“You don’t have to say the right things,” she said in a faux-cheerful voice. “I’m your assistant.” She took the tie from his hand and crooked her finger, gesturing that he should lean forward. He did, and a moment later, she had his tie fixed and smoothed his collar down over it. “There you go.”
“Thank you,” he murmured, and glanced in the mirror to straighten his clothes. He wanted to say romantic things to her. That she looked like a vision, that she looked like a princess. But he couldn’t get past the fact that she didn’t look like Maylee. It was making him feel rather confused.
“Since we’re doing makeovers today, can I make a small suggestion?”
He looked over at her, surprised. “What did you have in mind?”
Her mouth quirked on one side, and his heart flip-flopped. It was as if his Maylee was peeking out from underneath the glamorous exterior.
Then he swore to himself. His Maylee? He was insane. She wasn’t his in any sense of the word.
“I’d love to do something different with your hair,” she told him.
He looked in the mirror again, surprised. “What’s wrong with my hair?” He’d smoothed it down and gelled it like he normally did. His part was perfectly straight, not a strand out of place.
“It’s fine if you’re eighty,” she said, and that teasing little smile returned to her face, and all of a sudden he wanted to kiss her, to smear all that thick makeup off and see the bright, happy country girl underneath who he was obsessing over.
He needed to get ahold of himself. “What did you have in mind?”
She crooked her finger at him again, arching a now-perfect eyebrow. And he was lost to that enticing finger. He couldn’t resist that come-hither expression on her face. She could have told him she wanted to shave him bald, and he’d still have approached her, helpless to pull away.
“You should take off your jacket so we don’t mess it up,” she told him. “Shirt, too.”
Interesting. He removed his jacket first, and then undid the tie she’d just fixed so beautifully, tossing it onto the bed. This felt a bit like a strip tease. He looked over at her to see if she was thinking the same thing, but he noticed that her gaze was averted, and she had so much makeup on her cheeks it was impossible to tell if she was blushing or not.
He really needed to have a word with that hotel concierge. Even though she was just doing her job, he wanted someone to blame for his vague unhappiness with how Maylee looked. She was impossible to criticize; her gown, her makeup, and her hair were perfection.
And it was bothering him. He didn’t like it, and he couldn’t exactly say why he didn’t like it, just that he didn’t. Disgruntled, he stripped off his shirt.
When he was down to his undershirt, he looked over at Maylee. “All right. You have me half-naked. What do you want to do with me?”
The words came out huskier than he’d expected.
Her eyes widened, and her smile grew wider, then she bit her lip, as if she were trying to hide her expression. “Um. I’d like to borrow your bathrobe, actually, so I don’t get anything on myself.”
“Take whatever you need,” he told her. Damn, that sounded incredibly erotic, too. What the hell was his problem?
She went to his closet and pulled out the bathrobe, shrugging it on over her lovely pink gown. When she tied it at her waist, he felt another surge of possessive lust and had to count backward from one hundred again.
“Now,” she told him, tightening the belt of his robe at her narrow waist. “I need you to bend over the sink.”
***
Twenty minutes later, Maylee was pleased with Griffin’s transformation. Gone was that old, glued-down, bone-straight hair that was always plastered to his skull. She’d washed his hair and then put a bit of styling wax on her fingers to tousle his hair, and with the help of a blow dryer, Griffin’s hair was now a light golden-brown crown that topped his head in stylish spikes. It was slightly tousled, but trendy, she decided. Way better than his old hairstyle. “There,” she announced. “You look ten years younger.”
He gave her a curious look, then reached for his glasses and put them on, studying his expression in the mirror. “I look like I belong in a boy band.”
She laughed. “No, you don’t. You look very handsome. And I’ll have you know, this is how Luke Houston’s hair was done in his last movie.” She’d seen a picture of it in one of the magazines at the hair salon and was inspired. “Trust me, you look like a young, dashing viscount instead of like my Pepaw did your hair for you.”