Bedside Manners (The Breakup Doctor Series Book 2) Read online

  There was no sign of Cameron amid the crush, and I was surrounded on all sides by people with no seeming knowledge of the accepted personal space of Western culture. I tried to keep moving, but was stuck. I tapped the shoulder of the petite woman in front of me. She turned around to reveal herself as a very short man. He angled his body so I could make six inches of progress, and in that way I started working toward the rear of the club. People were tapping me for the same reason—or so I thought at first, until the tapping became touching, and the touching became groping, and by the time I was too deep inside to turn back, I had mystery hands copping a feel anywhere they could reach, their owners vanishing into the crowd as soon as I craned my neck to identify them.

  I cursed Cameron Fowler, cursed the manipulative Wayne Bukowski, and again cursed my own overprotectiveness. The only thing that kept me moving forward instead of shoving a path back toward the exit was that if I was a little freaked out, sweet little Cameron Fowler had to be about to lose her mind. I wondered if she was regretting her ill-conceived plan to learn to be someone she absolutely wasn’t, to try to please her boyfriend.

  Motivated now like a mother lifting a car off her child, I blazed a path amid the revelers, grimly ignoring the expanse of my body I was leaving wide-open for free gropes. I hadn’t had this many hands on me at once since offering myself up for the “light-as-a-feather-stiff-as-a-board” séance at a sleepover in fifth grade.

  Once I was through the initial crush, the crowd thinned out ever so slightly—enough for me to at least move relatively unmolested. This part of the club was like a maze, the open floor plan narrowing into walkways divided by what looked to be office cubicle walls, only painted the same flat black as the front doors, instead of carpeted in the usual corporate beige. At intervals the makeshift walls parted to reveal small rooms behind them, each one filled with a tableau that was hard not to stare at as I determinedly kept moving, knowing if I looked too closely there would be too many things I would never be able to unsee: a man wearing only what looked to be a diaper, seated in a slightly reclining chair, each of his limbs secured at uncomfortable angles, two silver clamps attached to his nipples like tiny voracious piranha. A woman on her knees, blindfolded, a man standing in front of her holding a riding crop.

  I passed a handful of rooms like that, each one filled with mise-en-scènes that made me feel like Doris Day in a Nicki Minaj video. Cameron was so far out of her depth. We both were.

  So it was a shock to come to the next peep area in the wall and be faced with my client in her lightweight, flowery dress, her baby-fine blond hair slicked behind her ears, and a long, narrow wooden paddle held firmly in one hand.

  In front of her was a mound of ass. That was really about all I could register at first: two globes of naked flesh jutting up like the white peaks of Kilimanjaro above a pair of startlingly hairy legs. The rest of what I assumed (and hoped) was the man who belonged to them was apparently draped over a sawhorse contraption in a dirty downward-facing dog, and he was doing some kind of wiggly little dance on it that suggested he was awfully excited over what was to come. From all appearances, Cameron was about to administer some stern corporal punishment to the man’s evidently quite anticipatory backside.

  Holy cow. I really didn’t think she had it in her. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d been wrong about a client—but I was pretty sure it would be the most memorable. I started to push back out the way I’d fought a path in; it wasn’t my job to judge my clients or decide what was best for them. If this was what Cameron wanted, then she was an adult and could make her own choices. I would just be there later in session to help with any fallout that resulted.

  But right before I turned away, I saw it: Cameron’s chin was shivering like an earthquake was happening underneath it. That was a woman fighting back hard sobs, or I had never seen anyone in distress before.

  Only one way to test the theory.

  “Cameron!” I called sharply.

  Her head shot up and her eyes wildly raked the crowd at the doorway, a beaten dog seeking salvation. I saw the moment she registered my presence: She looked confused, then stunned, then delivered. The paddle dropped out of her hands, but she didn’t seem to notice, and Cameron took a shaky step in my direction. I reached out a hand: I’m right here.

  Then the crowd closed in, and she was forced to a stop. “Brook?”

  “Come on, Cam. You’re okay,” I encouraged.

  Again she made motions to leave, but her audience was having none of that. They were primed for a good show—sweet young thing turned dominatrix—and they didn’t seem willing to sacrifice the expected spectacle. They swarmed her like angry bees, urging her with their mass and their not-so-gentle pushes back into the room. “Do it,” I heard someone call out. And someone else: “Hit him!” The cries were picked up, the exhortations swelling through the crowd into a sibilant hiss of menace.

  Things were careening quickly toward the unpleasant. This horde was stoked up. They wanted to see the girl next door turn into a BDSM mistress, and wouldn’t be deprived of their payoff now. I wasn’t getting Cameron out of here without some drastic action.

  Well. Desperate times...

  I shoved ungently at the shoulders nearest to me and forced a path to Cameron. As soon as I reached her I knew better than to hesitate or show any uncertainty. There was no time to communicate my plan or try to reassure her. Instead I grabbed her roughly by the arm, yanked her toward me, and bent her into a deep, possessive kiss.

  Up until recently I would never have found myself in a situation like this, and certainly not for a client. I was a good therapist, but under the tutelage of my graduate mentor, Dr. Janet Evanston, I’d learned to keep a strict line between the personal and the professional. (Dr. Evanston had spectacularly broken that code herself when she tried to kill her husband with a carving knife while he slept, but I still followed the example she’d set for me up until she started serving her prison term.)

  Since becoming the Breakup Doctor, though, I’d noticed an odd tendency in myself to be more personally engaged. More interactive. Even a little touchy-feely—sometimes a grieving, lonely person needed nothing so much as a hug.

  I wasn’t completely comfortable yet with the new version of Therapist Me, but I was learning.

  This, though, was pretty far outside my comfort zone.

  I pulled back from my lip-lock with Cameron just enough to see her eyes wide on mine. “Just go along,” I said, low, hoping she heard me over the din, hoping she understood. Then I straightened and swung her forcefully erect, using the momentum to shove her toward the exit from the room. Beside us the man bent over the sawhorse gave a tortured groan. I smacked his naked ass—hard enough to leave a vivid red handprint—and he groaned again, this time one of clear pleasure. I hoped my shudder didn’t show.

  “I don’t share my toys,” I snarled, loud enough to make sure the crowd overheard. Then I launched myself after Cameron, propelling her with a possessive hand on the back of her neck through the crowd at the opening to the hall—defused now, some of them laughing, idle applause from one or two—as smoothly as if the crush of bodies blocking the path had somehow become lubricated.

  Which, come to think of it, they probably had.

  We were almost to the front doors, pushing through the crowd like salmon swimming downstream, batting away free-ranging hands, when I felt fingers grabbing on and digging into my left cheek—and not the one on my face.

  Fed up, furious, and ready to snap, I spun around, blazing.

  And came face-to-face with Chip Santana.

  He hadn’t changed much. Same shaved head, same goatee, same slanted eyebrows over eyes whose unlikely teal color was presently concealed in pools of darkness in Sticks and Stones’ dim, trespass-forgiving lighting.

  Same overwhelming, animal jolt of...something that coursed through me the second I w
heeled around and our gazes locked.

  His expression morphed from sly amusement to disbelief to horror, until Chip looked as gobsmacked as I felt. We must have presented a monkey-see-monkey-do mirror reflection, both of us frozen, staring gape-mouthed at each other while the frenzy around us seemed to recede.

  But the memory of his aggressive clutch on my nethermost regions stifled my knee-jerk chemical reaction like baking soda on a flame, replacing it with indignant rage.

  “Hands off!” I growled, grabbing onto Cameron again with a grip I feared was harder than I intended, wheeling both of us around and pushing fiercely for the exit, my heart thunking into my ribs.

  I kept my hand on the back of her neck even after the tall black doors disgorged us, a warning pressure telling her to keep quiet. A couple passed us on their way inside, the man sending me a nod of camaraderie as I noticed the collar around his partner’s neck. Just us two fellow doms out for a stroll with our pets...

  I didn’t let go of Cameron until I opened the passenger door of my Honda and pushed her inside. Then I slammed it shut, went around fast to my side, started the engine, and squealed us out of the parking lot.

  “I’ll bring you back for your car tomorrow,” I said.

  Cameron’s answer was to burst into sobs.

  Pulling into a well-lighted gas station out on busy Cleveland Avenue, I put the car in park, then leaned across and took her into my arms.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” she cried over and over.

  “Shhh. Shhhh.” I stroked her hair the way I would comfort a child, hoping she didn’t realize it was the same hand I’d used on the naked guy’s butt. “Nothing to be sorry for.”

  “I’m such an idiot. I thought I...But then when I...” Her breath was hitching. “And I don’t know what to tell Wayne, but I can’t. I just can’t!”

  What I knew but had never told Cameron was that Wayne Bukowski was a textbook Type Three—one of the several categories into which my best friend Sasha and I had slotted the available Florida males into throughout our lifetime’s worth of experience in the local dating scene. A Type Three was an older man who courted only much younger women, dazzling them with his money and success, then moving on as soon as they aged out of his program. They dated their way through the pool of eligible, only-barely-legal hard-bodies, never intending to settle down or pursue anything more committed than tennis doubles.

  Cameron, a newcomer to the area, and a charmingly ingenuous soul, wasn’t familiar with our well-known local sharks. She was oblivious chum for someone like Wayne the moment she set one dainty, pink-painted toenail into the southwest Florida waters. But she was going to have to figure that out for herself. I didn’t intercept her tonight to talk her out of Wayne. I came to talk her out of doing something that, knowing Cameron, I thought she might regret for the rest of her life. Now that she was out of that immediate danger, the rest was up to her.

  “You can’t do something that isn’t right for you just to please someone else, Cam,” I said, keeping my tone free of judgment. “You be true to you first—always. If someone genuinely loves you, that’s all they’ll want of you.” I didn’t spell out whether that someone was or wasn’t Wayne Bukowski. I hoped that would become evident to Cameron as she thought about everything.

  I kept stroking her hair, murmuring soothing sounds into her ear. Cameron said nothing; she just sniffled, but her sobs had dried up, and she was listening.

  For now, that was enough.

  two

  I took a shower as soon as I got home, hoping the steaming water would rinse away the feel of strange hands on parts of my body I usually kept private.

  One invasive, inappropriate, outrageous hand in particular.

  I hadn’t seen Chip Santana in months. A bartender with anger-management issues, Chip was a former patient I’d been planning to terminate treatment with before my old mental health practice literally came crashing down under a wrecking ball, effectively ending our therapy work. He’d bordered on flirting with me back then in a way that was not only ethically questionable in the doctor-patient relationship, but personally unsettling: Chip Santana had a primal effect on me I could no more explain than control.

  As evidenced by that animalistic jolt I’d felt tonight before rage had kicked in.

  But rampant pheromones or not, I’d always kept personal and professional boundaries rigid and impermeable—up until the lowest point of my spectacular breakdown following my last breakup.

  Miserable, lonely, and humiliated by breaking every one of my own breakup rules after Kendall Pulver dumped me, I ran into Chip at a party and we’d gotten a little too up close and personal...in a naked kind of way.

  Luckily Chip and I had been interrupted from our middle-of-the-night clinch on the beach by the overzealous deputy who arrested us before we’d actually taken things to their logical conclusion—the only blessing of that ill-advised evening. The last time I’d seen Chip was nearly four months ago—the morning after we got hauled off to the poky for public indecency, when Sasha and I drove him home from the jailhouse and a silent, steaming Chip had stormed into his beach-basement apartment and slammed the door behind him.

  He hadn’t changed a bit. He was still breaking the rules and thinking he could get away with it, taking what he wanted—in this case, a handful of my ass—and disregarding anyone else. A pot-smoking bartender pushing forty who couldn’t control his impulses. A man-child who’d never grow up. A mistake I’d made at the nadir of my life.

  Until the worst of my behavior back then was staring me right in the face in the middle of an S and M club, I’d been trying to put that awful time behind me. And I had—with Ben Garrett, the man I’d been seeing for several months now. Ben, who’d started out as nothing more than a revenge date against my ex...and who had turned out in the last three months to be something so much more.

  Ben and I had been midway through dinner at Angelino’s when I got Cameron’s distress call, and after dropping me off at my house for my car without a complaint, he’d asked me to let him know when I got home, so he didn’t worry. It was late, but I wanted something good to end the evening. I poured a glass of wine and picked up the phone.

  “Hey,” Ben answered.

  The sound of his voice made me smile. “Hey. I’m home.”

  “Was she okay?”

  “She will be, I think. She’s having a tough time, but we got her out of there before she did anything she’d regret.” I’d told him a client was at Sticks and Stones, but that was all. “I’m really sorry about dinner.”

  “No big deal. Jake was pretty happy about your leftovers.” I could picture Ben’s enormous, shaggy Great Pyrenees—a dog I was fairly sure had ADHD—eagerly gobbling up my meatballs.

  “Tell the big goofball I said, ‘You’re welcome.’” He chuckled and then fell silent. “I hate that we had our only date night interrupted, though,” I added softly. Ben owned a construction company that was trying to create a niche as a green builder, and he’d recently landed a great project: designing and building a high-end green luxury home for a family in Cedar Key. Since it was four hours north, he’d been staying in a residence hotel there during the week.

  “Me too,” he said. “I miss you.”

  The simple words sent warmth spreading through my chest.

  I miss you too, I wanted to tell him. Come over. But that wasn’t something I could say.

  Because Ben and I hadn’t had sex yet.

  Regardless of what men’s magazines want you to believe, there’s no unspoken five-date “rule.” We’d had a lot more than that anyway since we’d started seeing each other, and I knew Ben was attracted to me. I could tell by the way he took a quick breath in whenever he picked me up for dates before he complimented my appearance; by the way he let his hand rest in the small of my back when a host led us to our table at a restauran
t; and I could totally tell by the way he kissed me good night at the end of the evening—never just a peck, and never an insistent, sloppy tongue job. Ben was a great kisser.

  And it wasn’t that I didn’t want to sleep with him. Frankly there were some nights it was all I could do to pull away and say good night.

  But during the worst of my breakup breakdown, I’d fallen apart for a while. And though I’d let go of judging myself for that—realizing that sometimes you have to get a little crazy to move past a broken heart—I wasn’t eager to repeat it. No matter how great Ben was so far.

  “Next weekend,” I said instead. “And no clients that night—I promise.”

  “It’s okay. I know it’s hard for you to turn away from someone in pain.”

  I loved that he “got” me, but I wondered how long his patience would last. This wasn’t the first time I’d had to change our plans for an emergency. “Who knew there were so many breakups going on in our sleepy little town?”

  He chuckled. “Too bad you can’t give seminars.”

  “Right?” I said. “TED talks for broken hearts.”

  We chatted for a few minutes longer before saying our good nights. “I’ll see you next Saturday?” Ben asked.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “And this time no S and M bars.”

  “Oh, no. Now I have to come up with another idea for date night.”

  I was still smiling when I hung up the phone.

  As late as it was, after the evening I’d had I couldn’t sleep. I poured more wine and went outside on my lanai to listen to the still night, broken only by the sounds of occasional passing cars on Winkler.

  What I’d told Ben was true—sometimes I couldn’t believe how many people had their hearts broken in Fort Myers alone, and how many of them felt they had no one to talk to about it, or worried that they’d exhausted the patience of the people they did have to confide in. It could be hard to let go of heartache as quickly as well-meaning friends and family wanted you to.