Can't Hold Back (9 page)

“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.”

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.

Alia:
How’d you get my cell number?

Nate:
Your friend. Gabi?

Alia:
She shouldn’t have given it to you.

Nate:
I can be very charming.

There was a long silence, during which the phone told him that she was typing and erasing and typing and erasing and typing and—

Alia:
I didn’t *ditch* you. You’re in competent hands.

Man, how he
wished.
He couldn’t believe she’d served him up that softball.

Nate:
I liked your hands better.

On the plus side, Jake’s hands were twenty percent bigger, at least, and definitely stronger, than Alia’s. On the minus side—

Well, he
wasn’t
Alia.
And Nate didn’t mean that in the most obvious of ways. Jake was a skilled healer, no doubt, but this morning Nate had been on the massage table for twenty minutes and he’d still been able to feel nerve pain radiating from that stuck spot behind his shoulder out to his fingertips. Alia wouldn’t have let that last more than thirty seconds. She would have used her weird X-ray vision, figured out exactly where it hurt, and extinguished the pain.

“Alia does this tapping thing? Like—” Nate demonstrated to Jake.

“Like this?”

“Um. More like—” Nate showed him the rhythm and the intensity, and Jake dutifully imitated.

Nate sighed. So did Jake. “You know,” Jake said mildly, “if you hadn’t kissed her,
she
could be doing this right now.”

“None of your fucking business, man.”

“Oh, there you’re wrong. There you’re very, very wrong. She is absolutely my business, quite literally. Although frankly, it’s not her I’m worried about. It’s you. I’ve been where you are. You’re trying to fill gaps, you’re trying to prove your body can still do something it used to be able to do—”

Nate threw off Jake’s hands and sat up. “Shove it. I’m not paying you to psychoanalyze me.”

“Whoa,” Jake said, putting his hand on Nate’s arm. “I’m not psychoanalyzing you. I’m telling you how it was for me.
I
was trying to fill gaps.
I
was trying to figure out what I was doing and what it meant.
I
was trying to prove my body could still do what it used to be able to do. And I’m just saying, don’t do anything stupid. Don’t do anything you’ll regret. Don’t do anything with strings attached you can’t afford to play out. That’s what I’m saying. What I’m saying is,
Leave her alone.
She wants a job here, and she doesn’t need you messing with her head.”

“Noted,” said Nate tightly.

Only he really must not have noted it very well. Because what was he doing now? He was flirting with Alia.

There were two opposing parts of him. The part that wanted to respect what she wanted, and the part that just
wanted her.

Alia:
I’ll sit down with Jake and make sure he knows what I know.

Okay. She was trying to keep this in the clean realm.

She doesn’t need you messing with her head.

But he wanted to know. He wanted to
know
whether she was
MenInUni242.
Whether she’d been typing, whether she’d been feeding him what she thought he wanted to hear from Becca, or whether she’d been telling him—

Telling him what
she wanted.

Was it messing with her head to try to find out? Would he be messing with her head any worse than she’d messed with his? He felt like he had a right to know what she’d really been thinking, how she’d felt about him, during that mad period of correspondence and care packages and instant messages.

Nate:
They still won’t be your hands.

There was a long silence. Long enough that he came to the conclusion that she’d decided to ignore him. Which, frankly, he had to admit, was probably what she
should
be doing. Not taking the bait he’d served up, because Jake was way too right about where Nate was coming from and about why sex wasn’t just sex in this situation.

He went and found Griff, dragged him out to the archery range. He’d never done archery before R&R, but he was hooked. Loved the feel of the arrow between his fingers, the sensation of pulling the string taut, sighting over his hand, the moment of decision just before release.

Sounded like sex, somehow. Fuck it. Everything sounded like sex to him right now. He couldn’t get her out of his head.

Griff loosed an arrow, which lodged itself in the center of the target with a sharp
thwack
. “Where will you go after you leave here?”

Nate nocked his own arrow. “A friend’s parents own a hardware store in southern Oregon.” The lack of past tense in that sentence struck him. Should have been a
late
friend or something, but real people didn’t say that. He was a dead friend, but no one said that, either. Just a friend. A ghost, of sorts.

“Thought you were a college boy. College degree? Army pedigree? You could do anything.”

“I owe him one.” Nate buried the arrow in the outermost ring of the target. He frowned. Sad that a guy who could shoot a rifle with so much accuracy was such a miserable mofo with a bow and arrow.

“Your friend—he still in the sandbox?” Griff tilted his head to one side.

Nate shook his head. “Dead.”

“So the hardware store—one of those fucking promises, huh?”

“I guess.”

“Blame yourself?”

“I guess.”

“Everyone does. Like that story you told, about Turk. No one thinks there was anything Turk woulda coulda shoulda done different, but that’s not how Turk sees it.”

Nate’s shoulders were starting to stiffen up, and he knew what Alia would say. That it was about J.J. But maybe she’d be wrong in this case. Maybe it was just about how different this kind of shooting felt from anything else he’d ever done. She couldn’t be right about every-fucking-thing.

He and Griff finished up and he was heading back to his room when her text came through.

Alia:
I can’t do this.

Nate:
Do what?

And then, when radio silence stretched too long, and he couldn’t keep himself from filling it:
Yes, you can. I’m not your client anymore. We’re just two people.

Alia:
We’re not just two people.

What did she mean by that? Was she implying that their history meant something, that their history made them more than two bodies gravitationally drawn together?

Alia:
You’re a recovering addict. Looking for another fix.

Oh. Ow.

Harsh. But not unexpected, and not entirely wrong.

Because what she was saying wasn’t so very different from what Jake had told him this morning. A little rawer, a little more frank, but a variation on the same theme. He was in no position to start something. He should pocket the goddamn phone before she told him more truth about himself.

Instead, he texted:
And what about you?

Another one of those long silences. He could imagine her, clutching the phone. Setting it down. Wanting to walk away from what he was asking her.

And then:
What about me?

Nate:
What are you looking for?

This time, there was no answer.

She caught herself watching him a million times a day.

She’d taken what was supposed to be a quiet, contemplative, head-clearing walk, and as she’d exited the pasture and stepped out of the first stand of trees, there he was on the archery range with Griff.

She dropped back behind a tree and watched him, appalled at herself for both the spying and the craving that had prompted it.

I liked your hands better.

They still won’t be your hands.

And what about you? What are you looking for?

Damn him.

She’d done exactly the right thing and it felt all wrong. Because all she wanted was to give him what he was asking for. Her hands. She wanted to make him feel whatever Jake couldn’t. She wanted to make him feel what that look at the lake had begged for the other day.

So maybe she was looking for her next fix, too. And that’s why she was hiding behind a tree and watching him.

He was in some kind of super-engaging conversation with Griff, his face all alight with whatever they were talking about.

He wore a pair of well-worn jeans and a form-fitting black T-shirt. That’s what he’d worn at the picnic where she’d first seen him. Then, the jeans had been snug over his magnificent ass, and the shirt had strained alarmingly over his chest and biceps. Today he was leaner, but no less eye-catching.

There was something primitively satisfying about watching him shoot, too. Sure, he wasn’t bringing down a buffalo for her and their small family of kids, but he
could
have been. Maybe it was that she now knew exactly what those hands could do, and watching them at work, the way those two fingers crooked around the arrow’s shaft—

Well, damn.

She snuck away.

The next afternoon, she saw him and one of his other friends—Tron, she thought—down at the lake’s edge, skipping stones. They were both big, good-looking guys, but Nate had a grace that echoed the stone’s dance over the taut surface of the water. She didn’t think he would have been able to whip his arm like that a week ago, not without pain. But he was laughing and joking, and he chucked probably twenty stones while she watched, before he rubbed his shoulder and called it quits.

She could have gone down to the water’s edge and skipped with them—she was good at it, could get a stone to bounce six or seven times—but she didn’t. She would have wanted to help him with the locked-up shoulder. She would have wanted to lean in close to him and rest her head against his chest. She would have wanted to tilt her face up to his.

And that couldn’t happen.

That night at dinner, she saw him in the dining hall, joking and laughing again, making the other guys laugh. There was no doubt that Nate was the kind of guy whose attitude was contagious. A natural-born leader. The guys he’d befriended were all doing better than they’d been doing two weeks ago, making a ton of progress on their rehab and starting to lose that air of darkness they’d had when they arrived.

Maybe Nate had been in a dark place, but he wasn’t a dark person. The glow of his old power was surfacing, struggling to shine through fatigue and despair and pain.

“Who are you staring at like you want to eat him for dinner?”

“No one.”

“Don’t tell me ‘no one,’ ” Gabi said. “You’re drooling.”

Alia frowned. “No one. I swear.”

Gabi leaned in confidentially. “I know the rules. We all know the rules. I’m married, for God’s sake. But it doesn’t hurt to look. Just tell me, who’s got you so distracted the fork’s missing your mouth?”

Gabi was right. It didn’t hurt to look. “Black T-shirt.”

“Niiiiiiice.”

“It’s kind of a bummer, though,” Melinda said thoughtfully. “So many men, so much muscle, so much testosterone, and all off-limits.”

Alia watched Nate slug Griff in the shoulder, deliver some kind of punch line with his index finger extended, then grab his plate and bus it. And there it was. Man, muscle, testosterone, doing its work on her body and emotions. A held-back smile in her chest, heat pooling between her legs, and something in her reaching out for him.

She really needed to get out of here before she found herself walking in his direction.

She got up so abruptly she almost knocked her chair over.

“Whoa, baby,” Melinda said, laughing.

“I think I’m gonna take it easy tonight. Read in bed, fall asleep early.”

Gabi sighed. “Sounds nice. I’ve got to pull together snacks for movie night tonight.”

“Could be fun.”

“Could be,” Gabi said. “Would be
more
fun if I were in your shoes, drooling over one of them and at least getting to
fantasize
it could happen, instead of going home to my deadbeat husband who will probably be farting and snoring when I crawl into bed.”

“At least he’s a sure thing,” Alia offered.

“Not if he’s been out drinking,” Gabi said, and sighed.

Alia gave her a sympathetic look, said good night to her friends, picked up her tray, and headed back to her room.

She changed into pajamas, brushed her teeth, and crawled into bed. The rooms in the main building, where both she and Nate were housed, were not quite as well appointed as typical business-hotel rooms, but they had their own bathrooms, and if they were spare in décor and amenities, they were clean and bright.

She reached out her hand. Touched her cellphone. It would be so easy. She’d done it once before.

I want your tongue all over me.

I want you to pin me down.

I want your cock in my mouth. As much as I can hold.

Those instant messages that for nearly two years she’d wished she’d never written. But now?

What she’d done had been absolutely, one hundred percent wrong, and yet—

She slid a hand into the waistband of her pajama pants, touched herself where she was already aching for him. Bodies didn’t lie. When she’d sent those texts?

She’d meant them. Absolutely, one hundred percent.

She had her phone cradled in her palm now, her thumb moving restlessly just over the place where swiping would bring the screen alive.