Accounting for Cole (Natural Beauty) by Holley Trent Page A

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