Hot and Bothered Read online

“I know,” Haven said fervently.

  While she waited for Mark, she tucked the plastic bag of his clothes into one of the shopping bags, where it couldn’t tempt her.

  4

  HAVEN DIDN’T HAVE a thing for celebrities. She liked to think that was a good trait in an image consultant, because she didn’t freeze up or go all fangirl around them. She didn’t fetishize fame or worship actors or read about British royalty with stars in her eyes. They were people just like anyone else, who had to do their jobs plus manage all of that expectation and public scrutiny.

  Just people.

  And, Haven would also have said about herself, Haven had believed about herself, that she didn’t have a thing for musicians. As a teenager, she’d never screamed or launched herself onto a stage or pulled off her top because some hot musician had thrust his pelvis in her direction.

  However, she was reconsidering her position, watching Mark Webster play the guitar at Village Blues.

  She’d tried to get Elisa to come out with her, but Elisa had muttered something smug about a night in with her boyfriend who’d been on the road too much. So here Haven was, sitting by herself at a little table in a dark club that was lit by a meandering string of white Christmas lights. She was sipping a glass of decent red wine and trying hard not to make eye contact with the motley assortment of men who made pre-makeover Mark look like a fashion plate.

  Now she was glad she was here by herself, because she wanted to be able to ogle him without a perceptive female friend catching her at it. She didn’t want to share the experience with anyone else, or process it out loud—she just wanted to watch him do what he was doing.

  There was, of course, something inherently sexy about the guitar, about all that strumming and stroking, about the grip he had around its neck, sliding up and down while his other fingers worked in well-coordinated harmony. You couldn’t help thinking about other things. Especially when the guitarist in question was Mark, with the jaw and the cheekbones, with the biceps that bunched and forearms that corded as his fingers clutched string to wood. He wore a form-hugging old T-shirt and ripped-up jeans—they’d bought them pre-ripped during the shopping spree, a compromise between his desire for well-worn and comfy, and her need for him to look like he hadn’t dug his clothes from a Dumpster.

  So, yeah, she was thinking about other things, but that was before he’d begun his solo.

  She didn’t know the tune, and she didn’t know much about blues, but she knew passion. And the look on Mark’s face, the rush of synchronized motion that came from his big, beautiful hands, the way his whole body contracted and arched, rocked and swayed—that was passion. He could coax the guitar to make sounds she didn’t even know how to describe, crisp dots, sharp clenches, long wails of music. She bet he could make it say anything he wanted it to. She bet he could make it deliver a whole Shakespearean monologue.

  Her mom and her sisters would love this guy, and she was sure he’d love them. Mark was a guy who lived big, lived out loud. Her mom gave whole workshops on this kind of thing—the authentic life, the artist’s life.

  She tried not to think about the look on his face and failed. There was no way she couldn’t see it as a sex look. Her body was definitely reading it that way. It said he was following his bliss and following it all the way down.

  It made her feel things.

  For one, it made her wish she had something like that in her life, some creative outlet that could take her out of time, out of her body, and let her express herself the way Mark could. Her mom made pottery, and even though the bowls were misshapen and the sets never matched, her mom looked as if she was in heaven when she was up to her elbows in gray mud. Haven even owned a set. She just didn’t...use them when people came over.

  Sometimes she convinced herself that the apple hadn’t fallen so far from the tree. Okay, she didn’t create poetry or shape pots or make music. But she created celebrities and shaped images and made people.

  Haven loved her job, and that was what mattered. And there were plenty of men out there who would respect what she did, love her ability to contribute financially, and enjoy being part of her social scene. She just needed to find one.

  Under the spotlights, Mark took another solo, and now he was grinning at the guy across the stage from him and trading licks, each of them feeding off the other. It made her realize something about Mark she hadn’t understood before. Why he resented the tour so much. Why he didn’t want to be a pop musician, even if it would make money and let him help his father. Even if it seemed like the sort of thing no one in his right mind would turn down.

  This was Mark, pouring himself into his music, his inner self on display for the whole room, in people’s ears, throbbing in their skin, pulsing in their blood. Of course he didn’t want to package himself up like some eighteen-year-old boy and make forgettable music for money.

  The exchange between the two guitarists rose in intensity, toward frenzy. Like—

  Like sex, she thought, of course. Mysteriously, miraculously, Mark Webster had the power to make Haven think about sex all the time. For two years, she’d hadn’t felt much interest at all, and now...

  Mark was in her ears, in her skin, pulsing in her blood. His music was making her wish for things she couldn’t have. Making her wish Mark Webster would put his hands all over her. Grip and slide and stroke and strum.

  * * *

  PLAYING BLUES WAS Mark’s therapy, and it felt good to be up on stage in that dark room, the noise so loud it rang like silence in his head as the music poured out of his guitar. His mind, his fingers and the strings were one. He loved being surrounded by a few of his favorite musicians and some ringers from the sign-up sheet, slipping into the groove, egging the other guitarist on, echoing a great riff from his buddy Jack on the Hammond B-3 organ. The drummer, someone he’d never seen before, wasn’t half bad, a hot-shot conservatory kid. People were into it, too, tapping and chair dancing and dropping conversations to pay attention.

  This was what he needed to drown out the confusion in his brain.

  As he played, he pictured Haven Hoyt watching him in the mirror and his mind wouldn’t let go of the image. Her eyes had wandered over him, a shameless scrutinizing and undressing he wouldn’t have expected from a woman like her. She’d dropped her gaze when he met her eyes in the reflection, then peeked back as if to make sure he was still looking. A flirtation, even if she didn’t know it or really mean it. It had boiled his blood, fast, and several times he’d had to force himself to think about Pete Sovereign in order to keep from sporting visible wood.

  A hard game of basketball with the guys earlier in the evening, plenty of pushing and fouls, yelling, laughing, hadn’t washed away the visual. None of it had brought his horniness back down to manageable. He couldn’t stop thinking about her, wondering what she was like in bed.

  The first time he’d met her, he’d thought her Teflon coating was too thick to penetrate, but he was far less sure now. He’d seen that blush sweep all the way down to her neckline. He bet if he got Haven’s clothes off, got her under him, she’d be a spitfire. He bet she’d writhe and squirm and beg and whimper his name.

  Oh, hell.

  The front man, Devon, called “Seven Nights to Rock,” a twelve-bar jump blues in A with a quick four, always a crowd-pleaser. People got up to dance, and through the path they’d cleared, he saw her. For a split second he thought he’d conjured her, voodoo’d Haven Hoyt right out of the dirtiest part of his mind. How else to explain what she was wearing? Some kind of top that tied around the waist and plunged deep between her breasts—was it possible she wasn’t wearing a bra at all? The thought made him flub a riff he’d been working up. Because those breasts, sans support—

  It was remarkably hard to imagine your hands on a woman’s breasts and play the guitar at the same time, like two pathways in the brain colliding. His lust t
ripped over the notes and made a jangled mess of his music.

  What the hell was she doing here? Coincidence? Or had she come down to hear him?

  If she had, he told himself, it was out of professional interest. She had to know who she was dealing with on every axis if she were going to remake him, right? She had to know where he spent his time and whether he was dressed like she’d told him to.

  He wasn’t. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to put on all those pretty-boy clothes. She’d kept his favorite jeans and bomber jacket. He’d meant to get them back from her, because there was no effing way he was going to let her dispose of them. He and that jacket had been to hell and back.

  Sure enough, she caught his eye, pointed at his clothes—an old T-shirt and the jeans they’d picked out together today—and shook her head. But he thought she might be smiling. Just a little.

  They finished up “Seven Nights” and started in on Delbert’s “Squeeze Me In,” and he couldn’t help himself, he gave her a look. Can you?

  Her gaze fled his, sought refuge anywhere it could get to. Then, as though she couldn’t completely govern herself, she turned to him again. She met his eyes, and then her gaze dropped. Haven Hoyt was looking at his mouth. Jesus. Her expression was telling him, Maybe so.

  No. He had to be making that up. No way this buffed-to-a-sheen, image-obsessed woman wanted him. He had proven that he could fluster her, but wanting was another thing entirely.

  And what the hell difference would it make if she did? There was no way he wanted to get himself tangled up with her.

  At the break between sets, she came over to him.

  “You’re amazing,” she said. She had to lean close in the chaos, and her breath brushed his ear and sent signals he did his best to ignore.

  He liked this way too much, her breath on his ear and her praise. He wanted to turn away so she wouldn’t have a chance of seeing how much it meant to him. “Thanks,” he said instead.

  “You’re crazy talented.” Her face was so close to his that his hair prickled on his scalp.

  He had to take a step back to keep himself sane. “Nah.” She was wrong about that. He’d never had a deep enough well of musical talent, only been in the right place at the right time. “I just, you know, mess around.”

  “Do you play here a lot?” She was shouting.

  He guided her, hand on her elbow, to a quieter corner of the room, where conversation, if not easy, was at least possible. “Whenever I can. And a few clubs in Queens and Brooklyn, too. There aren’t many blues jams left anymore.”

  “I get it now,” she said. “Why you hate the pop stuff. This is you, right? This comes from your soul.”

  He was startled by her words and by the rush of emotion and recognition he felt. He could only nod, and that felt inadequate.

  “You ever tour?”

  He laughed.

  “Not with Sliding Up. Like, with these guys?”

  She was wearing skinny jeans and knee-high boots, and he wanted to peel her like a banana. He had to force himself to stay in the conversation. “I don’t have my own band. I play jams. Just for fun.”

  “But why not? Why not a band? You’re good enough, Mark.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not. Just a dabbler. Besides, there’s no money in blues. You have to play five nights a week, and even then, you have to have a day job.”

  “You used to teach music lessons, didn’t you?”

  “Where’d you hear that?” It was just one of the unnerving aspects of this thing with her, that she knew so much about him and he knew so little about her.

  “I sniffed around,” she said. “Talked to some of your old students, actually. They all said you dumped them.”

  “I didn’t dump them.” He heard the defensive edge in his voice and tried to tone it down. “I decided to stop giving lessons.”

  “You didn’t like teaching?”

  He shrugged. He didn’t want to get into the whole reason he’d quit with the lessons.

  “So—what do you do these days?”

  “Like you said the other day. Live off Sliding Up’s hit, do birthday parties for groupies and fans, play weddings and bat mitzvahs.”

  She made a face at him that suggested she knew how he felt about that. “Doesn’t seem like you.”

  He shrugged. “What do you know about me?”

  She turned away. She was blushing again, for a different reason this time, but his body chimed in anyway. His balls tightened, blood rushing into his cock. He liked her off balance. What did that say about him? He wasn’t a nice man.

  She fidgeted with the tie on her shirt, a gesture so un-Haven-like he wanted to reach out and still her hand. “I just—do they let you wear those ratty T-shirts when you play weddings?”

  “I have a suit,” he said. “Once in a while, I rent a tux.”

  “You told the hostess—” Her eyes narrowed.

  “I was making a point.”

  “I should have guessed.” She frowned. “I can’t see you at a wedding, or with some little kid who’s trying to figure out basic chords.”

  “I hate the weddings,” he admitted. “But I loved the music lessons. Seventy percent of the time it was just paying the bills, but I’d get through to my students sometimes, or I’d see some talent in them, or a kid who was kind of dead, you know, would come alive playing. A parent tells you their kid won’t do their homework, is flunking out of class, but practices two hours a day. It’s a rush, then.”

  He was pretty sure he hadn’t talked this much in years. He wasn’t sure what had made him confess these things to Haven. She got him so heated up, and at the same time, lowered his defenses. It didn’t make sense.

  “Why’d you quit?”

  She was looking at him as though she could see straight through him again. He was pretty sure she knew the answer to her own question, or at least had her theories. “I screwed up,” he said. “Bunch of bad stuff happened in a row last year.”

  “The video?”

  Yeah, she knew all right. He’d been caught on someone’s iPhone, making out with two different women at the same party. Problem was, it wasn’t the same party. There’d been no way to prove the two spliced-together clips were from different nights because he’d looked identical in them—same hair, same two-days’ beard growth, same torn green T-shirt. He’d had his hands up one woman’s shirt, down the other’s pants. The thing went viral. “And then the DUI, a few days later. Meltdown city. Articles everywhere, blasting me for being a bad role model. You’d think the press wouldn’t care anymore, they’ve always had this love-hate thing with me. And all those articles were right. I was a shitty role model. So I quit the music lessons. I had to stop pretending to be good for kids.”

  He’d toned down the drinking and the partying after that, too, and quit driving under the influence, but no one had reported on that.

  “Your students—every single one of them—said you were the best teacher they ever had.”

  “They were just being nice.”

  “I don’t think so.” She tilted her head. “I want you to start again.”

  “What?”

  “The lessons. Some of the kids want to work with you again. I told them—” She hesitated, but only for a beat. “I told them you’d be available to teach again for the next six months.”

  Her words swirled in his head and his gut. His instant joy collided with all the messages saying No, not you, it’ll never work, you’re a shitty role model. He’d loved those kids, and he’d hated himself for not being the man who deserved to teach them. He never wanted to disappoint them like that again.

  “No,” he said.

  She crossed her arms, which was probably supposed to make her look stubborn and tough but mainly made it harder for him not to covet her breasts.
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br />   “You can mess with my hair and my clothes, and you can make me go to parties, but this is over the line. That’s not my image. That’s my life.”

  A few of the musicians had gone back up front and were messing around, so he couldn’t hear what she said next, just watched her lush lips and thought about kissing off all her lipstick. “What?”

  She leaned in. He guessed at some level he’d wanted her to. He could smell her perfume, assaulting his senses and traveling every synapse in his brain, right down his spinal cord.

  “Not for your image. For you. Because you loved it.” Her lips were closer to his ear than they had to be, surely. If he could feel warm breath, if he could sense the movement of her mouth, if he could imagine her tongue curling into the crevices of his ear and her teeth nipping his lobe—she was too close.

  “Let me make this happen.”

  Her breath feathered against his skin, a sensation that wound its way through his whole body.

  Neither of them said anything and she didn’t move. He breathed her, the soft scent of lust under all the perfume, the strongest and best.

  She stepped away, taking her warmth and scent with her. Disappointment curled in him. He hadn’t really thought that she’d—that anything could happen between them—

  He hadn’t thought it, but he’d wanted it.

  “Okay,” he said. Somehow, it felt as if he was agreeing to more than music lessons.

  She was straightening her clothes, stiffening her back, putting her whole Haven costume on again. “I’ll let you get to it. I didn’t mean to take up your whole break.”

  “No—it was— I’m glad. And thanks.”

  Don’t go.

  He didn’t just mean physically. He wanted her close to him again, taking him in. She’d seen him. She’d said—

  This is you, right?

  Because you loved it.

  “So, yeah—I’d better go. I’ll be in touch about the lessons. And regardless, Wednesday, my office, meeting with Pete.”

  “Yeah,” he said.