“You can turn around.”
I did so. And wished I hadn’t.
Edward was stretched naked, facedown across the massage table, as I’d ordered, covered only by a white towel across his backside, between his powerful back, his slender hips and thickly muscled thighs. Leaning his elbow against the leather cushion of the table, he propped up his head and looked at me darkly.
“Isn’t this what you wanted?” he said huskily. “Me naked and at your mercy?”
I opened my mouth for a witty comeback, but only a squeak came out. I coughed to cover, then nervously went to the table. It’s no big deal, I told myself fiercely. I’d massaged him many times over the past few weeks.
But something felt different. Something had changed. My skittish sexual awareness of him had managed to penetrate the gym. Why? How?
Edward lifted a dark eyebrow. “Be gentle with me,” he said mockingly. Closing his eyes, he propped his chin on his folded arms and waited for me to touch him.
Touch him.
I looked down at my hands, which felt suddenly tingly. I knew how to give a professional massage. Why were my hands shaking? I didn’t feel like a competent physical therapist. I felt like what he’d once called me—a frightened virgin.
Edward St. Cyr, my boss who’d inspired me and irritated me in equal measure, who was way out of my league and didn’t see me as anything more than someone he could casually flirt with, and perhaps casually sleep with, and casually forget, was naked beneath my hands. And I feared if I showed a moment of weakness, he might roll over and devour me. I pictured a lion devouring a gazelle in a documentary, the flashing jaws digging into the meat and sinew.
If he felt my hands shaking... All he had to do was turn around on the table and pull me down hard against him in a savage kiss.
Don’t think about it, I told myself fiercely. Flexing my fingers, I poured oil in one palm then rubbed my hands together to warm them. Slowly, I lowered them to his back.
Edward’s skin was warm, like satin. I heard the soft whir of the nearby space heater as I ran my hands down the length of his spine, feeling the smoothness of his skin over hard muscle.
I wondered what his naked body would feel like, pressed against my own.
Muscles. I tried not to think of him as a dangerous man I was longing to kiss, but focus instead on the individual parts of his body, muscles, the tendons, the ligaments. I tried to see him only as a patient.
Yes. A patient. Just a body, like a machine. Tissues connected to ligaments connected to muscles. Cells.
Not an amazing masculine body, rippled with muscles and power, attached to the soul of the man who’d teased and challenged me for the past seven-and-a-half weeks as I lived in his castle. The man I thought of before I slept, aware of his bedroom down the hall from mine.
As I ran my hands down the trapezius muscles of his upper back, I tried to calm the rapid beat of my heart. I looked across the room, past all the shiny, modern exercise equipment and weights and yoga mats. Outside the windows, the noonday sun was peeking through the clouds, a soft pink through the bare black trees, leaving patterns and shadows across the winter-bare garden.
But as I stroked and rubbed Edward beneath my palms, I felt hot as summer. I closed my eyes, trying not to imagine what it would be like if he were my lover. How it would feel to sink into the pleasure I imagined he’d give me. Afterward my soul might be ash, but I’d finally know the exhilaration of the fire.
For all these years, I’d guarded both my body and my heart, afraid of ever again feeling the pain of losing someone or something I cared about. But it turned out I hadn’t really managed to shield myself from pain. Could anyone?
Sadness and ash came into life anyway. People died. People broke your heart.