“I can help,” she said. “If you let me.”
He opened one eye to look at her. “How’s that?”
“I can rub the stiffness out of your neck and shoulders. I’m good at it,” she added hastily when he opened the other eye to regard her with a look she couldn’t fathom. “I used to do it for my mother all the time when Dad was sick. She said it helped. I have strong hands, I . . .”
Way to leave an opening, Emma.
“Please don’t make fun.”
To his credit, he looked surprised that she would even think that was a possibility. “I won’t,” he said. He looked at her hard for a moment. “Really? That would be great, but don’t feel like—”
“I wouldn’t offer if I didn’t mean it,” she said, more sharply than she’d intended to. It was habit, this reaction to being questioned, and one she knew she needed to work on. Especially where Seth was concerned. At least he didn’t seem to take offense.
“Okay,” Seth said, looking around. “Well, ah . . . where do you want me?”
There was a quick flash of the smile that melted her, sending her mind directly into the gutter.
Oh, you have no idea.
Out loud, however, she tried to cling to her dignity as best she could.
“You could sit on the floor in front of the chair,” she said. “Or grab a pillow and lie on the floor. Either wa—”
He was off the couch and out of the room before she could finish her sentence, which she supposed was enough of an answer. “If you’ve got muscle ointment, you might want to bring that, too,” she called after him as he disappeared upstairs. She slipped off her heels while she listened to him fumbling around upstairs, her heart quickening just a little.
This is completely innocent. You’re doing something
nice for him because he’s hurt,
she thought. Unfortunately, she was as bad at lying to herself as she was at lying to anyone else. She really did want to help. She also really wanted to touch him without looking like she was all about touching him, so this was perfect.
Seth hurried back downstairs with a pillow tucked beneath one arm and a tube of ointment in his hand. When his eyes met hers, he smiled, and it was the first time she’d seen him genuinely happy since she’d arrived. Apparently he was really easy to please.
“That was quick,” she said.
“You’re going to understand why when you start,” he said. “I’ve been putting off finding a masseuse around here, but I really need to. I had one back in Florida.”
He dropped the pillow in the middle of the rug, and without an ounce of hesitation dragged his shirt over his head. Emma forgot to breathe. She may have forgotten her own name for a few seconds. It was one thing to ogle good-looking guys in movies, but this was a living, breathing male now shirtless just a few feet away, and in her opinion, he was completely perfect. His gold-dusted skin rippled over lean, tightly corded muscle as he moved. Emma drank him in, savoring the way his chest tapered down to a narrow waist, the dusting of dark hair from his navel to somewhere beneath the waistband of his shorts. Tattooed on his right biceps was a raven in flight, simple and black and beautiful.
Seth seemed oblivious to the admiration. He crouched down and lay on his stomach, burying his face in the pillow.
“Ready when you are,” he mumbled from deep in the fabric.
Emma looked at him, prone and completely at her mercy, and wondered how exactly she was supposed to
get through this without dying of embarrassment. She’d never given a guy a back rub. She never gave anyone back rubs. It involved a lot of touching, which she tended to be reserved about with all but those closest to her. Still, this had been her idea, and Seth was certainly enthusiastic about it once she’d insisted. After a moment of consideration, she got up, walked over to him, and hiked up her skirt to sink carefully down on her knees beside him.
She picked up the little tube lying beside him and opened it, rubbing the mint-scented ointment over her palms while she tried to come up with a plan of attack. She’d come this far. Running wasn’t an option, so she supposed there was nothing for it but to follow through and hope she didn’t burst into flames from shame, lust, or some unholy combination of the two.
Tentatively, she put her hands on the tightly bunched muscles between his neck and shoulders and began to knead. Seth groaned, and she knew right away why this had appealed to him.
“How do you walk around like this?” she asked. “You’re completely knotted up!”
She dug her fingers in and began to work at the knots, grateful to have a problem to focus on. It kept her from thinking too deeply about her hands being on his bare skin. He muttered something unintelligible.
“What?”
Seth turned his face to the side, his eyes remaining closed. “I get kind of tense.”
“You hide it well,” Emma replied, rubbing circles into the back of his neck with her thumbs. The muscles snapped beneath them. “If this hurts, I’ll let up.”
“No,” he said quickly. “This is good. It always hurts before they loosen up.”
They fell into a silence that was surprisingly comfortable, Seth’s breathing slow and rhythmic while Emma worked on him. With tension like this, it was no wonder he used to go for regular massages, she thought. It was hard to believe that all this could be from stress—he always seemed so calm. Much calmer than she was. It made her wonder about him, all the parts of his life before this. She’d gotten a little of the abbreviated version, but it had told her almost nothing that she really wanted to know.
Her hands moved over him, kneading, rubbing, her hands warming to the task. Seth hissed when she found another nasty knot in his right shoulder.
“
Shit
. Right there. Don’t stop.”
His voice was a little slurred, and his words, spoken in the haze of some combination of pain and pleasure, sent Emma into a fit of giggles she couldn’t seem to hold back. She tried. Desperately. But after biting her lip nearly hard enough to break the skin and hoping the shaking of her shoulders wasn’t something he’d notice, a few breathless gasps of laughter escaped anyway. One eye opened to look at her.
“What’s funny?”
“You.”
A half frown. “Hey.” But he didn’t seem offended, only vaguely amused. “I’m just lying here.”
“I just thought, you know, if someone came to the door and heard you . . .” She pictured it and started laughing again. “Another chapter in my new life as a shameless harlot.”
Seth’s eye closed, but she got a big smile in exchange, along with a soft huff of laughter. “You have a dirty mind under all that polish. I knew I liked you.”
She flushed, but her smile remained.
“You’re good at this.” He sighed. “Hands tired?”
“No.” In fact, she thought she might be able to do this for hours as long as it was Seth. He made her nervous enough normally that she hadn’t expected to ever feel powerful around him. But that was exactly how she felt, unsure though she was of her actual talents in this area. He responded to every nuance of her touch, his muscles tightening and then relaxing, soft hisses and relieved sighs escaping his lips every now and then. She knew it was foolish, but right here and now, just the two of them, Emma felt as though Seth was hers in a way no one had ever been. Hers to touch. To take care of. To keep.
No. Look at his eye. He’s got a dangerous job. That little injury is just the tip of the iceberg. You can’t fix everything, Emma. And some hurts can’t be healed.
Her smile faded, and she dug her fingers in a little harder.
“Ouch!” Seth flinched. “Could you, ah, just a little lighter right there. Ow.”
“Sorry.” Emma immediately gentled her fingers. “Forgot what I was doing.”
“It’s okay.” He shifted a little, and she moved her hands slightly farther down his back, kneading taut muscles that gave a little more readily as she worked them. “You said you used to do this for your mom?”
“Yes. My dad had cancer. We had hospice come to the house, near the end, and Mom sat with him all the time. She was so afraid he’d leave without her being right there.” The memory could still make her ache with the old sadness. As long ago as it had been, she remembered it so clearly. Everything in their house seemed to have become muffled, every sound, every feeling—there had been a sense of stillness all the time, of waiting, accompanied by a faint medical smell that still made her avoid
hospitals like the plague. “Anyway,” she continued, “Mom was so tired, and she used to fall asleep in chairs and things, despite being under more stress than I could even comprehend. I didn’t know how to help. I didn’t know how to do anything. But one day her neck was in complete misery, and she asked if I could get at this one spot she couldn’t reach.” Emma remembered it well, how happy it had made her to be able to do even a small thing that could make her mother smile. “I was hired. And that was that.”
“How old were you?”
“Twelve.”
“That’s pretty rough.”
“Yes. It was.” It was odd to talk about it. She didn’t think she’d said so much on the subject for years. After everything, after the funeral, and the grief counseling, and the endless condolences, she, Sam, and their mother had just . . . put it away. The grieving had been so exhausting that there had come a day when they’d all just wanted to change the subject. Not that the pain hadn’t lingered. There’d just been nothing left to say.
“And you’re the older child, right? You probably looked out for your sister even before all that.”
“Sam would call it ‘bossing,’ but yes, as much as she’d let me. She was stubborn, though. We have very different ways of dealing with things.” She looked at his closed eyes, his dark lashes twined together. “Why?”
“I’m just interested.” His eye opened just a bit to look at her. “In you.”
Just like that, she was flustered all over again. How she could stay completely cool in combative business situations but be unable to deal with a compliment from a good-looking—okay, hot—man was one of her life’s greatest mysteries. Though in her defense, she didn’t get
a lot of interest from hot men in the first place. It wasn’t like she could practice.
“Oh. Well, um, what about you?” she asked, wanting the spotlight off herself. “Any personal tragedies I can pry into to discover the inner you?”
He chuckled, his back moving beneath her hands. “No.”
“Can you at least tell me why you were so upset tonight?”
He went quiet, and Emma had just decided he was going to ignore the question when his voice rumbled up from where his face was half-buried in the pillow. “An old army buddy of mine killed himself. I got an e-mail from his sister.”
Her hands stilled. “Oh. I’m sorry, Seth.”
“Me, too. We were never great about keeping in touch, but it was always good when we talked. I knew he was dealing with some things. I just didn’t think . . . I don’t know.” He exhaled heavily and fell silent.
She chewed at her lip, completely at a loss for what to say. One of the things about having been a relative hermit in her personal life for so long was that she’d avoided having to deal too closely with other people’s feelings—particularly the bad feelings. Parties were happy events, by and large, even if the planning could make people less than pleasant sometimes, and in any case, she was just the woman behind the curtain. Her level of emotional investment was different.
With Seth, she was reminded of exactly how little she could do in the face of someone else’s pain. A part of her, a part she was instantly ashamed of, wanted to run away from it. But a different part, one she was surprised to find existed, pushed her to stay. To try, even if she had no idea what she was doing.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked quietly.
Seth rolled onto his back, rearranging himself so that he looked up at her from where he lay on the pillow. She’d lifted her hands away, but he took them gently in his and brought them down again, holding them against his chest. She could feel the steady beat of his heart as he studied her, his eyes dark and serious.
“Not really,” he said.
Emma pressed her lips together and exhaled, frustrated. Being here like this, kneeling beside him with her hands against his heart, somehow felt like the most intimate position she’d ever been in with a man. But despite that, and despite the way he’d prompted her to tell him about one of her oldest, deepest wounds with so little effort, he was going to hold back. That it annoyed her was her own problem, not his, Emma thought. But it also made her realize something, something she would have thought impossible even a week ago.
I want more.
More of him. More from him. Just . . . more. And though it was as terrifying a thing as she’d been confronted with in years, Emma knew herself well enough to understand that it wasn’t something she could just banish. And because she apparently had a masochistic streak, Seth seemed like he was going to be more like Shrek than Prince Charming—layered, like an onion.
A fixer-upper. Great.
She really wasn’t sure her fixing abilities worked on humans. They hadn’t worked at all on her.
“What are you thinking about up there?” Seth asked, drawing her back into the moment. At least it was a good moment, she decided. Half-naked man, her hands on him, no company. Bad for strategizing, but good for other things. Things she really needed to consider before jumping onto—er, into anything.
“I was thinking that I’d like to see you again,” she said.
One eyebrow quirked up, as did a corner of his mouth. “Oh yeah? Like an actual date? Not just for public consumption?”
She gave him a self-deprecating smirk. “Yeah. The fake-date thing was a bad idea.”
“The hell you say.”
She liked him this way, playful and sweet. She just wished he’d let her see the rest of what was underneath, the bone-deep sadness she’d seen when he’d opened the door. She understood that feeling, even if he wouldn’t say much about what had inspired it.
Patience,
she thought. Too bad she’d never had much.
“Well, as my sister would say, I’m practically perfect in every way . . . but every once in a while even I can screw up.”
“Your sister thinks you’re Mary Poppins?” Seth asked. He looked her up and down so thoroughly that Emma felt like he’d stripped every shred of clothing off her. Her skin heated, but she tried to keep her tone light.