Five's A Crowd (4 page)

“What do you think is in brownies, Woody—rutabagas?” Taylor teased, finding it impossible not to like this handsome young specimen with the look of California beaches, the personality of Ronald McDonald and—seemingly—the brainpower of a fruit fly.

Woody frowned at the half-eaten brownie. “Thelma said it was healthful.” He looked at Taylor, his innocent blue eyes round with astonishment. “Are you saying she
lied
to me?”

Taylor held up her hands in mock horror. “Don’t get me involved in this, Woody,” she warned. “I have to work here, and I wouldn’t want to get on Thelma’s bad side.” Then she turned and left the kitchen, having forgotten why she had come upstairs in the first place. Probably to see if Holden’s bedroom door was open and ask what he was doing, and then say she was too busy to do it with him.

Probably.

But she had snapped back to her saner self now and should probably go for another run on the beach or something.

Or take another cold shower.

“Hey—are you really Holden’s private masseuse?” Woody asked, following her, dripping brownie crumbs like some overgrown puppy with a blue-blood pedigree and in need of training papers.

“Masseuse?” Taylor stopped abruptly, her foot poised over the first step leading down to the living room, so that Woody cannoned into her, nearly sending the two of them flying down the stairs. She whirled around to look up at the young man. “He told you I was his private
masseuse?
And I’ll bet he snickered and winked as he said it, didn’t he? Why, I’ll kill the son of a—”

“Whoa!” Woody interrupted, putting a hand against Taylor’s upper chest, holding her back from the mayhem she fully intended to inflict on Holden Masters’s superb body. “He didn’t say that—I did. Holden said you’re his physical and massage therapist. But I thought all therapists had hands like steak platters and names like Bruno or Helga. You’re way too pretty to be a therapist. Great legs, you know. And the rest of you isn’t too bad, either. Although I guess you are too old for me.”

“Centuries too old for you, Woody.” Taylor who had just turned twenty-seven, a mere four years older than Woodstock LeGrand, relaxed, wondering why
she had gotten so angry so quickly in the first place. She had heard all the “personal masseuse” jokes years ago and had learned to ignore them.

But there was just something about thinking that Holden Masters had made a joke at her expense that—well, she’d just forget it. “Whole centuries, Woody, but thanks for that remark about my legs—and the rest of me,” she added, then turned around again to go down the stairs and find a good book to read before dinner.

“You’re welcome,” Woody answered affably, then did his puppy imitation again, gaily padding after her. “So, you two an item or what? I pretty much knew give-me-lots-of-money Amanda was on her way out. It’s been six months, you know. Nobody lasts longer than six months with Holden. You’d think these bloodsuckers would buy a clue, you know, and figure that out.”

Taylor stopped dead on the bottom step, turned, placed both hands on the pipe railings on either side of the staircase and effectively blocked Woody from advancing any farther.

“Let’s do this all at once, okay?” she began, smiling over gritted teeth. “One, I don’t know who Amanda is, don’t care who or what you think Amanda is and, if she’s smart, she’ll dump him before he dumps her. Two, I am here as an employee, period, and do not have designs on your brother, don’t want to have designs on your brother, and if
your brother has designs on me he’s in for a bitter disappointment. This is not Hollywood, or Malibu, or a scene out of Thelma’s soap. This is Ocean City,
New Jersey,
for crying out loud, and not some romantic getaway island for swinging singles. Now, you got that, Woody?”

“Well,” said a voice from the kitchen level, sending Taylor’s heart to her toes even as she looked past Woody LeGrand and straight into the laughing green eyes of Holden Masters, “I don’t know if Woody’s got that, but I sure heard the message loud and clear. Did you get that message loud and clear, Tiffany?”

“I sure did, Holden.” A high-pitched, little-girl voice came from a lower level of the condo, and Taylor quickly peeked over the railing to see a beautiful young female face grinning up at her. “Didn’t Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn do that in a movie? Talk like that, you know—all quick and mean and full of put-downs? Maw-maw was always making me watch those old flicks with her. Gee, this is just like a movie, huh? So, who’s the blonde?”

“I…want…to…die,” Taylor muttered quietly in measured pauses, speaking only to herself, but unfortunately, loudly enough for Holden to hear.

“Why don’t you help Tiffany get settled first, Taylor? Talk to her, ask her about her life, her problems with Maw-maw and Daddykins,” Holden suggested, laughter in his voice. “If you survive that—and
not many have—then well, there’s always that proverbial long walk on a short pier.”

“Don’t do it, Taylor,” Woody warned, moving her hand from the rail so he could get past her. “You may not have had all your shots. Why don’t you go for a run on the beach with Holden instead. That’s what he said he was going to do. I’ll go help Tiff. After all, I’ve got those eight-by-ten pictures of her in her Snow White costume when she was six. Blackmail may not be pretty, but it’s kept me safe for a lot of years.”

“You’re so full of it, Woodstock!” Tiffany groused, then smiled, showing that the whiter-than-white teeth must be a LeGrand inheritance. “But you could help the chauffeur with the luggage. Oh, and could you tip him, too? I don’t have anything smaller than a hundred, I’m afraid.”

“Nothing smaller than a hundred?” Taylor repeated, dumbstruck. “How old is that kid?” she asked Holden as he came down the steps.

“Eighteen, going on thirty,” he answered, taking her hand. “Come on, let’s get out of here while the getting’s good. They may be happy now, but they’ll be screaming at each other in an hour. Unless they decide to gang up against me, at which point it will be every man and woman for themselves. I’m no hero.”

“Really?” Taylor shrugged. “Much as I hate to say it, I’m beginning to think you’re a lot nicer than you want me to believe. Either that or you’re soft in the
head. Do you realize what you’re doing, letting those two stay here all summer?”

His grin weakened her knees. “Shooting the hell out of any possible personal love life?” he offered, then ducked as Taylor took a halfhearted swing at him.

As they went down the remainder of the stairs, then sneaked out through the garage entrance to avoid further contact with either Woody or Tiffany, Taylor began to wonder just what in the devil had happened in the past eight hours, ever since the moment she had first laid eyes on Holden Masters. Because, whatever it was, she had a feeling her life would never be the same.

MASTERS MISSING, RUMORS RATTLE
OWNERS
byline Rich “The Nose” Newsome

Holden Masters, injured in a single car accident nearly a month ago, is still listed among the missing on the roster of Philadelphia’s favorite NFL team as preseason training camp sets to open next month.

Masters, we all know, became a free agent at the end of last season, but will a reputed bidding war continue when our local hero is nowhere to be found, his physical condition, or lack of it, still a mystery to team owner Phil Gibbons and the rest of the NFL?

And where is Sidney Feldon, Masters’s suddenly shy agent? Is this all a ploy to up the ante? Or has Masters’s career been put in jeopardy by an injury he’s doing his best to hide? So what’s the story, Masters? You “Holden” out on us?

“D
ID YOU HEAR
all of that, Sid?” Holden asked, pacing the living room as he shouted into the speakerphone
at Sidney Feldon, who was several thousand miles away in Maui. “Fun’s fun and all that, but Newsome is getting mean. I don’t like doing this to my team, or to my fans. I want to call it off, now.”

Sid’s voice boomed into the room, along with the sound of some Hawaiian chant playing along in the background. “Holden, Holden, Holden, you’re overreacting. Trust me on this. Everything’s fine. I talked to Phil yesterday and assured him you’re only taking a well-deserved vacation. Oh, and did I mention that the latest offer has a hell of a bonus that kicks in if you take the team to another Super Bowl in the next three years? So—it’s been a while since Taylor started working on you. How is the shoulder anyway?”

Holden smiled across the room at Taylor, who had been working at the table, doing a two-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. “Why don’t you ask my slave driver, Sid?”

“Taylor? You there, honey?” Sid asked, and Taylor grimaced toward the phone.

“I don’t like talking into those speakerphones. It’s like talking into an echo chamber,” she complained to Holden quietly, then shrugged as Sid called out her name again. “Hi, Sid—I’m here. What do you want to know?”

“It’s been over three weeks since the accident, Taylor, honey. How much can I hope to know? If he’s behaving, I suppose. That’s the most important. Did
you have to threaten him with your black belt in karate? And how the shoulder is, of course.”

Taylor smiled at Holden, who immediately began advancing on her, making puckering motions with his mouth, then pretending to defend himself from imminent attack. If nothing else, they had, over the past ten days, come to understand each other a little, relax a little in each other’s presence, had even begun to joke with one another. It was a nice relationship—when she wasn’t dreaming about him, when she wasn’t touching him, having his body under her hands, having to concentrate on keeping her professional detachment in light of her growing personal attachment.

“Of course he’s behaving himself. And it hasn’t been that long since I started working with him, Sid, so don’t expect miracles. He’s being religious about his exercises, of course,” she responded, now glaring at Holden in mock anger as he began pantomiming holding an invisible woman in his arms and kissing her madly.

“Now cut that out!” she growled quietly, hoping Sid couldn’t hear, then went on more loudly. “His bruises are about gone. I’ve worked a lot of the kinks out of his shoulder, and we’re into strengthening the muscles now. Oh—and I think I want to renegotiate our little contract. Or haven’t you heard about Woody and Tiffany? I want to put in for combat pay.”

“Don’t listen to her, Sid,” Holden said, walking toward the phone. “The kids are on their best behavior. Good talking to you, buddy. Aloha and all that. Call me next week, all right?” Then he pushed the button breaking the connection and turned to Taylor, frowning. “Okay, out with it. What did they do this time?”

Taylor placed another piece into the puzzle. “Nothing much. Tiffany just used my bathroom for this week’s application of temporary hair color, because Thelma promised to short-sheet her bed if she got hair dye all over her own bathroom again. It was a twisted sort of logic, but one Thelma probably wouldn’t appreciate, so I cleaned up the mess myself. Have you seen Tiffany yet today? She used a pink rinse this time. She looks like she did a three-and-a-half gainer into a cotton-candy machine.”

“And Woody?” Holden asked, his grimace showing he was not sure he wanted to hear the answer.

“He wants me to star in a movie he’s thinking of making with a bunch of old college pals,” Taylor related calmly, delighted to see the pained expression that immediately appeared on Holden’s handsome face. “He says it’s a sort of art film, but I think the plot is more in line with
Taylor Does Tulsa,
frankly. I thanked him, but then graciously declined. You know, those kids have more money than common sense.”

Holden drew his hands into fists at his side. “That idiot needs a keeper!” he exclaimed, looking ready to find Woody and lock him in his room until he grew a brain.

“Relax,” Taylor assured him quickly, for she really did like Woody and knew the boy meant no harm. “It’s only a passing phase, I’m sure of it. Just this morning, he told me he’s thinking seriously about becoming a seal. He is like a fish in the water, I have to give him that.”

“A
navy
SEAL? He’s got to be kidding!” Holden’s tone was incredulous, to say the least.

Taylor nodded, giggling. “I think he was dead serious, actually, although all he said was that he wanted to be a seal. I found myself biting my tongue so that I wouldn’t ask him if he thought it might be difficult to learn how to balance the ball on his nose.”

Holden let out a roar of amusement, grabbing onto the back of a nearby chair as if to keep himself from falling on the floor convulsed in mirth, and Taylor joined in his easy, infectious laughter.

There had been a lot of laughter over the past two weeks, mingled with a disturbing amount of sexual tension, but Taylor wouldn’t have missed a moment of either of them. She and Holden, after those first horribly tense and awkward few days, had fallen into a sort of rhythm, an unspoken understanding that said, yes, they were attracted to each other and, no, neither of them wanted to act on that attraction.

Woody’s and Tiffany’s presence had made it easier to follow through on this supposed understanding, although Taylor still privately considered those once-a-day massage sessions to be near occasions of sin.

‘Hey—what’s so funny? What’d I miss?” Tiffany chirped from the doorway, looking very California and about as erotic as Bambi with a bikini wax as she stood in bare feet, a six-foot, very tan, vacantly grinning boy standing close behind her, his elbows on her bare shoulders as if she were some sort of supporting prop that kept him from falling down.

A quick count told Taylor that the boy had three gold earrings in his left ear—two in his right ear—and she really did long to ask him why he had shaved his hair off all but the very top of his head. “Oh, and this is Lance,” Tiffany continued, still chirping in her little-girl voice. “Say hello, Lance.”

“Hullo,” Lance said obediently, then began rubbing the sides of Tiffany’s minuscule waist with his big hands, which brought a low growl out of Holden.

“Lance doesn’t know who you are, Holden,” Tiffany trilled, putting up a hand to stroke the boy’s cheek as he began nibbling at her neck. “Isn’t that, like, totally unbelievable?”

Thelma poked her head into the room, talking around her ever-present cigarette. “Get out of that wet bathing suit, young lady, or you’ll get a bellyache. Didn’t your mother teach you anything? Oh,
and you—Mr. Masters—there’s a wash basket in the laundry room. Mostly full of your underwear. Go carry it upstairs, why don’t you. It’ll be good therapy.”

The housekeeper disappeared before Tiffany could do more than grimace or Holden could say something he’d regret, leaving Taylor to quickly ask Lance if he wanted a glass of iced tea—or did he think he was going to have Tiffany for lunch?

“No, thank you, ma’am,” Lance responded, sounding dumb as a clam, but showing enough common sense to disentangle himself from Tiffany’s willowy body—and obviously not realizing that calling Taylor “ma’am” had not exactly endeared him to her. “We just ate up on the boardwalk, didn’t we, Sugar?”

“Sure did, Love Buns,” Tiffany responded, then looked at Holden once more, just as obliviously not noticing that a small tic had begun to work in her stepbrother’s left cheek. “Lance knows who Dad-dykins is, of course, but he doesn’t watch sports. Isn’t that a kick?”

Lance spread his hands almost apologetically. “I’m, like, just not into that whole team sports scene, you know? I’m saving up to hit all the great surfing spots. You know, like in that
Endless Summer
flick? Caught it on cable, and it’s totally rad. You haven’t lived ’til you’ve wiped out in one of those big ones. Waves, that is…” he trailed off, probably realizing
that he’d lost his audience—if he’d ever had it. “Well, you know.”

“Tiffany, I want to talk to you. Upstairs in my room.
Now,”
Holden commanded, walking out of the room without looking at Lance again.

Tiffany shrugged, looking at Taylor. “He’s ticked, isn’t he?”

“Considering the fact that no one is supposed to know he’s here, and you’ve told Lance and God knows who else—well, yes, Tiffany, I’d say Holden might be just a little bit
ticked,
” she answered honestly, then closed her eyes a moment before doing something dumb—volunteering. “Why don’t you and Lance go back to the beach, and I’ll try to calm him down.”

Tiffany sagged, bent kneed, faking a faint—a typically melodramatic Tiffany response—then recovered just as quickly. “You’d do that for me? Holden can be
such
a bear, you know. How can I thank you?”

“You can send my body back home to Mom and Dad in Pennsylvania,” Taylor mumbled to the thin air, because Tiffany and Lance—who couldn’t be as dumb as he looked, or talked—were already halfway down the stairs, rapidly making their escape.

H
OLDEN HEARD THE KNOCK
and turned around as the door opened, running his left hand through his hair. “Tiffany, we both know you’ve pulled some dumb
stunts in the past, but—” He broke off when he saw Taylor standing there. “It figures,” he said flatly. “What did she do, hop on Love Buns’s back and tell him to giddyap, getting her away from her pain-in-the-neck big brother?”

“I told her to go,” Taylor said, walking over to the bed and sitting down on the edge of the mattress. “My first aid is pretty rusty, and I had a feeling you weren’t going to be kind.”

Holden stared at her, goggle-eyed. “Kind?
Kind?
Do you know what she did?” he asked, pointing in the general direction of the front of the house and the beach, where Tiffany was probably already quite happily forgetting the consequences she had so recently escaped. “Why doesn’t she just rent one of those sign-bearing planes that fly past here all day and send it up and down the coast, advertising our address? Sid is going to have a cow.”

“A whole cow? Well now, I’d pay down real cash money to watch that,” Taylor remarked, pulling an emery board out of her shorts pocket and beginning to file her already short, neatly rounded nails, appearing as calm and unflustered as he felt hot and bothered. “Give yourself a moment to think about this, Holden, why don’t you? You just got off the phone with Sid after telling him you didn’t want any more stories from that ‘nose’ guy. You told Sid you didn’t like all this secrecy. And I don’t blame you. You’re not one hundred percent yet—that’s a few
weeks away—but you’re good enough to face a few reporters and cameras. So, what’s the big deal?”

He spoke slowly as if speaking to a child. “The big deal, Taylor, is that the best defense is still a good offense.
We
want to make any announcements to the press, picking our own time, our own place. Which we’re probably going to have to do now, before our resident Atlantic-to-Pacific big mouth plays whisper down the beach to anyone who’ll listen, until we find a dozen reporters and cameras parked outside our front door.”

“Oh,” Taylor said, replacing the emery board in her pocket. “Well, that makes sense. You going to call Sid? If you do, please put him on the speaker again. I love to hear people sputter.”

“I
told
him this was a bad idea,” Holden said, talking mostly to himself. “I didn’t like it from the beginning. Must have been those painkillers they gave me at the hospital. Yes, that’s it. I wasn’t in my right mind when I agreed to this idiocy. And how do I explain Taylor away, when Sid says I’m just vacationing with my family, or whatever lie he’s going to tell?”

“Maybe
Taylor
can just fold her massage table and steal away into the night? Maybe you can do the rest of your therapy on your own? I sure won’t cry over that decision,” Taylor suggested quietly, although he could detect an edge of anger in her voice.

“What?” Holden whirled around, looking at Taylor as she sat on the bed, sat on
his
bed, where he lay awake at night, every night, wanting her beside him. “No,” he said quickly, “I need you here.”

Taylor shrugged. “If you insist. I suppose you could tell the reporters I’m a friend of Tiffany’s? Or maybe even Woody’s girlfriend?”

Holden grimaced. “Nobody would believe either story. Besides, I couldn’t tell either lie with a straight face. Unless, maybe, you were to dye your hair green and only speak in words of one syllable?”

“Funny,” Taylor said, rising to her feet and walking to the sliding glass door that looked out over his private balcony and a less than sterling view of the alley and all the recycling garbage cans. “Well, do what you want, as long as you’ve decided to end the secrecy bit. It was all just a little too cloak-and-dagger to suit me anyway. Could I use your whirlpool tonight? I’ve got a couple of kinks hanging around after our run this morning.”

God had to be punishing him for some forgotten misdeed. It was the only explanation. The thought of Taylor in his bathroom, in his whirlpool, made his throat go dry—and brought out a little bit of the devil that had been in him these past two weeks. “It’s big enough for two, you know,” he said, walking up behind her and putting his hands on her upper arms.