Page 11 of His Curvy Temptation

She continues in silence, her hands finding my shoulders.

“More knots,” she says. “You must be torturing yourself in between massages. I think these are worse than the ones last week. Do you slouch often?”

I clear my throat uncomfortably.

“Uh, no,” I say. “I tend to get a lot of tension up there…Deepti might have mentioned it but I sustained a back injury a long time ago. My spine healed but the soft tissue has never been the same. The weekly massage is sort of a…maintenance thing, more than relaxation.”

Her hands hesitate over my shoulders for a moment before continuing.

“I didn’t know,” she says. “May I ask what the injury was, and how long ago?”

Talk about a boner killer. But if I didn’t want her to ask about this at all, I probably shouldn’t have brought it up.

“Bit of a long story. I was an active duty marine. Served a couple of tours overseas…”

I drift off.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Andy says quickly. “I’m sorry. We get a lot of people coming to us after car accidents…things like that. I didn’t mean to pry.”

Her softness makes me feel bad, remembering last week and the way she seemed almost terrified of me. Maybe I’m more intimidating than I think I am.

“It’s fine,” I say. “I don’t mind discussing it.”

This is a blatant lie. I hate fucking talking about it. Most of the time I pretend that this part of my life never happened. There’s very little about that period of time that I am able to think about without feeling…feelings.

So I do mind talking about it. But for Andy, for some reason I feel like I need to. I need to show her that I’m not as big of a jerk as she seems to believe I am, and that she doesn’t need to be afraid of me.

Others are afraid of me. Some of my employees. Other men. But women aren’t supposed to be afraid of me like that, especially a woman like Andy who — despite my best efforts to pretend to be a gentleman around her today — makes me want to bend her over this massage table and drive my cock deep inside of her.

“So you were injured during one of your tours?”

“You know, that’s what most people think,” I say wryly. “But no. Actually, I made it home with not much more than a twisted ankle and a few stitches. Training was harder than my deployments ever were. After training, twelve months in the desert felt almost easy.”

“So…if you didn’t get hurt while deployed, what was it?”

“You’re going to laugh,” I mutter.

“I would never!” Andy says, her hands pausing on my shoulders again.

“Well, maybe you wouldn’t. But you’ll think it sounds dumb. I fell out of bed.”

“You…just fell out of bed?” Andy asks. “Like…fell from a bunk?”

“Nope,” I say. “Just an ordinary bed.”

She’s quiet.

“Told you it was dumb,” I say to break the uncomfortable silence.

“It’s not dumb,” she insists. “Why would that be dumb? Getting injured sucks. And people get injured in the strangest of ways. I see it all the time. Some people don’t even know how they got injured in the first place. They just wake up in the morning in excruciating pain.”

“Sometimes I wake up like that now,” I reply. “My shoulder. It’s like the shoulder of an eighty year old, or something. Doesn’t take much to set me back and before I know it I’m icing it down all day long and can’t lift anything with that arm.”

“That must be so awful,” she murmurs.

“It’s not so bad,” I reply. “It’s not like I’m a baby or something. It’s just a stiff shoulder.”

“I wasn’t suggesting that you were a baby,” she says, some reproach and hurt in her voice.

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