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She gave a passing thought to checking if Darren was back from lunch yet and asking Spencer if he’d be more comfortable having the other therapist work with him on his rehab.
Except that the question implied that she was uncomfortable with the situation. Which she was, but she wasn’t eager to admit as much to the man who seemed completely unaffected by any memories of the last time they’d been together.
Of course, after seven years, it was entirely possible that he didn’t even remember the events of that night.
“Do you want my pants off, too?” Spencer asked.
Yes.
“No!” she responded quickly.
And maybe a little too vehemently.
He quirked a brow.
She cleared her throat. “We’ll just focus on the shoulder today—get everything loosened up and assess your recovery.”
“Okay,” he agreed.
“Lie down on the table,” she instructed, determined to assert control of the situation.
“On my front or back?”
“Front.” She could manipulate the muscles of his chest and back from either position, but if he was on his front, she wouldn’t have to worry about him watching her with those deep blue eyes that had always seen too much of what she was thinking and feeling.
He stretched out on the table, his arms at his sides.
She breathed a quiet sigh of relief, because now she could pretend he was just a patient, like any other patient. No one special.
But the tingle that danced through her veins as her hands stroked over his skin said something very different.
* * *
As Kenzie gently probed the injured area with her fingers, Spencer acknowledged that this might have been a mistake.
It was true that he’d been so eager to start therapy he hadn’t asked who would be treating him. He hadn’t imagined it would matter, because he hadn’t known that Kenzie worked at the clinic.
In fact, he knew very little about where she’d been or what she’d done over the past seven years, because he’d never asked anyone. Because asking would have suggested that he thought about her, and when he’d left Haven, he’d been determined to put all thoughts of his little sister’s best friend out of his mind.
Still, he’d be lying if he said that he’d never thought about her. But the truth was, whenever he did, he remembered the girl she’d been. A kid with barely a hint of feminine curves and an obvious crush on him.
He hadn’t been the least bit interested in any kind of a romantic relationship with her in high school, but he hadn’t wanted to hurt her feelings, either. So he’d mostly tried to keep his distance from her, and he’d succeeded—until the night before he was scheduled to leave for UNLV.
He’d made plans to meet his current girlfriend in the barn at Crooked Creek Ranch that night. The meeting was Ashleigh’s idea, so that they could say goodbye in private.
He knew what that meant. And when he climbed up to the hayloft, his body was already stirring in anticipation of what was going to happen. But he was a little wary, too, because Ashleigh had made no secret of the fact that she didn’t want him to go—and that she’d do almost anything to make him stay.
But Spencer wouldn’t let anything distract him from his goal of getting out of this one-horse town—especially not a girl he’d only been dating a few weeks. So despite her assurance that she was on the Pill, he had a condom in his pocket, unwilling to trust his future to anyone else’s hands.
He sure as heck wasn’t going to end up like his buddy, Mason, whose wedding was scheduled for the last week of September and whose baby was due the following April. And while Gina’s pregnancy might not have been planned, at least Mason and Gina were in love.
Spencer wasn’t in love with Ashleigh. But she was pretty and popular and willing to go all the way, and he was eager to use that condom in his pocket.
But when he got up to the hayloft, instead of Ashleigh, he’d found Kenzie waiting for him.
“What are you thinking about?”
Kenzie’s softly spoken question forced him to put the brakes on his trip down memory lane.
“Nothing important,” he said.
“Are you sure?” Her hands—so much stronger than he would have guessed—moved over his shoulder, probing and kneading.
She knew what she was doing, and he’d had enough massage therapy that ordinarily his muscles would respond to the skillful touch. But his brain couldn’t seem to let go of the fact that this was Kenzie’s touch, and it teased him with intimate memories of the last time she’d touched him—and let him touch her.
“I’m sure,” he said.
“Because you’re strung tight as a drum,” she noted, her fingers sliding over his skin, pressing into the knotted muscle.
He was also hard as a rock.
Thankfully, his facedown position on the table allowed that to remain his own little (or not so little, he amended immodestly) secret.
“Some clients like to talk while they’re on the table.”
“I’m not fond of chitchat,” he told her.
“Imagine that,” she said. “And you used to be such a chatterbox.”
The situation was awkward and uncomfortable—probably for both of them—but he felt his lips curve in response to her dry remark.
“And you never used to be a smartass,” he added.
She chuckled softly before acknowledging, “Probably because I could barely put together a coherent sentence around you.”
“I guess it’s true that people do change,” he noted.
And obviously she’d done so. The skinny, geeky teenager he’d remembered had grown into a confident and attractive woman.
A very attractive woman.
She didn’t say anything else after that as she focused her attention on doing her job.
And while she continued to work on him, he couldn’t seem to focus his attention on anything but how good it felt to have her hands on him. At least until he started to imagine how it might feel to have her hands stroking other parts of his body. And, of course, the harder he tried not to think about her touching those other parts, the harder he got.
Unfortunately, his life was already complicated enough without adding any extracurricular activities—or relationships—to the mix.
And that realization was admittedly a little bit disappointing.
* * *
The day before, when Spencer had passed the Welcome to Haven sign on the highway (if the seldom-used rural road could be called a highway), he’d experienced a sense of recognition and familiarity, but not much more than that.
There’d been no sense of homecoming. As far as he was concerned, Haven had ceased to be his home a long time ago. Now it was just the town where he’d grown up and where most of his family still lived. He didn’t mind visiting on occasion, but he had no intention of putting down his own roots in the dry, hardpacked dirt.
His opinion hadn’t changed when he arrived at his parents’ house on Miners’ Pass. Of course, that house had never been his home. Sure he’d stayed there on his infrequent visits, in the room his mother had designated as his and filled with his childhood trophies and buckles, but he’d never lived there.
In Spencer’s opinion, the three-story stone-and-brick mansion was a ridiculous and ostentatious display of wealth and status. Which was undoubtedly why Ben and Margaret Channing had built it. With three of their four adult children living independently, they certainly didn’t need six bedrooms, seven baths, a great room with a twelve-foot ceiling and a soaring river-rock fireplace, or three more fireplaces around the house.
On the other hand, if it made his parents happy, who was he to judge?
But now, as he turned off the highway and onto the access road that led to Crooked Creek Ranch, he felt a tug of something in his chest. Because as eager as he’d been to escape from Haven, he did have some good memories of the town—and almost all of them had happened at the ranch.
A lot of them involved some kind of chore, too, because Gramps didn’t tolerate laziness. But Spencer didn’t mind the work, and mucking out stalls, grooming horses and cleaning tack at least gave him something to do in a town that, at the time, offered little in the way of entertainment beyond the two screens at Mann’s Theater. And when he did his chores well, Gramps would let him saddle up one of the horses and ride out with him to count the cows.
Because even after gold and silver had been discovered in the hills and the family had turned their attention away from ranching and toward mining, Gramps had continued to raise cattle. It was a small herd that he managed—nothing comparable to that of the Circle G—but it was his and he took pride in the routine of breeding, calving, culling, weaning. There were more lean years than profitable ones, but he didn’t care. Of course, now that the family was making its fortune in gold and silver, his interest in the market price of beef was mostly academic.
Whenever Spencer returned to Haven, he tried to visit the ranch and ride out with Gramps. But today’s visit had another purpose—to check on Copper Penny.
He didn’t have a trailer hitch on his truck and, truthfully, he hadn’t felt up to wrestling with a thousand-pound animal on the eight-hundred-mile journey, so he’d arranged to have the mare delivered. He’d received confirmation that she’d arrived that morning, and he was eager to ensure that she’d suffered no ill effects from the journey, which was why he’d headed to the ranch as soon as he’d completed his first therapy session with Kenzie.
He was on his way to the barn when he spotted her grazing in the nearest corral. The sun shone on her chestnut coat so that she gleamed as bright as her name, and her tail flicked leisurely back and forth. If she was at all distressed by the recent travel or the change in her environment, she gave no evidence of being anything but perfectly content.
“She’s a beauty,” Gramps remarked, joining him by the fence.
Spencer nodded his agreement. It had been the mare that caught his eye first, five years earlier at a barrel racing event in Cherokee, Iowa, before he’d noticed the pretty girl hunkered low over her back. As horse and rider raced the familiar cloverleaf pattern, he’d been impressed by their form and their speed. Afterward, the girl who’d introduced herself as Emily had proven that she was just as fast outside of the ring.
“Where’d you pick her up?”
He was taken aback by the question, until he realized that Gramps was asking about the horse.
“Denver,” Spencer told him.
“Any particular reason you decided to buy a horse?”
“I didn’t buy her,” he said. “She was a gift.”
His grandfather’s pale gaze shifted to the horse again. “Heckuva gift,” he remarked.
“Yeah. And that’s not the half of it.”
The old man’s bushy white brows lifted. “I didn’t figure you came home just to deliver the horse.”
“I’m also rehabbing my shoulder, hoping to be ready for the National Finals.”
“It’s a good thing you can usually manage to stay on the back of a bull for eight seconds, because you’d never make any money at the card tables in Vegas,” Gramps noted.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you can’t bluff worth the stuff that comes out of the back end of those beasts you ride.”
Spencer felt a smile tug at his lips. Though Gramps had never been one to mince words, his wife had disapproved of coarse language. Widowed now for more than three years, the old man still lived by her strict rules.
“We both know you could rehab that injury anywhere,” Gramps said, calling his bluff.
“Maybe I wanted to do it at home.”
“And maybe those cows out there are gonna sprout wings and fly away.”
Spencer shifted his gaze to the far pasture, dotted with the thick bodies of his grandfather’s cattle—no wings in sight.
“I decided to take some time to reevaluate my life and my priorities.”
Gramps shifted the toothpick he held clenched in his jaw from one side to the other. “You knock up some girl?”
Though he was often amused by his grandfather’s characteristic bluntness, this time, Spencer couldn’t even fake a laugh.
His body was hurting, his mind was spinning and nothing about his current situation was the least bit amusing.
Chapter Three (#u4c669689-867b-56bf-8ded-97fa83c888af)
Seven years was more than enough time for a girl to get over a silly crush. And when Kenzie had been at lunch with Megan earlier that day, she’d been confident that any feelings she’d had for Spencer Channing had been trampled into dust a long time ago. Of course, that was before she’d walked into her treatment room and found him waiting for her.
Well, not waiting for her. Waiting for a therapist to work on his injured shoulder, and she just happened to be that therapist. She’d studied hard and trained carefully so that she knew how all the muscles in the body worked, how they were affected by various types of injuries and how she could manipulate the tissue to release tension and ease pain.
She’d treated the same kind of shoulder trauma in other patients, but when Spencer had removed his shirt, all that experience had faded from her mind. She’d been mesmerized by the taut bronzed skin molded to hard, sinewy muscle. She’d wanted to press her lips to his shoulder, drop kisses across that broad, powerful chest, then slowly lick her way down those washboard abs.
She didn’t entirely trust herself to continue to touch his body and maintain a professional distance, which meant that she should ask one of her coworkers to take over Spencer’s treatments. Therapists traded patients all the time and for various reasons, but she had no intention of admitting that being near Spencer, touching the exquisitely sculpted body that her hormonally-driven teenage-self had lusted for with every fiber of her being, had reawakened long dormant feelings inside her and started the playback of memories in her mind.
She’d always liked hanging out at Crooked Creek Ranch, and she never missed an opportunity to go down to the barn and visit with the horses that were stabled there. Brielle’s grandfather had taught her to ride, and she remembered how hard her heart had knocked against her ribs the first time she’d sat in the saddle astride the black gelding with white markings for which he’d been named Domino. She’d been equal parts excited and terrified, and she’d felt the same way waiting for Spencer to show up.
He’d been dating Ashleigh Singer for the past few weeks. Of course, he’d dated a lot of girls—and gone “all the way” with more than one, if the rumors were to be believed. According to the conversation Kenzie had overheard, Ashleigh was going to give Spencer a going-away present that just might change his mind about going away.
Kenzie hadn’t been sure what that meant, so she was glad when Rebecca asked for an explanation—and heartsick when Ashleigh told of her plan to meet Spencer at nine o’clock in the barn at the Crooked Creek Ranch and “knock boots” in the hayloft.
So Kenzie got to the barn first, and when Ashleigh showed up, she told the other girl that Spencer had asked her to meet him there. Ashleigh, furious at the thought of her boyfriend two-timing her with one of his little sister’s friends, stormed off. And when Spencer showed up to meet with Ashleigh, he found Kenzie there instead.
“Where’s Ashleigh?” He asked the question gruffly, without even saying hello.
Her heart was racing, her throat was dry, and she was grateful to be sitting on the edge of a hay bale, because her knees felt so wobbly she was certain they wouldn’t hold her up. “She, uh, had to go.”
“Where?” he demanded.
She shrugged, because she really didn’t know, didn’t care. All that mattered was that Spencer was here—with her.
“But I waited for you,” she pointed out to him.
He looked wary. “Why?”
