And immediately bursts out laughing, pressing her fingertips to her lips.
I scowl. “What?”
“You’re stiff as a board, my dude,” she says, stepping closer to the table. Her soft fingers brush my bare arm, my inner elbow, and rest there in little pinprick points of warmth. “It’s like you’re taking up planking as an Olympic sport.”
“Planking? No clue what you just said.”
“Of course not.” With an amused sigh, she presses down on my inner elbow. “Just relax.”
I start to say something.
Only for something about that pressure to click, and a sudden looseness flows through my entire body. Just like all my joints decided to pop and turn liquid.
I groan, sinking against the warm linen cover of the massage table, gasping out in something close to pleasure. “What the...what was that?”
“Chakra point,” she answers simply. “Almost like a switch, isn’t it? It’s a quick release of tension. Some folks say it’s all psychological, kinda like a placebo. Others think it’s from some mystical, higher place. For me, it’s a good place to start, whatever you want to believe.”
She leans over me then, a few wisps of her hair falling down to tease against my cheeks as she looks at me searchingly.
“Are you feeling any better?’ she asks. “Like it might be safe to get started?”
“Yeah. Okay.” I nod shakily.
Shit.
I think this girl might be about to ruin me in more ways than one.
“Okay,” she murmurs, pressing her slim hands flat to my stomach. “Close your eyes, then. And try to relax.”
It’s almost a relief to close my eyes—at first.
With my peepers shut I can’t see her bent over me, the heavy curves of her tits on the verge of falling out of that damnable tied-up shirt, her body this pure graceful siren call and her face too pixie-like.
You know, everything that’d make the brutal pain in my dick a hundred times worse.
But it’s actually harder with my eyes closed and nothing left to my senses but the imagination.
Underneath the scent of whatever she’s pouring into her hands, this musky semi-sweetness that makes me think of sand and heat and spices, I can smell her.
She’s almost got this creamy-thick scent, something I could sink my tongue into. It’s as radiant and real as the warmth of her body leaning in close, the soft sound of her skin and her clothing against the edge of the table as she works.
And holy damn, her hands.
Her hands are hell on my skin as she strokes me from neck to shoulders to chest to hips. Just like she’s waking me up, bringing my body back to life one square inch at a time.
I’m sizzling, prickling, electric charges in the shape of her palms left everywhere she touches. I don’t think it’s the oil warming slick against my skin, smoothed on in a soothing layer.
It’s her.
And if she keeps it up, no frigging pain’s gonna stop me from embarrassing myself under this flimsy towel when my cock spikes up a tent.
“Hey,” I growl without opening my eyes. “That ain’t my thigh.”
Peace stops, lower, somewhere near my knees.
When her hands lift away from my body, she sounds almost wounded. “I’m trying to help you relax so the treatment will be more effective.”
“Peace,” I sigh. “Please. Humor me.”
There’s a pause before I hear her moving, her heat shifting, and then those soft hands rest just above my knee. “All right,” she says. “If that’s what you want...but it may end up hurting more.”
“Don’t see how that’s possible.”
I damn well find out a few seconds later.
I don’t have to open my eyes to know the shape of the scar.
It’s like a gnarled knot in a twisted tree trunk, blazed against my skin, starting a few inches above my knee and snaking in a strange contortion halfway up my thigh. The muscle somehow swirled into place around where that chunk of metal slashed my flesh.
Muscle ain’t supposed to knot like that. It goes straight up and down, sometimes with a twist.
Too bad they put me back together wrong.
When her fingers press down on that knot, searching, looking for a single string to start unraveling, holy merciless fuck.
My leg explodes. Pure riptide pain shoots up my hip to my knee, then ricochets back to throb up to my groin.
I let out a low bearish sound, grappling at the edges of the table with my palms, digging my fingers in, spine arching. It hurts too much for me to even kick out, my teeth grinding like I’m trying to fucking crush them down to nubs.
“I’m sorry,” Peace says softly, her touch gentling. “You’re carrying so much tension here. It’s like a land mine. Everything I do will hurt at this stage. I can try to work my way in from the outer edges to let you get used to it.”
Part of me wants to say fuck this.
I don’t know how hurting like this is supposed to help me at all.
My eyes open to slits, watching her as she stands next to my thigh, looking at me with such warmth, such concern, still asking me to trust her.
Kind of like I asked her to trust me that night on the side of the road, alone and frightened and waiting for me to come find her.
Whatever.
Taking several shaky breaths, I nod, digging my fingers in harder to the plush table cover till I feel the wood underneath. “Go ahead, woman. Do your worst.”
She offers me a faint, almost sad smile.
The next time she touches me, it’s farther from the center of the wound. The pain’s more a soft burst versus the supernova blast it was before.
I close my eyes, swallowing hard, trying to endure it, counting out my breaths as her hands work and knead my flesh like it’s putty. She goes in a radial path around the most concentrated bits of the scar.
It’s this weird, rhythmic dance of pain.
Sometimes the pressure of her palms is enough to flatten it into nothingness, before it fights as soon as the pressure eases.
“Hey,” she murmurs, her voice part of the rhythm, soft and low. “Talk to me. Anything to take your mind off it. It’ll help.”
It’s hard to speak through gritted teeth. “Don’t know what you want me to talk about.”
“Tell me about Andrea?”
There’s a warmth in her voice when she says my daughter’s name that nearly undoes me.
I know she only met Andrea once.
That night I came to fetch my daughter, it’d been a hell of a something to see her through the windows, talking to Peace so easy. My Violet has a rare trust she’s been hard pressed to give to many since her ma died.
“She’s a good kid,” I start. “No—that ain’t even right. She’s the greatest. Stubborn as hell, smart as hell, too. Determined to be this wild child artist and I’m gonna let her if that’s what she needs to be, as long as she keeps out of serious trouble.” I smile faintly. “She’s nothing like her ma. I think I’m glad for that.”
Peace doesn’t answer for a long time.
“She mentioned her mother passed,” she murmurs.
“Yep. Abigail.” It’s weird to say her name out loud. When Andrea and I are locking horns, it’s always just your ma. “Four years ago last week. Freak medical condition. We were days away from signing the divorce papers anyway, but she was still Andrea’s ma. I was ready to work with that. Just because things went to hell in a handbasket with my lady didn’t mean it needed to spill over to my little girl. Didn’t want it destroying her.”