Scowling, she reminded both of them, “I’m a professional, dammit!”
“Yeah, sure,” Moira said. “You keep telling yourself that. And just in case you forget it, I’ll mention it to you every chance I get.”
Michael couldn’t seem to get his pants on. Lately he’d taken to wearing sweatpants because they were easy and comfortable and warm, but he’d gotten it into his head to put on a pair of jeans for this first session with Kelly. His bum leg wasn’t cooperating.
He had the pants half on and half off when the doorbell rang. Scowling, he gave one more forceful yank on the jeans and barely managed to stifle a howl of agony. Or at least he thought he had, until he looked straight up into Kelly’s worried gray eyes. Her cheeks were flushed and she was still wearing a bright pink ski jacket over a sweater that looked so soft he immediately wanted to stroke his hand over the material…and the woman under it.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Aside from having an uninvited guest appear in my bedroom, I’m just peachy,” he growled.
Her chin shot up and fire blazed in her eyes. “Not uninvited. I’m here for our appointment, and I’m not even a minute early. I only came in because you didn’t answer the door and I thought I heard you cry out.”
“I didn’t answer the door because I wasn’t dressed,” he retorted. “How the hell did you get in, anyway?”
“Your brother gave me a key,” she said. “And since you’re obviously okay, I’ll head on into the living room and get set up. You might as well strip out of those pants before you join me.”
The suggestion probably couldn’t have been more innocent, but something that felt a whole lot like desire slammed straight through him. “I beg your pardon?”
Kelly gestured toward his jeans. “The pants. Lose them. I’m going to start with a massage to loosen up those tight muscles.”
Michael swallowed hard. She intended to put her hands all over him? He frowned at her. “Did we talk about that when you were here yesterday?”
“I’m sure it came up,” she said briskly. “Five minutes, okay? I have another client in an hour, so there’s no time to waste.”
Michael stared after her as she left his room. They most definitely had not talked about this. He would never have agreed to letting her put her soft as silk hands on his body. He might be injured, but he wasn’t dead. One touch and he suspected this could go from a therapy session to something else entirely. It had been too blasted long since he’d felt a woman’s hands on his bare skin. His best friend’s baby sister was not the woman who should be testing his willpower.
Still wearing his jeans—zipped up and securely in place now—he wheeled himself into the living room. “We need to rethink this,” he said tightly. “It’s not going to work out.”
She leveled a look straight at him. “Oh? Why is that?”
“I don’t think you ought to be touching me.”
He could almost swear that her lips twitched at that, but she managed to cling to a perfectly serious expression.
Hands shoved into the pockets of her own snug-fitting jeans, she inquired curiously, “I don’t make you nervous, do I?”
“Of course you make me nervous,” he retorted. “What man wouldn’t be nervous when an attractive woman he barely knows suddenly announces that she’s going to be massaging him?”
“You’ve known me since I was fourteen,” she reminded him. “And it’s therapy, not seduction.”
“Tell that to my body,” he mumbled under his breath, very aware that the conversation alone was having an extremely interesting effect on certain parts of his anatomy. This was Kelly, dammit. What was wrong with him? Bryan would mop the floor with him—and rightly so—if he heard about Michael’s reaction to his sister.
“What was that?” she inquired, her expression all innocence.
“Nothing.”
“Come on, Michael. You were a SEAL. The way I hear it, they’re the bravest of the brave. Are you actually going to fire me before we even get started, just because I’m going to massage you? What would your buddies think of that?”
The challenge hung in the air. The woman was good. Really good. She knew exactly how to play him. He scowled at her. “If I had half a brain, I would.”
She did grin then. “Is that a yes or a no?”
Michael considered his options. He could fire her right now and hire somebody else—preferably some ox of a man—or he could try getting through at least one treatment before calling it quits. He owed Kelly for one session anyway, and something told him she wouldn’t take a cent if he didn’t let her do her job. He weighed fairness against self-preservation, and opted for fairness.
“We’ll see how it goes today,” he said finally.
She gave the slightest little nod of satisfaction. “Okay, then, let me help you out of those pants.”
One fierce look from him stopped her in her tracks. “Or you can get them yourself,” she said.
Wincing at the shooting pain that accompanied every movement, Michael finally managed to shed the pants and heave himself onto her portable massage table. At least he was on his stomach, so he wouldn’t have to see her face when she saw the jagged scars from the surgery. He didn’t miss her sharp intake of breath, though.
He felt a soft splash of warm oil on his injured leg, then the skimming touch of her hands as she smoothed it down the back of his thigh and over his calf. Her touch was gentle rather than provocative, but that didn’t stop the sudden shock of awareness that flowed through him. Michael forced his mind to detach itself from her actions and concentrate on counting backward from a thousand. It was a tactic that had served him well in other situations involving slow torture.
“Am I hurting you?” she asked.
The simple question dragged her from the periphery of his consciousness right back into his head. “No,” he said tersely, trying to mentally haul himself back to that nice, safe place.
For a few moments, blessed silence fell. Michael made it all the way down to nine hundred and two before she spoke again.
“What happened?” she asked.
He resigned himself to staying in the disconcerting moment. “When?”
“When you were hurt.”
“I walked into a trap,” he said, still filled with self-loathing at the stupidity of it. He should have known what was going on. He should never have trusted the intelligence report that the caves had been cleared of terrorists. He’d always relied on his own surveillance, his own instincts, but this one time he’d gotten anxious, a little careless. It was a bitter lesson that would have served him well in the future…if only he had one.
“Where were you?”
Too many years of keeping silent about his work kept him cautious even now. “I can’t say.”
“But you were a Navy SEAL, right? So I can assume that this had something to do with the war on terrorism?”
“You can assume anything you want to assume.”
Her fingers began to massage a little deeper, working muscles too long unused. Knots of tension in his legs seemed to ease, at least as long as she didn’t venture too close to the scars. That area was still amazingly tender. He yelped the first time she touched the bullet’s exit wound on the back of his thigh.
“Sorry.”
“I’ll