Free Bachelor On The Prowl by Kasey Michaels

Coli n said, nodding his head. “After all, it’s my fault.”
    “Yes, it is your fault,” Max agreed. Damn Max for always being so agreeable when Colin was the one looking bad. “But don’t do it just for me, or for Julia. Things are bad enough now. Don’t lead Holly on, okay? Just be honest.”
    Coli n tried to explain himself, just one more time. “She was going on and on about models—male models mostly—and how they’re so vain and how she feels, well, insecure around them. And the whole time she didn’t even notice that heads turned as we walked by, especially while she was eating that damn ice-cream sandwich. One guy nearly walked into a pole, watching her lick vanilla ice cream off her fingers. She’s cute, she’s funny and she’s sexy as all hell. All of it wrapped up in this tiny, yet rather volatile package.”
    He shook his head. “Now tell me, Max. How was I going to throw a monkey wrench into a wonderful evening by telling her the truth? It was just a whole lot simpler at the time to be Harry Hampshire.”
    “She’s staying at the Waldorf, like you,” Max said after a moment.
    “I know. I’ll head there now,” Colin said, feeling about as ready to move as a rabbit with a fox in the vicinity. “Maybe flowers? Candy?”
    “Your head on a platter might work,” Julia said, reentering the living room, young Max on her shoulder as she patted the baby’s back. “You might want to give her a little more time to blow off steam, Colin, and to have a good cry. Besides, I doubt that she went back to the hotel, because you know she’s staying there. If I know Holly, she’s at the Frick, sitting in the enclosed courtyard, trying to calm herself. She really loves the Frick.”
    “The Frick?” Co li n asked, frowning.
    “The Frick Collection, an art museum,” Max told him. “On East Seventieth Street, at the park. You can walk there from here on a nice day like this, which is probably why Julia’s so sure Holly went there.”
    Colin headed for the foyer, then stopped, turned around. “Thanks, guys, and I’m sorry. I’m very, very sorry, and I’ll fix it.”
    “Of course you will, Co li n,” Julia said encouragingly. “But just one favor before you go, if you don’t mind. What sign are you?”
    “What sign am I?” Colin, his head full of too much information as it was—and staffed even fuller with questions—answered blankly, “Sign of the Zodiac? Isn’t that question sort of old hat now? I thought it died out with the last millennium.”
    “Tell her your sign, Co li n,” Max said calmly, although a smile hovered at the co rn ers of his mouth.
    “It’s Taurus. Why?”
    Juli a smiled sweetly. “No reason. Taurus. How nice. Call us later and let us know how you make out, Colin, all right? Don’t forget.”
    “Sure,” Colin promised, then headed toward the door once more. If Holly was at the Frick, he’d go to the Frick. If Holly was on the moon, he’d go to the moon. Hell, he’d go to the moon on his own if he didn’t go after Holly, because Max would boot him straight into outer space.
    It was a nice day for a walk in Manhattan. The sun was warm, the breeze mild and the lunchtime crowd remarkably polite as they made their way along the sidewalks. Colin stopped at a small grocery store that had an outside display of bouquets, picking one made up of butter-yellow chrysanthemums that caught his eye.
    Holly would either accept them, or bash him over the head with them … which is why he decided not to buy her anything as dangerous as a five-pound box of chocolate truffles. A solid brass paperweight of the Statue of Liberty, also on sale at the counter of the grocery store was, of course, entirely out of the question.
    As he walked along, in his hand-tailored navy suit, his dark sunglasses shielding his eyes from the sun, the breeze doing a small dance in that one lock of hair that always seemed to fall forward onto his forehead, Colin was blissfully unaware that he had made