Hot to the Touch Page 3

  He opened his mouth to swear at her again, even got out the ‘f’ sound of the word he furiously wanted to express…only he forgot.

  He meant to swear, he really did, but nothing came out but a groan.

  A weak, vulnerable groan. Exasperated, he tried to do the cussing thing again, only to repeat the same problem. He forgot.

  Her fingers sifted into his short, coarse hair, fingertips gently massaging the skin, the pads of the fingers soothing, smoothing. The slick, soft stuff went into his hair, into his scalp. He didn’t care.

  “I can’t make a migraine go away,” she said quietly. “But if we can get you to relax, you’ll have a shot at sleeping it off. You’re so tense with the pain, it’s making it worse. But it’s hard to work on you while you’re lying on this couch. Especially with all your clothes on. If you could just shift forward a little, the couch arm wouldn’t be in our way so much…”

  He stopped listening to her. He couldn’t listen. He was too busy feeling.

  She couldn’t physically move him—hell, he had to be twice her size. But somehow she made the couch pillow disappear, so that she could lean over and contact him more directly. She worked, and kept working, behind his ears, down the sides of his neck.

  She stopped to get more of that smelly Creamsicle stuff, came back, shivered it through his hair, scraped it through his scalp, rubbed it, kneaded it, soothed it, caressed it.

  The more she worked, the more he felt a deep, sexual pull in the pit of his belly. Nothing she was doing was sexual. She never touched him below the neck and, hell, she was getting that gooey slippery stuff all over his head.

  But it seemed as if she pulled the pain right out of him.

  His headache didn’t instantly disappear. But the sensations she invoked seemed bigger than the pain, big enough to distract him, big enough to suck him under a sleek, silent, shimmering wave of sensation.

  She started humming under her breath, an old song. “Summertime.” About how living was easy and the cotton was high. She couldn’t hum. Her voice was so off-key it should have grated on his nerves—and God knew, his nerves had been in shreds for hours.

  But not anymore. The soft pads of her thumbs stroked his closed eyes, so lightly it was like being stroked by a skein of silk. She brushed his cheekbones, remolded them, scrolled down to his jawline, pushed, stroked, pulled.

  He suddenly went hard—which was as impossible as a phoenix rising. No man could get a hard-on with a migraine. The thought was ludicrous.

  But damn…he’d never had a woman touch him this way. He’d never had a woman own him this way. He’d never felt this…connection. As if someone else really were on the other side of the dark abyss and he wasn’t alone, not anymore, as if she knew intimate things about his feelings that no one else ever had.

  It was petrifying.

  He didn’t let other people in. Or he hadn’t, since coming back from the Middle East. His life had irrevocably changed. He just wanted to be left the total hell alone—and he didn’t want her near him, either, but hell.

  He felt himself slipping and then slipping further. Into her spell. Under her spell.

  She could have done anything, said anything she wanted—as long as she kept touching him. All the P.T. and rehab and rebuilding he’d been through over these last months—yeah, he’d survived it all, willing or not, but nothing had dented the pain. Nothing had come close.

  Until her.

  His eyes were already closed, but he could feel sleep coming. Real sleep. Not the kind where he’d wake up in an hour, soaked in sweat, heart pounding, screams and explosions and the indelible face of a little boy relentlessly in his head. But the other kind of sleep. The kind where you sank into a deep, safe stillness and felt free enough to…just…let…go.

  Mop and Duster lifted their heads when Phoebe snuffed out the candles. She waited a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkness and then quietly picked up her jacket and gear. She tiptoed through the silent house, trying to make no sound until she stepped foot outside.

  Ben and Harry were still there, waiting for her, pacing back and forth the length of the veranda.

  “I’ll be damned. He didn’t kill you.”

  She thought that was a particularly perceptive comment of Ben’s. “He’s sound asleep.”

  Both brothers shook their heads. “He can’t be. He doesn’t sleep anymore. In fact, that’s part of the problem—he’s so damn surly because he can’t get any rest—”

  “Well, he’s out for the count now. And hopefully he’ll stay asleep until he can clock up some serious rest.” Phoebe took a moment to inhale a deep, long breath. She had no idea how long she’d been inside, but the sky was now blacker than pitch and the bushes covered with a fresh coat of rime. She let the dogs chase off into the darkness to do their business. It gave her another moment.

  Right then she seemed to need about fifty moments. Typically her hands could tremble for a while after the intense, hard work of a serious massage. Tonight, though, she knew there was another reason for her shakiness—a reason that badly unsettled her. Complicating her concern, the Lockwood brothers were looking at her as if she were a goddess.

  “It wasn’t anything special I did,” she told them promptly. “I can’t cure anyone’s migraine. It’s just that the best ‘fix’ for people who have headaches like that is to get them to sleep, any way and any how you can. At least, that I’ve found. Anybody could have done what I did.”

  “But no one else has. And you can’t imagine all the people who’ve seen—”

  She wasn’t going to argue with the two big lugs, not after an impossibly long day. Right now, besides, her knees were moaning and groaning from kneeling so long for Fox. And her hands…her hands still felt him. “Look, I’m pretty sure he’ll be better when he wakes up—as long as he gets a few hours of solid sleep—but does he live here alone?”

  “Yeah.” Harry motioned to the big house. “Our mom has been living there alone since Dad died. We all moved out after we grew up. Normally Ben has a place in the country and I live over my restaurant. The bachelor house was empty for years. But Fox gave up his apartment when he went into the military—didn’t make sense to pay rent when he figured he was going to be gone for several years. The point, though, is that when he came home all beat up, the bachelor house seemed an ideal place for him to hole up, close to family.”

  Ben filled in more. “We’ve been hanging close for the last two months. Fergus won’t let anyone stay with him, but the idiot is in no position to take care of himself, and for darn sure, mom can’t cope with him alone.”

  “Hell, we can’t cope with him, either,” Harry said. “I can’t believe you got him to sleep—”

  “Don’t.” They kept looking at her as if she were an angel, which was funny and fun but too ridiculous to tolerate any longer. “I just got here at the right time, that’s all. He was probably on the other side of the headache, ready to sleep.”

  “The hell he was,” Ben said peaceably.

  “Yeah, well, I won’t be coming back, so don’t even try going there. He made it more than clear that he didn’t want me around, so this was definitely a one-shot deal.”

  “But you’d come back if he asked?”

  “He won’t ask.” She opened the van door. The pups leaped in.

  “But if he did ask—”

  “Yeah, then…maybe. If I could make it fit with my schedule. If I thought he was asking, and not you two pushing the idea on him. If…” She dug in her purse for her keys. Not that she carried a big bag, but she could probably have survived for six months in Europe on what she considered emergency supplies. Eventually her fingers emerged with the keys—and when she looked up, suddenly the two giants were descending on her, grinning ear to ear. She got a smooch on both cheeks before she could stop them.

  “Thanks, Phoebe. We love you.”

  Color bloomed in her cheeks. “You guys,” she began, and then just shook her head and climbed into the van.

 
Until she turned out of the driveway and disappeared into the dark night, her shoulders were knotted up with tension. Slowly, though, she felt her muscles—and heart—start to simmer down.

  Touch was erotic. That’s just the way it was. She couldn’t touch someone—intensely touch, the kind of touch required if you really wanted to help the person—without responding herself.

  So. Helping Fergus had turned her on. Nothing new about that. Nothing interesting.

  Nothing she needed to be afraid of.

  “Right, girls?” she asked the pups.

  The dogs looked up, as if trying to reassure her, yet she still seemed to need to take in heaping gulps of fresh air.

  It was Alan who’d made her feel cheap and immoral. Sleazy. As if sexuality and sensuality were a weakness in her character that made her less than decent. She knew that was crap. She knew, but, damn, the residue of hurt was harder to shake than a flu germ, even after all this time.

  In her head and her heart, she’d believed forever that touch was the most powerful sense. Almost everyone responded to being touched—the right kind of touch. People could go hungry, could go without sleep, could suffer all kinds of deprivation.

  But people who went without touch for a long period seemed to lose part of themselves.

  Phoebe understood perfectly well that touch in itself couldn’t heal anything. Touch just seemed to enable a body to want to heal itself. It seemed to help a body rest. It seemed to remind even the lost souls that there was wonder on the other side of loneliness—the wonder of connecting, of finding someone else who reached you emotionally.

  She pulled in her driveway, past the softly lit sign:

  BABY LOVE

  Phoebe Schneider, Licensed PT, Licensed LMBT,

  ABW, MP

  Infant Massage Therapy

  She docked the van in the narrow driveway, turned the key and leaned back. The sign was the key, she realized.

  She just had to quit thinking of Fergus Lockwood as a man—and think of him as if he were another one of her baby clients.

  Actually, he struck her very much like one of her lost babies—as if he’d been deprived of touch. As if he’d lost touch with himself because he’d become so isolated from human contact. In fact, as if he needed touch so badly that he’d responded fiercely and evocatively to any contact.

  In other words, he’d never been responding to her as a woman.

  She climbed out of the van, only to suffer a traffic jam at the back door with the pooches trying to barrel in ahead of her. It was after bedtime, after all. “So that’s the deal, girls,” she told them. “He’s not likely to call again, but in case he does, that’s how we handle it. We just think of him as one of our babies.”

  She flipped on the light and plunked down her purse. A vision immediately filled her mind of rolling smooth muscles, sleek warm skin, fierce dark eyes. She swallowed, and thought babies—yeah, right.

  By Sunday afternoon, when she pulled into the parking lot for Young at Heart, Gold River’s home for the elderly, she’d totally and completely forgotten about Fergus.

  A domineering, macho wind was hurling down from the mountain, throwing handfuls of confetti snow here and there and burning her lungs. It was the kind of afternoon when she just wanted to snuggle in a down comforter with two dogs, a book, a chick flick and a mug of hot chocolate—with melted marshmallows.

  She wondered—just idly, since she’d completely stopped thinking about him—whether Fergus might be tempted by a small, sizzling fire on a cuddly cold afternoon.

  There was a lot more wrong with him than the debilitating headaches, Bear and Moose had told her. He’d been home from the hospital for two months, yet except for short grocery runs, stayed locked in. Didn’t see people. Didn’t return calls. Didn’t do anything.

  She had no idea what he’d done before—for a living or for hobbies or anything else—but obviously they were describing a problem with depression. Maybe the depression was a result of his experience in the military. Maybe it was from injuries that refused to heal—chronic pain could cripple the strongest optimist. The thing was, it was hard to help someone without knowing specifically what was wrong with them. You had to have some clue what motivated the individual.

  Not that she was thinking about what might motivate Fergus.

  She wasn’t thinking about him at all.

  “Hey, Phoebe!”

  “Hey, handsome.” Typically she was effusively greeted the instant she walked into the rest home—as were the dogs, who were as welcomed here on Sunday afternoons as she was. In principle she had her hands full with her baby clients, but the manager of the rest home had somehow conned her into regular weekend visits. She hadn’t said yes because she was a sucker or weak-willed or anything like that. She just hadn’t quite known how to say no.

  Barney—who she invariably called Handsome—was ninety-three and skinnier than a stick, but he still had a full head of fluffy white hair. He could walk with a cane, although he couldn’t stop his hands from shaking anymore. The dogs piled over to greet him, as did Phoebe, who enthusiastically—if carefully—pecked him on the cheek.

  “I swear,” she whispered, “you’re so good-looking, I think we should run away from this place and have a wild, crazy affair.”

  “Go on with you. You’re young and beautiful—”

  “And you’re not?” She raised her eyebrows and patted him on the fanny—which he loved—and then she moved on.

  The bad wing was on the west side. She always started there. No one seemed to touch the end-stage patients but the nurses. The staff offered necessary care and caring, but no one had time to express affection or gentleness.

  Mop and Duster were allowed on the beds—encouraged, in fact. Even the Alzheimer’s group roused to pet a dog. She brushed hair, rubbed shoulders and necks, massaged cheeks, patted, soaked feet and hands. Some didn’t respond. But some always did.

  An hour later she hit the east wing—which was definitely more of a kick-ass crowd. They fought over the dogs, chattered nonstop, bent her ear with their endless array of health complaints.

  She couldn’t help loving them. They made her feel so needed.

  Most had lost the spouse who would have still touched them, and other living family seemed afraid of their brittle bones. They were so hungry to hold hands, to feel a cheek against theirs, to stroke and hold and hug.

  The manager at Young at Heart had repeatedly begged Phoebe to go on retainer for them as a regular. He claimed the whole place perked up after one of her visits; she made that much difference in health and morale.

  That was nonsense, of course. But for the next couple hours, she was busier than a one-armed bandit. She washed Willa’s hair—not because the rest home didn’t have a regular hairdresser, but because Willa adored the head massage. Who didn’t, Phoebe thought.…

  Which reminded her again of how Fergus had responded to even the most basic massage techniques. The Lockwood brothers had confused her by intimating Fergus was unreachable. Cripes, he’d melted faster than a sundae in the sun.

  It kept coming back to her…the feeling of his scalp in her hands, the short hair shivering through her fingers…but the best had been that one moment when she finally felt the tension in his muscles let go, let go, slow as a shadow, the pain in those beautiful eyes finally easing.

  “How come some nice man hasn’t snapped you up?” Martha always asked, invariably, like now, when Phoebe was soaking her feet in a baby oil and clove mixture. “I just can’t understanding it. You’re so pretty, with all that gorgeous red hair—”

  “I came close to marriage one time.” She gave the standard answer, standard smile, standard laugh. “But thankfully I escaped that fate worse than death by moving here.”

  “You won’t be singing that tune forever,” Martha said shrewdly. “He just wasn’t the right one. But it just makes no sense. The men should be pounding on your door.”

  “Nah. I think word’s spread that I’m a mouthy, bossy troub
lemaker.”

  Gus, who only asked one thing from her every week—to sit in the TV room holding hands for ten minutes with a dog on his lap—piped in, “I’ll marry you, Phoebe. You can have all my money.”

  “I’d marry you for love any day, you sweetie pie. I don’t want your money.”

  “A looker like you should be more greedy. Nobody can survive in this world without a little selfishness in their soul. You gotta think about taking care of yourself. Looking out for number one.”

  It was funny, she thought, how easy it was to fool people. She’d never have done this kind of work if it didn’t give back to her tenfold. The truth was, she was selfish and greedy and she always put herself first. And she proved it when her cell phone sang on her way home.

  It was Harry Lockwood. “Could you come for Fergus again?”

  “Can’t.” Her answer came out sure as sunshine.

  “He asked for you.”

  She believed that like she’d believed at fifteen when her date swore he’d stop, promise, hope to die. “Look, if Fergus calls and asks me to come, I’ll set up a time with him. But it’s Sunday night. I haven’t had any dinner. I have to wash my hair, get my stuff together for the week, groom the dogs. Sunday nights are sacred, you know?”

  “This is about hair?”

  “No. It’s about my not believing your brother asked for me.”

  “Okay,” Harry said, and hung up.

  The cell phone rang again just as she was pulling into her driveway. “Phoebe? Did I mention the last time I saw you that I’m deeply and hopelessly in love with you?”

  She laughed even before she recognized Ben’s voice. “I swear, the two of you are bad to the bone. But the answer is no. Absolutely no. I’m not intruding on Fergus again unless he specifically wants my help.”

  Ben went on as if she’d never spoken. “I’ve never been tempted to marry, but then I saw you. I’ve always been a fanny man, and your darling little butt is really the best I’ve ever—”