Tipsy (Take It Off #5)(4)
Author: Cambria Hebert

Part of me wondered if the color of his eyes was what inspired his name.

No thinking about him! I told myself and directed my attention back to the mirror. My cheeks were slightly flushed against my clear, creamy complexion, my nose was small and straight, and my full pink lips could use a little lip-gloss. I bent, fishing the gloss out of my bag, and when I stood back up, he was there.

“Blue,” I gasped, pressing a hand to my chest.

“For you,” he said, laying some folded bills on the station.

My heart thundered in my chest, and if I squeezed the gloss any tighter, it was going to explode. “Thanks,” I murmured, breathless. Why was he standing so close?

He reached out and cupped his large, warm hand over my elbow and stepped a little closer. He brought his lips right up beside my ear.

“You’re not so easy to forget,” he whispered.

I sucked in a breath and my mouth ran dry. The room actually went a little blurry. I blinked, focusing on the spot where he stood.

But he was gone.

I stared at the door for a long time, his whispered words echoing through my head.

2

Blue

I received confirmation today. Confirmation that she was definitely pissed off at me. I hadn’t been surprised by that. But I was surprised by the intensity of her anger. Even after all these weeks, she was still mad I never called.

That also confirmed something else.

She still wanted me.

The chemistry between us was undeniable. From the minute I stepped into that salon, she was all I could see. All I could feel.

She tried to act like she didn’t care, like I was just some guy she met once. But she couldn’t fool me. I caught the way she would look at me and then force away her eyes. The way she took extra care with her tools and scissors before getting started.

God, I could still smell her honeysuckle scent that practically wrapped around me every single time she leaned so close. Thank God for that stupid pink cape. It covered up the parts of me that had trouble hiding my strong and lusty reaction to her.

I’d been getting my hair cut all my life, but never, not one time had it ever given me a hard-on. I thought back to the way her perky, full breasts brushed against me when she sometimes moved. The way her black top clung to her narrow hips and her black and white skirt flirted with her ankles and hugged her tight ass. It made me itch to grab her, to pull her into my lap…

She looked as good as I remembered. Better, in fact. Her hair was golden blond with streaks of very light blond. The way it flipped out around her face drove me crazy. It was like she walked around with permanent bedhead, and all I could think about was what she would look like spread out across my sheets.

Her lips were full and ripe, like a juicy peach, and her blue-gray eyes were muted like the sky on a cloudy day. She seemed smaller than I remembered, though she wasn’t wearing high-heeled boots like the time I took her out. Right before I left, I actually had to lean down to whisper in her ear, and it made me want to curl around her protectively.

But she didn’t need protection. Julie was a girl with a set of claws on her. I noted today that they were painted a very eye-catching pink. I wondered how much work it was going to be to get her to retract those claws.

Would it even be worth the headache I knew she would cause me?

Maybe I should let it go, chalk it up to bad timing, and ask someone else out.

Even as I thought it, my body revolted against the thought. Yeah, I could ask someone else out, but it wouldn’t be the one I really wanted. I had spent weeks, months even, thinking about her, drawing up her face and the sound of her laugh whenever life got too dark or too stressful for me to deal. Without even knowing it, she’d quickly and irrevocably became the place my mind drifted whenever I needed some sort of comfort.

Even her spiteful and sarcastic behavior today wouldn’t change that. If anything, it endeared her to me more.

I shook my head. Blue, a high-maintenance woman is the last thing you need.

Still, the thought of driving her to the brink of madness and then kissing her back had an intense appeal to me. Life with someone like Julie would definitely not be boring. She would likely drive me insane, make me curse, and torture me in ways no other woman would.

What was wrong with me that made me want to move closer instead of farther away?

It’s just stress. It’s just you getting back to reality, I told myself. My job, my work life was full of drama. My home life needed to be calmer, more steady.

I sighed and took another wrong turn. I kept turning and driving in all different directions just to be sure that I wasn’t being followed. I wasn’t. I was told that I was safe. I liked to take precautions.

‘Course, I already knew it was safe. If I hadn’t been sure, I wouldn’t have gone to her to get a haircut.

I guess some habits are hard to break.

I sighed when the station came into sight. I slowed and pulled into the lot, grabbing my duffle out of the back and jogging to the entrance.

What I needed to do was get back into the swing of things. Focus on the job. Always the job.

But it wasn’t the job that I kept thinking about.

It was her.

3

Julie

My last client of the day was a walk-in. Technically, my day was done, but she was here and I was free so I extended my hours. I was exhausted. Seeing Blue again had pretty much made me feel like I had a gigantic shot of adrenaline straight to the heart, and when it drained away, I was left feeling like a wobbly noodle.

The woman in my chair was probably at least seventy years old. She had short curly hair, a rounded figure, and light wrinkles on her pale cheeks. Her eyes were bright and kind and she smiled a lot, which is probably the reason I offered to stay.

She leaned her cane against my workstation—which was a white built-in against the wall, with drawers and cubbies reaching to almost the ceiling on each side of the large rectangular mirror. There were bright lights overhead and in front of the mirror was a bar that ran across that held my blow dryer and styling tools.

She lowered herself down into the black chair, and I pulled out the black cape (okay, so maybe I didn’t spill something on it) and draped it around her shoulders.

I pumped the chair up with my foot, bringing her to the correct height for me to work. “What can I do today for you, hon?”

The woman’s hands moved around underneath the cape, and I watched as she drew out a folded-up section of a magazine. She’d brought a picture. I liked when clients brought a picture because it gave me an exact idea of what they were looking for so I didn’t have to try to interpret what they tried to tell me.