Megan cleared her throat. “You really should try it. If you’re this excited just reading about spa treatments, I’m sure you’ll enjoy experiencing them.”
“Maybe.” Kira reached for the notepad in Megan’s lap and scrawled mango salt scrub before handing it back. “So how much of this salt would I need to order?”
“I have no idea. This is what I meant when I said I don’t know how to run a spa.”
“You know the important stuff,” Kira said, dismissing Megan’s concerns. She flipped back to the page featuring body mud.
Kira was going to screw this up if she threw away her common sense. “You sank a lot of money into this—” Megan began.
“It’s going to work out great.”
Such optimism. Megan reached for her tea, but it was still too hot to drink. Frustrated, she put her mug down and leaned closer to read about the oh-so-fabulous differences between green, pink and black mud.
“Detox,” Kira read from the catalog description. “How does that work, exactly? I mean, how does putting mud on yourself—which is basically dirt—detoxify your skin?”
“Um…” They were definitely in each other’s personal space, and it felt so good she had a hard time reminding herself she had standards for how to act when discussing business. Standards? What standards? She slipped her feet out of her sandals and curled her legs underneath her on the couch, crowding Kira even closer.
A pulse fluttered in Kira’s neck. Megan watched it for a few beats. So Kira wasn’t as unaffected as she seemed. That was…not good.
And Megan knew she wasn’t going to do the right thing and move out of range of Kira’s aura until Kira made her do it.
Also not good.
When they came in from the rain, she had watched a single drop of water roll down Kira’s neck as it traced her dips and curves. She wondered what it would have tasted like to follow that raindrop with her tongue.
Megan caught her breath. She spoke quickly to cover it up. “I’ll research spa treatments and write up a brochure for you. But I do think if you’d just try going to a spa—and I don’t mean hanging out in their accountant’s office—you’d have a better sense of what your customers are looking for. At least get a massage.”
“I will. Are you sure you don’t want to do me the honor?”
No, no, no. Hadn’t Kira told Svetlana at the restaurant that she wouldn’t ask Megan for a massage? She had said it with such seriousness that Megan was convinced Kira really didn’t want her to think of her as a client. Wishful thinking, apparently.
“You don’t want to.” Kira evidently knew exactly what the look on her face meant.
Megan swallowed apologetically. “There’s plenty of other great massage therapists who—”
“Are perfectly safe?”
“Of course they’re safe…”
“I’m not talking about medical malpractice here, you know,” Kira said gently.
Oh.
Megan shifted farther away from her on the couch. Kira closed the catalog and tossed it on the floor. She pulled one knee onto the couch, turning so her whole body faced her, and waited for Megan to say something.
There were many reasons she didn’t want to give Kira a massage. Or, at least, one. Because she really did want to, but she shouldn’t, and—
“I had a nice time with you at Avalanche,” Kira said. “Especially at the end. Up until the part where you said you couldn’t kiss me anymore.”
Megan opened her mouth but no sound came out.
“So I’m a little confused. You can’t kiss me because you gave me a massage, but you can’t give me a massage because…?”
Kira had a right to force the issue. Megan had been less than clear. She’d ignored boundaries, she’d gotten too comfortable…and now, to top it all off, she was doing a heck of a job keeping herself in line. She wouldn’t give Kira a massage and she wouldn’t kiss her, and it was supposed to be one or the other—not both. Maybe Kira was right, and a ten-minute massage in the post-race massage tent didn’t exactly constitute a therapeutic relationship. But she knew from experience that lines had to be drawn. It was up to her to draw them.
“I’m sorry, that was rude of me,” Kira said. “I’ll make an appointment at Peaceful Moments.”
Relief loosened the knot in Megan’s throat. “For a massage? God, not there. Not for your first time. You’ll never want a massage again. Go somewhere good. Call Svetlana. Call Patrick. Didn’t I already give you Svetlana’s number? Geez, I’ll give you a list.”
“Actually, I was thinking of going to Peaceful Moments for a mud bath. I’ll save the massage for later.”
“Oh.” Did that mean Kira was going to wait for her to change her mind? Megan felt pleased at the thought, then guilty. She wanted Kira to get a massage from someone else. It was just that she was jealous of whoever was going to get to do it. “I guess they’re good at spa treatments.”
“Because anyone can slap mud on a customer, right?”
“Pretty much.”
Kira looked like she was hiding a smile. She never seemed to stay mad for long. “Is my spa going to have an anti-spa attitude?”
Megan busied herself making adjustments to their list of products to order. “I prefer to think of myself as pro-massage. Besides, you’re the one who was so determined to hire me for this job. You should have asked about my biases during my job interview.”
“Because I’m a professional,” Kira said.
“That’s right.” Megan didn’t look up from her list. What kind of businesswoman hired people without interviewing them, anyway?
“Then we’ll be the best damn massage-centered spa on the East Coast.”
That was nice of her to say. Although it did imply Megan’s involvement in the business, which was not part of their deal.
“You know,” Kira said, “at the restaurant, when you and your friends were figuring out what was wrong with our waitress’s shoulder—I got the feeling Patrick doesn’t think much of the medical profession.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty rampant among massage therapists. It’s because we see all their failures. The back surgeries that don’t help, the knee repairs that go wrong, the chronic pain they can’t fix. It’s not pretty. I treated a woman last week whose doctor said her severe pelvic pain was all in her head, because weeks of expensive tests had all come out normal. It turned out that the pain was caused by a simple trigger point in her abdominal muscles.”
“So we’re anti-spa, and we’re anti-doctor?”
“Can we put that in the brochure?”
Kira laughed. “No.”
Megan sat back and crossed her ankle over her knee. “They do save lives, though. If I get in a car accident, for God’s sake take me to the hospital, not to a Reiki practitioner.”
“Not a problem.”
“You think I’m kidding, but some people take the anti-medical thing too far. Doctors know a million times more than we do about the human body, even if it’s all disease-focused.” Megan uncrossed and recrossed her legs. “I think we get defensive and don’t give them enough credit.”
“Because doctors don’t give you enough credit?”
“Exactly. But it’s so foreign to everything doctors have ever learned about healing, why would they understand the value of what we do?”
“You don’t get resentful?”
Megan shrugged. “They deal with life and death. We deal with quality of life, and pain. They’re two completely different things.”
“I bet you would have made a good doctor, though. Why didn’t you go to med school? You’re smart enough, and you’re interested in how the body works.”
Oh, not this. Her parents still had not given up on the idea that she would one day go to medical school. She didn’t need anyone else hassling her about it. Megan didn’t bother to hide her annoyance. “You’re not going to tell me I’m wasting my talents, are you?”
“How can you say that? Your job is perfect for you.” Kira reached for her and
rubbed her shoulder. To give moral support? Megan fumbled with her list, but didn’t pull away. Ninety-nine percent of the time she did not care for back rubs, which were either too intimate or too rough, but Kira’s touch was the perfect blend of nonaggressive and respectful, radiating concern without weird sexual overtones. And she broke the contact almost immediately.
“Sometimes I get the sense that people think I’m no better than a high school dropout cleaning hotel rooms, that massage therapists aren’t very smart,” Megan said.
“Those people are idiots.”
Megan’s heart thumped at the conviction in Kira’s voice. “No they’re not.”
“Then they’re elitist.”
“Even my own mother thinks—” Megan broke off, wishing she hadn’t said anything. It sounded so childish.
“Your own mother thinks what?” Kira asked gently.
“That I’m not ambitious enough.” Megan’s throat closed up. She didn’t want her mother’s respect. She didn’t need it.
“You know what? Ruthless ambition is not something we need more of in the world. You care about people and that’s a heck of a lot more admirable than having an advanced degree. You’ve found a job that fits you and you’re wildly successful at it. And even if your mother doesn’t say so, I bet she’s really proud of you.”
Megan flushed. “It doesn’t matter, anyway.”
“So what happened? Why didn’t you go to med school?”
How had they managed to turn this into such a big issue? She’d honestly never wanted to be a doctor. The stress would have given her a nervous breakdown. “Doctors are taught to distance themselves emotionally from their patients so they can operate without getting queasy, and I didn’t want to do that. I understand why they have to do it, but it seems so cold. I wanted to feel like I was helping a human being, not just a body part.”
“So it sounds like you did consider it.”
“Not really. I also can’t stand the sight of blood.”
“Okay, so, not your best career choice.”
“You know how some kids have trouble dissecting the frog in high school biology? I didn’t even get to the frog. I passed out dissecting the clam.”
“The clam? Do clams even have blood?”
Yeah, yeah, it was kind of ridiculous, but she’d better not laugh. It had been pretty traumatic at the time.
“You poor thing,” Kira said. “Did your parents have to write you a note to get you out of doing the frog?”
Right, her parents. It might not have been so traumatic if they had understood. “My mother said I had to learn to not be so sensitive.”
Kira frowned. “But you said you never did the frog.”
“I told the teacher I felt dizzy and she sent me to the nurse to lie down. I think she was afraid I was going to give myself a concussion on her classroom floor if I passed out again.”
“Maybe she felt bad for you.”
“I doubt it. She did make me dissect the fish.”
“How did that go?”
“It went okay at first, because I was used to eating fish—with the heads, even—so it didn’t gross me out too much to cut one up, but after twenty minutes the smell of formaldehyde got to be overwhelming and I…” Megan shrugged helplessly.
“You passed out?”
Megan nodded.
“Wow. A fish.”
“The clam was worse.”
“Really? I would think it would be the other way around. Clams don’t have faces.”
“Yeah, but they have all this stuff inside you’d never expect. Yucky stuff. Organs.”
Kira smiled. “Organs, huh? I guess it’s a good thing you didn’t try to become a doctor, then.”
“Don’t laugh.”
“I’m not. It’s just funny because you obviously know a lot more about anatomy than you’re making it sound like.”
“I actually do. Massage school gave me the opportunity to learn about anatomy—at least the muscles and bones—without having to cut up a cadaver. But it’s not my main focus. What I’m best at is inviting angels to join us in the room. Most of the healing comes from them. I’m just a channel.”
Megan braced herself for the scoffing that usually greeted this sort of admission. She didn’t even tell half her clients what exactly it was she did that made them walk out of her treatment room feeling peaceful and energized. And her clients tended to be more receptive to talk of angels than someone like Kira, who had called her woo-woo more than once.
But Kira didn’t get that disbelieving, dismissive, even angry look she had seen so often on her mother’s face, on Amelia’s face, on the faces of a long line of others. Instead, her smile turned pensive, like she was trying to figure Megan out, and enjoying the process immensely.
“So when you say angels are in the room with you, that’s, like, a metaphor, right? For loving thoughts?”
“No, it means angels are in the room with me.” If she was going to tell her, she was going to make sure she understood.
“You mean you can actually see them?”
“Yes.”
“Huh.”
Huh? That was it? No ridicule?
“You’re an interesting person, you know that? You know all this medical stuff, you combine it with the angel stuff, and it all works.”
“Except for the anti-spa attitude,” Megan joked to cover her reaction to the genuine respect in Kira’s voice.
“Now that I know what an expert you are on the clam organ system, it’s totally understandable. If we ever have a clam come in for a facial…”
“Clams don’t have faces,” Megan reminded her.
“That could be a problem.” Kira broke into a smile and winked.
Megan huffed.
“You were impressive with that waitress,” Kira said, serious again. “I never knew massage therapists could sound so much like doctors.”
“We don’t. Svetlana and Patrick know Russian medical massage, but a lot of my classmates barely scraped by in anatomy class, and they just do relaxation massage. Or take my friend Gwynnie, for instance. She can treat injuries even though she doesn’t give a shit about anatomy. She does it solely through intuition, and her clients adore her because she’s great at it. But for me, when I put my hands on someone, I like to know what’s under the skin, and what that’s connected to, and what massaging it is going to do. My intuition became a lot more effective once I understood anatomy.”
“And yet you don’t call it medical massage.”
“Medical massage, sports massage, deep work—a lot of people respect that more. They want you to make it hurt. It has its place. But until they learn to appreciate how healing it can be to be touched gently by someone whose heart is in the right place, and how wonderful that feels, they’ll never really understand what massage is all about.”
Okay, maybe she shouldn’t have said that last part, because now Kira looked like she was going to kiss her, and she didn’t want to see that. She didn’t want to know that Kira felt that way about her.
“I should go,” Megan said.
Kira closed her eyes.
That was almost worse—wondering what she would see in her eyes when she opened them. Kira saved her from that by turning away and walking to the balcony’s sliding glass door. She pushed aside the curtain and pressed her face to the glass, cupping her hands to block the light from inside. “Looks like it’s still raining hard out there.”
“I have an umbrella,” Megan pointed out.
“The roads—”
“I can handle the roads.”
“I know.” Kira breathed a sigh of resignation and turned from the window. “That doesn’t mean you have to go.”
Wow. Megan could hear her pulse pounding in her motionless body. She was sure she was now the one who looked like she was going to kiss someone.
“So we can talk business?” Megan gulped.
“If that’s what you want.”
“I should go.” She had to get out of here before she t
hrew herself into Kira’s arms.
Chapter Twelve
That Friday, the phone rang while Megan was in her massage room jotting notes about what muscles she’d worked on with her last client of the day. “Megan McLaren. How can I help you?”
“Next time I get slathered in scented mud, I want you to be the one smearing it on me.”
Her heart relaxed at the familiar timbre of Kira’s voice. She could almost see Kira’s scowl turning into a teasing smile. Good to know that while Megan buried her confused feelings in work—because helping her clients get in touch with their pain was a great way to hide from her own—someone had been busy doing spa research.
“They used scented mud?”
“You would have hated it.”
“I would have asked for unscented.”
“It was itchy, too. Are they really supposed to leave it on your skin until it dries?”
Megan couldn’t tell if Kira was joking or not. “Haven’t you ever given yourself a mud mask facial?”
“Seriously?”
“You’re not joking.” She wondered again what Kira could possibly have been thinking the day she decided to open a spa.
“Never painted my toenails, either,” Kira added. “In case you’re wondering.”
“So you’ll be opening a nail salon in the near future?”
“You underestimate me. And I think you were wrong when you said just about anyone could give a mud treatment. It seems to me there’s definitely a learning curve involved.”
Uh oh. Had some undertrained, indifferent wage slave slapped mud on her in a careless, untherapeutic way and scared her off? “What did they do to you?”
“Maybe not a big learning curve…” Kira backpedaled.
Okay, so maybe Kira didn’t love the treatment, but mud was not for everyone. “Are you sure it wasn’t the whole concept you were uncomfortable with? Maybe it wasn’t the esthetician’s fault.”
“No, I think you definitely would have been much better at it.”
“I already told you I can’t—”
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