Fingers marched across Jill Cooper’s cheekbones like the legs of stalking tarantulas. She stiffened, eyes shut tight.

She wanted to retreat from the intrusion, or jump up from this table and escape. What horrors lay behind the other doors? What had she allowed herself to be talked into? Moral support was one thing, but this—

“Too rough?”

Jill opened her eyes and looked into the upside-down face of twenty-two-year-old Sheena Marshall. “No. It’s fine.”

Sheena had an uncommonly bright, perky grin that matched her bright, perky voice. All the employees of this spa seemed to have issues with terminal optimism, except for Sheena’s mother, Mary Marshall, who had been on the opposite end of that spectrum since Jill had graduated from high school with her twenty-seven years ago.

Today, Mary’s daughter was even perkier than usual.

“It’s fine.” Jill wanted to ask when the sheets had last been washed on this massage table, but the question could eventually reach the ears of the owner of this establishment.

Jill was here to provide the owner—her baby sister— moral support for this venture, not to irritate her. Noelle Trask ran a tight ship, and these sheets would be pristine. She would not take kindly to having her employees verbally abused, or even questioned by a client with a few…interesting hang-ups. Especially if that client just happened to be her bossy older sister.

Who would have thought Noelle, the wild child of Hideaway High, would have matured so well?

In fact, Noelle would be a mother before long.

That meant Jill would be an aunt. She felt her tension ease as she smiled at the thought. Aunt Jill. What a wonderful—

A sharp jab on her chin startled her. “Ouch!”

“It’s okay. Just relax,” Sheena said. “You have a few blemishes here. We can take care of that right—”

“I didn’t come here to have my pimples treated.” Noelle had warned Jill that the young masseuse tended to try to fix anything that wasn’t just right. The young woman obviously had delusions of becoming the makeover queen. Jill refused to be her first experiment.

“I just want a nice, painless massage,” Jill said. Actually, she hadn’t truly wanted that.

“Jill Cooper,” came a firm, commanding voice from another cubicle in the large, cedar lined spa, “you agreed to do this. So do it.”

“I agreed to a massage, not to have my face poked and prodded like a—”

“Settle down and let the girl do her job.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jill replied, then muttered under her breath, “Noelle needs to get these walls soundproofed.”