Accounting for Cole (Natural Beauty) Read online

  Accounting for Cole

  A Natural Beauty Side-story

  By Holley Trent

  © Holley Trent

  Published 28 June 2013

  All Rights Reserved.

  Accounting for Cole is a work of complete fiction. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover stock from 123rf.com by ©auremar.

  WARNING: this story contains adult situations including sexual innuendo and strong language. It is not intended for consumption by minors (age of majority as specified by your territory of residence).

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Natural Beauty Series

  Other Contemporary Romances by Holley Trent

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Accounting for Cole was originally published by Rebel Ink Press (twice!) in 2012. First, it appeared in the anthology The Dad Plan under the title “Impersonating Dad.” Later, it was republished as a stand-alone novella under the same name.

  This revised version is slightly longer and gives you a bigger hint of the world Macy, Beth, and Gretchen live in. Accounting for Cole is a side-story of the Natural Beauty series—novels that will be re-released under new covers in 2013. AfC is the shortest story of the series, and the only one told from a single point of view. While AfC could best be categorized as chick lit, the rest of the series are true contemporary romances. Macy’s story is a humorous diversion. An introduction to small-town insanity, and you’ll Macy and her friends again, providing comic relief to Nikki Stacy’s rural cosmetics dynasty.

  Please enjoy meeting my staid accountant Macy.

  -Holley Trent

  PROLOGUE

  I was somewhat disoriented when I awoke, facedown on a mattress that was far too firm to be my own with sheets of too high a quality. Furthermore, a heavy arm draped over my naked waist and the smooth hairless leg nestled between my two spread ones were components atypical of my normal, solitary waking contortion.

  I turned my face toward the breath that had been previously tickling my neck. I had expected morning to deal a blow to the desirability rating I had assigned the man the previous night, and held my breath as my bleary gaze focused on the chiseled jaw darkened with stubble, slightly parted lips, and his elegant nose. I exhaled my relief and my heart rate slowed to a more healthful pace. He was still as beautiful in the mottled light as he had been when we’d crawled into the bed of his hotel room the night before.

  He stirred and rolled onto his back, and his long black hair mussed from sleep fell over closed eyes. I put my hand back to pat my short ponytail. He’d given me his hair elastic.

  I leaned in and held my breath once more, reaching out a hand to gently brush the wayward strands of his hair from his cheek. There he was—living, breathing, perfection and next to me by choice. My cheeks burned as I squirmed out from his hold and pushed the hem of my borrowed shirt down over my scandalous bits.

  “This can’t really be happening.”

  His eyelids fluttered at the sound of my voice, but remained closed.

  “Jesus,” I whispered.

  In the daylight, the sleeping man seemed approachable and almost mundane. For much of the previous night he’d been flashy, glamorous, worldly, seemingly off-limits, and female.

  Perhaps I should explain.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I’d been working as an accountant for six years. I figured it’d be my life’s work. Accountancy is a good, respectable field and as far as I could tell, a recession-proof one. I worked Mondays through Fridays and some Saturdays. I would have worked Sundays, too, but small towns in the Bible Belt tend to close down on Sundays.

  The Saturday before Father’s Day, I was in the small office I rented from Mercedes Garcia catching up on quarterly tax reports. I was behind on the chore because I had a knack for attracting clients who couldn’t get their shit to me in advance of their due dates. I thought about cutting them loose and saving myself the frustration, but I’d been eyeing some office space in the old elementary school recently turned into a strip mall. I was squirreling away my pennies to save up for a security deposit.

  My office at the moment had in the past been Mercedes’s beauty salon supply closet, but seeing the potential for a sideline of income, she bumped the closet into the shop a bit so the space could accommodate a desk, three hard wooden chairs, and a few file cabinets. A peeling vinyl sign proclaiming MACY VICKERS, CPA was adhered to the shop’s back door. You couldn’t see the sign from the road, but most people knew where I was, anyway. Edenton’s a small town.

  I never knew who to expect would pop into the office, so I always tried to dress professionally…which is to say modestly, even on Saturdays. On that June day I paired a tan skirt suit with sensible black flats and my favorite white blouse. The shirt had ruffles at the neck, and I confess I always felt a bit like Mrs. Slocombe when I wore it, minus all that Brit-com sass. My friend Beth, owner of Edenton’s only dance studio, made a habit of telling me every time she saw it that the suit was hideous and that I should give it back to my mother.

  Well, I didn’t get it from my mother. I bought it off the rack at Peebles, and it wasn’t even on sale. The saleslady said I looked quite shapely in it, but in hindsight—and seeing as how she worked on commission—she was probably bullshitting me. I believed her compliment at that moment probably because I needed to hear it.

  I’m five-feet four and weigh about a hundred and twenty pounds. Beth said I’m shaped like an Irish peasant woman and should never wear suits. When I gave her my patented stuck on stupid look about the peasant woman remark, she rested her hands on my hips and said, “Macy, honey, if you ever give birth, that baby is just going to fall right out without you pushing.”

  I’d brushed her hands away and harrumphed. If I listened to hyperbole-prone Beth, I would have seriously considered renting out billboard space on my ass. Ten bucks a square inch.

  “There you are!”

  I looked up from the envelopes I was sealing and found the devil herself, Beth, and our friend Gretchen spilling into my doorway. Gretchen is our “lady of leisure.” Lacking responsibility of any sort, she’s frequently beyond the legal alcohol limit for driving. We’re working on finding her a passion.

  On that day in my office, she wore a gauzy maxi dress that showed off her toned arms and sunken-in belly. She was even going braless, but since she had that California girl vibe about her, she could generally pull that off…although most ladies in town would prefer she didn’t.

  Beth was usually well put-together, but that day she made my spidey-sense go off because instead of the sparkly flip-flops she typically wore when she wasn’t teaching, she was wearing hooker heels: four-inch spiked, purple-metallic, stiletto sandals with little rhinestones covering the heels. As it was only three o’clock, I knew something was up.

  “What do you want?” I asked, not bothering to suppress the suspicion in my voice as I assessed Beth’s stretchy, slinky, mini-dress. Like me, Beth was unmarried at almost thirty, but in her case, her single status is due to a profound monogamy allergy. Me? I was single because I really didn’t date.

  The dating pool in Chowan County—population 15,000—is pretty small so unless you like going to clubs and bars out of town to meet new people (which I don’t) you’re sort of out of luck. I hate crowds, so my luck is obviously at nil. Actually, Gretchen had once signed me up for one of those online dating sites. When
I’d cancelled the service after a month with no qualms, Gretchen damn near attacked me for my criticism that my profile wasn’t getting any hits. She’d shrieked, “Of course it didn’t work! Look at your profile picture. Are you trying to be ugly?”

  I had rolled my eyes at her and went back to scrutinizing the tax return I was preparing. I didn’t think it was that bad. It looked like me. Low-maintenance Macy. Gretchen had wanted to let her husband Marko do some photo manipulation in his computer program, but I figured I’d rather be disappointing up front than once I met whatever sucker decided to arrange a date with me.

  “Can’t we just be stopping by to say ‘hi’?” Beth asked, jaw gaping in mock insult.

  I tamped my envelopes into a neat stack. “No. The only time you come here is when you want me to talk Mercedes into giving you a discount on your brow waxing.”

  “That’s so not true,” she said, voice flat, and her gaze on her perfect manicure.

  “It so is.” I wrapped a rubber band around the envelope stack and bumped my desk drawer shut.

  Beth turned to Gretchen, they shared an inscrutable look, and both shrugged. “Okay, maybe it’s true usually, but today we’re on the up and up.” Beth opened her little two-hundred-dollar clutch, pinched out three lavender-colored tickets, and slid them across my desk.

  I leaned over and read the print without picking them up. “You bought tickets to a drag revue?”

  “Uh-huh!” Gretchen said, nodding like a bobble-head doll and grinning so wide the folks at the twin cinema could have used the landscape of her bleached teeth as a back-up screen.

  Beth gave our over-wound friend a calming pat on the shoulder. “I missed them last year when we were in Myrtle Beach at the same time, but I signed up for their e-mail newsletter to keep track of their tour dates. They’re going to be in Greenville for just two days and the only tickets they had left were for tonight. We couldn’t resist! Get your purse and let’s go. We have a dinner reservation at the sushi place before the show. We’re going to make a night of it.” She leaned her elbows onto my desk, effectively putting herself at eye level with me, and wriggled her brows.

  I shook my head, slowly and unambiguously before counting off on my splayed fingers. “Count me out. First, that’s a ninety-minute drive and I don’t have the mojo today. Second, I don’t eat raw shit. Third, I’ve got work to do. Fourth, the last thing I want to be doing tonight is sitting in some filthy, sticky club where the music is too loud, and sweaty people try to touch me.”

  “That’s the best part!” Gretchen squealed. She walked around the desk and grabbed my wrists, giving a forceful yank upward.

  I groaned, but stood. I needed to walk to the mailbox, anyway.

  “Come off it. You were going to sit at home tonight and balance your checkbook again.” Beth uncapped a tube of orangey-red lipstick, and smoothed it over her pout. After smacking her lips, she raised my name placard to her mouth, bared her teeth at her reflection in the polished brass, and used an index finger to scrub off an errant smear of lipstick. “Who the hell does that every week, anyway?”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “we need you to drive, Miss Teetotaler. I plan on getting so wasted that when they throw me out of the venue for indecency at one a.m., I won’t have any recollection it. I’ve even booked a hotel room so we can sleep it off. We’ve got our overnight bags in the car.”

  “Oh, I see.” I let my lips quirk up into a grin and batted my eyelashes like a coquette. “That’s too bad. I don’t have a change of clothes here. Sorry to disappoint.”

  She gave my suit a long glare and her upper lip rolled back.

  I was certain I was off the hook, and did a little jubilant bounce to celebrate.

  Beth cocked her head to the side and narrowed her eyes. She sucked in a breath, and on the exhale, whined, “Damn, that thing’s ugly. Who buys puce anything besides you?”

  I rolled my eyes, thinking Here we go again. “It was the last suit of its kind on the rack, so obviously someone.”

  Gretchen sighed and lifted her auburn ponytail from her breast, studying the ends. “Suckers. All of you. The suit doesn’t matter anyway. Everyone’s going to look at me, because I’m pretty, and Beth because she has big tits. I don’t think anyone is going to pay you any attention, Macy.”

  “Why don’t you just kick me in the head?” I put my shoulder to the outer door and pushed.

  Beth followed on my heels and emitted a dry chuckle. “A-heh. Don’t mind Gretchen, sweetie. You know she’s never had a well-functioning filter.”

  The door clicked shut behind us, and I turned my head to find that Gretchen had followed us out into the sunshine, too.

  “Come on,” Gretchen said. “Do you want us to beg? We asked Nikki to drive us but she broke her accelerator foot.”

  Lucky Nikki.

  We were at the corner now, and I pulled the mailbox flap down and tossed my pile of envelopes into the maw. “Nice to know I’m not even your first choice third wheel,” I grumbled.

  They didn’t have a response to that. They just followed me in silence back to my office, then stood a respectful distance away as I retook my seat at the computer. I had some e-mails to respond to.

  After about three minutes of typing, I’d gotten into a groove and almost forgot the ladies were there.

  Beth cleared her throat. “Look, Macy. Truth is, if you don’t take us, we can’t go. Marko said Gretchen can’t go out unsupervised anymore after that last stunt, and I don’t count as an adult influence. We even asked Nikki’s assistant Trinity, but she was supposed to go to the beach this weekend.”

  Lucky Trinity.

  Fortunately for my immaculate criminal record, I hadn’t been present for the stunt that got Gretchen put on spousal probation. I hadn’t wanted to know all the gruesome details, but the snatches I caught anyway seemed to indicate Gretchen had committed a little act of public nudity in a sacred place.

  I forced out a ragged breath and closed my e-mail software, eyeing both women in turn. Beth looked hopeful, Gretchen expectant.

  “Hey, I know we annoy the shit out of you, and have since elementary school,” Beth said with a cringe. “But there’s only a few people we trust to keep us on the straight and narrow, and one of you dropped a bowling ball on her own foot last week.”

  Raking my bangs back from my eyes, I stared at Gretchen, who chewed on one of her immaculate cuticles, then Beth, who finally had the good sense to look apologetic. They were like helpless puppies in a way. I felt sorry for them.

  “Dammit.” I snatched my keys from the corner of my desk, and stood. If anyone deserved pity at the moment, it was me. I would have rather been shredding seven years of tax returns than spending an evening babysitting the two most unpredictable women in Chowan County.

  CHAPTER TWO

  As I’d feared, Club Sapphire was hot, loud, and crowded.

  We managed to wrangle ourselves a table near the stage only because Beth had an eagle eye and absolutely no qualms about squatting. The table we nabbed was obviously occupied by a group whose anchor wasn’t smart enough to hold her pee until her absent companions returned from the bar and dance floor. We had been seated an entire three minutes when the obvious leader of our competition returned with an unopened bottle of champagne tucked under her arm, and a little digital camera gripped in her right hand.

  Even being dressed in a soft yellow shift with a silk scarf tied jauntily at her neck, she had a certain quality about her that whispered, “Hulk Smash.” She was big, and with the way her thin lips flattened and eyes narrowed at spotting us, I suspected she was no virgin to throwing her weight around. Hell, she could have played offensive tackle for the Panthers with as broad as her shoulders were.

  “Jesus,” Beth hissed through clenched teeth.

  Too late for prayer, I figured. I should have done that before we left Edenton.

  “This table is ours,” the lady slurred. She tucked the champagne bottle under the
arm with the camera and pointed to the charming pile of trash she and her cohorts had left behind. “We were here first.” She wrapped the fingers of her free hand around the top of my chair back and tried to tip me out of it.

  “Yikes!” I gripped the table and scrambled to my feet just before my ass slapped the polished cement floor.

  “What is your problem?” Beth asked the woman, with an accompanying poke to her shoulder.

  Naturally, the brick house didn’t budge.

  Beth swallowed, but straightened her back and let her smooth forehead furrow. “You abandoned your table, Bessie. We took it. Sorry for your loss. Buck up and put on your big girl panties.”

  “Who are you calling big?” the mountain of a woman asked. Her voice had deepened half an octave, and I could have sworn I saw an Adam’s apple bob.

  I gave Beth’s side a discreet pinch. “Um…Beth?”

  Beth swatted my hand away.

  The “lady” set her champagne bottle on the edge of the table, and stuffed her camera into her bra. She straightened her breast padding, and I took a step back, trying to pull Beth along with me.

  Red splotches bloomed on the woman’s face, and with each passing second her anvil of a jaw jutted out a bit more. The breathing through her slightly crooked Roman nose became loud and labored, the likes of which I’d only ever heard before from a cartoon bull about to charge a matador. I took another step back, but Beth remained oblivious.

  “You know what?” I said, finding my courage and putting my body between the woman and Beth. “It’s all right. We can find somewhere else to sit. I saw some tall cocktail tables near the entrance.”

  “I don’t think so,” Beth said with a scoff. “If she’s got a problem she can take it out on her friend who can’t hold her piss, or maybe the ones over there at the bar who are too stupid to flag the waitress down. There’s no reserved sign on this table.” She leaned in closer to the vexed behemoth and plucked a bit of lint off her linen dress with a sneer.