Work In Progress (Red Lipstick Coalition #3) - Staci Hart Page 0,29
pick another bitch to spend my cash on.” He leaned around me to make eye contact with her. “One who follows through.”
“You know, I have a better idea.” I reached for my wallet, opening it up to thumb through the bills. I offered him a hundred, folded in my fingers. “This should cover her drinks and your cab fare. Come on, I’ll help you catch one.” I grabbed his upper arm to steer him out, but he thrashed away from me.
He listed, but I kept him upright by my grip on his arm. “You assholes are all alike,” he said. “Pretty boys throwing money around, models and milkin’ guys for drinks and then not putting out. It’s bullshit—that’s what it is. Why the fuck aren’t you on my side?”
My anger tightened with my grip, my voice low with quiet menace. “Because I’m not a sorry piece of shit who can’t take no for an answer. She doesn’t owe you one fucking thing. I don’t care how many drinks you bought her. Maybe she thought you were all right and then figured out you were a fucking creep. Who knows? But she doesn’t want to go home with you. So take this”—I shoved the money into his front pocket—“and go home. Alone.”
His face twisted. And in almost the same motion, he wrenched away from me, cocked his fist, and let it fly.
The hook caught me on the jaw, snapping my head to the side. Nothing else moved other than my heart, which hit double time in an effort to pump a surge of adrenaline through me. Slowly, I brought my head around to look at him as he gaped at me. The crowd around us held their breath.
And with a smile, I clenched my fist, wound up, and returned the favor.
Booked
Amelia
I was still rubbing the sleep from my eyes when I saw Thomas Bane’s mug shot.
My lungs stilled, full of the air drawn on a gasp.
I scanned the Twitterstorm, trying to parse what I was seeing.
Despite the fluorescent lighting, the orange jumpsuit, and the gap in his grin where one of his front teeth used to be, he was still absolutely, ridiculously gorgeous.
My eyes touched every corner of that photograph. His shining black hair. His dark, stubbly beard. His twinkling eyes, black as sin, one ringed in a sick shade of purple, the lid fat and watering. His nose, red and swollen. His gap-toothed smile, like he didn’t have a care in the world.
Like he hadn’t been arrested.
Twitter was on fire. The hashtag toothlessthomas was trending, and though many of the top tweets were news outlets recounting his bar fight and subsequent arrest, the vast majority of posts were composed of clever one-liners about how stupidly hot he was, even missing a goddamn front tooth.
No, somehow, the damage to his face made him even more attractive.
That picture was everywhere. Everywhere. Not just gossip outlets, but even CNN and Fox had jumped on the bandwagon. He’d been arrested for assault at a publisher event in SoHo where one of the many models he used to date was having a launch party for her book. The articles were calling him a delinquent, an unconscionable beast, a menace.
And they were calling for his head.
Dread bubbled up in my stomach at the realization of just how much trouble he might be in. A fight at an industry event with his reputation and the publicity nightmare splattered all over the internet? That spelled trouble with a capital T to start and an oh fuck at the end.
I wondered if he was still in jail and brushed away the errant thought that if he was, we’d need to reschedule our meeting.
I took a breath. I let it out. I stared at my phone with my heart clanging and his mischievous, dark eyes sparking from my screen. It was a look that said, I’m not even sorry about it.
That made him hotter, too.
I flipped off my comforter. Claudius lifted his head, watching me with only mild interest as I chugged out of the room in search of someone who could help me make sense of things.
Katherine glanced up from her Raisin Bran and took me in. “You okay?”
“Uh-uh. Look.” I shoved my phone at her.
She took it, her eyes widening fractionally. “Oh my God. He’s…what happened to his tooth?”
“It was knocked out in a bar fight.”
She nodded. “Very masculine. I bet his testosterone production is off the charts.”