“Can I come in?” I touched the heavy curtain.

“Yeah.”

He was facedown on the massage table, his head in the cradle, the white sheet resting right at his waistline. He was shirtless. Of course he was, he was here for a treatment.

“Do you remember what you liked and didn’t like last time?” I asked, out of habit, the way I started every appointment.

“Everything was fine.”

I ran my hand down his bare back. Rising goose bumps appeared in the wake of my fingertips. I shivered. I needed to turn the music up and forget that the client on the table was Kael, or I wouldn’t make it through the hour.

“Okay . . . so I’ll apply the same pressure and see where we go from there?”

He nodded.

I ran my fingertips up his back again, just like I did with every other client. My fingers were shaking, and I was almost afraid to touch him because it didn’t feel right to want to touch a client. Maybe this was a mistake. Should I see if Elodie would switch with me? I knew that realistically that wouldn’t work, and I also sort of hated the idea of her touching him. What the hell was going on with me? I was fine before he came here. We’d spent the whole morning together and I was totally fine.

I grabbed a towel and tried my best to go through the motions. The warm towel glided easily across the bottoms of his feet. He was wearing his sweats on the table again, the gray fabric peeking out of the bottom of the white sheet. I almost pushed them up a little so I could rub his ankles more thoroughly, but something told me not to. He was wearing the pants for a reason, and though I could admit to myself that I really wanted to know what that reason was, I knew that he would tell me if he wanted me to know.

I pressed my thumb into the pad of flesh right under the line of his toes and he groaned. I eased up and his tense body relaxed again. He rolled his ankle to get rid of the feeling. It was a sore spot for a lot of people.

“Sorry. It usually releases tension. It’s a pressure point.”

I walked back around to the top of the table where his head was and reached for my oils.

“No peppermint, right?” I asked him.

“No, thanks. I hate the smell.”

Okay, then.

“I can use one without a scent. Will that work?”

His head nodded in the cradle.