Hot to the Touch Page 14

  She’d never been short of opinions, and she’d easily offered them to Fox before, but it was different now. The times they’d made love stood between them like a velvet wall. He didn’t refer to them. Neither did she.

  She knew how to communicate using touch. But she didn’t know the words he wanted to hear.

  And when she still said nothing, he filled in. “Phoebe, I wasn’t trying to lead you into saying something I wanted to hear. But I was specifically thinking about building a house. Right here. I own this property, have for a while. What do you think about it for a home site?”

  “I think it’d be gorgeous,” she said, and then realized that seemed to be the only word that kept coming out of her mouth.

  He motioned. “Probably put the kitchen there—facing east—with big glass doors leading to a deck, so a body could sit outside, eating their grapefruit, sipping their morning coffee.” He waited, then went on. “Then I could see an octagonal room, glass walls—the great room facing the mountains and creek. The sun would come in there too strong, but we could fix that by using solar windows. Put the master bedroom upstairs. Make it a solid north wall, but put windows east and west, so the room would get the sunrise in the morning, the sunset in the evening.”

  When he paused again, she said, “It couldn’t sound better, Fergus. It’s a beautiful plan.”

  “Can you picture the house ideas?”

  “You bet.”

  “Could you picture living in a house like that?”

  She frowned. “Sure. Who couldn’t? It sounds like a dream house. But…I’m not sure it’d be a good idea for you to be out this far in the woods alone, do you?”

  “You’ve got that right. I don’t want to live alone anymore.” He fell completely silent then, scraping a hand through his hair and then, for a few seconds, squeezing his eyes closed.

  “Damn,” she murmured. “I knew something was wrong. You’re getting a headache, aren’t you.”

  “Not a headache. I just…” He opened his eyes. He suddenly looked so despairing, so frustrated. “Phoebe, I…”

  “No,” she said swiftly. “I can see you’re hurting. Bad hurting. Don’t talk. Just turn around for me, Fox. Face the side window.”

  “You don’t understand. I wanted to—”

  “No talking! I mean it!” Energy surged through her. She knew what to do when he was hurting. Anything was better than those strange moments when he kept waiting and waiting, clearly counting on her to say something and her failing to come through. Whatever that had been about mattered, but if Fox was hurting, that took precedence over any and everything else.

  “Lean forward,” she said quietly, firmly. “I told you before, I had another exercise I wanted to give you. It’s like the first one we did. An exercise you can use whenever you’re in pain or stressed. Not just for now but whenever you feel stressed.…”

  He turned toward the driver’s window—not at a perfect angle, but good enough. She knelt behind him—again not easy to do from her seat, but she could manage. Thankfully he was wearing an old, loose sweatshirt that she could push out of the way. She closed her eyes when she felt his warm, supple skin under her fingertips again. Maybe she had no oils to work with today, no soothing warm water, no props. But she had her hands, to knead into his hair, into his nape, around his temples and forehead. And she had her heart, her love, to convey through the sense of touch.

  “Okay now, Fox,” she whispered, “this is called the rainbow exercise. I want you to picture yourself standing at the beginning of a giant tunnel that’s entirely made of color—”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  She considered taking a small nip out of his shoulder, but that would be too loverlike. A headache was serious business. Healing him was no joke. “Just go along with me, okay?”

  “Okay.” He used that patronizing tone men used on women when they were pretending to be patient, but she didn’t care. She’d won what she needed. His attention.

  “Okay, now close your eyes and imagine this rainbow tunnel. Just like with a real rainbow, the first part is red. You’re going to take an imaginary step inside where it’s all red, Fox. I want you to feel that red, smell it, taste it, touch it. There’s huge energy in that color, isn’t there? Passion. Anger. High emotion…

  “And then we’re going to keep walking, slowly, into our rainbow. We’re going to walk past the red into orange. Feel how bright and colorful and splashy the orange is? And now we’re walking into yellow. All warm and healing and sunny. A happy color, yes? And you’re feeling washed in that yellow. Drenched in that yellow. It’s bathing you from head to toe.…”

  She rubbed and stroked, his head, his temples, playing out the rainbow exercise, talking softly, soothingly. Lovingly. She could feel the knots in his neck start to ease. Feel those big strong shoulders give up some of their tension.

  He was such a sucker for a head rub. Again she felt her heart surge. It was such a simple joy—knowing that she was the one who could reach him. Knowing she was the one person who could relax him, whom he could trust enough to be himself with, to let down his heart with.

  “The green is so beautiful, isn’t it? You can almost smell all the green things—the grass and leaves. The emerald is so alive, so full of life. But then, at last we come to blue, Fox. A deep, rich royal blue…but not dark. This is a clear blue. This is the blue color that makes you think of peace. There’s no stress in this blue. No worries. No fears. Feel the blue, Fox?”

  “Yup, I feel your damn blue, red.”

  She grinned and dropped her hands. “Okay…that’s it. Just kind of wake up from this slowly. How’s the headache?”

  Slowly he lifted his head. Slowly he turned around. She was still crouched on her knees, waiting to see his face, to study how he was doing. The storm clouds had thundered on, but it was still raining outside—a clean, soaking downpour that hissed in the leaves and washed down the meadow. She could see his face much clearer now, and the intensity in his expression startled her.

  “What did he do to you, Phoebe?”

  “What?”

  “The guy. The jerk you were engaged to. What did he do to you? And no ducking out this time. You promised that you’d try to be as honest with me as I was with you. You promised you’d try. And I told you what happened to me.”

  She sucked in a breath, feeling suddenly at a loss. “I didn’t heal your headache? The exercise didn’t work?”

  “Red, you’ve been healing me from the day I met you. How about giving me a shot?”

  “At what?”

  “At helping you heal this time,” he said softly, and then repeated insistently, “What did the son of a gun do to you?”

  She clicked up the lock and pushed out the door. She could have grabbed her jacket, but at the moment she just didn’t care. Rain sloshed down, not hard, but too relentlessly to escape it. It slithered in her hair, matted her eyelashes.

  Still she took off, hiking fast, and only moments later realized that Fox had caught up and was keeping pace beside her. He said nothing, just walked with her, getting as soaked as she was.

  “Darn it, Fox! It’s not something I can explain. Not to a man.”

  “Then forget I’m a man and just think of me as a friend.”

  “For Pete’s sake. I do think of you as a friend. But I’ll never forget you’re a man in this life. No woman would.”

  “Um, I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or an insult.”

  “It’s just a statement of fact.”

  He said quietly, “Find a way to tell me.”

  Like it was that easy. And damnation, but the warm rain was squishing in her shoes now, and making her long hair feel heavier than a rope.

  Besides, she didn’t know where to start. “In high school…I went out with a lot of boys. Always had a good time. But also always pulled back before it went too far. I just really wanted to save it for the right guy. Girls still believe there’ll be one perfect guy for them when they’re in high s
chool. Or some of us still did—”

  “Okay.”

  “So anyway. That was the point. That I’d waited. That I thought Alan was The One. So when we got engaged…”

  Fox wasn’t going to waste time on euphemisms. “You did the deed. And he hurt you?”

  “No.”

  “He scared you somehow?”

  “No. Nothing like that. It went great.”

  “So…”

  She turned on him in a fury. “If you catch cold from this walk because of me, I’m going to shoot you myself.”

  “Threat accepted. So go on.”

  She lifted her hands in a helpless gesture. “So that was the problem. That it went great. I didn’t understand at first. We were engaged. Why would he be unhappy if things were going well when the lights went out? Yet from that first night, he started pulling back.”

  Ahead, a rabbit hopped into their path, stared at them and then hopped back under cover like any sane animal would have done.

  “I guess you could say I got more adventurous. I was…blind. This whole part of life seemed…great to me. Natural. Wonderful. And I believed I loved him, so there was nothing I wasn’t willing to think about or talk about or try.”

  “And?”

  “And he was repulsed.”

  “Say what?”

  “You heard me.”

  “I couldn’t have,” Fox said bluntly.

  She sighed. There was a time she thought nothing would mortify her, but trying to talk about this did. “I could claim that we both wanted to break the engagement, but the truth is…he wanted out. It’s not like he didn’t want to keep sleeping with me, but he shut me off any time I brought up marriage plans after that. The better it got between the sheets, the less he trusted me. Anything I said or tried to say, somehow I ended up feeling dirty. Amoral.”

  “Phoebe, we may have to run through this again, because something’s wrong with my hearing. Something has to be wrong, because I couldn’t possibly be hearing what you’re telling me.”

  “I know you’re trying to be funny. And it is, in a way. There’s nothing new about the old double standard. It’s been around since the beginning of time. I’m not blaming him. I’m saying there was something ingrained in him. And maybe it’s ingrained in a lot of men and women. That women who are…sexy…must be of low moral character.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  She persisted quietly, firmly. “There’s a fear that a woman ‘like that’ won’t be faithful. That if she’s a great lover, she won’t make a steady wife. I know, I know, we all say differently out loud. Alan said differently, too. But that’s how he felt deep down. The more times we slept together, the more he pulled away, the less he trusted me, less he shared with me. Oh, for God’s sake. Let’s head back to the car and get out of this ridiculous rain before we both catch our death.”

  “Wait a minute—” He hooked her arm, not roughly, but determined to spin her around to face him.

  She faced him, but she also shook her head. “I really don’t want to talk anymore about this. I know what you’ll say. That it’s all wrong. That he was a creep. That of course a guy wants a hot woman. I mean, come on, we’re not kids.”

  “Maybe I wasn’t going to say any of that.”

  “Oh, yeah, you were.” She lifted her face, ardently wanting to kiss him—wanting to be kissed. Actually wanting anything but to still be talking about this. “But I don’t need logic or that kind of reassurance, Fox. I was just trying to tell you what happened. How it made me feel. How it affected me.”

  “You moved away. Gave up regular physical therapy completely. Concentrated on work with babies.” He added, “I understand it took you a while to get over him. But it’s been a while. You have to know it isn’t that way with me. I can’t believe you’d paint me with the same brush as that jerk.”

  “It’s not about painting you with the same brush.” She knew it’d be impossible to explain. Even to Fox. Especially to Fox. “It’s about…feeling different about myself. I grew up thinking that sensuality was a good quality in myself. He…crippled that.”

  “You let him cripple that.”

  She felt stung. “Come on, that’s not fair. When you knife someone where they’re the most vulnerable, it’s pretty hard to just…go on…as if your life hadn’t been seriously changed.”

  Fergus touched her cheek, whispered, “You think I don’t know that?”

  His voice—his words—struck her with the surprise of a slap. He did know that. As totally unalike as their problems were, it wasn’t being physically injured that had crippled Fox. It was being hit in the heart, because it was a child who’d injured him, and it was children where his whole self-image—as a man, as a leader and teacher and a role model—was founded. She’d always understood. When a child betrayed him, he felt as if he’d betrayed the child, as well.

  And now she saw the parallel. When her innermost nature betrayed her, she’d felt as if she had become her own worst enemy. How do you recover when something you had believed was totally good in yourself turned out to hurt you?

  Fox looked at her. Rain had soaked through his sweatshirt. It dripped from his brows, had turned his hair dark. “Is that where you want to leave it, red? You can do what I did. I gave up teaching, my life.”

  “I didn’t give up sex. I made love with you, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, you did. Which is really fascinating, when you think about it. You took on a man who was running straight to loserdom. No job. No future. Wallowing in self-pity, hiding in dark shadows. So what the hell were you doing, sleeping with me?”

  “That’s completely different, because you were never a loser. You were never at fault for what happened to you, even if you thought you were. None of that was who you were. You were just…hurt. You just needed time to heal.”

  “Maybe that’s true—but you couldn’t have known that. You took a chance on me. You took a huge risk with me. But now…you just want to walk away?”

  She frowned, fiercely confused, sick to her stomach. Darn it, he was deliberately rattling her. “Fox, I never said that.”

  “Well, I want you to think about it. Because I’m not disappearing, red…unless you send me away. I’m not positive where I’m going, but I won’t be hiding in the shadows anymore. I am sure of that. And I want to be sure of what you want from me.”

  She heard an implicit ultimatum in his voice. Not a threat. Just a fish-or-cut-bait warning—the same one she’d been waiting for weeks now. “I can’t be, Fox! You don’t understand!”

  “Oh, yeah,” he murmured. “I understand.” And he turned away from her and stalked back to his car.

  Eleven

  F ox, standing at the stove in his mother’s kitchen, pointed the royal finger at his mom. “No. Sit. You are not to help. You are supposed to sit there and drink wine and let me do the work.”

  “You’re treating me like a dog,” Georgia complained. “Sit. Stay. What kind of language is that to use with your mother?”

  “Down, girl,” Fox repeated when she tried to stand up again. “This is my night to cook for you, remember? You said you wanted to do this exercise of Phoebe’s. That means you’re supposed to put your feet up and I’m supposed to do the dinner. That’s the deal.”

  “Something is very scary about you lately,” Georgia said darkly. “At least when you were sick, I could order you around. You still didn’t obey much, but you didn’t give me all this lip.”

  “I think we always gave you a ton of lip, Mom.” Before he could stop her, she’d sprinted out of the chair—carrying her wine—and was trying to see over his shoulder at the progress of the sizzling food on the stove.

  “That isn’t remotely related to beef Stroganoff,” she announced.

  “You’ve got that right.”

  “I bought all the ingredients for your favorites. Beef Stroganoff. Double blueberry pie. Waldorf sa—”

  “Sit.”

  Muttering ominous threats, Georgia retreated as far as
the counter stool, but she still looked at him with nosy, suspicious eyes. Mother eyes. “What’s going on,” she said finally, flatly. She didn’t make it a question.

  Fox deserted the stove long enough to set the table—at least, his version of setting the table. He scooped up some forks and knives from the silverware drawer, added a couple of plates, then tossed some napkins on the middle of the table. He wasn’t sure everything was going to be ready at the same time, but whatever. He could cook well enough not to starve. Putting together a complete dinner—especially the dinner he was trying to create tonight—was impossibly tricky.

  “Fergus Lockwood, answer me,” his mother said firmly.

  “What’s ‘going on’ is that this is the last dinner you have to put up with, as far as risking life and limb on something I cooked. I’m at the end of Phoebe’s crazy program.”

  “The whole family loved the program, Fox. It made all of us feel we were doing something for you, instead of just sitting back and watching you hurt. That was awful.”

  “Well, I’m not admitting it out loud—at least to Phoebe—but I’ve liked it, too. What can I say? I’ve got a helluva great family. But there’s just no need for it now. I’m better. Really better.” Since he was stuck talking about sticky stuff, he eased into another little matter. “It’s time I moved out of the bachelor house.”

  “Why?” she demanded instantly. “I’ve loved having you so close! And the house is just sitting there. There’s no reason on earth—”

  “I know. You’d like all of us close. And we are close, but I need to get my own life back together. You know the property up on Spruce Mountain? I want to build a house up there.”

  “Oh. That’s not too far.” Georgia took a sip of wine, looking relieved. “Fergus. You put the knife on the right of the plate, not the left. That’s a beautiful site up there. Still in the school district…in case a body ever wanted kids…but peaceful and quiet and all.”

  He motioned her to the table and started serving dishes. “So, here’s the plan. You’re hearing it before anyone else. I’m going to spend the year building a house up there. And next fall I’ll be teaching again.”