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condition and that he was not exactly repulsive to the female sex.
    “Ready when you are, Taylor,” he said, putting a hand to his waist, ready to strip off the towel as she looked up from the notebook she was writing in, then stared at him like a deer caught in headlights. “Where do you want me?”
    “Siberia would be good,” he thought he heard her say as she shut the notebook with an audible snap and rose to her feet. “I think we need some ground rules, Holden, old sport,” she continued, patting the table, indicating that he should hop up on the six-foot-long surface she had covered with a towel.
    “No biting, eye gouging, or holding and hitting in the clinches?” he suggested, feeling more vulnerable than threatening as she stood on the other side of the table and ran a finger down the length of his spine.
    “Nice, straight spine. Yes, definitely no holding and hitting. That’s good for starters, I suppose,” she answered, walking around to stand in front of him as his legs dangled several inches above the floor. “But I was thinking more of a dress code. I’ll be working on your upper body, Holden, not your—”
    “Gluteus maximus?” Holden offered, and had to smother a smile as he watched color rush into Taylor’s face.
    “Pompous ass was more what I was searching for,” she countered, taking hold of his forearm. “Hop down, please. I want to measure your range of motion. Then we’ll get started.”
    A half hour, several measurements and considerable pain later—although Holden refused to mutter a single curse as Taylor lifted his arm above his head, then clucked her tongue at his impeded movement—he was facedown on the table, staring at the carpet just as he’d supposed.
    Soft, rather comforting piano music drifted from the portable CD player Taylor had turned on, and he reached down to his waist and pulled the towel away, revealing the team shorts he was wearing beneath them.
    “Stupid human trick, Taylor. I’m sorry,” he mumbled in apology, then flinched as she placed soft, yet strong hands on his upper shoulders and began what he would later term as fifteen minutes of hell followed by an equal quarter hour of heaven.
    He’d never been injured before, not even in high school or college. He’d never had more than a few transitory muscle aches, a few leg cramps. A massage, until this moment, had been a mostly pleasurable experience, a sort of cool-down after Sunday afternoon’s game.
    But that was before he’d been tossed around the inside of his Ferrari, his shoulder making sharp, repeated contact with the pushed-in passenger-side door, or spent nearly two weeks sitting alone in his condo, his only exercise coming from punching the buttons on the remote control.
    For the long minutes it took Taylor to “warm” his muscles, he alternately thought of either leaping from the table or whimpering, or both, and for the past fifteen minutes he’d fought the urge to moan in ecstasy.
    The woman had magic hands, capable of inflicting both deep muscle soreness or soothing, strangely provocative pleasure that had him grateful to be lying facedown on the table rather than faceup. When she at last made that evocative trail down his spine with one hand, then held her fingertips against his skin for a few moments, signaling that she was finishedwith him, he didn’t know whether he should say thank-you kindly and crawl away, or offer her a cigarette.
    He decided to crawl away. But as he jackknifed to. a sitting position, the room spun around a single time and he clutched the ends of the table for support.
    “Always sit up slowly after a session, Holden,” Taylor told him, already wiping down the doughnut with scented rubbing alcohol. “You’ve lost all the blood in your head, sitting up so fast.”
    “And I know just where it all went,” he muttered beneath his breath as she turned away to shut off the CD player. How could she pretend to be so indifferent to him? They’d set off sparks on