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‘Lousy,’ she told him feelingly.
‘Perhaps I can help; where does it hurt?’
‘What are you doing?’ Star demanded breathlessly as he placed his hand on the bare skin of her naked shoulders and gently started pressing the tense muscles.
‘Giving you a massage,’ Kyle responded easily. ‘It’s a proven fact that it’s just about the best way to relieve stress-induced tension.’
‘A massage!’ Star started to sit up and then subsided as she remembered that she was completely naked.
‘I don’t need a massage,’ she tried to protest crossly, but her body was telling a different story as it positively revelled in the sensation of Kyle’s fingers easing the knots of tension from her taut muscles. Star tried to tell him to stop but her demand was muffled by the pillow as Kyle pressed more firmly into the knotted tissue.
‘No wonder you’ve got an aching head,’ he told her wryly. ‘The whole of your back feels like it’s virtually seized up. Breathe deeply and slowly,’ he instructed her, ‘and we’ll do this properly; you feel like you need it.’
She felt like she needed what? Star wondered edgily. If it had been another man she would have been highly suspicious of that type of comment, but Kyle, of course, was different.
‘There you go, tensing up again,’ she heard Kyle complain as her body reacted to the message that her brain had just given her. Kyle was different. Kyle was different.
An odd sensation, a combination of breathlessness, light-headedness and exhilarated relief, burst upon her, causing her to feel somehow as though she had just laid down an extraordinarily heavy burden that she had been forced to carry. She opened her mouth to tell Kyle about it and then closed it again as her habitual protective caution reasserted itself. As she turned her head she saw a neat pile of clothes on the chair next to her own and recognised that they were Kyle’s.
‘Just stay right where you are,’ she heard him instruct her before she could ask what he was doing. ‘I’ll be right back.
‘Here you are; you can lie on this,’ he announced several seconds later as he emerged from her bathroom carrying a huge bath towel. ‘I haven’t got any massage oil but I guess this will do...’
‘Massage oil?’
Star’s head whipped round. Kyle was standing beside the bed holding what looked like a courtesy bottle of some kind of body oil. He had stripped off to his underwear—a pair of snugly fitting black briefs.
The sight of a man in his underwear was not one that Star normally found in the least erotic. In her opinion men looked sexy either fully dressed or wearing nothing at all; a man wearing briefs and, even worse, his socks in her view looked totally unalluringly and ardour-dampeningly coy. But in Kyle’s case...
She gulped and tried to look somewhere else. From the way her pulse was starting to race it was just as well that he hadn’t stripped off completely, she thought.
‘I don’t think this is a good idea...’ she started to say, but Kyle refused to listen.
‘It’s OK, I know what I’m doing,’ he told her. ‘I had a lot of practice when I was in my teens.’
‘Thank you,’ Star told him through gritted teeth, ‘but I do not want to hear an account of your youthful sexual adventures...’
‘My youthful sexual adventures? What have they got to do with this?’ Kyle asked her. ‘Like I was saying...I had a vacation job one summer, working for the coach of the local hockey team. He swore by a thorough massage for relieving heavy bruising and muscle strains... He was the one who taught me how to do it...
‘It’s a pity we don’t have a proper table, but I suppose the bed will have to do,’ he added, whipping away the duvet before Star could protest.
Unlike him, she had removed all her clothes, and for some reason she did not feel in the least mollified when Kyle tactfully draped a small towel over the rounded curves of her behind.
‘Now try to breathe slowly and deeply and just relax,’ he instructed her.
‘Just relax’. And how on earth was she supposed to do that when he—? Star stiffened in startled surprise as she felt him start to knead not her shoulders as she had expected but her foot.
‘It’s my back that’s stiff, not my feet,’ she protested.
‘Your whole body is stressed out and tense,’ Kyle informed her firmly. ‘Now keep still and just relax. A good massage should be a pleasurable, enjoyable experience...’
Star looked back over her shoulder suspiciously but Kyle’s head was bent as he concentrated on massaging her calf and she couldn’t see his expression—couldn’t see his and quite definitely didn’t want him to see hers, she acknowledged as she fought to suppress the very definite quiver of sensation that shot up her leg and which she knew perfectly well had nothing to do with the efficacy of a good massage and everything to do with the efficacy of the massager.
By the time he had reached the top of her thigh, Star was both gritting her teeth and curling her hands into two small, agonised fists beneath the controlling protection of the pillow.
‘I don’t understand it,’ she heard Kyle protesting. ‘It just doesn’t seem to be working. You’re every bit as tense as you were when I started...’
On the contrary, Star could have told him, it was working only too well, but in a rather different way from the one he had obviously envisaged.
‘Well, there isn’t much point in going on, then,’ Star said in relief, but Kyle shook his head.
‘No, my guess is that what you need is a whole course of treatment with a qualified physio...’
‘You’re probably right,’ Star agreed. ‘I’ll organise something.’
‘I’ll just try and see if I can free some of the tension from your back,’ Kyle told her, adding, ‘You’ll have to move further down the bed, though, so that I can come to that end and work that way...’
Work that way...? Work what way? He surely didn’t mean...?
But apparently he did, and Star smothered a small, protesting groan as Kyle pushed the pillows out of the way and positioned himself on the bed in front of her. Did he have to kneel there like that? she wondered indignantly. And if
he did...if he did... Dizzily she closed her eyes. Weren’t men past the youth of their teens and twenties supposed to lose muscle tone and develop potbellies, especially those of them who were desk-bound executives?
Kyle didn’t... Kyle hadn’t...
‘You really are in a bad way,’ she heard him complain as he leaned over her and placed his hands on her back. ‘You’re actually twitching.’
Twitching... He would twitch if he... She smothered another groan as his fingers stroked slowly over her spine. She didn’t know which was having the more destructive effect on her self-control—the sensation of him touching her or the sight and scent of him. The sight at least she could blot out, but the scent...his scent...
There was no masking the shudder that tormented her as Kyle worked his way over her back, and it was almost a relief when he found the flat, hard lump of knotted muscle which had formed as a direct result of her tension and worked on it, causing her to gasp with pain.
‘It’s all right,’ he assured her soothingly.
All right? Oh, of course it was all right, Star decided helplessly. After all, all he was doing was reducing her to a helpless, gibbering wreck of agonised female desire—an aching, tormented, thoroughly aroused bundle of female cells and hormones.
As she ground her teeth against the moan of arousal that she could feel rising in her throat, Kyle asked solicitously, ‘Did that hurt? Sorry...’
Star had had enough.
‘No, it did not hurt,’ she told him forcefully, wrenching herself out of his hands.
‘Turn over, then,’ Kyle suggested, ‘and I’ll—’
Turn over!
Star closed her eyes. ‘I can’t,’ she told him in a small, mortified voice, and then added despairingly, ‘Kyle, will you please put some clothes on?’
‘On.’ He was actually laughing wickedly at her, Star recognised as he released her. ‘I kinda hoped you were going to ask me to take them off.’
‘Off?’ Star tried to sound quellingly acerbic but she knew her voice was trembling and she knew her body was as well.
