4

MASTERS MISSING, RUMORS RATTLE
OWNERS
byline Rich “The Nose” Newsome

Holden Masters, injured in a single car accident nearly a month ago, is still listed among the missing on the roster of Philadelphia’s favorite NFL team as preseason training camp sets to open next month.

Masters, we all know, became a free agent at the end of last season, but will a reputed bidding war continue when our local hero is nowhere to be found, his physical condition, or lack of it, still a mystery to team owner Phil Gibbons and the rest of the NFL?

And where is Sidney Feldon, Masters’s suddenly shy agent? Is this all a ploy to up the ante? Or has Masters’s career been put in jeopardy by an injury he’s doing his best to hide? So what’s the story, Masters? You “Holden” out on us?

“DID YOU HEAR all of that, Sid?” Holden asked, pacing the living room as he shouted into the speakerphone at Sidney Feldon, who was several thousand miles away in Maui. “Fun’s fun and all that, but Newsome is getting mean. I don’t like doing this to my team, or to my fans. I want to call it off, now.”

Sid’s voice boomed into the room, along with the sound of some Hawaiian chant playing along in the background. “Holden, Holden, Holden, you’re overreacting. Trust me on this. Everything’s fine. I talked to Phil yesterday and assured him you’re only taking a well-deserved vacation. Oh, and did I mention that the latest offer has a hell of a bonus that kicks in if you take the team to another Super Bowl in the next three years? So—it’s been a while since Taylor started working on you. How is the shoulder anyway?”

Holden smiled across the room at Taylor, who had been working at the table, doing a two-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. “Why don’t you ask my slave driver, Sid?”

“Taylor? You there, honey?” Sid asked, and Taylor grimaced toward the phone.

“I don’t like talking into those speakerphones. It’s like talking into an echo chamber,” she complained to Holden quietly, then shrugged as Sid called out her name again. “Hi, Sid—I’m here. What do you want to know?”

“It’s been over three weeks since the accident, Taylor, honey. How much can I hope to know? If he’s behaving, I suppose. That’s the most important. Did you have to threaten him with your black belt in karate? And how the shoulder is, of course.”

Taylor smiled at Holden, who immediately began advancing on her, making puckering motions with his mouth, then pretending to defend himself from imminent attack. If nothing else, they had, over the past ten days, come to understand each other a little, relax a little in each other’s presence, had even begun to joke with one another. It was a nice relationship—when she wasn’t dreaming about him, when she wasn’t touching him, having his body under her hands, having to concentrate on keeping her professional detachment in light of her growing personal attachment.

“Of course he’s behaving himself. And it hasn’t been that long since I started working with him, Sid, so don’t expect miracles. He’s being religious about his exercises, of course,” she responded, now glaring at Holden in mock anger as he began pantomiming holding an invisible woman in his arms and kissing her madly.

“Now cut that out!” she growled quietly, hoping Sid couldn’t hear, then went on more loudly. “His bruises are about gone. I’ve worked a lot of the kinks out of his shoulder, and we’re into strengthening the muscles now. Oh—and I think I want to renegotiate our little contract. Or haven’t you heard about Woody and Tiffany? I want to put in for combat pay.”

“Don’t listen to her, Sid,” Holden said, walking toward the phone. “The kids are on their best behavior. Good talking to you, buddy. Aloha and all that. Call me next week, all right?” Then he pushed the button breaking the connection and turned to Taylor, frowning. “Okay, out with it. What did they do this time?”

Taylor placed another piece into the puzzle. “Nothing much. Tiffany just used my bathroom for this week’s application of temporary hair color, because Thelma promised to short-sheet her bed if she got hair dye all over her own bathroom again. It was a twisted sort of logic, but one Thelma probably wouldn’t appreciate, so I cleaned up the mess myself. Have you seen Tiffany yet today? She used a pink rinse this time. She looks like she did a three-and-a-half gainer into a cotton-candy machine.”

“And Woody?” Holden asked, his grimace showing he was not sure he wanted to hear the answer.

“He wants me to star in a movie he’s thinking of making with a bunch of old college pals,” Taylor related calmly, delighted to see the pained expression that immediately appeared on Holden’s handsome face. “He says it’s a sort of art film, but I think the plot is more in line with Taylor Does Tulsa, frankly. I thanked him, but then graciously declined. You know, those kids have more money than common sense.”

Holden drew his hands into fists at his side. “That idiot needs a keeper!” he exclaimed, looking ready to find Woody and lock him in his room until he grew a brain.

“Relax,” Taylor assured him quickly, for she really did like Woody and knew the boy meant no harm. “It’s only a passing phase, I’m sure of it. Just this morning, he told me he’s thinking seriously about becoming a seal. He is like a fish in the water, I have to give him that.”

“A navy SEAL? He’s got to be kidding!” Holden’s tone was incredulous, to say the least.

Taylor nodded, giggling. “I think he was dead serious, actually, although all he said was that he wanted to be a seal. I found myself biting my tongue so that I wouldn’t ask him if he thought it might be difficult to learn how to balance the ball on his nose.”

Holden let out a roar of amusement, grabbing onto the back of a nearby chair as if to keep himself from falling on the floor convulsed in mirth, and Taylor joined in his easy, infectious laughter.

There had been a lot of laughter over the past two weeks, mingled with a disturbing amount of sexual tension, but Taylor wouldn’t have missed a moment of either of them. She and Holden, after those first horribly tense and awkward few days, had fallen into a sort of rhythm, an unspoken understanding that said, yes, they were attracted to each other and, no, neither of them wanted to act on that attraction.

Woody’s and Tiffany’s presence had made it easier to follow through on this supposed understanding, although Taylor still privately considered those once-a-day massage sessions to be near occasions of sin.

‘Hey—what’s so funny? What’d I miss?” Tiffany chirped from the doorway, looking very California and about as erotic as Bambi with a bikini wax as she stood in bare feet, a six-foot, very tan, vacantly grinning boy standing close behind her, his elbows on her bare shoulders as if she were some sort of supporting prop that kept him from falling down.

A quick count told Taylor that the boy had three gold earrings in his left ear—two in his right ear—and she really did long to ask him why he had shaved his hair off all but the very top of his head. “Oh, and this is Lance,” Tiffany continued, still chirping in her little-girl voice. “Say hello, Lance.”

“Hullo,” Lance said obediently, then began rubbing the sides of Tiffany’s minuscule waist with his big hands, which brought a low growl out of Holden.

“Lance doesn’t know who you are, Holden,” Tiffany trilled, putting up a hand to stroke the boy’s cheek as he began nibbling at her neck. “Isn’t that, like, totally unbelievable?”

Thelma poked her head into the room, talking around her ever-present cigarette. “Get out of that wet bathing suit, young lady, or you’ll get a bellyache. Didn’t your mother teach you anything? Oh, and you—Mr. Masters—there’s a wash basket in the laundry room. Mostly full of your underwear. Go carry it upstairs, why don’t you. It’ll be good therapy.”

The housekeeper disappeared before Tiffany could do more than grimace or Holden could say something he’d regret, leaving Taylor to quickly ask Lance if he wanted a glass of iced tea—or did he think he was going to have Tiffany for lunch?

“No, thank you, ma’am,” Lance responded, sounding dumb as a clam, but showing enough common sense to disentangle himself from Tiffany’s willowy body—and obviously not realizing that calling Taylor “ma’am” had not exactly endeared him to her. “We just ate up on the boardwalk, didn’t we, Sugar?”

“Sure did, Love Buns,” Tiffany responded, then looked at Holden once more, just as obliviously not noticing that a small tic had begun to work in her stepbrother’s left cheek. “Lance knows who Dad-dykins is, of course, but he doesn’t watch sports. Isn’t that a kick?”

Lance spread his hands almost apologetically. “I’m, like, just not into that whole team sports scene, you know? I’m saving up to hit all the great surfing spots. You know, like in that Endless Summer flick? Caught it on cable, and it’s totally rad. You haven’t lived ’til you’ve wiped out in one of those big ones. Waves, that is…” he trailed off, probably realizing that he’d lost his audience—if he’d ever had it. “Well, you know.”

“Tiffany, I want to talk to you. Upstairs in my room. Now,” Holden commanded, walking out of the room without looking at Lance again.

Tiffany shrugged, looking at Taylor. “He’s ticked, isn’t he?”

“Considering the fact that no one is supposed to know he’s here, and you’ve told Lance and God knows who else—well, yes, Tiffany, I’d say Holden might be just a little bit ticked,” she answered honestly, then closed her eyes a moment before doing something dumb—volunteering. “Why don’t you and Lance go back to the beach, and I’ll try to calm him down.”

Tiffany sagged, bent kneed, faking a faint—a typically melodramatic Tiffany response—then recovered just as quickly. “You’d do that for me? Holden can be such a bear, you know. How can I thank you?”

“You can send my body back home to Mom and Dad in Pennsylvania,” Taylor mumbled to the thin air, because Tiffany and Lance—who couldn’t be as dumb as he looked, or talked—were already halfway down the stairs, rapidly making their escape.

HOLDEN HEARD THE KNOCK and turned around as the door opened, running his left hand through his hair. “Tiffany, we both know you’ve pulled some dumb stunts in the past, but—” He broke off when he saw Taylor standing there. “It figures,” he said flatly. “What did she do, hop on Love Buns’s back and tell him to giddyap, getting her away from her pain-in-the-neck big brother?”

“I told her to go,” Taylor said, walking over to the bed and sitting down on the edge of the mattress. “My first aid is pretty rusty, and I had a feeling you weren’t going to be kind.”

Holden stared at her, goggle-eyed. “Kind? Kind? Do you know what she did?” he asked, pointing in the general direction of the front of the house and the beach, where Tiffany was probably already quite happily forgetting the consequences she had so recently escaped. “Why doesn’t she just rent one of those sign-bearing planes that fly past here all day and send it up and down the coast, advertising our address? Sid is going to have a cow.”

“A whole cow? Well now, I’d pay down real cash money to watch that,” Taylor remarked, pulling an emery board out of her shorts pocket and beginning to file her already short, neatly rounded nails, appearing as calm and unflustered as he felt hot and bothered. “Give yourself a moment to think about this, Holden, why don’t you? You just got off the phone with Sid after telling him you didn’t want any more stories from that ‘nose’ guy. You told Sid you didn’t like all this secrecy. And I don’t blame you. You’re not one hundred percent yet—that’s a few weeks away—but you’re good enough to face a few reporters and cameras. So, what’s the big deal?”

He spoke slowly as if speaking to a child. “The big deal, Taylor, is that the best defense is still a good offense. We want to make any announcements to the press, picking our own time, our own place. Which we’re probably going to have to do now, before our resident Atlantic-to-Pacific big mouth plays whisper down the beach to anyone who’ll listen, until we find a dozen reporters and cameras parked outside our front door.”

“Oh,” Taylor said, replacing the emery board in her pocket. “Well, that makes sense. You going to call Sid? If you do, please put him on the speaker again. I love to hear people sputter.”

“I told him this was a bad idea,” Holden said, talking mostly to himself. “I didn’t like it from the beginning. Must have been those painkillers they gave me at the hospital. Yes, that’s it. I wasn’t in my right mind when I agreed to this idiocy. And how do I explain Taylor away, when Sid says I’m just vacationing with my family, or whatever lie he’s going to tell?”

“Maybe Taylor can just fold her massage table and steal away into the night? Maybe you can do the rest of your therapy on your own? I sure won’t cry over that decision,” Taylor suggested quietly, although he could detect an edge of anger in her voice.

“What?” Holden whirled around, looking at Taylor as she sat on the bed, sat on his bed, where he lay awake at night, every night, wanting her beside him. “No,” he said quickly, “I need you here.”

Taylor shrugged. “If you insist. I suppose you could tell the reporters I’m a friend of Tiffany’s? Or maybe even Woody’s girlfriend?”

Holden grimaced. “Nobody would believe either story. Besides, I couldn’t tell either lie with a straight face. Unless, maybe, you were to dye your hair green and only speak in words of one syllable?”

“Funny,” Taylor said, rising to her feet and walking to the sliding glass door that looked out over his private balcony and a less than sterling view of the alley and all the recycling garbage cans. “Well, do what you want, as long as you’ve decided to end the secrecy bit. It was all just a little too cloak-and-dagger to suit me anyway. Could I use your whirlpool tonight? I’ve got a couple of kinks hanging around after our run this morning.”

God had to be punishing him for some forgotten misdeed. It was the only explanation. The thought of Taylor in his bathroom, in his whirlpool, made his throat go dry—and brought out a little bit of the devil that had been in him these past two weeks. “It’s big enough for two, you know,” he said, walking up behind her and putting his hands on her upper arms.

“Holden…” she said warningly, then let her voice trail off as he bent forward and pressed his lips against the side of her throat, using more finesse than Love Buns, but feeling all the swift sexual passion of any hormonally charged teenage boy.

“Hm…?” he answered, sliding his hands down her arms to her elbows and then splaying them against her flat stomach. He would have said more, said something low and hopefully sexy, but he was having considerable difficulty in swallowing. And thinking.

“We can’t do this,” Taylor told him, although he was still clearheaded enough to know that she might be protesting, but she wasn’t moving. In fact, she was melting against him. “You’re my employer.”

“Sid hired you, not me.”

“You know what I mean,” she persisted even as he blazed a trail from the tender skin beneath her ear all the way to the collar of her soft cotton shirt. Her breath became audible as she blew it out in a long, ragged sigh that did wonders for his ego.

When she spoke again, it was rapidly, as if she was trying to say the words as quickly as she could, while they both still believed them. “I’m your therapist. You’re my client. We have a strictly professional relationship that can’t be forgotten just because we have this…this mutual physical attraction. There’s…there’s ethics…and there’s…there’s…oh, the hell with it!”

She turned in his arms and grabbed his face between her hands, yanking his head down so that his mouth crashed against hers.

He needed no further encouragement, pulling her hard against the length of his body as her fingers tangled in his hair, urging her lips open so that he could deepen their kiss. He felt like an animal, like they were both animals, set to devour each other to satisfy appetites too long denied.

His hands stroked the length of her back, cupped her buttocks as he pulled her even closer, then eased her slightly away from him, their mouths still locked together as he bent forward slightly so his hands could skim the flatness of her stomach, cup the fullness of her breasts—all as her hands were working on the front button of his shorts and as he began maneuvering her toward the bed.

“Holden! Who is that woman?”

Holden froze in the act of unbuttoning the top button of Taylor’s shirt, his eyes popping open at the sound of a very distinctive, husky female voice. “Somebody has put a curse on me,” he mumbled in disbelief, his lips still mostly clinging to Taylor’s.

He put his hands on Taylor’s shoulders and disengaged himself reluctantly—oh, so reluctantly—then carefully placed her behind him protectively as he turned to smile at the latest in a long line of beautiful, supposedly disposable women who stood just inside the door that should have been closed.

“Why, hello, Amanda. What brings you to Ocean City?” he asked brightly, knowing he was a dead man.

IT HAD BEEN OVER two hours since Amanda Price had made her entrance. Taylor had spent the time sitting on a towel she’d laid on the nearly deserted beach, silently calling herself every kind of fool she could imagine and then some she couldn’t.

How could she have been so stupid? So irresponsible? So horribly unprofessional?

Why had she gone to the man’s room in the first place, knowing how attracted she was to him?

How could she have allowed him to tear down all the barriers she had been carefully building against him these past two weeks?

How could she have been so careless as to not close the door behind her!

No. No, she’d skip that last part. She couldn’t think like that. It was good that she had left the door open. Good. Fortunate. Lucky, even. Why, she should consider Amanda’s interruption to have saved her from making the second biggest mistake in her life—Geoff, the playboy golf pro, having been the first four years ago. She certainly didn’t need to have her second love affair be with Holden, the playboy quarterback. Some lessons shouldn’t have to be learned twice!

However, if Amanda Price hadn’t come along, then surely Thelma would have, or Woody. That would have been a lot worse than having supermodel Amanda Price and her expensive clothes, beautiful yet strangely expressionless face and choking perfume stumble over her and Holden as they were about to do something she’d simply rather not think about right now.

“She’s gone finally, back to her hotel,” Holden said from above and behind her, then sat down beside her on the sand, his long, bare legs stretched out in front of him. He had the straightest legs she’d ever seen, tanned now, and covered with rapidly blonding hair, even though the hair on his head was dark as night.

How she longed to touch him!

Taylor closed her eyes. “What did you say to her?” she asked, not really wanting to know. After all, the woman had ignored her as if she didn’t exist, walking into Holden’s bedroom and draping herself over his arm, telling him he had been a naughty boy to have gone off without telling her where she could find him when she got back from her swimwear shoot in the Virgin Islands.

Lucky for her, the model had gone on saying, there had been a small item in the New York papers this morning, saying that Woody and Tiffany LeGrand, children of Peter LeGrand, had been seen cavorting on the beaches in Ocean City, New Jersey, of all places.

“You’d said something to me about Woody spending the summer with you when you turned down my invitation to Rome. So I took a chance and called out to California, and the housekeeper gave me

this address,” she’d explained as she dragged Holden through the kitchen and down the steps to the upper living room, away from Taylor. “Aren’t you proud of me, Holden? I’m a budding detective! Now, tell me all about your arm. Is it true that you need major surgery on something called your rotator cuff—and that your career may be over?”

“I guess I hadn’t realized the rumors had gotten so bad, so blown out of proportion,” Taylor said now, pushing her bare toes into the cooling sand, wondering just how long it would take to dig herself a hole deep enough to bury herself in. Or was she the only one who remembered what had almost happened in Holden’s bedroom? Besides, if he dared to try apologizing for having kissed her, she’d have to slug him. It was better to talk about Amanda and the press, and leave the subject of that fairly explosive interlude to die a natural death. “Did you convince Amanda that you don’t need surgery?”

“I did.”

She laid her elbows on her bent knees and stared out at the ocean as sea gulls laughed overhead, mocking her nervousness. “And did you tell her you’re just fine, that your career isn’t in jeopardy?”

“That, too.”

Why was he talking to her in shorthand—barely getting out more than two words at a time? Something else was wrong. She was sure of it.

Taylor turned her head, rested her chin against her upper arm and looked at Holden out of the corner of her eye. Oh, yeah. Something else was wrong, all right. That tic was working in his left cheek again.

“What else did you tell her?” she asked, feeling an apprehensive knot beginning to tighten in her stomach. “I mean, how did you explain me? Explain, um, what we were doing?”

“Oh, that was simple enough,” he said, still speaking in a monotone and still not looking at her. “I told her we’d just gotten engaged.”