“I’m sure you’ll agree that in this fast-paced life we all lead, we could certainly use a little revitalization, not to mention a small precious island of time where we can step back from our incredibly busy lives and just take a deep breath and relax.
“And did you know that a good massage can also improve your circulation? That means no more cold hands and feet—if you have them, that is,” she quickly added in case he thought she was insinuating that this was his problem. “Think how good that would feel,” Hailey added with another bright smile. “Massage therapy can also help improve your flexibility, strengthen your muscles and reduce your pain levels by releasing endorphins.”
Her hand on his elbow, she gently guided Dillon toward yet another area.
“Now, right over here, Mr. Fortune, is where we decided to put...”
Hailey continued with what turned out to be a monologue for another good half hour, opening various doors and explaining in vivid, glowing detail what each area was for, be it a sauna, a tanning salon or the aforementioned massage tables. There were also large rooms where various classes would be conducted.
“Giving massages is my specialty,” she told the contractor. “I actually began working in the wellness field as a masseuse.”
She turned around to see how her one-man audience had received that piece of information. Looking at Dillon, she stopped talking for a moment, wondering if he had heard a single word she had said. He certainly didn’t act as if he had. He hadn’t made a single comment or said anything at all during the entire tour she had just conducted.
In fact, if she were to hazard a guess, Dillon Fortune was acting as if he would rather be anywhere else other than here.
Oh, he was being polite, she’d give him that, but the man was also being distant. Extremely distant.
And just like that, without any warning, she was five years old all over again. Five years old and desperately trying to engage her father by attempting to show him the new hairstyles she had so painstakingly fashioned for her favorite dolls. He’d been a workaholic who had never had time for her. All she wanted was just a little of his attention, but he was always too busy being successful to notice her. Eventually, she gave up trying.
Her father had had that same distant, removed look on his face that was now gracing Dillon Fortune’s ruggedly handsome face.
Well, handsome or not, it wasn’t good enough as far as she was concerned. Mentally resolved, Hailey decided to give it one last try. She was determined to engage Dillon Fortune on some level so she wouldn’t feel as if she were talking to a wall.
Or to a man who just didn’t hear her.
“You might have noticed,” Hailey started again brightly, “but everything here at the spa has this really good smell about it.”
Checking his phone for what felt like the tenth time since he’d arrived, Dillon looked up at his incredibly chipper tour guide. Had she just said something about smelling good, or was that just his imagination?
She was looking at him as if she expected some sort of a reaction from him. “Excuse me?”
“Scent,” she repeated. “There’s a really good scent here at the spa. That’s not by accident,” she assured him. “Finding just the right scent is all part of the experience here at Paz. We find that the right scent helps not just soothe our clients but it also invigorates them. We’re planning to use some of these scents as part of our aromatherapy massages.”
Hailey found herself talking fast now, trying not to lose his attention. To that end, she began showing him all the different bottles of the various scents that the spa had stocked up on.
“Care to take a whiff?” Hailey offered, uncorking one of the bottles. It was jasmine and was her personal favorite.
Dillon shook his head. “No, that’s all right.”
He was resisting, she thought and took it as a challenge. She was determined to use this latest example of therapy to get through to this man. These scents were meant to soothe a client, to help that person relax, and if there was ever an uptight person who needed to relax, it was definitely Dillon Fortune.
“C’mon,” Hailey coaxed, “you can take one whiff, can’t you?” She raised the bottle up for Dillon to get a better sense of what was in it. “Go ahead. Try it.”
Seeing that she wasn’t going to back off until he did as she urged, Dillon said, “Okay, fine, let me smell it.” If he didn’t breathe in too deeply, he’d be all right, he told himself. And then maybe she’d terminate this tour and let him leave.
Hailey held the open bottle up to his face and Dillon took a deep breath of the scent.
Perhaps a little too deep because the next thing he knew, he was sneezing.
A lot.
Waving Hailey back away from him, he accidentally hit the bottle she was holding up to him. That in turn sent the entire contents of the bottle flying out and all over his shirt.
And just like that, Dillon found himself utterly drenched in jasmine oil.
Horror stricken by the unfortunate chain of events that had brought about this present dilemma, Hailey could only stare at the drenched man, wide-eyed.
“Oh, my Lord, I am so sorry, Mr. Fortune,” she cried, embarrassed.
Dillon couldn’t comment on her apology at first. Not because he was so angry but because he just couldn’t stop sneezing.
Finally, all but wiped out thanks to his sneezing, Dillon could only hold his hand up, silently indicating that she had to stop saying she was sorry.
Damn it, Dillon thought, he smelled like a damn flower garden. Not exactly the scent he was going for, he thought.
He should have known better than to let this woman anywhere near him with that bottle. He wasn’t normally prone to allergies, but there were certain scents that could just set him off. He had never investigated the matter or found out which particular scents affected him, but he was aware that there were some that could be devastating to him. So he normally steered clear of all of them.
He realized he should have stuck to that instead of allowing himself to be overwhelmed by a rapid-fire motor mouth.
Dillon waved the petite woman away.
Stunned and embarrassed, as well as somewhat annoyed, she moved back. She was still clutching the bottle. It was obviously empty now, but who knew, maybe whatever traces of the scent that could be left coating the sides of the bottle might still be affecting him.
As if reading his mind, Hailey tossed the bottle into a trash can on the other side of the room.
When she quickly rejoined him, Dillon was still sneezing, although not nearly as violently as before. Hailey realized that he was sneezing because the scent was still around him, thanks to the fact that it had soaked his shirt and was now probably on his chest.
Hailey instantly felt just awful. It was clear that Dillon was suffering.
“Again, I am so sorry,” she apologized with feeling. “I didn’t know you were allergic to the oils we used. Why didn’t you say something?” she wanted to know.
It took Dillon a moment to clear his throat enough to be able to answer her. “Because I’m not allergic to oils,” he informed her almost indignantly. And then he was forced to add, “I just have this reaction sometimes when I pass by a department store perfume counter... I mean, not that I go around inhaling perfumes, it’s just that sometimes there are these overly zealous sales people spraying perfumes into the air and—”
Dillon had to abruptly stop because he’d started sneezing again.
Hailey saw only one solution to end the man’s misery. “You’re going to have to take off your shirt,” she told him.
Her declaration caught Dillon totally by surprise. He stared at the spa manager, certain that he had misheard her. “Say what?”
“Your shirt. It’s soaked,” she pointed out in case he had somehow missed that. “Take it off,” she instructed. It was half a request, half
an order. “I can wash it for you.”
The hell she could, he thought. He wasn’t about to strip off his shirt.
“No, that’s all right,” he said as he began backing away. “I can just—”
“What, walk out of here smelling like a flower garden on steroids?” she asked him. There was a skeptical expression on her face. “I don’t think so. At the very least, you might wind up attracting bees and being attacked by them. Besides,” she said, pausing as Dillon sneezed again, “you’re probably not going to stop sneezing until you’re separated from that scent. It’s clearly all over you, and in your case, apparently a little bit goes a long way. So don’t argue with me, Mr. Fortune. Give!” she told Dillon, holding out her hand. “We have a small dedicated laundry area here at the spa. That’s how we get our spa robes so clean and fluffy.”
Dillon still looked really hesitant about surrendering his shirt.
“That’s too much trouble,” Dillon told her. “I can just—”
“Oh, I know what the problem is,” she told him, realizing why he was hesitating so much—or at least she thought she knew why he wasn’t taking his shirt off. After all, he was the spa’s contractor. He didn’t exactly want to be standing around in his semi-bare glory. The man looked as if he had hard muscles rippling under that shirt of his. Still, being shirtless would undoubtedly prove to be somewhat embarrassing for him. She could understand that.
“Oh?” Despite himself, Dillon’s curiosity was aroused by what this woman thought she knew.
“Yes,” Hailey answered enthusiastically. “You need something to put on,” she declared as if she had the inside path to his mind. “Wait right here. I’m going to go find something for you,” she promised, rushing off.
“No, really,” Dillon called after her, “you don’t have to go to any more trouble.”
Especially since she had managed to cause all this trouble just by taking him on a harmless tour of the place to begin with.
But Dillon found he was talking to himself. Hailey Miller, eager beaver par excellence, had rushed off in search of something for him to wear.
Dillon was about to cut his losses and just get out of here before something else went wrong. But his dearly savored escape was quickly aborted when Hailey came hurrying back less than a minute and a half after she had left him standing there dripping.
Instead of a T-shirt with the spa’s logo splashed across the front as Dillon would have anticipated, she came back carrying something white and fluffy.
“Here,” she announced, holding up what looked like one of the spa robes. “It’s the best I could come up with on such short notice—and it does cover everything up.” Although, she caught herself thinking, the man did have a really nice set of muscles on him.
Looking at the robe, Dillon suppressed a groan.
Chapter Two
The next second, Dillon’s mind did a complete 180 degree turn regarding what he was about to do. Although the bubbly manager was holding out the white robe for him to put on, Dillon decided he wasn’t about to put it on.
“No, that’s all right,” he told Hailey, shaking his head. “I’ll just take a pass on putting that on, thanks.” He spared one final look at the offered garment, a disapproving expression on his face. “It’s not exactly my style.” He was rather conservative and the idea of stripping his shirt off in front of a total stranger left him with a bad taste in his mouth.
For a second, Hailey was puzzled. She looked at the robe she was holding out as if she’d never seen it before and reevaluated it.
And then it suddenly dawned on her.
“I didn’t mean that you’d have to wear this when you leave,” she clarified. “This is just something for you to put on temporarily while I’m getting that overwhelming scent washed out of your shirt. C’mon,” she urged, taking a step toward him, holding out the robe again. “The sooner I take the shirt and get started, the sooner you’ll get it back.”
Dillon took a step back, and then another and another. For her part, Hailey just continued coming toward him. He felt like he was being stalked, while for her part, Hailey felt he was being unduly shy. She was only trying to help.
“No, I said it’s okay. Really,” he stressed. He didn’t know how to make his position any clearer to her.
“But it’s not okay,” Hailey insisted. “I can’t have you leaving here like this, with your first impression of the spa being the place where you wound up smelling like a garden full of jasmine on steroids. Consciously or unconsciously, you’ll wind up hating the place. And who could blame you?” she told Dillon. “No, you need to take your shirt off so I can wash it,” Hailey repeated, more forcefully this time.
He made one last attempt to beg off, but it was becoming very obvious to him that the woman didn’t know how to take no for an answer. He opened his mouth to protest again, but before he could say a word, Hailey was already talking.
“Look, Mr. Fortune, I need your shirt,” Hailey stated in a friendly but firm tone.
With every step that this persistent petite woman had taken toward him, Dillon had taken an equal step back. But now his back was against the wall—literally—and he had nowhere to go.
The only way he could get her to stop was to raise his voice and tell her to back off, although that really wasn’t his style. However, as a last resort, he was willing to change his tactics.
And he was just about to, when the slender, vivacious spa manager cut him off at the knees. She raised up those big beautiful eyes of hers, aimed them directly at his and then fired the winning salvo.
Hailey said, “Please?”
And just like that, Dillon felt as if he’d been completely disarmed.
With a loud sigh, he conceded that he had lost the battle.
But how was he going to remove the shirt without feeling like a male stripper?
Hailey had always been blessed with the ability to somehow intuit what was going on in a person’s mind. She applied that ability to the situation she found herself in at the moment. When she did it, she was able to see exactly why Dillon was still hesitating to give her the shirt.
For some reason, he was embarrassed. Dillon was obviously well built, but apparently he was not one of those men who was comfortable about flaunting it.
“Tell you what,” she proposed. “There’s no one around here so you can take your shirt off now. I’ll even turn around to give you your privacy,” Hailey offered, then smiled brightly at him. “You can’t really do better than that, Mr. Fortune.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he countered, contemplating whether or not to tell her exactly how he could have done better. He could have passed up on this royal pain of a tour altogether, he thought. But saying that out loud sounded cruel to him, so he decided to let it go.
Rather than argue with him, Hailey deliberately turned her back on the man she was determined to impress.
“Any time you’re ready,” she cheerfully announced, holding the robe out to the side.
Keeping her back to him, Hailey took a single step backward toward the contractor so that the robe would be more accessible for him.
As she did so, because of the angle where he was standing, Hailey realized that she could see his naked upper torso. It was reflected in the side mirror near him and that image was ricocheted back to her via the larger mirror that ran the length of the left wall.
The end result was that she was able to see exactly what he undoubtedly hadn’t wanted her to see—Dillon in all of his exceptionally sculpted glory.
Hailey’s mouth suddenly went very dry. It became clear to her that she wasn’t really able to swallow even if her life depended on it.
Dear Lord, the man was magnificent!
It was all Hailey could do not to utter the word out loud.
Belatedly, she realized that she had given herself away because in that first ungu
arded, unprepared moment, she had sucked in her breath the way someone sitting in the first car of a roller-coaster ride might do just as that car started to take its first plunge down the steep incline.
No matter how prepared she might have thought she was for the sight of this good-looking male, she was not that prepared. Seeing all those muscles, all those incredibly hard ridges, even secondhand because she was seeing them all reflected in the mirror, she was totally unprepared for the effect that gorgeous body had on her.
Maybe he hadn’t heard her, Hailey thought, crossing her fingers.
The next moment, her hopes were dashed. She could see from the raised eyebrows in his reflection that he’d heard her. Moreover, he probably knew that she knew.
Dillon, however, made the decision to carry on the charade and pretend that he hadn’t heard her sharp intake of breath. It was far safer that way. This way there would be no need to talk about anything.
Ignorance created a welcomed cloak that draped helpfully over everything, he thought as he thrust the shirt in the direction of Hailey’s waiting outstretched hand. “Here’s my shirt.”
“I can tell,” she answered, smiling to herself as her fingers closed over the surrendered article. Without turning around—she could tell by the sound that he was just shrugging into the robe she’d given him—Hailey started to hurry off. “I’ll get this started. Your shirt will be the only thing in the washing machine so it should be done in no time flat.”
It wouldn’t be done fast enough for him, Dillon thought.
* * *
When Hailey returned to the area several minutes later, Dillon saw that her hands were empty. Still, he couldn’t help asking her, “Is the shirt ready yet?”
“The spa’s washing machine is the very latest model on the market,” Hailey proudly told him. “But it’s not that fast,” she politely pointed out. “Again, I am so sorry about all this.”
Fortune's Greatest Risk (The Fortunes 0f Texas: Rambling Rose Book 4) Page 2