After Hours Bundle Read Free Page A

the cap of a body mist and sprayed some into the air. She sniffed. “Nice. Breezy. Gardenias.” She squirted some under each arm of her white lab coat, recapped the bottle and stuck it onto one of the spa’s shelves.
    Shirlie laughed and tossed her short blond curls. Peg looked at them with envy. Why hadn’t she been born tall, thin and blond, instead of short, curvy and carrottopped?
    â€œCome on,” Shirlie urged. “This new club is fab. Hot men, cold drinks, great music!” She kept on blandishing. Shirlie was twenty-two, fresh-faced and eternally optimistic.
    Peggy herself was twenty-nine, cynical and currently cranky, even though she kept reminding herself that she didn’t like cranky people. “I think what you mean, Shirl, is gay or gruesome men, cheap, watered-down vodka and lip-synching to the latest prepackaged boy band. I love you, hon, but I think I’ll pass.”
    Men were of no interest to Peggy for the next fifty-two weeks; she was committed to finding her center. Before the year was out, she’d be floating in a state of total balance between mind, body and spirit. She’d taken up meditation, she was reading about Buddhism and she not only gave massages and treatments but underwent them regularly herself.
    Peg popped the lids off some new erotic lipsticks from Sugar Lips and inspected them. Nice. High quality. Very kissable. The company was new, and she’d only recently discovered it.
    Since the image for After Hours was oriented to sexy, evening fun she’d tested one and ordered some immediately. They glided on beautifully and tasted delicious.
    She chose three different flavors and drew stripes of them on the inside of her wrist: one cinnamon raspberry, one pink and one deep slut red. “Hmm. Try this on, okay?” She tossed the red one to Shirlie.
    She tested the pinky cinnamon one on herself, applying the Ride Him Raspberry generously.
    Then she lip-synched—puckered up against an invisible microphone—to the Brazilian pop song on the sound system. She moonwalked to the reception desk while Shirlie laughed again. Peg scooped up a box behind the desk and cushioned it against her stomach as she gyrated back to the shelves.
    Producing a utility knife from her pocket, she slit open the box with a dramatic, pseudosexual gesture and tore it open as if it were a man’s shirt.
    Shirlie shook her head at her and tossed the lipstick back, her mouth now fire-engine red. Peg evaluated the color, nodded and then continued to stock new products on the spa’s curvy modern shelves, blinking under the bright halogen lighting.
    Her heart-shaped, freckled face and red hair competed with bottles, jars and tubes for reflection space in the mirrors behind the shelves. Her skin was almost as pale as the white tips of her chipped French manicure. What had possessed her to move to sunny Miami?
    Oh, right: the ability to spend more time outdoors, under an inch of SPF 30 sunscreen instead of two inches of wool.
    â€œYou have to get back into the swing of things sometime,” Shirlie urged. “Not all men are like Eddie.”
    Ugh. Her ex-fiancé. Steroid-popping jock. Compulsive gambler. Borderline alcoholic. Cheap, lying bastard! She’d moved down here from Connecticut to make a new start.
    Peg’s hand tightened around a tube of hair gel so hard that it spit off the loose top and plopped some product onto the floor. She looked down at the mess, reached for a tissue and mopped it up.
    â€œYou deserve so much better than that,” Shirlie said. “And trust me, you have a better chance of finding it—him—while wearing a cute little miniskirt on a dance floor than wearing your baggy, ice-cream-stained pajamas on your couch.”
    â€œHey!” Peggy said. “There are no ice-cream stains on my pj’s. I wash them regularly. And besides,” she added, “since they can now clone sheep, it’s got to be a snap