Stephanie Doyle - The Comeback of Roy Walker

“You’re asking me ? For that kind of help? You don’t think it was enough to ask for my skills, now you want more? That’s a lot of nerve, Roy.”

“I know it is. But I also know you were the most generous person around.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not that person anymore,” she said. “I don’t give anymore, because I don’t trust anymore. You did that to me. You and Danny.”

To be lumped in with Danny Worthless felt like someone had shoved a knife through Roy’s stomach and twisted it all around. But was she wrong? They had both betrayed her.

Roy dropped his hand and could feel that some heavy clouds had blocked out the sun. Cool air had rolled into the stadium and his arm felt all of it. Definitely the start of spring, where one minute it could be balmy and beautiful and the next minute a person could be shivering and cold.

His shoulder started to stiffen and he knew he needed to get to a hot shower fast if he was going keep it loose enough to take another session tomorrow.

“I gotta...” He pointed to his arm and Lane nodded, totally familiar with what was happening to his body in the cool air. That shared knowledge created a sense of intimacy between them. Just like it had back then when she used to work on him. There had been times when he believed she understood his body more than he did. It had always been an unsettling thought.

“Yeah. Right. Take your shower and then meet me in the therapy room. We’ll get to work.”

Therapy. That was more than he should have asked for. To ask for even more from her probably had been a dick move.

“Okay.”

She walked away from him but then stopped a few feet away and turned back. “I don’t know if it helps or not, but the Roy I knew back then had a lot of nerve, too.”

Roy smiled at that. “Yes, he did.”

Lane shrugged. “Maybe that’s where you start looking for yourself again. See you in a few.”

CHAPTER FIVE

LANE LOOKED DOWN at the lean body with the hairy chest and belly that was stretched out on the therapy table and listened as Roy let go with a particularly erotic-sounding groan. Her finger pressed against an artery, constricted because of the inflammation in his shoulder, and waited it out until the nerve relaxed and the blood started to flow. She could feel the pulse of it beneath her fingers, could feel Roy’s muscles release the tightness. Then came the groaning.

Roy had always been a groaner. It wasn’t as though he was her only client who would make noises during their therapy sessions. But for some reason that raw sound coming from him always did something funny to her insides.

And then there was his chest. With swirls of dark hair that always seemed intriguing, despite the fact that bodies were commonplace to her. Short ones, tall ones, fat ones, skinny ones. None of it mattered when someone was a patient on her table. They were like a big lump of clay that she needed to mold back into health.

The fact that Roy’s chest fascinated her could have been borderline unethical. It wasn’t as if she had ever given in to temptation and ran her fingers through those dark swirls of hair.

So she was fine. Mostly.

Danny had had a smooth chest. Something that had been so sexy to her when she had first started sleeping with him. Later, it became this big contrast between the way he and Roy looked. A contrast she never would have made had she been a happily married woman.

Roy’s chest reminded her that when she’d still been married, there had been a part of her that saw Roy the man, not just the player.

“Jeezus, that feels good,” he said, sounding like a man getting a blow job instead of physical therapy.

Damn it! Why had she even gone there in her head? This was work. This was a client. This man was her greatest enemy.

Except...he wanted her help. Because he was lost.

Despite what she told him, the hurt she’d tried to inflict, there was a part of her that wanted to give him that help. She couldn’t lie to herself. Roy was different and she toyed with this idea that if she shook him hard enough, then the old Roy would return.

What a hypocrite that idea made her. Calling him pathetic, comparing him to Danny, telling everyone she hated him. If that was true, she should want to be as mentally and emotionally far from Roy Walker as a person could be.

Yet she was here, standing over his body, helping him to heal. If she’d wanted to, really wanted to, she could have walked away. She could have found a way to say no to Duff and still accomplish what Scout brought her home to do.

But instead she’d stayed and thrown words at him and reminded herself that he was the bad guy who hurt her.

It was the only way to hold on to the righteous hatred she had for him.

The hatred that deflected the blame for her failing marriage away from her. The hatred that kept her from looking too closely at her own mistakes. The hatred that, up close, didn’t look at all like hate—not when her first instinct was to say yes to his plea for help.

“Can I ask a question?”

“Sure,” Lane said, hoping that whatever he said would be a distraction from her thoughts. She slid her fingers deeper under his shoulder and started working there to get the inflammation to ease. His shoulder felt like it was on fire under her hands.

Just don’t ask me about the past. My marriage. Or what my feelings were for you back then. Please don’t ask that. Please don’t ask about what I’m doing now because I quit my job and I’m as lost as you say you are.

Lane held her breath.

“Why did you really agree to come back here? Everything I heard about you said you walked away from the game. Didn’t want anything to do with it anymore. You were helping veterans or something.”

“I worked...work for the VA trying to get the amputees returning from Iraq and Afghanistan rehabilitated.”

“Sounds important.”

“Certainly more important than baseball.”

“Then why are you here? Are you giving baseball a second chance, too?”

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