The Care and Feeding of Unmarried Men (13 page)

A
shaman was chanting softly through speakers, there was the green scent of sage curling in the air, and a butt-naked Nash was lying facedown on a cushy tabletop, covered in nothing more than a soft white towel.

His sister had insisted on the massage, claiming it would relax him, but there was nothing relaxing about more inactivity. Obviously Jemima was trying to bore the big brother right out of him.

There wasn't a chance of that happening. Not that he wasn't itching for something to do besides observe Pilates classes, eat mandarin orange, avocado, and almond salads, and shop for teeny girlie clothes in Skittle colors—his sole occupations since becoming his sister's self-appointed bodyguard—but Nash had a hunch. Blame it on all the nuts he'd been eating or the
New Age flute tones wafting through the air, but he couldn't shake the feeling that he had a real purpose here in Palm Springs.

And a man nicknamed The Preacher couldn't ignore that sense of a Higher Power at work in the universe. The best Nash could figure was that he was still supposed to be protecting Jemima.

The door to the massage room opened, then snicked softly shut. With his face buried in the horseshoe-shaped pillow at the head of the massage table, Nash couldn't see the massage therapist as she approached the table. But he knew what she looked like already. He'd shaken hands with Helga, not realizing until he heard the feminine name that the five-foot-ten-inch, slender figure with the long fingers and silver brush cut was a woman. Dressed in no-nonsense hospital scrubs, she'd already worked over the front of his body and had given him a few minutes alone to turn to his stomach and rearrange the towel across his buttocks.

He heard her move toward the small countertop and sink in the room. The oil she used was sage-scented too, and he imagined she was coating her hands with it again before getting about her business on his back.

Her footsteps now took her toward the massage table, and he consciously loosened his muscles. Helga had already commented on the coiled tension in his body as she'd kneaded his front side. It seemed insulting to the woman that he was unable to relax under her professional touch. Her hands had been pleasantly warm and competent, and if he could just let go a little, he probably would enjoy it.

Helga said it wasn't uncommon for someone to fall asleep during their massage. Since he'd been sleeping like shit since he'd ended up in a dark bathroom with
Eve Caruso a couple of nights before, he could use the extra Zs.

Clothing rustled beside him, then something ruffled the hair at his nape, sending goose bumps sprinting down his spine. Nash forced himself not to squirm. Okay, he knew he was overdue a visit to the barber, but why the hell was Helga-the-masseuse blowing on the back of his neck? It was embarrassing. The goose bumps for damn sure were.

Helga had to be twenty years older than he was and probably disinterested in men to boot, and he was reacting as if she'd laid her tongue on him.

She blew again, and he gritted his teeth against a second round of that skittering sensation against his skin.
Calm yourself, Cargill,
he told himself. His too-long hair would get in the way of her massage, that was all. She was trying to spare him from getting the ends of it greasy with her hands.

Then she put them on him.

His body jerked, shocked by their chill.

Christ! What had happened to that “pleasant warmth” he'd experienced before? He frowned, his forehead bunching up against the circular pillow. Thumbs dug in and edged down the muscles of his neck, then pushed out along his shoulders. More goose bumps flagged out across his flesh. Feminine fingers feathered against his deltoids.

His cock stirred.

And then he knew who was touching him.

“Hey there, Eve.”

Her hands whisked away from his body. “How'd you know it's me?”

“Well, when it wasn't Helga's clinical touch, I could
think of only one woman who can't keep her hands off me.”

“You wish.”

“Every minute, darlin', and I'm paying at least a couple of bucks for each one spent on this table, so get back to work.”

She laughed. “I took a couple of classes. You'll get your money's worth.” Her fingers returned to his skin.

He flinched again. “Jesus, your hands are colder than a well-digger's butt in winter.”

“Then you'll have to warm them up for me, handsome.”

He didn't need to see her face to imagine that saucy tilt to her lips and that sassy gleam in her eyes. “The heat's all on the other side, baby.”

Eve kneaded his trapezius muscles with both hands. “I don't know about that. I find you're pretty hot all over.”

That shut him up. She'd been teasing before, but there was something new in her voice now. Something…husky.

And damned if pressed against the massage table was not where his hard-on was aching to be. He squeezed his eyes tight and tried to pretend it was Helga who was stroking his skin.

It didn't work.

“What do you want, Eve?” he asked, aware he sounded surly.

“I thought you had that all figured out.”

He'd said she couldn't keep her hands off him. That she had a “thing” about him and sex. That was true. But he didn't expect it was a rare occurrence for a
woman with Eve's air of experience, so he wasn't going to feel bad about stomping out all the little fires she managed to set inside of him.

Let her go and play with matches around someone else. One look and he'd known she was trouble for him, and despite previous lapses he was re-determined not to succumb to temptation again. He had no wish to let the man-trap eat him alive.

Her hands stilled, each cupping one of his shoulders. “Uh, thanks, by the way.”

Thanks? Was she reading minds? Did she
want
him to keep his distance?

“For helping me out with my little…problem the other night,” she clarified.

Her claustrophobia, brought on by small, enclosed spaces. He remembered the feel of her, thrumming with tension in his arms. “You're okay now? This room isn't very big.”

“I'm all right. The skylight helps.”

In his mind's eye, Nash replayed those minutes in the darkness all over again, the pale shape of her face and the fear in her eyes that turned their blue into black pools of anxiety. “I'm a flag-waving, law-and-order type of man myself. I never thought I could consider the FBI sons of bitches.”

“Joey calls them the Federal Bureau of Ignoramuses. They take a particular pleasure in hounding her.”

Startled, Nash lifted his head and craned it over his shoulder to stare at Eve. She looked as shockingly beautiful as usual, in a simple pair of straight leg jeans, sneakers, and a white, long-sleeved T-shirt pushed up to her elbows. “The feds are still after you?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Not me. But Joey works with my grandfather in the family's gourmet food business.
He recently announced he's going to retire, and so they're keeping their eye on him and those associated with him.”

“What?”

“You'll get a crick in your neck.” She pressed the back of his head so that he was forced, facedown, into the horseshoe pillow. “My grandfather, Cosimo, is retiring from La Vita Buona and the other…businesses he's involved in. The FBI is interested in those other businesses. So they give the Carusos a goose every once in a while to see if they can shake anything free.”

Nash tried imagining the kind of sangfroid it took to be able to talk about a federal shakedown with such equanimity. A self-assurance built on years of practice? Yes, but a self-assurance that fell apart when a door closed behind her and a light turned off.

“Joey strikes me as a woman who can handle it, I guess,” he murmured. But
Eve,
Eve didn't handle the demons in her life so easily. He knew it. He'd embraced her as she'd struggled against her vulnerability.

And damn, if vulnerable was just the way he didn't want to think of her. He didn't want to be anyone's white knight anymore.

“You're right. If anyone can handle it, Joey can. It's Téa who gets the most upset.” Eve was making long strokes down the sides of his spine, from the base of his neck to that line of the towel across his hips.

The touch seemed to wrap around his groin and tug at his balls. He cleared his throat. “Téa? Did you say something about Téa?”

“She's the edgy one. Particularly right now, with the wedding coming up. We're all trying to keep her calm and happy.”

Nash was trying to focus on her words. He was, honest he was, but she must have really taken some massage classes, because she
was
good at touching him. She was taking her time, rolling his muscles with her thumbs and working at the kinks. Except instead of loosening him up, he was just getting harder and harder.

“That's why I agreed to ask you to the masquerade ball,” Eve said. “I know you'll want to go along with it.”

Some part of that “I know you'll want to go along with it” got through the haze of sexual pleasure starting to fog his brain. “Huh?”

“Johnny bought a ten-seat table for this upcoming charity thing. Téa would like you—and Jemima, too—to join us.” Her magic fingers worked back toward his traps, and he almost groaned aloud in bliss. “So will you do it?”

“Sure,” he murmured, thinking only of Eve's blue eyes and her heart-shaped mouth and her hands, stroking, touching, taking him—

“Wait. What? What did I just say?” He craned his head to stare at her again.

“You said you and Jemima will attend that party. We'll all be there.” Her smile was way too innocent, when her fingers were still engaged in their carnal activity, working at his hips now, under the towel.

“‘We' as in that brother-in-law of yours, right?”

“Brother-in-law-to-be.”

Someone should tell her that a woman with her looks didn't have a prayer of pulling off the sinless act. “What, he wants another chance at giving me the third degree? Is he going to have his shotgun this time?”

A blush rose up her cheeks. “He did that just to be funny. Johnny knows I can take care of myself.”

He frowned. “Then why is he insisting I attend this party?”

A flicker of expression crossed her face. It dismissed the last of the lingering sexual fog in his brain and put him back on full Eve-alert. With a swift movement, he rolled over and sat upright on the massage table, bunching the towel in his lap.

“What aren't you telling me?” he demanded. And he'd thought her vulnerable! He should have known something was up when she'd barged into his massage session. She'd wanted him where she could have the upper hand. With her fingers on him she'd figured she could get him to agree to anything. Wily witch.

Her little pout didn't move him.

“Out with it, Eve.”

She shrugged. “It's just that Téa…Téa's in full-blown bride mode. Discovering the two of us in the bathroom together gave her this romantic idea about us.”

“Romance is the last thing on my mind when I'm around you.” It was either screw her or strangle her, that was it.

“I tried telling her that, but she has this idea in her head about you attending the masquerade ball with us, and I'd like to make her happy.”

“You want me to fake a romantic interest in you?”

“No!” She shuffled back. “I just want you to go to the party. That's it, I promise.”

Nash shook his head. Because that might not be “it” when it came to the two of them. “Look, you and I are both too old and too experienced to pretend there isn't some fairly combustible chemistry between us.”

She raised that damn eyebrow.

He didn't let it deter him. “More than fairly combustible, and don't bother denying it.”

“So? I'm not in the market for any explosions at the moment.”

“Me neither.” He'd said that too quickly, hadn't he? But it was true. He'd tried considering sex as a workout or as an itch that needed scratching, but it rarely failed that he didn't end up with some lovely yet needy woman whom he couldn't walk away from until he'd paid off her charge cards or married her off to one of his buddies or both. He'd vowed to take a break from that—at least until he made some more single friends.

The next woman he went to bed with would be strong, secure, and absolutely average in every way.

He narrowed his eyes at the ball-breakingly beautiful woman standing before him, who hadn't had an average day since being born a mob boss's daughter. “So let me get this straight. You don't want sex.”

“I'm not against pleasure, but I've got a pretty full plate at the moment.”

It was as if she could take it or leave it. “You don't like being with men?”

She frowned, and her voice rose. “Why is everyone asking me that lately? I've never been with a girl, if that's your question.”

He laughed. “Don't encourage my imagination to go there, please. But seriously, we get close and lips will lock.”

Her smile didn't look the least bit uncertain. “I'm convinced I can resist your oh-so-many charms.”

The confident tone struck him like a bolt of lightning.

Epiphany.

Revelation.

That was it! That Higher Power wasn't telling him he was here just for Jemima's protection. Nash was
also here to take the superbeauty down a peg or two as well. Eve Caruso needed to be taught the lesson that sexual chemistry could be stronger than her control of it, and Nash Cargill was the one appointed teacher.

The Lord worked in mysterious ways after all, he decided, because he now realized he was in Palm Springs to get laid.

But then his cock started to make its opinion on the idea known in rigorous fashion, and reason resurfaced.

Whoa. Wait just a minute
.

Wasn't it more than a tad too convenient that the good Lord and his lust were on the same side?