Hot and Bothered(5)

                “Oh, God, they’re making you do it,” Haven guessed.

                He nodded. “Those were the terms. Work with you and kiss Pete Sovereign’s ass.” Their eyes locked and she could see the emotion, for a split second, clearly.

                Pain.

                She didn’t know exactly what had gone down between him and Pete all those years ago, but whatever it was, it hadn’t been pretty.

                She had her work cut out for her, but he did, too. Grovel to Pete Sovereign. Remake himself.

                The compassion she’d felt when she’d first seen him in his raggedy clothes, haggling with the hostess, came back in a wave. Which was weird, because she rarely mourned people’s “old selves,” rarely had qualms about rehabbing their images. She believed in image. Image was its own armor, and donning it could make you ready for anything. Even so, people could be resistant. Sometimes they had ideas about wanting to be themselves or not wanting to be fake. In those cases, Haven reassured them that the right image wouldn’t be like that. It would feel as though they were showing their best selves to the world. Let me show you how to wear the real you on the outside.

                She didn’t expect that argument to fly with Mark. He was too smart, too cynical. Too sure his best self was already showing.

                “Can I ask you something? Given how much you obviously don’t want to work with me or apologize to Pete Sovereign, why are you doing the tour? What are you hoping to get out of it?”

                The look he gave her could have lasered through glass, sheared it off clean. “Do we have to analyze it? I’m here, right? What if I just tell you I need to do this?”

                “That’s fine,” she said, and watched his shoulders sink with relief.

                It would be helpful to know who he was, what he was about, but strictly speaking, no, she didn’t have to know his motivations to do her job. She just had to get him cleaned up, keep him cleaned up and present him to the public eye at events where journalists would make a stink about his new, clean-cut self and the boozing, womanizing wreck he’d renounced.

                She’d keep it simple, do her job and deliver a shiny new version of Mark Webster to his manager, as promised. Which meant she couldn’t waste time on sympathy or curiosity or any other extraneous emotions. She was an artist, Mark Webster was her medium and she had work to do.

                * * *

                MARK’S STEAK WAS AWESOME, no two ways about it. It was worth the awkwardness of this whole stupid scene, worth eating in this sterile black-and-gray room with the other stiff-backed diners, worth getting waylaid by the teenaged hostess and her judgmental eyes, worth being head-shrunk by Haven Hoyt. Mark could almost slice the tenderloin with the side of his fork and the flavor was amazing. He loved it when meat tasted like meat, not frou-frou ingredients.

                Concentrating on the food also made it easier to keep his gaze off Haven’s breasts, which otherwise were... They were the eighth wonder of the world. He was surprised the other diners weren’t magnetically drawn right out of their seats to stare. Every time he lifted his eyes from his steak, he had to focus like a madman on her face and not on her curves. He didn’t know what she was wearing—the bottom part was like a burlap sack with a riding crop tied around the waist, and the top part was a 1970s-style button-down shirt under an absurdly short sweater—but whatever she’d engineered underneath her clothes should be part of the building plan for the next generation of bridges. He could practically feel her against his palms. His hands curved involuntarily.

                It would probably be a bad idea to proposition her, but that was what he really wanted to do. He wanted to do that a hell of a lot more than he wanted to have a conversation with her about whitewashing his bad self.