Midnight Oil

Midnight Oil
Karen Kendall

Spa manager and massage therapist Peggy Underwood's new catchphrase is impulse control.No men — particularly jocks! She's going to focus completely on herself for a change. But as soon as former football player Troy Barrington walks through the door, Peggy's control takes a time-out. Especially when Mr. Sex-in-the-Flesh ends up lying naked on her massage table!As the new landlord, Troy is on a reconnaissance mission. He's looking for a way to close the spa…permanently. But as soon as he relinquishes himself to Peggy's hands, Troy knows he's headed for trouble — the kind with red hair and a smart mouth. And he can hardly wait to get there….

KAREN KENDALL

Midnight Oil

TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID

PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

To my editor, Wanda Ottewell,

who is always a lot of fun to brainstorm with.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

1

TROY BARRINGTON FELT like a pervert, sitting here in his car in a dark parking lot at 10:00 p.m. Either a pervert or a cop on a stakeout, except he didn’t have any doughnuts or one of those cool police radios.

“What are you doing, Uncle Troy?” asked his eleven-year-old nephew, Derek, via cell phone.

He visualized the kid, tousled blond hair sticking out every which way and a chocolate stain on the Marlins T-shirt he liked to sleep in. His skateboard was probably at the end of his bed. “Just sitting out on the porch, smoking a cigar,” Troy lied. He couldn’t tell an eleven-year-old what he was really up to: spying on a bunch of people he didn’t know but suspected were up to no good. He also couldn’t tell Derek that one luscious redhead in particular made the stakeout a lot less boring than it could have been.

“Why are you still awake?” Troy asked, tearing his eyes away from her very interesting curves. “Huh? You should be in bed.”

“Mom says cigars are bad for you,” Derek told him, ignoring the question.

“They are. Terrible. But someone gave me this as a gift, and I didn’t want to throw it away.” It was true that he had a cigar in his glove box, from his friend Amos, whose wife had just had a baby girl. His old teammates were dropping like flies to wives and kids. He scrubbed a hand over his face. Hadn’t it been just yesterday that they were all a bunch of rowdy, testosterone-crazed twentysomethings? He had no idea how he’d suddenly fallen into his midthirties, and still had no desire to settle down with a woman.

“Well,” Derek said judiciously, “I guess that’s okay, then. So did you fix the holes in your porch?”

“Nope. That’s my weekend project, big guy. You wanna help?”

“Yeah! Can I really?”

“Uh-huh. If you promise to hang up the phone and go to bed now. I’ll bet your mom doesn’t know you’re still up.”

Guilty silence.

“Does she?”

“No. Are you gonna tell?”

“Not if you get to bed this minute. I’ll talk to her tomorrow and see if I can pick you up Sunday morning, okay? After church.”

“How ’bout before church?”

“After church. But good try.”

His nephew sighed. “Can I use a power saw?”

“Absolutely not. But you can measure and mark for me, and help in other ways.”