Ben filled in more. “We’ve been hanging close for the last two months. Fergus won’t let anyone stay with him, but the idiot is in no position to take care of himself, and for darn sure, mom can’t cope with him alone.”
“Hell, we can’t cope with him, either,” Harry said. “I can’t believe you got him to sleep—”
“Don’t.” They kept looking at her as if she were an angel, which was funny and fun but too ridiculous to tolerate any longer. “I just got here at the right time, that’s all. He was probably on the other side of the headache, ready to sleep.”
“The hell he was,” Ben said peaceably.
“Yeah, well, I won’t be coming back, so don’t even try going there. He made it more than clear that he didn’t want me around, so this was definitely a one-shot deal.”
“But you’d come back if he asked?”
“He won’t ask.” She opened the van door. The pups leaped in.
“But if he did ask—”
“Yeah, then…maybe.If I could make it fit with my schedule. If I thought he was asking, and not you two Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
pushing the idea on him. If…” She dug in her purse for her keys. Not that she carried a big bag, but she could probably have survived for six months in Europe on what she considered emergency supplies.
Eventually her fingers emerged with the keys—and when she looked up, suddenly the two giants were descending on her, grinning ear to ear. She got a smooch on both cheeks before she could stop them.
“Thanks,Phoebe. We love you.”
Color bloomed in her cheeks. “You guys,” she began, and then just shook her head and climbed into the van.
Until she turned out of the driveway and disappeared into the dark night, her shoulders were knotted up with tension. Slowly, though, she felt her muscles—and heart—start to simmer down.
Touch was erotic. That’s just the way it was. She couldn’t touch someone—intensely touch, the kind of touch required if you really wanted to help the person—without responding herself.
So. Helping Fergus had turned her on. Nothing new about that. Nothing interesting.
Nothing she needed to be afraid of.
“Right, girls?” she asked the pups.
The dogs looked up, as if trying to reassure her, yet she still seemed to need to take in heaping gulps of fresh air.
It was Alan who’d made her feel cheap and immoral. Sleazy. As if sexuality and sensuality were a weakness in her character that made her less than decent. She knew that was crap. Sheknew, but, damn, the residue of hurt was harder to shake than a flu germ, even after all this time.
In her head and her heart, she’d believed forever that touch was the most powerful sense. Almost everyone responded to being touched—the right kind of touch. People could go hungry, could go without sleep, could suffer all kinds of deprivation.
But people who went without touch for a long period seemed to lose part of themselves.
Phoebe understood perfectly well that touch in itself couldn’t heal anything. Touch just seemed to enable a body towant to heal itself. It seemed to help a body rest. It seemed to remind even the lost souls that there was wonder on the other side of loneliness—the wonder of connecting, of finding someone else who reached you emotionally.
She pulled in her driveway, past the softly lit sign: BABY LOVE
Phoebe Schneider, Licensed PT, Licensed LMBT,
ABW, MP
Infant Massage Therapy
She docked the van in the narrow driveway, turned the key and leaned back. The sign was the key, she realized.
She just had to quit thinking of Fergus Lockwood as a man—and think of him as if he were another one Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
of her baby clients.
Actually, he struck her very much like one of her lost babies—as if he’d been deprived of touch. As if he’d lost touch with himself because he’d become so isolated from human contact. In fact, as if he needed touch so badly that he’d responded fiercely and evocatively to any contact.
In other words, he’d never been responding to her as a woman.
She climbed out of the van, only to suffer a traffic jam at the back door with the pooches trying to barrel in ahead of her. It was after bedtime, after all. “So that’s the deal, girls,” she told them. “He’s not likely to call again, but in case he does, that’s how we handle it. We just think of him as one of our babies.”
She flipped on the light and plunked down her purse. A vision immediately filled her mind of rolling smooth muscles, sleek warm skin, fierce dark eyes. She swallowed, and thought babies—yeah, right.
By Sunday afternoon, when she pulled into the parking lot for Young at Heart, Gold River’s home for the elderly, she’d totally and completely forgotten about Fergus.
A domineering, macho wind was hurling down from the mountain, throwing handfuls of confetti snow here and there and burning her lungs. It was the kind of afternoon when she just wanted to snuggle in a down comforter with two dogs, a book, a chick flick and a mug of hot chocolate—with melted marshmallows.
She wondered—just idly, since she’d completely stopped thinking about him—whether Fergus might be tempted by a small, sizzling fire on a cuddly cold afternoon.
There was a lot more wrong with him than the debilitating headaches, Bear and Moose had told her.
He’d been home from the hospital for two months, yet except for short grocery runs, stayed locked in.
Didn’t see people. Didn’t return calls. Didn’tdo anything.
She had no idea what he’d done before—for a living or for hobbies or anything else—but obviously they were describing a problem with depression. Maybe the depression was a result of his experience in the military. Maybe it was from injuries that refused to heal—chronic pain could cripple the strongest optimist.
