Irrepressible You Read Online Free PDF

cursing both Alex’s sense of fair play and his own smart mouth. There’d just been something about the lady that had made him want to push her buttons to see which ones made her go. He knew he should be feeling a little remorse for his rudeness, and he was, but not enough to want to get out of bed. After all, she was only someone he’d offended once. There were numerous people in his life he’d offended on multiple occasions and he’d never bothered to get out of bed early to apologise to any of them.
    Although . . . he hadn’t yet come up with any material for his weekly newspaper column in the London Enquirer. Maybe the little blonde mistakenly identifying Alex as a sailor could be rounded out to produce an entertaining tale. He’d discounted it earlier because that one meeting didn’t provide quite enough material.
    Ben’s personal experiences were frequently fodder for his column, albeit augmented with a generous sprinkling of the salt and pepper of literary free licence. That wouldn’t change now that he’d relocated to Australia. In fact, after the recent unwanted media attention he’d received care of an ill-conceived fling with a publicity-hungry reality star, shining the light on someone else’s world would be entertaining.
    As much as he didn’t want to get up, he couldn’t pass up this golden–or more to the point, blonde–opportunity.
    Forty minutes later, Ben studied the front of an old-fashioned barber salon, its window painted with bold white letters declaring ‘Babyface’ and garnished with a spinning red and blue pole. Next to the barber shop sat some kind of beauty salon with similar bold writing over its window declaring that ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’.
    ‘Cute,’ he murmured before pushing the door open. A bell rang in the shop next door but the long, narrow space before him was devoid of life. Well, almost. The silence was broken by an antique record player spinning the sounds of an old Muddy Waters classic.
    Glancing around with a critical eye, Ben set about mental note taking, registering the dark green walls, scarred, dark wood floorboards and the two plush, deep brown leather barber chairs facing heavy square mirrors. On the wall directly behind one of the chairs, visible in the mirrors, was a large framed print from Marilyn Monroe’s famous 1953 Playboy spread. It hung next to an equally large black and white print of a young shirtless Rock Hudson, a cigarette dangling out the corner of his mouth. Obviously catering to all tastes , Ben mused with raised brows.
    The room smelled invitingly of coffee and, if he wasn’t mistaken, chocolate.
    He turned around, wondering what the hell he was supposed to do now, when he spotted a discreet sign by the record player requesting that patrons take a seat and wait for Amy . Deciding to do just that, he took the chair affording the view of Marilyn and waited.
    The bell rang announcing someone’s presence in the barbershop and Amy paused in applying bleach to Jody Greave’s inch-long hair to make a futile motion for Kate, her only other senior stylist, to take over. When Kate feigned blindness, Amy squelched the urge to throw a hair dryer at the woman’s beautiful, sleek blonde head. She met her nail and beauty technician Marissa’s sympathetic gaze and grimaced, cursing the circumstances that had left her short staffed.
    On Monday the week before, Amy’s other senior stylist and good friend, Mel, had quit for the third time in the space of a year. As always, Mel had cited personal reasons for leaving without providing any details. She didn’t need to. It was obvious that she and Kate were on a downturn in their perpetual rollercoaster romance.
    For her part, Kate appeared largely unaffected by the temporary split. Well, other than exploring her inner bitch and being a total drama queen, but that was kind of normal.
    Amy had seen this particular soap opera numerous times now and knew that the two women would patch things up in