The flight attendant squealed. “Oh my god! Thank you so much!”
He handed a coupon to her coworker too, and then took his opportunity to hustle up the hallway to freedom while they were busy perusing the little blue cards.
Ten minutes later, he’d collected his garment bag from Baggage Claim and headed outside into the moist heat of early summer in Austin. He loosened his tie, glad for the sunshine and humidity after the chilly rain and winds of Chicago, and held out a hand for a cab.
He was glad his website was finding such success. He’d built it from the ground up. In some sense, it was his baby. He almost felt closer to the site, to the company, than he did to any actual human being in his life, aside from Dan, his best friend and business partner, and his stepsister, Jess.
Which, he could admit, was a little bit pathetic. And while he was happy to see his baby grow up and take flight, he could definitely do without this fame crap.
A taxi pulled up, and he slid gratefully into the back seat.
“Where to?” the driver asked, eyeing him in the rearview mirror.
“Downtown, please. The Keiko Hotel.” Another hotel, another Dream Date weekend, and then on to the next city on the tour.
As the cab sped down the highway toward town, Adam stared out the window, pondering the state of his life. Five years ago, he never would have guessed it was possible to be hailed as a success, with money, fame, and a full and busy schedule, and yet feel so damned empty and lonely all the time.
Chapter 2
____________________________________
At Indulgence Spa inside the Keiko, Lisa was distracted during her first massage of the day. She couldn’t get into the zone, and that annoyed her.
She blamed Clare and Willow. Here it was, almost Friday, and she was still trying to forget about Monday night and their online-dating torture.
Worst of all, their little intervention had somehow wormed its way into her head. Clare hadn’t yet mentioned any men Lisa was supposed to meet up with, and if and when she did, Lisa was going to refuse. And yet, she couldn’t deny that in the back of her mind, a very small part of her was actually feeling hopeful that this ridiculous scheme might actually work. That Clare might actually find someone for her, someone worth meeting. Someone worth falling for.
She hated that—the hope. Feeling hopeful meant she was just setting herself up for more disappointment.
She tried not to grimace as she ran her fingers up her client’s wide, overstuffed cushion of a back. It was just fitting, she thought, not for the first time, that his first name was Harry. The massage lotion she was using on him was something new, thicker than she was used to. If she wasn’t careful, she’d have to give his back a comb-out at the end of the session.
“Oh, Lisa,” he moaned, and she bit back a sigh. She would prefer that he keep it more professional by calling her Ms. DeLuca—she called him Mr. Richmond, pointedly, every chance she got—but she’d given up that crusade months ago. Harry Richmond seemed to believe the world was his personal wait staff. Of course, Lisa figured, a yearly income in the high seven-digits must give a person a pretty skewed view of life.
She gave him one last rub, pressing her thumbs into the ample flesh at his shoulders and then swooping her palms down the length of his back, before pulling his sheet up and stepping back from the table.
“All right, Mr. Richmond, you’re done.” Like a big ol’ turkey, she added in her head. She grabbed a hand towel and began working the excess lotion from her fingers, trying to ignore the fact that dark, wiry back hairs were probably clinging to her palms, creeping between her fingers like miniature leeches. “Clare will check you out at the front desk whenever you’re ready, like always. And of course, please feel free to relax here for a few minutes, if you like.”
He answered with a deep, wet moan that ended in a satisfied sigh.
Lisa shuddered inwardly. She had to stop thinking such uncharitable thoughts about the poor man. Harry Richmond wasn’t a bad person—he was actually kind of nice—but she dreaded his appointments the same way she dreaded visits to the dentist. Like Mr. Richmond, the dentist was also probably a perfectly nice human being. Just not someone she wanted to get up-close-and-personal with very often.
But Harry visited her for weekly massages, like clockwork. And in Lisa’s current state of financial near-death-by-drowning, regular clients were like a life jacket—about the only thing keeping her afloat.
Harry shifted his bulk to look up at her with a sweet, bleary smile, and suddenly she felt bad for having such mean thoughts about him. He really was a nice person, after all, and he was a loyal client, even if he never tipped—
And then he said, “So, Lisa,” and she cringed, because she knew what was coming.
“You find a boyfriend yet?”
There it was. She forced a smile, though she felt like baring her teeth. Couldn’t there be one week, just one, when he didn’t ask? Not even her mother asked that often.
“No, Mr. Richmond, no boyfriend. I told you that last week.” She smiled in a belated attempt to conceal exactly how much the question annoyed her.
He shrugged. “Never know, with you kids. All this Internet dating and, what do you call them? Shot In The Dark ads, those things in the back of the Chronicle?” He waved a hand as he clutched the sheet around his midsection and struggled to sit up. “A pretty girl like you should have a boyfriend. Someone nice to take you out and show you a good time.” He wagged a meaty finger at her. “I’ll tell you what, if I were single and twenty years younger, I’d be banging down your door.”
Try thirty years, champ, she thought, and then very nearly winced as the unwelcome image invaded her mind of a trimmer, younger Harry Richmond, back hair in full splendor, kicking down her front door to ask her for a date.
If that were the dating world, she’d just as soon stay single for life.
Scanning the small room for any excuse to leave, she grabbed the bottle of massage lotion—the first thing she saw—and held it up like a weapon. “Well, um, thanks for coming in, and I’ll just let you sit here for a few minutes, okay? See you next week, Mr. Richmond.”
She took the clipboard holding his client sheet and stepped out of the room.
As soon as the sliding door was closed behind her, she exhaled in relief. The spa’s architecture lent itself to quiet and meditation, and always soothed her nerves. The doors to the massage rooms were built like Japanese screens, with blond wood framing rectangles of frosted glass that looked like thin rice paper but provided the necessary privacy for a bodywork session.
She shook back her thick, dark hair, trying to get it off her neck, where it was clinging like vines in the jungle. The entire hotel was cooled to sub-Arctic temperatures against the May heat outside, and normally Lisa shivered throughout her entire shift. But working on Mr. Richmond’s bulk was no light workout.
She took a deep breath to cleanse and calm herself, as Willow had taught her, and let it out slowly. The relaxation technique did help, sort of. It was just that stress seemed as natural to her these days as panting was to a dog.
She slipped on her sandals and walked down the hallway to the reception area.
“I just finished with Harry Richmond,” she told Clare. “He should be out in a minute.”
Clare, sitting behind the reception counter with one bare, bony foot propped on the desk in front of her, was apparently transfixed by something on her toe. Lisa frowned as she placed the clipboard on the counter. “What are you doing?”
Lower lip caught between her teeth, Clare stayed focused on her task even as her short-cropped burgundy hair swung into her eyes. She flicked it out of the way with a quick toss of her head, never breaking eye contact with the job at hand. “Plucking my toe hairs.”
Lisa watched in horror as her friend yanked mercilessly at what looked to be a particularly stubborn whisker on her big toe. “How can you do that to yourself?”
“It doesn’t hurt. We got these new tweezers in t
oday, for the waxers. They cost almost two hundred bucks. And they really work.”
Lisa raised her eyebrows. “Two hundred bucks, wow. They must work really, really well.”
“Top of the line,” Clare agreed.
Lisa snorted. If anyone could convince herself that a large price tag made it hurt less to rip hairs out of her toes, it was Clare, the queen of painful, high-dollar wax jobs and expensive shoes that looked to Lisa more like torture devices.
She lowered her voice. “If those things are so amazing, maybe you could do Mr. Richmond’s back next.”
Clare brayed out a laugh. “Let’s not go crazy, now. We wouldn’t want to wear the things out on their first day.”
Lisa groaned and passed a hand over her face. “I swear, that man is like a stand-in for my mother. He asks me every single week, without fail, whether I have a boyfriend yet.”
“Is he offering?” Clare cackled at her own joke, then looked thoughtful. “Come to think of it, you could use a sugar daddy. Your car is a bucket of bolts, and your apartment needs a ton of work.”
“A sugar daddy?” Lisa rolled her eyes. “Come on. Mr. Richmond’s a really nice guy, and he’s married. He actually refers to her as ‘my beloved wife.’”
It was embarrassing that she actually went a little dreamy at the thought. Lisa shook her head. She might be fierce these days about her independence, but some small part of her still couldn’t help but long for a man to call her his beloved.
To change the subject, she held up her bottle of massage lotion. “Speaking of Mr. Richmond, who ordered this stuff?”
Clare squinted tawny eyes up at the bottle. “Willow, maybe? I remember she was saying the other stuff was too slippery. And it was, like, made by meat-eating child laborers, or something.” She smirked. “I think the new stuff is made by vegan child laborers, which is way better.”
“Yeah, well, it’s also way too thick.” Lisa dropped her voice to add, “It almost gave Mr. Richmond hairballs.”
As always, the scent of spiced citrus preceded Willow into the room.
“What did?” she asked as she joined them.
“This stuff.” Lisa held up the bottle again. “I hear this is your doing.”
An ethereal smile wreathed Willow’s pale face. “Mmm, isn’t it great? I found out the other lotion was produced by a company that has shares in a slaughter yard out in California.” Her smile disappeared as she shuddered delicately, then looked more closely at Lisa. “Sweetie, you don’t look so hot.”
“The headaches are getting better. More just twinges lately.” Lots and lots of twinges, but Willow didn’t need to know that.
“Have you been doing the deep-breathing exercises I told you about?”
“Yes,” Lisa said, feeling again as if she were facing her mother, this time trying to convince her she wasn’t sick. “As a matter of fact, I just did a mini-breathing session out in the hall.”
Willow inspected her a second longer with her wide, smoky gray eyes. “Good. Keep it up. Remember what I told you: When you breathe in, imagine clear, white light entering every pore and cell of your body. When you breathe out again, imagine slimy greenish-brown stuff exiting through your pores.”
She frowned as Lisa and Clare glanced at each other and started to laugh. “What?”
Lisa nearly snorted. “It’s just that every time you say that, I automatically think of—”
“Diarrhea,” Clare finished for her, bluntly, as usual. “Slimy, greenish-brown diarrhea.”
Lisa shrugged squeamishly. “I might’ve put it a little differently, but yeah. That.”
Willow’s smile was gentle and long-suffering. “I suppose that’s not a very relaxing thought.”
“Not really,” Lisa agreed.
“Oh, come on, Will, it’s nasty.” Clare leaned forward. “Say it. Di-yuh-ree-uh.”
Willow laughed, shaking her head. “No! I won’t, you can’t make me!”
Smiling, Lisa rolled her eyes at the two of them. Their day-and-night personalities and constant ribbing cracked her up all day long, which made it pretty fun to come to work. Sure, she might get sick of Willow and Harry Richmond and everyone else acting like her mother, but at least she knew they were doing it out of caring for her.
Things could be worse, she reflected. Things could be a lot worse.
In that moment, she got The Shiver—the feeling she’d had countless times in the past year, a sudden and unexpected sense of gratitude and anticipation that stole over her at random moments. She’d been through a lot of heartache after her breakup with Rodney, and she was still recovering. But in certain moments, she also recognized at a very deep level that he had done her a huge favor by leaving her. She’d dodged a bullet. And she was immensely grateful for her life, her friends, and even, in a way, her single status. It meant she wasn’t stuck anymore in a relationship with a sleazy narcissistic user.
Willow was addressing her again. “Just do the white light, then, and skip the slime. It really works. Anyway, I was looking for you.” Her multiple silver bracelets tinkled against each other as she handed Lisa a new clipboard with a client sheet attached, already filled out. “Can you take a walk-in? Room four, and he’s all ready to go.”
Lisa frowned down at the sheet, which listed an Adam Masters from Dallas, registered at the hotel for Thursday through Saturday nights. “You can’t do it? I was about to run some errands.” Errands. Right. There went the behind-the-eye throb, predictable as a clock, that usually preceded a doozy of a headache.
Willow looked concerned. “I’ve got Ms. Longbaugh till noon. Should I go tell him we’ll have to fit him in later? You were clear on the schedule, so I said we could take him now.”
Lisa knew she should take the appointment. There was hardly a snowball’s chance in hell that her quote-unquote errand would be fruitful, anyway. “All right, all right. I’ll do it.”
“Thanks.” Willow flashed her a smile and turned on her heel, her long, sky-blue skirt swishing around her legs like water.
Lisa tucked the clipboard under her arm. “Back to your toe hair plucking, then,” she said to Clare. “Be careful, though. An ingrown hair would be a real bitch.”
“And you know, bitch just isn’t my style. Hey—have fun in there.” Clare winked and waggled her eyebrows suggestively. “God, can you believe we were just talking about him the other night, and now he’s—”
The spa phone rang, and she instantly dropped her foot and let the chair fall to the floor. Apparently, four casters on the carpet signaled the switch into professional mode. “Indulgence Spa at Keiko Hotel, this is Clare, how can I help you?”
Lisa squinted at her quizzically. Who had they talked about the other night? Ugh—other than Rodney, of course.
Her eye suddenly throbbed as if someone had squeezed it, and her chest prickled with cold. Relax. White light, and all that crap. There was no way Rodney was down the hall in room four, waiting for her to give him a massage. That would be the cruelest of jokes. Willow and Clare would never do that to her.
Twinge.
“Massages are fun,” she muttered to herself as she walked down the hall. “I love my job.” Even when she had to perform it through a throbbing headache.
She removed her sandals, knocked lightly on door four, and waited a beat before sliding it open.
And was immediately brought up short by a broad, tanned, muscular back. Smooth, powerful shoulders. Dark, wavy hair just begging for her fingers to run through it and mess it up a little. And a really, really great ass, covered only by gray boxer briefs with “Calvin Klein” woven into the elastic waistband.
Chapter 3
____________________________________
The man was apparently about to drop his pants to the floor. Instead, he froze, holding them at thigh level, and turned at the same moment that Lisa lifted a hand to her mouth.
“Oh, crap.” He yanked his pants back up.
The surprise in his dark blue eyes was no doubt mirrored in her b
rown ones. “I’m so sorry,” Lisa said quickly, looking downward as she backed into the hallway. “I was told you were ready.”
“I was getting ready,” he said, “and then I had to take a call. I’m sorry.”
He sounded flustered, but also clearly amused. He was trying not to laugh; she could hear the smile in his deep, smooth voice.
“Please,” she murmured, “take your time. I’ll just come back in a few minutes.” She slid the door closed behind her.
Out in the hall, she pressed her fingers to her burning cheeks. God. God. When was the last time she’d seen a man that good-looking, up close and personal? Maybe never.
His eyes had bored right into her, and though she’d only gotten a quick glimpse of his face—well, the guy was model-good-looking. No, more like Hollywood handsome. He was more rough than pretty, and his eyes and mouth held both humor and character.
And heat. He’d only gotten a quick look at Lisa, too, but he’d stared at her with some kind of ultra-awareness, like he’d wanted to eat her up. And, oh, how she would love to be eaten up by a mouth like that right about now—
“Good Lord, girl,” she whispered fiercely to herself. “Get over it.” Hot men were one-hundred-percent untrustworthy. Hadn’t she learned that the hard way from her experience with Rodney? Thanks to him, she finally understood that men were basically incapable of being handsome and decent human beings at the same time.
And compared to the man she’d just walked in on, Rodney wasn’t hot in the least. He was tepid, at best. Which meant, if good looks and lie-like-a-dog dishonesty were directly correlated, she’d better stay as far away from this guy as possible.
Adam stood with his pants clutched around his hips for a full ten seconds before he remembered himself and yanked them up.
“Hoo, boy.” He couldn’t help but laugh aloud as he zipped them up. This had been a bad idea from the start. He didn’t even have time for a massage. The interview with Kiki James was in just a few hours, and he needed to prepare. But Jess had suggested he do something to relax, and she had this way of being really insistent, even via long-distance phone calls. The Keiko offered in-house massage sessions, and it had seemed like a good idea...
Mister Match (The Match Series Book 1) Page 2
