The Secrets of Bell River. Kathleen O'Brien

shout away.”

      “Thanks,” Tess said.

      And then she and Jude were alone. For an awkward minute, she was ridiculously tongue-tied, forgetting her protocols as if she really were the newbie that Mrs. Fillmore and Bree took her for.

      His coloring and perfect features had been striking enough, even in his work clothes, but like this, half-dressed, tousled and damp from the shower...

      It was impossible not to have a purely female reaction. The robe hugged the lean contour of his hips, ending just above the knees. Long, trimly muscled legs extended bare beneath the hem. The casually knotted belt nipped the robe in at his narrow waist, but above that his chest and shoulders tugged the cloth apart, exposing golden skin and a light dusting of dark hair.

      Pull yourself together, girl! She never did this. Never.

      Once clients lay on the table, they ceased to be “people” in that way—they weren’t male or female, young or old, beautiful or homely. They certainly weren’t sexual.

      They were simply exquisitely complex interlacings of muscle, tendon, nerves and needs. They were...well, it sounded silly but she sometimes thought of their bodies as works of art entrusted to her care. Art that had been damaged somehow. Misaligned. Knotted. Twisted, overtightened or blocked. Her job was to find the parts that had been disturbed and restore them to harmony.

      Perhaps Jude was the most artful of all the works she’d ever been asked to restore. But so what? In her experience, athletes and body-builders and actors—all the physical perfectionists who populated Los Angeles—needed her help more than most.

      They punished their bodies to take them to those heights of performance, and, once they relaxed, they proved to be masses of knotty pain and foreshortened tendons.

      “Are there any injuries I should know about? Anything you’d particularly like addressed today?” She was glad to hear that her voice was normal.

      He shook his head. “Nothing serious. I’ve got an ankle sprain that bugs me now and then, but massage helps, as a rule.”

      Internally, she noted that.

      “Okay, then. Good. There’s a sheet on the first table, and a light blanket, in case it feels a little cold to you. Make yourself comfortable, and I’ll be right back.”

      Her crisp, competent tone made her feel less nervous, and Jude’s easy smile helped, too. “Sure thing,” he said.

      She stayed away longer than was strictly necessary, giving him plenty of time to get covered, and giving herself plenty of time to get calm. Finally, she gathered the supplies she had chosen earlier, took a deep breath and moved down the hall, too.

      He’d left the door open, so she walked in—slowly enough to alert him, and speaking as she entered. “Sorry. I don’t know where everything is, so it took me a minute to find it all.”

      No response.

      She moved to the counter nearest the massage table, where he lay on his stomach, his head not in the padded opening, but turned to one side, so that he presented his elegant profile. He was completely still.

      “Mr. Calhoun?”

      Tilting her head, she looked closer. He was so completely motionless he might have been dead...except that as she drew near he shifted once, sighed deeply and let out a low rumble that was...

      Instinctively, she smiled. Yes, it was a snore. In the dim lighting, made more soothing with the addition of a few candles, with a Chopin Prelude playing on the sound system and the perfume of clean sheets and lavender oils floating in the air, he had fallen asleep.

      She fiddled with her supplies, not banging things around, but not attempting to be particularly quiet. If he woke on his own, it would be much less awkward.

      He didn’t. He wasn’t snoring anymore, but he remained utterly still, his eyes shut and his beautifully bowed lips slightly apart, glistening in the candlelight.

      She allowed herself the indulgence of studying him. It wasn’t voyeurism. As a therapist, she could learn a lot by how he held himself, whether his shoulders relaxed into symmetry when he slept, whether his body twitched in those little ways that spoke of tension that dissipated only when the conscious mind shut down.

      A couple of seconds passed before she could stop staring at his face, but when she finally transferred her gaze to his shoulders and back, she inhaled sharply.

      The perfection stopped there. On either side of his spine, starting just below the neck and running down between the shoulder blades for at least five inches, were the unmistakable thin, thready scars left by a set of human fingernails.

      She’d seen similar scars before, once or twice. But Jude’s were deeper than the average remnant of exuberant passion. These were more like...an attack.

      “I suppose this is what Bree meant,” he said, “when she said she should probably warn you.”

      Tess’s gaze flew to Jude’s face. His eyes were open, and he was smiling. She tamped down her momentary embarrassment and reached for her lotion.

      She didn’t see any point in pretending she hadn’t been staring at the scars. His body was her business, right now.

      “No need for a warning,” she said calmly. “I don’t think the scars present any special concern. They are clearly fully healed. Are they sensitive?”

      “No.” He raised himself on his elbows and rubbed his thumbs across his eyelids, as if to scrape away the sleepiness. “I’m sorry I passed out. I was up all night with the baby, and I guess it caught up with me the minute I lay down.”

      The baby?

      The word surprised her. He didn’t look...

      He didn’t look what? Like a father? How absurd was that? There was no “father” look. But then she realized that, on some subconscious level, she’d already observed that he didn’t wear a wedding ring.

      Equally absurd. Her subconscious shouldn’t be registering such things in the first place, and, in the second place, wedding rings weren’t required in the baby-making process.

      “No problem,” she assured him as placidly as she could. “You wouldn’t be the first client I’ve had who slept through a massage.” She warmed some lotion in her hands. “Though usually they do wait until I’ve begun, at least.”

      As he chuckled, she touched gently between his shoulder blades. He automatically dropped down, as if he knew the drill well.

      “Might make it tricky to rate your technique, though,” he said, his voice muffled by the cushion of the face support. He seemed about to speak, but the word dissolved into a contented “mmm” as she began to massage the lotion into his skin.

      From then on, he didn’t utter a sound. She didn’t worry that his silence meant a lack of appreciation, or that he’d fallen asleep. He was her favorite kind of client, the kind who understood that the body spoke for itself.

      When a tight muscle began to relax under her fingers, she didn’t need a murmur of bliss to tell her about it. And when she encountered a knot of pain, she didn’t need a wince to alert her. She read the ridges, valleys, ribbons and rocks of his body as if he were a story written in braille. Any decent massage therapist could do the same.

      The irregular embossing of the scars was harder to read. They weren’t sexual in nature, she felt sure of that. The gouges had been too deep, caused by true violence, whether intentional or accidental. And they had been painful.

      She thought she might, with time, be able to break down some of the collagen build-up and reduce the scars, but that wasn’t her mission today. She’d been asked to demonstrate a Swedish massage, the kind that felt great and left the client purring.

      Besides, Jude might not have any interest in having his scars worked on. He didn’t seem to be a bit self-conscious about them. She could tell when she hit a client’s