Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Bax
Mortification was my word of the day.
Out of everyone I knew, it had to be Bea who found me right as I was falling on my ass and dousing myself in paint the color of sunshine?
She was enjoying my humiliation and, for the second time today, stripping me bare and getting ready to help me with basic hygiene. It hadn’t escaped my careful attention that had she not been on my farm, I wouldn’t have been trying to paint my house in the first place.
Something about Bea made me want to at least try to act like a productive member of society.
And then I felt guilty because poor Athena had been living in a dump, and it had taken a veritable stranger to push my ass into gear.
Candy would’ve been on me ages ago to repaint the house, if she were still here.
In my bathroom, Bea smacked the back of my shoulder with her sticky hand. I heard the suction when she tried to pull it away from my skin. “Stop fidgetin’!”
“Stop ticklin’ me,” I spat back. I couldn’t see her, but I felt her behind me, like a sexy, pint-sized shadow. Every time her skin brushed over mine, I shivered. “What’re you doin’? You’re givin’ me goosechills.”
When she snorted and bent over in a fit of laughter, her hair dusted my low back, and she caused even more chills. “What the hell are goosechills?”
I tried to turn to see the laughter in her eyes. I twisted but lost my balance and gripped the sink. “You know, when you break out in?—”
“Goose bumps ?”
Her puffs of giggles rushing over my skin had me smiling too. “Yeah, same thing.”
“No, you made it up! Nobody says goosechills.” She pushed me forward so I couldn’t see her anymore and dragged a towel down my back, and I smiled. Her laughter was infectious. I couldn’t help myself.
My bathroom really needed a makeover now. It was almost as annoyingly yellow as the outside of my house. Why had I never painted it a different fucking color? My mama had picked out the canary-cum shade when I was ten years old. It was ugly as sin, but I just kept repainting it.
I stood on my good leg, still braced against the sink, trying to see Bea in the mirror.
After managing to wrangle me out of my shirt and sweats, she covered my cast with trash bags, which she’d patched together and sealed with duct tape.
And now she was covered in paint too. While the bath water ran and warmed up, she wiped the excess paint off my shoulders and back with old, holey and threadbare bath towels I used to wipe Figs paws off when it rained.
Luckily, Athena had recently washed them.
“You’re a bossy little brat, ain’t you?” As soon as the whisper left my lips, her head peeked around my arm and her eyes locked on mine in the mirror, and I clenched my jaw closed so nothing else ridiculous would come out of my mouth.
“Yeah, what of it? Now, stop movin’,” she challenged, arching an eyebrow. “You’re makin’ a mess.”
Her green eyes landed on the back of my neck, and she rolled her lip beneath her teeth again. She was always doing that, particularly when she looked at my body, and it was making me wild. I wanted to grip her jaw and smash those lips to mine.
The realization made the broken heart inside my chest jump and race like a jackrabbit.
“Can you get your underwear off by yourself, or do you need me to do it?”
“I think I can get ’em.”
“I would tell you just to keep them on, but your ass is soaked in paint. Sit on the toilet, and when you get them off, use those strong arms and just slide over to the tub and sink in. I’ll clean up later.
” She twisted and bent to shut off the tub faucet.
“I’m gonna go find a big cup so I can wash your hair. ”
“Thanks.” Technically, I could wash myself. My arms weren’t broken, but if she wanted to run her fingers through my hair, I wasn’t about to stop her.
She turned back to me before she walked out the bathroom door. “I put some of your body wash in the bath water.” Swirling her hand in a circle over the deep vee between her legs, she said, “You know, so you can cover all your bits and baubles with bubbles.”
A snort escaped my mouth when I saw the awkwardness all over her face. What was the big deal? She’d already seen my bits and baubles.
Bea gasped softly, watching my mouth as I laughed, and then slowly raised her eyes up to mine. She whispered, “Be right back,” and she closed the door with a quiet click behind her.
Strong arms? I flexed my biceps and looked down at them. I mean, I supposed they were strong. I’d worked on a ranch my whole life, but why was Bea noticing my arms?
Oh, well duh, probably ’cause I’d stripped in front of her twice now.
Fuck . Could this get any worse?
Athena wasn’t due home for hours. She had that drama-club thing after school, and then Abey called and said she’d have time to take Athena for new riding boots, so she’d pick her up after drama club.
There was little danger of my kid walking in on this disaster in the middle of the day, but just what the hell did I think I was doing?
Brand would probably disown me if he knew I was about to be completely naked with his employee.
Again. And she was important to him. As far as I knew, Brand and Bea had never had a thing for each other, but they were close friends.
He relied on her a lot concerning Lee Construction.
Besides me and Abey, there wasn’t anyone my brother trusted more.
After nearly falling onto the toilet seat, I’d almost decided to dig through the bathroom drawer to root around for a pair of scissors, but I finally managed to get my boxers off, and I transferred myself into the bath. Going commando was getting more appealing by the day.
The urge to lean back and relax in the warm water was there, but it was only four or five inches deep.
I raised my leg and rested my foot on the edge of the tub as I released the tension in my shoulders and pressed them back against the cold ceramic.
More goosechills broke out over my neck and chest. My nipples hardened to two cold, tiny points of pain, and then Bea walked in, holding an empty thirty-two-ounce soda cup from the Stop and Go in town.
She’d found an apron in my kitchen covered in pink flamingos, though, I’d completely forgotten we even owned one, and when she saw me and my bare chest on display for her, she did the lip roll again, then pulled the apron’s strings so tight, I worried they might cut off circulation to the lower part of her body.
She tied them and then sat carefully on the closed toilet lid.
My bits and baubles were properly covered in bubbles, but I had an inkling that wouldn’t last very long.
“Um, can you sit up?” she asked quietly. “I need to rinse your hair. You’re gettin’ paint all over the wall.”
“Yeah,” I said, and I used my core to propel me forward.
The laughter and teasing had gone from Bea’s voice. “Fill this up.”
She shoved the cup into my hand, then reached to turn the faucet back on, and I leaned forward and held the cup underneath the flow till it was full.
“Here.” Handing the cup back to her, I risked a glance at her face. She blinked and moved her eyes to my hair. I closed mine but felt the warm rush of water when she tipped the cup over my head.
“I’m sorry I’ve put you in this position,” I said.
It was emasculating, being bathed by a woman I barely knew.
But the situation made me realize again that I had a bad habit of not accepting help when it was offered.
As the oldest sibling in a big family, responsibility had always fallen to me, so maybe I’d internalized that and equated help to failure.
And then there was Candy. She’d always expected me to take charge, so maybe that had helped to fuel my need to control everything myself.
I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, but now I remembered arguments Candy and I’d had, and how I’d wanted her to weigh in on decisions we needed to make, but she rarely did.
“You’re the head of this family,” she used to say. “You know what’s best for us.”
I wished I’d realized back then what a load of bull that was.
“What position?” Bea asked.
“You know, the whole ‘bathtime for a grown man’ thing. You didn’t come here to take care of your boss’s brother, but thank you for doin’ it anyway.”
“No. I didn’t. But it’s fine.”
“It’s really not.”
“I said it’s fine, so it’s fine. Quit whinin’.” One of her eyebrows bowed in half, and she narrowed her eyes. “If I didn’t wanna help you and your sweet little ass , I wouldn’t. I’d call Abey or Devo or somebody.”
A wavy, nauseating memory slammed me in the head of the night I’d met Bea, and of her getting right in my face to put me in my place after I’d drunkenly made a comment about her taut backside.
I winced. She was still pissed about that comment, but it seemed like the intimacy of our current situation had flipped her confidence on its ass. “Bea?”
She froze and stared at me.
“I’m sorry about that. I should’ve said sorry that night. It’s no excuse, but I was way too drunk. I swear I don’t make a habit out of gettin’ shit-faced like that, but it was the first anniversary of— But what I said to you that night was inappropriate and probably demoralizin’. And I’m sorry.”
“Thank you,” she said, but she averted her eyes away from mine. “Now fill the cup again.”
For the next ten minutes, I sat there in silence with my eyes closed, listening to her breathe, blindly refilling the cup again and again when she handed it back to me.
She left the hot water running but pulled the plug so the yellow paint swill could drain.
What the bubbles didn’t cover, I hid with my hands.
I was freezing my ass off, but after she stoppered the tub again and added more body wash to the water, I endured the chill while the bath filled back up and she rinsed my hair one last time.
And when she was done and she massaged in shampoo, my hands splayed wider and I leaned forward, because, oh God.
I hadn’t been touched like that in over three years.
The slow, soft strokes of her thin fingers over my scalp were like nothing I’d ever experienced.
I never wanted her to stop touching me. I couldn’t totally hide the erection that had grown hot and hard beneath the quickly dissolving bubbles, not in five inches of water, but when I looked at her, Bea’s eyes were closed as she touched me.
The rhythmic caresses of her fingers became slower. She moved them gently over my hair, applying firm pressure occasionally and scrubbing with her fingernails to get the paint out.
“That feels good,” I whispered.
“Mm-hm,” she hummed, but her eyes stayed closed.
I had to try to start a conversation. If I didn’t have the distraction, I was afraid I’d pull her into the tub with me, and then what? Bea didn’t want that. Did I want that?
I did. Or I thought I did, but what would Candy?—
Candy wouldn’t say anything. Candy was dead. She’d been gone three years.
Mumbling, I asked the first question to enter my head, “So how’d you end up in Sheridan workin’ with my little brother?”
Bea sucked in a breath, like I’d startled her.
“Oh, um, I’d just moved there. I got lucky the day I walked into his office for my interview.
He’d had one of his foremen at the time doin’ interviews, but that guy had gone to lunch, and I’d gotten the time wrong, so Brand interviewed me himself.
I guess we just hit it off. He offered me a job on the spot, and it was a good thing, too, ’cause if he hadn’t, I probably would’ve ended up gettin’ my meals from a soup kitchen. ”
“You were in a tight spot?”
“Yeah, you could say that. I left my ex-husband back in North Carolina. I’d been skippin’ from town to town for a few years, lookin’ for somethin’ steady, but I didn’t find it till I met Brand. He changed my life.”
“You mean you ran away? Did he… Was your husband abusive?”
“No.” She scoffed. “He wishes he had the balls. If anybody was gonna hurt anybody, it would’ve been me. He’s a chauvinistic idiot. He knew I was through with him.”
Her sometimes brusque nature was starting to make more sense to me now. “Good for you.”
She nodded. “I haven’t heard from him since I left, which was exactly one day after our divorce went into effect.
Hit the road and never looked back. But I’d never been out of North Carolina, except to South Carolina once when I was little with my parents.
We went to Myrtle Beach. My mama grew up around there.
She always talked about takin’ me there, but we only went the one time.
“Anyway, when I left, I didn’t know where to go. I had a high school diploma and some construction certifications from when I worked for my dad, but most of those were out of date. I had a little money saved up, but that doesn’t go far on the road.
“I tried out a few places: Nebraska, North Dakota, southeastern Wyoming, but nothin’ fit.
I’d never felt so alone in my life. So I kept goin’.
I got a flat tire outside Sheridan and stopped there for the night.
I saw elk the next day, grazin’ next to my motel, and they were so beautiful.
They seemed like a good sign, so I found a place to buy a new tire and stayed. I met your brother a week later.”
“Wow. You’ve got guts. I don’t know if I could leave my home like that.”
“I needed to. All that’s left there for me is heartache and misery.”
“Your parents are gone? No brothers or sisters?”
“No. Only child, and my dad died when I was nineteen.”
“Your mama?”
Bea paused, her fingers stilling in my hair at the back of my neck. “She passed when I was Athena’s age.”
I looked at her, and sympathy crossed over her features, but she smiled softly.
“You understand her,” I whispered.
“I do.”