Chapter 14 #3
A soft voice asks, “Did you hurt yourself?”
As if on command, Grace hisses at a red-hot stab of pain in her lower back.
“No, I—” Another hiss, followed by a little contorting until she finds relief.
“I just slept wrong, I think.” But she continues, wholly certain that the middle section of her hair is coated in shampoo while the top and bottom remain untouched. “It’s fine.”
“It’s not,” Crew argues, and his voice sounds closer now. “You’re in pain.”
Grace sighs, struck by the need to keep his attention elsewhere, so she says through a watery laugh, “My pain tolerance is pretty high, if you recall.”
He doesn’t take the bait—and when he speaks again, it’s directly into her ear. As though he’s standing right behind her. And now that she’s homing in on it, she thinks he is—thinks she can feel the heat of his chest against her bare back. “Let me help you,” he commands gently.
Despite herself, despite the radiating aches coursing through her limbs, she scoffs. “You know, you don’t always have to come to my rescue. I can take care of myself.”
He’s quiet for a few heartbeats. “I know you can.”
Grace nods. “Good.”
“But I’ve seen those scars on your hands,” he says unceremoniously, and Grace tenses up, eyes squeezing shut at the pain that follows. “And I know you didn’t so much as whimper when I reset your shoulder. But I also know you’re crying right now.”
“It’s the water,” she lies, eyes remaining shut. “It feels great. They’re happy tears.”
“Don’t,” Crew interjects. It’s faint, barely there, but the press of his chest against her back has her movements halting.
Her hands freeze in her hair; her shaky breath catches in her throat.
His lips are touching her ear now. She can feel them, hot and insistent as they caress the skin on her lobe.
He breathes against her, and the sound—the feeling—makes her knees weak. “Don’t lie to me.”
“I—”
It’s a futile effort, trying to contradict him. Crew Caldwell is not a man to be toyed with or manipulated. He has always seen right through her to the darkest, rawest parts. Now is no different.
“Let me help you,” he says again. His lips travel downward, and when they move across that wondrous spot between her ear and jaw, Grace lets her arms fall. She couldn’t stop them if she tried.
Crew is there first, wrapping one of his own arms around her torso, so when Grace’s land, they fall atop his sinewy forearm. He pulls her tight against him, keeping her upright, which—thank God, because all of her bones have suddenly transformed into jelly.
He breathes hard against her neck. “Can I, Grace?”
She hums, lets her head fall back onto his shoulder, and then, finally, gives in. “Yes.”
A lot of things happen very quickly once she gives him permission, but Grace keeps her eyes closed to it all.
She knows Crew must retrieve the shampoo bottle and somehow get more of it into her hair, because now he’s massaging her scalp with that same level of care and expertise he used for his own.
It’s sinful, how good it feels. When he uses his short nails to scratch at the base of her neck, she lets out an indecent sound, and maybe she should be embarrassed—maybe she should apologize and run like hell away from the pond, but she doesn’t.
He rinses her hair by gently lowering her into the water with one hand secured behind her neck, and it surprises her how safe she feels in his grasp. How confident she is that he won’t let her fall.
The aches and pains in her back and neck have subsided at his ministrations, and Grace is left with only the feeling of being clean and boneless, a lump of clay for him to mold at his will.
She silently rejoices at the sound of him opening another bottle; he clearly has other ideas about skipping the conditioner, and she’s glad for it. If he were to stop touching her right now, she might actually combust into a million tiny molecules of wanton dust.
Crew’s fingers are adept despite the size of his hands.
He pulls them delicately through her tangled, now-clean hair, smoothing out the neglected bed of chaos with ease.
When he’s worked the conditioner into her ends, he proceeds to braid her hair down her back, then plucks the hair tie from her wrist and secures the end.
A little smile folds into her lips, even through the haze of serenity. “Did you just braid my hair?”
Crew hums, then lays the braid over her shoulder. The tip of it grazes her left breast, still concealed by her bra, which is now completely soaked and heavy with pond water. Quietly, he says, “It’ll keep your hair out of the way while the conditioner works.”
She can’t help but ask. “Is that why your hair is so wavy and shiny? Because you braid it?”
The laugh that rumbles in his chest vibrates onto her back, and it’s a tantalizing combination of sweet and arousing. Grace leans a little farther into it, testing, seeing how far she can go before he calls her out. Before he backs up and calls it a job well-done. Her hair is washed, after all.
He doesn’t. Instead, he situates her until there’s just enough room between them that he can shift his attention to her neck.
For a moment, it feels like his entire palm is encompassing it, his thumb grazing her hairline.
Grace’s breathing stutters again, caught off guard by the change in grip—by the unexpected possessiveness.
In a gruff voice, he asks, “Is this where it hurts?”
“Mm-hm,” she manages.
With his other hand, he stairsteps his fingers down her spine. He presses just slightly between the grooves, adding pressure and making her shiver. “And here?”
“Yes,” Grace breathes. She feels weightless in his hands, like her entire body has been reduced to only the parts where he touches her. She is no longer a thinking, breathing human, and instead is a maelstrom of sensation blanketed by feverish skin.
Silently, he works. He kneads her neck and her back until the rigid, aching muscles are pliant and devoid of tension. Grace has no concept of time; she can only register their synchronous breathing, heavy and warm.
“There you go again,” she tells him after he tames a particularly difficult knot.
His voice is soft, with a hint of amusement. “What?”
Grace sighs, letting her head fall forward as he works his hands into the top of her spine. “Fixing me. You’re always fixing me.”
For a beat, he says nothing, and Grace worries she’s crossed some invisible line.
Some arbitrary boundary between them that didn’t exist seconds ago.
But then he breaks through the silence and his voice is a shade firmer than it has been since she joined him in the pond.
He sounds more like himself and less like this rugged but soft cowboy masseur-slash-hairdresser.
“For me to fix something,” he says, pushing his nails into the hair at the base of her neck.
Grace’s lips fall open in an involuntary silent cry for more. He hears it, somehow, and scratches there, while also pulling her head back gently and closing the distance between them once again. Pressed flush against her, he speaks into her temple.
“It would need to be broken. You aren’t broken, Grace. You never were.”
Grace’s eyes blink open at the affirmation.
He says it so plainly, without even a sliver of room for argument.
Though she knows he’s wrong on so many levels, she doesn’t argue.
She lets herself live in this reality for a precious moment, where she is strong and capable and respected by this man.
Where she is wanted and welcomed and home.
Crew must be in a giving mood. Something in the water must have him ready to spill all of the feelings he keeps tightly under lock and key, because without prompting, he continues.
“I never got to tell you what I thought about your dress,” he begins, as one of his hands moves slowly to her hip.
It’s a question more than an action—a tentative, slow request to break through the pretense of massaging her aches and just touch her.
Grace bites back the What took you so long? that wants to break from her lips and nods. He grips her there, no longer gentle. When he pulls her even closer to his body, she feels something hard against her backside.
“At the party.”
The dress—the party—Grace swallows, nodding again. It feels like it was ten minutes and ten months ago all at once, coming back to her in a kaleidoscope of colorful, misshapen memories.
“Uh-huh,” she attempts, then swallows down the only remaining saliva in her mouth. “You—you ran away before you could.”
“I think it’s more appropriate to say I was dragged away,” he counters. “But if I hadn’t been—”
The hand at the back of her neck comes to her other hip.
Another question, followed by another quick answer, another quick, silent insistence that Yes, you can touch me anywhere you want to.
His hands are big enough that when he spreads them across her belly, his fingers can intertwine.
He uses this woven grip to keep her in place, speaking now into the apple of her cheek.
“I would’ve said you were stunning. That I always thought you were beautiful, but in that dress—it hurt to look at you. It hurt to look away.”
Oh. This man and his beautiful, honeyed words. Grace doesn’t know whether to smile, or laugh, or cry at this, and so instead she simply accepts it, letting it wash over her skin alongside the spring water.
“I like it,” she eventually murmurs, words slurred with desire, “when you look at me.”
Another deep, reverberating rumble. “You do?”
“I didn’t know it at first,” Grace admits. “Didn’t know—what this was, what the feeling was when I felt your eyes on me in a crowded room.”
He strokes up her torso, teasingly soft. “But you know now,” he says. “What it is.”