Can't Hold Back Page 9

Alia: How’d you get my cell number?

  Nate: Your friend. Gabi?

  Alia: She shouldn’t have given it to you.

  Nate: I can be very charming.

  There was a long silence, during which the phone told him that she was typing and erasing and typing and erasing and typing and—

  Alia: I didn’t *ditch* you. You’re in competent hands.

  Man, how he wished. He couldn’t believe she’d served him up that softball.

  Nate: I liked your hands better.

  On the plus side, Jake’s hands were twenty percent bigger, at least, and definitely stronger, than Alia’s. On the minus side—

  Well, he wasn’t Alia. And Nate didn’t mean that in the most obvious of ways. Jake was a skilled healer, no doubt, but this morning Nate had been on the massage table for twenty minutes and he’d still been able to feel nerve pain radiating from that stuck spot behind his shoulder out to his fingertips. Alia wouldn’t have let that last more than thirty seconds. She would have used her weird X-ray vision, figured out exactly where it hurt, and extinguished the pain.

  “Alia does this tapping thing? Like—” Nate demonstrated to Jake.

  “Like this?”

  “Um. More like—” Nate showed him the rhythm and the intensity, and Jake dutifully imitated.

  Nate sighed. So did Jake. “You know,” Jake said mildly, “if you hadn’t kissed her, she could be doing this right now.”

  “None of your fucking business, man.”

  “Oh, there you’re wrong. There you’re very, very wrong. She is absolutely my business, quite literally. Although frankly, it’s not her I’m worried about. It’s you. I’ve been where you are. You’re trying to fill gaps, you’re trying to prove your body can still do something it used to be able to do—”

  Nate threw off Jake’s hands and sat up. “Shove it. I’m not paying you to psychoanalyze me.”

  “Whoa,” Jake said, putting his hand on Nate’s arm. “I’m not psychoanalyzing you. I’m telling you how it was for me. I was trying to fill gaps. I was trying to figure out what I was doing and what it meant. I was trying to prove my body could still do what it used to be able to do. And I’m just saying, don’t do anything stupid. Don’t do anything you’ll regret. Don’t do anything with strings attached you can’t afford to play out. That’s what I’m saying. What I’m saying is, Leave her alone. She wants a job here, and she doesn’t need you messing with her head.”

  “Noted,” said Nate tightly.

  Only he really must not have noted it very well. Because what was he doing now? He was flirting with Alia.

  There were two opposing parts of him. The part that wanted to respect what she wanted, and the part that just wanted her.

  Alia: I’ll sit down with Jake and make sure he knows what I know.

  Okay. She was trying to keep this in the clean realm.

  She doesn’t need you messing with her head.

  But he wanted to know. He wanted to know whether she was MenInUni242. Whether she’d been typing, whether she’d been feeding him what she thought he wanted to hear from Becca, or whether she’d been telling him—

  Telling him what she wanted.

  Was it messing with her head to try to find out? Would he be messing with her head any worse than she’d messed with his? He felt like he had a right to know what she’d really been thinking, how she’d felt about him, during that mad period of correspondence and care packages and instant messages.

  Nate: They still won’t be your hands.

  There was a long silence. Long enough that he came to the conclusion that she’d decided to ignore him. Which, frankly, he had to admit, was probably what she should be doing. Not taking the bait he’d served up, because Jake was way too right about where Nate was coming from and about why sex wasn’t just sex in this situation.

  He went and found Griff, dragged him out to the archery range. He’d never done archery before R&R, but he was hooked. Loved the feel of the arrow between his fingers, the sensation of pulling the string taut, sighting over his hand, the moment of decision just before release.

  Sounded like sex, somehow. Fuck it. Everything sounded like sex to him right now. He couldn’t get her out of his head.

  Griff loosed an arrow, which lodged itself in the center of the target with a sharp thwack. “Where will you go after you leave here?”

  Nate nocked his own arrow. “A friend’s parents own a hardware store in southern Oregon.” The lack of past tense in that sentence struck him. Should have been a late friend or something, but real people didn’t say that. He was a dead friend, but no one said that, either. Just a friend. A ghost, of sorts.

  “Thought you were a college boy. College degree? Army pedigree? You could do anything.”

  “I owe him one.” Nate buried the arrow in the outermost ring of the target. He frowned. Sad that a guy who could shoot a rifle with so much accuracy was such a miserable mofo with a bow and arrow.

  “Your friend—he still in the sandbox?” Griff tilted his head to one side.

  Nate shook his head. “Dead.”

  “So the hardware store—one of those fucking promises, huh?”

  “I guess.”

  “Blame yourself?”

  “I guess.”

  “Everyone does. Like that story you told, about Turk. No one thinks there was anything Turk woulda coulda shoulda done different, but that’s not how Turk sees it.”

  Nate’s shoulders were starting to stiffen up, and he knew what Alia would say. That it was about J.J. But maybe she’d be wrong in this case. Maybe it was just about how different this kind of shooting felt from anything else he’d ever done. She couldn’t be right about every-fucking-thing.

  He and Griff finished up and he was heading back to his room when her text came through.

  Alia: I can’t do this.

  Nate: Do what?

  And then, when radio silence stretched too long, and he couldn’t keep himself from filling it: Yes, you can. I’m not your client anymore. We’re just two people.

  Alia: We’re not just two people.

  What did she mean by that? Was she implying that their history meant something, that their history made them more than two bodies gravitationally drawn together?

  Alia: You’re a recovering addict. Looking for another fix.

  Oh. Ow.

  Harsh. But not unexpected, and not entirely wrong.

  Because what she was saying wasn’t so very different from what Jake had told him this morning. A little rawer, a little more frank, but a variation on the same theme. He was in no position to start something. He should pocket the goddamn phone before she told him more truth about himself.

  Instead, he texted: And what about you?

  Another one of those long silences. He could imagine her, clutching the phone. Setting it down. Wanting to walk away from what he was asking her.

  And then: What about me?

  Nate: What are you looking for?

  This time, there was no answer.

  —

  She caught herself watching him a million times a day.

  She’d taken what was supposed to be a quiet, contemplative, head-clearing walk, and as she’d exited the pasture and stepped out of the first stand of trees, there he was on the archery range with Griff.

  She dropped back behind a tree and watched him, appalled at herself for both the spying and the craving that had prompted it.

  I liked your hands better.

  They still won’t be your hands.

  And what about you? What are you looking for?

  Damn him.

  She’d done exactly the right thing and it felt all wrong. Because all she wanted was to give him what he was asking for. Her hands. She wanted to make him feel whatever Jake couldn’t. She wanted to make him feel what that look at the lake had begged for the other day.

  So maybe she was looking for her next fix, too. And that’s why she was hiding behind a tree and watching him.

  He was in some
kind of super-engaging conversation with Griff, his face all alight with whatever they were talking about.

  He wore a pair of well-worn jeans and a form-fitting black T-shirt. That’s what he’d worn at the picnic where she’d first seen him. Then, the jeans had been snug over his magnificent ass, and the shirt had strained alarmingly over his chest and biceps. Today he was leaner, but no less eye-catching.

  There was something primitively satisfying about watching him shoot, too. Sure, he wasn’t bringing down a buffalo for her and their small family of kids, but he could have been. Maybe it was that she now knew exactly what those hands could do, and watching them at work, the way those two fingers crooked around the arrow’s shaft—

  Well, damn.

  She snuck away.

  The next afternoon, she saw him and one of his other friends—Tron, she thought—down at the lake’s edge, skipping stones. They were both big, good-looking guys, but Nate had a grace that echoed the stone’s dance over the taut surface of the water. She didn’t think he would have been able to whip his arm like that a week ago, not without pain. But he was laughing and joking, and he chucked probably twenty stones while she watched, before he rubbed his shoulder and called it quits.

  She could have gone down to the water’s edge and skipped with them—she was good at it, could get a stone to bounce six or seven times—but she didn’t. She would have wanted to help him with the locked-up shoulder. She would have wanted to lean in close to him and rest her head against his chest. She would have wanted to tilt her face up to his.

  And that couldn’t happen.

  That night at dinner, she saw him in the dining hall, joking and laughing again, making the other guys laugh. There was no doubt that Nate was the kind of guy whose attitude was contagious. A natural-born leader. The guys he’d befriended were all doing better than they’d been doing two weeks ago, making a ton of progress on their rehab and starting to lose that air of darkness they’d had when they arrived.

  Maybe Nate had been in a dark place, but he wasn’t a dark person. The glow of his old power was surfacing, struggling to shine through fatigue and despair and pain.

  “Who are you staring at like you want to eat him for dinner?”

  “No one.”

  “Don’t tell me ‘no one,’ ” Gabi said. “You’re drooling.”

  Alia frowned. “No one. I swear.”

  Gabi leaned in confidentially. “I know the rules. We all know the rules. I’m married, for God’s sake. But it doesn’t hurt to look. Just tell me, who’s got you so distracted the fork’s missing your mouth?”

  Gabi was right. It didn’t hurt to look. “Black T-shirt.”

  “Niiiiiiice.”

  “It’s kind of a bummer, though,” Melinda said thoughtfully. “So many men, so much muscle, so much testosterone, and all off-limits.”

  Alia watched Nate slug Griff in the shoulder, deliver some kind of punch line with his index finger extended, then grab his plate and bus it. And there it was. Man, muscle, testosterone, doing its work on her body and emotions. A held-back smile in her chest, heat pooling between her legs, and something in her reaching out for him.

  She really needed to get out of here before she found herself walking in his direction.

  She got up so abruptly she almost knocked her chair over.

  “Whoa, baby,” Melinda said, laughing.

  “I think I’m gonna take it easy tonight. Read in bed, fall asleep early.”

  Gabi sighed. “Sounds nice. I’ve got to pull together snacks for movie night tonight.”

  “Could be fun.”

  “Could be,” Gabi said. “Would be more fun if I were in your shoes, drooling over one of them and at least getting to fantasize it could happen, instead of going home to my deadbeat husband who will probably be farting and snoring when I crawl into bed.”

  “At least he’s a sure thing,” Alia offered.

  “Not if he’s been out drinking,” Gabi said, and sighed.

  Alia gave her a sympathetic look, said good night to her friends, picked up her tray, and headed back to her room.

  She changed into pajamas, brushed her teeth, and crawled into bed. The rooms in the main building, where both she and Nate were housed, were not quite as well appointed as typical business-hotel rooms, but they had their own bathrooms, and if they were spare in décor and amenities, they were clean and bright.

  She reached out her hand. Touched her cellphone. It would be so easy. She’d done it once before.

  I want your tongue all over me.

  I want you to pin me down.

  I want your cock in my mouth. As much as I can hold.

  Those instant messages that for nearly two years she’d wished she’d never written. But now?

  What she’d done had been absolutely, one hundred percent wrong, and yet—

  She slid a hand into the waistband of her pajama pants, touched herself where she was already aching for him. Bodies didn’t lie. When she’d sent those texts?

  She’d meant them. Absolutely, one hundred percent.

  She had her phone cradled in her palm now, her thumb moving restlessly just over the place where swiping would bring the screen alive.

  Quite apart from the job, quite apart from her promises to Jake, there was the reality of Nate’s situation. Of their situation. That he had nothing to give, and that her own motives for wanting to help him were tangled and dark. That it gave her a rush to know he needed her. Wanted her.

  And it only made it hotter that the way he wanted her wasn’t pure, either.

  She set the phone on the floor. Pushed it as hard as she could, so it slid across the floor and bumped to a rest against the opposite wall.

  There.

  Safe.

  Chapter 12

  She was awakened in the pitch dark by knocking at her door.

  Her nervous system went nuts—heart pounding, breath rapid—until she realized it was only eleven—not obscenely late. Maybe Gabi stopping by after the movie for girl talk? She roused herself and went groggily to the door, peered out through the peephole.

  At first she didn’t see him, because he was leaning his head against the door. She opened it very slowly so she wouldn’t hurt him. “I’m sorry,” he whispered roughly.

  “You shouldn’t be here.” But there was no force behind her words. Because he was in pain, and he’d come to her, and both of them knew her well enough to know she couldn’t turn him away.

  He raised his head and took her in. For the first time in her life, she wished her pajama style ran more toward Victoria’s Secret and less toward worn T-shirt and flannel pants.

  Even though she shouldn’t have wished that, because she was supposed to be making sure nothing else happened between them.

  And not that it would have mattered to him if she’d been wearing black lace. He was deep in his suffering. When she stepped back to let him in, he moved past her like a zombie and crumpled into her desk chair.

  She turned the desk lamp on because it was the least glaring and closed the door, leaning her head against it for the briefest moment in an echo of the posture he’d been in moments before.

  She knew she should make him go downstairs to her office. She’d made this mistake once before, and she’d outright promised Jake she’d learned from her error. And while even her office wasn’t a completely safe place to be with him at eleven o’clock at night, at least it would provide the semblance of professionalism. Here—

  Here, they were in her bedroom. She was in her pajamas.

  “Nate, I can’t—”

  “Please.”

  “You should go.”

  He raised his head and let her see his eyes. Dark, pained, craving. “I need your hands on me.”

  There were a thousand other ways he could have asked her, a thousand missteps that might have allowed her to summon the self-control to send him away, but he’d said that instead. She felt it, straight to her core, her blood heating everywhere.

  She took a
deep breath.

  “Lie down,” she said. “On your stomach.”

  She crossed the room, stood beside the bed.

  She began as she would have begun in her office. Because maybe there was still hope that if she kept this official, professional, it wouldn’t go where she hoped it wouldn’t and prayed it would.

  The bed was entirely the wrong height, impossible. So she pulled over a chair and tried to work from it, but the angle was difficult and her own body began to protest. Then she tried sitting at the edge of the bed, which felt risky but not terrifying. But that was awkward, too, twisted. For tapping it wasn’t so bad, but when she wanted to put pressure somewhere, when she wanted to lean in, it was uncomfortable.

  She was about to tell him it wouldn’t work. She was about to say—God’s truth—that years ago she’d promised herself she wouldn’t work in a way that put her body at risk. That put her career at risk.

  But then he made a sound. Not a sensual sound. A hurt sound, part grunt, part groan, part whimper.

  There was probably something wrong with her, because she felt that sound not only in the parts of her that were primed for care, but in the secret, hungry parts, too. His wordless plea for help felt like sex.

  She didn’t have any more resistance, not for any of the things he made her want.

  She climbed onto the bed, onto him, and she felt him go rigid for a moment and then relax. This was what she’d wanted all along, to be able to comfort him with her whole body, however it was needed. She gave in to it and lay down along his back, pressing her cheek to the groove at the base of his neck, letting her hands reach around to cup the caps of his shoulders. She was hyperaware of her breasts against his back, and he must have been, too, because he groaned, and it wasn’t a groan of pain. And beneath her hips, she felt him move ever-so-slightly, pressing into the bed.

  Her body reacted like a shot, molten heat pouring down deep.

  What the hell was she doing?

  She raised her head. She couldn’t. Of course she couldn’t. She started to sit up—

  “No,” he said quickly. “Don’t move. Please. You’re helping.”

  “Nate—”

  “Please.”

  It was less a plea than a command. He reached a hand back and grabbed her thigh, but then he made a sound that was definitely pain, twisted and harsh. The sound called out to that part of her that couldn’t refuse him, and after a moment she lowered herself again. Tried to tell his body, with hers, to let go.