closed his eyes briefly and sucked in a breath. Then he opened them and stared into hers. Her hands stopped without her even realizing it. Abruptly she began again.
She wanted Troy to touch her. She’d never, ever wanted a client to do that. But he was different. His skin was hot beneath her fingers, his breathing as shallow and quick as her own.
No matter how she tried to tell herself that this massage was like any other, nothing personal, just business—it was a lie. She poured herself into this treatment as if she were making love to him, slowly, thoroughly and deeply.
She rubbed oil into each of his arms, silently stunned at the hardness of the muscle, the ropiness of the veins that stood out in clear relief against them. Steroids? She still wondered. Or just an intense daily workout for years upon years of playing football, basically from the time he could walk?
He wasn’t puffy and bulky the way Eddie had been, especially toward the end when she’d left. Troy was hard and solid but streamlined. He looked like a man of endurance, patience and intensity.
How could just a single arm turn her on like this? But Peggy felt her breasts grow heavy and insistent against the cups of her bra. A trickle of perspiration ran down the small of her back, even though it wasn’t hot in the room.
She reached Troy’s wrist and then his hand, working the oil into his palm and wrapping her hand around each of his fingers in a warm, pulsing cocoon. She dipped into the valleys between his fingers, too, and the contact between them grew more intimate without a word or a move on his part.
It was just that she could sense his response, long before he curved his hand around hers and then interwove his fingers with her own, riveting her with his eyes while he did so.
Peggy froze, and after a moment he slipped his hand from hers.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I didn’t mean to do that. It just…came naturally.”
She nodded without speaking and moved to the other arm, smoothing the oil down it in one long motion. His skin glistened with it under the light, glowing like temptation itself. She traced one of his visible veins from elbow to wrist and tried to break the mood with conversation.
“You work out a lot.” She said it as a fact, not a question.
He nodded, then reached up and laid a finger across her lips, whisper-soft.
She could have gotten angry—after all, who was he to give her orders, even if they were nonverbal? But she understood perfectly, and when he traced her bottom lip with that same finger, she felt the sensation at her core.
Slowly, not believing she was doing it, she took his index finger into her mouth and sucked the tip of it while he exhaled, his eyes riveted to the sight.
Mind, body, spirit. Impulse control.
But she knew sleeping with this man was inevitable. Her body didn’t give a rip about her mind or her spirit right now—it had taken over. To hell with impulse control!
She moved her hands to his chest and lightly rubbed her thumbs over his nipples while his pupils widened in shock. She swept her hands over him, raking over his rib cage and following the indentations of muscle at his abdomen. She spread her fingers over his lower belly, diving slightly under the sheet and tickling the strip of hair that led down, down, down.
Troy tensed, pulled his finger from her mouth and clenched his own hands into fists. He waited to see what she would do, and she waited to see what he would do.
He was fully erect now, straining at the sheet. She struggled with the ethics of the situation. But hadn’t she already thrown ethics to the winds?
Peggy closed her eyes and tried to resist this particular impulse of hers. It was dangerous and it was a form of self-betrayal.
But Hot Sex Personified lay on her massage table in front of her, ready, willing and clearly able. And she hadn’t had any in so long. Instead, she’d had a dysfunctional relationship with a dysfunctional man, and she still wasn’t sure why she’d stayed in it.
When she opened her eyes, Troy’s gaze burned into hers, hot and amused and challenging on the most primal level. Do me, it said. I’ll make you scream.
She was wet, and he knew it, and she knew he knew it.
She grasped the sheet, the cool white cotton against her heated skin. Should she remove it…or not?
6
HAD SHE LOST her mind? Peggy dropped the sheet as if it were scalding and backed away. “No,” she said out loud. “I cannot be doing this, and especially not here.”
On the table, Troy closed his eyes. “Okay. I can respect that,” he said, then grinned. “But I sure don’t have to like it.”
She stared at him with something like despair. “Do you have to be so reasonable and calm? Why can’t you be a total jerk and call me a cock tease or something? Give me an excuse to kick you out of here?”
Troy sat up again, propping himself up on his elbows, and smiled at her. “Do you want me to leave, Peggy?”
She swallowed. “No.”
“Do you want me to stay?”
“No.”
He laughed and swung his legs over the side of the table again, dangling them with his knees apart. Thank God the sheet was still in place. “What do you want? C’mere, babe.”
She shouldn’t have gone anywhere near him. But his eyes drew her, moth to flame. He grasped her hands and pulled her to within six inches of his chest, so that she stood intimately between his knees. They touched her hips.
She could smell the faint musk of his skin, see every bit of stubble on his face, the slight circles under his eyes and the laugh lines at the outside corners. He had heavy, lazy lids and lashes any woman would kill for. His jaw stretched wide and stubborn, his nose curved, slightly Roman, and his lips…God, those lips. They were parting, tilting and coming toward hers.
They took her mouth gently but firmly, not asking permission. He poured his desire into her and sought hers, licking it out from between her teeth and nipping it out of her lower lip. He sucked on her desire, pulling it from her until she gasped and tried to snatch it back, hide it again in all her secret places.
They wrestled over her attraction to him as if it were a live thing, but he finally took it hostage and she was forced to admit defeat—for the time being.
Satisfied, he relinquished her mouth, took her face between his big hands and dropped a kiss on her forehead. “It’s gonna be okay, Peggy. It really is. Better than okay.”
It was his kindness, his reassurance, his understanding that weakened her resolve again. He turned her hesitation into something charming instead of irritating and embraced it.
When he took her mouth again, the room seemed to drop away and she melted into him, conscious of nothing but his tongue stroking hers; his hands warm on her scalp, sifting through her hair; and the press of her breasts against his naked chest.
Soon his hands left her hair and he parted her lab
