Midnight Oil Page 16

  Peggy stared at the machine, almost unable to process what she’d just heard. You’re in luck, they are in violation of the lease, and you can break it. Your sporting goods store is about to become a reality!

  She recalled how odd Troy had been the first time he’d come to After Hours. Looking around the place as if he were an engineer…purchasing a body-treatment package that he clearly wasn’t much interested in.

  Her blood boiled.

  She recalled him choking at Benito’s when she’d asked him if he’d found a location for his new store. And all along, she’d been happily oblivious. He’d used her.

  Girlfriend?

  More like tool. Mark. Easy recreational lay.

  I am so stupid that I redefine the word. I make the whole concept of stupid look like genius.

  Fury spilled into her veins and she felt sick. She wanted to spew his Mickey Mouse pancakes all over his wreck of a house…the house that she’d come to think of as sweet and charming in its shabbiness. Sweet and charming like him.

  She got up to find that her legs were shaking, along with the rest of her body. She thought about hurling her coffee cup through the sliding glass door.

  She thought about murdering Troy, Psycho-style, in the shower. She thought about boiling his head on the 1930s stove. If she confronted him right now, she wasn’t sure she could be responsible for her actions.

  Girlfriend. Her temples throbbed. She left her coffee sitting on the newspaper and went outside in search of her pants. She plucked them off the ficus, decided she didn’t care about finding her underwear and tracked down one shoe. She vaguely remembered the other one flying over the hedge. To hell with it, too. She scooped up her purse and slammed out the gate of the backyard.

  She’d made it to the street when Troy emerged from the front door, the lower half of him wrapped in a towel. “Peggy?”

  Slowly she turned and looked at him, taking in the powerful chest and arms, the sunlight catching the water droplets falling from his hair, his puzzled expression.

  “You rat bastard,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You pathetic lowlife.”

  He took a step toward her. “Peggy?”

  “Girlfriend?” she screamed at him, her rage erupting like a geyser between them. “When were you going to tell me, Troy? After you’d explored every sexual position with me?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “You booked our body-treatment package so that you could get into After Hours and find some bullshit violation! In order to break the lease and kick us out!”

  “Jerry. It was Jerry who called, wasn’t it?” He scrubbed his hands over his face, and she knew he was guilty.

  Some small part of her had wanted him to deny it, still hoped that it wasn’t true.

  She lost all respect for him and let go a stream of invective. “Unbelievable! And then you had sex with me? Over and over again, while you were planning this the entire time?”

  “It’s not like that—”

  “It is like that! Go listen to your own damn answering machine and tell me it’s not true!”

  “I wasn’t actually going to do it—”

  “Save the bullshit for someone else, Barrington. You make me sick!” She turned and walked down the street.

  “Where the hell are you going like that? Barefoot? You can’t walk home!”

  “I can do whatever the hell I please, you asshole.”

  Troy ran after her, still holding the towel at his waist. “Look, can we talk about this?”

  “I have nothing to say to you—”

  “Let me at least drive you home, for chrissakes!”

  “—except may you rot in hell.”

  “Peggy, damn it, let me explain!”

  “What are you going to explain, huh? That you’re a complete dickhead? A liar? An opportunist and a two-faced piece of dog shit?”

  “Call me names if it will make you feel better, but let me—”

  “Girlfriend!” she shrieked at him.

  “That’s one I’ve never been called—” He put a hand on her arm and tried to stop her.

  “Get your hands off me!”

  He winced and put a hand to his ear. “Message received, loud and clear, thanks.”

  “So how does this play out now, Troy? Is it me who delivers the message to my business partners? Oh, by the way, that guy I’ve been screwing is the landlord, and now that he’s ready to move on, we have to get out! The fifty grand we all borrowed to build out the place and remodel is history, and we may as well default on the loan tomorrow.”

  “There is no such message to deliver, that’s what I’m trying to tell you—”

  “Stop lying to me! What, are you going to tell me next that I am such a Grade A lay that you were planning to forfeit all business sense and open your sporting goods store somewhere else?”

  “Yes!”

  She laughed, and even to her own ears the sound was high and wild. “Don’t bother.”

  “Peggy, what do I have to do—”

  “You’ve done enough. Go screw yourself, Troy.” She walked away, desolate and not caring that the hot pavement was burning the soles of her feet. Three blocks east and a couple of turns should bring her to Miracle Mile, where she hoped a bedraggled, barefoot woman could catch a cab. Peggy found her sunglasses in her bag and jammed them onto her nose, protection not only from the sun but from strangers who might see her cry in public.

  She half hoped Troy would follow her, but only so she could push him in front of a bus.

  Chapter 17

  TROY STARED AFTER PEGGY, her wild red hair streaming down her back, his shirt covering her almost to the knees of her ugly cargo pants. She looked ridiculous, beyond furious and…beautiful.

  Why hadn’t he had the talk with her when he’d had the chance? If he could have kicked his own ass, he would have.

  Instead, he stood stupidly in the middle of his residential street, slowly becoming aware of the fact that his towel was causing a great deal of interest.

  Across the street and two doors down, Mrs. Costas was watering her mailbox, staring fixedly at his rear end.

  Next door a pair of beady eyes, a hooked nose and a white fluff of hair peered at him from behind the navy blue curtains. Mrs. Zavala looked like a cross between Mata Hari and a pelican. Troy waved at her and hitched up the towel.

  Meanwhile down the street the mail delivery truck, driven by a blond woman named Sally, jumped a curb and mowed down two garbage cans. Troy decided that maybe he should go inside before he was kidnapped for salacious purposes by some perverted housewife in a minivan.

  He cursed and stalked toward his front door. If he’d been in a better mood, he might have shaken his booty for them all. But unfortunately the one woman he wanted to look at him that way was currently hiking home barefoot.

  Not to mention the fact that she’d told him to go screw himself. He sighed. Clearly, he wasn’t going to break the lease and kick her out of the retail space. But that wasn’t enough at this point. How the hell did he get her to talk to him again?

  Flowers didn’t work. He personally selected them at the florist, handwrote the card and asked that they be delivered to her at After Hours that day.

  Peggy wrote, in block letters on a piece of computer paper, Return to Sender. Then she stapled it on securely, through six of the nicest blooms.

  Stymied, he tried calling her there, but even Shirlie was cold, and Peggy wouldn’t come to the phone.

  He tried sitting on her apartment steps when she was due to come home, but when she saw him from the parking lot, she called building security, and he was asked, in no uncertain terms, to leave.

  Exasperated, Troy called Jerry in the hopes that legally he could force a tenant to meet with him. Jerry asked him what the hell he was smoking.

  Troy even tried to enlist the help of his nieces, Danni and Laura. Borrowing Sam’s SUV, he drove them to practice with a gorgeously wrapped two-pound box of Godiva chocolates. He watc
hed them take it to Peggy, who talked to them for a couple of minutes, then rubbed their backs and kissed them both on the cheek. Interesting.

  Troy watched as she walked to the twenty-yard line they’d spray painted in the church’s grass, tossed the box up into the air and kicked it clean through the goalposts. Then she sent a glare in his direction and started the girls on their sprints.

  All righty, then. That went over well. Annoyed, Troy gunned the engine and drove away, trying to think of some way to get through to her. A few hours later he had it. He was a client of After Hours. A client who had purchased a body-treatment package and paid in full—but hadn’t received the second half of the hot stone massage or the last treatment. Legally they had to give him what he’d paid for. Didn’t they?

  PEGGY WENT TO WORK and football practice even though she felt more like curling up under her covers and not moving for about three weeks. That was what animals did when they were wounded, wasn’t it? They crawled into a dark, quiet space and waited for time to heal them.

  Too bad she had opposable thumbs, a social security number and no fur. She also had rent to pay and clients to massage and little girls to coach. She couldn’t just drop down a hole and off the planet, no matter how much she wanted to.

  Her hands were sunk deep into the dough of Pugsy Malloy’s back one day when Shirlie knocked on the door. “Peggo? I’m really sorry to disturb you, but I have to talk to you about something.”

  Peg frowned. It was not cool to interrupt a client’s session this way. She placed a hot towel on Malloy’s back, covered him with the sheet and a cotton blanket and excused herself with an apology.

  “What?” she said. “Shirl, this better be important.”

  “It is. Troy Barrington called again—”

  “I thought you said this was important.”

  “Listen! This time he is demanding the last part of his body-treatment package. He says he’s paid for it and you can’t turn him down. He even threatened to sue.”

  “Oh, he did, did he?” Peggy gritted her teeth while her blood came to a simmer. She thought for a moment. “Fine. You tell Mr. Big Shot to come in Monday night. I will personally oversee his body mistreatment.”

  Shirlie’s eyes widened. “But we’re closed on Mondays.”

  “So? You tell him that’s the only time I can work him in. Monday at 7:00 p.m.”

  “O-kaaaay,” said Shirlie. She started to turn away, but then stopped, smirking. “So you never did tell me about his equipment.”

  Peggy shot her a level look and folded her arms across her chest. “Because it wasn’t even worth mentioning. Barrington’s got a piece of elbow macaroni down there. Steroids, I’m telling you.”

  Shirlie blinked in abject disappointment. “God. That’s almost criminal. Talk about false advertising!”

  Peggy went back into the treatment room. Pugsy was so relaxed that he was almost drooling. She gently removed the towel from his back and worked at finding the musculature under all his padding. His eyelids fluttered and he murmured, “You’re the best.”

  She smiled. Such a sweet man. She applied more oil to her hands and tended to a couple of tight spots in his lower back. Pugsy groaned and moved his hips. He moved them again.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. “Does something hurt?”

  Pugsy’s legs went rigid and he pushed against the table with his hands. His butt quivered. He emitted one small grunt and then lay still.

  She froze. Had he…? Oh, euw. This was an occasional hazard of the job, but it hadn’t happened to her in years, and the fact that it was Pugsy particularly repulsed her.

  “I think I pulled my, uh, shoulder the other day,” he said in an odd voice.

  She found hers and took her cue. “Oh? I’m so sorry to hear that. Why don’t we end early today. I’d hate to aggravate that.”

  “I think that’s a good idea.”

  “All right,” she said brightly. “Then I’ll just leave you alone to get dressed.”

  “Yep.”

  Peggy fled the room and resolved to burn those sheets if her hunch was correct. Unfortunately, it was.

  When another elaborate arrangement of exotic flowers arrived for her later in the day, she had a feeling she knew who they were from—and it wasn’t Troy. This time, she had the flower guy take them straight to the hospital.

  OVER THE NEXT COUPLE of days, Peggy thought a lot about how she should handle her last appointment with Snake-in-the-Grass Barrington. She could a) not speak to him at all, just stick him in the mud bath and maybe toss the spa’s tiny color television in after him, b) be sugar sweet and then boil him in the bath like a shellfish, or c) pretend that she’d forgiven him and then get her revenge by taking nude pictures of him.

  She still hadn’t decided on the best course when Monday dawned, the hour hands on her clock creeping slowly toward 6:00 p.m., when she’d have to be at After Hours to prepare the wet room.

  TROY REHEARSED HIS SPEECH in the privacy of the Lotus on the way over. “Peggy, I realize that things look bad on the surface, but I never meant to lie to you. Yes, I made that first visit to the spa and even the second and third in order to find a way to break the lease, but I didn’t plan on what happened between us. And later, I couldn’t walk away from you….”

  It was a start. He’d get her to see that he wasn’t the jerk she thought he was. He’d make her understand. And then maybe she’d share this mud-bath thing with him. They’d get good and dirty together…yeah. Oh, yeah.

  Really, when he thought about it, this plan of his was brilliant. And she’d started to soften, or she wouldn’t have had him come in on a day when the spa was technically closed and nobody else would be there. She wanted a little privacy with him—that much was clear.

  He pulled the Lotus into the parking lot and patted her walnut steering wheel before he got out. Other ball players could keep their Lamborghini Diablos and their showy Porsches. He had a classy car.

  Peggy’s little blue Mini Cooper barely took up half a parking spot, and Troy reflected that it was the perfect car for her: compact and sporty with a sense of fun.

  He knocked on the glass door of After Hours and she came out casually from the back, rolling up the sleeves of her white lab coat. Her hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail, and he was glad to see that it appeared Crisco free. Crazy woman. Adorable woman. His woman.

  “Hi,” she said as she unlocked the door. She was a little cool, but just the fact that she was speaking to him was a start in the right direction.

  “Hi.” He thought about kissing her, but it seemed like a bad idea. “Thanks for taking the appointment, especially on your day off.”

  She lifted an eyebrow. “It’s not like you left me a lot of choice about seeing it through. Do you always threaten to sue women when they’re already angry with you?”

  Oh, boy. Perhaps a light approach was best? “Yes. I find that it mellows them, makes them more forgiving of jerks who’ve abused their trust.”

  She locked the door behind him. “Interesting.”

  “Peggy,” he said. “In all seriousness, I was desperate to talk to you and you wouldn’t let me near you. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “Troy Barrington, aka The Man, desperate?”

  Groveling time. Women always wanted groveling. He wasn’t particularly good at it, but for her he’d give it a whirl. “Yeah. Desperate. I’ve never met anyone like you before, and I don’t want you to walk out of my life. Especially over a misunderstanding like this.”

  “Misunderstanding? Is that what you call the current situation?” Her tone was just short of scathing. She started walking toward the back of the spa, in the direction of the wet rooms. He followed.

  “Peggy, what can I say besides I’m sorry?”

  She reached the door of a wet room he hadn’t seen before and opened it. Steam curled out: she obviously had already started the water and made her preparations.

  Inside was a long, deep tub literally filled with a sloppy, li
quid mud. The stuff looked disgusting. He viewed it dubiously, having second thoughts about any boinking in it. “I’m supposed to get into that?”

  “Yes. It’s a mineral-rich substance that’s great in combination with steam for flushing toxins and impurities out of the skin. It will also relax your muscles. I’ll set a timer for thirty minutes, and when you come out you can shower. Then I’ll give you a twenty-minute massage. Okay?” Her voice was professional and detached.

  “Any chance that you’ll stay in here with me and we can talk?”

  She looked at him wearily. “Troy, what is there to talk about? I have a long history of trust issues with men. You have lied to me since the day we met, and abused the trust that I stupidly placed in you. I hate liars and I hate feeling like a fool.”

  “I never lied to you. Omitting to tell you something is not the same thing. And there were a number of times when I tried—”

  “Get in the tub, Troy. I’m here out of professional obligation, and that’s all.”

  “Please. I’m asking you to hear me out. Just give me five minutes.”

  She sighed. “Fine. I’ll give you a couple of minutes to undress and then I’ll be back.”

  He frowned at her. “It’s not like you haven’t seen everything there is to see.”

  She shrugged. “Leave your clothes in the locker room. They’ll get damp from steam if they’re in here.”

  He stripped off his shirt and unbuckled his pants on the way to the locker room door. He stepped out of them, dropped his drawers and kicked off his shoes. Troy left everything on a wooden bench and strolled back into the wet room. He looked down into the muck in the tub and wrinkled his nose.

  “How do I know you haven’t dropped a water moccasin or a piranha in there?” he asked Peggy.