An Offer He Cant Refuse - By Christie Ridgway Page 0,41

eyes to savor how well things had gone. He'd made it into the house, no problem. He'd make it with Tea, no problem there either.

Maybe he'd even sleep again.

But then... maybe not, he thought with a wry grimace and opened his eyes. With the image of the Kama Sutra players over his head and Tea in his head, it was possible he'd only made his insomnia just that much worse.
Chapter Twelve
"Tell Me, Tell Me" Ann-Margret The Vivacious One (1962)

"You're here early."

Tea froze, midsquat. Her gaze jumped from her own reflection in the mirror to that of her mother, Bianca, standing behind her. Tea's cross-trainers wobbled on the inflatable discs she was standing upon. Instinct made her glance down at her feet to stay balanced, but that only made the wiggling worse. She leaped back to the stable rubber flooring of the workout room at the Kona Kai Resort & Spa.

"I didn't expect to see you either," she told her mother. She'd hoped to avoid the women of her family. She had enough to deal with, like how she could have been so foolish as to allow Johnny Magee to goad her into a date, for example. No doubt about it, the man was dangerous.

Her mother studied her, cocking her head so that her sleek chin-length bob slid across her slender jaw. In black, calf-length yoga pants and a matching form-fitting T-shirt, the older woman defied the stereotype of an Italian-American mother. Bianca Sabatino Caruso, now back to plain Bianca Sabatino, was no Mama Boy-ar-dee, responding to crises and death by retreating to the kitchen and the parish church.

Instead, in sixteen years she'd gone from part-time manicurist to manager, then owner, of one of Palm Springs's premier spas. Expansive and completely enclosed by thick, twelve-foot-high walls, the Kona Kai offered the usual health and beauty services, but was also known for its very private and very pricey guest villas to which the famous or just plain rich withdrew to recover from addiction, plastic surgery, or the convenient catch-all, "exhaustion."

Her example of beauty, hard work, and grace under pressure stood firm in the minds of her three daughters. But she rarely cooked. And as far as Tea knew, Bianca hadn't been to Mass in sixteen years. They'd never once seen her cry.

"You look tired, cara" her mother said. "Maybe you should have slept in this morning."

Tea grimaced. "I thought I might need a little extra time in the gym to sprain my ankle or pull a hamstring or something."

Her mother's dark eyes widened and she laughed. "What?"

Shaking her head, Tea spun toward the mirrored wall again and stepped back onto the stability discs. "Only in Palm Springs would a cocktail party revolve around a tennis match," she grumbled, sinking into another squat while trying to maintain her balance. "Nobody else in the world still plays the game, do they? Except for Serena and Venus, that is."

"There's Jennifer Capriati."

Tea made a disgusted face. "Oh, thanks for reminding me. Now my 'Italians aren't good with rackets' excuse is shot to hell."

A couple came into the workout area and her mother smiled at them as they took their places on side-by-side treadmills across the room. Then she returned her attention to Tea. "What's this all about?"

"Maybe you could give me a real excuse," Tea said, feeling inspired. "You know, like the ones you used to write to get me out of Sister Franca's gym class."

"If you don't want to go to this party, then why did you say yes?"

Tea stalled by making herself complete the set of fifteen squats before answering. She'd been egged into saying yes. For some reason, mention of that plastic-coated predator of a woman, Missy Banyon, got under her skin.

Not to mention how that mirrored ceiling had... muddled her thinking.

"I accepted for business reasons," she lied.

Johnny wouldn't have reneged on their design deal if she'd refused him. He'd asked her to be his date because he was out to get her into bed. She wasn't so foolish that she couldn't figure that out.

But she'd been naive enough to consider herself resistable to the powerful punch of a purely physical lure... and she'd been wrong. So very wrong.

Oh, God. That pulled hamstring was sounding better and better.

Her gaze caught on another guest entering the workout area. Somewhere near fifty, the man had a silver brush of short hair, a deep tan, and a boxer's flattened nose that could benefit from a referral to one of her mother's plastic surgeon buddies. He was