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The shirt she was wearing was pale blue, with thin, delicate straps stretching over the golden skin of her shoulders. Tiny wisps of hair curled against the nape of her neck, and the impact of them damn near had me swaying on my feet. I wanted to bury my nose there and pull in the sweet scent of her.
This was a sick test of my control and a testament to how badly I couldn’t leash my own thoughts. And I’d likely regret it.
But I didn’t now.
Her breath was choppy as she sat in front of me, her head bowed in supplication, like she was about to pray. What she didn’t realize was that I was too.
For control.
For restraint.
For a moment like this that I didn’t deserve, not even the littlest bit.
My hands looked big and clumsy when I lifted them, settling my palms over the curve of her shoulders. Her skin was warm and smooth, and she exhaled in a hard puff at the touch of my hands.
There was no choice but to close my eyes at the feel of it. Of just touching her.
But instead of a racing heart and jangled nerves, something very close to peace settled along my skin.
It wasn’t hard to find the cord of tension with my thumbs, and when I pushed against it, trying to draw the tightness along the line of her back, she made a low moaning sound that plucked at all the little hairs on the back of my neck.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“Oh my Lord,” she groaned. “Yes, there.”
Her head dropped lower, and I smiled faintly.
“When your muscles are locked up like this, you can’t just leave them to keep getting worse. A knot under your skin like that—you have to find a place to push all the tension away.” My voice stayed quiet and low. “You have to move it along; otherwise, it’ll build and build, causing a whole host of other problems.”
The layered meaning of my words wasn’t lost on me, and what a dumbass I was for thinking it’d be lost onher. She tilted her head as she listened, humming in understanding.
I used the heel of my hand to push against her muscles, and she hissed softly.
“Relax your shoulders,” I murmured. “Don’t keep tensing.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re not the one feeling what I’m feeling.”
I smiled again, thankful she couldn’t see. But I moved back to my thumbs all the same, gentling the pressure just a touch.
Zoe’s entire body melted, and I dug my thumbs harder into the knot. “What kinds of books is she sending you that cause this? I don’t even have knots this big, and I’m getting knocked around for a living.”
She made a small laughing sound. “Dirty ones. This one is, at least.”
My eyebrows popped up, hands stilling in an instant. “How dirty?”
“Don’t judge.”
“I’m not,” I said easily.
I continued working on the knot, drawing my thumbs along the muscles, then pushed the heel of my hand along the full length of her shoulder blade. She shivered, and I closed my eyes.
“Too much?” I asked, and fucking hell, my voice sounded like I’d been chewing glass.
Yes. It was too fucking much, and I was the idiot who’d put us here.
“No,” she whispered. I brought my thumbs along the base of her neck and pushed up to the base of her skull. Those little curls tickled my fingers, and I fought the urge to keep pushing, to bury them in her hair, to tug her face back and taste her skin with my tongue. “It’s nothing,” she added.
“No bullshit, remember?”
