After Hours Bundle (9 page)

“Aha. You're avoiding the subject, which means Something Happened. So is he a good kisser?”

“Because I'm trying to get that order together. The rep will be by tomorrow—”

“We're fine. So about the kissing? Lots of tongue action? Little nibbles? Does he go for the ears?”

There simply was no explaining to Shirlie that she was Peg's friend but not her confessor—especially not of intimate personal details!

“Can I see the appointment book, please?”

“Why? I gave you the day's schedule. And you're holding out on me!”

“Shirlie, there's really nothing to tell,” Peggy said firmly, and rounded the reception desk to grab the book. “I hate to disappoint you, but it was just a couple of drinks.”

Shirlie pouted and chewed her Cupid's bow lip. “Well, what does he drink? I'm guessing bourbon. And what did you talk about? His glory days in pro ball, right?”

Peg silently counted to three and refrained from clobbering her with the appointment book. “He drank Tanqueray and tonic last night, but he usually sticks with beer. And we talked about the Marlins, actually, and his sister,” Peggy fibbed as she flipped back a couple of pages in the book, found Troy's number and silently memorized it.

Once she'd gotten away from Shirlie, she closed the door of the wet room behind her and dialed. He answered on the third ring. “Hello?”

“Troy? It's Peggy.”

He paused. “Hi, Peggy.” Was it her imagination, or did his tone sound a little cool?

“I just wanted to thank you for the flowers—they're stunning.”

“What flowers?”

Her mouth went dry. Then her entire body broke out in a sweat. And her heart dropped into her stomach. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out.

He chuckled, but it sounded forced, not genuine. “So you've got a secret admirer.”

She finally forced her voice past her utter humiliation. “I guess so. Uh, I didn't mean to put you on the spot, but after last night I just assumed they were from you.”

“I wish they were. I feel like a jerk now. I probably should have sent you some flowers.”

“No, no….”

“But then you'd have a surplus, wouldn't you?”

She produced a half laugh.

A painful, awkward silence fell between them. Where was the camaraderie of last night? Peggy wanted to hang up and take a bath with her toaster oven. Her miserable life would be over then, and she could go right to hell.

Troy cleared his throat. He started to speak, caught himself. After a moment's hesitation, he said in a rush, “But if you're not tied up with your secret admirer, would you like to have dinner with me?”

“Uh, sure!”

“Great. That's great,” he emphasized, as if it wasn't at all but he was making the best of it.

Oh, God,
she thought.
He didn't mean it. He had no intention of asking me out, but he felt obligated to since I called him. He was being polite. I should have said no.

Her face started throbbing with heat. The bath with the toaster was looking better and better…maybe she'd throw in the hairdryer, too, just for a little added excitement.

She heard his voice rumbling through the phone but didn't register what he'd said. “Um, could you repeat that, please?”

“I asked what time I can pick you up.”

“Right. Of course you did.”
How about never?

“Will you be at After Hours? Is nine too early?”

“Nine is fine.” The words came out of her mouth before she could concentrate on a good lie, like she was booked until midnight for the next three years.

“Okay. We can just walk over to Benito's. I'll make a reservation.”

Peggy wrapped her natural sarcasm around her like a protective blanket.
Fabulous. Don't take me anywhere out of the strip mall or anything. I might get jet lag.
“See you then.”

 

I
N
C
ORAL
G
ABLES
, Barrington stared at his own phone, which was attached to the same line he'd just used to fax three possible code violations through to his attorney. He felt a little sick. Flowers?

I am such a bastard.

Had he really just asked her to go to dinner with him? And at Benito's? The words had popped out of his mouth without him really thinking about it. Benito knew he was the new landlord. Troy would just have to pray he wouldn't out him.

But that was really the least of his concerns. Was it fair of Troy to eat with her, joke with her, laugh with her,
sleep
with her—when the whole time he was essentially plotting against her?

When he found a way to break the lease, she was going to hate him. There was no doubt about that.

The problem was that he really wanted to see her again, no matter how he tried to talk himself out of it.

Troy told himself that none of his actions had been premeditated. That he hadn't meant to take things with Peggy so far. He wouldn't have let it happen with any other woman, but there was just something about her. She was half tough and half vulnerable. Half glamour and half pragmatism. And she'd fought her way onto a college football team, which impressed the hell out of him.

All of that and the gorgeous red hair, the unbelievably curvy body and the mind-blowing sex…. Could he really blame himself for weakening and asking her out again?

Troy told himself that really, the damage was done. After all, he couldn't unsleep with her now. So did sleeping with her again make things all that much worse?

He tried to snap his focus back to his own future and his agenda of owning a sporting goods store. He wasn't a rich, big cheese anymore. He had to make a living.
It's just business, nothing personal.

But somehow he'd gone and made it
very
personal, hadn't he? And at some point, there'd be hell to pay.

He tried to refocus on the mounds of paper in front of him, but his concentration was shot. Not only was he a jerk, but…possessive instincts that he had no right to have about Peggy kicked in. Who the hell had sent her flowers? And was it reasonable for Troy to beat the shit out of him?

P
EGGY NOW EYED
the mysterious flower arrangement as if it were a grove of Venus flytraps. She really didn't care who it was from if it wasn't from Troy. In fact, it began to give her the creeps.

Who else would spend so much money, make an overblown statement like that? Did she have a real stalker?

At three-thirty, when she had to leave for her coaching gig, she wrestled the Amazonian flower arrangement off of the kitchen table and struggled down the hallway with it, narrowly escaping being poked in the eye by a particularly vicious bird of paradise “beak.”

She emerged at the reception area and told Shirlie that she'd be back.

“What, you can't bear to be separated from your flowers? You're going to drive them to the middle school and then the take-out window at Taco Bell?”

“Turns out they're not from Troy. I don't know who they're from, and I don't like it. So I'm dropping them at the hospital.”

Shirlie blanched in horror. “You can't just…get rid of those gorgeous flowers!”

“Yes, I can. Some sick person will enjoy them a lot more than I do.”

Ignoring Shirlie's outrage, Peg hauled them outside and set them on the hood of her Mini Cooper while she hunted for her keys. She found them, unlocked the passenger-side door and wrestled the arrangement into the front seat of the tiny car, dislodging a foam rock and some moss in the process. Then, after a couple of delightful jabs in the ear with another bird's beak, she zoomed off.

A hospital volunteer gladly took the mini rain forest to cheer up patients in the oncology ward, and Peg tried to put her secret admirer out of her mind.

But even on the middle-school's practice field, she found herself eyeing a lanky maintenance man and a stoop-shouldered stay-at-home dad as the potential culprits.

Why,
she asked herself as she put the girls through a series of sprints and agility exercises,
am I so cynical that I automatically assume the flowers are from a weirdo? Why can't I believe they're from a nice person who just wanted to brighten my day?

Because there are too many not-so-nice people out there.

She looked out at the girls on the field, her heart softening at the gangly limbs, the braces, the beginnings of some adolescent acne. A few of them had training bras and wore cosmetics and even got periods, while others were freshly scrubbed, wide-eyed and still forbidden to get their ears pierced.

All of them would eventually develop into young women, encounter men and confusing relationships. She couldn't protect them, couldn't live their lives for them. But she could give them the gift of athletic competence and foster their self-esteem—so that they had the tools to do battle in what was still so often a man's world.

No one had prepared her for the nastiness and resentment that occurred when, for example, a woman dared to usurp a man's position on a college football team.

While most of her teammates had been outwardly polite, if not warmly welcoming, she'd sensed an underlying current of contempt. And that was before the really ugly incident…the one she couldn't ignore. The reason she'd walked away for good.

Peggy shoved the past out of her mind, blew her whistle and gathered the girls around her. “Okay, ladies, good job on the sprints! Let's work on some skills training for about ten minutes now, and then we'll scrimmage. Brianna, Cathy and Dara—I want you focused on blocking.

“Jody, Liz and Kimmie, pay attention to footwork and tip skills. Laura, you work on getting clear so that Danni can pass to you, and Danni, whatever you do, don't get sacked. How's that knee, Jen? You holding up okay? I don't want you to overextend it again.”

She had no time to think about Troy, or their awkwardness on the phone, or his feeble invitation to dinner. But later, on the drive back to the salon and in the blessed coolness of the showers there, she did mull over things.

If she hadn't called him first, would Troy have called her at all?

Why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free?
Her aunt Thelma's old-fashioned saying popped into her head. Ridiculous in this day and age…but Peggy couldn't help thinking about her sex-to-football analogy.

It's easier this way—you don't have to worry about the downs—you just score.

And Troy's answer:

It's like the other team handing you the ball and inviting you over the goal line. That sucks.

She'd definitely invited him over her goal line, and he'd scored multiple orgasms. So perhaps the thrill of the chase was gone. Perhaps he didn't respect her, now that it was morning.

But why did it always boil down to the woman losing the guy's respect? What about
her
respect for the man? Why were women seen as giving something up, rather than receiving something that they wanted? She liked the modern-day response to the free-milk adage:
Why buy the whole pig when all you want is a little sausage?

Peggy decided she was a freewheeling woman in charge of her own sexuality and her own life…and her very atypical mother would be proud.

Speaking of her mother, she hadn't talked to her at all lately. She wondered what kind of crazy poem or performance art piece Mom was working on now.

She only spoke in rhyme and she only wore green, varying shades of green ranging from chartreuse to hunter. The last time Peg had seen her, she'd been in an olive phase. But who knew? She might have moved on to teal or emerald by now.

Mom had been divorced for years, ever since Peggy and Hal's father had shacked up with a dolphin trainer from Sea World. It was then that her mother had lapsed into rhyme as a way of expressing herself…. Peggy understood her, but everyone else just assumed she'd had a mental breakdown.

Of course, everyone who knew their family had always thought Peg's brother, Hal, teetered on a fine line between genius and madness, too. So she'd looked like the normal one, even if she'd pursued an all-male sport with an intensity their community didn't understand.

Peg pulled her cell phone out of her bag and dialed her mother's number, wanting advice, but her mom didn't answer. She didn't bother leaving a message.

Suddenly she decided that what she really needed was a male point of view. Where was Alejandro? She tracked him down in the small, windowless office that he used for doing paperwork.

“Alejandro?”

“Yes,
chica?
”

“Give me the male point of view on this situation. I spent last night with a guy—”

“You slut,” he teased.

She ignored that. “The guy and I had a great time. This morning that arrangement of flowers came. But when I called to thank him, he said he didn't send them. Then, to make it worse, he asked me out, but almost as if he didn't want to, as if he was just being polite. What does it mean?”

Alejandro pursed his lips. “Is he married?”

Horrible thought. Had she spent all last night having wild monkey sex with somebody's husband? No. Somehow she just knew he wasn't married.

“I don't think there's a wife anywhere in the picture.”

“Then maybe you just caught him at a bad time.”

“No, I think it was more than that.”

“Maybe you sprained his Mr. Happy and he's in pain.”

“Alejandro, be serious!”

“Okay, okay. Maybe he's just shy.”

Peggy reminisced about some of the things Troy had done to her last night. “He's definitely not shy.”

“Well then, I'd say he was just a jerk who got some of your aunt Thelma's free milk and isn't thirsty anymore, but he did ask you out again. So, what's to worry about, except who did send the flowers?”

“Alejandro, listen to me. His tone of voice was weird. He was kind of cool toward me.”

“Peggy, you women overanalyze these things to death. This could be as simple as he doesn't like taking personal calls at work. What does he do?”

It was a damn good question. Peggy couldn't believe she didn't know the answer to that. She'd have to ask him.

By the time she left Alejandro's office, she felt better. But she still didn't know who'd sent her the damn flowers.

 

“S
O
,
WHAT DO YOU DO
, Troy?” Peggy asked him as they sat at a table at Benito's. The place was dark and simply furnished with long wooden picnic tables and benches; squat green candles set at two-foot intervals along them. You didn't want to come to Benito's in a tight skirt, since sitting down required a bit of climbing. Luckily, Peg had worn a loose-fitting jean skirt today. It was short, but she could maneuver in it.

Benito's was slightly cheesy, but cheesy in a charming way. Plastic pizza-wedge lighting blinked on and off around a large open window to the kitchen, where Benny's high-school-age son would occasionally amuse kids and himself by juggling meatballs or twirling pizza dough. If his mother, Claudia, caught him with the meatballs, she'd whack him in the butt with whatever came to hand: a cooking spoon, a rolling pin, a box of spaghetti.

Peggy rested her elbows on the red-and-white-checkered tablecloth, looking up surreptitiously every once in a while. Benito and Claudia had hung Chianti bottles over all the tables, intertwined with fake grape vines. She couldn't get rid of the fear that one of the bottles would fall on her head and knock her unconscious. She might even pitch forward into the candle in the center of the table, catching her hair on fire.

Troy repeated her question. “What do I do?” He looked vaguely uncomfortable. “I, um…well, I'm retired from the Jaguars and I decided to quit coaching after I left Gainesville, which was only a month ago. So I'm kind of…taking a break to work on my house in the Gables. And I'm planning to open a sporting goods store.”

The awkwardness that had pervaded their phone conversation was still present. Peggy took a sip of the Cabernet she'd ordered.

“A sporting goods store! How cool. So will it be here in Miami? Have you found a location yet?”

His own glass at his lips, Troy had started to nod at the first question and then began to cough.

“You okay? Need me to pound on your back?”

He nodded, then shook his head, continuing to hack and wheeze. Finally he gasped, “Wine down the wrong pipe.”

She wrinkled her nose in sympathy. “Oooh, don't you hate that?”

He nodded, still recovering.

“So when are you going to open this sporting goods store?”

“Oh, you know. I'm hoping by next year. There's a lot of, uh, legwork to be done. And a lot of numbers to crunch.”

“Will you specialize in anything?” Peggy asked. “You could sponsor some of the kids' teams around here—you know, donate the uniforms. It would be good PR for you, and I happen to know of a certain powder-puff team that could use some new stuff, especially helmets. I can't wait to ask you to price pink helmets by the dozen, Barrington.” She grinned at him, but he didn't grin back.

Finally he did muster a smile. “Yeah. Well, we'll have to see how it goes. Of course, since I'm the coach of my nephew's team, they'll get first dibs.” He winked.

Peggy put her hands on her hips. “Oh, really? But you have
two nieces
on
my
team. I'd think that their equipment would be equally important to you.”

Troy raised his brows. “Pink helmets? Are those really necessary? Besides, what's wrong with their existing ones? I can't supply the equipment for every youth team in Miami, and let's face it, the boys are a little more rough-and-tumble than the girls.”

Peggy's temples started throbbing. “That is so untrue. My girls are every bit as aggressive—and talented, I might add—as your boys! I'd put the ladies on the field any day and they'd kick your butts.”

“Is that so.” His body language became cocky and competitive: shoulders back and chin up.

“Yeah, that
is
so.” Her chin came up, too.

“Uh-huh.” Troy smirked. “Well, I think your strength lies more in color coordination. That's why Danni and Laura and the rest of the puff team painted their nails before their last game—because matching team polish really brings out the beast in them.”

Peggy narrowed her eyes on him. “That was a team spirit thing, and I can't believe you'd be so snarky about your own nieces. You obviously don't take them or their talent seriously.”

“Yes, I do,” Troy protested. “I didn't mean it that way. I just meant that the guys are rougher. They'll need the helmets more, especially as they get a little older and things get serious for them. Let's face it, most of the girls won't go on to play in high school.”

Peggy gritted her teeth. “Because nobody takes them seriously and nobody
encourages
them to play in high school. They're pushed to try out for cheerleader instead.”