Ahead in the Heat

by Lorelie Brown

  He was the one who’d called her the best. She bit back a little smile at that memory. The past four years of private practice hadn’t been easy. On more than one occasion, she’d been tempted to throw her DPT degree away and run the shelter full-time. Letting someone else direct her practice would have been so much easier than trying to balance all the pieces of her life. But she’d worked damn hard for the privilege of her physical therapy career too.

  If Sean didn’t like how messy she kept things, he could suck eggs.

  She was thankful the back section of her clinic was much tidier. She pushed open the door to a corridor between consultation rooms, then led him into the front office, which had been created out of a spacious dining room. It was a little unusual to use a residence as an office, but it’d been converted in the seventies by a general practitioner who wanted to work out of his home. Annie hadn’t been able to resist the Craftsman charm. The old GP’s backyard pool had been the absolute capper.

  She had drained it straight away.

  Fishing her key ring out of her pocket, she unlocked her secretary’s filing cabinet and pulled out a new-patient packet. “Here. Most of these you can take home and fill out, but it’ll be helpful if you could sign a records request from your doctor.”

  “Writing isn’t so easy right now.”

  She managed not to roll her eyes. “Think around the corner, Sean.”

  “I’m right-handed. Exactly what do you want me to do?”

  Pulling out the sheet she needed immediately, she laid it out along with a pen that she pulled from a cup on Cynthia’s desk. It had a fake flower taped to it to keep patients from accidentally wandering away with it. “I need it legible, not pretty.”

  He opened his mouth as if to protest, but then shut those pretty lips. Wise man. He dug his phone out of the pocket of his slacks. God, even the fact that he wore slacks with an obviously tailored button-down shirt on a Saturday morning meant she shouldn’t be messing with the dude.

  She was probably the foolish one. This was ridiculous. She’d had a tiny taste of the pro sports world, and it had been bitter. Awful. She’d stayed away ever since, and she got enough work with regular people who had it hard getting insurance companies to pay for physical therapy. Bending her personal ethics because he was offering such an exorbitant price . . . She didn’t want to think of what that said about her. It probably wasn’t flattering.

  Did doing awful things still count for good if she had the right motives behind them? Probably not. There was all that talk about the road to hell being paved with good intentions and the like.

  Sean finished the form and pushed it back across the desk. “There. If the doc doesn’t recognize my signature, I guess he can call me.”

  “These kinds of forms are often mostly for record keeping.”

  “Covering your ass. Lovely,” he said with dry wit. “Isn’t that exactly what I want to hear about the state of my health care?”

  She took the sheet and flipped it around, scanning through the information. “The state of your health care is just fine. I know your doctor. He’s good.”

  “Like I said, I don’t want good. I want the best.” He said it with a wry smile, one that said he was aware of how arrogant he sounded. He dripped attitude. He was someone who deliberated every step he took and knew how to get what he wanted precisely when he wanted it.

  She was going to have a hell of a time tipping his life upside down. Everyone knew about Sean Westin. His ability to be a party boy extraordinaire as well as a championship surfer made him something of a marvel. But now he’d pushed too far. He’d been too reckless. He was going to have to do more than a few stretches to make sure he didn’t lose his grip. “Tell me about the accident.”

  “Didn’t you read Nate’s account?”

  Nate Coker was his Coyote surfing team comember. The guy had tweeted about Sean’s busted collarbone and had posted a few photos to Instagram. Injury in the days of social media. That wasn’t even counting the bloggers who’d reported on it in the following days. Sean Westin was big business as a man who’d made his face familiar on a household level. At one point, he’d even done national commercials for top-shelf vodka. Pity his career wasn’t keeping up with his moneymaking. He was a midrange surfer. But, of course, being midrange on the World Championship Tour still said a lot.

  She crossed her arms over her chest and leaned against the waist-high customer counter. She wasn’t used to a patient being on this side of the desk. “Humor me. I ask that every patient tell me about the precipitating incident, when possible. It gives me clues about the nature of the injury and also about the nature of the person. The ways to go forward are often myriad. It helps to be able to narrow things down.”

  “Anyone ever told you that you’re awfully smart?”

  “More times than I can count.”

  He hitched one lean hip on the side of the desk. His thumb ran over the seam down the front of his slacks, over and over again. She wondered if he realized the nervous tell, or if he was one of those guys who thought he was perfectly put together at all times. She preferred the men who had at least some level of self-awareness. They were more manageable and didn’t require her to take a baseball bat to their heads.

  “I know people think I was drunk, but I wasn’t.” His gaze burned into hers, filled with intensity, almost as if he were willing her to believe him.

  As well he might, since her belief was a little bit on short order. “Nate said you’d been drinking in a dive bar.”

  “Because he’d been drinking. And I’d had a drink. I’m not going to deny that.”

  His mouth set into a flat line. His lips weren’t particularly finely shaped—he was missing much of a bow at the top of his mouth. But there was something about the way he talked. . . . It was almost as if he was considering every single word, though at such a fast clip that most people wouldn’t notice. He was . . . deliberately fast. That was it, as if he were slinging the patois of a carny barker.

  “You know what they say about driving. Even one is too many.” She baited him deliberately, trying to see if he’d rise to the occasion. Or if he’d deal calmly.

  “I had two over the course of the morning—”

  “Morning?” she repeated. “Seems like that’s pretty hard-core if you’re drinking before noon.”

  He shook his head. “It was Bali. Beach life. It’s normal to start drinking around ten thirty, because we’d been up since four and would probably crash out at dusk. It’s like life on a deserted island when you’re filming.”

  “But your island wasn’t deserted. There was a pretty local girl.”

  “Her name was Eoun, and yeah, she was really pretty. But she was really nice too. When a few locals came in and started giving her shit, I stepped in.”

  The laugh burst out of her abruptly and awkwardly. She shoved her fingers over her mouth, smashing her lips against her teeth, but she couldn’t hold the laugh in. “Did you challenge them to a surf off?”

  He shot her a look from under his brows that said he was much less than amused. “Very funny, Dr. Baxter.”

  “Sorry, but I just don’t see the leap from a waitress getting hassled to you injuring yourself surfing.”

  “I have a reputation for fighting. I’ve been sanctioned twice.”

  “I know,” she said, beaming a slightly obnoxious smile at him. “Trust me. It’s on the mental list I’m compiling of things to address immediately.”

  The unimpressed look didn’t go away. “I couldn’t afford to get in a fight. I’m too low in the rankings this year to cope with point penalties from the ASP.”

  The Association of Surfing Professionals—Annie knew that one. She didn’t follow the World Championship Tour devotedly anymore, but she knew the ASP still managed it. Sanctions from them would cause any competitor problems, most especially one who was in danger of not making next
year’s cutoff. “Fighting is a poor relief for conflict, anyhow. It usually only serves to deepen tensions.”

  “You’ve obviously never been on a boat with ten men filming a surf vid for three weeks. Fighting is practically like playing poker. It’s a means of passing the time.”

  “Thanks for putting a name to my worst nightmare. I hate violence.”

  His mouth tweaked up at the corners. “Certain kinds of violence are recreational.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. There was something about the way he’d said that, giving weight to the phrase, that made her nipples tighten and her stomach turn wobbly with sudden heat. Good Lord, that was such a bad idea, she didn’t even know how to express it. She didn’t need to be sexually attracted to a client. Especially since that client had already put a strange twist on their relationship by offering a fee that verged on bribery.

  Business. Therapist and patient and nothing else. She pushed herself back into proper territory. “Get on with the story, please.”

  “You’re a hard case, Doc.” But he gave a little nod. “It sounds completely dorky, like a Gidget movie gone wild, but yeah, it practically was a surf off. They were talking smack, and I started talking smack back. I had a stack of borrowed boards anyway, since I’d left my favorites in Australia for the Margaret River Pro. The next thing I knew, we were all out in thirty-foot surf. It was just short of needing a tow-in.”

  “You were able to paddle out.” She made a note on a small pad at the counter.

  “I was even able to surf one wave. Then a second. But it was the third one. I dropped off the lip too hard and came down on the front. My knee twisted, and my board slipped. I free-fell into the front of the wave.”

  “I assume that wasn’t enough on its own to cause the injury?”

  He shook his head. “I had my arm out for balance. The wave pulled me one way while the ocean sucked me down.”

  “Were you concussed?”

  “No. I didn’t black out either. I remember every second of the pain.”

  “Did you receive treatment in Bali?” She scribbled more on the pad, but she wasn’t really taking much in the way of notes. Every word of his story was scratched with more than just his pain—his determination and fire snapped through every word. She was doing her best to keep her head in the right frame of mind and not watch his eyes burn.

  “Some first aid, but Coyote flew me back to the States as soon as possible.”

  “Good enough.” She capped her pen. “Mr. Westin, I look forward to the next eight weeks.”

  He leaned forward, coming away from the desk. His shoulders were wide underneath his pale blue button-down shirt. The sling did nothing to dent his image. He hadn’t taken even a nibble of her bait when she’d pushed him about the initial incident, but at this he suddenly seemed like a live wire. “Six weeks. I need time to get my game together.”

  “Eight,” she replied calmly. “I won’t promise you six. My program will be intensive, difficult, and, as it is, shorter than I’d like it to be.”

  He bit back a sigh. The lines of his neck were sharp as blades. “Then I suppose you should call me Sean. It seems like we’re going to be spending a lot of time together.”

  Chapter 3

  Sean knew he had issues. Plenty of them. Well, even that was hedging it a bit. More like he had a duffel’s worth of issues wedged into an overnight bag. Things were busting out at the edges.

  Like the fact that he didn’t want Annie in his house. It wasn’t anything personal against her. Actually, she seemed pretty cool so far. Less like a stuffy doctor and more like a . . . life coach, maybe. She was slightly snarky, and it almost seemed like her sarcasm oozed out around her words unintentionally. Sean liked that. His strange upbringing meant he sometimes missed that people put up false fronts. He took them at face value, accepting their word that they were exactly the person they presented themselves to be. If he believed the faces he was presented with, people would give him the same courtesy. And he’d had plenty of secrets to keep as a kid and into his teen years.

  Which was still related to not wanting anyone in his place. He was sitting on the cement brick wall that lined his short driveway before it dipped into the underground garage. His legs bounced, heels lifting off the backs of his flip-flops. The fingers of his left hand sought purchase on the wall at his hips, but each digit only scraped over the concrete. He had a bad habit of biting his nails to the quick.

  Telling himself to get a fucking grip didn’t help much. The front of his house wasn’t designed to be useful for pacing, but he pushed up from his seat anyway. He managed, going ten feet one way by picking around carefully balanced beach plants chosen to emphasize the local habitat. He’d paid a lot for the gardening. He’d paid a lot for the house, too, so it had seemed only fair.

  He liked his place. It was custom built, and he’d picked everything from the land to the roof plus everything in between. The labor of love had been done long distance as he traveled to Bali and Teahupoo and Indo during construction. There had been walk-throughs when he was in town, and making decisions via Skype when he wasn’t.

  It was kind of ironic that he’d put so much effort into a home, considering what had once happened to the house he’d grown up in.

  Annie’s surprisingly beat-up Nissan Pathfinder pulled in alongside the curb. The SUV had once been dark red, but its fading topcoat made it look closer to gray, and the back right window had a two-foot-long crack running through it. When she hopped out, Annie craned her neck to take in the full view of the tall, narrow-fronted beach house.

  “Nice ride, Doc,” he drawled. It came out more sarcastic than he’d intended, but that was probably his nerves coming through. “At least I know my three million won’t be wasted on fast cars and loose women.”

  She leveled a dark-eyed gaze at him. Her eyebrows lifted; then her lashes flicked back toward her SUV. “Maybe not fast cars. But I don’t think we’ve ruled out loose women, have we?”

  He choked down the laugh that sprang up from nowhere, but he wasn’t sure why he bothered. She made him laugh. That ought to be a good thing. But there was something about her that left him slightly on guard and unable to drop his defenses. She was his therapist, and there would be forced proximity to navigate. She wasn’t one of his usual, no-strings-attached sort of girls.

  Why he was thinking even slightly in that direction he had no idea. She was about as far from those usual girls as possible. He liked them tall, so they looked appropriately dramatic when he walked the red carpet with one on his arm. Their blond hair helped balance his darkness when it came to the surfer image he carefully cultivated. He didn’t look like a world championship surfer . . . and Annie didn’t look like a world championship surfer’s date.

  In fact, she looked more like one of the street kids she sheltered at her center than anything else. Another pair of skinny jeans clung to her narrow hips. Her hoodie was still a dark color, but this time it had a silk screen that suggested a female comedy duo for presidential election. Sean would vote for them, considering the newest scandal pushing through Congress lately. They seemed more legit to him.

  “You’re too casual for loose women,” he pointed out. “They wouldn’t take a second look at you.”

  “Not you, though, right, Sean?” She meandered up the short walkway. “You’re just right for that type.”

  “Maybe they’re just right for me.”

  “Are you going to let me in?”

  He kept his smile as casual as he could, but there was no denying his flinch. Christ, he needed to suck it up. He reached past her to push open the door. She was little, coming only to the top of his chest, but her spine never bent. She was steel and wire as they were knotted together in the small alcove. Her chin lifted up farther.

  “I’m still not sure why this is necessary,” he groused.

  She sailed past him into the foyer. Her ha
ir was caught up in another of those snubby ponytails, but the front was a dark fringe that hung into her eyes and covered her ears. She glanced back over her shoulder, but he barely got more than a flash of brown eyes completely ringed in black eyeliner and a smudge of black shadow. “If you’re going to start arguing at this point, I might as well walk away.”

  “Three million.”

  She shook her head, shoving her hands in her back pockets. She stood in the middle of his living room, where slanted ceilings drew the eye to two-story windows. Though she wore shiny black boots, they had a little rim of pink between the top and the sole and pink laces up the front. “This isn’t going to work like that, Sean. You’re donating the cash to my center. Your choice. If it doesn’t come from you, I’ll go back to my five-year plan. No harm, no foul. I’m not going to become your lapdog because of the money.”

  “Seems a shame. You’re about the size of a lapdog.”

  Her head tilted to the side, that dark brown hair shifting. “You’re being childish. Is your injury causing you any problems? Does your shoulder hurt?”

  His first impulse was to tell her to fuck off. He was being childish because she pushed him to extreme responses. She was standing here. In his house.

  But since hitting adulthood, he’d made a conscious decision to not lie. He’d been so desperate throughout his childhood that he’d been forced to lie all the time. Constantly. Every breath in lunchrooms and at recess had been a lie while he pretended that everything was just fine, absolutely normal.

  He didn’t lie anymore. “Hurts like a son of a bitch. I tried to roll over when I woke up, before I remembered what an idiot I was.”

  “Not your best moment. Have you taken anything?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t like the pills. They’re strong.”

  “They’re strong for a reason. Because the pain is strong. Where do you keep them?”

  “Kitchen.”