LITMIR.BIZ

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staff was merciless in vetting credentials, checking IDs and keeping out media riffraff.

      She’d seen them in action, and knew that facet of the hideaway’s reputation was what brought celebrities and public figures here for intimate trysts, photos of which they didn’t want splashed across tabloid covers.

      That was the atmosphere she, too, had needed, and with the help of trusted friends, she had escaped the East Coast, leaving the gossips floundering.

      For months after, newsmen who followed society scandals had hunted her, wanting the exclusive of her exile. She’d watched from the safety of her snowy cocoon and experienced a flurry of emotions, her feelings ultimately boiling down to one.

      She hated the press. H-a-t-e-d reporters and their supposed journalistic integrity. They were vultures. They’d treated her like carrion during Marshall’s trial and the divorce. They were as responsible as her ex for making her life hell. But no more.

      She refused to spend another moment feeling bared and naked, flayed, exposed to her bones like an instructional cadaver or a plasticized body in a museum display. That’s how it had seemed, having the population of the northern Atlantic states knowing minute details of her life….

      Her propensity for speeding through traffic lights. How she spent more time on her own charity work than socializing with Marshall or at home. The way an hour of Ashtanga yoga left her smelling as though she hadn’t bathed in days. Whether her salon’s beauty technician gave her a bikini wax or a Brazilian. And if any of those things sent Marshall into the arms—and beds—of all those other women.

      Despite her very public night job she now held, no one had found her, partly because of the disguise she wore onstage—and that was one of the reasons she wore it, to limit any obvious connection between her two selves—and partly because of how well the residents of Mistletoe protected their own.

      But the main reason her cover hadn’t been blown—besides her legal change of name—was that the only outsiders she mixed with were the customers who came in to order plants and floral arrangements from Under the Mistletoe.

      Or such had been the case until she’d fallen all over the gorgeous stranger who’d kissed her until she felt as though she was going to die.

      Smart. Real smart. A veritable genius of a cookie.

      She dropped her forehead to the vanity’s surface and groaned—which only made things worse because it brought to mind all the things he’d made her feel. She’d forgotten how sweet it could be to slide her tongue against a man’s seeking to enter her mouth.

      Such an exquisite pleasure, that first sweet connection, its wetness, its promise, its warmth. She’d enjoyed a comfortable sex life with Marshall—until he’d begun finding his comfort elsewhere—but she never had seen stars.

      She could get used to stars, she told herself, sitting up to study her reflection. She didn’t know what she was looking for, something different or new, a visible indication that something within her had changed because of a starry kiss.

      She knew that nothing had, that nothing could have. She’d been on her stranger’s table and in his lap no more than seconds, and her mouth had been pressed to his, seeking, searching, aching, almost no time at all.

      The only thing to change had been her perfect record at staying smart. Five years sober, and she’d fallen off the wagon because of a man. Stupid, stupid, stupid. If her actions became a time bomb and blew up in her face, she would have no one to blame but herself.

      “Argh,” she roared, surging up off the bench. She needed someone to talk to. Reassurance that she hadn’t screwed herself. A reinforcing slap to the head telling her that everything she wanted was not in a stranger’s kiss—no matter that it had felt as if that was exactly where she would find it.

      3

      “DO YOU BELIEVE in love at first sight?”

      Alan Price, Club Crimson’s manager and overflow bartender, stared at Miranda as if she’d grown two heads, which she supposed was about the size of it. She had her Miranda head, and her Candy head, and Alan was one of the few people who knew both well, working with her here at the club, and having lived next door to her when they were kids.

      “Was it love at first sight with me and Patrice?” he asked, clipboard in hand while he did his nightly inventory, a shock of his sun-bleached hair falling forward to hide his frown. “Is that what you’re asking?”

      Miranda settled more comfortably onto the bar stool in the now-empty lounge, leaning an elbow on the bar and propping her chin in her hand. “Tell me about meeting Patrice. I’m in the mood for a good love story.”

      Alan had calmed her down with a couple of drinks when she’d blasted into the club after her dressing-room panic attack, promising her the crowd had thought nothing of the spice she’d added to her show.

      He’d calmed her enough, in fact, that she was almost ready to call it a night, to head back to her dressing room, to strip off Candy…and then hope her ancient import started when she went out in the cold to go home. One of these days, she really did need to spring for a new car.

      A reformed ski bum, having shed the bum part for respectability, Alan shook his head as if too busy cleaning up to humor her. “You know how I met Patrice. I’ve heard her tell you the story more than once.”

      Feeling all fluid and relaxed, Miranda sighed. “She’s told me, yes. I want to hear it from you.”

      He took away her wineglass, added it to the crate of dirties destined for the kitchen before he left for the night. After that, he pointed at the clock on the wall at the end of the bar. The hands, shaped like corkscrews, were edging toward 1:00 a.m., the club having closed at midnight.

      He yawned for emphasis. “She’s waiting for me to get home. If she calls, I’m handing the phone to you.”

      “And I’ll tell her it’s your fault, not mine,” Miranda said before sticking out her tongue, the back and forth a familiar pattern from their years as friends.

      “How the hell in any universe is it my fault?”

      “You could be halfway through the story by now, for all that you’re dawdling.” Men. Why was it so hard for them to talk about their emotional investments? They certainly had no trouble talking about their portfolios. It wasn’t like she’d asked him to open a vein and bleed out his feelings for Patrice all over the bar.

      Then again, maybe it wasn’t copping to love at first sight he was dodging. Maybe it was the embarrassment of not having been on his game when they met, she mused, smiling to herself as she recalled the story Patrice had shared.

      “I was skiing,” he told her, obviously taking note of the look on her face and scowling as he wiped a rag over the bar, his motions so furious that she thought he’d rub away the finish. “I crashed, broke my leg. Patrice was on the patrol team that rescued me.”

      The short, to-the-point, testosterone version. She wanted more. She wanted all the heat and the want and the feelings. “What about the eye contact? The jolt to your heart? The tingle you felt when she pulled off her gloves and laid the backs of her fingers against your cheek?”

      “That was frostbite.”

      Miranda laughed, the sound echoing loudly in the quiet room. “You, Alan Price, are so full of crap. You felt it all just like Patrice did, and you know it.”

      He stopped scrubbing the already clean bar, and gave her a look, color high on his sharp cheekbones. “Then you didn’t need to hear it from me, did you?”

      “Sure I did. You’ve restored my faith that men will be men, and nothing there will ever change.” He’d also reminded her that she wasn’t missing out by being alone, no matter how magic a man’s kiss. “Just the facts. No embellishments. No personalization. No deeper meaning.”

      His expression was very male and almost angry. “We feel things, Miranda. We

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