Free Waiting for Wyatt (Red Dirt #1) by S.D. Hendrickson Page B

burlap, and a worn-out leather chair sat in the corner. Besides the little coffee table, Wyatt had no other furniture in the trailer—not even in the kitchen.
    The door opened back up, and Wyatt came through the bright doorway. He studied me for a moment, shoving his hands down inside his jean pockets. He didn’t seem to know what to do with me now that I was inside his trailer.
    He finally let out a deep breath and sat down at the end of my feet. “Does it hurt all the time or just today?”
    “Sometimes. It’s worse when I run. I’m not really supposed to do that right now.”
    “I figured as much.”
    “It’s hard, you know. I ran a lot before it happened.” I shrugged. “I was a cross-country runner back in high school.”
    “Hmm. Well, sometimes it helps if you work the muscles. Not with those tools they use in therapy. But just with your fingers. Works out the kinks.”
    “Like this?” I smashed with my hands as the pain clutched around my knee. “I’ve tried when it gets tight, but I’m not very good. I usually make it worse.”
    His conflicted green eyes tilted up to mine, then flashed back down. He did it again before his hand reached forward, touching my leg. The contact burned all the way to the bone. I froze. Just like all the other times he’d surprised me to being speechless.
    Wyatt had wanted me to leave and he hated my being within a fifty-yard radius of his presence. But now he held my leg between the palms of his hand. His fingers worked the muscles around my knee and then down under my calf.
    “The doctor has me in therapy again.” I concentrated on breathing normal. Wyatt was touching me and everything seemed so surreal. “I’ve skipped it some. I don’t like what they do. It’s all barbaric and painful.”
    “You shouldn’t skip,” he muttered.
    “I know,” I whispered, staring at Wyatt as he worked down around my ankle. He untied the lace on my shoe and slipped it off, rubbing below the arch of my foot.
    I watched completely entranced. My eyes followed up his wrists to the muscles in his arms to the wide shoulders and the hard face. Deep thoughts twisted around in his head. Deep thoughts that intrigued my curiosity and pulled me closer.
    His hands made another pass down my leg. They glided softly over my skin, rubbing and touching, inch by inch as I focused on breathing. The warmth flowed along my calf to my knee and across my thighs and settled somewhere around my belly button. The intense sensation shot back down through my stomach.
    If Wyatt wanted me to not become enamored with him, this was the completely wrong thing to do to me. I wanted to close my eyes and lie back against the cushions. I wanted to melt and disappear into the feel of this complicated guy, choosing to touch my skin. His green eyes glanced up to my face before darting quickly away.
    “How do you know so much about messed-up knees?” My words slipped out as one of his dreaded personal questions.
    “I broke my leg once.” He worked his finger underneath my calf muscles again. “How long ago did you get the cast off?”
    “The place with the scar isn’t recent. I broke my leg back in high school. It busted through right there. But my knee has never been quite the same. I’ve got a flimsy meniscus and I’m pretty sure the ACL is going to bust at some point. I fell the day I brought Charlie out here, which caused it all to flare up again. Now the doctor wants to do surgery.”
    Wyatt touched the top of my knee and frowned. His fingers examined my leg with the same meticulous scrutiny he’d given Charlie the first day.
    My breath caught, feeling each place he touched on my thigh and ankle. Wyatt moved my leg around in a few positions, watching the kneecap bend in ways it shouldn’t on a person. “You should have the surgery.”
    “Maybe I don’t want to have surgery.”
    His green eyes looked back over to me with a slew of unasked questions. They swirled around under that hard face. They plagued