Tease Me (3 page)

“You’re sure?”

“Stop badgering the poor girl, Irma,” Ida chided. “She agreed, after all.” She moved
closer to her sister and lowered her voice. “We really should tell her though.”

Irma quickly leaned past her. “Thank you so much,
Lainey, we knew we could count on you. Minerva is right to be so proud of you.” She
turned to Ida. “Come on, I want to check out that dress down at Natties.”

“But …” Ida took several steps behind Irma, then turned and shot Lainey an apologetic
look. “We’ll drop in for lunch Saturday.”

“But you have bridge on Sat—” Lainey didn’t bother finishing her sentence. They were
gone. Now what was all that about? They hadn’t even stayed for coffee. She shrugged,
but before she got busy and forgot, she dialed Lillian’s and reserved an early-morning
slot. Lillian’s receptionist, Jewel, was harried with the early-morning rush but seemed
both surprised and happy at the appointment request.

Saturday morning at eight-thirty, thirty-four-year-old Lainey Cooper was getting her
first massage. Hey, she thought with a smile of anticipation, it was the least she
could do to help out some friends. Before she’d left Philly, both Conrad, her ex-husband,
and his mother, Agatha Maitland of the Philadelphia Maitlands, which was how she always
thought of her, had warned her that living in a retirement village would be a stifling
bore. As if living with them had been a riot-a-minute, she thought dryly.

Well, they hadn’t met the Armbruster sisters. Imagining Irma and Ida at one of her
ex-mother-in-law’s stiff-necked, pinkie-extended, Junior League teas had Lainey laughing
as she went back to slicing the pie.

“I did not sell a successful international business so that I could spend my days
rubbing down eighty-year-old bodies.” Tucker frowned down at Lillian’s bent head.
Her
white-gold hair had been ruthlessly combed into a deceptively wispy, gravity-defying
cloud that was held together with enough spray cement to make it hurricane-proof.
The head beneath it was every bit as hard.

“You sold an international business because you’re having a midlife crisis. I’m offering
you decent work. Stop whining.”

Lillian was wearing purple leggings under a long, silky tropical shirt printed with
eyestraining pink, purple, and white flowers. They perfectly matched the ones sprouting
from the middle straps of her wedge-heeled, white patent-leather sandals, not to mention
the ones clipped onto her ears and painted on her purple nails. Tucker had taken one
look at her and wished for the towel and satin turban.

She lifted the glasses that hung around her neck on a long chain of plastic pearls,
slid them on halfway down her nose, then went back to surveying her product invoice
sheet. “How many Exo Waves do I have?”

From his perch on a footstool, Tucker scanned the top shelf of supplies. “Six. I could
crack ribs, Lillian. Hell, one wrong move, and their entire skeleton might disintegrate.”
He turned to face her. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

She shoved the clipboard at him. “You’re helping me with inventory and having a tantrum.
Trade places.”

“I don’t have tantrums.” He tightened his lower lip and dutifully stepped off the
stool.

“It’s the one job here you can do, and the added benefit to it is that it must be
done privately, where you have the best shot of gaining confidences and getting some
inside information. Heaven knows the things they used to
tell Helga. Of course, she didn’t understand much English, but—”

“Lillian.”

“My ladies are a lot tougher than they look, Tucker. If Helga didn’t send them to
the ER, you certainly won’t.”

“I’m not so sure about that. And do you really think they’ll trust a man?”

She eyed him over her glasses. “Well, that’s a loaded question women have been grappling
with for eons.” She turned back to counting perms, ignoring his scowl. “You’re charming.
When you want to be. And good-looking. For your age.”

“Please stop before my ego gets too big.” He switched tactics. “Don’t you need a license
for this sort of thing? You could get sued or worse.”

“I’m not advertising that you have one, but I won’t lie if asked, which I won’t be.
They’ll be clamoring for you, trust me. And this will all be over before the state
board catches on. You did read the books and watch the videos I got you, right?”

“I hardly think
Shiatsu: The Sensual Way to Rub Your Mate the Right Way
is part of any accreditation course on clinical massage.”

“Oh, don’t be such a snob. I happen to think it was wonderful. Why, last weekend,
I lit a few candles and invited that nice Stanley Shemanski over and we—”

“Stop right there.” He knew when he was whipped. “You win. I hope your insurance premiums
are up-to-date.”

“Let me worry about that. You worry about finding out what Minerva, Bernice, and Betty
Louise have gotten themselves mixed up in.” She reached out and pushed his bottom
lip in. “Buck up. It won’t take that long.”

He wasn’t so sure about that. “It might take longer than you think to gain their confidence.
If Louise Betty, Bernice, and Minerva aren’t talking about—”

“Betty Louise. And keep your voice down. The walls have hearing aids around here.”

“I still think that if you’re that worried about them, you could ask the sheriff to
help.”

“I couldn’t go to Roscoe. He’s a friend. The ladies would be mortified if—”

“It’s his job, Lillian.” But he didn’t push it. She’d been quite adamant about not
involving Old Tumbleweed. He hadn’t been any more successful in changing her mind
about hiring a real investigator.

Lillian leaned closer. “I did think of a lead.”

Tucker worked at not rolling his eyes. “A lead?”

“Bernice’s husband, Leland, God rest his soul, was quite the gambler. He loved the
dogs. Did pretty well, too, as I recall. Maybe Bernice has hit the tracks. Maybe she
got in over her head with a bookie.” She frowned. “Betty Louise is a mouse and would
do anything Bernice told her to, but Minerva …” She shook her head. “That I can’t
figure out. Other than bingo, she’s not much of a gambler. Besides, she’s a cat person.”

Tucker massaged his temple.

She waved a dismissive hand. “Anyhow, this is a lead worth pursuing. I think they’re
involved in something, and they’ve somehow gotten in over their heads. They’d be too
embarrassed to tell anyone. But I’m afraid they’re in danger. I tell you, that guy
looked menacing. He’s certainly not from around here.”

“Anyone under seventy is not from around here.”

Ignoring him, Lillian did a last scan of the shelves,
then snapped the cupboard shut, slipped her glasses off, and turned back to him. “You’ll
do fine.”

“What makes you think they’re going to open up and spill their guts to me?”

She laughed. “Don’t kid yourself. You are underestimating the effect of strong male
hands on a naked female body. Some of these women haven’t had a man’s hands on them
in over a decade.”

Tucker groaned silently, and his stomach tied into another knot.

“Stop worrying. Follow the videotape, sans the candles and Bolero music, and they’ll
be eating out of your hands.”

“Very fanny.”

Lillian gave him a sharp once-over. “Actually, I’m more worried about heart attacks
than cracked ribs.”

“Oh, so now the over-the-hill guy is okay?”

“Hey, if you’re single and breathing on your own, you’re not over the hill to them.”

Tucker was saved from a reply when the intercom crackled. “Tucker, your eight-thirty
is here.”

His what?
Oh, no
. A client. He had a client. He looked at Lillian with unconcealed dread. “I have
an eight-thirty?”

Blue eyes twinkling, she said, “Looks like it.” She shoved at his shoulder, almost
pushing him out of the small room. “Go on.” He tried to stop, but she swatted him
with her clipboard.

“Hey!” He rubbed his backside but moved down the hallway.

“And Tucker?”

He glared at her. “What?”

“Knock ’em dead, honey.”

“Not funny.” He swore under his breath. What in the hell had he gotten himself into?
He wondered if he shouldn’t have argued so hard to use his own name. But Lance? He
still shuddered. “And I changed my mind about that inheritance,” he called back. Her
only response was a laugh.

Lainey tucked in the towel more firmly above her breasts and tried to find a graceful,
minimum-exposure way to climb onto the massage table. The room was warm and softly
lit, the exotic fragrance of heated oils mixing with the soft jazz being piped in
to create a relaxing atmosphere. It was not at all the clinical setup she’d imagined.
She laughed at herself. She was there to be pampered, not probed. If she could get
over feeling so exposed, she might actually enjoy herself.

Ignoring the fact that in minutes she would be even more exposed, she gripped the
knot at the top of her coral-pink towel, flattened her other palm along the end that
barely dangled past her backside, and sidled over to the side of the linen-covered
table. No footstool. Hmmm.

That made graceful and minimum exposure an either/or proposition. What she needed
was leverage. She tightened her grip on both ends of her towel and looked at the hip-high
padded table. “I’m short one hand.”

“You can use one of mine,” a deep voice suggested helpfully.

With a muffled shriek, she spun around. The tall man standing inside the doorway was
dressed in white pleated pants and a white crewneck T-shirt. He had thick, finger-ruffled,
dark blond hair and blue eyes that would make even Mel Gibson’s wife drool. The first
thing that struck
her was that Irma was most certainly right. He was definitely no Helga.

The second thing that hit her was the real reason the sisters had conspired to get
her in there.

“Matchmakers,” she muttered. She thought the Charlie Kovacs incident had cured the
Armbruster sisters of their matchmaking tendencies. Charlie was the “nice young accountant”
who gave tax seminars at the senior center whom she had agreed to go out with. She’d
firmly believed that if she hadn’t said yes, the sisters might have come up with someone
a lot worse than a short, balding CPA.

As it turned out, Charlie had been quite charming, and she’d continued to see him.
He’d been confident without being overbearing and had no mother in sight, so Lainey
had seen him as a safe way for her to reenter social life as a single woman. And he
had been just that … right up until the day the risk-free tax shelter he’d gotten
her into was exposed as a scam, which had resulted in her being audited and heavily
penalized by the IRS and Charlie being sent to live in a nice minimum-security prison.
They had all decided that in the “men” department, there couldn’t be much worse than
Charlie Kovacs.

Lainey looked at the broad-shouldered back and perfectly shaped butt of the man currently
sliding a sign that said Occupied into a metal track on the outside of the door. He
was a fantasy waiting to happen. And yet she knew with absolute certainty that somehow,
some way, the Kovacs theory was about to be proven wrong. Good things did not happen
to Madelaine Cooper.

“He’s got to be married, gay, or a serial killer who likes to massage old people to
death,” she murmured.

He stepped into the room. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

The instant she heard the soft click of the door closing, the room’s temperature went
from pleasantly warm to uncomfortably hot.

When she didn’t answer right away, he said, “I didn’t mean to startle you. I knocked.
I must not have done it hard enough.”

There wasn’t anything this man couldn’t do hard enough. The images that thought produced
made her throat go dry.
Resist, Lainey. Be strong. Remember Charlie. Remember Conrad. And if that doesn’t
work, remember Conrad’s mother
. She straightened as a vision of Agatha’s disapproving glare swam across her mind.
“I don’t guess you’re the towel guy or the shampoo, uh, boy.”

He grinned. “I’m Tucker, your masseur. And I can’t tell you how relieved—uh, happy
I am to see you.” When she clutched her towel, he glanced down, then quickly back
up. “Uh, not
see
-you see you. To serve you, I mean.” Realizing he wasn’t making matters better, he
gave up and shrugged far too endearingly. He stepped forward and stuck out his hand.
“Tucker Morgan, pleased to meet you.”

Lainey could have sworn her kneecaps liquefied. She pressed against the table for
support. “Pleased to meet you too.” Too pleased, judging by the happy hula her hormones
were doing at the moment. Her gaze moved to his hand. It was wide and tanned, with
long fingers that looked entirely too capable. And in less than a few minutes they
would be running all over her body.

Her oiled, naked body.

She tried shallow breathing. It didn’t help much. Even Agatha’s nightmarish visage
deserted her. Not even
for the twins could she do this. No matter her good intentions, it
had
been a long time since Charlie. He’d start rubbing, she’d start groaning, he’d slide
his hands lower … No, uh-uh. She’d never done this before, but she was fairly certain
writhing was not acceptable behavior during a massage. And it was a moot point anyway,
since there was no way she’d attempt a graceful table mount now.

“I, uh—” She broke off at the hoarse sound of her voice, took a stabilizing breath,
then clutched the towel tighter when it began to slide. “Listen, it’s like this. I’m
sure you’re wonderful—”

He let his hand drop back to his side. “Actually, I’m nervous as hell. This is my
first day. You’re my first client.”

He
was nervous? Oh, wonderful. “I’m your first?” Why did saying that make her skin all
shivery?
No, no, you don’t, Lainey
. Sternly ignoring her hormones, which were too busy planning a major party in her
lower extremities to listen to her anyway, she firmed her spine and her resolve. “Don’t
take it personally. It’s nothing you said or did, but I really don’t think I want
a massage after all.”