Page 55 of Wild, Wild Cowboy

Her gaze briefly snagged on my abs but then she was all business. “Great.” She swung her legs off the bed and pushed to get up. “Don’t move.” She darted into the bathroom and came back with a fresh towel, which she spread horizontally on the bed.

I looked at the towel. “Is this…so you don’t have to sleep in the wet spot?”

“Ew, Zack. No.” She wrinkled her nose. “It’s for you. So we don’t get oil all over the sheets because oil stains are almost impossible to get out.” She patted the towel. “Lie here, face down.”

I arched a brow at her, but did as she told me, biting back a groan as I settled onto the bed. I didn’t want her to know how badly I was hurting. I heard her rummaging through her purse for something, and when I craned my neck to look, I saw her pull out a bottle of some kind of oil.

Interesting.

“I bought this at the convenience store while you were pumping gas. It’s arnica oil. It’s supposed to be great for muscle soreness and healing scars.” She pumped a teaspoon amount into her palm, rubbed her hands together, and held them to her nose for a sniff. “Not bad. It smells like a mowed lawn.”

This was starting to sound less like a sexy massage and more like physical therapy.

I eyed her as she came to the edge of the bed, where my head was cradled on my arms. “You don’t have to do this.”

She blew a raspberry. “I don’thaveto rub my hands all over your incredible muscles? Gee, thanks. I was really dreading it.”

I sighed. “This is going to hurt, isn’t it?”

“If you’re a good boy, I’ll make it worth your while.”

My dick twitched at her promise. “I’ll be so good.”

“I have a theory about you.” She placed her oiled hands on my shoulders, then leaned forward, her hips over my head, leaning her weight into her hands as she slowly pushed them down either side of my spine.

Holy mother of god.

“Wasshat,” I muttered because forming coherent words was suddenly beyond me.

She laughed softly as her hands continued to work magic on my stiff muscles. “I bet you showed up to every single physical therapy appointment you had and put in the work. You built your strength back. You worked on your flexibility. You did everything they told you to do…except this. And I bet theydidtell you to get regular massages to heal your muscles and break up the scar tissue, but you didn’t do that. Because suffering to get stronger is one thing, but laying still and letting someone make you feel good is something else entirely. It wasn’t tough enough for you. It felt like weakness.”

“You dunno me,” I mumbled, but I suspected I was wrong about that. She did know me.

And she wasn’t wrong.

I had shown up to every physical therapy session and done the exercises they told me to do. Not once did I phone it in. I pushed myself as hard as they let me. But I had never followed up on those massages they told me to get. It seemed like such a wussy thing to do.

She worked my back and shoulders thoroughly, her touch gentle and careful when she got to my lower back, where I’d fractured my spine. “I’m not going to go too deep here, even though I can feel how stiff you are. I’m not trained, and I don’t want to mess you up worse. Promise me you’ll go see a licensed massage therapist when we get back to Aspen Springs.”

There wasn’t a massage therapist in Aspen Springs. I’d have to drive an hour to the physical therapy clinic, but I said yes anyway. I would have said yes to anything right then.

I had to bite my fist when she joined me on the bed and got to work on my hamstring and calf muscles. That fuckinghurt. But when she was finally done, it felt like for once, there weren’t rocks under my skin.

“All right. Turn over.” She slapped me gently on the butt.

I rolled after hesitating a moment, because I knew what she’d see when I did. She took in my hard dick with an arched brow and then reached for the bottle of oil, pumped it twice, and then got to work on my chest.

“Now,thisis probably going to hurt,” she admitted. She dug into the muscles right below my collar bone.

It did hurt. “Take off your shirt. It will distract me from the pain.”

She huffed an exasperated sigh, but paused the torture long enough to whip her shirt off over her head. I watched her tits as she did awful, wonderful things to my pecs, the front of my shoulders, and my biceps. It wasn’t so bad with that for my view, and even though the massage hurt, it was agoodpain. A healing pain.

“This might feel a little odd,” she said as she moved to my scars. Her touch was light as she rubbed the puckered skin. “You really need to keep the scars hydrated. Scars tighten the skin, and you want it to be flexible to keep your mobility.”

Then she was back between my legs, where she had better access to my thighs. I groaned as she kneaded my tight quads. And then, with one last, lingering stroke, she was done. She rocked back on her heels and regarded my dick, which was still at full mast.

But it was the only thing that was hard right then. My muscles were so relaxed I wasn’t sure I could move. I had melted into the mattress.

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