Hot and Bothered(18)

                He frowned. “I don’t think he’s going to let me get away with it.”

                “Trust me.”

                Their eyes met in the mirror again, and he gave a short, hard laugh. “If I didn’t trust you, do you think I’d let this guy put a straight razor on my throat? And cut my hair off? I feel like—Samson, right? Don’t you sap my strength or something?”

                He didn’t look sapped. He looked...potent. She had to turn away from the mirror because his gaze kept catching hers and not letting go properly.

                Mark Webster had a reputation in the media for saying and doing the wrong things, but he seemed to know the right way to get under Haven’s skin. She was having a difficult time remembering why she shouldn’t exchange smiles, meaningful glances and double entendres with him.

                Right. Right.

                Mark Webster was her client, and her job was not to land them both in the press as a seedy example of how to become his next castoff. He was a serial womanizer. By definition, that meant he was not interested in anything serious with her. And her job was to clean him up, not let herself be dragged into the mud.

                “What do you think?” Derek asked her, warming some kind of expensive styling product between his palms and smoothing it through Mark’s hair, which was now short enough to be “not long,” but still had a lot of wave. He had really great hair, thick and coppery brown with streaks of lighter and darker colors. Women paid fortunes for hair like that.

                She was not secretly envying Derek for being allowed to run his fingers through Mark’s hair. Not at all.

                Oh, she was such a liar.

                “It looks great,” she said.

                That, at least, was the truth.

                “What do you think of the new, improved Mark Webster?”

                It didn’t matter how she answered, because she couldn’t not meet the ferocity of his unblinking challenge in the mirror. So he knew. He knew he looked good, and he knew he was having an effect on her.

                Derek very politely did not roll his eyes at them.

                She wrenched her gaze away, but she couldn’t stop herself from putting her fingers to her wrist to feel the way her pulse raced under the hot skin there, and when she looked up again, Mark’s eyes were on her.

                * * *

                JUDY, HAVEN’S FAVORITE personal shopper, kept touching Mark.

                She brushed her fingertips briskly over his collarbone, tapped them thoughtfully on his muscled shoulders. “Hmm. Too tight through here. You’re nice and broad.”

                He was nice and broad. Haven’s fingers tingled sympathetically as Judy’s moved. Haven wanted to check out exactly where that seam fell on those excellent shoulders, but she sat on her hands instead, lest they start dancing through the air with vicarious excitement.

                They were in the large fitting area in the personal shoppers’ suite, and Mark stood on a carpeted platform facing a three-way mirror. Today had included altogether too many mirrors, and she wished she didn’t have to see Mark’s reflection or her own flushed face anymore. He kept looking above the button of the suit jacket that restrained her breasts and meeting her glances with his intense gray-blue stare.

                Her own clothes felt limp with heat and damp. Strands of her hair had come loose from her updo and now clung to her forehead and cheeks.