Five's A Crowd (3 page)

T
AYLOR HAD ALREADY
thrown the suitcases on Holden’s bed and was halfway down the seeming half-dozen small flights of stairs before he passed her going the other way. She smiled her most blighting smile and kept on going, not stopping until she was safely behind the closed door of her own bedroom.

“Uncle Sid—you’re in big,
big
trouble!” she vowed, looking up at the ceiling, ordering her heart rate to slow to a reasonable speed. It had gone into overdrive the moment she’d laid eyes on Holden Masters and had actually skipped a beat when he’d smiled at her with those gorgeous green eyes. She wouldn’t even think about what had happened to her when she’d touched him to correct his incorrect movement, when her fingers had pressed against the taut muscle beneath his black cotton-knit shirt.

“It’s a job, Angel,” she told herself as she left the room and entered the adjoining bathroom to splash cold water on her face. “Just another job.”

She looked at herself in the mirror, pulled the band from her ponytail so that her hair fell to below her shoulders, and winced. “And in another hour, that
job
is going to be lying facedown and defenseless on your massage table while you put some Yanni on the CD player, oil up your hands and…oh, brother!”

She stripped off her jogging clothes and stepped into the shower, sticking her head beneath the needle-sharp spray, hoping to calm herself. It wasn’t, after all, as if she hadn’t given massages to a handsome, intelligent, famous, living Adonis of a man before this. There had been Geoff, right? Geoff, the golf pro. Geoff, who had become her first and only lover.

Bad comparison…

She rubbed shampoo into her hair. Maybe it wouldn’t take eight weeks to get Holden Masters back into shape. He hadn’t been injured all that long, hadn’t had a lot of time to stiffen up or lose muscle memory. She could probably whip him into fighting strength in a couple of weeks. Three, tops. Three times a day for therapy, once a day for massage, some running on the beach to keep his general muscle tone and strengthen his legs—that shouldn’t be bad. She could certainly handle that without going all sloppy or weak in the knees.

Yeah, right…

Three weeks of Holden Masters living in the same condo, with Thelma there for protection during the day and three floors of condo separating them the rest of the time, through all the long, long nights.

Three weeks of looking into those absurdly beautiful green eyes.

Three weeks of touching his body, of looking at him, stripped to the waist, lying on her massage table.

Three weeks of living closely, intimately, with the idol of millions, the face that had launched a thousand commercials, boosted the sales of a thousand products, the athlete who had just been named Star of the Millennium by some sports magazine.

Oh, yeah. She could do this.

Standing on her head.

Right.

“I’m in big trouble,” Taylor groaned, turning the water to cold and sticking her head under the spray once more. “Big,
big
trouble!”

L
UNCH HAD BEEN
uneventful.

Well, “uneventful” was probably too tame a word, Holden thought as he rapidly made his way down to the lowest level of the condo. Nobody had died. That was a better description.

Thelma Helper had kept up a running commentary as she served fairly delicious tuna salad sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, mounds of greasy potato chips and something resembling iced tea but “guaranteed to put hair on your chest—and maybe even your tongue’—all while telling Holden all about her Sam, who had wisely departed for Heaven some two decades earlier, probably just so he didn’t have to listen to Thelma anymore.

Miss Taylor Angel had barely said a word, only nodding when he dared to suggest they not be so formal and call each other by their first names, and leaving the table before the dessert of chewy chocolate brownies arrived in order to prepare for his first “session.” The way she had said the word, he fully expected to walk into the living room on the ground
floor to find a rack, thumbscrews and, he was sure, an iron maiden named Angel.

What he found was a simple burgundy leather massage table set up in the middle of the room, complete with a doughnut-shaped extension pad at its head that he knew he would soon place his face on so that he could spend the next half hour or so helplessly staring at the floor while Taylor Angel tortured him.

But first, Holden Masters was going to have himself a little fun.

He walked into the room in his bare feet, all six feet four inches of him covered only by a small white towel he’d pulled from the bar in his bathroom and wrapped around his waist. He wasn’t by nature a very vain man, but he knew his body was in prime condition and that he was not exactly repulsive to the female sex.

“Ready when you are, Taylor,” he said, putting a hand to his waist, ready to strip off the towel as she looked up from the notebook she was writing in, then stared at him like a deer caught in headlights. “Where do you want me?”

“Siberia would be good,” he thought he heard her say as she shut the notebook with an audible snap and rose to her feet. “I think we need some ground rules, Holden, old sport,” she continued, patting the table, indicating that he should hop up on the six-foot-long surface she had covered with a towel.

“No biting, eye gouging, or holding and hitting in the clinches?” he suggested, feeling more vulnerable than threatening as she stood on the other side of the table and ran a finger down the length of his spine.

“Nice, straight spine. Yes, definitely no holding and hitting. That’s good for starters, I suppose,” she answered, walking around to stand in front of him as his legs dangled several inches above the floor. “But I was thinking more of a dress code. I’ll be working on your upper body, Holden, not your—”

“Gluteus maximus?” Holden offered, and had to smother a smile as he watched color rush into Taylor’s face.

“Pompous ass was more what I was searching for,” she countered, taking hold of his forearm. “Hop down, please. I want to measure your range of motion. Then we’ll get started.”

A half hour, several measurements and considerable pain later—although Holden refused to mutter a single curse as Taylor lifted his arm above his head, then clucked her tongue at his impeded movement—he was facedown on the table, staring at the carpet just as he’d supposed.

Soft, rather comforting piano music drifted from the portable CD player Taylor had turned on, and he reached down to his waist and pulled the towel away, revealing the team shorts he was wearing beneath them.

“Stupid human trick, Taylor. I’m sorry,” he mumbled in apology, then flinched as she placed soft, yet strong hands on his upper shoulders and began what he would later term as fifteen minutes of hell followed by an equal quarter hour of heaven.

He’d never been injured before, not even in high school or college. He’d never had more than a few transitory muscle aches, a few leg cramps. A massage, until this moment, had been a mostly pleasurable experience, a sort of cool-down after Sunday afternoon’s game.

But that was before he’d been tossed around the inside of his Ferrari, his shoulder making sharp, repeated contact with the pushed-in passenger-side door, or spent nearly two weeks sitting alone in his condo, his only exercise coming from punching the buttons on the remote control.

For the long minutes it took Taylor to “warm” his muscles, he alternately thought of either leaping from the table or whimpering, or both, and for the past fifteen minutes he’d fought the urge to moan in ecstasy.

The woman had magic hands, capable of inflicting both deep muscle soreness or soothing, strangely provocative pleasure that had him grateful to be lying facedown on the table rather than faceup. When she at last made that evocative trail down his spine with one hand, then held her fingertips against his skin for a few moments, signaling that she was finished
with him, he didn’t know whether he should say thank-you kindly and crawl away, or offer her a cigarette.

He decided to crawl away. But as he jackknifed to. a sitting position, the room spun around a single time and he clutched the ends of the table for support.

“Always sit up slowly after a session, Holden,” Taylor told him, already wiping down the doughnut with scented rubbing alcohol. “You’ve lost all the blood in your head, sitting up so fast.”

“And I know just where it all went,” he muttered beneath his breath as she turned away to shut off the CD player. How could she pretend to be so indifferent to him? They’d set off sparks on each other from the first moment, and this past half hour had been a living hell of mingled attraction and unbearable tension. Surely he wasn’t the only one who felt this way?

“You said something?” Taylor asked as he stood up, pulling the towel with him, holding it in front of himself protectively, trying his best to look nonchalant while he felt like a horny teenager.

“I said, I wonder where Mrs. Helper went. I don’t hear her singing anymore,” Holden improvised quickly, not really caring where Thelma Helper was as long as she wasn’t in the room with him.

“She said something earlier about taking a nap before her soap comes on. She did tell you not to ask her for anything between three and four, didn’t she? Now, I want you to drink plenty of water for the remainder
of the day—I want you to drink plenty of water every day, actually, to help cleanse your system after I’ve massaged some of the gunk from your muscles.”

“Gunk? That would be the technical term? I’m very impressed.”

“It’s close enough, okay? Now, if you’ll let me finish? Tonight I’ll show you a few simple exercises you can do on your own, all right? I know I have rubber bands in my case. I think I’ll start you with the yellow one. The red one is too easy.”

“Rubber band?” Holden eyed her owlishly.

“It’s just a long, stretchy piece of rubber you use for stretching exercises. Nothing major. People spend entirely too much money on complicated machines and contraptions. A big can of corn, a rubber band—you’d be surprised how much mileage you can get out of just those two things.”

“The imagination runs rampant, truly,” Holden responded dryly, looking at the clock on the VCR across the room and already wondering what he would do for the remainder of the day. The remainder of the week. The long weeks stretching out ahead of him before he could return to Philadelphia.

And wondering how long it would be before he couldn’t keep his hands off the infuriating Miss Taylor Angel.

“You play gin?” he asked, feeling desperate.

“Penny a point?” she answered immediately, folding up the other towel and laying it on the table. “There’s a deck of cards in the upstairs living room. I’ll meet you there in ten minutes. Bring your wallet.”

“Agreed,” Holden said, and quickly left the room so that he didn’t have what would have been the pleasant satisfaction of seeing Taylor sag against the edge of the table, roll her eyes heavenward and let out a long, shaky sigh.

H
OLDEN WAS DOWN
ten dollars and eighty-seven cents when somebody outside started doing a tap dance on a car horn, the noise persisting until he pushed back his chair, a premonition of imminent doom having settled over him, and walked out onto the balcony to see a vintage cherry red Volkswagen convertible with California license plates parked, cockeyed, at the curb.

Inside the Bug were a fluorescent yellow surfboard, a small mountain of designer luggage and a deeply tanned young man with sun-bleached white blond hair and a toothful grin that would rival the brilliance of all of the Osmonds’ dental work put together, then squared.

“Woody,” Holden breathed quietly, fatalistically, motioning for his stepbrother to both stop leaning on the horn and get himself inside, where he wouldn’t scare the locals.

“Woody who?” Taylor asked from behind him, then walked to the white pipe railing and looked down into the street. “Oh, boy. He looks like a commercial for suntan lotion—or the poster boy for Dumb But Beautiful, Incorporated. A blood relative, I presume?”

“Don’t be mean. Isn’t it enough you’re beating the hell out of me at gin?” Holden snapped back, then laughed, as she had been close to correct. “Woody is my stepbrother, actually. Did I mention that he was driving here from Malibu? I didn’t expect him yet. He must have broken every speed limit from here to Nevada. Nobody speeds in California, the roads are too crowded.”

“No, you didn’t mention it,” Taylor responded, something very much like disappointment in her tone. “Is he staying long?”

“All summer,” Holden told her. “I’m baby-sitting while his daddy revisits his past. You ever hear of Peter LeGrand?”

Taylor’s eyebrows climbed almost comically on her forehead. “The rock star? Well, that’s one secret you’ve kept from the media, or at least from the legitimate papers. I don’t read the tabloids.” She peered over the railing once more. “Son of a gun. He does look sort of like Pistol Pete. Like he did a couple of decades ago, I mean. Shouldn’t we have told Thelma he was coming? I don’t think she’s made up any of the other beds.”

“I think Woody could sleep in a bathtub and probably has,” Holden said, wincing as Woodstock LeGrand vaulted out of the car without opening the door, displaying a muscle shirt and a pair of psychedelic shorts with a hole just beneath the back pocket. “Where’s Tiff?” he then yelled, leaning over the railing.

“Who’s Tiff?”

“She’s flying in to Philly, then taking a limo! You know how Tiff likes to rough it,” Woody, cupping his hands at the sides of his mouth, responded in a near bellow.

“A limo?” Holden repeated, shaking his head. Tiffany certainly had style. Sort of.

“Who’s Tiff?”

“If we’re lucky, she’ll be skyjacked, huh?” Woody offered amicably, if loudly, as he pulled his surfboard out of the back seat.

“She’s coming alone, isn’t she? She shows up with a beach bum, and you’re all outta here!”

“Who is Tiff!”

Holden turned and looked at Taylor, who was looking decidedly mulish. “Huh?”

“I asked, and will repeat for the benefit of the listening audience—which must be half of Ocean City, which you ought to be thinking about if you want to stay anonymous while you’re here—
who
is Tiff?”

“My teenage stepsister. And Woody’s half sister. Before my mother’s time—wives two and three, I
think. Mother and Peter lasted about six weeks, but Woody and Tiffany and I, well, I think we’ve bonded in some strange way. Don’t frown,” he told her. “I’ll draw you a family tree.”

“Better have a lot of branches,” she quipped, then frowned. “If Woody down there is the older one, how old is this Tiff person? And is she staying here all summer, too? And before you answer—will that be everybody? Or am I not going to be able to tell all the players without a scorecard?”

Holden grinned. “Thought we’d be all alone, did you? Just you and me and this great big condo. I’m flattered. And as disappointed as you, to tell the truth. It could have been fun.”

“Go to hell, Holden Masters,” Taylor retorted hotly, then stomped back into the living room, leaving him alone to lean against the railing, an absurdly pleased smile on his face.

Maybe he wouldn’t have to kill Sid after all….

W
OODSTOCK
L
E
G
RAND WAS
a neat kid, kid being the operative word. Neat was definitely not one of his virtues. Within two hours of his arrival, the condo showed signs of his habitation from kitchen to foyer.

Taylor pushed the boy’s surfboard closer to the wall as she headed for the stairs, snagged a muscle shirt from the railing on the between floor where the two smaller bedrooms were located, picked up a sneaker on the way to the upper living room and
tripped over a second sneaker as she entered the kitchen—to see Woody perched, barefoot, on the tiled countertop, telling Thelma she should rename her parakeet Louise.

“Get him out of here, would you?” Thelma pleaded, a cigarette clamped between her teeth, the rising smoke forcing her to keep one eye closed—a look that had already put Taylor in mind of Popeye on acid, not that she’d dare to say any such thing to the housekeeper. “They oughta fence in all of California, or so my Sam always said. Not to keep other people out, but to keep the Californians
in.
Nuts—all of them!”

“And sloppy, too,” Taylor commented pleasantly, tossing Woody his muscle shirt. “Thelma? Isn’t it time for your soap?”

By way of an answer, Thelma took a swipe at Woody with her wet dishcloth and muttered, “Now see what you’ve done? And Rosemary is going to tell Vanessa that Rob isn’t her real father and that’s why the kidney has to come from Garth, who Vanessa thinks is her uncle! Stand back, T and A. I’m going to miss the best part!”

“T and A?” Wood repeated, hopping down from the counter even as he picked up his full glass of Thelma’s potent iced tea. “That wouldn’t be what I think it is, would it?”

“It doesn’t stand for tonsils and adenoids,” Taylor grumbled, then watched in amazement as Woody
chugalugged the entire glass of iced tea without so much as pausing to grimace. “You like that stuff?”

Woody shrugged. “What’s not to like? I don’t do sugar anymore. Bad for the system—upsets the hell out of the body’s natural balances and all that.” He frowned, then shrugged. “I think.” Then he picked up a knife and sliced himself a man-size hunk of brownie from the pan sitting on the counter.