Beautiful Read online

  Praise for the Beautiful and Wild Seasons series by New York Times and #1 international bestselling author

  CHRISTINA LAUREN

  “[Christina Lauren] have fast become my go-to for sexy, honest contemporary erotic romance.”

  —Heroes and Heartbreakers

  “The thing that I love the most about Christina Lauren and the duo’s Beautiful books is that there is always humor in them. As well as hot steamy moments and some of the sweetest I love yous.”

  —Books She Reads

  “Writing duo [Christina] Lauren have really hit their stride blending erotic romance with a flirty, funny new adult voice. Lauren continues to write simmering sexual tension like no other, and the creative sex scenes keep things interesting.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “Deliciously steamy.”

  —EW.com on Beautiful Bastard

  “A hypersexy, sophisticated romance that perfectly captures the hunger, thrill, and doubt of young, modern love.”

  —Kirkus Reviews on Wicked Sexy Liar

  “No one is doing hot contemporary romance like Christina Lauren.”

  —Bookalicious

  “Sweet Filthy Boy has everything necessary for a great romance read. Love, passion, heat, turmoil, and humor are all perfectly combined.”

  —Bookish Temptations on Sweet Filthy Boy

  “Smart, sexy, and satisfying, Beautiful Bastard is destined to become a romance classic.”

  —Tara Sue Me, author of The Submissive

  “Most of the time when I read contemporary romance, I find myself suffering the lead girl for the sake of the story. Maybe I just don’t identify with her, or I can’t imagine myself being friends with her. With Harlow, I don’t find myself just wanting to know her, I want to be her. She’s not afraid to say what she thinks, but she’s compassionate and thoughtful. . . . In a lot of ways, the most interesting female protagonist I’ve read in a long time.”

  —That’s Normal on Dirty Rowdy Thing

  “A devilishly depraved cross between a hardcore porn and a very special episode of The Office.”

  —PerezHilton.com on Beautiful Bastard

  “Full of expertly drawn characters who will grab your heart and never let go, humor that will have you howling, and off-the-charts, toe-curling chemistry, Dark Wild Night is absolutely unforgettable. This is contemporary romance at its best!”

  —Sarah J. Maas, author of Throne of Glass

  “Will we ever stop falling in love with Christina Lauren’s fictional men? The answer to this is HECK NO.”

  —Fangirlish

  “The perfect blend of sex, sass, and heart, Beautiful Bastard is a steamy battle of wills that will get your blood pumping!”

  —S. C. Stephens, author of Thoughtless

  “[The] Wild Seasons series is equal parts hot, funny, and romantic. . . . In our eyes, Christina Lauren can do no wrong.”

  —Bookish

  “I recommend this story to everyone who is old enough to read . . . Fans of Fifty Shades, Bared to You, and On Dublin Street will love this story and will have their own love/hate relationship with Bennett (the Beautiful Bastard).”

  —Once Upon a Twilight

  “Fresh, hip and energetic, Wicked Sexy Liar layers earthy sexiness with raw, honest dialogue to create a page-turning keeper.”

  —BookPage

  “I blushed. A lot.”

  —USA Today

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  To A. K. W.:

  For every patient smile,

  and each battle fought.

  One

  Pippa

  I’ve tried not to be too bitter about the close friendship between clarity and hindsight.

  Such as, only once you’re sitting for your final exams do you register that you might have studied a bit more.

  Or perhaps, staring down the barrel of a gun held in your face, you think, Gosh, I really was quite a wanker.

  Or maybe you’ve just happened upon the white, thrusting bum of your idiot boyfriend as he shags another woman in your bed, and you muse with a touch of sarcasm, Ah, so that’s why he never fixed the squeaky stair. It was the Pippa alarm.

  I threw my purse at him mid-thrust, hitting him squarely in the back. It sounded like a hundred tubes of lipstick hitting a brick wall.

  For a cheating, lying, dickhead forty-year-old man, Mark really was quite fit.

  “You asshole,” I hissed as he attempted—rather gracelessly—to climb off her. The sheets were stripped from the bed—add lazy to his list of attributes, obviously he didn’t want to have to carry the bedding to the laundrette on the corner before I got home—and his cock bounced against his stomach.

  He covered it with his hand. “Pippa!”

  To her credit, the woman hid her face behind her hands in mortification. “Mark,” she choked out, “you didn’t tell me you had a girlfriend.”

  “Funny,” I answered for him. “He didn’t tell me he had two of them.”

  Mark let out a few abbreviated sounds of terror.

  “Go on, then,” I said to him, lifting my chin. “Get your things. Get out.”

  “Pippa,” he managed. “I didn’t know—”

  “That I’d be coming by at lunchtime?” I asked. “Yeah, I figured that out, love.”

  The woman stood, scrambling in humiliation for her clothes. I suppose the decent thing to do would have been to turn away and let them dress in their shameful silence. But actually, if I was being fair, the decent thing to do would not be to claim she didn’t know that Mark had a girlfriend when everything in the bloody bedroom was a delicate turquoise hue and the bedside lamps had lace-covered shades.

  Did she think she was visiting his mum’s flat? Give me a fucking break.

  Mark pulled on his pants, coming at me with his hands up as if approaching a lion.

  I laughed. Right then, I was much more dangerous than a lion.

  “Pippa, dearest, I’m so sorry.” He let the words sit in the space between us, as if they might actually be enough to diffuse my anger.

  An entire speech filled my head in an instant, fully formed and articulate. It was about how I worked fifteen-hour days to support his start-up, it was about how he lived and worked in my flat but hadn’t washed a dish in four months, it was about how he seemed to be putting a lot more focus into giving this woman a bit of fun than he’d put into making me happy in the past six months. But I didn’t think he deserved even that much of my energy, glorious as the speech would have been.

  Besides, his discomfort—increasing with every second that passed without a word from me—was too delicious. It didn’t hurt to look at him. You’d have thought it would, in this type of situation. But instead, it set something inside me on fire. I imagined it was my love for him, maybe, igniting like newspaper held over a match.

  He took one step closer. “I can’t imagine how this feels right now for you, but—”

  Tilting my head and feeling the anger boil up inside, I cut him off: “Can’t you? Shannon left you for another man. In fact, I imagine you know exactly how this feels right now for me.”

  Once I said it, memories of those early days bubbled up, when we’d met at the pub, when it was just friends between us and we’d enjoy long conversations about my dating adventures and his relationship failures. I remembered how I could tell that he’d truly loved his wife from how devastated he was without her. I tried to keep from falling for him—with his dry sense of h
umor, curly dark hair, and luminous brown eyes—but failed. And then, to my utter glee, one night it turned into more.

  Three months later he’d moved in.

  Six months after that, I’d asked him to fix the squeaky board on the stairs.

  Two months after that, I’d given up and fixed it myself.

  That was yesterday.

  “Get your things out of the closet and leave.”

  The woman scurried past us without looking up. Would I even remember her face? Or would I forever remember only the thrusting of Mark’s backside over her and the way his cock bobbed wildly as he flipped over in a panic?

  I heard the front door slam a few seconds later, but Mark still hadn’t moved.

  “Pippa, she’s only a friend. She’s a sister of Arnold’s, from football, her name—”

  “Don’t give me her bleeding name,” I said, laughing incredulously. “I don’t give a fuck what her name is!”

  “What—?”

  “What if it’s a beautiful name?” I cut in. “What if, someday in the future, I’m married to a really nice bloke, and we have a baby, and my husband suggests that name, and I say, ‘Oh, lovely one, that. Unfortunately, Mark shagged a girl with that name in my bed, with the sheets pulled off because he’s a lazy wanker, so no, we can’t use that for our daughter.’ ” I glared at him. “You’ve already ruined my day. Maybe my week.” I tilted my head, considering. “Definitely haven’t ruined my month, because that new Prada bag I got last week is bloody amazing—and not even you or your unfaithful pale arse can hamper that.”

  He smiled, trying not to laugh. “Even now,” he said quietly, with adoration, “even after I’ve betrayed you like this, you’re such a funny girl, Pippa.”

  I set my jaw. “Mark. Get the hell out of my flat.”

  He winced apologetically. “It’s only that I’ve got a telecon at four with the Italians, you see, and I was hoping to be able to make it from the—”

  This time it was my hand across his cheek that interrupted him.

  Coco set down a mug of tea in front of me and ran a soothing hand through my hair.

  “Fuck him.” She whispered this, for Lele’s benefit.

  Lele loved motorcycles, women, rugby, and Martin Scorsese. But she did not, we’d learned, like her wife to swear in the house.

  I buried my face in my folded arms. “Why are men such wankers, Mum?”

  The Mum was for both of them, because it’s the one name they’d both answer to. It was confusing at first—shouting for one and having both turn to answer—and why, as soon as I could really speak, Colleen and Leslie let me call them Coco and Lele instead of Mum.

  “They’re wankers because . . .” Coco began, and then trailed off, floundering. “Well, they aren’t all wankers, are they?”

  I assumed she looked to Lele for confirmation, because her voice returned, stronger when she said, “And women can be wankers, too, for that matter.”

  Lele came to her rescue. “What we can tell you is that Mark is definitely a wanker, and we all feel a bit blindsided by that, now don’t we?”

  I was sad for the Mums, too. They liked Mark. They appreciated that he was halfway between my age and theirs. They enjoyed his sophisticated taste in wine, and his appreciation for Bob Dylan and Sam Cooke. When he was with me, he liked to pretend he was still in his twenties. When he was with them, he easily transformed into the best friend of fiftysomething lesbians. I wondered which version of himself he was with the faceless tramp.

  “I do, and I don’t,” I admitted, sitting up and wiping my face. “In hindsight, I wonder if maybe Mark was so gutted about Shannon because it had never occurred to him to cheat.”

  I looked up at their wide, worried eyes. “I mean, he didn’t even know it was an option until she cheated. Maybe it became a terrible option if you’re unhappy, but an option anyway.” I felt the blood drain from my face. “Maybe it became the quickest and easiest way to break it off with me?”

  They stared at me, speechless as they witnessed my dawning horror.

  “Is that it?” I asked, looking back and forth between the two of them. “Was he trying to end things, and I was just too thick to see it? Did he sleep with a woman in my bed to push me away?” I swiped my hand over my mouth. “Is Mark just a giant coward with a great knob?”

  Coco covered her own mouth to keep from laughing. Lele seemed to give this question its fair consideration. “I can’t speak to the knob, love, but I would say without a doubt that that man is a coward.”

  Lele cupped my elbow, guiding me with her solid grip to stand and follow her to the overstuffed sofa. She pulled me down beside her long, hard form, and within a breath, Coco’s soft curves were there, too, pressing her warmth into my other side.

  How many times had we sat like this? How many times had we done this very thing, sitting huddled together on the couch as we considered the mystery of boyfriend behavior? We’d muddled through it, together. We didn’t always come up with answers, but we usually felt better after a good cuddle on the couch.

  This time, they didn’t put much effort into hypotheses. When your twenty-six-year-old daughter comes home with man troubles, and you’re a lesbian couple married to your first love going on thirty years, there’s only so much to say other than Fuck him.

  “You’re working too much,” Lele murmured, kissing my hair.

  “You hate your job.” Coco massaged my fingers, humming in agreement.

  “You know that’s why I came home for lunch that day to begin with? I’d felt like shredding my stack of spreadsheets and dumping Tony’s coffee over his head, and decided a good brew and some biscuits might set me right. The irony.”

  “You could quit and move home?” Coco said.

  “Aw, Mum, I don’t want to,” I said quietly, ignoring the way the suggestion of quitting sparked a tiny thrill inside me. “I couldn’t.”

  I stared ahead of us at the tidy sitting room: the small television that was used more as a stand for Coco’s vases full of flowers than it was for its intended purpose; the nubby blue rug that used to be a minefield of hidden Barbie shoes; the meticulously stained hardwood floor peeking out beneath.

  I did hate my job. I hated my boss, Tony. I hated the dull tedium of the interminable number crunching. I hated my commute, hated not having any good friends in the office anymore now that Ruby had left nearly a year and a half ago.

  Hated how each day seemed to bleed into the next.

  But maybe I’m lucky, I remembered. At least I have a job, yeah? And friends, even if most of them spend more time gossiping in the pub than anything else. I’ve got two mums who love me beyond measure, and a wardrobe that would make most women drool. Really, Mark was lovely sometimes but a bit of a slob if I’m being fair. Great cock, lazy tongue. Fit, but rather dull, now that I think about it. Who needs a man? Not me.

  I had all that—a good life, really. So why did I feel like broiled shit?

  “You need a holiday.” Lele sighed.

  I felt something inside me pop: a tiny burst of relief.

  “Yes! A holiday!”

  Heathrow was fucking nutters on a Friday morning.

  Fly Friday, Coco said.

  It will be quiet, she said.

  Apparently I should not take advice from a woman who hadn’t been on an airplane in four years. But she seemed like a wizened sage compared to me: it had been six years since I’d flown; I never traveled for work. I took the train northwest to Oxford to see Ruby, and I took the train southeast to Paris—or had—with Mark, when we wanted a mini-holiday and to gorge ourselves on food and wine, a wild sexual excursion with the Eiffel Tower in the background.

  Sex. Goodness, would I miss that.

  But there were more pressing things on my mind, and I had to wonder whether there were more people in Heathrow right then, at nine on a Friday, than there were in the entire city of London.

  Don’t people go to work anymore? I thought. Clearly I’m not the only one out here who’s flying
off before the end of the workweek, on a random non-holiday in October, escaping the boring tedium of my job and the cheating, thrusting—

  “Get on, then,” a woman snarled behind me.

  I startled, having been caught lost in my thoughts in the security line.

  I took three steps forward and looked at her over my shoulder. “Better?” I asked flatly now that we were standing in the exact same order and only a few feet closer to the agent checking passports.

  Thirty minutes later, I was at my gate. And I needed . . . an activity. Nerves gnawed at my stomach, the kind of anxiety I wasn’t sure whether to feed or starve. It wasn’t as though I’d never flown before . . . I just hadn’t flown much. To be clear, I felt worldly in my everyday life. I had a favorite shop in Mallorca I would visit for new skirts. I had a list of cafés in Rome I could offer to anyone traveling there for the first time. Of course I was a seasoned Tube traveler—routinely managing the mass of aggresively impatient commuters—but somehow I assumed the airport would be more welcoming: a gateway to adventure.

  Apparently not. It seemed enormous, and even so, the crowds were surprisingly thick. Our gate attendant was calling out information at the same time that another gate attendant across the way was making similar announcements. People were boarding, and it felt like chaos, but when I glanced around, no one but me seemed to find this at all jarring. I looked down at my ticket, clutched in my fist. Mums had bought me a first-class fare—a treat, they said—and I knew how much it had cost them. Surely the plane wouldn’t leave without me?

  A man stepped up to my side, dressed smartly in a navy suit with polished shoes. He looked far more sure of himself than I felt.

  Stick by this one, I thought. If he’s not on the plane, surely it’s not time for me, either.

  I let my eyes travel up his smooth neck to his face and felt just the slightest bit dizzy. Obviously, I was viewing the world through rebound-colored glasses, but he was gorgeous. A head of thick, sunny hair; deep green eyes focused on the mobile in his hand; and a lovely jawline ripe for nibbling.