table.
Sera looked up, seemingly satisfied with what she’d gleaned from his intake papers. “So how did the ACL tear occur?”
“A game three weeks ago against the New York Islanders. I heard a pop.” He shrugged. “I knew what it was. Cole’s been through this before.”
His older brother had suffered a couple of knee injuries that had ended his professional hockey career. These days, Cole was the head of Serenghetti Construction, having taken over after their father’s stroke had forced Serg Serenghetti to adopt a less active lifestyle.
“You’re lucky it happened at the end of the hockey season, and the Razors didn’t advance in the playoffs this year.”
“I’ve never thought of getting knocked out in the playoffs as a lucky break,” he quipped. “Especially when I wasn’t there to help.”
“It’s a tear, not a break,” she parried. “So who performed the ACL surgery on your knee?”
“Dr. Nabov at Welsdale Medical Center, and it was last week. In-patient for a day. They insisted I stay overnight. I guess they didn’t want to take any chances with my recovery. Hockey fans, you know.”
“Mmm-hmm.” Sera flipped through his paperwork again. “Did you sign autographs while you were there?”
He cracked a smile and folded his arms over his chest. “A few.”
“I assume the nursing staff went wild.”
He knew sarcasm when he heard it and couldn’t resist teasing back. “Nah, they’ve seen it all.”
“You’ve been icing the knee?”
“Yeah. The staff at the hospital told me what to do postsurgery.”
“Until you could get yourself into more expert hands?”
He flashed a grin. “You. Right.”
She might totally be his type if she wasn’t so thorny...and since she was related to him by marriage, a casual fling was out of the question. Still, there were layers there, and he enjoyed trying to peel them back.
Sera set aside his paperwork and approached him, her expression all business. “Okay, I’m going to unwrap your knee.”
For all her prickliness up to now, her touch was light as she removed his bandages. When the bandage was off, they both studied his knee.
“Good news.”
“Great.”
“No signs of infection and very little bleeding.” She pressed on his knee as he remained in a sitting position on the table but leaned back propped up by his arms.
“Am I hurting you?” she asked, not looking up.
“Nothing I can’t handle.”
“Manly.”
“We hockey players are built tough.”
“We’ll see.” She continued to press and manipulate his knee.
“I’m your first. Otherwise you’d know.”
“I’ve never been curious about how tough hockey players are.”
“You’re mentally disciplined.”
“We physical therapists are built tough.”
Jordan smiled. “Built pretty, too.”
“Behave.”
“Right.”
Then she reached over to the counter for an instrument. “I’m going to take some baseline measurements so we know where you are.”
“Great.” He waited as she straightened his knee a little, measured, and then bent his leg and measured again.
After putting the measuring instrument aside, she said, “Okay, not a bad starting point considering your knee has been wrapped since surgery. Our goal today is to improve your quad function and the mobility of the patella, among other things.”
“What’s a patella?”
She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Your kneecap.”
“Of course.”
“Let me know if I’m causing you too much pain.”
Her tone was surprisingly solicitous, so he joked, “Isn’t that what you promised? Pain?”
“Only the intended and expected variety.”
He was a high-level athlete—he was used to pain and then some. “How many ACL tears have you treated?”
“A few. I’ll let you know at the end if you were my best patient.”
He stifled a laugh because she’d deftly appealed to his competitive instincts. He wondered if she used the same technique to cajole all her patients. Probably some played sports—since a torn ACL wasn’t too unusual an athletic injury—even if she’d never treated a professional hockey player like himself before. “Will you dock me points for irreverence?”
“Do you really want to find out?” Methodically, she taped two wires to his thigh. “I’m going to set you up with some muscle stim right now. This will get you started.”
In his opinion, they’d gotten started with the electricity when she’d walked in the room. But he sensed that he’d teased her enough, and she wasn’t going to take any more nonsense, so he kept mum for the next few minutes and just followed her directions.
After the muscle stim, she taught him how to do patellar glides. He followed her instructions about how to move his knee to gain more flexibility. They followed that up with quad sets and heel slides, which she told him to do at home, too.
Overall, he found none of it too arduous. But at the end of half an hour, she announced that his ability to bend his knee had gone from around ten degrees to eighty.
He grinned. “I’m your best?”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Superman. Your knee was wrapped in bandages that interfered with motion until now, so you were bound to make some significant improvement.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
“You’re impossible.”
“No, I’m very possible if you’ll consider your options. Now, insufferable, that’s another thing...”
Sera seemed to grit her teeth. “You’ll need weekly appointments.”
“How long will my therapy last?”
“Depends on how it goes.” Her expression was challenging—as if she’d been referring to his behavior, good or bad, as well as his recuperation.
