Breaking the Ice

Chapter 26

26

“You do this every month?”

“No.” Samantha gave a half smile at the alarm in his voice and shook her head gingerly. Her stomach may have been empty, but it was still waging a precarious battle and anything too vigorous was likely to start it off again. “I just get a really bad one every now and then.”

“Fucking hell. Being a woman sucks.”

“Yep. It’s not all sleepovers and naked pillow fights.”

Nick laughed. “You forgot the lying in bed all day playing with your boobs.”

It was her turn to laugh but it ended in a wince and she squeezed her eyes shut as Nick asked, “What can I do?”

“Just keep rubbing my back,” she murmured, her back pain receding beneath his deft fingers. “It’s blissful.”

She let his fingers lull her for a while but she knew she had to get up, take her pills, shower and crawl into bed with a hot water bottle.

“What?” he asked as she roused herself.

“I need a hot shower and to take some tablets.”

“Where are they? I’ll get them.”

Nick retrieved the medication and was back in a flash with the three bottles. He filled a glass of water from the faucet then decanted the pills as she pointed to each bottle. “One migraine tablet, one painkiller and two anti-inflammatories.”

Handing them to her, Samantha swallowed them then sat for another minute before attempting to stand, Nick’s warm hand at her elbow. The room started to spin and she must have swayed as he pushed her down onto the seat.

“I’m not leaving you alone,” he said, as he pulled back the bath curtain and flipped the shower taps on, holding his hand under the spray until he was satisfied with the temperature. “You’re likely to faint and kill yourself. Get undressed, I’ll turn my back.”

Samantha almost smiled at his don’t-even-think-of-arguing voice. Like she was actually capable of giving him one! At the moment he could strip her and bring the entire Crabbers team in for the show and she couldn’t have cared less. As long as she could feel the hard, hot needles of the shower spray against her back asap, nothing mattered.

Using the vanity for support, she stripped out of her clothes, leaving them in a heap on the floor as she stepped gingerly into the old-fashioned bathtub with its overhead shower and pulled the curtain.

“Sit,” he said. “You’re too weak to stand.”

Samantha didn’t need telling twice. She sat in the middle of the bath, her back to the shower head, her legs drawn up to her chest and her head resting against her knees in kind of an upright fetal position as the water cascaded down her back, washing away the blood and alleviating some of the grind. Still, it needed to be hotter.

She turned around to add more hot but the taps seemed so far away and her back, now Nick had stopped massaging it, was unbearably sore. She wanted to cry but groaned into her knees instead.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, from the other side of the curtain.

“Hotter,” she muttered, not bothering to lift her head.

The curtain pulled back a little at the tap end and the water temperature suddenly increased. But it wasn’t enough. “Hotter.”

The temperature increased again to a point where it was almost unbearable, which made it perfect, and she sighed in contentment. The heat worked its magic and she sat for as long as she could stand as steam rose around her. But the hardness of the bath beneath her quickly got uncomfortable through her hips and lower back and she thanked the fates that Nick was just outside the curtain.

“I’m done now,” she said, raising her voice over the pounding spray. The shower shut off and a towel magically appeared through the curtain.

“Will you be alright with that?”

His voice was gruff like he was trying to figure out how in the hell he’d manage getting her dry if she said no. “Yep,” she assured as she buried her face in the towel, inhaling its sunshine and soap aroma.

Slowly, Samantha rose, pleased that the dizziness seemed to have passed. But drying herself was far too complicated right now so she just wrapped the towel around her body and stepped out of the bath, taking Nick’s offered hand.

“Now what?”

“Hot water bottle. Bed.”

“I’ll get the water bottle. You get dressed and hit the sack,” he bossed as he walked with her to the bedroom.

Too wrung out to argue, she simply said, “In the linen cupboard.”

Samantha got herself dressed, pleased that the edge was just coming off the churning in her lower abdomen. But there was a dullness behind her eyes now and she hoped she had taken the tablets in time to avoid a full-blown migraine.

She climbed onto her bed, not bothering to pull back the feather duvet, preferring to settle into its cushioning layers. Her back protested her movements but as her head hit the pillows she sighed, grateful to be horizontal at last.

Nick stopped short in the doorway at the sight of Samantha all clean and fresh and snuggled among all the fluffy pillows and covers of her bed. It had an unexpected effect. He felt… domesticated. And he’d never felt domesticated.

Not with the ice always calling his name.

“Where do you want it?” he asked, shaking the feeling off as he strode into her room.

She opened heavy eyes and gave him a slow sleepy smile and Nick was struck by the sudden urge to crawl in beside her and hold her as she nodded off to sleep. Holding out her hand for it, he passed the hot water bottle over and watched as she pressed it to her belly, and curled around it into a fetal ball.

“Mmm,” she sighed, deep and long. “That feels so good. Thank you.”

“Anytime.”

She was looking much better now and Nick didn’t realize how worried he’d been until the acuteness of it all had started to recede. “Anything else you need?”

It was a dangerous question to be asking a horizontal woman with their shared history, but he hardly thought she was in any state to request that orgasm he’d failed to deliver last week.

“You can massage my back again?” she murmured drowsily, her eyes closed.

Nick blinked. Being in bed with Samantha seemed inherently dangerous but then, he couldn’t deny her, either. Which meant there was only one way to get through this – humor.

“Will that be with or without a happy ending?”

Much to his relief Sam gave a ghost of a smile. “How about never ending?”

“Greedy,” he said as he climbed on the bed. “Just the way I like it.”

Lying on his side behind her, he propped his head on his bent arm and went to work, stroking her lumbar region through her pajamas. She pushed back hard against his hand as if seeking more and he increased the pressure until she mewed a little and relaxed.

“Is there a particular trigger for the bad ones?” he asked, curious now as he massaged.

Much to his shame he’d never given a lot of thought to women’s cycles.

“Nope. Probably just my bloody eggs revolting on me. Haven’t found someone to stop their cheeping so they’re probably just being bitchy.”

Nick chuckled at the thought of Samantha’s eggs holding their own protest march in her ovaries and somehow it didn’t even seem strange that he knew more about Samantha’s reproductive situation than any woman he’d ever been to bed with. He’d heard about their biological demands so often in the last few months he felt like he could call each one by name.

“Demanding, aren’t they?”

“You have no idea. I pity the sperm that gets anywhere near. They’ll probably heckle him until he hits the jackpot.”

Nick laughed and made a mental note to never take the female body for granted ever again.