After Hours: Midnight Oil / Midnight Madness / Midnight Touch. Karen Kendall

side of the table and accepted the glass from her. She looked anywhere and everywhere in the room except at his broad shoulders and sleek, muscled chest.

      Why had Margaret had to get food poisoning on this particular day?

      She took a sip of her tea, set it down and then drew a rolling side table closer to him. He emitted some kind of aura, a force like a magnet. She could feel it, and instinct told her to go no closer.

      Unfortunately her job required her to go closer to Troy, touch him, slide her fingers across his warm, damp skin and gently knead his flesh. But somehow she knew that if she did, there would be no turning back.

      Peggy had dealt with creep clients and their pickup lines before. She’d sidestepped unwelcome advances and had no problem whatsoever refusing to work on someone who made her personally uncomfortable.

      But the discomfort she felt around Troy wasn’t due to any creepiness on his part…it was all about her primal response to him, the way he sprawled there with the sheet draped casually across his lap—and those seawater eyes inviting her to come sit in that lap.

      She found her voice and was amazed that it sounded normal. “Want to get started? Why don’t you lie down on your stomach?”

      Troy shook his head. “No, I’ll lie on my back. I want to watch you while you work.”

      Great. Just great. “All right.”

      He swung his powerful legs back onto the table, careless of the sheet that slipped dangerously low on his hips.

      Peggy’s mouth went dry as her gaze flew automatically to a dusky crevice exposed by the movement, and she jerked the sheet over him before her brain could even process what she’d seen. Dark curls and thickness. He was well-endowed in the diameter department, that was certain.

      She stood next to him and looked down at him as he lay prone, memorizing the little details of his human terrain. The swells and valleys, the faint creases in his neck, his perfectly formed nose and lips. His eyebrows grew a bit wild, which only added to his manly appeal.

      He raised an arm a little as if he wanted to curve it around her, but then stopped. If he hadn’t, then nothing further would have happened between them.

      But he did stop, seeming to remind himself that it was she who’d do the touching; that anything else was inappropriate and out of the question. He flattened his hand on the sheet and waited.

      Peggy scooped massage cream out of a jar and warmed it in her hands before putting them on his shoulders and applying it in effleurage, the term for the gentle stroking that initiated a body treatment.

      Troy closed his eyes briefly and sucked in a breath. Then he opened them and stared into hers. Her hands stopped without her even realizing it. Abruptly she began again.

      She wanted Troy to touch her. She’d never, ever wanted a client to do that. But he was different. His skin was hot beneath her fingers, his breathing as shallow and quick as her own.

      No matter how she tried to tell herself that this massage was like any other, nothing personal, just business—it was a lie. She poured herself into this treatment as if she were making love to him, slowly, thoroughly and deeply.

      She rubbed oil into each of his arms, silently stunned at the hardness of the muscle, the ropiness of the veins that stood out in clear relief against them. Steroids? She still wondered. Or just an intense daily workout for years upon years of playing football, basically from the time he could walk?

      He wasn’t puffy and bulky the way Eddie had been, especially toward the end when she’d left. Troy was hard and solid but streamlined. He looked like a man of endurance, patience and intensity.

      How could just a single arm turn her on like this? But Peggy felt her breasts grow heavy and insistent against the cups of her bra. A trickle of perspiration ran down the small of her back, even though it wasn’t hot in the room.

      She reached Troy’s wrist and then his hand, working the oil into his palm and wrapping her hand around each of his fingers in a warm, pulsing cocoon. She dipped into the valleys between his fingers, too, and the contact between them grew more intimate without a word or a move on his part.

      It was just that she could sense his response, long before he curved his hand around hers and then interwove his fingers with her own, riveting her with his eyes while he did so.

      Peggy froze, and after a moment he slipped his hand from hers.

      “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I didn’t mean to do that. It just…came naturally.”

      She nodded without speaking and moved to the other arm, smoothing the oil down it in one long motion. His skin glistened with it under the light, glowing like temptation itself. She traced one of his visible veins from elbow to wrist and tried to break the mood with conversation.

      “You work out a lot.” She said it as a fact, not a question.

      He nodded, then reached up and laid a finger across her lips, whisper-soft.

      She could have gotten angry—after all, who was he to give her orders, even if they were nonverbal? But she understood perfectly, and when he traced her bottom lip with that same finger, she felt the sensation at her core.

      Slowly, not believing she was doing it, she took his index finger into her mouth and sucked the tip of it while he exhaled, his eyes riveted to the sight.

      Mind, body, spirit. Impulse control.

      But she knew sleeping with this man was inevitable. Her body didn’t give a rip about her mind or her spirit right now—it had taken over. To hell with impulse control!

      She moved her hands to his chest and lightly rubbed her thumbs over his nipples while his pupils widened in shock. She swept her hands over him, raking over his rib cage and following the indentations of muscle at his abdomen. She spread her fingers over his lower belly, diving slightly under the sheet and tickling the strip of hair that led down, down, down.

      Troy tensed, pulled his finger from her mouth and clenched his own hands into fists. He waited to see what she would do, and she waited to see what he would do.

      He was fully erect now, straining at the sheet. She struggled with the ethics of the situation. But hadn’t she already thrown ethics to the winds?

      Peggy closed her eyes and tried to resist this particular impulse of hers. It was dangerous and it was a form of self-betrayal.

      But Hot Sex Personified lay on her massage table in front of her, ready, willing and clearly able. And she hadn’t had any in so long. Instead, she’d had a dysfunctional relationship with a dysfunctional man, and she still wasn’t sure why she’d stayed in it.

      When she opened her eyes, Troy’s gaze burned into hers, hot and amused and challenging on the most primal level. Do me, it said. I’ll make you scream.

      She was wet, and he knew it, and she knew he knew it.

      She grasped the sheet, the cool white cotton against her heated skin. Should she remove it…or not?

      6

      HAD SHE LOST her mind? Peggy dropped the sheet as if it were scalding and backed away. “No,” she said out loud. “I cannot be doing this, and especially not here.”

      On the table, Troy closed his eyes. “Okay. I can respect that,” he said, then grinned. “But I sure don’t have to like it.”

      She stared at him with something like despair. “Do you have to be so reasonable and calm? Why can’t you be a total jerk and call me a cock tease or something? Give me an excuse to kick you out of here?”

      Troy sat up again, propping himself up on his elbows, and smiled at her. “Do you want me to leave, Peggy?”

      She swallowed. “No.”

      “Do you want me to stay?”

      “No.”

      He