Hot to the Touch Read online

  “Not this year?”

  “Not this year. I’m going to coach the basketball team. Keep my hand in with the kids. Work with some of the liners.” The “liners” was the term he and the principal created for kids who were on the line between failing and making it—those who could fall the wrong way if something didn’t happen to pull them out of a slump. “I talked with Morgan about it two days ago. It’s a done deal.”

  “You really are putting it back together,” his mom said quietly, and then looked at the dishes in front of her. “Fox, since when did these become your favorite foods? What’s this?”

  “Chicken with cilantro.”

  “And this…well, I can see this is the holiday potato dish—”

  “Yup. And dessert is a marshmallow sundae with chocolate ice cream.” He added kindly, “You can have the sundae with dinner, if you want. This isn’t like growing up. I won’t tell if you have dessert first.”

  His mother lifted a fork, then put it down and just stared at him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “It’s Phoebe, isn’t it.”

  She didn’t phrase it like a question, just like she almost never phrased things like questions when she already had a mom sense about the answers. So Fox didn’t try to balk or duck.

  “Yeah, it’s Phoebe,” he said quietly. “But don’t start counting on grandchildren, Mom, because the truth is…I think I lost her.”

  “Oh, Fox, you—”

  “No.” This time his voice turned firm. Not disrespectful. Just firm. “You want the secret side of stuff, I’ll give it to you. I love her. Completely. Totally. Enough so that she’s the only thing in my head, the only woman I can even imagine spending my life with. But she’s not seeing me the same way. I can’t open a door she wants locked. And that’s all I’m willing to say. Besides, this dinner is supposed to be about you. I want to hear how the bridge club’s going, what’s new with the neighborhood crowd, how your arthritis is.”

  “But, Fox, I—”

  “This is the deal. No dessert if you keep asking questions.” He added, “This is between her and me. There’s no one else in the universe but her and me. Not as far as our private lives go.”

  And he couldn’t talk any more about it. Not without panic climbing a sharp ladder up his spine. She hadn’t even blinked when he’d talked about building the house for the two of them, much less given him even a tiny sign that she might be willing to build that home with him. And as far as the whole rotten thing her ex-fiancé had pulled on her…hell.

  Fox just couldn’t see how to make any move without making the situation worse. If he tried to make love to her, she’d think he wanted her for sex. If he didn’t try, she’d think he’d stopped wanting her. That jerk had done a number on her from the inside, and Fox couldn’t remember feeling more frustrated. That someone could twist Phoebe’s sensual, loving, nurturing and, you bet, sexy nature against her made him see red. Bull red. But short of finding the guy and beating him up, there was little Fox could do—and besides, that would only make him happy.

  He wasn’t used to feeling impotent.

  In fact, he’d never felt the sensation before.

  But if Phoebe needed to know how much he respected her, he’d already shown her how much he did…by reaching out to her. By revealing his most vulnerable side. By sharing his weaknesses with her the way he’d been unable and unwilling to share with anyone else.

  Fox didn’t just respect her in theory; he respected her with his heart. The more critical problem was Phoebe herself. The jerk had dented her self-respect. And that was something he had no way of fixing for her.

  He looked down at Phoebe’s cilantro chicken and the infamous holiday potatoes—the potato dish no man had been able to resist since the beginning of time. And suddenly he couldn’t eat.

  He had one more occasion to see her, but he doubted it would help. He’d lost her.

  And he knew it.

  Exhausted and frazzled, Phoebe opened the van door and let Mop and Duster leap up on the seat. They faced the window and determinedly ignored her.

  “Look, guys. Everybody has to have shots. The vet loves you. The nurse loves you. You hurt their feelings when you treat them like they were torturers, did you ever think of that?”

  Neither pup bothered to turn around. She’d pay all day for taking them to the vet. Probably have to feed them steak. Take them for extra walks. Suck up for hours. She knew what to expect. They’d been through this before.

  Phoebe drove straight home, relieved it was Saturday, because she’d lost all her usual energy. She didn’t want to work, didn’t want to see people, didn’t want to do anything. As soon as she got home, she was inclined to lock all the doors and mope in peace with the dogs.

  At the base of her driveway, she stopped at the mailbox, picked up three bills, five catalogs and a reminder that she needed to renew her physical therapist’s license this coming fall. She was still shuffling through envelopes when she glanced up and realized that there was already a vehicle in her driveway. A white RX 330.

  Fox’s car.

  The pups noticed it at the same time she did and, turncoats that they were, promptly commenced a barking frenzy until she braked and let them out. They zoomed for the door, Mop quivering with excitement, Duster’s tail swishing the ground in equally ardent fervor. “What is it about him,” Phoebe muttered, but it was a silly question, when she already knew what it was about Fox that inspired the female of the species to fall totally and irrevocably in love.

  She shouldn’t have been that surprised he was here, because she’d given him a house key weeks before. It just made sense. He tried to work on the waterfall when she didn’t have clients and he wasn’t in her way. Usually, though, he didn’t show up early on Saturday mornings, because she often had neighbors over…and, besides, this Saturday she’d just thought he wouldn’t come.

  He hadn’t called or been around since their walk in the rain.

  She knew she was to blame, which ached all the more—because she’d only told him the truth. She couldn’t seem to get past what Alan had done to her—how to get past the whole feeling that she wasn’t…good. That the sensual and sexual part of her nature was a flaw instead of something good and natural. The thing was, when a girl got down and naked with a man and then he crushed her for it, it did something to her spirit. Her heart. Her self-respect.

  And Phoebe believed she’d had no choice but to be frank with Fox…until she’d gotten home that day, walked into her bedroom, peeled down for a shower and started crying her eyes out.

  Maybe she’d told him the truth…but she suddenly realized there were other truths. She kept remembering what he’d said at the house site—how he wanted to build a deck off the kitchen, a place to sit outside, eat grapefruit in the morning.…

  Grapefruit. Her vice, not his. Her goofy favorite food, not his. He’d been talking about living in that house with her. Building that house for them.

  And until that grapefruit word poked in her mind and stabbed her sharply, she just hadn’t realized that Fox was thinking about her seriously. Not as a lover. But as a wife. Not as a red-hot mama when he needed healing.

  But as the kind of woman he might be willing to share a grapefruit with when they first got up in the morning.

  Now she took a gulping huge breath. From the sound of the pups barking, they’d already located Fergus in the back room. She peeled off her fleece jacket, stashed her bag and mail on the kitchen counter, pushed off her shoes and tried to think how to handle seeing him, greeting him.

  No magical or brilliant ideas occurred. She shook her hair loose, took a big breath and then walked to the doorway of her therapy room—then stopped, still.

  The waterfall was done. Or it sure looked that way.

  Fox was crouched down with the dogs, making a fuss, rubbing tummies and baby talking to them. There was still a mountain of trash and debris that he’d obviously just started to clean up, but the waterfall itself took her breath aw
ay.

  It was her dream. The backdrop wall and sides were mortared in river stone. There were steps, as if you were in nature and really walking from shallow water into a deeper pool before you stepped under the waterfall. The tall windows above had the effect of skylights. You could lie in the pool, look up and see sunlight or stars, be secluded from the rest of the massage room environment. Lighting had been built into the lower pool. The outside steps had places to set ferns and plants.

  “Oh, Fox,” she whispered hopelessly. “It’s so, so perfect.”

  He spun around at the sound of her voice and immediately stood up. If the light hadn’t been straight behind him, she might have perceived his expression, but as it was, she caught his dusty knees, his rough-brushed hair, but his eyes were in shadow. “You’re here just in time.”

  “In time for what?” she asked, and then shook her head for asking such a silly question. “Obviously in time to help clean up—”

  “No. That’ll wait. I need a victim, an experimentee. Translate that to mean ‘sucker.’ Your waterfall’s done, ready to test. I know it works, but I don’t want to put everything away until I’m positive we’ve got it all the way you want—height of the hidden shower head, water pressure, water temperature and all that stuff. I don’t think we’ll have to make any major plumbing adjustments—please God—but I still want to test the details.”

  “Sure. What do you want me to do?”

  “Just use it the way you’d use it. Close the drain. Turn it on. Fill up the pool the way you would if you were using it with a client. Just make sure everything’s the way you expected, then we’ll drain it and call it quits. I’ll keep cleaning up in the meantime.”

  Something inside her froze for the oddest second. It was as if her heart understood she had a choice. One choice. Right then. A choice, a chance, that would disappear if she didn’t take it.

  Fox turned away again. Flanked by the dogs, who seemed to think he desperately wanted their company constantly, he started stacking spare parts, gathering trash, putting away tools. The whole time he kept up a conversation. “Now, you’re used to using oils in your work, right? You can’t in this. You’ll need your clients to take a ‘clean’ shower to get the oils off before they soak in the waterfall tub, or it’ll be too slippery.”

  “I hear you,” she said, as she pulled off her shirt. Fox didn’t glance back, just kept working.

  “And then, I’ve been thinking about a way you could rig up a sling for babies. I assume that’s part of what you want to do, right? Use it for the little ones?”

  “I had in mind using it for all ages. But when I’m working with babies, part of my idea was having their moms in there with them. So both of them could relax at the same time,” she said, as she peeled off her jeans and socks.

  “Yeah, I figured that. So this sling idea…it’d be like a little hammock. Soft. But water flowing in and around it. Obviously you wouldn’t leave a baby alone in it, but it would be a way for a small child to feel the flow of water without it overwhelming him.” A couple of hammers and crowbars made a heck of a racket when he piled them in one long metal container.

  Slowly, her stomach starting to curl, she unsnapped her navy lace bra and let it fall. Then walked barefoot into the new waterfall tub and turned on the faucets. “That sounds ideal for the babies,” she said. She stood there, not getting wet yet, just lifted her hand to the spray until she had the water temperature nice and warm.

  She wasn’t completely naked yet. She was still wearing her favorite thong—the navy satin one, with the red, white and blue flag in the triangle. They weren’t the underpants of a shy, retiring girl. They weren’t underwear for a woman who wasn’t inherently in-your-face sexy. Which, of course, was why Phoebe had always worn the kind of clothing where no one could see them.

  “Okay…well, while you’re letting the pool fill up, I’m going to start making a bunch of trips out to the truck. It’s going to take me quite a—” He turned around. Saw her.

  Dropped a crowbar. Then a hammer.

  While he was speechless, which she suspected wouldn’t last long, she stepped under the waterfall spray. “You got the water pressure perfect,” she called out.

  He dropped the whole damn toolbox.

  She lifted her face to the pelting spray, feeling the water gush and rush and slink down her face, her throat, her body. Her hair went from a tidily brushed mass into a heavy, thick, water-soaked rope in seconds. She closed her eyes, trying not to feel how hard her pulse was thudding, her badly her tummy was twisting, how scared she was.

  When it came down to it…this was how she used to feel when she was younger. About herself. About life. It would never have occurred to her that it wasn’t a joyful thing to enjoy the feel and the smell of fresh warm water on her bare skin, to love the explosion of her senses. To want to be this free—for a lover. With a lover. Open. Open in her heart, open in her mind, open to wherever the senses could take them both.

  It had been gone—that freedom, that feeling—for a while now. And it wasn’t totally back. Phoebe wasn’t positive she’d ever totally get it back…but she knew, positively, that’s how she wanted to be for Fox. With Fox. With the man she loved.

  “And you’ve got the temperature perfect,” she called out, and in that second, when she was blinking water out of her eyes, she almost jumped to the ceiling…because there was Fox.

  Right there. His eyes inches from her eyes. His mouth inches from her mouth. He was still wearing all his clothes, except for his boots. His work socks already looked heavier than cement, and the rest of his work clothes were molding to his body faster than glue.

  “Most of us,” she said tactfully, “remove our clothes before taking a shower.”

  “Don’t you mess with me, red.”

  She sobered, softened. “I’m not messing with you.”

  “This is a pretty brazen, bawdy thing for you to do. Stripping in front of me. Getting naked in front of me.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said regretfully.

  “You could give a guy ideas. Bad ideas. Ideas like…that you know how delectably beautiful that body of yours is. Like…that you want me to notice how delectably beautiful that body of yours is—”

  “Fox?”

  “What?”

  “This is what you’re going to be stuck with. A brazen, bawdy woman. Who likes to get naked. For her lover. Only for her lover. No one else.”

  “Oh, I hope so,” he whispered, and then leaned down and took her mouth. It was a kiss that started out hard and firm and just got more tenacious. The pelting warm water couldn’t compete with this steam.

  Her Fox, her crazy wonderful Fox, seemed to forget that he was standing there in all his clothes. He framed her face in his hands and kissed her and kept on kissing her, closed-eye kisses, tongue kisses, silver kisses, come-on kisses, claiming kisses.

  She was still feeling nervous and worried. But maybe not quite as worried and nervous as she started out, because a competitive streak seemed to kick in.

  She could do kisses.

  In fact, she could do downright fabulous kisses. For the right man. And Fox was so totally the right man.

  She made him suffer through an intensive repertoire. She tried whisper-soft kisses and ardent, take-me kisses. Wooing kisses and shy, silky kisses. Kisses involving tongues and teeth, and kisses that barely touched, only hinted at what the future might hold. Could hold. If he was a very, very good boy.

  “Phoebe?” he gasped in a breath.

  She took the chance to gasp in some air, too. “What?”

  “We’re drowning.”

  “That’s not the serious problem, Fox. You want to know the serious problem?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “You have all your clothes on. And that really is a problem that needs fixing immediately.”

  “I’ll help,” he assured her, and there was a grin. A dark, intimate, wicked, pure, guy grin. The memory burst in her mind of how she’d first seen Fergus…so
low, so sad, so unreachably angry and lost. It wasn’t her fault that that grin inspired her to huge, vast heights of risk. Getting wet clothes off a guy was no easy task…but she was up for it.

  He was also definitely up for it, in every sense—particularly as she followed each loosened button with a kiss everywhere and anywhere she discovered bare skin. By the time she’d battled four shirt buttons, he was ripping off his belt, trying to tear off his jeans.

  By then, the water in the pool had filled to knee height. Unfortunately, everything suddenly went kaflooey. His jeans were too soggy, too stuck to him, to pull off the rest of the way. He tried. She tried. They bumped heads and staggered back, and both ended up sitting in the water with the waterfall exuberantly splashing water on both of them, and Fox, laughing, roared out, “Damnation. I need help!”

  “You think I’m not trying?” She’d started helplessly laughing, too, and between his sitting and bracing and her pulling, they managed to win the war with his pants.

  “You’re not supposed to have fun when you’re this desperate,” he grumped.

  But his laughing and grumping was what sealed his fate, she thought. And hers. Because the more they battled his pants, the more they laughed, the more they loved…the more she knew it was going to be all right with Fox. To be herself. Always. That this was the one man she could be with.

  Fear melted away, not all at once, but in flashes of searing sensation…like when his teeth scraped the hollow of her shoulder. Like when his hands slid down her ribs, around her spine, onto her fanny, where he clenched his hands and drew her tight and hard against him. When she reached back to turn off the water—before the pool overflowed all over kingdom come—he could barely seem to give her that spare second before he reached for her again, too impatient and hungry to wait.

  “I love you, red. Not just want you. I love you. Now. Tomorrow.”

  “And I love you back,” she said fiercely.

  “I mean love. And you can take it to the bank, we’re going to love the sex. It’s going to be hot and wild and inventive for a long time.”