Midnight Oil

Ugh. Football player, worst species of the genus Jock. She should have known. “Of course—that’s where I’ve heard your name,” Peg said politely. “Shirlie, our receptionist, was convinced that you were some celebrity…she’ll be so psyched that she was right.”

“Celebrity? Nah.” But he looked pleased. “You tell her I’m just a broken-down old ball player.”

He certainly didn’t look broken-down to Peggy. He didn’t feel broken-down, either, as she polished his body with the salt scrub and a loofah mitt. She was so close to him as she worked that she could smell the faint aftershave on his jaw and the essence of Dial soap on his skin.

The gel she’d mixed with the salt had a sweet grapefruit scent. Imported from France, they’d just gotten it in last month and it was very popular. She smoothed it into his skin, exfoliating and massaging, and thought about the odd intimacy of her job. Most of the time, if anyone was uncomfortable, it was the client, unused to the touch of a stranger.

But right now she herself was discomfited, and fighting the urge to…she didn’t know exactly. Rub her face against the smooth skin of his back, or even hike up her lab coat and skirt and sit astride him, feel him between her thighs.

To distract herself from the renegade thoughts, she forced herself to focus on his nieces, white-blond Danni and dishwater-blond Laura.

“Laura’s an amazing place kicker and Danni throws one of the tightest spirals I’ve ever seen,” she said, trying not to be fascinated with the corded muscle in Troy’s forearms. The man might have retired from the playing field, but he still worked out.

“Yeah.” He chuckled. “Danni’s got quite an arm. And she’s fierce, too! Laura’s not as aggressive, but she’s all about precision. I started working with them on my visits when they were about six, I think. So how did you get into football? I know a lot of women who watch it, but not many who play it or coach it.”

Peggy didn’t know exactly what to say. She had a love-hate relationship with football. How did she explain, without sounding pathetic, that she’d started learning it to get her father’s attention after he left? That she was so good that all the Little League teams had been thrilled to have her—until high school, when suddenly she was suspect.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, working her way down to his lower back muscles and getting perilously close to the sheet covering his glutes. “I was a real tomboy, I guess, and used to play with the neighborhood kids. I worked at it. I was good. I watched it all the time on TV—thought it was a lot more interesting than making Barbie kiss Ken. And my dad was really into football.”

She didn’t mention that she’d loved to tackle people, that it had helped with all the pent-up anger and frustration she’d felt over her parents’ divorce. At first she’d blamed her mom for not being nice to Dad, for making him want to leave. Then she’d found out why Mom wasn’t nice: Dad had a girlfriend on the side.

“Yeah? So what’s your favorite team?” Troy asked, his voice trailing into something like a deep purr as she firmly massaged the muscles on either side of his spine.

“Dolphins. Dan Marino was my hero.”

“Yeah? Mine, too.” Troy turned his head toward her and smiled. “Watching the guy run with those bad knees was like seeing paint dry, but man, his passing game was incredible.”

Peggy nodded. “Quick release, amazing accuracy, tight spirals. Good thing he had Mark Clayton and Mark Duper to pass to.”

“I can see my nieces are in good hands. Speaking of which—” Peggy moved from his back to his thighs, and he edged them apart a bit “—so am I. They teach you how to do this in some special school?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ll bet you got all As.”

“Let’s just say I did better at this than at trig and calculus.”

His legs were covered in a light sprinkling of coarse hair, and his thighs were packed with muscle, as were the calves. She applied more scrub and worked it in over every inch that wasn’t private, right down to his feet and each toe.

“Okay,” she said finally. “You can turn over now.”

He rolled onto his back, holding the sheet in place over him.

She did her very best not to look at that area, even though Shirlie’s questions came tumbling back into her mind. Do you have a camera phone? Can’t you just accidentally step on the sheet? You can text message me from the back….

Peggy bit her lip to keep from laughing.

“What’s the dimple for?” Troy asked, just as her humor vanished on seeing his chest and shoulders again.

She turned away for another handful of the salt scrub. God, the man was gorgeous. And this—she applied the scrub to his skin, trying not to meet his eyes—this was even more intimate.

“Dimple?” He had flat, coppery nipples, and she avoided them, not wanting the salt to irritate the more sensitive areas of his skin.

“You get a dimple, only on the left, when you’re trying not to smile. It’s cute.”

“Um, 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 next week. Sylvia rolled her eyes and went to take her next facial appointment.

Peggy shook her head, took a deep breath and went back to the front of the salon, where she opened a tip envelope and stared at the enormous bonus Troy Barrington had left for her. Shirlie and Marly stared, too.

“That’s, like, a thirty percent tip!” Shirl exclaimed.

Marly lifted a dark, winged brow, her expression teasing. “Sea salt scrub, hmm? You must not have missed an inch.”

“Hey! Just what are you implying?” Peggy could feel her face flushing, though she knew her friends were just kidding around. “I do not finish off the clientele sexually, okay?”

“Maybe he wants you to think about it for next time,” Shirlie said, with an evil wink.

Peggy drew herself up to her full height, which wasn’t much taller than the receptionist sitting down. “There won’t be a next time, ladies. Margaret can do the honors when he returns for his next treatment.”

“I take it his happy-package was disappointing?” Shirlie probed for the information dear to her heart.

“Did I say that?” Peggy asked.

“Well, it must be tiny if you don’t want to do him next time.”

Peggy shrugged. She wanted to do him, all right. She just didn’t think it was healthy for her to be around Troy Barrington in such an intimate setting—not until she’d purged the sexual attraction from her mind and body.

This is my year of self-discovery, she told herself firmly. The year of Peggy Power. I’m not going to cater to anyone else, especially not a man. I’m not going to try to fix anyone’s ego or gambling habit. I’m going to recover who I am and figure out how I got so out of balance last year.

“Girls, I hate to disappoint you, but the size of Mr. Barrington’s tip probably has more to do with the fact that I coach his nieces’ powder-puff football team. He was just being nice.”

The phone rang, forcing Shirlie to answer it. Peggy escaped to the kitchenette, where she found Alejandro looking elegant and tailored as usual, despite his recent harrowing experience with Monica Delgado. He was frowning and poking at something in the microwave.

“This tamal is still frozen,” he explained. “And I am starving.” She loved his slightly accented English—he was half Peruvian.

“They say patience is a virtue, doll.”

He laughed. “How would you know, eh?”

Peggy stuck her tongue out at him. “I don’t. But my New Year’s resolution had to do with patience and impulse control.”

“I can tell you’re sticking with that,” Alejandro said, “since it took you five seconds to make up your mind to move down here after I suggested the partnership.”

She winced. Yeah, and it had taken her three seconds to decide what college to attend, two seconds to get engaged to a dud and one to buy a car.

He took pity on her by changing the subject. “So is Hal still dating that crazy image consultant, up there in Connecticut?”

Peggy brightened. “Yes! As a matter of fact, they’ve moved in together. Can you believe that? A woman brave enough to actually live with my brother. And she’s got him dressed like an actual human being now, and keeps his hair cut.”

“Wonders will never cease.” The microwave pinged, and he removed the tamal once again. This time steam rolled off it in waves, and the aroma of corn, garlic, onion and shredded pork was delicious.

Peggy watched Alejandro spread a huge quantity of Ahi (an unbelievably hot pepper sauce) over his tamal and dig in. How did the guy eat pure fire?

“Don’t you at least want a glass of ice water?” She asked. “You know, for when your throat goes up in flames?”

He grinned and shook his head.

She opened the refrigerator and pulled out the lentil salad she’d made as part of her new, healthy, Peggy-Power regimen. She was not going to snarf fast-food pizza and burgers any longer. She was going to eat fiber and vitamins and leafy green vegetables. She was going to feel like a million bucks each and every day. Her chest swelled with pride as she mounded the lentils on a plate and sprinkled a few sliced green onions on top.

Shirlie walked in with a Wendy’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers bag smelling of heavenly grease. “I super-sized my fries. Want some?”

Typically, it took Peggy half a second to decide. “Slap ’em right here,” she said. “Where’s the ketchup?”

SINCE THEY WORKED at the spa all day Saturday, Sunday was relaxation day, and Monday usually got taken up by errands and housework.

Marly was working too much to pay attention to her dating life, so she and Peg spent a lot of time together, this Sunday being no exception.

Peggy had sold everything she owned in a whirlwind garage sale before she’d driven to Miami from Connecticut. As part of her self-improvement program, she’d even sold her television, intending to read in her spare time instead of being sucked into sitcoms. Now she missed the TV’s comforting presence, and she had an idea.

“You want me to paint a television on your living-room wall?” Marly said incredulously.

“Yup. C’mon, you could do it in an hour with one hand tied behind your back.”

“Yeah, but it’s a nutty thing to do.”

“It’ll make the room seem more homey.” Anything would make the sterile white box of an apartment seem more homey, even a fire extinguisher and a can of bug spray. It was awful. White tile. Beige carpet. White walls. White ceiling. White vertical blinds. She was living in a freakin’ hospital. Every morning, she half expected to wake up in surgery.

“Uh, Peg?” said Marly. “The TV will have only one, unchanging image.”

“I know! It’s motion picture subversion. How cool is that?”

“Huh?” Marly started to laugh.

“Simplifying the constant barrage of images into one. But it’ll be hard to choose which one I want.”

“What’s gonna be hard is convincing your landlord to give you back your deposit money.”

Peggy waved that mundane thought away. “I’ll just roll the walls white again before I leave. Can you do the TV today?”

“Sure, Miss Crazy. Bring me a pencil and think about what colors you want. Should I put it on that big wall over the couch?”

“Perfect. And I have some tempera poster paint. Will that work?”

Marly nodded, resigned to the project. She stood on the couch and lightly outlined a huge television screen on the wall, using the side of a framed art poster as a straightedge. “So, is this a plasma TV, Peg?”

“Oh, definitely. Only top-of-the-line equipment for me. Don’t you agree?”

“Uh-huh. Get me some paint and some paper cups to mix colors in, okay?” Marly worked quickly, somehow making the sketch look three-dimensional.

They threw a sheet over the couch, and within half an hour Marley was painting in the frame and asking Peg, who was daydreaming about the possibilities of Troy Barrington’s backside, what image she wanted on the screen.

Without even thinking about it she said, “A football player’s backside in uniform. He’s bent over, gripping the ball and ready to hike.”

Marly set down her brush. “Peggy. You really want to look at a butt every time you walk into your living room?”

“Yup. If it’s a nice male one in spandex, I sure do!”

“Have you been sniffing too many aromatherapy candles, honey?”

“Probably. Hey, when you’re done let’s have a glass of wine and give each other pedicures. I think your laundry’s just about done.” Peg went to check on it, transferred the wet load to the dryer and got her cheap little foot spa out of the cabinet over the washer.

She brought it into the main room and set it down on a clean towel. Then she filled a pitcher with warm water from the kitchen sink and poured it into the basin. She added bath salts and brought out other supplies.

Marly was deep in concentration now, sketching the seat of the player’s pants, his socks, cleats and hands on the football. Peggy was impressed that she didn’t have to work from a photograph to get the details, proportions and angles right.

“Why didn’t you go to art school, Marly?” she asked.

“I did.”

“But you do hair.”

“You know the story about why I didn’t graduate. My dad got sick. Besides, I love what I do for women every day. I get to be creative, I make them feel better, it pays well and I’m never between jobs for longer than a couple of hours. What more could I ask for?”

Peggy nodded.

“And I’m able to do my art on the side.” Marly painted in the football, somehow giving it texture and dimension, too. The stitching appeared almost real.

As Peg looked at it, the familiar wash of conflicting emotions about football rolled through her. It represented both success and failure for her, strength and weakness, power and victimization.

A guy like Troy Barrington—great, there she went, thinking about him again—had been a natural to play on a high school team, then a college one and finally go pro. He’d been encouraged all the way.

But her experience had been different. Suddenly, when she’d gone out for the high school team, she was resented. She’d made it because she was so good, but all the guys had looked at her funny. She’d cost one of their friends a place on the team. She had long hair and breasts and odd plumbing. She was just different with a capital D.

Instead of the camaraderie that someone like Troy had with the team, she’d battled sexually aggressive glances and felt bad because she couldn’t share the same locker room, causing no end of logistical problems.

But she’d stuck it out. She’d won everyone’s respect, however grudging. She could kick a decent field goal, run like the wind and would tackle anything that moved. The problem was, admittedly, that her body weight didn’t stack up to a six-foot, two-hundred-pound male’s.

Still, by the end of her senior year, she’d been practically the team mascot, carried on their shoulders when they won the district championship with her field goal.

Peggy would always proudly carry that moment in her heart, no matter what had happened later when she’d fought her way onto her college team. Nobody could take the district win away from her, not even her father’s absence from the stands at the crucial moment.

Impulse struck again. “Marly, you’re going to kill me, but I promise you a deep-tissue massage if you’ll change the image on the screen.”

“You’re right, I am going to kill you.” Marly straightened and glared at Peg.

“Please can you paint over the man butt and put a kick-ass woman there, instead? She’s triumphant. She just kicked a field goal that won a big game.”

“Why do I have a feeling that this kick-ass woman should have long red hair?” Resigned, Marly was already whiting out the other picture. “Get me a hair dryer, will you? It’ll speed us up. I’m not staying here all night.”

“Even if I make whiskey sours?”

“Okay, I’m staying all night. But you have to give me dinner, too.”

“Deal. You know I wouldn’t ask you to do this if you weren’t so fast and so good.”