One Track Mind by Bethany Campbell Read Free Book Online Page B

eyes, and all he could think of were her lips.
    He felt as if he were tumbling into an alternate universe. She sat beside him, her bright hair dancing in the breeze. The emerald green of her damp bathing suit clung to her slender body, and her eyes were the same emerald green. And she looked at him as if he were somebody. Somebody special.
    Her hands were on him, gentle and sure. She took a pair of tweezers and pulled the thorn from deep in his arm, and he could not allow himself to flinch in this girl’s presence. She was dabbing his arms and then his chest with antiseptic.
    Oh.
    Good.
    Lord.
    She cleaned his side, used tweezers to pull out the remaining slivers—they were impressively long, and he was rather glad they were, and acted as if nothing hurt at all, like a knight trying to seem nonchalant about his wounds.
    She poured antiseptic right into the gash. Yikes! He had to allow himself to clench his teeth a bit. “Did that hurt?” she asked, her voice so full of concern something inside him melted.
    “It…um…smarted a bit,” he admitted. “Nothing really.”
    “I’ll put a bandage on it,” she said, and took one from its wrapper. She held the edges of the cut together with small, steady fingers. Her fingertips made him forget that his side hurt, he was only conscious of her touch.
    “Be sure to change that often,” she said. “Promise.”
    “I will,” he said gruffly. He wasn’t used to anybody fussing over him like this.
    People hurting you? He’d been there, plenty of times. But somebody who touched you gently, kindly, with the utmostdeliberate care, bent on making you feel better, this was novel. And he liked it. He liked it a lot.
    He tried to think of something smart to say and couldn’t. He just let her keep doing what she was doing.
    She wiped clean the scratch on his neck. “I don’t think that needs a bandage,” she said in almost a whisper. “Just let it get some air.”
    He could feel her breath on his throat. “Yeah,” he managed to say.
    She put her hand on his face and turned it so she could examine the long scratch next to his mouth. He stared straight ahead at a long row of gooseberry bushes.
    She ran her fingers along the edge of the cut, so lightly it was like a moth exploring his skin. “It’s deep,” she said in the same hushed voice. “I’ll clean it.”
    She dabbed the antiseptic on, and he found that he was having trouble breathing. He swallowed and stared at the gooseberry bushes so hard he almost saw them double.
    She smelled like chlorine and menthol and camphor and other medicinal stuff—oh, better than roses any day. And three times her fingers brushed his lips, making him half-dizzy with longing for more.
    But then she took her hand away, and he had an eerie sensation of incompleteness. “I think that’s most of it,” she said, searching his face for any other damage.
    He searched hers, too, but not for flaws. It was just so hard to resist looking. She glanced downward and picked up his T-shirt, which was wet from sweat and blood and the hose.
    She unfolded it and clucked her tongue softly. “I don’t think this can be saved,” she murmured.
    He looked at the pathetic, ruined thing in her manicured hands. He started to take it from her. But she hung on.
    “Oh,” she said. “It’s a NASCAR shirt. I didn’t realize—”
    She probably hadn’t realized because it was so faded. He’d bought it at the Salvation Army.
    She looked into his eyes and gave him an enquiring little smile. “You’re a fan?”
    He tried to act casual. “Well…yeah. Sure.”
    “Do you ever go to the speedway?” she asked.
    “Uh, yes,” he said with as much aplomb as he could. “I do, actually. From time to time.”
    He knew of a gap beneath the wall he could sneak under, and he’d done so many times. He didn’t have money for tickets. He gave his mother some of his money, but he put the rest away, because someday soon he was going to take it and go far, far from