Read Online Accounting for Cole (Natural Beauty) by Holley Trent - Free Book Online Page A

“Where’s this go?” shrug. “Would you believe I need tax advice?”
    I shook my head, smiled, and gestured to my open car trunk.
    He set the carton in and helped himself to a few sheets from the roll of paper towels I kept in the emergency box in my trunk. He kept one for himself to wipe his hands and handed the rest to me.
    “We had a show in Norfolk. Dom must have been really taken with your friend Beth because he got her number last month before you left. Called her last night and they met up in Elizabeth City.”
    I dabbed at the red drink dye on my shirt and chewed my lip pensively. “Beth must have been pretty taken with Dom, too, because she never gives out her real number. Odd for her. He’s not really her type.”
    “Well, Dom doesn’t have a type.”
    “That I could guess.”
    He chuckled. “Uh. Anyway, when he stumbled back into our hotel at breakfast this morning I interrogated him on his whereabouts and he told me where he’d been. You see, our stage manager quit so when he left I took his job. I still put on a mini-skirt a few times per week, but I have a bit more free time now. I didn’t know you were so close or I would have tried to see you.”
    I stopped dabbing my shirt and looked up at him with a bit of suspicion and probably a lot of hopefulness. “Why?”
    “Well, I forgot to finish something before you left my room.”
    I must have looked confused, because Cole lifted my chin and crushed my lips beneath his. I felt my eyes go a bit wide with shock, but he pulled me closer, sticky shirt and all, and kissed me harder, sliding his tongue between my lips and urging me to kiss back. I didn’t need more prompting. I just gave myself over to him and chewed at his lips, pulling his polo shirt out of the waist of his shorts and slipping my hands up to feel his familiar back.
    When the back door slammed we both pulled apart and turned to look at Mercedes holding a bag of trash from the shop and poised to throw it into the dumpster. “Shit, that why you quitting? I’d quit, too. I’d stay home barefoot with no panties on all the time, just waiting.” She went back in, mumbling something in Spanish I couldn’t quite translate but with my high school-level language education I thought it sounded a lot like “fine-ass motherfucker” although I may have just been projecting.
    Cole held me back a bit from him, brow furrowed and face serious. “What does she mean? You’re quitting? If you had quit one day sooner I wouldn’t have found you, Miss Macy Vickers . All Dom could tell me was to look in the yellow pages.”
    I grimaced and shrugged, realizing I hadn’t even told him my last name that night. It honestly hadn’t come up. “Come on.” We walked back into the office and I picked up the last of the boxes. Cole picked up my computer monitor and wireless keyboard and we made the trek back to the car. With the trunk loaded, we got inside the car and I started it up and steered toward the downtown waterfront.
    I turned off the engine in the playground parking lot and we walked over to the gazebo, seagulls crowding our path and darting away at the last moment as we stepped. We sat.
    “I suppose I had a bit of a personal self-crisis after we met. I kept thinking about the choices you made to take care of your son and wondered if I was making the right sacrifices to be where I want to be.”
    “And?”
    “And I figured out that I don’t really know where I want to be. I’ve been an accountant for six years. All I know is numbers, but I’m not sure if this is what I want to be doing forever. There’s no room for advancement from here, and I have to admit it can be a pretty lonely job.” I chewed my bottom lip for a moment while I stared out at the Albemarle Sound, and confessed in a quiet voice, “I’m tired of being lonely.”
    Cole put his long legs up on the bench and slid me in closer to his side. “Are you leaving? Going somewhere?”
    “Sort of. I’m going to try something