Touch Me (19 page)

Darn, he did. Rose busied herself by peeling the top off her coffee to stare at the dissolving foam at the bottom of the cup.

“You like him, don’t you, Rose?”

“Of course,” she said, shrugging one shoulder.
I like what he did to me last night. That’s all.
Who didn’t appreciate a good spinal adjustment? But she was beginning to worry it hadn’t been the deliverance from crush-dom that she’d expected. Needed.

Fucking’s a state of mind. I’m going to find my way into yours.

Struggling to shove that memory aside, she wanted to scream, beat her breast, yell at her big sister who’d advised her to get physical with P—

The chiropractor, damn it.

“All right, all right,” Cami said, as if sensing Rose’s agitation. “I’ll stop channeling my inner Cilla, because as much as I love the woman, I find her tendency to see heart-shaped balloons filling the air as annoying as the next person.”

Rose smiled a little, because nobody found Cilla Maddox annoying in the least. But if Cami was willing to drop the subject—

“About Payne’s tattoo. That twisty ladder is the DNA double helix, as I think you’ve guessed.”

Rose briefly closed her eyes. “To remind him that infidelity is in his genes? From his father?”

Cami nodded. “My best guess. But if you ask me, his mom passed along her own crap. Aside from shitty weekends here and there when she used him as an emotional punching bag, she abandoned him. I sometimes wonder if he’s not been spending his life racing away from that.”

Infidelity and abandonment. Rose tried breathing through the sharp ache in her chest, no longer able for even a second to think of him as a physical therapist or an especially gifted chiropractor. He was a flesh-and-blood man, with his own wounds.

Oh, Payne. Rose thought.
Pain.

Chapter Eleven

Standing by the desk in the salvage yard’s back office, Payne glanced over his shoulder to ensure he was alone. Certain he was by himself, he tucked in Rose’s earbuds that he’d found abandoned along with her phone on the desk beside the computer.

She was listening to a new book. The female narrator spoke with a soft twang.

When Willa swung down from her horse, Rowdy was there to catch her. She turned in his arms and he didn’t pretend not to stare at the delectable cleavage revealed by her Western-styled shirt. She stiffened in his arms, temper clearly kindling.

Little wildcat.

Rowdy teased her with a blatant leer. “You shouldn’t leave so many of those pretty pearl buttons undone, darlin’, if you don’t want a man to look.”

“No gentleman would mention such a thing,” she retorted.

Rowdy slipped his hand beneath her wide leather belt and her painted-on jeans. His fingers found the skinny rear strap of her thong panties. With two fingers, he plucked the stretchy fabric from its snug seat, then let it snap back into place, grinning when she jumped.

Her face flushed and he knew she’d enjoyed the little bite of pain against her private place. “Baby,” Rowdy murmured against Willa’s hot ear. “We both know I ain’t no gentleman.”

“Payne!” Now it was he who jolted, tearing the buds from his ears and spinning to face Rose, who strode through the doorway. A streak of grease decorated one cheek and her hands were smudged with more of the stuff.

“Need something?” he asked, innocent and cool, as if listening to that suggestive bit of foreplay followed by the appearance of her in the small room hadn’t switched his libido to On.

Her brows came together for a second, as if she suspected something, then she shrugged and looked down at her dirty hands. “Can I talk to you a minute?” she asked.

“Sure.” He raised his voice. “Jeb, you got some time?”

The teenager jogged in. “What do you need?”

Payne tossed a sheaf of papers onto the nearby couch. “Look those over, will you? It’s a set of business codes we need to make sure we’re not violating.”

The kid didn’t blink, though it had to be the most boring task ever. Not to mention completely unnecessary, since Payne knew them by heart. But this had been his strategy the last few days.

Never be alone with Rose.

It had been working out fine, actually. They’d spent hours at the new salvage yard and it was shaping up. Security cameras had been installed around the perimeter. The completely worthless, rotted-out junk cars had been identified and towed away for scrap. They’d cleaned up and rearranged the ones with promise.

Best of all, construction had been finished on a hangar just off the main building. It was filled with tables that housed bins of the rare salvage pieces that were now accurately cataloged in the data base.

Rose had accomplished a tremendous amount of the work, something above and beyond her job description. But she’d said she wanted to keep busy.

Maybe, like him, trying to keep at bay the memory of their night together.

Payne cleared his throat now. “Need to say it again, babe. Thanks for all the extra effort.”

Her eyes had narrowed at the word “babe,” as if she knew he used that to put her in her place.

Far away from him.

“Yes, well. Glad you appreciate it,” she said, then hesitated, her teeth coming down on her lower lip.

Shit. That made him fixate on her mouth. Unpainted, just asking for a kiss. But he didn’t do mouth-to-mouth, and remembering that also reminded him of why he couldn’t have her again. Rose needed the kind of man who could give her every kind of intimacy.

A man she could trust.

“So, your doctor’s appointment is coming up next week...” she began.

“Yeah.” Thinking of that brightened his mood. “I should get the all-clear to go back to my pre-crash life.”

“And your pre-Rose life,” she added.

He couldn’t afford to miss her presence in his house, even though he supposed he’d falsely see her figure out of the corner of his eye for weeks after she finally left him. Already he knew she’d put healthy meals in his freezer, which he found both annoying and adorable. Playing mommy again, when every time he saw her precise handwriting on the plastic containers he wouldn’t be thinking in maternal terms.

He would remember her bent over his kitchen table.

He’d been considering burning it.

His cock was enjoying its own wander down memory lane, by now hard enough for her to see a bulge if she took a look. But like him, she’d been keeping things impersonal since the Night of the Hawaiian Shirts, as he’d taken to calling it in his head.

Swinging the desk chair around to face her, he dropped into it and propped one ankle on his knee, hoping to make a little more room in his pants for his hard-on. “What’s up, Rose?”

“I have a proposition for you.”

He jerked back, his gaze jumping to teenage Jeb, sitting just a few feet away. The kid’s eyes met his, widened.

“Geez!” Rose exclaimed, clearly peeved. “Not that kind of proposition.”

Payne’s heart started beating again and Jeb swallowed a sudden grin. “Sorry, babe,” Payne said. “A guy’s mind will go the way a guy’s mind will go.”

She glared at him. “No more ‘babe’.”

“Okay, okay.” He held up both hands. “What’s all this about?”

Glancing down at her dirty hands again, she frowned. “Over dinner.”

“Huh?”

“I want to discuss it over dinner.”

“You probably have some disgusting tofu and tomato surprise casserole to feed me in my freezer, though fair warning, that won’t soften me up.” But hell, he remembered he didn’t want to be alone with her. Which of the tribe could he call upon to chaperone?

“We’ll go out,” Rose said, already turning on her heel. “I’ll pick you up at seven.”

Just like that, he had a date with the woman he was trying his best to avoid.

Punctual as always, Rose pulled into his drive and tapped her horn at 6:59. Payne glanced across at her as he slipped into the car’s passenger seat, by now accustomed to the cramped nature of its interior. “You honked, mistress?”

She waved a hand. “Sorry, we have reservations and I don’t want to miss them.”

Over the past few hours he’d tried guessing the exact nature of her proposition. This wasn’t his first time at the “proposition” rodeo—and fuck, he’d been thinking of Willa and Rowdy for hours too—but he didn’t suppose Rose wanted him to introduce her to the Velvet Lemons manager in exchange for a baggie of cocaine, or that she would ask for a loan and offer up payment in shibari lessons.

It had been a weird and wicked life, he thought, suddenly very weary of it.

“Are you okay?” Rose asked.

He stretched his legs as best he could. “Tired, I guess. In need of something good.”

“I think I can do that.”

“Yeah?” Sensing her excitement, he glanced over again. It was too dark to read her expression, but her ebullient mood was catching. He smiled, and realized he’d miss that too when she was gone from his life. She was upbeat when she wasn’t snarky. And he liked the snarky side of her too.

Settling into his seat, he folded his arms over his chest. “Does this mean I get steak?”

“Just you wait,” was her only reply.

The menu of the restaurant she took him too had just about everything, he noticed, perusing the one on display as they waited to be seated. From steak and potatoes to Asian fusion. After a few moments they were led to a heated patio surrounded by well-trimmed shrubbery covered in hundreds of fairy lights. As he followed Rose to their table, he noted she’d dressed up for the occasion—down to graceful black pumps.

In Southern California, a pair of jeans and strappy high heels or stiletto boots were a common mode of dress for female restaurant goers—whether they were dining at a sports bar or a swanky place with a year-long waiting list.

Tonight, his companion wore a dress as black as her shoes, knee-length, and that swung out at the hemline. The cut was modest and might have been boring, except the shoulders and tight long sleeves were black lace, the woven design big, loopy flowers that exposed a tantalizing amount of the creamy skin beneath.

When they sat down, the second thing he noticed was she’d brought a slim leather portfolio along with her tiny purse.

Then he looked up, and his next observation left no room for any other in his mind.

He’d never seen her by candlelight.

At the center of their table, the flame contained by a round glass holder threw off a buttery shine. It washed over Rose’s features, highlighting her brow, cheekbones, and chin, while creating two mysterious pools for her beautiful eyes. Her lashes looked a mile long and as lush as her lips.

Payne, who since the age of ten had seen starlets in nothing but hot tub bubbles and supermodels on their knees for super-moguls, was struck dumb.

“What?” she asked, patting her hair self-consciously. She ran a fingertip around the contours of her mouth. “Is my lipstick smudged?”

He cleared his throat. Tried to clear his head. “You take my breath away.”

Now she made a face. “It’s Lily’s perfume. You don’t like it? Are you allergic?”

Get a grip, Payne told himself, and shifted in his seat. “Rose—”

“Am I making you wheeze?”

Finally, he had to laugh. “No. It was an actual compliment, idiot girl.”

“Oh.” Her expression turned disgruntled. “I’m not an idiot.”

“Sometimes you are.” He grabbed her hand, squeezed.

She squeezed back. Then both their gazes dropped to their linked hands. In the same moment, they let go.

The barrier of menus rose between them. “Have whatever you like,” she said to him. “My treat.”

“No way.” Payne frowned at her over the leather and parchment. “You’ve done so much more for me than you agreed to…”

And suddenly he was back in his kitchen and she was half-dressed, her partial nakedness all the more alluring for the cover-up she was desperately clutching below her breasts and the swimsuit bottoms that were rolled like a band around her thighs.

In a blink she was bent over the table, her swollen charms completely exposed. He’d gone wild at the sight of her wet, pink sex.

“I’ll even spring for oysters,” she said.

Stifling his groan, he hid his expression behind his menu. The last thing he needed was an aphrodisiac.

Downing a bracing swallow of his ice water, he pushed off his wayward thoughts and decided on the prime rib and loaded baked potato, reveling in the look of displeasure on Rose’s face when he repeated his order to their waiter.

“Now, Mom,” he said. “I don’t have to eat healthy every night.”

Shaking her head at him, she flattened out her quick smile and took a sip from her own glass. “I don’t know why I put up with you.”

As they were served and consumed their meal, Payne still hadn’t a clue why she’d invited him out. But he let her play the evening her way, and they conversed about nothing pleasantly enough, though he was aware of her heightening tension.

When the waiter had removed their plates and she tossed back half of her wine glass in one go, he sighed. “You’re not gearing yourself up to ask for one of my livers are you?”

She stilled, then laughed. “You only have one liver, as you very well know—the one that has just been repaired. I’m not going to beg for a kidney, either.”

“Whew.” He pretended to wipe sweat off his brow. “What do you want then?”

“A job.”

He straightened in his chair, the idea of her continuing to flit around his house—not good. Not good at all. “Rose, once I can drive again—”

“I’ve been thinking about this. I want to do the books for the new salvage yard.”

His eyes flared. He hadn’t see that coming. “I don’t get it.”

“Yeah, you do. You just said the other day you’re going to have to find someone to keep the books, because your other gal is too busy. I’m proposing I do it.”

“Rose—”

“I’ve learned a lot about the business in the last couple of weeks. You know that.”

“Yeah, but you wanted to get out of accounting.”

She made a face. “I’ve tried thinking up something else I want to do. I don’t knit at all well, honestly, and I’m not sure how it could be a career anyway. I helped Lily paint a bedroom, and that bored me to tears. I’m taking this self-defense course with law enforcement in mind, but I don’t think that’s me either. And it turns out…”