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Michael studied his one-time best friend with a narrowed gaze. He still wasn’t sure how much he appreciated Bryan’s unequivocal recommendation of Kelly for the job as his therapist. “Did she do a tour in the marines I don’t know about?”
“Nope.”
“I remember her as a sweet kid. She’s changed.” And that was a massive understatement that didn’t even take into account the pale gold hair swept up in a knot that revealed the long, delicate line of her neck, the silky complexion and the woman’s body with all the appropriate curves.
“She deals with a lot of cantankerous patients at the rehab clinic. She’s had to change,” Bryan said. He gave Michael a warning look. “Give her any grief and you’ll have me to contend with, too.”
“Trust me, I don’t think she needs her protective big brother butting in,” Michael told him. “She could take me out in ten seconds flat.”
“Are you telling me there’s finally a woman who can get the upper hand with you?” Bryan taunted, clearly delighted. “And that it’s my baby sister?”
“Only because of my weakened condition,” Michael assured him.
“Good to know. Back in high school I used to envy the way you could take ’em or leave ’em. The rest of us were slaves to our hormones, but not you. There wasn’t a girl in school who could twist you in knots.”
That seemed like a lifetime ago to Michael. He’d had a purpose then, and he’d known that a teenage romance would only get in the way. “I was focused on what I wanted to do with my future. I didn’t have time to get serious about any girl.”
“That doesn’t mean you couldn’t have had any one you wanted,” Bryan said. “It was great hanging out with you. The girls swarmed around you, and I ended up dating them.”
Michael gave him a wry look. “I hope you’re not counting on that happening now. I doubt any woman will give me a second look while I’m in this chair.”
“If you ask me, that alone is a great reason to get out of it,” Bryan said. “Stick with Kelly. She’ll have you whipped into shape in no time.” His expression sobered. “Seriously, pal, she’s good. Cooperate with her. Let her do her thing. If anyone can help you, she can.”
“Stop trying to sell her. She has the job. And it’s not as if she’s going to give me much choice about cooperating,” Michael retorted, able to laugh for the first time in weeks as he thought of the way Kelly had held her own in the face of his display of temper.
Even as the unfamiliar sound of his laughter filled his cramped apartment, he realized that Kelly Andrews had brought two things into his life during her one brief visit—a breath of fresh air and, far more important, the first faint ray of hope he’d felt since his SEAL team had dragged him out of harm’s way.
He immediately brought himself up short. He had been in some tricky, dangerous situations over the years, but nothing had ever scared him quite so badly as the sudden realization, that well-intentioned or not, Kelly might be holding out false hope.
Fear crawled up the back of his throat until he could almost taste it. If he tried to walk and failed, it might be far more devastating than never having tried at all. In the real world, how many miracles was one man entitled to? He’d gotten out of his last mission alive. Maybe that was his quota of good luck for one lifetime.
He looked up and saw that Bryan was regarding him with concern.
“You okay?” Bryan asked.
“Just reminding myself of something,” he said grimly.
“Judging from that expression on your face, it wasn’t anything good.”
Michael shrugged. He wasn’t about to tell Kelly’s brother that he’d been reminding himself that she was a mere woman, not a miracle worker. It was a distinction he couldn’t allow himself to forget, not for one single second.
“Are you sure you ought to be taking on this particular client?” Moira Brady asked Kelly, her expression filled with concern.
“I’m a professional. I can keep my feelings under control,” Kelly insisted. “Besides, it’s been years since I had my crush on Michael Devaney. I was a kid.”
Moira regarded her skeptically. “Then you had absolutely no reaction to seeing him again? He was just a patient, someone you happened to know from years ago?”
“Absolutely.”
“Liar.”
Kelly frowned at her best friend, who also ran the rehabilitation clinic where Kelly worked part-time on days when she didn’t have private patients scheduled. “I don’t understand why you’re making such a big deal about this, Moira.”
“Because I don’t want to see you get hurt,” Moira said bluntly. “You always give your patients a hundred and ten percent, Kelly. You care about their progress. You feel guilty if they don’t achieve the results you’ve been anticipating.”
“Well, of course I do. Are you saying I shouldn’t?”
“No, but add in your personal history with Michael Devaney, and I see a disaster waiting to happen.”
“Oh, please,” Kelly said derisively. “Michael and I don’t have a personal history.”
“But you fantasized about one,” Moira countered. “I know that because you told me about him in glowing detail way back when we first met in college. He’d been gone for three years by then, but you hadn’t forgotten the least little thing about him. Can you honestly tell me that there wasn’t one teeny-tiny spark when you walked into his apartment yesterday?”
A spark? More like a bonfire, Kelly thought wryly. Not that she intended to admit it. “No spark,” she said flatly.
Moira’s gaze narrowed suspiciously. “Okay, is this one of those semantics things? What if I asked about fireworks? Would you admit to that?”
Kelly sighed. “It doesn’t matter. Michael Devaney doesn’t think of me in that way. I’m his friend’s kid sister.”
“Think he’ll remember that when you’re massaging his muscles?”
Kelly felt the heat climbing into her cheeks. She’d been wondering about that very thing herself. Anticipating it. She’d been itching to get her hands on those taut muscles of Michael’s for years. Now she had the perfect excuse. She swallowed hard and banished the totally unprofessional thought.
Scowling, she reminded both of them, “I’m a professional, dammit!”
“Yeah, sure,” Moira said. “You keep telling yourself that. And just in case you forget it, I’ll mention it to you every chance I get.”
Michael couldn’t seem to get his pants on. Lately he’d taken to wearing sweatpants because they were easy and comfortable and warm, but he’d gotten it into his head to put on a pair of jeans for this first session with Kelly. His bum leg wasn’t cooperating.
He had the pants half on and half off when the doorbell rang. Scowling, he gave one more forceful yank on the jeans and barely managed to stifle a howl of agony. Or at least he thought he had, until he looked straight up into Kelly’s worried gray eyes. Her cheeks were flushed and she was still wearing a bright pink ski jacket over a sweater that looked so soft he immediately wanted to stroke his hand over the material…and the woman under it.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Aside from having an uninvited guest appear in my bedroom, I’m just peachy,” he growled.
Her chin shot up and fire blazed in her eyes. “Not uninvited. I’m here for our appointment, and I’m not even a minute early. I only came in because you didn’t answer the door and I thought I heard you cry out.”
“I didn’t answer the door because I wasn’t dressed,” he retorted. “How the hell did you get in, anyway?”
“Your brother gave me a key,” she said. “And since you’re obviously okay, I’ll head on into the living room and get set up. You might as well strip out of those pants before you join me.”
The suggestion probably couldn’t have been more innocent, but something that felt a whole lot like desire slammed straight through him. “I beg your pardon?”
Kelly gestured toward his jeans. “The pants. Lose them. I’m going to start with a massage to loosen up those tight muscles.”
Michael swallowed hard. She intended to put her hands all over him? He frowned at her. “Did we talk about that when you were here yesterday?”
“I’m sure it came up,” she said briskly. “Five minutes, okay? I have another client in an hour, so there’s no time to waste.”
Michael stared after her as she left his room. They most definitely had not talked about this. He would never have agreed to letting her put her soft as silk hands on his body. He might be injured, but he wasn’t dead. One touch and he suspected this could go from a therapy session to something else entirely. It had been too blasted long since he’d felt a woman’s hands on his bare skin. His best friend’s baby sister was not the woman who should be testing his willpower.
Still wearing his jeans—zipped up and securely in place now—he wheeled himself into the living room. “We need to rethink this,” he said tightly. “It’s not going to work out.”
She leveled a look straight at him. “Oh? Why is that?”
“I don’t think you ought to be touching me.”
He could almost swear that her lips twitched at that, but she managed to cling to a perfectly serious expression.
Hands shoved into the pockets of her own snug-fitting jeans, she inquired curiously, “I don’t make you nervous, do I?”
“Of course you make me nervous,” he retorted. “What man wouldn’t be nervous when an attractive woman he barely knows suddenly announces that she’s going to be massaging him?”
“You’ve known me since I was fourteen,” she reminded him. “And it’s therapy, not seduction.”
“Tell that to my body,” he mumbled under his breath, very aware that the conversation alone was having an extremely interesting effect on certain parts of his anatomy. This was Kelly, dammit. What was wrong with him? Bryan would mop the floor with him—and rightly so—if he heard about Michael’s reaction to his sister.
“What was that?” she inquired, her expression all innocence.
“Nothing.”
“Come on, Michael. You were a SEAL. The way I hear it, they’re the bravest of the brave. Are you actually going to fire me before we even get started, just because I’m going to massage you? What would your buddies think of that?”
The challenge hung in the air. The woman was good. Really good. She knew exactly how to play him. He scowled at her. “If I had half a brain, I would.”
She did grin then. “Is that a yes or a no?”
Michael considered his options. He could fire her right now and hire somebody else—preferably some ox of a man—or he could try getting through at least one treatment before calling it quits. He owed Kelly for one session anyway, and something told him she wouldn’t take a cent if he didn’t let her do her job. He weighed fairness against self-preservation, and opted for fairness.
“We’ll see how it goes today,” he said finally.
She gave the slightest little nod of satisfaction. “Okay, then, let me help you out of those pants.”
One fierce look from him stopped her in her tracks. “Or you can get them yourself,” she said.
Wincing at the shooting pain that accompanied every movement, Michael finally managed to shed the pants and heave himself onto her portable massage table. At least he was on his stomach, so he wouldn’t have to see her face when she saw the jagged scars from the surgery. He didn’t miss her sharp intake of breath, though.
He felt a soft splash of warm oil on his injured leg, then the skimming touch of her hands as she smoothed it down the back of his thigh and over his calf. Her touch was gentle rather than provocative, but that didn’t stop the sudden shock of awareness that flowed through him. Michael forced his mind to detach itself from her actions and concentrate on counting backward from a thousand. It was a tactic that had served him well in other situations involving slow torture.
“Am I hurting you?” she asked.
The simple question dragged her from the periphery of his consciousness right back into his head. “No,” he said tersely, trying to mentally haul himself back to that nice, safe place.
For a few moments, blessed silence fell. Michael made it all the way down to nine hundred and two before she spoke again.
“What happened?” she asked.
He resigned himself to staying in the disconcerting moment. “When?”
“When you were hurt.”
“I walked into a trap,” he said, still filled with self-loathing at the stupidity of it. He should have known what was going on. He should never have trusted the intelligence report that the caves had been cleared of terrorists. He’d always relied on his own surveillance, his own instincts, but this one time he’d gotten anxious, a little careless. It was a bitter lesson that would have served him well in the future…if only he had one.
“Where were you?”
Too many years of keeping silent about his work kept him cautious even now. “I can’t say.”
“But you were a Navy SEAL, right? So I can assume that this had something to do with the war on terrorism?”
“You can assume anything you want to assume.”
Her fingers began to massage a little deeper, working muscles too long unused. Knots of tension in his legs seemed to ease, at least as long as she didn’t venture too close to the scars. That area was still amazingly tender. He yelped the first time she touched the bullet’s exit wound on the back of his thigh.
“Sorry.”
“I’ll survive.”
“I’m sure of that,” she agreed. “But I’ll be more careful around the scars. I can’t ignore them, though, because that skin’s going to need to be stretched.”
“Whatever you say.”
She patted his leg. “That’s it for today, then.”
He glanced up and regarded her with surprise. “You’re finished?”
“It’s been nearly an hour, and I have another appointment across town.”
“At this rate, we’re not going to make much progress,” he said, suddenly disgruntled by the too-quick end of the session and the complete lack of anything remotely like measurable improvement. “I thought you were going to work my butt off, or am I misquoting you?”
“Nope, that’s what I said, and that day will come. I’ve got you scheduled for two hours, day after tomorrow. We’ll start the exercises then.” She met his gaze. “That is, if I passed today’s probation.”
He ought to tell her to get the hell out and stay away, but he couldn’t seem to make himself do it. He was too afraid of the disappointment or disdain he’d see in her eyes. Either one would make him feel like a jerk. Besides, a part of him couldn’t help clinging to the possibility that she was his best hope for getting back on his feet again.
He met her gaze. Now that he was willing to give therapy a try, he wanted to see progress. He wasn’t scared of a little pain or hard work. In fact, he looked forward to it. “Make it three hours, day after tomorrow.”
“You’re not ready for three hours,” she said flatly.
He scowled at her reaction. “Let me be the judge of what I can handle. I’ve gone through training so rigorous, it would make your therapy seem like child’s play.”
“Have you done it since having several bones shattered, to say nothing of going through—what was it—three surgeries?” she inquired tartly.
The woman was tough as nails. It was a trait he couldn’t help admiring. “Okay, you made your point. Two hours, but if I’m up to it, we’ll go to three the next time,” he bargained. “Is it a deal?”
Kelly looked for a moment as if she might argue. Finally she held out her hand. “Deal.”
Michael took her hand in his and instantly regretted it. It had taken every ounce of willpower he possessed to ignore the way her hands had moved over his body earlier. Now, with something as simple as a handshake, he was once more thoroughly aware of her as a desirable woman.
Her skin was amazingly soft, her grip strong. A faint hint of the aromatic oil she’d used for the massage lingered in the air. It wasn’t the least bit feminine—quite the opposite, in fact—but it suddenly turned erotic. If he’d been another kind of man in a different situation, he would have brought her hand to his lips and brushed a kiss across her knuckles. Instead, he released her hand as if he’d been burned.
