‘What am I doing in here? This is where I was brought. What are you doing in here?’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Sherry said, looking as confused as the rest of them. ‘I think there’s been a terrible mistake. I thought this was a couple’s massage? Like the other two? I thought the other woman said...I thought you were...together.’
Luke glared at the guy whose hands had stilled on the back of Claudia’s thigh. The masseur removed them, eyeing Luke warily. ‘No,’ Luke said tersely. ‘We’re not.’
‘Oh, dear, I’m terribly, terribly sorry,’ Sherry apologised, wringing her hands, looking more mortified than Luke had ever seen another living person. ‘No worries,’ she said, ‘I can rebook you. It’ll need to be tomorrow—we’re fully booked today.’
‘I won’t be here tomorrow.’
‘Perhaps another day,’ Sherry the mortified asked.
Luke’s jaw clenched. ‘I don’t need a massage,’ he said and turned to go.
Claudia frowned as a wave of crankiness accompanied Luke’s dismissive statement. Oh, no. Avery was right—he did need a massage. Now more than ever—clearly! And she’d be damned if she was going to be the one to stand in the way of it.
‘Wait,’ she said as he neared the door. ‘You stay and I’ll go. You’re working two jobs and long hours. You need the massage more than I do.’
Luke stopped and turned to face her. ‘I’m fine, Claude.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I insist.’ She craned her neck around further until she could see the man whose fingers had been working magic until this rather abrupt interruption.
‘Can you cover me please, Marco?’
Marco went to shift the towel from Claudia’s derrière and Luke stepped forward on an alarmed, ‘No.’ Marco stopped and shot Luke a puzzled look. Claudia was looking at him as if he’d lost his mind as well. But he’d seen more than enough of her skin for one day.
In the few weeks he’d been home he’d seen more than enough of Claudia to last him a lifetime.
‘You’ve had more stress than all of us combined,’ he said. ‘And besides...’ Luke glanced at Marco. ‘You sounded like you were enjoying it. Very much.’
Claudia couldn’t deny how much she’d been enjoying it. How much she’d been looking forward to a massage ever since Avery had mentioned the spa idea yesterday. And to deny herself Marco’s fingers would be a particularly heinous form of torture.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she said, suddenly annoyed at him and herself for acting as if they were in some Victorian melodrama. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t already seen each other in next to nothing. ‘The table’s here, Sherry is here...we shared a bed for years. Just lie down already.’
Luke was aware of the two masseurs exchanging looks. ‘We were kids,’ he clarified to Sherry. And then flicked his gaze back to Claudia. ‘I’m fine.’
Claudia glared at him. ‘And dandy?’ And then when he didn’t look as if he was going to give in she said, ‘You’re making me tense just looking at you.’
Which really wasn’t a lie. The thought of what he had on under that robe was making her really freaking tense. They’d asked her to strip everything off so she assumed he had too...
Luke held Claudia’s gaze for long seconds. ‘Fine,’ he muttered again. He turned to Sherry. ‘Where do you want me?’
Claudia wasn’t sure if he was being deliberately provocative but she gritted her teeth as she placed her face back in the hole on the massage table and prepared to go back to her happy place.
Not easy to do with six feet four inches of pissed-off man right beside her.
Naked pissed-off man.
Luke found it difficult to relax even under Sherry’s expert hands. Everything in the environment around him was conducive to a state of relaxation—the low lighting, the essential oils, the rainforest music—he just couldn’t find it. All he could see behind his shut lids was big male hands on the backs of Claudia’s legs, slippery and kneading.
And they weren’t Marco’s.
Luke tensed even more as the deep melodic timbre of Marco’s voice reached him. ‘I’ll lift the towel if you want to turn over to your front.’ Claudia’s table creaked slightly and he swallowed as he tried not to think about her turning over.
Do not think about Claudia naked and jiggling.
‘You’re very tense,’ Sherry murmured somewhere near his ear in the same melodic timbre that blended with the music and ambience.