CHAPTER 2
BEN MAY HAVE neutralized the no-shelter problem for her, but he couldn’t help her with the Dragon Queen—her mother. She was going to have to slay that beast herself.
Chloe cast a covert glance at her purse, which was sitting on the floor where she’d abandoned it, about four feet away. Just do it, she lectured herself. Woman up and stop putting off the inevitable.
She heaved herself off the bed to retrieve her purse, grabbing her coat off the floor, as well. After she’d wasted a couple more seconds arranging her coat on the back of the desk chair and applying some ChapStick, there were no more stalling tactics left in her arsenal. With a resigned breath, she pulled out her cell phone and dialed the number she’d been dreading calling since the moment she’d realized she’d be spending the night in Chicago.
“Hello.” The frigidity of the word let Chloe know that caller ID had already announced her identity.
She exhaled. “Hey, Mom.”
“‘Hey, Mom’? You’re calling me during the rehearsal dinner where everyone is staring at the gaping hole where the bride’s sister is supposed to sit and all you have to say is ‘Hey, Mom’?” Fiona Masterson’s voice was eerily calm. Which meant her mother was furious. “Everyone is wondering where you are.”
She had no doubt that was true. Her sister’s big day might be the main event, but more than a few of the attendees were waiting with gossipy glee to see the sideshow—Chloe’s return.
“My flight got canceled. There’s a really bad storm here in Chicago. I’m really sorry.” Chloe paced the short length of the hotel room.
“This is why we wanted to buy you the first class ticket that would have gotten you here days ago, if you’ll recall. To avoid just such a situation. You know winter weather is completely unpredictable. Never mind the fact that you’ve missed your sister’s stagette, her bridal shower, her lingerie party, the family brunch, the luncheon for out-of-town guests, the—”
“I told you I couldn’t get that much time off work. I’m really sorry I missed...all those things, but it’s not as if I’m a bridesmaid or anything.” Thank God.
Some people might have felt slighted by the oversight, but Chloe had been all kinds of relieved. Standing up at the altar in front of all those people... Just the thought of it was enough to give her PTSD. “And I’ll be there for the wedding. I promise. Even if I have to hitchhike, I’ll be there.”
Her mother sighed, and Chloe hoped she’d sounded much less melodramatic when Ben had called her out for the same thing on the plane earlier.
“So help me, Chloe Marie, if you do not arrive in time for your sister’s wedding...”
“Mom, I gotta go. I’ll be there tomorrow around ten.”
Chloe disconnected the call and sat heavily on the side of the bed.
What was it about talking to her mother that made her feel like she was sixteen years old again? She’d moved across the country to escape the phenomenon. Yet all it took was a phone call to bring back all the feelings of being less than.
The tears caught her by surprise. They were followed closely by sobs that made her shoulders lurch. The more she cursed and fought the show of weakness, the more torrentially it manifested itself. After a while, she just gave in.
The sound of the door opening couldn’t have startled her more if it had been a gunshot.
Shit. She wiped desperately at her puffy, tear-swollen face, trying to erase the evidence of her breakdown. The man had the worst timing of anyone she’d ever met.
“Chloe? You should have seen the lineup for the restaurant. It’s a madhouse down there, so I had to improvise. Also, I added my name to the cot waiting list. Which is hilarious because— Hey, what’s wrong?”
“I’m fine,” she lied, willing him to turn around and give her a minute so she could pull it together.
He came closer. Chloe kept her eyes down and her body still, but he wasn’t deterred by her attempts to ignore him. She hiccupped as he set an ice bucket on the nightstand and then sat on the bed beside her.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” She shot him a watery smile, with every intention of leaving it at that. But when she saw the genuine concern on his face, felt the warmth of the reassuring hand he’d placed on her back, she spilled her guts.
“It’s just, today has sucked,” she said with a sniffle. “I’m talking monumental amounts of suckage, and I’m tired, and moody, and people have really been getting on my nerves. All I want is to go home, but I’m stuck sharing a hotel room with a complete stranger who must think I’m mentally unbalanced. And you’ve been really nice to me anyway. And now I’m crying again. I hate crying,” she finished on a shaky sob.
Ben reached past her to the nightstand and snagged a tissue, handing it to her.
“You see? You barely know me, you have every reason to believe I’m deranged, and still you have the decency to hand me a Kleenex.”
“It’s really not that big a deal.”
“Yes, it is, Ben. You’re nice. And you’re tall. You’re very tall.” She wiped her nose with the tissue. “How tall are you, anyway?”
“Six-three.”
“That is very tall.” Chloe shook her head, looking down at her hands. She picked resolutely at the flaking black nail polish on her right thumbnail. She must have been chewing on it—she did that when she was stressed.
She expected him to bail then, distance himself from his sobbing lunatic of a roommate with some teasing remark about how tall guys are known for their big wangs or something equally ridiculous. She’d laugh, and he’d laugh, and they’d get back to the superficial banter that befitted two strangers stuck in a hotel room together.
But he didn’t.
He just sat beside her, respecting the silence. And her thoughts slipped out. “Honestly, Ben. How is it possible for one person to mess up her life so monumentally?”
“Hey, I’m sure it’s not as bad as it seems right now.” He rubbed her back, his big hand hot against her T-shirt. “You’ll figure it out. You’ll fix it.”
Tears brimmed in her eyes with a vengeance. They burned like acid. “No. I won’t. And do you know why?”
Ben shook his head.
“Me, neither! I mean, do you see this? Do you see my hair?” She grabbed a handful and held it in his direction.
“Yeah...”
“I did this for them!” she exclaimed, dropping the strands back into place. “I colored it boring old brown so they wouldn’t be embarrassed by me, but it didn’t work! I’m not even at the wedding yet, and I’ve already disappointed them. Nothing I try ever works, Ben. I don’t know what to do.” She’d never said that to anyone before and admitting the truth hurt so badly she thought her ribs might crack.
Chloe dropped her face into her hands. Ben’s arms came around her, pulling her close, tucking her cheek to his chest. She gave in and greedily took what he was offering. Wrapping her arms around his waist, she leaned into him and let herself cry.
She wasn’t sure if it was minutes or hours, but he held her until she had no more tears.
“You know what, Chloe?” His voice was soft and deep, breaking the silence she’d been measuring with the rise and fall of his chest beneath her cheek. “Maybe there’s nothing to do. I mean, I realize I just met you, but you seem okay to me.”
That tiny reassurance allowed Chloe to muster enough gumption to reach up and wipe the wet tracks from her face. She couldn’t quite bring herself to lift her head off his shoulder, though.
“And they’ll see it. One day, they’ll see it. You just gotta give them some time.”
Her lip trembled, and she bit it, fighting the sadness. “They’ve had twenty-six years, Ben.”
She felt him exhale. “It’s a really hard thing, you know, not taking the people we love for granted.” She looked up at him then and he smiled, a sad-but-reassuring little half smile that made her believe there was a chance that the despair she felt in that moment might not be insurmountable.
Chloe pulled away with a final sniff. She was trying desperately to hold onto that moment of comfort even as the embarrassment of her epic cry-fest in front of a virtual stranger began seeping in at the edges.
She exhaled shakily. “Sorry I got mascara and snot on your fancy shirt.”
“It’s just a T-shirt,” he averred as he pulled the black-smeared wet patch away from his chest. He even managed not to look horrified.
“Yeah, but I bet it cost, like, fifty bucks.”
“Seventy-five,” he corrected. “But I’ll accept it as punishment for being douchebaggy enough to have spent that much money on a plain white T-shirt in the first place.”
Chloe’s chuckle was waterlogged.
“C’mere,” he said, tucking his thumb in the hem of his shirt. She leaned ever so slightly forward and let him rub the cotton-covered pad of his thumb under her right eye, then her left. She’d be surprised if she had any makeup on at all at this point. Some warrior, she thought, choking in battle and crying off her armor.
“There,” he said, showing her the black smudges on the fabric. “All cleaned up.”
She frowned, letting him know she wasn’t buying his bullshit.
“Okay, you should probably go wash your face before we have dinner,” he admitted. “Unless the raccoon look is a thing now.”
Grateful for the reprieve, Chloe headed for the bathroom, pulling her suitcase into the tiny room with her. She groaned when she caught sight of herself in the mirror.
Apparently in addition to being an all-around good guy and world-class hugger, Ben Masterson was also the King of Understatement. She looked like a comic-book villain whose face was melting off. Chloe shut the door and set her suitcase on the toilet, rifling through it for her toiletries case.
A couple of swipes of a makeup remover pad later, her cheeks were clear of black streaks, and her eyes were bare, if a little puffier than they had been this morning. She’d have liked to take all her makeup off and start again, but snotting all over Ben had been all the weakness she could handle. No way was she going to be bare-faced in front of him. She didn’t even start the makeup videos on her YouTube channel that way.
“Hurry up in there, Chloe. I’m starving!”
“Almost done! Don’t eat everything!” She ran a brush through her hair, topped up her deodorant, and rooted around in her suitcase in search of her pajamas.
* * *
WELL, TONIGHT HAD certainly not been the typical room-service-and-work type of night that tended to dominate his business trips.
Chuckling to himself, Ben pulled off his T-shirt, wiping his shoulder with it before folding it up and placing it in the dirty laundry bag he kept in his suitcase. He’d say one thing about Chloe Masterson, she was the antithesis of boring.
A woman who couldn’t decide whether to smile at him or punch him in the face. A woman who was super tough one moment, and vulnerable the next. A woman who had no idea her expressive face betrayed her, even in her most badass moments.
He tugged the white button-down he’d worn on the plane back on—she’d walked in on him before he’d gotten around to changing out of his suit pants, so it wasn’t like he’d be overdressed—but he left the hem untucked and the buttons at his throat open anyway.
She was such a nice change from the women who’d inundated his world lately. As he’d moved up the corporate ladder, everything had gotten more proper and refined. So serious. He’d met a lot of very pretty women with very pretty plans for their future. The few dates he’d been on in the past year had felt more like job interviews, and they’d fizzled accordingly.
But Chloe didn’t look at him as if he was a steak on display at a butcher shop. She wasn’t angling for marriage, sizing up his earning potential or evaluating his parenting qualities. Which was good, because marriage was not high on his list of priorities anymore. She was the kind of woman who understood that a date should be fun and flirty, two people trying each other on. No expectations, just opportunity.
Not that this was a date.
In fact, he wasn’t sure what this was, but he kind of liked it. Tonight he got to hang out with a flawed, stressed-out, hot-then-cold-then-hot-again woman with a kick-ass body, a pierced nose and a star tattoo on her right arm. And he couldn’t wait.
He moved her abandoned phone to the nightstand so he could prop the pillow upright against the headboard, and sat down against it. He’d just stretched his long legs out in front of him when he heard the bathroom door open.
She appeared from around the corner a moment later.
Ben let his gaze slip from her berry lips down to her bare shoulders, then to her arms—that star tattoo was going to be the death of him, he was sure of it—lingering a moment on the way she filled out her tank top before sliding past her black boxer shorts to take in her truly spectacular thighs, her shapely calves and the shiny black polish on her toenai—
“Oh, my God, are you walking on hotel carpeting in bare feet?” he asked, lunging forward. “Do you have any idea how gross hotel carpet is?”
He was half expecting another sardonic smile, but apparently the panic in his voice had registered, because her eyes widened in response to his alarm.
“How gross?” she asked, scrunching up her nose in preparation.
“My grandma was a nurse, and she once had this patient who ended up with cellulitis from walking barefoot on hotel carpeting—”
“Are you kidding me?”
“—and he didn’t get it checked right away, so by the time he went to the emergency room his whole leg was full of pus—”
“Ew, ew, ew!” She was hopping from foot to foot by this point.
“—and he had to stay in the hospital for three days so they could give him antibiotics intravenously.”
“Okay, enough, enough!” She jumped onto the bed beside him, scrambling into a sitting position and staring down at her feet. “Oh, God! My feet are itchy. Is itchy a symptom of cellulitis?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes went wide.
“Well, probably.” He didn’t remember all the details of the story...just the gross ones. “Do they feel swollen? Like there’s a bunch of pus accumulating under your skin, getting ready to erupt and—”
Chloe recovered enough to sock him in the arm. “Shut up with the gory details, wouldja?”
Ben rubbed his arm where her punch had landed. Chloe crawled over to the end of the bed. She braced one hand on the very edge of the mattress and reached toward her coat, which was hanging on the back of a chair that was just out of reach. Her fingertips brushed the thick material, but she didn’t quite get purchase on it. He watched in fascination as she set herself up for another attempt.
“What are you doing?”
“I left my suitcase in the bathroom, and if you think I’m setting one bare toe on that hideous, infested carpet then you’re way dumber than you look,” she said over her shoulder.
He shot her a tight smile. Ha, ha.
“So I’m going to stand on my jacket, slide my way over to the bathroom, and get myself some socks.”
“Or you could just ask me to get your suitcase,” he pointed out, getting to his feet.
She gazed up at him with such wonder that he honestly believed the idea had never occurred to her. “I... You don’t have to. I mean, I can do it myself.”
“I’m sure you could, eventually. But I’m happy to help, because if you slip and contract cellulitis, the amputation would ruin your sister’s big day.” Ben smiled angelically and dodged when she chucked a pillow at him.
Her ugly suitcase was sitting on the toilet. “You should really have a lock on this when you’re flying,” he advised, grabbing the scratched-up plastic case and heading back into the bedroom. He dropped it on the suitcase stand and set it down beside her. She threw open the lid to reveal bedlam inside.
“You know, most people fold stuff before they put it in the suitcase, just FYI.” Ben resumed his position on the bed beside her.
“Thanks for the packing tips.” Her voice sounded less than sincere as she hunted through the chaos. She rescued a ratty sock from inside the suitcase and jammed a foot into it. “Wow. That looks sexy.” She stuck her foot in the air so Ben, too, could admire the purple, elastic-challenged sock that was slouched around her ankle.
“Yeah, well, it’s sexier than athlete’s foot.”
“Amen, brother.” She reached out to give him a high-five before quickly pulling on the other sock. She closed up her suitcase. “Okay, now that that’s taken care of, on to more important things, like food.”
He reached over to the nightstand and dumped the contents of the plastic ice bucket on the bed between them. An avalanche of candy spilled across the sheet. “Dinner is served.”
“Whoa. What’d you do? Knock over a vending machine?”
“I wasn’t sure what you’d be in the mood for—salty, sweet, stale,” he offered, rapping a rock-hard, prepackaged Danish against the headboard with a disconcerting tap, tap, tap, “or all of the above—so I got one of everything.” He lobbed the Danish at the trash bin on the floor beside the television stand. It landed inside the plastic container with a heavy thud.
She did that cute nose-scrunch thing again as she deliberated over the colorfully-wrapped mound of sucrose and diabetes. “SunChips, Skittles, Aero Peppermint. And I’m taking the cherry Life Savers,” she decided, grabbing each of her picks from the junk-food dog pile as she named them. “You know, in case of emergency.”
Ben nodded contemplatively, undoing the buttons at his wrists. “Those are some bold choices, Masterson.” He rolled up his shirtsleeves in preparation for his own selection process. “Personally, I’m more of a traditionalist. I’m going for the Doritos with a side of Mike and Ike, Jolly Ranchers to cleanse my palate, and Twix for dessert. You want to split the pretzels as an appetizer?” he asked, ripping into them and holding the miniature bag in her direction.
“Why not?” Instead of taking one pretzel, though, she took a handful, and Ben liked that about her. She balanced them in a precise stack on her knee. “So does the wife know you leave the ring off while you’re away on business so you can lure pajama-clad strangers into sharing hotel-bed dinners?” she asked, crunching into a pretzel.
Ben shook his head. “Single and loving it.”
Chloe’s laugh was smug. “There’s a shocker.”
“So what about you?” he asked.
“What about me?”
“Well, I know you’re a Masterson by birth because on the plane you said there was no Mr., but that still leaves plenty of options.”
She shook her head as she started on the SunChips. “Also single. Mostly loving it, except when I’m on the phone with my mother, dodging the grandkid discussion. I did, though. Have a boyfriend. We broke up about five months ago. He cheated on me,” she explained, answering his unspoken question. “A couple of times, actually. It was all very cliché. I have horrible taste in men. Spider and I were a mistake right from the beginning.”
Ben choked on his pretzel. “You dated a guy named Spider?”
Chloe nodded.
“Wow. Was he a professional wrestler?”
“No.”
“Did he have superpowers?”
Chloe rolled her eyes. “He owned a tattoo parlor.”
“That was going to be my next guess.” The chip she hurled in his direction bounced off his chest and landed on the sheets. “So where did you meet Spider? Intermission at La Bohème? Church book club?”
“I met him when he gave me these.” She set her chips on the pillow and reclined, tugging the waistband of her shorts down enough to reveal a pair of small birds etched just inside her hip bones, one on either side of her abdomen.
Ben almost swallowed his tongue. Christ, he ached to touch her. His hands flexed involuntarily, resulting in the decapitation of several pretzels unfortunate enough to be left in the bag he was holding. He set it on the mattress beside him and took a deep, steadying breath. And he’d thought the star on her arm was haunting him.
“Which is kind of ironic when you think about it,” she continued, oblivious to his slack-jawed appreciation of her body, “because swallows mate for life.” She snapped the elastic back into place and, instead of resuming her sitting position, she rolled onto her tummy.
Is she commando under those shorts?
“Anyway,” said Chloe, reaching toward the pillow to retrieve her dinner as though her extreme hotness hadn’t just evaporated every speck of moisture in his mouth, “I finally kicked his ass to the curb when I walked in on him and his latest conquest christening the kitchen table I paid for. And the rest, as they say, is history. How about you?”
Ben managed to work up enough spit to moisten his tongue. “I have never dated a guy named Spider.”
“C’mon, Ben. I showed you mine.” Chloe fished the last chip from the bag, crumpled the empty packaging in her fist and tossed it awkwardly over her shoulder in the direction of the garbage can. It hit the end of the bed and rolled onto the navy carpet. “Spill it. How did your last relationship go down in flames?”
Melanie’s face flashed in front of his eyes. He felt like a dick for giving Chloe a hard time. He was the king of clichés.
The boss’s daughter. The heirloom ring. The proposal eclipsed soon after by her announcement that she was leaving him. For some douchebag lawyer who was her father’s age and had enough money to keep her in the style to which she was accustomed. They’d walked down the aisle six months after she’d ditched his ass. They’d recently celebrated a year’s worth of wedded bliss.
Ben shook off the humiliating memory.
“Nothing to tell.” Ben poured some M&M’s into the palm of his hand and held them in Chloe’s direction.
“Love ’em and leave ’em, huh?” she ventured, selecting the three red ones from the mix and eating them simultaneously.
Ben transferred the remaining candies from his palm to his mouth and gave her a “whatcha gonna do?” shrug. “What can I say, Chloe? I’m a lone wolf. I don’t play by society’s rules.”
Smiling, Chloe tore open her Skittles. “Perfect. Then you can be the one to spike the punchbowl at the next family reunion. I’m tired of being the black sheep of the Masterson family.”
He grinned. “Much as I’d like to be in on your diabolical plots, I probably won’t be scoring an invite to the party. Grandpa and Grandma Masterson couldn’t have children. My dad was adopted.” He selected a blue M&M’s from the package and tossed it in the air, catching it in his mouth.
She froze, sexy green eyes wide. “We’re not twelfth cousins twice removed?”
The idea hadn’t even occurred to him, but he realized now it had been dominating her thoughts. And why wouldn’t it be? Unlike him, she couldn’t have been sure they weren’t related.
Something had shifted in the way she looked at him. It was a slight change, almost indiscernible, but he felt it in his gut. And a little south of his gut.
She took a deep breath and Ben was treated to an eyeful of cleavage. God, her breasts were amazing. His hands flexed again.
His pulse raced and Chloe’s breathing grew shallower. Her lips parted.
The piercing cry of the hotel telephone jerked him out of the moment.
He fumbled with the bulky receiver before bringing it to his ear. “Hello? Yes, this is Ben. No, I only requested one cot. Yes, I realize the room has a queen-size bed.”
His prey—or had she been the hunter?—took the opportunity to retreat, mouthing the word shower at him before grabbing her suitcase and disappearing.
* * *
SHE WAS IN BIG, big trouble.
Chloe tipped her head back and let the warm spray of the shower wash the remnants of the day and the smell of chemically-approximated flowers—courtesy of the Value Inn’s complimentary two-in-one shampoo—from her hair.
This wedding stuff had been stressing her out since the day she’d received the meticulously calligraphed invitation requesting her presence at her little sister’s nuptials. Throw in a couple of icy phone calls with her mother and a return-airfare-from-Seattle-to-Buffalo-shaped dent in her savings, and, well, Chloe was on the edge.
And people on the edge did stupid things, such as blubber in front of a complete stranger, and then think dirty, filthy thoughts about him. And while she’d found Ben handsome from the start, something warm and wicked was bubbling up to the surface now, waking parts of her that had been dormant for...well, quite a while.
If not for the ring of the phone, she’d be letting Ben indulge a few of those parts right now. Suddenly the water sluicing over her body felt hotter. She ran her soapy hands over her breasts and across her stomach, the utilitarian washing of her body growing sensual. She would love to explore Ben’s abs, to see if her brain had Photoshopped them in hindsight, or if they were truly as spectacular as she remembered. Her mind drifted lower and so did her hands.
Oh, God.
She knew how long it had been since a man had touched her—going on five months now—but how long had it been since she’d touched herself? She couldn’t remember the last time she’d indulged in the best stress relief available to womankind.
Sure, nothing beat a willing partner, but there was something to be said for being the one in control...of getting exactly what you wanted...right when you needed it.
Yes. Oh, yes.
Chloe reached out to brace her hand on the wall but overshot and knocked the entire line of Value Inn mini bath products off the built-in shelf. They rained down to the tub with a series of bangs that jerked her out of the moment. Her heartbeat, already revving from her sexy daydreams, revved even higher with a shot of adrenaline.
Seriously? First the phone, and now this?
Chloe knew when she was beat. With a sigh, she turned off the shower. She reached past the curtain to pull one of the white hotel towels off the metal rack above the toilet. Like all mass-laundered hotel towels, it was scratchy and barely reached the tops of her thighs when she wrapped it around herself.
The TV went silent as she stepped out of the tub. There were some muffled noises she couldn’t quite place, and then the squeaky floor betrayed Ben’s presence.
Chloe froze.
He was walking toward the bathroom.
Her hand flew to her chest, gripping the tiny towel in a tight fist. Her skin buzzed. Her heartbeat picked up. The light seeping under the bathroom door was interrupted by his shadow. There were only two inches of ramshackle door and a threadbare towel separating them. He was right...there...
“Chloe? You okay?”
Oh, man. His deep voice hit her right in the estrogen and her body picked up where it had left off in the shower. All that delicious heat flared back up. “Fine. Dropped something.” The ability to form full sentences had deserted her.
“Okay. Well, good news. According to the weather forecast, the storm’s moving quicker than they thought. It’s already stopped snowing out there. We should get out of here on time tomorrow.”
“Great.” She hoped the word didn’t come out as breathy as it had sounded to her own ears.
“I’m going to head downstairs and see a man about a cot. Or a woman. I’m not picky. Judging by the ominous ‘no one’s available to take your call’ message I just got when I phoned the front desk, it might take a while. Wish me luck.”
“Good luck.” Yep, pretty breathy. Now she felt guilty for forming such a dark opinion of Stewardess Barbie. Maybe the poor girl couldn’t help it. Maybe it had been Ben’s fault the whole time.
Then the hotel room door shrieked open and banged shut.
Chloe exhaled a shaky, disappointed breath.
What had she expected him to do? Bust open the door, profess their chemistry was undeniable, and ravish her like the hero in some old romance novel her grandma kept hidden at the back of her bookshelf? Well, kind of. But dudes got arrested for that kind of stuff nowadays.
With a sigh, Chloe wiped the steam from the mirror and stared at her blurry image.
Barefaced. Plain brown hair.
Maybe it was for the best that Ben hadn’t broken down the door after all.
She barely recognized herself. She wasn’t even in Buffalo yet and she was already reverting to the old Chloe. The one who’d been so desperate to escape. It was as if the closer she got to home, the more of her identity she was losing.
Her mother always said she wore too much makeup. It didn’t matter how many strangers complimented her, or how many friends asked for a quick lesson. Her mother wouldn’t be impressed that she’d worked her way from sales associate to manager of her local Titanium Beauty store in less than two years. Or that customers loved her makeup recommendations, and that the job afforded her a decent apartment and a means to pay her bills. To Fiona Masterson, it would never be more than a menial labor job at a makeup store in the mall.
And sure, her life wasn’t as posh as her childhood had been, but she had a position in an industry she loved, and it was a great learning experience that was going to help her when she finally launched her own business and became a full-fledged makeup artist. She’d even started a YouTube channel where dozens of people thanked her for her tips and tricks on a weekly basis. It wasn’t netting her much money yet, but she’d broken the five-hundred-dollar mark two months in a row. Not bad for a fledgling channel that relied on word of mouth.
Besides, making money wasn’t the reason she had a YouTube channel. Mostly, it was a place for her to indulge her passion for makeup, for teaching women how to apply it, for investigating and reviewing products. Makeup wasn’t just about vanity, it was about confidence, and she loved reading the comments of her subscribers as they discovered their best selves.
She grabbed the tiny blow-dryer that hung on the bathroom wall and attacked her wet hair with the renewed resolve of a woman with a plan. She was done feeling crappy about herself. She had a video to make for her regular Sunday night upload, anyway, so why not kill two birds with one stone?
First she was going to do her makeup.
Then she was going to do Ben.