Midnight Oil. Karen Kendall

thanks.” She worked salt scrub into his left bicep and tricep groups, using both hands to span the muscles. She swallowed as she met his eyes, which were gray green like stormy seawater and set off by his tanned skin.

      His lips held a devilish curve as she bent over him and worked her way over his chest, across his rib cage, down his abdomen. He had an old scar there, she noticed, and as her fingers drew near it he murmured, “Appendicitis at fifteen.”

      “Painful,” she said.

      “Mmm.”

      She’d reached the limits of the sheet and couldn’t help looking right smack into the center of it. Not that she was sharing with Shirlie, but she didn’t need to accidentally step on the sheet to tell that there was nothing wrong with his personal equipment. Troy Barrington, she decided, had never been on steroids.

      4

      TROY RELAXED on the massage table, relieved that Peggy hadn’t connected him with the “stalker” in the parking lot.

      She’d been quite the little scrapper then, and he loved her hands on him now. They were small, white and soft, just like her, but they possessed an unexpected strength—and she radiated competence from every pore.

      Competent, confident women turned him on like nothing else. Women who didn’t need him and didn’t look up to him; women who weren’t groupies or sluts. Cool women who were a challenge without being bitchy—those were the ones Troy found irresistible.

      Troy had seen all types, having been a professional ball player. He’d been chased by hundreds of beautiful women, very few of them interested in who he was as a person. They just flocked to the outer package: the muscular guy with the glamorous, well-paying job and the great car—not that most of them even recognized what the Lotus was. “Why don’t you drive a nice car, like a Porsche, instead of that old thing?” one girl had asked him. That had been their first and last date.

      Troy had no regrets about leaving Jacksonville or Gainesville—well, besides his new, lowly status of Head Cheese Doodle and Nobody. It was a little lonely starting over, but it felt good. He had no baggage in Miami. No big reminders of the selfish, hedonistic guy he’d been for years. He was a new man, shouldering new responsibilities, and he was strangely enthusiastic about them. For the first time his life would have meaning to someone other than himself.

      As Peggy’s hands slid over his skin, buffing him with the coarse salt stuff, he felt half relaxed and half energized. The cute redhead with the dimple was genuinely into football. The girl knew her stuff. Even coached his nieces…. It was a small world.

      He felt her hands stop at the sheet covering his privates and wished he could throw it off. Though come to think of it, he really didn’t want his knob polished with sea salt—it might be a tad painful. He wouldn’t mind rinsing off the stuff and then pulling her on top of him, though.

      Troy entertained himself by imagining once again that she was naked under that spiffy little white lab coat. That her full breasts were straining against the buttons and that maybe she had a Brazilian wax job with just the skinniest strip of red hair covering her down there.

      He groaned as Peggy went to work on the tops of his thighs, and was forced to push his fantasies away before things got embarrassing. A folded sheet couldn’t hide a determined arousal, and he shouldn’t be thinking this way about his nieces’ coach, for chrissakes.

      To relieve himself, he pictured her instead in a hair-net, à la cafeteria lady. Then he added a flannel nightgown and matching robe with giant blue cabbage roses all over them. He smeared her face with cold cream for good measure.

      Ah, that was better: the pressure in his groin subsided.

      Peggy, oblivious to these changes in her appearance, simply did her job. And with her hands all over his body this way, Troy found it hard to remember why he was here in the first place: to scope out the spa for code violations.

      Okay, she’d mentioned that the showers were new and they’d undergone extensive renovations. There should be city permits for all of that on file.

      Oh, damn, that feels good! He almost drooled with gratitude. No, no, where was he?

      Oh, yeah. There should also be inspection reports by officials to determine that everything was built to code. What he needed to do was somehow research each and every change to the building in the last two years….

      Peggy’s wonderful hands stopped—

      No, no! Don’t stop, please don’t stop. Touch me just a little farther south. There’s a toy surprise there, honey.

      —and she announced that he should go and shower now. He thanked her and regretfully got up after she’d exited. Troy pulled on the cotton waffle-weave robe again and headed for the state-of-the-art showers to rinse off.

      He stood under the warm water and used a sea sponge she’d given him to remove all traces of the salt scrub. He smelled like a large, aromatic-but-manly grapefruit and tingled from head to toe. This spa stuff wasn’t bad, was it?

      What was bad was his urge to see the delectable redheaded Peggy again, preferably naked. And he wished it would go away, seeing as how he wanted to kick her and her business partners off his property…and she probably wouldn’t take kindly to that. Go figure.

      Troy turned off the water and buried his face in a soft, clean towel. He rubbed at his hair with it, then dried his body and wound the towel around his waist. He stepped into some rubber shower thongs provided by the spa and reminded himself of his mission: to snoop. To make notes. To remember each and every detail of the place so that when he combed through the hundreds of pages of records and regulations, he could find something—anything—to nail them with and therefore break the lease.

      He did feel regret about Peggy and her magic hands and her sweet smile with the single dimple. But when it came right down to it, this was just business, nothing personal.

      PEGGY TOOK A COFFEE BREAK and watched wryly as one of Alejandro’s pedicure clients, Monica Delgado, deliberately messed up the polish on one of her feet so that he’d have to redo it, and therefore spend more time with her. Monica liked to wear miniskirts for these occasions and flash the poor guy as much as she could. Today she also wore an array of toe rings: three different ones, set in white gold with expensive stones.

      Alejandro’s shoulders tensed as she called him back to the pedicure station, “embarrassed” by her clumsiness. But he smiled and joked with her, saying that Monica just enjoyed having him at her feet.

      In the manicure area, the group of fortysomething ladies they’d dubbed The Fabulous Four gossiped and shrieked with laughter over what was probably their third bottle of wine. The downside to serving alcohol in the salon was that certain clients took total advantage of it. The Fab Four showed up like clockwork once a week, all at the same time, and indulged in a raucous happy hour at After Hours’ expense.

      But since they collectively spent so much money, Alejandro had decided that as long as they weren’t allowed to drive drunk, the few bottles of wine and the noise were worth it. Today, the poor guy looked as though he should have a glass himself and maybe lie down on her massage table for a half hour.

      There were days when After Hours was more zoo than spa. At his hairstyling station, one of the master cutters, Nicky, shrilly accused Sylvia of swiping a pair of his shears to cut her own bangs. She denied it at the top of her lungs.

      Ugh. As the manager, it was Peggy’s job to go break up the argument, calm them down and find the missing scissors. They turned up under the GQ magazine by his hand mirror, but when Peg suggested that he apologize to Sylvia, he sniffed and said he didn’t like her attitude and she could kiss his left ass cheek.

      Peg sighed, while Nicky launched into a long dialogue about how he couldn’t find the right man to do it, no matter how many Internet dates he went on….

      She finally took Sylvia into the back and explained that Nicky was experiencing a bad case of PMS and he’d be over it