Five's A Crowd Read Online Free PDF

each other from the first moment, and this past half hour had been a living hell of mingled attraction and unbearable tension. Surely he wasn’t the only one who felt this way?
    “You said something?” Taylor asked as he stood up, pulling the towel with him, holding it in front of himself protectively, trying his best to look nonchalant while he felt like a horny teenager.
    “I said, I wonder where Mrs. Helper went. I don’t hear her singing anymore,” Holden improvised quickly, not really caring where Thelma Helper was as long as she wasn’t in the room with him.
    “She said something earlier about taking a nap before her soap comes on. She did tell you not to ask her for anything between three and four, didn’t she? Now, I want you to drink plenty of water for the remainderof the day—I want you to drink plenty of water every day, actually, to help cleanse your system after I’ve massaged some of the gunk from your muscles.”
    “Gunk? That would be the technical term? I’m very impressed.”
    “It’s close enough, okay? Now, if you’ll let me finish? Tonight I’ll show you a few simple exercises you can do on your own, all right? I know I have rubber bands in my case. I think I’ll start you with the yellow one. The red one is too easy.”
    “Rubber band?” Holden eyed her owlishly.
    “It’s just a long, stretchy piece of rubber you use for stretching exercises. Nothing major. People spend entirely too much money on complicated machines and contraptions. A big can of corn, a rubber band—you’d be surprised how much mileage you can get out of just those two things.”
    “The imagination runs rampant, truly,” Holden responded dryly, looking at the clock on the VCR across the room and already wondering what he would do for the remainder of the day. The remainder of the week. The long weeks stretching out ahead of him before he could return to Philadelphia.
    And wondering how long it would be before he couldn’t keep his hands off the infuriating Miss Taylor Angel.
    “You play gin?” he asked, feeling desperate.
    “Penny a point?” she answered immediately, folding up the other towel and laying it on the table. “There’s a deck of cards in the upstairs living room. I’ll meet you there in ten minutes. Bring your wallet.”
    “Agreed,” Holden said, and quickly left the room so that he didn’t have what would have been the pleasant satisfaction of seeing Taylor sag against the edge of the table, roll her eyes heavenward and let out a long, shaky sigh.
    H OLDEN WAS DOWN ten dollars and eighty-seven cents when somebody outside started doing a tap dance on a car horn, the noise persisting until he pushed back his chair, a premonition of imminent doom having settled over him, and walked out onto the balcony to see a vintage cherry red Volkswagen convertible with California license plates parked, cockeyed, at the curb.
    Inside the Bug were a fluorescent yellow surfboard, a small mountain of designer luggage and a deeply tanned young man with sun-bleached white blond hair and a toothful grin that would rival the brilliance of all of the Osmonds’ dental work put together, then squared.
    “Woody,” Holden breathed quietly, fatalistically, motioning for his stepbrother to both stop leaning on the horn and get himself inside, where he wouldn’t scare the locals.
    “Woody who?” Taylor asked from behind him, then walked to the white pipe railing and looked down into the street. “Oh, boy. He looks like a commercial for suntan lotion—or the poster boy for Dumb But Beautiful, Incorporated. A blood relative, I presume?”
    “Don’t be mean. Isn’t it enough you’re beating the hell out of me at gin?” Holden snapped back, then laughed, as she had been close to correct. “Woody is my stepbrother, actually. Did I mention that he was driving here from Malibu? I didn’t expect him yet. He must have broken every speed limit from here to Nevada. Nobody speeds in California, the roads are too