Touch Me

by Christie Ridgway

  “How do you think he’s doing?” Cami asked, worry written all over her face. “He claims to be nearly as good as new, but…”

  Guilt shot through Rose. The sex—uh, spinal readjustment—had been vigorous. “He seems in very good shape. The doctor cleared him for workouts that are intense, at least in my book.”

  “Good. Good.”

  “He seems most bothered by the fact he’s not allowed to drive.”

  “Yeah.” Payne’s sister fiddled with the insulation sleeve circling her coffee, frowned. “I wish we could convince him to give it up altogether.”

  Good luck with that. “Sorry, I don’t see him turning in his driver’s license any time soon.”

  “It’s the racing we want him to quit.”

  “Oh.” Rose’s hands went cold. “You think he’ll go back to it? Even after the crash?” When she’d spoken to him about it that one time, he’d not denied his intention to return. But she’d put it from her mind, finding it much too hard to understand.

  Cami’s brows lifted. “What do you think?”

  “I just don’t get why he’d want to race and possibly…” The word stuck in her throat. “Die.”

  “Yeah.” Cami sifted her hand through her auburn and gold hair and blew out a breath. “He’d say the idea is to race and live as long as possible.”

  “Still…why chance cutting that ‘as long as possible’ short?”

  Cami sipped from her cup. “The thrill, he says. The adrenaline jolt make him feel alive. Fills him up.”

  “Seems like he could find a safer hobby,” Rose grumbled.

  “I hope he’ll find someone who thrills him enough that he’ll be motivated to take better care of himself…” Cami settled her gaze on Rose’s face. “For her.”

  Eeek. Did Payne’s sister think that Rose had a chance to be that one? First, no. Second, no. Third, just no.

  He might be an excellent spinal adjuster, but Rose wouldn’t count on anything long term with a player like Payne Colson. And really, how could a woman compete with an adrenaline addiction?

  “Leopard, spots,” she said. “Even his own mother seems convinced he’s not the type to settle down.”

  At least that’s what she’d thought his mom had insinuated about thirty minutes ago. From the kitchen, Rose had heard—and yes, she’d been straining her ears—the older woman’s parting words. Does she know what kind of man you are? Followed by, Is she aware you’re not designed to be faithful?

  Cami was frowning. “Vanessa’s been around?”

  “Just this morning.”

  “Ugh,” Cami said. “Nothing good comes from her. When we were kids Ren and I called her Vainessa.”

  Rose didn’t think she should laugh. “She’s very beautiful.” Tall, slender, blonde, the other woman had a fragile, refined air about her.

  “It’s not her looks, it’s her emotions that she’s obsessed with. Though she’s recently married, it took her years to get over our father’s refusal to put a ring on her finger.”

  “Oh.” Rose grimaced.

  “Ren, Payne, and I all did poorly in the mother department. Let’s face it, Bean has absolutely zero discrimination. You’d think when he was in his procreative years—and honestly, I swear that must have come about through some drunken and stoned pact amongst the Velvet Lemons when they hit middle-age—he would have been more careful about where he deposited his swimmers.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rose said, because nothing else came to mind.

  Cami waved that away. “But Vainessa, she takes the cake. Signed away her custodial rights, but took full advantage of her visitations to scoop up her son for weekends here and there in order to rant at him about infidelity and her broken heart.”

  “So she was in love with your father?”

  “She’s in love with drama. Once I went to the zoo with the two of them and God, she could even make that afternoon a lesson in all the ways males can’t be trusted to stick around.”

  “You should have visited the wolf enclosure.”

  “Then she would have taken the opportunity to point out that a dog is better than Bean and his ilk.”

  Rose winced. “That does sound unpleasant.”

  “Well, let’s face it, she isn’t too off the mark with Bean,” Cami admitted cheerfully. “But she always piled on Payne, too. ‘You’re just like your father,’ she’d say. ‘You’re going to make women very unhappy.’ He still believes that crap. Says it’s in his DNA.”

  A bad feeling settled in Rose’s belly. “He seems to get along okay with her, though.”

  “That’s Payne. He gives her a pass because he says she was hurt. Damaged.”

  Rose thought of how Lily had once told her that she knew Gavin would be a good husband and father because he was nice to his mother, even though she could occasionally be a trial. Vanessa sounded so much more than that.

  Then Cami’s words came back to her. Says it’s in his DNA.

  She took a quick swallow of her cooling coffee to lubricate her throat. “Um, Cami?”

  “Hmm?”

  “That tattoo on Payne’s ribs. The dragon-headed twisty ladder?”

  “Oh.” A light sparked in Cami’s green eyes. “You’ve seen that?”

  No blushing! Rose commanded herself. “He went swimming yesterday, remember?”

  “If I recall,” the other woman said, smirking. “He had a shirt on.”

  Darn, he did. Rose busied herself by peeling the top off her coffee to stare at the dissolving foam at the bottom of the cup.

  “You like him, don’t you, Rose?”

  “Of course,” she said, shrugging one shoulder. I like what he did to me last night. That’s all. Who didn’t appreciate a good spinal adjustment? But she was beginning to worry it hadn’t been the deliverance from crush-dom that she’d expected. Needed.

  Fucking’s a state of mind. I’m going to find my way into yours.

  Struggling to shove that memory aside, she wanted to scream, beat her breast, yell at her big sister who’d advised her to get physical with P—

  The chiropractor, damn it.

  “All right, all right,” Cami said, as if sensing Rose’s agitation. “I’ll stop channeling my inner Cilla, because as much as I love the woman, I find her tendency to see heart-shaped balloons filling the air as annoying as the next person.”

  Rose smiled a little, because nobody found Cilla Maddox annoying in the least. But if Cami was willing to drop the subject—

  “About Payne’s tattoo. That twisty ladder is the DNA double helix, as I think you’ve guessed.”

  Rose briefly closed her eyes. “To remind him that infidelity is in his genes? From his father?”

  Cami nodded. “My best guess. But if you ask me, his mom passed along her own crap. Aside from shitty weekends here and there when she used him as an emotional punching bag, she abandoned him. I sometimes wonder if he’s not been spending his life racing away from that.”

  Infidelity and abandonment. Rose tried breathing through the sharp ache in her chest, no longer able for even a second to think of him as a physical therapist or an especially gifted chiropractor. He was a flesh-and-blood man, with his own wounds.

  Oh, Payne. Rose thought. Pain.

  Chapter Eleven

  Standing by the desk in the salvage yard’s back office, Payne glanced over his shoulder to ensure he was alone. Certain he was by himself, he tucked in Rose’s earbuds that he’d found abandoned along with her phone on the desk beside the computer.

  She was listening to a new book. The female narrator spoke with a soft twang.

  When Willa swung down from her horse, Rowdy was there to catch her. She turned in his arms and he didn’t pretend not to stare at the delectable cleavage revealed by her Western-styled shirt. She stiffened in his arms, temper clearly kindling.

  Little wildcat.

  Rowdy teased her with a blatant leer. “You shouldn’t leave so many of those pretty pearl buttons undone, darlin’, if you don’t want a man to l
ook.”

  “No gentleman would mention such a thing,” she retorted.

  Rowdy slipped his hand beneath her wide leather belt and her painted-on jeans. His fingers found the skinny rear strap of her thong panties. With two fingers, he plucked the stretchy fabric from its snug seat, then let it snap back into place, grinning when she jumped.

  Her face flushed and he knew she’d enjoyed the little bite of pain against her private place. “Baby,” Rowdy murmured against Willa’s hot ear. “We both know I ain’t no gentleman.”

  “Payne!” Now it was he who jolted, tearing the buds from his ears and spinning to face Rose, who strode through the doorway. A streak of grease decorated one cheek and her hands were smudged with more of the stuff.

  “Need something?” he asked, innocent and cool, as if listening to that suggestive bit of foreplay followed by the appearance of her in the small room hadn’t switched his libido to On.

  Her brows came together for a second, as if she suspected something, then she shrugged and looked down at her dirty hands. “Can I talk to you a minute?” she asked.

  “Sure.” He raised his voice. “Jeb, you got some time?”

  The teenager jogged in. “What do you need?”

  Payne tossed a sheaf of papers onto the nearby couch. “Look those over, will you? It’s a set of business codes we need to make sure we’re not violating.”

  The kid didn’t blink, though it had to be the most boring task ever. Not to mention completely unnecessary, since Payne knew them by heart. But this had been his strategy the last few days.

  Never be alone with Rose.

  It had been working out fine, actually. They’d spent hours at the new salvage yard and it was shaping up. Security cameras had been installed around the perimeter. The completely worthless, rotted-out junk cars had been identified and towed away for scrap. They’d cleaned up and rearranged the ones with promise.

  Best of all, construction had been finished on a hangar just off the main building. It was filled with tables that housed bins of the rare salvage pieces that were now accurately cataloged in the data base.

  Rose had accomplished a tremendous amount of the work, something above and beyond her job description. But she’d said she wanted to keep busy.

  Maybe, like him, trying to keep at bay the memory of their night together.

  Payne cleared his throat now. “Need to say it again, babe. Thanks for all the extra effort.”

  Her eyes had narrowed at the word “babe,” as if she knew he used that to put her in her place.

  Far away from him.

  “Yes, well. Glad you appreciate it,” she said, then hesitated, her teeth coming down on her lower lip.

  Shit. That made him fixate on her mouth. Unpainted, just asking for a kiss. But he didn’t do mouth-to-mouth, and remembering that also reminded him of why he couldn’t have her again. Rose needed the kind of man who could give her every kind of intimacy.

  A man she could trust.

  “So, your doctor’s appointment is coming up next week...” she began.

  “Yeah.” Thinking of that brightened his mood. “I should get the all-clear to go back to my pre-crash life.”

  “And your pre-Rose life,” she added.

  He couldn’t afford to miss her presence in his house, even though he supposed he’d falsely see her figure out of the corner of his eye for weeks after she finally left him. Already he knew she’d put healthy meals in his freezer, which he found both annoying and adorable. Playing mommy again, when every time he saw her precise handwriting on the plastic containers he wouldn’t be thinking in maternal terms.

  He would remember her bent over his kitchen table.

  He’d been considering burning it.

  His cock was enjoying its own wander down memory lane, by now hard enough for her to see a bulge if she took a look. But like him, she’d been keeping things impersonal since the Night of the Hawaiian Shirts, as he’d taken to calling it in his head.

  Swinging the desk chair around to face her, he dropped into it and propped one ankle on his knee, hoping to make a little more room in his pants for his hard-on. “What’s up, Rose?”

  “I have a proposition for you.”

  He jerked back, his gaze jumping to teenage Jeb, sitting just a few feet away. The kid’s eyes met his, widened.

  “Geez!” Rose exclaimed, clearly peeved. “Not that kind of proposition.”

  Payne’s heart started beating again and Jeb swallowed a sudden grin. “Sorry, babe,” Payne said. “A guy’s mind will go the way a guy’s mind will go.”

  She glared at him. “No more ‘babe’.”

  “Okay, okay.” He held up both hands. “What’s all this about?”

  Glancing down at her dirty hands again, she frowned. “Over dinner.”

  “Huh?”

  “I want to discuss it over dinner.”

  “You probably have some disgusting tofu and tomato surprise casserole to feed me in my freezer, though fair warning, that won’t soften me up.” But hell, he remembered he didn’t want to be alone with her. Which of the tribe could he call upon to chaperone?

  “We’ll go out,” Rose said, already turning on her heel. “I’ll pick you up at seven.”

  Just like that, he had a date with the woman he was trying his best to avoid.

  Punctual as always, Rose pulled into his drive and tapped her horn at 6:59. Payne glanced across at her as he slipped into the car’s passenger seat, by now accustomed to the cramped nature of its interior. “You honked, mistress?”

  She waved a hand. “Sorry, we have reservations and I don’t want to miss them.”

  Over the past few hours he’d tried guessing the exact nature of her proposition. This wasn’t his first time at the “proposition” rodeo—and fuck, he’d been thinking of Willa and Rowdy for hours too—but he didn’t suppose Rose wanted him to introduce her to the Velvet Lemons manager in exchange for a baggie of cocaine, or that she would ask for a loan and offer up payment in shibari lessons.

  It had been a weird and wicked life, he thought, suddenly very weary of it.

  “Are you okay?” Rose asked.

  He stretched his legs as best he could. “Tired, I guess. In need of something good.”

  “I think I can do that.”

  “Yeah?” Sensing her excitement, he glanced over again. It was too dark to read her expression, but her ebullient mood was catching. He smiled, and realized he’d miss that too when she was gone from his life. She was upbeat when she wasn’t snarky. And he liked the snarky side of her too.

  Settling into his seat, he folded his arms over his chest. “Does this mean I get steak?”

  “Just you wait,” was her only reply.

  The menu of the restaurant she took him too had just about everything, he noticed, perusing the one on display as they waited to be seated. From steak and potatoes to Asian fusion. After a few moments they were led to a heated patio surrounded by well-trimmed shrubbery covered in hundreds of fairy lights. As he followed Rose to their table, he noted she’d dressed up for the occasion—down to graceful black pumps.

  In Southern California, a pair of jeans and strappy high heels or stiletto boots were a common mode of dress for female restaurant goers—whether they were dining at a sports bar or a swanky place with a year-long waiting list.

  Tonight, his companion wore a dress as black as her shoes, knee-length, and that swung out at the hemline. The cut was modest and might have been boring, except the shoulders and tight long sleeves were black lace, the woven design big, loopy flowers that exposed a tantalizing amount of the creamy skin beneath.

  When they sat down, the second thing he noticed was she’d brought a slim leather portfolio along with her tiny purse.

  Then he looked up, and his next observation left no room for any other in his mind.

  He’d never seen her by candlelight.

  At the center of their table, the flame contained by a round glass holder threw off a buttery shine. It washed ove
r Rose’s features, highlighting her brow, cheekbones, and chin, while creating two mysterious pools for her beautiful eyes. Her lashes looked a mile long and as lush as her lips.

  Payne, who since the age of ten had seen starlets in nothing but hot tub bubbles and supermodels on their knees for super-moguls, was struck dumb.

  “What?” she asked, patting her hair self-consciously. She ran a fingertip around the contours of her mouth. “Is my lipstick smudged?”

  He cleared his throat. Tried to clear his head. “You take my breath away.”

  Now she made a face. “It’s Lily’s perfume. You don’t like it? Are you allergic?”

  Get a grip, Payne told himself, and shifted in his seat. “Rose—”

  “Am I making you wheeze?”

  Finally, he had to laugh. “No. It was an actual compliment, idiot girl.”

  “Oh.” Her expression turned disgruntled. “I’m not an idiot.”

  “Sometimes you are.” He grabbed her hand, squeezed.

  She squeezed back. Then both their gazes dropped to their linked hands. In the same moment, they let go.

  The barrier of menus rose between them. “Have whatever you like,” she said to him. “My treat.”

  “No way.” Payne frowned at her over the leather and parchment. “You’ve done so much more for me than you agreed to…”

  And suddenly he was back in his kitchen and she was half-dressed, her partial nakedness all the more alluring for the cover-up she was desperately clutching below her breasts and the swimsuit bottoms that were rolled like a band around her thighs.

  In a blink she was bent over the table, her swollen charms completely exposed. He’d gone wild at the sight of her wet, pink sex.

  “I’ll even spring for oysters,” she said.

  Stifling his groan, he hid his expression behind his menu. The last thing he needed was an aphrodisiac.

  Downing a bracing swallow of his ice water, he pushed off his wayward thoughts and decided on the prime rib and loaded baked potato, reveling in the look of displeasure on Rose’s face when he repeated his order to their waiter.

  “Now, Mom,” he said. “I don’t have to eat healthy every night.”