CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Monday morning, just after six, Bea let herself into her apartment, stopping only to shuck her smoky clothes and to feed a royally pissed Princess before tumbling into bed, wearing a T-shirt, panties, and an unholy smile on her face. It had been a magical night under the stars with Austin, an orgy of sexual exploration that seemed to intensify the later into the night it became.

But there hadn’t been a lot of sleep, so, ignoring Princess’s not-so-subtle display of neglected feline animosity, Bea slept the sleep of a woman who had been absolutely, positively, thoroughly fucked.

It was almost one in the afternoon when she woke. Princess was in her usual spot on Bea’s pillow, purring up a storm, and Bea stretched up, scooping the cat down as she rolled on her side and hugged Princess in tight to her chest. She didn’t object.

If anything, she purred louder.

“I’m sorry I left you all alone last night, kitty cat,” Bea apologized in a whisper. Even though she knew from their short time together that Princess had taken to Bea’s hermit lifestyle like a duck to water.

“You ever been with a boy cat who just…blew your ever-loving mind?” Bea asked.

Princess let out a very smug-sounding meow. “Yeah.” Bea smiled. “I bet you have, you foxy feline, you.” Princess had probably cut quite the figure before she’d lost her eye and most of her fur and her tooth had gone rogue.

Of course, it hadn’t just been the sex. It had been the way Austin had looked at her every time he’d been buried deep, like he was rummaging around in her soul.

Like she was the only woman in the world.

It was the intensity of his stare, his singular focus on her and what he saw in her and what he was offering her that had elevated the entire night beyond the physical.

Sighing, Bea kissed Princess’s neck before climbing out of bed and heading for her shower. Her hair smelled like woodsmoke and her skin smelled like marshmallows and the bourbon Austin had licked off certain parts of her body.

And sex. Good God, she smelled utterly debauched.

Princess was still on the bed when Bea stepped out of the bathroom fifteen minutes later, totally naked, her fine, damp hair all fluffy from being towel dried. She stepped into her Monday panties and sweats and a tee and padded back to bed, sitting cross-legged on top of the duvet as she opened up her laptop. Her Winchester brothers screen saver stared back at her, and Bea almost laughed.

Prior to this, her screen savers had always been the latest ad campaign she’d worked on, and Bea marveled at how dramatically her life had changed in such a short period of time.

Clicking to her email, she downloaded the dozen that had come in since Friday, including one from Kim with the subject line: You’ve gone viral baby!! Blinking at that rather startling claim, Bea opened the email, which had so many exclamation points, she wondered if Kim needed some kind of intervention.

And then Kim left a list of six different numbers she could be reached at. Just in case!!!!

With her advertising background, Bea knew that going viral was the kind of advertising money just couldn’t buy. Not even the most outstandingly beautiful or searing insightful, multimillion-dollar ad campaign could beat a lol Cats or Baby Shark for exposure and potential riches.

But she doubted her quick, sarcastic sketches were in the mega-influencer realm.

Grabbing her cell phone, Bea checked out Greet Cute’s socials and almost fell out of bed. No, it wasn’t Kardashian-esque, but it was still impressive. They’d posted the three images as separate posts on their Insta and TikTok accounts, and each one had been liked several hundred thousand times, with the comments over the three posts running into the thousands, not to mention the reposts and the myriad story shares.

She blinked. Holy cow. Her head started to buzz, her veins started to prickle, her chest started to tighten as Kim’s we need more caused a creative rush of potential images she could draw. Not that they were causing the buzz. No, it was the success of the sampling exercise. She always felt this way when one of her campaigns took off.

Picking up her phone, she tapped in Kim’s cell number with shaky hands.

…

Bea was still finding it hard to wrap her head around it all several hours later, when Austin clomped up her stairs. Kim’s offer had been a lot to take in, and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to go there. Well, part of her—LA Beatrice—was excited at the possibilities of contributing to an ad campaign again because she was still, at heart, an ad woman. But the other part—Credence Beatrice of the sweats and beer for breakfast and flaming red hair—wasn’t so sure.

Spending the afternoon in bed with Princess, Daryl Dixon, and a bunch of zombies for company while absently doodling on the sketch pad hadn’t really helped clarify her position, either.

Austin’s footfalls and his key—she’d given him the spare one this morning so she didn’t have to get her ass out of bed—in the lock were a welcome distraction, and she paused the screen mid–zombie bite as the door opened and shut and Austin suddenly appeared in her line of sight, coming to rest a few feet from the end of the bed. He looked hotter than an LA summer in his police uniform and hat, his hands behind his back as he looked down at her like she was the next thing on his to-do list.

Like he hadn’t to-done her thoroughly all night long.

“Hey,” he said.

Bea smiled. “How was your day, dear?”

He laughed, a low, sexy sound that slid onto the mattress, slithered up her foot and her calves and her thighs, and settled between her legs. “All the better for seeing you. How was yours?”

“Interesting,” she said. “Very interesting.”

“Good interesting or bad interesting?” He cocked an eyebrow.

“I…don’t know?” Because she really didn’t.

“Would pie give you more clarity?” He pulled out his left hand from behind his back to reveal a brown paper bag.

Bea’s visceral reaction to its appearance was almost as potent as her visceral reaction to his low, sexy laugh. “It might.”

He grinned as he took two paces toward her, placing the bag on the end of the bed with all the due care and attention a piece of culinary joy should be afforded before undoing the buckle on his utility belt. Their eyes met and that smile played on his lips as he slid it off and placed it on the couch. His hat followed as he kicked off his shoes, then undid the buttons of his shirt, pulling the tails out of his pants as he went. He didn’t remove it altogether, but there was enough flap of material going on to reveal flashes of his truly spectacular abs and chest.

“I think things are already getting clearer,” she teased.

He laughed again as he picked up the pie and prowled up the mattress on his hands and knees, pushing aside the multiple discarded sketch pages strewn across the bed. When he got to Bea, she quickly moved her laptop aside as his body claimed the space between her legs, and he leaned in to kiss her hard on the mouth.

Pie was temporarily forgotten as Bea opened to him—her legs and her mouth—welcoming the taste and the smell of him as his tongue stroked against hers, welcoming the feel of his body, hard and perfect, cradled between her legs. Welcoming the harsh suck of his breath and the deep, guttural resonance of his groan that ruffled over her like a hot breeze and was satisfying in ways she didn’t fully understand.

Every breath she took was full of Austin, and Bea slid her arms around his neck, sinking lower in the bed, taking him with her.

Princess and her very loud, very disapproving mewl dragged them out of their spiraling passion. The look of utter disgust from that one gnarly eye spoke volumes.

“Like you’ve never driven the boy cats wild,” Austin called after her as she jumped off the bed, and they watched her amble away, her tail twitching indignantly. He glanced back at Bea. “Well, at least she saved the pie from being squashed,” he said as he shifted a hand precariously close to the brown paper bag.

Levering himself into a sitting position, he pulled the cover back and settled beside her. Bea also sat higher in the bed, her back to the wall, her shoulder rubbing against his. “You want cherry or pecan?” he asked, peering into the bag.

“I don’t mind.” It was fair to say that the quality of Annie’s offering had made her a pie agnostic.

He reached into the bag and pulled out the slice of cherry, then held it close to her mouth. “Open,” he said softly, and Bea, whose pulse had barely settled from their mini make out, felt it kick up again.

She opened obediently, their hot gazes meshing as she bit into the divine combination of tart and sweet. He fed himself then, and his low, appreciative noise of satisfaction also had an effect on Bea’s pulse. He offered her another, but she shook her head, reaching in for the slice of pecan and making a start on that.

After he was done, Austin picked up the sketches still scattered on the mattress.

“You’ve been busy.” He picked up a few more that had fallen to the floor on his side of the bed and perused them like he was some kind of art collector.

“Just messing around, really.” She’d forgotten how much she’d doodled as a kid. When she’d been anxious from her parents fighting or her father fretting about her mom’s whereabouts, it had helped calm her. During college, it had helped her clarify her thinking about an assignment or memorize something for an exam.

“Are you craving honey?”

Bea frowned. “What?”

He shuffled through the sketches. “All of these are bees.”

“Oh…yes.” She hadn’t really been conscious of what she’d been doodling, but now that Austin had mentioned it, she’d clearly been obsessively drawing bees all with different body quirks and expressions on their little bee faces.

“Has this got something to do with your interesting day?”

“Yeah.” She supposed it had, and she filled Austin in on everything from the email to the phone call.

“And?” he prompted as she got to the end of her tale. “What did you tell her?”

“I told her I…didn’t know. I wasn’t sure.”

He shuffled through the sketches one more time as if looking for one in particular and, when he found it, he placed it on her lap. This bee had its brows beetled together in an irritated little frown, its mouth a foreboding slash, and the buzz coming out from a word bubble near its head was written expletive style—buz@z$zz#zzz!!!

“I think you are.” Tapping the drawing, Austin said, “Looks like a logo to me.”

Bea stared at the cranky little bee. Just like her—Cranky Bea. She smiled, marveling at her subconscious and the power of doodling. “What do you think I should do?”

“It’s not up to me.”

“I know, but…I’d appreciate your take.” Maybe she was wrong, but she didn’t think Austin would be too excited about anything that might shift her focus from Credence, and it would be good to have that perspective strongly represented.

“I…” He shrugged, seemingly reluctant to venture it even if he did have one. “Think you’re an artist, Beatrice. I think maybe you always have been?”

“No.” She shook her head vehemently; he was dead wrong about that. She had an appreciation for art and an eye for design because so much about advertising revolved around that process, but an artist she was not. “This”—she picked up the logo from her lap—“isn’t art.”

“Okay. If you say so.” Clearly, he didn’t believe her declaration. “Whatever it is,” he said, then lifted a shoulder in a half shrug, “I think maybe you’re liking it, so…why not keep doing it? For as long as you’re enjoying it? You didn’t know what you wanted to do when you came here, and yeah, this has kinda fallen into your lap, but maybe that was for a reason? Especially if, as you say, Kim is happy for you to work freelance. Then you get the best of both worlds. Advertising and art while working to your own timetable and staying away from corporate life.”

Bea nodded absently. Austin was, as always, separating things down to their most simple parts. But her deepest worry bubbled to the surface, and she expressed it before she even knew what she was saying. “What if it’s a slippery slope?”

“You mean, what if you start wanting more? If advertising starts to suck you back in?”

She blinked, suddenly not entirely sure that was what she’d meant and she hadn’t just channeled her grandmother’s fears about the perils of surrendering to an artistic temperament, which she knew all too intimately. Bea was an ad woman, not an artist. Art was a part of the process—a means to an end. Not the whole.

That had never been in doubt. Until recently. Until the lake.

“Yeah,” she said huskily, because the other stuff was too big to contemplate.

His hand nudged hers, and he entwined their fingers. “I say, take it one day at a time. If you start feeling like it’s getting to be too much and you don’t want to do it anymore or you want to ease back, then ease back. You left for a reason, Bea, so go back for a reason. Like believing in Kim and Greet Cute. But with your eyes open. And maybe give yourself an out?”

Her heart skipped a beat. This twenty-five-going-on-one-hundred guy was more than she’d ever hoped for, and this thing between them was madness. Sudden, intense, and inexplicable—but also very real.

Bea rubbed her cheek against his shoulder. She had no clue what to say, but she was inordinately pleased that Austin was here with her in this moment.

“Of course,” he said, a smile in his voice, “when all else fails, you can always ask, WWDD?”

And just like that, the intensity of their conversation lifted. Bea laughed. “He wouldn’t laze around in his bed all day, sketching.”

Fucking, maybe, but not something so damn passive.

“True,” Austin agreed. “But he never backs away from a challenge. Or an opportunity. And isn’t that exactly what Greet Cute is?”

Bea nodded. She couldn’t dispute that.

“Look, Beatriss, honey.” He looked down at her the same time she looked up, and their gazes met. There was humor lurking there but also a streak of seriousness. “Whatever you decide to do, just know I’ll keep you supplied with pie and orgasms, okay?”

Bea’s breath got stuck somewhere between her lungs and her throat. How could she resist that offer? “Okay,” she agreed, her voice breathy.

“Good.” He grinned at her wolfishly as he tossed the sketches over the side of the bed and reached for her, dragging her up and over his lap until she was straddling him, the hard ridge in his pants causing that breath she’d only just caught to get stuck again. “So…I’ve taken care of the pie…” And he leaned in and kissed her.