Can't Hold Back

by Serena Bell

  Holy hell, she was in trouble.

  And the thing was, none of this should come as a surprise to her. She knew from the past how good she was at deceiving herself and how bad she was at resisting him. And she had just done both again.

  God, she was an idiot.

  She made up her mind. She would stay as far away from him for the next three days as humanly possible. And when Jake came back, she would tell him, Let’s transfer Nate’s care to you. He kissed me, and I don’t think I should treat him. That would be enough truth for her to feel like she wasn’t lying, without risking her future employment at R&R. She’d help get Jake up to speed on what was working best for Nate’s care, but it would be Jake laying hands on Nate’s smooth, golden skin from this point forward. Temptation removed.

  What a relief that would be.

  Chapter 10

  When he woke up the next morning, he knew he had to get away. He hadn’t slept. He hadn’t been able to get her out of his head. Not the taste of her mouth or the way she’d half climbed into his lap or her Oh, God or the scent of her, rich and sweet in the air. He’d thought he’d been sleepless before—this was something new, jerking off twice in the silent dark, to have a few minutes’ respite from wanting to beg her to change her mind.

  Horny and pissed—an awesome combination.

  She’d responded to him. Without thinking, reacting to the touch of his mouth. She’d kissed and licked and wanted more. She’d been ready to take more, before good sense had prevailed.

  That had gotten him going so fast—

  And then she’d been all No way. And he couldn’t quite see it. Because he’d told her he’d forgiven her for the past. And she’d said herself there was wiggle in the law. So if they liked each other, why couldn’t it all be okay? Then he could haul her onto his lap again, but this time do everything he wanted to her.

  Although he agreed with her on one count. This couldn’t go anywhere. She loved this job and he was going to work for Jim and Suzy. They couldn’t really hope to have anything between them other than a few rolls in the hay, and as hurt as he’d been when he’d discovered the truth about what she’d done with those letters, he definitely wasn’t vindictive. He didn’t want to ruin her career over a romp.

  Even if he was going to get calluses on his right hand and wear a permanent groove in his brain thinking about the way her thigh had felt against his erection.

  He had to remember why he’d put himself in Alia’s hands at all, to be the man he knew he could be for J.J.’s family. For Braden and Jim and Suzy, for the store, for J.J. Alia wasn’t the end, she was just a means. So he packed up a duffel bag and drove himself the four hours down to Eagle Hill.

  J.J.’s mom all but made him pee in a cup, quizzing him about how long he’d been clean and how he was feeling. Then she let him take Braden out kayaking. They’d rented boats and stayed out most of one afternoon.

  Braden was cool. He was ten, a little boy one minute and a man the next. The grief came and went, too, bursts of anger Nate could see were bigger than his frustration with not being able to turn as easily as he wanted, or getting his paddle wrapped up in lake weeds. Nate didn’t try to talk to him about J.J. They’d have time on the longer trip, plenty of time for big conversations. Maybe Braden would ask Nate about J.J. then. In the last few years, Nate had spent more time with J.J. than Braden had, a fact he was acutely conscious of. It sucked that he’d gotten the best and last years of J.J.’s life.

  When he wasn’t out with Braden, he helped Jim in the store. They’d talked about how when Nate’s time at R&R was up, he’d come to work there, but they hadn’t discussed the long term. Nate hadn’t hinted that he was thinking maybe he could be the one to fulfill J.J.’s mission, to keep the business alive until Braden was old enough to take over.

  Between times, he did his PT exercises diligently, strengthening. Stretching. Things were different now, more space behind his shoulder blades, more separation between the individual knots that made up his spine. When he couldn’t make a muscle let go, he tapped on it with a tennis ball he’d brought with him.

  The pain came and went, but it seemed less—angry. Less personal. Less stubborn.

  Over Suzy’s obscenely good meatloaf and garlic mashed potatoes, she’d asked a million questions.

  “So you grew up near Seattle?”

  “Port Orchard. Across the Sound.”

  “Brothers, sisters?”

  “I was an only. My mom’s great—she was a single mom, but she worked like a dog to take care of me, but managed to still have time to be the fun mom.”

  “And your—”

  “My dad was a firefighter. He died when I was four, in a fire.”

  Their eyes met, acknowledging what they shared. He could see the sadness that would probably never leave her, and he didn’t kid himself that he could make it go away. He wasn’t J.J., and he’d never be J.J. But maybe he could be something. Some help, some consolation. Like a rope bridge over a chasm.

  “What’d you study in college?”

  “Nonprofit management.”

  “Store’s profitable, though,” Jim said. He was a man of few words and rare smiles. Nate wondered if he’d smiled more. Before.

  “It’s all the same. Business.” Which wasn’t true, of course, but he didn’t want them thinking he was sacrificing something for them. Making them feel guilty was the opposite of the point.

  “But you must have chosen that degree for a reason,” Suzy said. “You must have had plans. Ideas.”

  “Well, sure, but plans change.”

  He had had plans, but, then, so had J.J. What was that thing people said? Life was what happened while you were busy making other plans.

  Or death was what happened.

  “And how about love? Is there someone—special—in your life now?”

  He saw Alia in his mind’s eye, clear as water, the way she’d looked that first day in the kayak, fierce and beautiful. She had somehow found her way into all his senses. Because when he thought about her, he thought about the way she’d felt in his arms beside the lake, the way she’d tasted and smelled. And how when he couldn’t see her or touch her, he could still hear her, in the dark behind his closed eyes. The sound of her voice moving around him as her fingertips probed, and the sound of her silence when she was listening.

  Suzy regarded him, that sadness there again, and the sensual surround experience of Alia shattered. Because he knew what Suzy was thinking. That there would never be someone special for J.J.

  “No,” he said. “No one special.”

  And then they’d talked about J.J. About how he could always make them laugh. About how he wasn’t scared of anything. Suzy said he never had been, that he’d scared the shit out of her as a kid, climbing fifty feet up a tree, sledding down hills that should have been reserved as double-black-diamond ski trails, riding his bike like a trained stuntman. Jim said J.J. had been a total pain in the ass about school, forgetful as shit, the class clown, always in the principal’s office.

  “I guess nothing ever changes,” Nate said. Because J.J. had been the same damn way in the Army, the first one to volunteer to charge into a building they only half believed was abandoned, and most of the time Nate wondered if he would have even remembered his ruck if he hadn’t seen Nate hoist his on.

  Except, of course, everything had changed.

  There was a terrible silence, and no one looked at anyone else. Jim’s fingers gripped the table.

  Then Braden, with the brilliant innocence of childhood, piped up, “Is there any dessert?” and the moment shifted and dissipated, and Suzy brought out the most amazing chocolate cake.

  —

  “Welcome home!”

  Jake was sitting on the rolling stool in his office, reading patient records. Getting caught up, she assumed. He was tanned and looked even more ridiculously fit than usual. He moved so easily with his prosthesis and was so utterly unconcerned by it that most of the time she completely forgot it existed.<
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  “Thanks,” he said, looking up.

  “How was Hawaii?”

  “Damn nice.” A smile spread over his handsome face.

  “I’m going to chalk that goofy grin up to your surroundings,” she said, grinning back.

  “Well, the beaches are lovely. But so was the company.”

  Alia felt a stab of unexpected envy. After five years, the two of them were still so happy in each other’s company.

  She’d never really craved that. At least not before. She’d been content with the idea of having a life of meaning. With taking away people’s pain.

  “How’d it go here while I was gone?”

  “It was great. The movement therapy class is up to six regulars, and—”

  “I heard you did morning meditation.” He raised his eyebrows. “That was gutsy. Plus, I had three different men tell me they would just as soon I go back to Hawaii so you could keep laying hands on them. And I stopped in to see Nate this morning and he looked almost like his old self. You must have done some kind of magic on him.”

  She winced. She hadn’t seen Nate since the other day at the lake. She’d wondered, even, if he’d left—but apparently not. She couldn’t figure out from the butterflies in her stomach whether that was good or bad news.

  “Not magic. He still has a lot of pain.”

  “But he says he’s feeling much more in control of it. Not blindsided nearly as often, more able to find strategies to work with it.”

  “That’s good news. I’m glad to hear he’s feeling like there’s progress.”

  “He attributed it to you.”

  She scoffed. “Not if he was looking good this morning—I haven’t worked with him in days. I think so much of it is being in a place like this, with other guys who understand what he’s been through. Being active, being purposeful. You’re doing such a great thing here. I don’t think I can take much credit for Nate’s progress.”

  “Well, he feels like you can. And I feel like you can. He’s not the only one who swears by what you’re doing. I knew I was making a good choice, asking you to come here.”

  He was making it savagely difficult for her to tell him what she needed to tell him, but she wasn’t going to shy from it. If she was going to work here, this was her chance to clear the air.

  “Jake.”

  He must have heard the edge in her tone, because he squared his shoulders in the manner of a man taking bad news on the chin.

  “I need you to pick up Nate as your client. I need to—recuse myself.”

  Jake’s gaze probed her face for more information, and she found herself, unexpectedly, blushing. Which wasn’t lost on Jake. “Did something happen?”

  “He—” It wasn’t getting any easier to say it. “He kissed me.”

  “Oh, shit.” Jake’s eyes widened.

  “Yeah.” She couldn’t quite look at him.

  “What happened?”

  So much for not too much detail.

  “We were swimming and we were on the other side of the lake, and he had pain, and I tried to help, and then—” She peeked. He looked pretty horrified, which she couldn’t blame him for. “I know. I should haven’t touched him out of the context of the office, but I ran into him swimming across the lake, and he was struggling, and I was worried about him making it back across the lake, so I tried to do some tapping and massage—”

  He didn’t say anything, only crossed his arms and fixed her with a hard look.

  “I know. I know.” She wasn’t going to let herself think about how far she’d let things go before she’d rebuffed Nate. Her brain had shut down. Her body had taken over. But as soon as she’d recovered her senses…“It won’t happen again. I made that completely clear. I explained how the rules work, that I couldn’t be involved with him if I was treating him.”

  “Oh, hell,” said Jake, running his hand through his hair. “See, this is the downside of having a female therapist in an army of sex-deprived men. I’ve got friends who own retreats who won’t even hire women, and of course I was like, bullshit, that’s wrong, that’s illegal, I’m not going to do that, but damn. You can see why it’s tempting to go that route.”

  She shook her head. “No. That’s not the right answer, and you know it. And this won’t be a problem. We’ll transfer his care to you. Everything will be fine. I want this job. I can handle this situation. Whatever it takes. Look at it this way: Now you know that if a conflict of interest arises, I can handle it in an aboveboard way.”

  He paced back and forth a few times along the length of the office, finally settled with his hands on the windowsill, facing away from her. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. You’re right. And I feel bad, too. I’m partially to blame. I shouldn’t have let you treat him in the first place.” He turned to her, his face lined with concern. “That was my bad all over. You guys had a history, and he was into your sister, which should have told me that there was a big chance he’d be attracted to you.”

  She didn’t see the logic there, but she let it go.

  He crossed his arms. “So, okay, let’s do this. I’ll take over his care. And what’s going to happen between you and Nate?”

  “Nothing. I’m not going to let sex get in the way of working for R-and-R.”

  “And that’s all it is? Sexual attraction on his part? You’re not interested in something more with him?”

  She shook her head. It wasn’t so much that she wasn’t interested, but that she couldn’t imagine a positive outcome for anything between them.

  “Because even if you’re not treating him—” He hesitated, shook his head. “It’s none of my business, but you’re like a sister to me, and I have some personal experience with this stuff, and I just think it would be a really bad idea to get yourself involved with him.”

  “I know. That’s why nothing’s going to happen. I’m not interested in making anything happen. I know a guy in his shoes isn’t in a position to—”

  She remembered, abruptly, that she was talking about a guy like the guy that Jake had once been, not very long ago, and shut her mouth fast.

  Jake frowned, but Alia was pretty sure he wasn’t angry. “He’s vulnerable. I’ve been there. Trying to put your life back together when your body isn’t what it used to be—and with the painkiller issue on top of that. But I’ve got to tell you, you’re vulnerable, too. It’s a powerful thing, stopping someone’s pain.”

  “I know.” It was a powerful thing. Nate’s face, smoothed suddenly of pain lines. How close his expression was to bliss, how much removing pain felt like giving pleasure, so seductive. It had definitely been part of what had propelled her yesterday, stripped away her good judgment. And she knew, too, how easily Nate could mistake the sudden cessation of pain for gratification.

  “It’s not a good basis for any kind of relationship.”

  “I know,” she repeated.

  “I know you know. I’m trying—I want you here. I want you here, and happy, and not all wrapped up in Nate’s…stuff.”

  “I’m not—or I won’t be, once you start treating him.”

  “Look. We talked about this at the beginning. How hard it is to keep your distance.”

  “I fell down on that.” Her only hope, she knew, was to totally own it. “But I swear this had way, way more to do with having a history with Nate than with anything else. There is no way I am going to have trouble keeping my distance with any other client, Jake. I promise. Swear to God.”

  “If I’d been here, you would have come talk to me right away, right? Before—”

  “Absolutely.”

  Jake sighed. “Alia, I really want to give you this job.”

  “I really want you to give me this job.”

  He stared at her long and hard, as if trying to reassure himself of something, then nodded. “Okay. Okay. I’m going to dig around in the couch cushions. I don’t know where the money’s going to come from, but I’ll figure it out. Just give me a little more time, okay? In the meantime, can you stay on and help
with my schedule? If you take on a few more of my clients, I can call some potential donors. I can’t promise it will lead to a job, but I will do my damnedest.”

  “I wouldn’t need a huge salary.”

  He looked down his nose at her. “That’s the oddest salary negotiation I’ve ever heard. But thanks. I’ll do my best. I want you to be happy here, and getting paid fairly is a big part of that. And room and board. And benefits.”

  “I really love it here.” It was true, quite apart from how loose and limber, how strangely peaceful, touching Nate Riordan had made her feel. She loved the woods, the lake, the no-nonsense male energy—even the terrible stories and sometimes disturbing volatility of the veterans. “It’s the first time I’ve ever felt like I was really using all my—” She stopped.

  “Gifts,” finished Jake, the soft word odd, coming from such a tough guy, but she knew it was the way she would have finished the sentence if she’d had the nerve.

  “They need me,” she said quietly.

  “Yes,” he said, his gaze on her face thoughtful. “They do.”

  Chapter 11

  Nate stared at the text he’d written for a moment before he hit send.

  You ditched me!

  He hoped she’d take it in the spirit in which it was intended. He wasn’t mad. Okay, maybe he was a little mad. Because she’d said if he laid off the kissing, she’d still be able to treat him, but then she’d gone and—dumped him. On Jake. If she was going to do that, why not give in to temptation? Why not let the intense chemistry play out?

  When Jake broke the news that Alia was turning his treatment over, he’d had about ten thousand different emotions in an instant. A sense of betrayal—she’d talked to Jake about what had happened—followed by disappointment—she wasn’t going to touch him again the way she had those times on the table and beside the lake—followed by relief—well, then! If she wasn’t his therapist anymore, he had some other ideas about what they could do instead.