again sitting cross-legged.

  “It’s still a double standard, Shandi—the women a guy takes to bed and the one he takes home.”

  That particular truth really sucked, yet in this case it was more the reverse of the situation that she couldn’t let go. She shouldn’t be so hung up, but with Evan and April both her very best friends, it was hard to think of either hurting the other. Or either getting hurt.