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  He stumbled back to his place and started a shower, hid under the hot spray, hoping his side would fix—it didn’t—hoping the hot water would splash some sense in his head. Which it did. Sort of. He climbed out, pulled on a fresh sweatshirt and jeans and headed out.

  He wasn’t going to Phoebe’s because she’d arranged the time, but because he needed to see her. Even if she was using witchcraft or ooga-booga and was a scary, scary woman, the reality still was that no one had fixed his headaches but her. There was nothing wrong with seeking her services.

  The problem was that he needed to set up a fair payment schedule for her so they were totally on a business basis. And the other problem was…she bugged him.

  In her driveway, Fox slammed the door of his RX 330. Damn woman. How could she possibly know enough about him to get under his skin? When it came down to it, what did she really know about him?

  Nothing.

  She was bossy. Domineering. Cute. Trouble by any man’s definition.

  Why did it have to be her that made the pain go away? Five million drugs out there, why couldn’t one of them work? All the doctors and physical therapists and tests he’d been through and to—none of it had been worth spit. He’d stopped believing anything could help him.

  He stomped up her gravel drive, scowling at her place. Even in the dimming light, he could see the whole place needed repair. The lawn was a weedfest. A shingle hung crooked from the roof—and if he could see one, there had to be more. And, yeah, he’d seen the inside of her house earlier.

  The wild color scheme inside had taken him aback initially…until he’d studied it, figured out what she was doing. The colors were so striking and interesting that they drew the eye. You noticed the walls instead of what wasn’t there, such as furniture. Carpeting. All the stuff that people filled rooms with.

  It wasn’t Fox’s problem if she was living on a financial shoestring, but hell, the whole damn world was greedy today, so why couldn’t she be? Instead she was feeding the neighborhood on Saturday mornings. Donating her time weekends, and on nonpaying customers—like him.

  That kind of generosity was a disgusting character trait. Who could live with a saint like that?

  He barged up to the front door, rapped hard enough to crack his knuckles and then waited. Hissing in air under his breath.

  Only…then she opened the door. And there she was, fresh and barefoot, wearing something that looked like pajamas—kind of a pale green, made out of a fabric that made him think of a soft, snuggly rug. Her feet were bare, her hair looped up with some kind of wooden pin holding it together. There was no baby in sight or sound. Somewhere she’d switched a light on, but the light barely trailed as far as the entranceway, creating only enough illumination to make her skin look impossibly soft. Softer than moonshine. Softer than petals. Softer than silver. And then there was the other stuff. She was wearing colors and smells that soothed. Her bare mouth aroused him, so did those sassy-bright blue eyes.

  Suddenly it was easy to remember that he was pissed off. He didn’t waste time on hello, just went straight for the punch. “This isn’t going to work.”

  She didn’t waste time on hello, either. “Yeah it is. Or it can.”

  He started to walk toward her massage room, but she said swiftly, “Wait, Fox, we’re going to the living room.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re not doing a massage. We’re going to do an exercise to help you work with pain. Where is the pain, by the way? It’s not a headache this time, is it.”

  She didn’t phrase the comment like a question, which further ticked him off. Damn woman knew things about him that no one could know. “My side’s giving me a little trouble. The left side. Not something you can help with, and not why I’m here.” He aimed his trigger finger at her. “You used my family against me.”

  “Yup.”

  “That’s unethical. Mean. Underhanded.”

  “It sure is,” she agreed. “Whatever works, huh?”

  He wasn’t buying into that smile. Not this time. “Don’t do it again. If I’ve got a problem, I solve it. I don’t involve family or anyone else.”

  “Well, of course you don’t, you’re a grown man. But in this case, your family’s pretty frantically worried about you. So now we’ve given them something to do. That may not help you, but it sure helped them. Think about it, Fox. I’ll bet the bank they’ll let up on the heavy-handed caring if they have a constructive way to feel they’re helping you.”

  He thought about that and then scowled. “If you say one more wise thing, I may just put a fist through a wall. There’s nothing more annoying than a woman who’s always right.”

  “Got it. Heard it before. Let’s move along.” She motioned to the fluffy rug on the living room floor. “What I want you to do is sit down—any way you want, cross-legged, with a pillow, lying down, whatever’s the most comfortable for you.”

  He sat. Both her pooches beelined for him the instant he crossed his legs. He’d have scooped them onto his lap if she hadn’t crooned, “Mop. Duster. Lie down.”

  She knelt down across from him—which gave him a binocular shot of the round swell of her breasts, the dip of white skin at her throat. Although her sweater was bulky, it was loose at the neck. He wondered if she really believed the cumbersome fabric concealed anything. He also wondered if she ever wore shoes, and how in God’s name she’d found a pistachio color to paint her toenails. Her toes were damn near as cute as her—

  “Fox,” she repeated sternly.

  “Pardon? I didn’t hear you.” He heard the courteous hint of apology in his voice and damned his mother for raising him to be polite to women. “Phoebe, I really didn’t come here for any damn fool exercises. I came here to argue about—”

  “I understand. You don’t like me. You don’t want to be here. You’re ticked off that I’ve been able to work with your pain so far, when you’d rather not be asking help from anyone.” She said all that smoothly and swiftly, as if to get it out of the way—and as if the damned woman had been reading his mind. “We can fight about all that later, though, can’t we? Let’s just get this exercise out of the way first. Then you can take all the time you want to rip me up one side and down the other. Take my hands, Fox.”

  He knew she wasn’t coming onto him. There was absolutely nothing about her attitude or dress or expression that let on she even remembered the heat of those kisses a few days ago. But for an instant…Fergus mentally corrected himself. It wasn’t even an instant. Maybe it was a milli-instant. Or a micromilli-instant. But for that micromillisecond of an instant, when she said “take my hands,” the image whooshed through his mind of the taste of her mouth.

  Of his touching her again.

  Of her coming apart for him again.

  Of him forgetting the whole damn world with her again.

  Naturally that micromillifantasy was absurd and he immediately squelched it…only, it was already too late. The redheaded witch had done it to him again. Forced him to take her hands, forced him to close his eyes, and the next thing she knew, Charlie was stiff as a poker, and Phoebe was forcing him to do ludicrous things.

  “Now, Fox…don’t talk…don’t think. I only want you to do one thing. Imagine. Put a picture in your mind…of the safest place you can possibly imagine. It’s a place where nothing can hurt you. Where no one can hurt you. Where you have absolutely no fear of anything.”

  “Phoebe, I—”

  “No. Don’t talk. You can in a little bit, but right now—just for a couple minutes—I want you to do this with me. Concentrate. Concentrate with everything you are, on imagining a safe place in your mind.” She waited. “Can you invent someplace like that? Imagine it? A place where you know you’d feel completely safe?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. Now keep that picture in your mind and explore it. Look up. Look down. In your mind, pretend you can smell the smells there, hear the sounds there. Know every part of it.” She waited. “Are you doing that?”
>
  “Yeah.”

  “I want you to feel how safe this place is.”

  “Okay, okay, I feel it.” Eyes still closed, he scratched his knee, then stopped, because her voice was flowing over him like music.

  “No one can touch you in this place. It’s yours and yours alone. No one else has the same safe place you do. No one knows where your place is. And no one can ever take it away from you.”

  Her voice kept doing that hypnotizing thing—and, yeah, of course he figured out what she was doing. But that didn’t seem to be able to stop him from putting this picture in his mind. The picture wasn’t anything special. Just a rolling field, a meadow with wildflowers and tall sweet grasses, swaying in a spring wind. Aspens and poplars hemmed the far edge of the field, rustling and shivering in that same breeze. The sun beat down, softer than a balm and healing warm. A bird soared overhead. A fawn cavorted in the grasses. It was a busting-gut happy kind of scene. Nothing hurt. For some crazy, totally insane reason, nothing hurt.

  His eyes snapped open. And found Phoebe, still sitting cross-legged across from him, her eyes on his face, her smile on his smile, her scruffy pups snoozing on both sides of her. He said heavily, “This is beyond weird.”

  “What’s weird?”

  “Nothing hurts.”

  “That’s great.”

  “No. You don’t understand. I mean it. Nothing hurts. Even my side doesn’t hurt.”

  “Great.”

  Before, Fergus thought he’d had enough. But now he’d had enough. “This is not funny. It’s impossible. What’d you do to me?” he demanded suspiciously.

  “You did it, not me, Fox. And the exercise won’t always work, but it’s always worth a try. So when you feel stress or pain coming on, give it a shot. Go to your safe place.”

  “That’s a pile of hooey,” he informed her succinctly.

  “Actually, Mr. Skeptic, it’s not hooey at all. It’s plain old physiology. When you feel pain or stress, your body tenses up. Those tense muscles and tendons essentially cause more pain—whereas when you feel safe, your blood pressure and heart rate both calm down. That helps your body loosen up. Which helps ease the pain. Any exercise that helps you relax would work the same way.”

  He understood what she was saying. He’d just quit believing in Santa Claus almost three decades ago. Determined to jolt himself back to sanity, he yanked up his sweatshirt on his right side to above his ribs. There, in plain sight, was the needle-size fragment that had been working its way to the surface of his skin for hours now. As Fergus well knew, there was pain and then there was pain. This wasn’t bad pain. It was barely mentionable compared to the serious injuries he’d had. But it was what it was—an annoyance. It hurt just enough that he couldn’t get it off his mind, the same way it was impossible to ignore a sharp sliver.

  Phoebe sucked in her breath when she saw the injury. “What on—”

  When he made to poke the spot, she grabbed his hand.

  “Are you nuts, Fox? Don’t touch that, for Pete’s sake! It’s an open sore!”

  He was speaking to himself more than her. “I can still feel it. It’s just…damn. You were right, Red. Who’d believe it? It’s not gone, but it really is nothing compared to how much it was bothering me before.”

  “That’s what I was trying to tell you. That ‘safe place’ exercise is one way to physically slow down your breathing and pulse. If you can do that, then you’re always going to win some over pain. It’s not a magic cure. But there are more exercises I can—” She gulped. “Look. Can I take that out? Or do you want to go to a doctor?”

  He couldn’t twist well enough to see the spot very well—but enough to notice the sliver had broken through the skin. “If you’ve got tweezers, I can deal with it.”

  She had tweezers. She had first-aid cream. She had red stuff to wash the spot. She kept him talking while she ran around, accumulating her little tray of supplies, making him explain about the dirty-bomb thing, how parts kept coming to the surface, how that was likely to happen for a while, how it wasn’t the end of the world, just disconcerting, and occasionally…gross.

  “It’s not gross, Fox. That’s ridiculous. It’s just a sore. But how come no one ever tells us this kind of thing on CNN?”

  “Beats me—what are you doing?” He was conscious that for all the touching she’d done to him before, she hadn’t actually put her hands below his neck. Not on bare skin. And, yeah, she’d seen him bare that day in the shower, but it wasn’t the same thing as having her eyes an inch away from his ribs. Her mouth, her eyes, her face, so close to his heartbeat. So close to his damned ugly scars. “Ouch,” he said.

  “Darn—did that hurt?” she asked cheerfully, and bent closer with the tweezers again. He could see all that wild, thick red hair of hers, but not her face just then, not the sore. And out of nowhere she suddenly started singing the national anthem.

  He forgot the sensitive spot where she was probing. Anyone would. “My God. Is there a cat in heat in here?”

  “Fox. This is one long sliver. Are you sure you don’t want to go to the emergency room?”

  “Hell, no. I can do it myself.”

  “No, you can’t. You can’t reach it on your own. It’s too far under your arm. Okay, turn a little more this way.” When he failed to, she picked up the lyrics. “…what so proudly we hailed…”

  He used a cuss word. The big one. And promptly shifted his arm over his head promptly. “I heard you hum before. It was bad, but not this bad. I’ll sit as still as you want if you just don’t sing again, all right?”

  “You promise not to move?”

  “I’ll promise anything. If you swear you won’t sing again.”

  It was a weak attempt at humor. Very weak. So weak that suddenly neither of them was moving. Somewhere a pup was snoring. Somewhere a faucet was dripping. But the only thing he was really aware of was her face, inches from his. She was looking at him with this…expression. Of caring. And compassion. And something more. Something so gut personal, so intimate, so about her and him, that he couldn’t seem to breathe for a whole long second.

  And then she said, “It’s gone, Fox.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s there every damn time we’re in the same room together. Every time you look at me. Every time I look at you.”

  “No. I mean…it’s out.”

  “I wish I could believe that, but I swear to God, that feeling’s coming after us like a freight train. Damn it, Phoebe. I’m not totally sure I planned to have sex again for the rest of my life. I came home not expecting to feel anything for the rest of my life. And then you came along.”

  “Fox. All I’m trying to tell you is that the long metal sliver is out!”

  Oh. The sliver. But when he looked at her face again, that fierce, soft look of longing and desire and closeness was still there—real as moonlight. As real as the pulse drumming in her throat. As real as her parted lips.

  Six

  P hoebe saw him coming, saw him aiming for a kiss, and knew perfectly well he intended trouble—and not a little trouble, but a major-meltdown type of trouble. Yet she couldn’t smack him. Not after having seen all those scars, all those healing wounds, all those hurts, so close up. She couldn’t do anything to further hurt Fox. It was unthinkable.

  Yet when her body bowed toward his—when her lips parted for his—it wasn’t exactly because she wanted to kiss him. It was just that she recognized his soul needed healing far, far more than his body. And, of course, she had no power to heal his soul or anyone else’s. But she couldn’t be so mean as to reject Fox.

  That was her excuse for kissing him as if she’d die without another taste.

  It wasn’t because she was a wanton, red-hot mama. It wasn’t because she let her senses rule her sense. It wasn’t because she was the kind of woman who’d kick out her morals when a guy turned her on. Phoebe wasn’t worried about all those insinuations Alan had implied about her character. She wasn’t.

  She didn’t have time to wor
ry about nonsense like that just then. Her brain was scrambling too hard trying to figure out how to tactfully, carefully, extricate herself from Fox without hurting him. She was fiercely considering that problem. Or trying to—only, by then he was kissing her again. And again. And again.

  She fought for a breath. “You’re not up for this,” she whispered worriedly.

  “Oh, trust me. I am.”

  “I don’t want to touch you in the wrong place. Risk hurting you—”

  “Phoebe. You couldn’t conceivably hurt me in the wrong way. It’s the first time I’ve hurt this good in a lifetime and then some.” His hands sieved through her hair. Even in the dusky light, she could see his eyes, fiercer than fire. “Don’t stop me. You can stop me later. I swear, I won’t go further than you want, not now, not ever. But…don’t stop me from kissing you a little more right now, okay?”

  If any other man tried that ridiculous line on her, Phoebe would have laughed…but Fox, damn him, wasn’t any other man. He sounded as if he really meant it—that he truly believed they’d stop, that he’d stop, that he wasn’t just beguiling her into being seduced. And because she believed he was telling her the whole truth—as he knew it—her heart helplessly lunged again.

  He’d locked the door on his feelings for so long. It meant something huge that he’d opened himself now, for her. Yeah, it was sex—she knew it wasn’t for more—-but that didn’t make his trusting her with his wary emotional state any less. The man was in so much pain. She had to respond to him. Anyone would have. Her heart wasn’t involved. Not really.

  Not exactly.

  Oh, hell. Maybe she was falling so deep, so hard in love that her heart was going to get ripped apart and shredded…but right now, holy kamoly, could he kiss.

  Since she’d kissed him before, she should have realized how flammable he was. She knew how potent those narrow lips were. How tasty. But he got these terrible inventive ideas this time. His tongue dipped and swirled and teased. His mouth tucked and ducked and tilted and found a hundred new ways to claim hers.