I probably wouldn’t notice if I wasn’t used to searching for pain.
That’s what massage therapists do.
Learn people’s pain, so they can tame it and chase it away.
But he’s stoic, withdrawn, as he stops in front of me, scanning my body with a critical eye that makes me feel kind of like one of those dummies they teach you first aid on.
Eep. So much for all those flutters. My butterflies just iced over.
“You Peace?” he growls.
I smile faintly, pulling my frozen fingers from my pocket to wiggle them at him in a little wave. “Only person out here with a burning wreck. Blake, right?”
He only grunts, giving me another one of those looks. “You’re not hurt?”
“No.” I shake my head. “I jumped out and got away as soon as I had the van parked on the side of the road. I’m just cold.”
“Lucky it’s not quite cold enough tonight for hypothermia, but you’ll still catch a chill.”
He takes a step back then, retreating to the fire truck, and digs out one of those massive, thick fire jackets from a side compartment. It’s deep grey with reflective yellow and orange bands on the sleeves and back.
Slowly, he returns to me and swings it around my shoulders.
For a moment, I’m almost wrapped up in his arms. He reaches around me to pull the jacket tight, draping it over my shoulders and then drawing it in to bundle me up.
Now, my butterflies are thawed.
And it’s definitely not the jacket leaving my face so hot my ears burn against the cold, the contrast bordering on painful.
Oh, no.
Why did he have to be so…so…
That.
All of that, including the faint whiff of cologne and Goliath I get as he straightens, still looking at me with this fierce, unmovable gaze.
“Thanks,” I say faintly, curling my fingers in the jacket, drawing it closer. “For coming out here.”
“It’s my job.”
“Right.” I’m really playing it smooth here.
So I bite my lip, searching for something to say, then glance past him at the other two men who have shut the hose off and lifted the hood of my van to see inside. “You doused it out fast. I’m a little amazed. It’s not every day I see—”
“A dude with a leg as fucked as mine doin’ this kind of work?” he cuts me off. “Heard it a thousand times, darlin’.”
Oh, crap city!
Wrong tack.
Absolutely the wrong tack.
He can’t possibly think I meant—
Ugh. He caught me staring like a deer in the headlights.
I realize it the instant his eyes go practically black, savage and dark, and his mouth tightens. There’s no other hint I’ve hit the wrong button, but it’s enough when the air around us drops a hundred degrees as he turns away, giving me his broad back.
The lines of his shoulders, his trapezius, are so tense.
Like he’s carrying boulders around inside him.
“Blake, I’m sorry,” I fumble out. “I didn’t mean—”
“Forget it. Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says flatly, and that empty, detached voice sounds nothing like the gentle man who’d reassured me over the phone.
He stalks over to my van, reaches in the open driver’s side window, and snaps off the radio that’s been babbling in the background the entire time.
I trail after him.
I feel lost, unsure what to say. This is definitely in the top ten most surreal nights of my life.
“Hey, I’m sorry,” I offer again to his back. “I wasn’t trying to be rude or nosy. I’m just—you know, I’m a massage therapist and—”
“I heard about you!” One of the other men—the one with the mess of dark Grecian curls—looks up from under the hood with a grin. “You set up shop at the inn, right? Trying to get the snowbird crowd?”
I smile slightly. “Yep. Figured if I was going to put down roots for winter, settling in with the tourists wouldn’t be a bad way to make a living.”
He laughs, straightening and pulling one of his big bulky gloves off to offer me his hand. “Not just the tourists. We get more stress in this town than we have any right to. Hell, we’ve probably got collective PTSD by now after all that Galentron—”
“Justin,” Blake growls, snapping a look at him, dark with warning.
“Sorry, Chief.” Justin winces, but he keeps grinning, his big hand still outstretched. “I’m being unprofessional.”
“It’s fine.” I shake his hand, quickly and warmly. “I’m not real big on professional. Most hippie kids aren’t.”
“Figured you had some punk in you. Nice hair, by the way.”
He’s talking about the ombre purple tips dyed in my hair. Most people usually are. It gets me looks in small towns like this, but I’m used to it and don’t mind when it’s a good icebreaker.
I smile at Justin. “Thanks, dude.”
Then his grin broadens.
“Hey, you mind if I snap a few photos? I like keeping albums, and uh…this is my first burning van in the middle of the night around these parts. It’s not too far from the old Paradise Hotel ruins, might even be able to get them in the same shot off in the distance…”