Chapter 928: Courtney: Third Reasons
She uncrossed and recrossed her arms, scowled at a passing cloud as though it had personally witnessed something it had no right to witness, and hauled her attention — with the brute force usually reserved for sword forms — back to the perimeter, the exits, the Monster’s last known position, anywhere, anywhere that was not the sun-gilded geometry of the Young Master’s bare—
She took her mind from there. Firmly. By the collar.
The cloud, mercifully, told no one.
Phei saw the looks the others gave the makeup woman for it — the narrowed eyes, the muttered bitch traded behind cupped hands, the whispered theories about what she thought she was doing.
But she wasn’t simply taking advantage of him.
Well — she was.
But there was more empathy in her than a single soul on that set ever thought to credit her with, because she had clocked, early and without being told, that Phei disliked being handled like a mannequin by strangers who touched him however they pleased.
So she cleared the room every time before she locked the door on the swarm without him ever having to ask, and gave him the one thing the entire production hadn’t thought to offer — a moment where his own skin belonged to him again, even if her hands were on it.
Whatever they called her, she didn’t appear to mind....
For his comfort, or for her own professionalism — or, most likely, for the elegant convenience of both at once.
His favourite hours, though, were when the two of them worked him over together.
Because the wardrobe designer was nothing like the cool make-up one.
Where the makeup artist was still water, this one was the splash — confident, quick, a relentless tease who flirted the way other people breathed.
And in the closed makeup room, just the three of them, she and her stoic counterpart fell into an easy, devastating tandem, and Phei — lustful dragon that he indisputably was — enjoyed every illicit minute of it.
"Arms up, gorgeous," the wardrobe designer instructed, sliding a shirt off his shoulders with hands that took a scenic route and lingered at every curve. "There he is. You know, half this island would commit several felonies to be standing where I’m standing."
"Only half?" Phei replied with a cheeky arrogant smile.
"The other half is too smart to admit it." She tugged the fabric free and let her gaze travel down him at a leisurely, appreciative pace. "God. They really do build them better in whatever workshop you came out of."
The makeup artist, kneeling to adjust the shimmer along his collarbone, said nothing — but her thumb pressed, slow and deliberate, into the hollow of his throat, and the corner of her cool mouth lifted by a single fractional degree.
"Careful," the wardrobe designer told her, grinning. "He’ll start thinking we like him."
"He’d be right," the makeup artist said, the first full sentence she’d spoken in twenty minutes admitting she liked it here, and went straight back to silence as though it had cost her nothing.
So long as Phei showed no flicker of discomfort, the two of them only grew bolder — and Phei, leaning back under four warm hands and two pairs of unhurried eyes, made very sure to show no discomfort whatsoever.
He grinned as the final shot of the session was captured. The director called the break — they’d resume later — and the set exhaled all at once.
And then the third reason walked over.
Because — he’d said two reasons, hadn’t he? An oversight. There were three reasons actually.
And this last one sat comfortably, smugly, above the first two.
Courtney.
She crossed the floor toward him with the brisk warmth of a woman who ran rooms for a living and enjoyed it, and Phei straightened to meet her.
Courtney stood on the shorter side of things—not tiny, never that—but with a stature that asked for the faintest upward tilt of her chin to meet his eyes without concession.
She was slim, built along clean, deliberate lines, dressed in a white tie-front shirt whose sleeves had been rolled to the forearm unstudiedly; she knew exactly how much skin to show and how little.
The knot at her waist drew the fabric inward, tracing the trim, elegant contour of her body in a way that felt less like invitation and more like a secret she might, under the right circumstances, allow to be discovered.
The parted collar offered only the modest, pretty small of her chest and the barest whisper of cleavage—enough to suggest warmth and softness beneath, not enough to grant it.
Cream trousers sat high on the subtle flare of her small round hips before breaking long and loose around her feet, the fabric moving with her in soft, liquid folds that made every shift of weight look like choreography.
Her pale blonde hair fell in soft waves past her shoulders, catching what light there was and turning it into something gentler, something that made a man want to reach out and see if it felt as cool and silken as it looked.
What captivated Phei more was her eyes; they were colour of a cloudy shifting grey that never quite settled—they watched him with open, amused affection.
There was nothing coy in that gaze, nothing calculated.
She simply saw him, found him interesting, and extended the smallest, most dangerous courtesy: the possibility that, if he proved worthy, she might let him see what lay behind the amusement.
At least that’s what he thought of it.
That possibility alone was enough to make the air between them feel thinner, warmer, charged with the slow, sinfully elegant promise that some women did not need to bare skin to make a man ache to earn the right to touch what they chose to keep covered.
"I’ll be honest," she said, "I didn’t think you’d make it through all this." Her long slender fingers rose to cover the small private laugh on her sweet, thin lips, and her cloud-grey eyes danced.
"Most pretty faces doing this for the first time tap out by the second wardrobe change. You’re tougher than you look — and you look, just so we’re clear, like trouble that photographs extremely well." A beat. "And from what I heard happened on the fitting yesterday, I had a wager on you walking out before lunch."
Phei groaned, low and heartfelt. "Don’t. Don’t speak of the fitting. I have repressed the fitting. There were pins, Courtney. A woman held pins in her mouth and then spoke to me."
She laughed outright at that, the hand at her lips failing entirely to contain it, her shoulders shaking. "Oh, you poor, beautiful, suffering creature. However you will recover."
"Mock me. Everyone else is. At least you’re prettier about it."
"Flatterer." But the colour that touched her cheekbones said the flattery had landed exactly where he’d aimed it. She reached up and tapped his shoulder twice, warm and easy.
"Hold on a little longer, hm? It’s nearly done. Be brave for me."
"I have to, don’t I." He let one shoulder rise and fall. "It’s not as though I can do anything else. Bolt for the cliff? Throw myself into the lake and let the current take me somewhere this strobe light can’t reach?"
"Mm." She pretended to consider it, head tilting, a smile tucked into the corner of her mouth. "Sadly, no. The lake’s been booked. You’d be trespassing on your own production." She patted his chest once, fond and final. "You’re stuck with me, dragon. Worse fates exist."
"Name three," he said, and she was still laughing as she turned to go.
He watched her walk away toward her crew, already rattling off instructions, already running her room again — and something in his chest settled warm and amused.
’She’s genuinely kind, this one. Underneath all that pretty mouth.’
His gaze drifted, because he was who he was, down the line of her: the designer trousers cut loose and pooling around her feet, but riding high and snug where it counted, framing the trim, pert curve of her perky ass with an honesty the fabric hadn’t earned.
He looked away before he was caught. Mostly.
A moment later the two designers reappeared at his elbow, the cool one and the tease, bracketing him on either side.
"Come on, then," the wardrobe designer purred, hooking two fingers in the waistband of his loosened shirt and tugging. "Let’s get you out of all this paint and let you breathe. We’ll take very good care of you."
"Very good," the makeup artist agreed quietly, which from her was practically a soliloquy.
"I do hope," Phei said, letting himself be led, "that the washing-off is more fun than the putting-on was."
The two women exchanged a single glance over his shoulder — slow, conspiratorial, the look of two professionals who had already agreed on something he hadn’t been consulted about.
"Oh," the tease said, steering him toward the door. "You can bet on that."
