Five's A Crowd Read Online Free Page B

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!”

3
    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 groundfloor 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