Jonah had been one of those older boys. The type of guy girls wanted attention from and rarely received. He’d been in his own world, but that place had included high school sports like football and baseball. He’d driven a big truck and had even been on the homecoming court.
He snorted. “No.”
I scooted his leg out to get better access to his full thigh. He moved without much prodding, whether it was more comfortable or because he didn’t want me to jerk his limb in a direction it couldn’t go easily. “You two were hot and heavy.”
“We were teenagers.”
“I heard you were seeing her again,” I murmured. Was I digging for information? Absolutely.
“We were, but we’re done.”
My heart skipped a beat. “Oh?”
“Sometimes you just gotta let something go that should’ve stayed in the past.” His gruff words steadied my pulse. If he thought like that, maybe I could talk to him—about everything.
I continued to work the flesh around his thigh. He was so dang tight. That couldn’t be good. I shifted the blanket higher. “I can do your hip while you’re like this.”
He tensed. “It’s fine.”
“There’s that word again.” I halted my upward progress. “I’ve learned, Jonah, that when you say it’s fine, it’s not. I can help.”
“No.”
I held his gaze. I couldn’t cross my arms when my hands were slippery with lube. I’d get the gel on my sweater, and while it was water-based lubricant, I had no other clothes. “Does your shoulder feel better?”
A muscle ticced in his jaw. “Yes.”
“Your knee?”
“The ache isn’t as bad.” Stubbornness resounded in his voice.
“Then I can help your hip.”
He held my attention, his pupils dilating. He worked his jaw like he was chewing over the words. “My dick isn’t by my shoulder or my knee.”
Oh.
Oh. I was rubbing him down with lube. I’d heard once that erections were a common occurrence for men getting massages. Surely, he wasn’t having problems getting a massage from me. Delight pushed through my shock. Would his reaction be from me?
He tugged the sheet, and if he kept straining his shoulder at that angle, he’d undo all the work I’d done. “I’m a lot more comfortable than I was. I think I can sleep now.”
Disappointment was a loud gong in my ears. It didn’t matter that my palms tingled from the warmth of his skin and the slide of his silky body hair under my fingers. He was dismissing me. After barging into his home and pushing him into a massage, the least I could do was leave him alone.
CHAPTER TEN
Jonah
I stared at my dark bedroom ceiling. The wind had picked up, howling outside. There was little ambient light, but I could picture the snow swirling and gusting, clouding the view in every direction.
The weather wasn’t keeping me awake.
The inhuman restraint I’d had to use to keep from sporting an erection around Summer was obscene. I was a pervert. Smelling her while she had leaned over me, enveloping me in her strawberry-sugar scent while she rubbed me down with the same stuff I’d used to stroke myself off with the night after she’d left...
I’d almost let her work on my hip only to keep her in my room longer. To have her hands on me for another twenty minutes. But each time I looked at her, blood rerouted to my dick. Each time my brain dwelled on the fact that she was the one touching me and not Hannah, my fifty-five-year-old surrogategrandmother of a massage therapist, my cock swelled. Inconveniently and rampantly.
Each glimpse I’d stolen of her, she’d been bathed in weak lamplight, and now I knew what she looked like in my bedroom. I knew what she looked like in comfy clothes, like this was her home. Like we did this on our Saturday nights.
A creak sounded and I frowned. The house was sturdy, but the noise wasn’t one of the normal sounds that happened during a storm. Another squeak. This one I recognized. The bottom step. The damn thing had made noise for years, and while I didn’t traverse the stairs often, I knew the sound.
