Page 11 of Healing Her Cowboys
“Not if you want my help to get back to full strength. Let’s start with stretching and work our way up from there.”
He scoffed. “I didn’t know I was hiring a babysitter when I brought you in.”
“I’m not here to babysit you. I’m here to make sure you get stronger, but to do that, I need you to trust me.”
He huffed and moved over to the mat.
Brik still watched her, unable to keep his eyes from following her movements in the room. His breath hitched as she guidedhis leg through the exercises. Her fingers were strong but light, supporting him in every movement.
Her touch was making him crazy. With every movement that she helped him through, he thought he would lose it just by the way her fingers glided over his skin. He did his best to listen to Atlas’s reasoning of why he shouldn’t be an asshole to her, but he enjoyed picking a fight just to watch her react to him.
Even as she stretched him, he pulled back, adding more resistance than necessary.
“Brik, you don’t have to make this so hard,” she said. “I need you to relax and move with my sense of direction.”
Brik wasn’t sure what got into him, but he suddenly wanted her to care about him more than Atlas. “Relaxing isn’t something that comes easy to me.”
She let out a small laugh. “Yeah, I kind of caught on to that.” She met his gaze. “I know you don’t want to be here, but if you stop giving me pushback at every turn, we can get through this together and quickly move on.”
He shrugged. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Since that’s the best I’m going to get out of you today, I’ll take it for now.”
He realized the more he worked with her, the more he could let her take the lead on his routine. As they moved through each exercise, he felt himself loosening up without having to force himself to.
After a while, the sharp pain in his hip came back. Each movement caused him to grimace at the need to push through it. The phantom pain creeped in too, and he gritted his teeth to fight the powerful ache.
Reese noticed it right away. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“It’s nothing,” he said.
“If you keep pushing yourself past your limits, you’re only going to injure yourself more. Tell me what’s hurting you.”
“Fuck! It’s my hip. Sometimes the pain is bearable, but other times, it feels like someone is stabbing me with a poking iron.”
Reese nodded. “That’s not uncommon at this stage. I’m going to guide you through a few different stretches. They should help.”
The last stretch brought them so close to each other that their faces were only inches apart. It lowered the intensity of the pain to something he could handle, and he could breathe easy again.
“You’re actually pretty good at this,” he said.
“Thank you. You’re actually not bad to be around when you’re not talking out of your ass. Didn’t know you had it in you.”
He gave a chuckle at that, but all the laughter disappeared as his eyes fixed on her lips. Without thinking, he pulled her down to him for a kiss.
Her lips were so supple that he pulled her in even closer, taking hold of her hips and pressing his fingers into her curves. He was so into her that he completely forgot about the part of him that was missing. Almost.
He broke their kiss with regret. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.” He pushed her away, sat up, and moved off the table so fast that it shifted on the floor.
“I understand,” she said, looking away from him.
She couldn’t understand, but he didn’t know how to explain it to her. There was no way he could let her get close to him like that again. It didn’t matter how much he wanted her.
“Thanks for the session.” He walked out, wishing he was a whole man to satisfy her.
***
Reese rocked back on the porch swing with a warm blanket, trying to calm her frustration. She wasn’t usually so upset by people, but Brik was getting under her skin in all the wrongways. At least she wasn’t angry at him this time. She just felt lost by that kiss.
