Dangerous to Love

by Sally Tyler Hayes

  She was lying against the back of the tub, her head pillowed on a rolled-up towel, her eyes closed. Her dark hair was loose and wet along the ends. He would wash it for her, he decided, itching to feel the silky strands beneath his fingers.

  “This is the first time I haven’t felt like I was seeing everything through a fog,” she said drowsily. “While I was out of it, I had the oddest dreams.”

  “Really?”

  “Mmm. You were there. You were with me. In the ambulance? Or the emergency room?”

  “I was there, babe,” he began.

  “You were walking...” And then she opened her eyes. He watched as she looked at him, at his feet planted firmly on the floor, at his legs, the cane, the way he leaned against the wall. By the time her gaze met his, he didn’t know if she was going to yell at him or cry again.

  He figured he had a fifty-fifty shot at either one at the moment.

  She considered for another minute, a hurt, accusing look coming into her eyes. “You didn’t even tell me?”

  Ouch. A week ago, he wouldn’t have felt so guilty about that. He would have justified it by saying it was his life, his body, and no one’s business but his own. He would have told himself he’d been a loner his whole life, that spilling his guts to anyone didn’t come easily to him, particularly to a woman.

  But that was before he’d seen her thrown from a moving car. It was before he’d spent a hellish few days at the hospital waiting for information from a half-dozen different specialists about how she was, all the time fighting to make them understand he had a right to know. Because it was killing him to wait and to watch and to worry, to not know if she was going to be all right or when she was going to wake up.

  He remembered the way he’d treated her after he was shot, remembered pushing her away with words designed to hurt her. He’d instructed his doctors not to talk to her or anyone else about his condition. He’d checked himself out of the hospital behind her back and disappeared, and he’d refused to talk to her or to see her for weeks on end.

  If she’d done that to him, he’d have gone stark-raving mad, and he wouldn’t have been quick to forgive her, either.

  “I’m sorry,” he said inadequately. “I didn’t understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “What I was doing to you,” he said carefully. “I didn’t know how much I was hurting you by shutting you out of my life.”

  “I just...I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.” She closed her eyes and turned her head away. “I’m starting to think my mother was right about you.”

  “I wasn’t aware that your mother knew me.”

  “She knows enough about men to warn me that I’ll never be able to change you into what I want you to be. Or what I need you to be. That I’m fooling myself if I think I can.”

  Dan froze. He didn’t often miscalculate this badly.

  Maybe he had thought this would be easy, that he would explain and beg her to forgive him, and she would, because she was incredibly generous and stubborn and for some reason she wanted him and had never quite given up on him. But maybe he was wrong. Maybe he’d abused her generosity and her trust once too often.

  So he stood there leaning against the wall, feeling like he was choking, wondering what he could do, what he could say. He was truly sorry, but the words seemed too insignificant when weighed against what he’d done, the hurt he’d caused.

  “Jamie...” he began, then thought of what she’d said.

  I’ll never be able to change you into what I want you to be. Or what I need you to be. I’m fooling myself if I think I can.

  “What do you want me to be, Jamie? What do you need from me?” He’d give her anything within his power to give.

  “I want into your life. Inside your head. I want you to stop keeping me at arm’s length.”

  Dan closed his eyes. That.

  He had a quick flashback to the final, bruising days of his marriage, to another woman he’d left hopelessly disappointed, one who wanted inside his little world herself.

  He had to try to make Jamie understand it wasn’t her. It had never been her. It was always him.

  “Jamie—this is hard for me. I’ve never been able to let anyone inside my head. I’ve been a loner all my life—”

  “I know, Dan. But I can’t do this anymore.”

  “Jamie, please. Listen to me. I told you about my wife. I never really let her in. I disappointed her and drove her away instead, and there probably wasn’t anyone in my life I’d been closer to than her. My father took off before I was born, and my mother—to put it mildly, she was coldhearted, distant. Unfortunately she was too easily distracted from raising her kids or earning a living by a bottle of cheap booze or any man who came along.

  “I’ve always taken care of myself, always kept to myself. Somehow it seemed safer, smarter that way. But, Jamie... you make me want to be different, and you’ve given me more chances than any man deserves.”

  Dan took a breath. She couldn’t understand a fraction of what he felt for her, because he’d never shown her. He certainly hadn’t told her.

  And he wouldn‘t—he couldn’t—lose her now.

  Jamie just looked up at him. Tears were forming in her eyes.

  Moving carefully, awkwardly, Dan lowered himself to the floor and sat down, putting his back to the wall so they were sitting side by side, nothing but the wall of the bathtub between them. It was a struggle for him to get into that position, something he normally wouldn’t have let her see. But it was honesty time, and this was as honest as he could get. He was still a mess physically.

  He’d be lucky if he ever got back to his feet from this position, but he didn’t care. He needed to be close to her, and he thought he was making her uncomfortable by standing over her and by looking at her.

  He thought again of what she’d asked of him. He thought of what he’d learned in the last few, harrowing days, of the way he’d changed.

  “I saw you come flying out of that car,” he said, plunging right into the worst of it, the blackest thoughts running through his head. “I saw your head connect with the pavement, saw you crumple like a rag doll. When I finally got to you, my hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t tell if you had a pulse or not at first, and even after I found it, I couldn’t quite make myself believe that you were still alive.

  “I have never been that scared in my life. Not when that kid shoved his gun in my face on the street outside the warehouse. Not when I was lying in the hospital that first night thinking I would go out of my mind if I had to live that way for the rest of my life. It didn’t even come close.”

  He stretched his arm out along the rim of the tub, reached for her hand, which she slipped inside his. He felt marginally better.

  “They let me ride in the ambulance with you,” he continued. “But when we got to the hospital, and they rushed you inside that room and closed the doors in my face... I could barely breathe. I haven’t prayed in years, Jamie, but I did that night.

  “I started to think of what I must have put you through when I got shot. I thought of what it must have been like to be able to do nothing but stand outside the door and watch. I’ve never felt so helpless in all my life. I thought about all the time we’d wasted and how stupid I’ve been.

  “Then the nurse finally came out, and she didn’t want to tell me anything. She didn’t want to let me inside the room where you were, and I swear, if she hadn’t, I would have taken that place apart with my bare hands, piece by piece, until I got to you.

  “She was asking me exactly who I was and was trying to figure out if I had a right to know how you were, and I was remembering the way I’d kept you in the dark the whole time I was in the hospital, then disappeared on you for six weeks. I couldn’t...” he sighed, the words stuck in his throat. “I can’t believe I was that cruel to you. I just...I didn’t have any idea what I was putting you through.”

  He squeezed her hand, grateful for that small contact with her. “I’m so sorr
y, babe. I know that can’t begin to make up for that. I know I always seem to be apologizing to you for something. Honest to God, I don’t know what I ever did to deserve you. Jamie...please...”

  His words trailed off. He felt curiously empty inside and incredibly vulnerable. He’d never felt vulnerable to a woman before, and she hadn’t said a word back to him.

  “That’s what’s going on inside of me right now,” he said “That’s as honest as I can be.”

  He turned his head to look at her, saw the sheen of tears on her face and reached over to wipe them away. She shivered, and he wasn’t sure if she was upset or just cold, but he needed something to do, so he dipped two fingers into her bathwater, found it cool to the touch and reached for the knobs that controlled the water.

  “Let me warm this up for you,” he said, then remembered something.

  From the pocket of his shirt, he pulled the bath salts. Hers. He opened the package and emptied it into the tub. She glanced warily at him. The fragrance that was so familiar to him—because it was hers—filled the room.

  She noticed it as well. “Where did you get that packet of lavender bath salts?”

  “I stole it from your bathroom.”

  “When were you in my bathroom?”

  “A few days ago when Josh and I were trying to figure out where you were.”

  “You and Josh searched my apartment for me?”

  “Yes.”

  He resisted the urge to add that Josh had a key. She knew Josh had a key. What he really wanted to know was why Josh had a key, but he wasn’t going to ask. She was mad at him already, justifiably so, and he doubted she was going to volunteer any information about Joshua Carter and keys to her apartment.

  “Do you want to know why I stole your bath salts?” he offered instead.

  “You have a fetish for them?”

  “Just yours,” he admitted, cutting off the water and reaching for a bar of soap in the soap dish in the far corner of the tub, thinking he simply had to touch her.

  Maybe it was a cop-out, but there were all different aspects of intimacy, and he understood the physical ones quite well. He wanted to touch her, merely to put his hands on her. He needed to. It was one more way to cement the bond between them.

  “I’ve been smelling that scent on your skin for years,” he said, “ and it drove me crazy. I knew it wasn’t perfume, because it was all over you. Even in your hair. And I couldn’t stop thinking of exactly how your entire body came to smell so good. I closed my eyes and thought about powder, one of those big, old-fashioned powder puffs, about you dabbing it all over your body. But that wouldn’t explain the hair. Neither would perfumed lotion, although I could picture you smoothing that over your skin, too. And then I decided it had to be something you put in the bathwater. It was the only way to get that scent all over you.”

  She looked more than a little interested by the time he was done, seemed quite taken with what he was doing with his hands—rubbing at the soap until he worked up a lather.

  He touched his hand to the top of her right knee. “Give me this leg, babe.”

  She lifted it a bit, and he did the rest, taking her foot between his hands and running his soapy hands over it, gently massaging as he worked his way from her toes to her ankle.

  “Dan?”

  “Hmm?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Groveling,” he said, getting turned on just by touching the sole of her foot. “Am I getting any better at it?”

  “What?”

  “At groveling? You said I was no good at it, so I thought I’d work on it. I thought I needed to.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I’ve been an ass, more times than I care to remember where you’re concerned, and I need to find a way to make amends.”

  “Well,” she considered. “I’ve never had a man wash my feet for me before.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” he growled, hating the image that brought to mind, of her with any other man.

  “It’s an original approach.”

  “That’s all? Original?”

  She considered. “It feels good.”

  That didn’t begin to describe what it was doing to him. He let his hands slide up from her ankles to her calf, lathering soap along her skin as he went, feeling her tense and go still as his hands slid higher.

  “I intend to do a lot more than your feet, babe. If that’s all right with you?”

  “I don’t—”

  Her words gave way to a gasp as his soapy hands slid beneath the surface of the water, to midthigh. He wrapped both hands around her leg, gently massaging, forcing himself to hold back now, not letting those hands go any farther.

  “I wanted to do this a week ago when we talked on the phone. I wanted to get out of my bed, find someone to drive me into D.C. and show up at your door. I wanted you in the tub waiting for me. And I intended to run my hands over every inch of your body, and then get in that tub with you. I’ve damned near lost my mind wanting you, waiting for you, arguing with myself that there had to be some way to forget about you, when I just couldn’t bring myself to do that.”

  “Are you finished?”

  His heart skipped a beat as he tried to figure out what she was talking about.

  “Staying away from me?” she clarified.

  “Babe, I’ve got my hands in your bathwater. I’ve accepted the fact that there is no way to forget about you, that I was a fool for fighting this for so long.”

  He found his bar of soap again, started lathering it between his hands and went to work on her other leg, giving it the same painstakingly slow treatment he gave the first one, thinking it was sheer heaven to touch her this way. Her thighs especially were slaying him. He remembered having his hands on them that night in the solarium, finding that strip of skin at the top of her thighs where the stockings ended. He remembered tracing his path around that strip of bare skin, slipping his hands beneath her panties and cupping her buttocks, guiding her to him, rocking his body against hers.

  He started to sweat in the steamy, fragrant air of the bathroom, and he was painfully aroused and resigned to living with it for now.

  He took her hand next, working his way up her arm, then doing the other. She was still reclining against the back of the tub, her eyes closed. She sighed from time to time, smiled a bit. He tried not to look down into the water, to the blurry image of her submerged body, because it was hard enough to touch her like this and still maintain some semblance of control.

  He finished with her arms, then wondered at the wisdom of going any farther.

  “What next?” she murmured lazily, smiling at him in a way that seemed to say he could do anything he wanted with her.

  A muscle twitched in his jaw, which was every bit as tight and as hard as the rest of him. He thought of all the ways he could pleasure her. With his hands. With his mouth. With his tongue. Wondered if she could take that without him hurting her. Wondered if she wanted him a fraction as much as he wanted her.

  She couldn’t, he told himself. It didn’t seem possible to want anyone this much, to need anyone so completely. And yet he did.

  Backing off, thinking of her sore ribs and her head, he reevaluated his plan. “Your hair,” he said. “We need to wash your hair somehow.”

  She slowly lowered herself farther into the water, her knees rising, her shoulders sinking. He could tell it hurt.

  “Jamie, wait,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “I want to do this. I want to be clean. I want you to scrub every inch of my body, and take away...”

  She stopped abruptly, and he thought of the one thing he hadn’t asked any of the doctors, the one thing no one had mentioned to him. He simply hadn’t possessed the courage to ask, hadn’t been sure he wanted to face the answer.

  But now... Now it was right there. He’d thought it was odd, knowing how weak she was, how sore she was, that she would want to take a bath. But maybe it wasn’t so odd after all. Maybe she neede
d the cleansing, healing powers of the water. Maybe it was important enough that she could endure whatever discomfort it caused her, to be able to feel clean again.

  When he looked back at her again, her gaze was steady, her voice matter-of-fact. “I don’t think this is going to work unless you get in here with me.”

  He waited, thinking there was nothing he’d like better than to be there with her in his arms, her entire body pressed against his. He gave her time to think about it, time to change her mind. She didn’t, just waited patiently for him to come to her.

  His hands went to the buttons on his shirt, which he undid one by one. “I’ll smell like a bouquet of flowers,” he pointed out.

  That won him a small smile. “It’s a sacrifice, I know. But you’re groveling, remember?”

  “Mmm. I had no idea I’d have to resort to such extremes.”

  He shrugged out of the shirt, braced his hands on the side of the tub and the handrail along the bathroom wall and lifted himself, until he could sit on the lid of the commode, and from there, get to his feet. He was wearing a pair of sweatpants, because they were relatively easy to get in and out of. Relatively being the operative word. With her watching him, getting out of them seemed incredibly awkward to him.

  He turned toward Jamie. He was through hiding what had been done to his body by that single bullet. He wouldn’t call what he was doing walking. He hobbled along, using a different, less efficient set of muscles to propel his left leg forward. But he was on his feet and grateful for that.

  He found her waiting for him, watching him. As he stood there, she reached for him, her hand coming to rest against the still-reddish ridge of the surgical scar along his side and his back.

  He met her stare head-on, unflinchingly. No more hiding.

  She smiled faintly, her hand skimming down his side, stopping again against the back of his right thigh. He sucked in a breath. Her hand slid along the muscle at the back of his thigh, exploring lazily, sensuously, until he thought he would go out of his mind.