After Hours: Midnight Oil / Midnight Madness / Midnight Touch

Oh, God, she thought. He didn’t mean it. He had no intention of asking me out, but he felt obligated to since I called him. He was being polite. I should have said no.

Her face started throbbing with heat. The bath with the toaster was looking better and better…maybe she’d throw in the hairdryer, too, just for a little added excitement.

She heard his voice rumbling through the phone but didn’t register what he’d said. “Um, could you repeat that, please?”

“I asked what time I can pick you up.”

“Right. Of course you did.” How about never?

“Will you be at After Hours? Is nine too early?”

“Nine is fine.” The words came out of her mouth before she could concentrate on a good lie, like she was booked until midnight for the next three years.

“Okay. We can just walk over to Benito’s. I’ll make a reservation.”

Peggy wrapped her natural sarcasm around her like a protective blanket. Fabulous. Don’t take me anywhere out of the strip mall or anything. I might get jet lag. “See you then.”

IN CORAL GABLES, Barrington stared at his own phone, which was attached to the same line he’d just used to fax three possible code violations through to his attorney. He felt a little sick. Flowers?

I am such a bastard.

Had he really just asked her to go to dinner with him? And at Benito’s? The words had popped out of his mouth without him really thinking about it. Benito knew he was the new landlord. Troy would just have to pray he wouldn’t out him.

But that was really the least of his concerns. Was it fair of Troy to eat with her, joke with her, laugh with her, sleep with her—when the whole time he was essentially plotting against her?

When he found a way to break the lease, she was going to hate him. There was no doubt about that.

The problem was that he really wanted to see her again, no matter how he tried to talk himself out of it.

Troy told himself that none of his actions had been premeditated. That he hadn’t meant to take things with Peggy so far. He wouldn’t have let it happen with any other woman, but there was just something about her. She was half tough and half vulnerable. Half glamour and half pragmatism. And she’d fought her way onto a college football team, which impressed the hell out of him.

All of that and the gorgeous red hair, the unbelievably curvy body and the mind-blowing sex…. Could he really blame himself for weakening and asking her out again?

Troy told himself that really, the damage was done. After all, he couldn’t unsleep with her now. So did sleeping with her again make things all that much worse?

He tried to snap his focus back to his own future and his agenda of owning a sporting goods store. He wasn’t a rich, big cheese anymore. He had to make a living. It’s just business, nothing personal.

But somehow he’d gone and made it very personal, hadn’t he? And at some point, there’d be hell to pay.

He tried to refocus on the mounds of paper in front of him, but his concentration was shot. Not only was he a jerk, but…possessive instincts that he had no right to have about Peggy kicked in. Who the hell had sent her flowers? And was it reasonable for Troy to beat the shit out of him?

9

PEGGY NOW EYED the mysterious flower arrangement as if it were a grove of Venus flytraps. She really didn’t care who it was from if it wasn’t from Troy. In fact, it began to give her the creeps.

Who else would spend so much money, make an overblown statement like that? Did she have a real stalker?

At three-thirty, when she had to leave for her coaching gig, she wrestled the Amazonian flower arrangement off of the kitchen table and struggled down the hallway with it, narrowly escaping being poked in the eye by a particularly vicious bird of paradise “beak.”

She emerged at the reception area and told Shirlie that she’d be back.

“What, you can’t bear to be separated from your flowers? You’re going to drive them to the middle school and then the take-out window at Taco Bell?”

“Turns out they’re not from Troy. I don’t know who they’re from, and I don’t like it. So I’m dropping them at the hospital.”

Shirlie blanched in horror. “You can’t just…get rid of those gorgeous flowers!”

“Yes, I can. Some sick person will enjoy them a lot more than I do.”

Ignoring Shirlie’s outrage, Peg hauled them outside and set them on the hood of her Mini Cooper while she hunted for her keys. She found them, unlocked the passenger-side door and wrestled the arrangement into the front seat of the tiny car, dislodging a foam rock and some moss in the process. Then, after a couple of delightful jabs in the ear with another bird’s beak, she zoomed off.

A hospital volunteer gladly took the mini rain forest to cheer up patients in the oncology ward, and Peg tried to put her secret admirer out of her mind.

But even on the middle-school’s practice field, she found herself eyeing a lanky maintenance man and a stoop-shouldered stay-at-home dad as the potential culprits.

Why, she asked herself as she put the girls through a series of sprints and agility exercises, am I so cynical that I automatically assume the flowers are from a weirdo? Why can’t I believe they’re from a nice person who just wanted to brighten my day?

Because there are too many not-so-nice people out there.

She looked out at the girls on the field, her heart softening at the gangly limbs, the braces, the beginnings of some adolescent acne. A few of them had training bras and wore cosmetics and even got periods, while others were freshly scrubbed, wide-eyed and still forbidden to get their ears pierced.

All of them would eventually develop into young women, encounter men and confusing relationships. She couldn’t protect them, couldn’t live their lives for them. But she could give them the gift of athletic competence and foster their self-esteem—so that they had the tools to do battle in what was still so often a man’s world.

No one had prepared her for the nastiness and resentment that occurred when, for example, a woman dared to usurp a man’s position on a college football team.

While most of her teammates had been outwardly polite, if not warmly welcoming, she’d sensed an underlying current of contempt. And that was before the really ugly incident…the one she couldn’t ignore. The reason she’d walked away for good.

Peggy shoved the past out of her mind, blew her whistle and gathered the girls around her. “Okay, ladies, good job on the sprints! Let’s work on some skills training for about ten minutes now, and then we’ll scrimmage. Brianna, Cathy and Dara—I want you focused on blocking.

“Jody, Liz and Kimmie, pay attention to footwork and tip skills. Laura, you work on getting clear so that Danni can pass to you, and Danni, whatever you do, don’t get sacked. How’s that knee, Jen? You holding up okay? I don’t want you to overextend it again.”

She had no time to think about Troy, or their awkwardness on the phone, or his feeble invitation to dinner. But later, on the drive back to the salon and in the blessed coolness of the showers there, she did mull over things.

If she hadn’t called him first, would Troy have called her at all?

Why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free? Her aunt Thelma’s old-fashioned saying popped into her head. Ridiculous in this day and age…but Peggy couldn’t help thinking about her sex-to-football analogy.

It’s easier this way—you don’t have to worry about the downs—you just score.

And Troy’s answer:

It’s like the other team handing you the ball and inviting you over the goal line. That sucks.

She’d definitely invited him over her goal line, and he’d scored multiple orgasms. So perhaps the thrill of the chase was gone. Perhaps he didn’t respect her, now that it was morning.

But why did it always boil down to the woman losing the guy’s respect? What about her respect for the man? Why were women seen as giving something up, rather than receiving something that they wanted? She liked the modern-day response to the free-milk adage: Why buy the whole pig when all you want is a little sausage?

Peggy decided she was a freewheeling woman in charge of her own sexuality and her own life…and her very atypical mother would be proud.