Harlequin - Jennifer Greene by Hot Touch (read full novel txt) 📕

to relax, you’ll have a shot at sleeping it off. You’re so tense with the pain, it’s making it worse. But it’s hard to work on you while you’re lying on this couch. Especially with all your clothes on. If you could just shift forward a little, the couch arm wouldn’t be in our way so much…”

He stopped listening to her. He couldn’t listen. He was too busy feeling.

She couldn’t physically move him—hell, he had to be twice her size. But somehow she made the couch pillow disappear, so that she could lean over and contact him more directly. She worked, and kept working, behind his ears, down the sides of his neck.

She stopped to get more of that smelly Creamsicle stuff, came back, shivered it through his hair, scraped it through his scalp, rubbed it, kneaded it, soothed it, caressed it.

The more she worked, the more he felt a deep, sexual pull in the pit of his belly. Nothing she was doing was sexual. She never touched him below the neck and, hell, she was getting that gooey slippery stuff all over his head.

But it seemed as if she pulled the pain right out of him.

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His headache didn’t instantly disappear. But the sensations she invoked seemed bigger than the pain, big enough to distract him, big enough to suck him under a sleek, silent, shimmering wave of sensation.

She started humming under her breath, an old song. “Summertime.” About how living was easy and the cotton was high. She couldn’t hum. Her voice was so off-key it should have grated on his nerves—and God knew, his nerves had been in shreds for hours.

But not anymore. The soft pads of her thumbs stroked his closed eyes, so lightly it was like being stroked by a skein of silk. She brushed his cheekbones, remolded them, scrolled down to his jawline, pushed, stroked, pulled.

He suddenly went hard—which was as impossible as a phoenix rising. No man could get a hard-on with a migraine. The thought was ludicrous.

But damn…he’d never had a woman touch him this way. He’d never had a womanown him this way.

He’d never felt this…connection. As if someone else really were on the other side of the dark abyss and he wasn’t alone, not anymore, as if she knew intimate things about his feelings that no one else ever had.

It was petrifying.

He didn’t let other people in. Or he hadn’t, since coming back from the Middle East. His life had irrevocably changed. He just wanted to be left the total hell alone—and he didn’t want her near him, either, but hell.

He felt himself slipping and then slipping further. Into her spell. Under her spell.

She could have done anything, said anything she wanted—as long as she kept touching him. All the P.T.

and rehab and rebuilding he’d been through over these last months—yeah, he’d survived it all, willing or not, but nothing had dented the pain. Nothing had come close.

Until her.

His eyes were already closed, but he could feel sleep coming. Real sleep. Not the kind where he’d wake up in an hour, soaked in sweat, heart pounding, screams and explosions and the indelible face of a little boy relentlessly in his head. But the other kind of sleep. The kind where you sank into a deep, safe stillness and felt free enough to…just…let…go.

Mop and Duster lifted their heads when Phoebe snuffed out the candles. She waited a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkness and then quietly picked up her jacket and gear. She tiptoed through the silent house, trying to make no sound until she stepped foot outside.

Ben and Harry were still there, waiting for her, pacing back and forth the length of the veranda.

“I’ll be damned. He didn’t kill you.”

She thought that was a particularly perceptive comment of Ben’s. “He’s sound asleep.”

Both brothers shook their heads. “He can’t be. He doesn’t sleep anymore. In fact, that’s part of the problem—he’s so damn surly because he can’t get any rest—”

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“Well, he’s out for the count now. And hopefully he’ll stay asleep until he can clock up some serious rest.” Phoebe took a moment to inhale a deep, long breath. She had no idea how long she’d been inside, but the sky was now blacker than pitch and the bushes covered with a fresh coat of rime. She let the dogs chase off into the darkness to do their business. It gave her another moment.

Right then she seemed to need about fifty moments. Typically her hands could tremble for a while after the intense, hard work of a serious massage. Tonight, though, she knew there was another reason for her shakiness—a reason that badly unsettled her. Complicating her concern, the Lockwood brothers were looking at her as if she were a goddess.

“It wasn’t anything special I did,” she told them promptly. “I can’t cure anyone’s migraine. It’s just that the best ‘fix’ for people who have headaches like that is to get them to sleep, any way and any how you can. At least, that I’ve found. Anybody could have done what I did.”

“But no one else has. And you can’t imagine all the people who’ve seen—”

She wasn’t going to argue with the two big lugs, not after an impossibly long day. Right now, besides, her knees were moaning and groaning from kneeling so long for Fox. And her hands…her hands still felt him. “Look, I’m pretty sure he’ll be better when he wakes up—as long as he gets a few hours of solid sleep—but does he live here alone?”

“Yeah.” Harry motioned to the big house. “Our mom has been living there alone since Dad died. We all moved out after we grew up. Normally Ben has a place in the country and I live over my restaurant. The bachelor house was empty for years. But Fox gave up his apartment when he went into the military—didn’t make sense to pay rent when he figured he was