After Hours: Midnight Oil / Midnight Madness / Midnight Touch

“Peachy,” Troy growled. Real estate had gone sky high in South Florida, and Coral Gables was a primo location, so his three-bedroom shack was a great investment in spite of its appalling interior. Troy actually looked forward to the do-it-yourself challenge—it would distract him for the next year or so while he accustomed himself to not being part of a football organization. Until he got his sporting goods store going, he had way too much time on his hands.

Troy was also going to have to accustom himself to being on a budget. As a former strong safety for the Jacksonville Jaguars, he wasn’t used to that. But the stock market had been performing poorly, he had his nieces and nephew to think about and he’d lost his coaching job in Gainesville after the team went on a losing streak. Just business, nothing personal.

In a heartbeat he’d gone from being a big cheese in Jacksonville to a…cheese doodle. He was unaccustomed to being a nobody and, frankly, it abraded his ego. Hell, nobody in South Florida even recognized him, much less asked for an autograph.

But beyond that, Troy wanted to control his own financial future: he was sick of being jerked around like a puppet by various football organizations, just as he was sick of women who used him for his connection to them. It was time to change all of that.

He considered hiring Jerry’s intern to snoop around After Hours, but decided to suck it up and do it himself. He’d park in the back, and hopefully the curvy redhead wouldn’t recognize him in daylight. All she’d really seen was a head in a car.

He ended the call with Jerry, cutting off his banter about the Miami Heat and the unbearable mosquitoes this time of year. At a cool three hundred an hour, Jerry loved to have long conversations with his clients and then bill them for the pleasure. Once, Troy would have played along, but not now. Jerry could discuss free throws and insect larvae at somebody else’s expense.

Troy glared again at After Hours and the hundreds of foo-foo bottles and jars in the window. Snooty, tooty-fruity place.

He pictured canoes, camping equipment, mountain bikes in that window. Hiking boots and parkas, wet suits and surfboards. Rugged, outdoorsy stuff.

He pictured a gathering place for sports-minded, manly men. Hell, maybe he’d install a wide-screen TV and some seating and serve beer himself! If the Pretty Palace could, then he sure as hell could. The vision grew in his head until he saw himself presiding over a retail version of Cheers. He’d have company all day and everyone would know his name…he’d be, if not a big cheese, a medium one.

Troy gave a mighty yawn and thanked the Guy Upstairs that he didn’t have to play Peeping Tom again tonight. Being sleep deprived made him cranky.

But no matter what it took, he’d get this silly salon and spa off his property. He just had to get inside the damn place and figure out how.

2

“PEG,” THE RECEPTIONIST reasoned at After Hours Salon and Spa, “how are you going to meet Mr. Right when you won’t go out?”

Peggy Underwood, the spa’s manager and massage therapist, rolled her eyes. “I’m going to buy him from a pet store, already housebroken.” She no longer believed in Mr. Right. She was pretty sure that he’d been dreamed up by Disney, like Donald and Goofy and Mickey.

“Peggy! You’re so cynical.”

“Yeah. And I refuse to apologize for it. I told you about the weirdo staring at us from the parking lot last night.”

Shirlie looked uncomfortable. “He was probably harmless, but I’m glad you got rid of him.”

Peg twisted off the cap of a body mist and sprayed some into the air. She sniffed. “Nice. Breezy. Gardenias.” She squirted some under each arm of her white lab coat, recapped the bottle and stuck it onto one of the spa’s shelves.

Shirlie laughed and tossed her short blond curls. Peg looked at them with envy. Why hadn’t she been born tall, thin and blond, instead of short, curvy and carrottopped?

“Come on,” Shirlie urged. “This new club is fab. Hot men, cold drinks, great music!” She kept on blandishing. Shirlie was twenty-two, fresh-faced and eternally optimistic.

Peggy herself was twenty-nine, cynical and currently cranky, even though she kept reminding herself that she didn’t like cranky people. “I think what you mean, Shirl, is gay or gruesome men, cheap, watered-down vodka and lip-synching to the latest prepackaged boy band. I love you, hon, but I think I’ll pass.”

Men were of no interest to Peggy for the next fifty-two weeks; she was committed to finding her center. Before the year was out, she’d be floating in a state of total balance between mind, body and spirit. She’d taken up meditation, she was reading about Buddhism and she not only gave massages and treatments but underwent them regularly herself.

Peg popped the lids off some new erotic lipsticks from Sugar Lips and inspected them. Nice. High quality. Very kissable. The company was new, and she’d only recently discovered it.

Since the image for After Hours was oriented to sexy, evening fun she’d tested one and ordered some immediately. They glided on beautifully and tasted delicious.

She chose three different flavors and drew stripes of them on the inside of her wrist: one cinnamon raspberry, one pink and one deep slut red. “Hmm. Try this on, okay?” She tossed the red one to Shirlie.

She tested the pinky cinnamon one on herself, applying the Ride Him Raspberry generously.

Then she lip-synched—puckered up against an invisible microphone—to the Brazilian pop song on the sound system. She moonwalked to the reception desk while Shirlie laughed again. Peg scooped up a box behind the desk and cushioned it against her stomach as she gyrated back to the shelves.

Producing a utility knife from her pocket, she slit open the box with a dramatic, pseudosexual gesture and tore it open as if it were a man’s shirt.

Shirlie shook her head at her and tossed the lipstick back, her mouth now fire-engine red. Peg evaluated the color, nodded and then continued to stock new products on the spa’s curvy modern shelves, blinking under the bright halogen lighting.

Her heart-shaped, freckled face and red hair competed with bottles, jars and tubes for reflection space in the mirrors behind the shelves. Her skin was almost as pale as the white tips of her chipped French manicure. What had possessed her to move to sunny Miami?

Oh, right: the ability to spend more time outdoors, under an inch of SPF 30 sunscreen instead of two inches of wool.

“You have to get back into the swing of things sometime,” Shirlie urged. “Not all men are like Eddie.”

Ugh. Her ex-fiancé. Steroid-popping jock. Compulsive gambler. Borderline alcoholic. Cheap, lying bastard! She’d moved down here from Connecticut to make a new start.

Peg’s hand tightened around a tube of hair gel so hard that it spit off the loose top and plopped some product onto the floor. She looked down at the mess, reached for a tissue and mopped it up.

“You deserve so much better than that,” Shirlie said. “And trust me, you have a better chance of finding it—him—while wearing a cute little miniskirt on a dance floor than wearing your baggy, ice-cream-stained pajamas on your couch.”

“Hey!” Peggy said. “There are no ice-cream stains on my pj’s. I wash them regularly. And besides,” she added, “since they can now clone sheep, it’s got to be a snap to clone a single-cell organism like a man. I’m thinking we’ll be able to order men from a catalogue within about five years. I could be really into that.”

Shirlie wrinkled her nose. “That would take all the fun out of life. What about the thrill of the chase?”

Poor thing. She was still young enough that she got excited about the whole silly mating dance. “What thrill? Shirlie, I’d get a huge charge out of just ordering up a man without the burping or farting gene. Or the beer-gut gene! Can you imagine the possibilities? You might even be able to special-order one with an on-off switch. Or even better, an erect-limp switch!”

“Eeuuwww.” Shirlie’s expression was priceless.

Peg stuffed an unruly curl behind her ear and said, “Oh, right. You’re still too young to have had more than a five-minute-long relationship, so maybe none of these issues has come up. Or, uh, refused to come up, as the case may be.” She produced some fiendish laughter. “Mwah-ha-ha-ha, my pretty! Nothin’ but good times ahead.” She winked.

“Peggy, I wouldn’t date a…nonstarter.”

Peg scooped more bottles and tubes out of a box, her tongue in her cheek. “Well, here’s the thing, honey. You don’t always know at first. For example, take my advice and stay far, far away from any guy who’s on steroids.”

“Oh, my God! You don’t mean that Eddie…”

Peg nodded. “I could write a book called Limp Lovin’. The man popped so many pills that his dong had turned to linguine.”

Shirlie’s expression was priceless. “Hey, at least you know he wasn’t cheating on you, right?”

Peg choked. “True. Not without a Popsicle stick and some electrical tape, anyway.” She didn’t feel in the least bad about revealing her ex’s dark secret, since the creep had actually swapped the stone in her engagement ring for a cubic zirconia. Which brought her to another piece of advice for Shirlie. “And, hon, take it from me—don’t date any guy who shows an affinity for gambling.”

“O-kaaaay.”

“Then there are the ones who hate women, even though they like to have sex. And the ones who have inferiority complexes and have to bring you down so they can feel superior. And worse, there are—”

Shirlie clapped her hands over her ears and moaned. “Stop! Look, maybe it is a good idea for you to stay home tonight. I just want to go dancing and have a good time, Miss Wet Blanket.”

Peg grinned at her. “Yeah, well, it’s better than being Mrs. Wet Blanket, married to a guy who’s so cheap that his wallet creaks when he has to open it. Or—”