Once Touched (14 page)

The house was quiet, Alfie back in his cage and happily practicing whirring noises while he chewed a carrot. He loved it when she used the food processor to chop onions and cilantro for her guacamole and salsa. There was enough guac for two. And, refusing to analyze why, she'd prepared a couple of extra butternut squash quesadillas. She could eat them tomorrow if Ethan behaved true to form and refused to be social for more than thirty seconds.

She laid the tortillas on a silicone carving board and began spooning beans, goat cheese, Monterey Jack, diced squash, and guacamole onto half of the tortilla, folding the other half over the filling, until she had a row of neat semicircles. She wasn't much of a cook—no need to be when she counted professional chefs among her friends—but she did have a few recipes down. This was one of them.

First she'd gotten a dog, and now she was fixing extra food in case Ethan was hungry.

Why didn't you ask Josh?

Of all the people in her world whom she would have expected to press her—repeatedly—about Josh, Quinn would have thought Ethan to be the very last. He'd asked a good question, though. It ranked right up there with why she spent yesterday and today consciously avoiding Josh and suggesting to Maebeth that she cook one of his favorite dishes. Wasn't Josh what she ought to be looking for in a guy? They shared the same interests, he understood ranching, he was nice, he was attractive, and he hadn't made her go cold with dread or embarrassment when he put his tongue in her mouth.

And yet…

It occurred to Quinn that her character might be far more twisted than she'd acknowledged. Perhaps in addition to her sexual hang-ups, she yearned for the unobtainable. If so, then she'd really hit the jackpot with her fascination with Ethan. It was equally possible she suffered from self-delusion, believing she could sneak past his prickly-as-barbed-wire demeanor to find the man he'd been before he went on assignment in Afghanistan.

But even if she found the Ethan of old, what made her think that he might be remotely interested in her or that he would be the man for her?

A
T THE ARMY
base, once the guys had warmed up to Ethan, they often talked about wives and girlfriends, pulling out creased photographs or clicking on laptops to show pictures or videos of smiling faces and puckered lips blowing kisses. The gamut ranged from demure angels posing in flowered sundresses to decidedly more earthy sisters in thongs and pasties performing seriously acrobatic pole-dancing routines.

Along with the women were other images of those that had been left behind to await the soldiers' return: pythons, ferrets, horses, cats, parakeets, turtles, and iguanas, but most of all, dogs. He'd seen cherished pics of dogs of every shape, age, and variety, from nine-month-old pit bulls to grizzled Chihuahuas.

They were loved, those animals, and missed as deeply, if differently, as the girlfriends and family members were.

Ethan's thoughts turned to Bowie's owner. Had he been deployed to Afghanistan? If so, where had he been based and what kind of action had he seen? Did he have photographs of Bowie that he scrolled through as he lay on his bunk, the images momentarily transporting him to a place far away from rocket blasts and sniper bullets?

How long would it take for the soldier to hear that Bowie had been placed in a shelter? One thing Ethan already knew: the news would add worry to the omnipresent fear and exhaustion that weighed heavily, like a sweat-drenched blanket, on every soldier deployed.

He'd walked Bowie around the ranch's outbuildings, letting him sniff and pee on posts or tufts of dried grass that held some special canine significance. Then he took him to an open area, not too hard to find on a ranch the size of Silver Creek, and began tossing the ball.

The dog caught his every throw. Ignoring his shoulder, he launched the ball ever farther and higher until the growing darkness made it impossible to distinguish the gray speckled fur.

“Sorry, boy,” he said when the dog trotted up to him, dropped into a crouch, and, with a nudge of his snout, rolled the ball toward his boots. “You've got the moves, all right, but the fun has to end. My arm's gonna fall off if I keep this up.” Bending over, he snapped the leash onto Bowie's collar.

They walked back to Quinn's house. The light over the front door was illuminated and the small house looked neat and cozy. Appearances could be deceiving. Bracing himself for a blast of parrot-induced mayhem, he knocked and heard Quinn call, “Come in.”

This time when he stepped inside he caught the cultured tones of David Attenborough explaining how the giraffe enjoyed grazing on the leaves of the acacia tree.

Sir David's voice faded and the camera zoomed in on a giraffe stretching for a dainty morsel. Then Quinn spoke. “There's beer in the fridge. I left a bowl of food for Bowie on the counter. If you're hungry, help yourself to some quesadillas. And there's chips and salsa. The food's under the metal mesh domes. Pirate likes to raid.”

He waited to see whether she'd shift her gaze away from the giraffe that was delicately and deliberately denuding the branches of the spiky acacia. When he noticed that Sooner and her one-eyed cat were seated on either side of her like furry animal bookends and that their attention, too, was glued to the TV, he gave a mental shrug. A beer might not be so bad. A quesadilla would save him the hassle of scrounging for food.

He left Bowie in the kitchen chowing down on a bowl of kibble. He assumed it was the caviar of dog foods. The dog had taken one sniff and then plunged into the mix.

His two fingers wrapped around the cold neck of a beer. An earthenware plate piled with golden-brown quesadillas and a couple of spoonfuls of salsa balanced in his other hand, he rejoined Quinn. An elephant was on the screen now, plucking high-hanging berries from a tree with surgical precision. It must be an “animals eating” segment of the program.

Ethan sank into a club chair with a grunt of pain. Luckily his grunt coincided with the crash of a tree toppled by an African bull elephant. Nonetheless, he glanced over at Quinn, relaxing when he saw that her gaze was still riveted on the screen.

“The walk go okay?” she asked.

“Yeah. He's a good dog.” He bit into the quesadilla. It was damn good. Three more bites and it was gone. He picked up another one and dipped the pointy end into the salsa.

“Aussies are smart. Highly trainable. I think I'll start him on the basics of herding in a couple of weeks once he's had a chance to acclimate and has met a few sheep.”

“Mmm.” He took a sip of his beer to wash down his last bite of butternut and black beans. Antelope were thundering across the savannah. Over the TV, he heard the click of toenails on wood. Bowie came straight to his chair and lay down by his feet.

Ethan tried hard not to be pleased. “You know David Bowie doesn't really have bicolored eyes, don't you? He got punched in the eye when he was a teen. A fight over a girl.”

“That so?”

At least she didn't ask who David Bowie was.

“I'm pretty sure there are ways to post a message saying you've got Bowie here at Silver Creek that the army will forward.”

She nodded at the screen. “It's why I adopted him, to make it as easy as possible for Bowie's owner to reunite with him once he returns home. If that can't happen, I'll do my part to give Bowie a great life.”

He chugged the beer, despite the fact that his throat had closed with emotion. Quinn often did the unexpected; he should never be surprised by the size of her heart.

“So the shoulder's paining you?”

Caught off guard, he said, “Yeah. A bit,” and then cursed silently.

“Perfect.”

He paused with the bottle halfway to his lips. “Excuse me?”

She stood. “Finish your food. I'll be back in a couple of secs. Just have to get my table.”

What was she up to now?

The table was a massage table that she unfolded with the efficiency of a vacuum cleaner salesman. He wasn't buying.

“Forget it, Quinn,” he said flatly.

“I'm going to start calling you Dr. No,” she said, whipping out a white sheet. With a snap of her wrists, it billowed like a sail before settling over the table. “Don't you know that you're supposed to jump at the chance when a woman offers you a massage?”

Every atom in his body screamed,
Hell yes.
Thankfully he still had a few functioning brain cells left. “Sorry, not interested.”

Amazingly, she didn't look surprised or even skeptical, which meant he must have become an exceptional liar in the past thirty seconds. No, what she looked was determined. Ethan was beginning to recognize that when she thrust her jaw out just so, it was a sign that Quinn Knowles had the bit between her teeth.

“I've been learning equine massage. It's something I was already planning on doing with Tucker. Now I really want to. I'm hoping it will help him relax and handle being confined to a stall better. But I need more practice. I can use you.”

“I'm not a horse.”

“But you're an ass a lot of the time, so that qualifies, doesn't it?” She must have caught the ghost of a smile on his face. “Come on. I dare you,” she said.

He exhaled wearily. “Do you ever give up?”

“Nope. Wanna know a secret? Ward and Reid live in terror of me.”

He believed it. “Will you stop talking if I say yes?”

“Guys,” she said, shaking her head. “There is nothing wrong with conversation, you know. There are days when getting more than five words out of Ward is a major achievement.”

No wonder he liked Ward. “Yes or no?”

“Fine.” She exhaled loudly. “You take off your shirt and I'll hit the mute button.”

Oh, Christ. The shirt.
If he reneged now, she would know immediately that it was because he didn't want to show her what his shoulder looked like. He had his pride.

Feeling as if his molars might crumble to pieces, he unbuttoned the heavy flannel shirt. Shrugging it off, he tossed it onto the chair he'd vacated and kept his gaze fixed on the weave of the rug.

His hearing suddenly extra acute, he caught the sound of her breath whooshing out—in horror? Pity?—and then there was silence, a charged silence. He regretted his demand that she stop talking. If she'd been talking, then she wouldn't be absorbing the sight of his wounds.

“Should I lie on my front or back?” he asked gruffly.

She made a strangled noise, then coughed. “Could you, um, please lie facedown?” Her voice was now stiff with formality. At any other time he'd have glanced at her face to read it. He refused to do so now. Were he to see naked pity there, he'd never be able to forget it.

He did as instructed. The cotton sheet she'd draped over the table was rough as cement against his skin.

Squeezing his eyes shut, he prepared for the worst.

The sight of Ethan's naked torso hit her like a hard punch, leaving her breathless and reeling. He was broad-chested, his nipples a dark tan against his pale skin. Brown hair sprinkled the space between, covering the taut swell of his pecs. A thicker line of hair formed a path, starting at the flat of his stomach, just above his navel, and continuing down. Her gaze reached the top of his low-slung jeans and skittered back up.

Oh God, he was beautiful. Not in a beefcake hunk or overpumped, steroid-fueled bodybuilder way. There was no flash, no excess. He was simply bone, sinew, and lean muscle.

She'd seen men's chests before, had touched a number of them. Six, to be exact. But not even Mark Adams's naked torso—he was the last man she'd attempted to have sex with—had made her react like this, not even when she'd been rubbing it with her own.

What had she done? Why had she given in to impulse once again? This compulsion to fix things was a weakness of hers. A habit that might be okay when it came to rescuing orphaned baby bunnies and donating her time and energy at shelters and sanctuaries but verged on dangerous when it involved a man who made her heart beat crazily.

But maybe you don't only want to fix him. Maybe you've been looking for an excuse to touch him,
a nagging voice suggested.

The idea was startling in its novelty and pretty darn terrifying.

She looked again and this time couldn't seem to resist the pull he exerted on her. But all too aware of what happened to the cat that was curious, she approached the narrow table with a tentative step. She took in the taut skin stretched over his back, the still-red scars snaking over his right shoulder, a road map of pain. She could see the tension radiating off him. What had made her think she could do this, offer relief to his suffering?

But backing down wasn't an option.

Opening her palms, she touched him.

If she used her body weight to press and knead, she reasoned, he wouldn't feel the trembling of her hands or guess that the tremors coursed through her entire body. If she focused on the pressure points and worked the knots constricting his muscles, holding and waiting for them to loosen and relax, then she wouldn't be tempted to caress the taut skin or stroke the puckered lines that covered his right shoulder in the hopes that she might absorb the hurt.

She told herself to forget that the body beneath her hands was Ethan's. She made herself close her eyes to the breadth of his shoulders, to the lean proportions of his back, to the awful scars, evidence of the agony suffered by this man she was coming to admire so much. It was simply her hands listening to a nameless person's body. Listening, gauging, probing, kneading.

Grunts and short
mmnf
s punctuated the quiet as she located trigger points and worked at the knots in his muscles. When they began to ease, his breathing deepened. Every now and again he released a low groan that coursed through her like an electric charge.

Her breasts grew heavy, her nipples tingly, as if they were missing or anticipating something. His touch. Knowing that the small of his back would be as tense as the area of his neck and shoulder blades, she began walking her hands down his spine. With each shift of her open palms over hard muscles and ridiculously soft skin, sparks ignited low in her belly, making her ache. Making her hot.