Ahead in the Heat (2 page)

A
nnie wasn’t sure why she kept arguing ten minutes more. When one protested too much, it took on the distinctive
did-not, did-too
flavor of being eight and on the school yard playground all over again. Except that was the problem. Sean Westin made her feel about as self-assured as she’d been at eight. What a massive dork she’d been. Wearing blue kneesocks that were so big on her petite frame she’d had to pull them all the way up to her thighs, and a red corduroy skirt. No girls in the nineties owned corduroy. Ever.

She’d been painfully aware of her lack of coolness. In sixth grade, Elizabeth Manhein, also known as the Perfect Blonde, had teased Annie because she’d been the last one to shave her legs. The cool kids always made sure the not-cool kids knew their status. She’d thought she’d made it by the end of her senior year when she was considering her own pro surf career, but then Terry had cleared up those misapprehensions—and set her right back where she belonged.

So standing less than five feet from Sean Westin—
the Sean Westin
—made the backs of her knees sweat. It made a ball of nerves twist up and take over her whole stomach. There wasn’t much she could do about it, except hang on to the false bravado she’d cultivated over the past fifteen years.

But goddamn, was he cute. More than that. Gorgeous.
Beautiful
in a way that was perfectly masculine. His dark hair was the same length as his artfully scruffy beard. His eyes were so crisply blue, they reminded her of the time she’d been to Cancun for spring break. She’d spent most of the trip dreadfully sober since she remembered all too well how vulnerable alcohol made her, and she’d spent her time watching her friends make asses of themselves in bars. Hanging out at the beach during the day had brought back sharp memories of her own near miss of a pro surfing career. The water had been the same perfect blue as Sean Westin’s eyes, and there was something hauntingly beautiful about them.

After another minute or two of arguing, Annie threw up her hands. “Fine. I’ll take you on. You might as well come in and fill out the new-patient paperwork.”

Turning on her heel, she stomped through the back door, wincing when she saw the state of her mudroom. She’d left piles of gear in the corner from the last time she’d led the kids on a hike at San Onofre—and someone had left a stack of swim fins in the giant sink. The laundry room wasn’t much better. She kept donation clothes on hand for any of the drop-in kids who needed them. It was ridiculous
how long one of them would wear the same sweatshirt before admitting he didn’t own another one and that was the reason it stank. But that was why Annie hadn’t caught up on laundry in the past nine months.

And she didn’t think she was projecting, but it seemed like she could feel the weight of Sean’s disapprobation like claws digging into her shoulders. He didn’t like what he was seeing. Well, too damn bad, he was the one who’d come to her.

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.”

S
ean 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 hair 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.”

That was enough for her. She spun on one booted heel and marched toward the back of the house, peeking in every room as she went. The kitchen was sleek and clean. The cabinets were glassed in, with an edge of chrome. He’d considered wood but wanted to avoid a cutesy feel. Even the fridge was
glass-fronted, with stainless steel drawers beneath for the freezer.

Annie whistled. “Jesus. Between the size of this joint and this room, I don’t even want to think about how much your maid service runs.”

“I have a housekeeper.”

Her mouth tucked into a smile on one side. “That doesn’t really surprise me, somehow. Is she a little old lady with gray hair who leaves a cake out on your birthday?”

He snagged the bottle of pills from the cabinet next to the six-burner stove and leaned against the waist-high butcher-block-topped island. “Actually, she’s a he. A twenty-seven-year-old guy named Keiji who usually leaves a bottle of Patrón out on my birthday. He’s not one for cake, but he makes a really fucking killer chicken alfredo.”

“Yeah. Okay, I suck for that one. Stereotypes for the win.” She winced and sighed, rubbing her fingertips over her brow. “Ugh, I feel like shit now.”

He touched his knuckles to her upper arm in the gentlest punch ever. “Nah, don’t be so hard on yourself. I know Keiji is unusual. When I put out an ad for a housekeeper, I was expecting a little old lady too. Keiji was putting himself through his second year of college at UC Irvine and needed the money badly. Now he’s worked for me for eight years.”

“He stuck around after he was finished with school?”

“I pay really well.” As well he should. Sean’s standards were crazy high, and he liked his things in a particular order. Keiji had come with Sean from a
rented apartment on Twelfth Street to this house once it had been built. Disruption was unnecessary.

Seemingly without thinking, she grabbed a glass from one of the open-view cabinets and filled it with cool tap water. She set it in front of him, took the pill bottle from his hands, and then consulted both the dosage instructions and her watch. “It’s seven thirty. If one isn’t enough, you can have one more at eight thirty, as needed. Otherwise about an hour after lunch.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he teased. But when she tipped one capsule into the lid and held it out to him, he took it obediently. “I just don’t like how fuzzy they make me.”

“If you don’t take them, your body has to concentrate on mitigating pain rather than healing itself. You’ll only delay the process. If you hurt, you take them. End of story.”

“You’re a bossy little thing.”

She grinned. “You bought bossy with your three mil. Feel like a good bargain?”

His smile surged up in response to hers. “Depends. What are you doing here at half past seven?”

“We’re going to have a purge.” She opened the door next to the fridge, obviously banking on its being a pantry. “Normally I’m an advocate of balanced living, including balanced eating. But if you want immediate results, you’re going to have to concentrate on a diet that operates at the highest possible nutrition level.”

She was right, but his pantry was basically stripped bare compared to the average person’s stores. Sean didn’t cook much, preferring to dine out
at expensive restaurants. When he was home, he asked Keiji to cook with locally sourced, fresh products. It kept things easier, with the added benefit of avoiding stockpiling too much of anything in his house. “You’re not going to find a secret stash of Little Debbies, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

She flashed a cheeky smile over her shoulder. “Little Debbies are your weakness, huh? I’ll have to remember that for an end-of-treatment celebration.”

He could think of something else she could give him for an end-of-treatment prize. Maybe something involving the ass she was showing off by bending at the waist to look at the lower shelves of his pantry. It was a small ass but sweetly curved enough for his hand. He had the instant, absurd impulse to pat her.

Wouldn’t that go over well? She’d probably punch him. Or maybe he’d get off lucky and she’d just walk out, probably with several snarky comments. He hid his involuntary chuckle against a loose fist.

She jerked upright. “What was that?”

“Nothing. What
are
you looking for?”

“No particular item. I’m trying to get an idea of your general taste and where we can proceed from here.” She poked around in his fridge next, and that made his back teeth set on edge. He wasn’t used to anyone touching his
stuff.
Which, Christ, sounded way too much like his mother talking inside his head. He took a slow, deep breath and pushed it out again. This was no big deal. Nothing to worry about.

Possessions were simply objects, nothing more. They weren’t memories in solid form, and they had only the emotions people imbued them with. That was it.

Pity his mom had never been able to think of them like that.