The kiss lasted maybe half a second, but it electrified everything inside Lucy from her toes to her scalp, and she had to grip the back of the bar stool she’d just vacated to keep from keeling over.
Oh, Lord, she was in trouble. She knew deep down that it was all an act, that Bryan had been working undercover for years and that the ruse of a girlfriend came as easily as breathing to him. But it was all new to her. The casual possessiveness he’d treated her to had felt awfully damn real.
Scarlet, apparently oblivious to the tidal wave of feelings coursing through Lucy, was testing the weight and texture of Lucy’s still-damp hair.
“You’ve got great hair,” she said. “Thick and healthy. It’ll do just about anything you want. I assume you’ll want to keep most of the length, but we can do some layers-”
“No. I want it short. I want it to look as different as possible. And blond.”
“You want highlights?”
“Oh, no. I want to be radically blond.”
Scarlet grinned. “I’m so glad you said that. I was prepared to be cautious, but if you’ll trust me-let me go crazy on you-you’ll be ready for a Charisma cover shoot when I’m done.”
Lucy laughed self-consciously. “Well, I hardly think that.”
“Why not? You’ve got excellent bone structure, regular features, good teeth. The glasses, though, have got to go.”
“I want contacts,” she said, remembering Bryan’s instructions. “I want green eyes. Bright green. But I’m afraid there’s not much you can do about my figure.”
“Hey, most of our models have even less in the chest department than you do.
You’d be surprised what good foundation garments can do. You’re slender, which means the clothes will fit you. Help me carry all this stuff into the bedroom and we can get started.”
“I’m staying-” Lucy almost blew it in the first five minutes. If she was Bryan’s girlfriend, she wouldn’t be in the guest room; she would be sharing the master bedroom with him. “I’ll be staying here for quite awhile, I guess, and I don’t have any clothes at all. I’ll need everything.” There. She congratulated herself on a skillful recovery.
“What happened to your clothes?” Scarlet wanted to know, obviously sensing a juicy story. “And don’t worry, nothing you could say would shock me. My twin sister is marrying a rock star.”
“Really? Which one?” Please, dear God, don’t let it be anyone she knew, anyone with In Tight.
“Zeke Woodlow.”
Lucy was infinitely relieved-until she put it all together. She’d read about Zeke’s engagement in The Buzz. “Your sister is Summer Elliott. You’re the Elliott family, the ones who own all those magazines.” One of the richest families on the Eastern Seaboard.
Scarlet looked startled. “You didn’t know that?”
Maybe she’d just better shut up. “I didn’t know Bryan was one of the Elliotts.
I’m a little slow-just putting it together now. We haven’t been dating for long,” she added, hoping that would explain away her cluelessness. “As for my clothes, I, uh, burned them. I need a fresh start.”
“Burned them? Where?”
Belatedly Lucy remembered you couldn’t burn anything in New York-it was against the law.
“Back home.”
“Where’s home?”
“Kansas. On a farm.” That much, at least, was true. She’d grown up in a small, conservative Kansas farming town, and her parents were still there.
“What was Bryan doing in Kansas? I thought he was in Europe.”
“Oh, he was. We met in Paris.”
“Then you went home to the farm, burned your clothes and came back here? Naked?”
Lucy smiled as if this wasn’t the most ridiculous story anyone had ever tried to pass off as the truth. “Right.”
“Girlfriend, I like your style.”
Bryan was still trying to recover his equilibrium as he headed down to the restaurant. He’d realized he was going to have to make it look good if his family was ever going to believe Lucy was his girlfriend. He’d never had a serious relationship before. Well, he’d tried once, but he’d quickly found out that women didn’t like it when he disappeared for weeks at a time. He’d decided that as long as he was in the spy business, it wasn’t fair to any woman to try to have a relationship. Not only would they have to put up with frequent absences, but there was always the chance he wouldn’t come home.
If that ever happened, the poor woman would probably never find out his fate.
So he dated casually. He occasionally slept with a woman if she was hot, willing and understood the ground rules. He’d seldom brought a woman into his loft, and he’d certainly never installed one as a live-in mistress. For his family to buy “Lindsay’s” sudden presence in his life, he was going to have to claim he was utterly smitten. And that meant acting the adoring boyfriend, with public displays of affection, longing glances, the whole nine yards.
He probably should have prepared Lucy better for the role she was playing. They hadn’t even gone over a cover story-where Lucy was from, where they’d met.
Oh, well, Lucy was smart enough to wing it. As long as she reported back to him any details she’d given Scarlet, so they could keep the story consistent, it would be okay.
As for that kiss, Lucy had looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights when he’d swooped in for the light smooch. But he was the one who’d been surprised. Her lips had been soft and warm, and her vulnerability had somehow transmitted itself straight from her soul to his, all in the half second of contact between their mouths.
It had been the merest brushing of lips, so innocent, yet it had shaken him to his shoes. No kiss had ever done that.
He’d mostly composed himself by the time he entered the restaurant kitchen, but the memory of the kiss remained in the back of his mind.
“Hey, boss, you’re back!” one of the sous-chefs greeted him.
“Monsieur Bryan!” called out another. “Hey, those Florentine eggrolls are going like hotcakes.”
The head chef, Kim Chin, who ran the kitchen like a marine bootcamp, looked up from his sauté pan and grunted a greeting. “‘Bout time.”
All right, so he’d been neglecting his business lately. No one said it was easy working two jobs, and the Alliance Trust case had been occupying every waking hour these days. While Lucy had worked it from her end, Bryan had been tracking down the people receiving the embezzled funds, working with two French agents to prevent any of the illicit funds from reaching terrorists in Iraq while not tipping off the bad guys on the American side. Not until he had them all rounded up could he assemble the evidence needed to put them away for a good long time.
“Where’s Stash?” he asked Kim.
“Out schmoozing the beautiful people, of course, the worthless Frenchie.” Which was pretty funny, since Stash practically lived at the restaurant, keeping everything running, paying the bills, meeting payroll, handling all the hundreds of details that kept Une Nuit at the top of everyone’s list.
“Bryan, you’re back!” Stash greeted him with a hearty hug and a double air-kiss.
Stash Martin was an energetic Frenchman in his thirties. With equal parts stubbornness and optimism, he was the perfect manager for an often absent owner.
“What keeps you away for so long, eh?” he asked with a French accent. “The place could have been turned into a hot-dog stand while you were gone.”
Bryan had prepared a long, shaggy-dog story about his exploits in Europe.
Instead he said, “I met someone.” He had to set up Lucy’s cover story, he reasoned. Lying came easily to him, given the number of years he’d worked undercover. But the scary thing was, he didn’t have to manufacture the edge in his voice when he talked about Lucy. What had started as a fairly routine job had turned into something exciting and challenging-and for all the wrong reasons.
Lucy stared at herself in the mirror, then stared some more. Scarlet hadn’t allowed her to watch the transformation, so her own image was a complete surprise. No, a shock. Her mother wouldn’t recognize her-which was the point, of course.