shouldn’t allow herself to be drawn in by someone who represented all her family had lost. She shouldn’t wonder if he was hurting in a way that had nothing to do with the bullet-size scar on his back. She shouldn’t stick her nose into other people’s problems when she had enough of her own. But something was keeping Shane from walking when he should have been, and now that something was keeping him from even taking the critical first steps. And, God help her, she had to find out what it was.
* * *
SHANE STARED UP at the pair of parallel bars and then lowered his gaze to his gripped hands, his nail beds turning white halfway down from his tight squeeze. He could feel the sweat building just under his hairline, but there was no way he would reach up to swipe his forehead. Not with Natalie already watching him closely enough that she had to know what he was feeling, and it wasn’t confidence. Chicken, maybe? He hated like hell that he couldn’t shake off all those feathers.
Of course his PT would expect him to stand up from that chair eventually. Had he expected to walk again from a seated position? Maybe he should have tried it while lying flat on his back.
No, he hadn’t expected either of those things, but like he’d told her, maybe it still was too soon. It probably didn’t say anywhere in his file that he’d had a bad fall the first time the hospital PT staff had used that sling thing to lift him out of his bed and that half of his sutures had to be sewn again. If he’d believed that just by changing his treatment location he could exorcise his fear of falling again, he was dead wrong.
Was this why his recovery had stalled?
He glanced at the bars again, and a seed of panic embedded itself in his gut.
“Okay. Have it your way. For today, anyway.”
Natalie had closed the file now, her steady gaze seeming to judge him a coward.
“You know, the sooner we get you up on your feet—”
“I know. I know. It’s just...” He shook his head, the truth too embarrassing to share. He was like a toddler who’d fallen once and decided to settle in as a permanent crawler.
“I guess we can continue a few more days with your first group of home exercises. But by the end of next week—”
“Yes. Next week,” he said to cut her off. The sooner they stopped talking about it, the sooner he could stop sweating like a marathon runner hitting a wall near the twenty-two-mile marker.
“Well, let’s get started.”
She flipped open his file again to the sheet of exercise instructions she’d given him on Wednesday. He didn’t need to see it to begin the stretches he’d already memorized. Filling the role his coworkers had taken during his home sessions the past few days, Natalie lifted his leg, straightening and bending it several times before lowering it to the ground.
“I’m getting an idea why the muscles in your upper body haven’t atrophied as much as we would have expected by now,” she said as she lifted the other leg. “You’ve only been working out from the waist up.”
He couldn’t help grinning at that. “So you noticed my upper body?”
She frowned up at him, the color in her cheeks deepening.
“It’s my job to pay attention to such details about my clients.” Without looking at him again, she repeated the stretch on his other leg. “Besides, who could avoid noticing when someone looked like a cartoon character?”
“I guess there are worse things to be compared to than a cartoon hero.” He’d take her words as a compliment, even if she hadn’t intended them that way.
“Whoever said hero?”
“It was one of the few things I could still do in bed.”
Her lids fluttered, her blush deepening over his comment about his activities in bed.
“What was?” she managed.
There were so many things he could say, but he gave her a break this time. “Low-weight strength training. Sometimes I couldn’t watch another minute of TV, and my eyes were strained from reading. So I had a friend bring over her hand weights. I started with the five-pound ones.”
“You should have been exercising under a medical professional’s care. It might have caused more damage—”
“More damage than a bullet?”
She shrugged. “Well, not that much.”
“Anyway, there was hardly any moment when at least one medical professional wasn’t watching me or telling me what to do.”
“We tend to do that.”
Shane smiled at that. At least some of the tension between them had dissipated. He just hoped she didn’t ask him now why he was putting up roadblocks in the path of his recovery—because that would only multiply the stress again.
If he knew the answer to that question, he would be pushing the obstacles out of the way as fast as his arms could move them. It wasn’t that he was afraid of walking again—he couldn’t think of a single thing he wanted more.
But what if it just wasn’t in the cards? What if he got up there on the parallel bars and nothing moved, ever, except his arms as they dragged his legs behind him? How could he repay his debt to society then? He had to make some progress, had to have some good news to share with Kent. Especially now, since his mentor’s cancer had failed to respond to the most recent round of chemo.
But he couldn’t tell Natalie that. It probably wouldn’t come off as such a great story, since Natalie definitely had something against police officers. He’d been wondering what it could be for the past few days, but had told himself he would only be opening a can of worms if he asked. But suddenly he had an irrepressible urge to pop open that can’s lid.
“So, what do you have against cops, anyway?”
She dropped the file and had to pick it up again before she could look at him. “I don’t have anything against cops. Why would you ask something like that?”
“That’s the story you’re sticking to after the other day with the cops and robbers comment and the question about whether or not I bothered to wear a vest?”
“It was just a bad—”
“A bad day. So you’ve said. But most of us have our bad days without offending an entire profession.”
Instead of answering, she shrugged.
“Is it about the problems law enforcement has had with the African-American community?”
Her eyes widened as she stared at him.
He cleared his throat, his face suddenly hot. “I mean...well... I thought that maybe you might be...”
“Biracial?”
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have assumed. It’s just—” He cut off his words, but he couldn’t stop his gaze from gliding over the smooth-looking skin of her neck before returning to her gleaming eyes. “Again...sorry.”
