lesson well by her ex-fiancé.
Though she tried not to think of it very often, she forced herself now to relive that horrible time at Walter Reed five months ago when Clay had finally been able to leave his busy surgery schedule in Phoenix to come to the army hospital.
Of all the people in her life, she thought he would be able to accept her amputation the easiest. He was a surgeon, after all, and had performed similar surgeries himself. He understood the medical side of things, the stump-shaping process, the rehab, the early prosthesis prototypes.
She had needed his support and encouragement desperately in those early days. But the three days he spent in D.C. had been a nightmare. She didn’t think he had met her gaze once that entire visit—and he certainly hadn’t been able to bring himself to look at her stump.
One time he happened to walk in when the nurses were changing her dressing and she would never forget the raw burst of revulsion in his eyes before he had quickly veiled it.
She had given him back his ring at the end of his visit, and he had accepted it with an obvious relief that demoralized and humiliated her.
She couldn’t put herself through that again. She had been devastated by his reaction.
If a man who supposedly cared about her—who had e-mailed her daily while she was on active duty, had sent care packages, had uttered vows of undying love, and who was a surgeon—found her new state as an amputee so abhorrent, how could she ever let down her guard enough to allow someone new past her careful defenses?
She couldn’t. The idea terrified her. Like her career as a nurse practitioner, sex was another part of her life she decided she would have to give up.
No big whoop, she decided. Lots of people lived without it and managed just fine.
She hadn’t even had so much as an itch of desire since her accident, and she thought—hoped even—that perhaps those needs had died. It would be better if they had.
If she wasn’t ever tempted, she wouldn’t have to exercise any self-control in the matter.
To find herself responding on a physical level to any man would have been depressing, proof that now she would have to sublimate those normal desires for the rest of her life or face the humiliation of having a man turn away from her in disgust.
To find the man she was attracted to was none other than Jake Dalton was horrifying.
The best thing—the only thing—would be to stay as far away as possible from him. She had enough to deal with, thanks. She didn’t need the bitter reminder that she was a living, breathing, functioning woman who could still respond to a gorgeous man.
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