Lonely Business
LILA
Aspike of heat and excitement surge through me.
“For what?” I say.
“I’ll massage it for you. Had enough PT. I know what to do. You massaged my shoulder, now it’s my turn.” Slade pats Lucky and tells her, “Go on back to your bed now. Make room for your mama.”
She gives him, and then me, a comically pitiful look, and grumbles off to her extremely cozy dog bed.
“She’s mad at you now,” I say, clucking my tongue. “You’ll have to make that up to her.”
As I roll onto my stomach, Slade kneels beside me. The couch shifts with his weight. “Right now I’m worried about you.”
I’m wearing short silk PJ shorts and Slade’s flannel that I stole from the chair he laid it on. He just looked at me wearing it, but made no comment, so I figured he didn’t mind.
But it means that my legs are almost totally exposed, my ass just barely covered by the silk fabric. And his hands are going to be on me.
I tuck my arms under the throw pillow and stare at the coffee table and tell myself this is fine. This is just physical therapy. This is my friend helping me with my ankle.
He rests a hand lightly on my calf.
“This might be uncomfortable at first,” he says. “Tell me if it’s too much.”
“Okay,” I say. My voice comes out normal. That’s a relief.
He starts to massage. His hands are very warm. The calluses on his palms rub slightly against my skin as he settles his grip, and I feel that friction everywhere. Up the back of my leg, up my spine, a pleasurable heat kindling between my thighs.
Of course, I’ve felt Slade’s hands before. He wraps my ankle every morning. I’ve learned to play it cool when he puts his hands on me, because he’s so level and professional about it that I try to match his energy.
But this? Me laying down, ass up, while he massages me? That’s a whole other thing.
“Relax,” he says gently. “I won’t ever do anything that would hurt you.”
Not what I’m worried about, I think silently. What I’m worried about is the opposite: that this feels too good. That I’m going to do something that hurts me, like start wanting things I can’t have.
He says softly, “Breathe for me.”
His voice. God, his voice. It’s always deep but it’s lower now, unhurried, the murmur he drops to when he’s focused on something.
I breathe.
“There. Good girl.”
That heat between my thighs intensifies. Drums hotly throughout my limbs with every heartbeat.
This is going to be an interesting experience.
I press my face into the pillow as he gently rubs my shins.
“You’ve been staying off your ankle,” he says, conversational, unhurried, like he’s not currently dissolving me one careful touch at a time. “It shows. Less swollen than last week.”
Another circle, deeper. The pad of his thumb drags and I feel the roughness of it, that hand that has gripped hockey sticks and reins and rifles for years.
“Still holding a lot of tension here though.” His voice drops further. “Let’s work you through it.”
“Mmhm,” I mumble. It’s the best I can do.
He smells like his cedar soap with a hint of woodsmoke. He’s close enough that I can catch it every time he shifts his weight, every time he leans in to work a different angle. It’s a good smell, masculine and woodsy and deep.
His thumbs press in along either side of my Achilles tendon in slow, patient circles.
“Tell me what feels good,” he says.
Everything. Literally everything.
“Will do,” I say faintly.
His hands move up. The heel of his palm drags slowly up the length of my calf, and the roughness of it against my skin is a kind of blissful torture.
“Tight here,” he murmurs.
My mind instantly floods with filthy thoughts.
His thumb finds a knot just below my knee and presses in. “Is that too much?”
“No,” I breathe.
“Yeah.” Quieter. Right behind me, close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating off him. “I knew you could take it.”
Oh my God.
He works the knot loose with methodical, unhurried pressure. I close my eyes and lose myself to the sensation of it. The roughness of his palms. The way his thumbs sink into me and the way his hand wraps around my calf.
Liquid heat floods my belly. Lower, too.
“Don’t tense up, sweetheart,” he says. “I can feel when you do that. Gonna make it hurt worse.”
I didn’t know I was tensing. I mean, I did, but I thought it was localized to the tensing between my thighs. I didn’t realize it was my whole body.
“Sorry,” I breathe.
“Nothing to apologize for.” His voice is like gravel now as his thumb drags up, achingly slow. “You’re gonna let me take care of you, right?”
I’ve been taking care of myself since I was eighteen years old. I’m good at it. I made it a point of pride. The fact that this man wants to take care of me feels deeply, dangerously good.
“Yes,” I say.
I close my eyes and press my burning face into the pillow and remind myself that Slade Rhodes is my friend. My husband on paper only.
“So tight here too,” he murmurs, hands moving higher, thumbs pressing into the soft sensitive skin behind my knee, and the calluses catch there too, that same rough drag, and I bite down on my lip hard. Make a small sound.
His hands stop instantly.
“Does that hurt?”
“No,” I whisper. “It doesn’t hurt.”
“Good. I want it to feel good.” His hands shift, massaging deep into my muscles. “Does it?”
Other than the fact I’m dying inside, sure. I’m wet now, I can feel the familiar slickness there, and the humiliation of that fact does nothing to dull the pleasure of his touch.
“Yes,” I manage. “So—yes.”
“Mm.” Slade sounds maddeningly calm considering he has me melting into a puddle.
The fire crackles in the hearth. Outside the ranch is dark and quiet and it’s just us in the firelight, and his hands moving on my bare skin, and the slow steady sound of his breathing while mine is anything but.
I would give anything for him to not be my friend right now.
My face is on fire. My eyes are closed and I can only hope that what’s going on inside my head isn’t showing on my face.
He works back down to my ankle and wraps both hands around the joint. His grip is sure, his thumb pressed to the inside of my ankle where my pulse is hammering.
Please don’t feel how fast my heart is racing. Please have no idea what you’re doing to me.
“How’s that?” he asks.
“Good,” I whisper. “So good.”
A pause. Long enough that I open my eyes to look at him to see if something is wrong.
His gaze is trained on my bare legs. His expression is opaque as always, but when his eyes lift to mine I can see his eyes are very dark, the green almost entirely obscured by his pupils. The reflected firelight dances in their dark depths.
The man is literally smoldering.
I’m struck again by what a beautiful man he is, stern and almost forbidding in his handsomeness. It’s all those hard edges, sharp cheekbones and jaw, the dark slash of his brows, softened only by his long black lashes.
“Do you want me to do your hamstrings and glutes?” he asks.
“Oh. Um. Sure.”
“Okay.”
I’ve never thought about the back of my knee as anything other than a joint, but it turns out to be wired directly to every nerve ending I possess. His fingers skim across the soft skin there, sending pleasure simmering through my entire body.
I make a sound, small and involuntary.
Even though I clamp down on it immediately, it’s already out there, already in the quiet room between us, and I feel him go very still.
“Sorry,” I breathe. “That’s just—the back of the knee is apparently…”
“Sensitive,” he says.
“Yes.” My voice comes out slightly unsteady. “Very.”
A beat of silence.
“I’ll be careful,” he says.
And as he continues massaging me, he is careful. But careful isn’t the same as gentle.
His touch is firm and confident. His thumbs press into the muscle at the back of my thigh, working slowly upward. Every pass of his hands sends heat radiating outward through my whole body.
I’m gripping the cushion beneath me with both hands and trying to remember how to breathe normally.
“Tell me if it’s too much pressure,” he says.
Too much pressure is not the problem. The problem is that his hands are moving higher and the firelight is warm on my skin and I’m about thirty seconds away from doing something that will make the next several months of living in this man’s house extremely awkward.
Like moaning. Or begging him to just touch my pussy already.
Friend. Husband in name only. Friend, friend, friend. I chant it like a mantra as he touches me.
The issue is that the way he’s touching me feels like anything but friendly. It feels like a lover’s touch. The touch of a man who’s going to kiss me and take me in his arms and call me baby.
His thumbs press in slow circles and I feel my whole body go loose and tight at the same time, boneless from his hands and coiled with wanting. The only sound is the fire crackling. His hands are on the back of my thighs, rubbing, inching ever higher.
He clears his throat. But his voice sounds rough, almost guttural when he speaks. “Glutes now?”
I press my face into the cushion.
“Sure,” I say, muffled.
His hands move higher.
I guess I didn’t really realize that your glutes are your ass.
And Slade is now touching mine.
His fingers knead my flesh, arousal pulsing hotly through me with every squeeze.
His fingers find the hem of my pajama shorts and push the silk up slowly, until the curve of my ass is bare in the firelight, and then both hands are on me.
Warm. So warm. His palms span the full width of each ass cheek as he rubs slowly upward.
I grip the cushion as he works the muscle thoroughly, the heel of his palm driving in deep, his fingers spread wide across my skin. All I can think is that my husband has his hands on my ass and he’s rubbing and gripping me in a way that feels intensely, unbearably, deliciously sexual.
My toes curl. My hips want to move, to writhe, to push up further into his hand or to press my clit against the sofa to ease the overpowering ache there. It’s only by curling my hands into fists so tight my nails dig painfully into my palms that I’m able to resist.
I risk a glance back at him.
He’s looking down. There’s a tension in his shoulders and his forearms. His breathing is measured but deep.
His gaze is riveted to my ass. To watching himself touch me.
I feel like I’m going to combust. If he keeps doing this, if his hands drift even slightly inward, if somehow he finds out how wet he’s made me just with his hands on my legs and the low even cadence of his voice…
There’s no way this won’t rapidly spiral out of both of our control.
I start to prop myself up on my elbows.
“Stay still,” he says. It comes out almost like a growl, the instructional tone entirely gone.
Another bolt of heat pulses straight through me.
I put my head back on the pillow and let out a helpless sigh. “Yes, sir.”
His fingertips flex on my ass. Then slowly his fingers spread outward and down, following the curve of my glute toward my inner thigh. He is so close, so searingly close to touching me there, the edge of his finger nearly brushing against my pussy lips.
I know how wet I am and if he moves even a fraction of an inch further he’s going to know it too.
I tense involuntarily. Every muscle in my body going rigid at once, my thighs pressing together, my whole body locking up in a panic of pure mortification.
He stops.
His hands lift off me completely.
I hear his breath come out in one controlled exhale. Feel him shift his weight back. Away.
The loss of his touch feels more than physical. It feels like he’s wrenching himself away from me emotionally, too, like the cord of intimacy we’d been knitting between us is suddenly torn in two.
He’s sitting back on his heels, his forearms resting on his knees, looking at me with those dark green eyes in the firelight. His jaw is still tight. His chest is still rising and falling with that deliberate measured breathing.
A log in the fire pops.
“That should help,” he says finally.
His voice is even. Completely, infuriatingly even. Like nothing happened. Like his hands weren’t just on my body, like the tension that felt thick enough to slice with a machete never existed at all.
He doesn’t meet my eyes as he adds, “We should both get some sleep now.”
He gets to his feet, facing away from me and holding himself with a straight spine. Meanwhile I’m a melted puddle of my former self, every nerve ending still alight with his touch, still longing for it.
I squeeze my eyes shut.
Does he think I tensed because I didn’t want him to touch me there?
Does he think I flinched away from him?
I try to think of some way to call him back to me that doesn’t sound pathetic and desperate, but it seems my brain as well as my body has turned to jelly, and I’ve got nothing.
There’s no version of the truth I can tell him right now that doesn’t blow everything up.
It’s for the best, I tell myself, but the words feel more painful than ever.
I drop my eyes. Shift position so my knees are curled up under me, almost a protective position.
I pull a blanket over myself, staring into the fire.
Lucky rises up from her bed and comes to me, putting her chin on the cushion beside me.
She doesn’t ask for anything, just stays there.
I scratch behind her ears and try not to feel sorry for myself.
A fake marriage with no complications. Who was I kidding?
Slade crosses to the hallway before stopping with his hand on the frame and his back to me.
“Ankle feels better?” he says.
“Yes,” I say. I’m working so hard to keep my voice neutral, as unaffected as him, that it come out downright toneless. “Thank you.”
A beat.
“Goodnight, Lila,” he says.
“Goodnight, Slade.”
That night, as I lay alone in my guest bed, I toss and turn, feeling hollow inside. It’s lonely business, longing for someone. Especially when that someone is your husband.
But when I get up in the morning, once more wearing Slade’s stolen flannel because it still smells like him, there’s a perfectly grilled breakfast burrito wrapped in foil resting on the counter.
In the fridge, there’s a maple latte waiting for me to add ice to it.
By the door, a mason jar filled with wildflowers Slade must have gathered by hand, and a note next to it:
Wild flowers for my outlaw bride.
Yours,
S
In the place of that hollowness inside me, butterflies take flight.