by Nancy Adams
Copyright
Clash of Hearts
Copyright © 2017 by Nancy Adams.
All right reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
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Published by: Nancy Adams
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Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
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1
“That's it, that's it,” Rob Christopher said, encouraging the girl on the parallel bars to keep walking forward. She was straining to stay on her feet, holding herself up mostly with her arms on the bars, but he could see the effort she was putting into making her legs take part of her weight. “Come on, only five more steps to go and you can sit down again. You're almost there!”
She glanced up at him as he stood there at the end of the bars, waiting for her, and she grinned. “Up yours,” she said. “When I get there, I'm gonna turn around and go back the way I came!”
The girl was Katie Lou Brennan, and she was one of Rob's physical therapy clients. She'd been in a terrible automobile accident only two weeks before, thrown through the windshield with head injuries that left her fighting for her life, and only the skilled hands of a surgeon and the prayers of her parents and family had saved her life. She'd nearly died, and because of bruising and trauma to her spinal cord, she was left partially paralyzed, her legs refusing to work.
Rob had been recommended to her as a physical therapist, and he'd been amazed at her progress. From not being able to move anything but a toe when she'd first come to him, she had now progressed to the point of being able to control both legs enough to begin walking on the bars. He hoped to take her out of her wheelchair within another week, and put her on a walker, instead. It would allow her to keep up the progress she was making already, and help her to retrain her legs to walk again.
Katie Lou was twenty-two years old, with auburn hair that sported natural blonde highlights. At five foot one and only ninety-four pounds, she'd been the star of the cheerleading squad in her last couple of years in high school, and then went on to get her Associate's Degree in psychology before she became engaged to up-and-coming attorney Darren Allsip. She'd been on top of the world, ready to begin a new life with a husband, children, and a future that was so bright it was almost frightening.
And then she and Darren had taken his family's boat out one Saturday, and on the way back from that outing, something had gone terribly wrong. She didn't remember the wreck, thankfully, but she knew what had happened to her.
The car, a brand new Corvette, had gone off the road, and struck a tree at more than sixty miles an hour. The air bag went off, as it should have, and kept her from impacting the dashboard, but because of a freak set of circumstances, the seat belt she was wearing had been damaged over time, and it snapped. Her body, which was still trying to move at the speed of the car even though the front end of the vehicle had come to a sudden stop against the tree, hit the air bag with all her weight, but it couldn't hold her in the car on its own. It flexed, and she literally slid up and over it and through the windshield that the air bag had already broken.
She suffered a number of cuts and bruises as she left the car, but the tumbling motion that began with sliding over the air bag continued when she was in the air, and her body turned over completely as she flew, landing on her back more than fifteen feet away. She bounced, tumbled again, and then hit the ground on her face and began rolling end over end. When she finally came to rest, she was on her back again, and barely showing any signs of life at all.
Paramedics arrived, and she was life-flighted to a trauma center at a college medical center, where the finest doctors in the entire area worked to keep her alive. She was considered to be comatose and non-responsive, and her condition was listed as critical. By the time her parents arrived, she was in the ICU, with tubes and wires making her look like some kind of science fiction monster. She might recover, her parents were told, or she might never regain consciousness; it was just too early to tell.
Plans were made to begin testing as soon as she was stable enough, to try to reach her and make some sort of contact and determine if she were even still in there. Brain activity said she was alive, but it couldn't guarantee that she was aware, that she was still Katie Lou, and the hours that went by seemed like years as they waited, prayed, hoped for some sign that their daughter was still with them.
And then she woke up, scared, angry, bitter at what had happened to her, unable to walk and with no certainty that she ever would again. The doctors had done all they could, and though she'd been near death only days before, her condition was so stable that she was released and sent home.
In a wheelchair.
Her fiancé, Darren, had called her the day after she came home and dropped the biggest bomb of all on her. He was planning a political career, he reminded her, and a crippled wife would mean that he would be seen as one who needed sympathy. Sympathy votes can get you elected to some offices, but not to the big ones, and that's where he wanted to go—and if she couldn't tell him she'd be back on her feet in a couple of days, he would have to move along.
Katie Lou was not only crippled, she was abandoned by the man she loved, and so she determined to make herself walk again. She wouldn't do it to try to win Darren back, though; she'd do it to show him he'd been a fool to let her go.
She was told that physical therapy was her best hope, and physical therapist Rob Christopher, who was in practice not far from her home, was highly recommended. She'd gone to her first appointment the very day she left the hospital, and her progress had been incredible. Rob had put her through some of what seemed like the simplest exercises, but each of them made a part of her body begin to respond a little more, and then a little more, until finally she was able to make both of her legs move at her command.
That was the milestone that she had prayed for, that she had strived so hard to reach, and now it was here! She had come in that morning, only an hour before, and Rob had taken her straight to the bars. He and her sister, Kylie, had helped her get onto her feet between them, put her hands on the bars, and then stepped away. She was on her own, and it was time to step
forward.
She closed her eyes and visualized her right foot, willing it to lift off of the floor and move forward ten inches, twelve inches—she felt it rise, and gasped in a wild mixture of joy, relief, fear and determination, as it moved forward and came to rest on the floor again.
One step, that's all it was, but it was one step! She had done what was impossible for her only a few days before, and the emotions within her were racing from one extreme to another. She felt her left foot follow its mate, and looked down to see it move forward to get ahead of her right, counting a second step. The right moved, a third step, and then again the left, in a fourth. One more step and she'd be halfway to the other end.
“That's it,” Rob was saying. “Just keep coming, Katie, you're doing great!”
“You got this, Sis,” Kylie said, standing there beside Rob. Katie grinned, because she knew that Kylie had a major crush on the physical therapist, and did everything she could to get his attention, but if there was one thing that could be said for Rob Christopher, it was that he was professional, and his attention was focused on his client, his patient, and her needs. Poor Kylie had figured it out, finally, that as long as Katie Lou needed him focused on helping her get back on her feet, he couldn't even see them as girls; they were patients, people he could help, and that was all.
Katie understood her sister's frustrations; she might not be able to walk just yet, but she was still a woman, and she'd noticed that Rob was attractive. The trouble was that she didn't want to see anyone that way, not yet. She was still hurting over Darren, true, but it was more than that. Katie Lou wanted to find out just who she was before she tried to let anyone else get close.
Besides, if she flirted with Rob, Kylie would be hurt. Her crush was no secret, and to try to get his attention that way would cause a rift between the sisters that Katie Lou didn't want to think about. Katie wasn't the kind of sister who would do that.
“You're almost here,” Rob said. “Come on, now, you can make it! Just two more steps, that's all it'll take!”
“Come on, Katie, come on!” Kylie said, and Katie could see the smile on Kylie's face, the one that said, “That's my big sister!” Katie loved Kylie with all her heart, and at that moment she could feel that love trying to bubble up and boil over.
“You guys better go back to the other end,” Katie said, straining to get the words out on top of the effort of holding herself up on the bars, but true to her word, when she got to the end of them, she turned herself around and took the first of ten more steps to get back to where she'd started. “You better hurry,” she said, “or I'm gonna beat you back there!”
Rob laughed, pushing the wheelchair back to where Katie had gotten out of it, with Kylie on his heels. They kept on shouting their encouragement, and Katie was laughing even as she gasped for breath, until she reached the end again and let them help her lower herself into the chair once again.
“That was awesome, Katie,” Kylie said, and Rob nodded his enthusiastic agreement.
“Awesome, yeah,” he said, “and I'd throw in incredible, stupendous and amazing, too. Katie Lou, I can't believe you've come so far in such a short time! If I could figure out what I did to make it happen, I'd do it for all my clients!”
Katie smiled at him. “Hey, who said it was something you did? Maybe I'm just that awesome, all on my own. I haven't exactly been lying around moping about this you know, I've been working on getting these legs back into action.”
“And you've done an excellent job,” he said. “Ready to do it again?”
Katie looked at him, aghast. “Give me a few minutes to catch my breath, would you? Holy cow, Rob, that was a lot of work!”
Rob grinned. “Work, work, work, that's me! You can have five minutes, then let's do it again. This is Monday; I want you walking with a walker by Friday, so we can give that wheelchair to someone who really needs it.”
Katie and Kylie both lit up in brilliant smiles. “Do you really think we can do that?” Katie asked.
“If you can make it across the bars and back now, like you just did, then I think we can do it. I've got a wheeled walker waiting for you. It's got brakes so you can control it, and a seat for when you just have to sit down, but unlike a wheelchair, you can't just sit on it and push yourself along, it won't work that way. To get somewhere, you get up and grip the handlebars, and push it ahead of you.”
Katie nodded. “I've seen them,” she said. “One of my professors in college had one, and I remember thinking it was really neat.”
“Then you know what it can do for you. You'll be a lot better off if you're not sitting on your backside all the time, in lots of ways.”
“Yeah,” Kylie said. “Especially since your backside won't keep getting bigger from sitting on it all the time!”
Rob laughed along with them, and they cut up a bit more for the next few minutes, but then he got a serious look on his face. “Okay, Katie, it's time. Ready to go again?”
Katie gave the bars a determined look, and nodded. “Let's do this!” she said.
Rob and Kylie reached to help her up again, but this time she motioned for them to let her do it. She reached out and took hold of the ends of the bars, and pulled hard, almost jerking herself up onto her feet. She pushed with her legs, telling them not to bend and collapse under her; the last thing she needed right then was to make a fool of herself when she was trying so hard to be strong and brave in front of them both.
She made it, standing up on her own legs, holding part of her weight on her arms like before. She stood there for a moment and concentrated on balancing herself, trying to get as much of her weight onto her legs as she possibly could. For just a moment, it seemed as though she was standing on her own. Her hands were barely resting on the bars, and she could feel the strain on her legs as they held her up.
It wasn't that her legs weren't strong enough to hold her as much as the fact that the nerves that controlled the muscles had been damaged in the accident. Bruising the spinal cord can cause severe damage to the tissues that nerves are made of, and this was the case with Katie Lou. Some of the nerve tissues were so damaged that they couldn't carry the information necessary to transmit orders from the brain to the muscles. As a result, her brain could tell her legs to move all it wanted to, but that didn't mean that they would.
She was standing at the very beginning of the parallel bars, and was determined to once more walk to the other end and come back. If she could do that repeatedly, then hopefully her body would reroute the signals from her brain to her legs, and they would begin working properly once again. If she could get to the point that she could walk the bars over and over, then the walker that Rob had waiting for her would enable her to walk outside of this room. She should be able to walk in the world again, just as she used to.
Okay, maybe not exactly like she used to, but at least on her feet and not in that wheelchair. As far as she was concerned, a wheelchair should be classed as a torture device, because no matter how beneficial it might be, sitting in it for too long meant you were going to hurt. She'd sat in hers for long enough to know why people who are wheelchair-bound tend to hate them.
"Okay," she said, "ready or not, here I come." She leaned slightly forward, once again letting her arms take her weight, and wheeled her foot forward. Just like before, her right foot moved the way it should, and then her left foot followed. Each step took about five seconds, so she wasn't going to win any foot races; on the other hand, she would soon be able to get around better on her own.
Another benefit of a walker would be that she would be standing a lot. At that moment, doing simple things like reaching for a cup in the cabinet meant calling for help, simply because she was too low to reach anything that was more than three feet off the floor. Like so many things about her condition, that left her frustrated, so the thought of being able to hold onto her walker and stand while she reached for that cup in the cabinet was one that seemed like a reward she was striving to obtain.
"Great j
ob," Rob said, "that's two steps. Only eight more, come on, you can do it! Keep coming, it's not that much farther."
"Come on, Katie," Kylie said. "Come on, come on, you got this."
Katie made her fourth step, and then her fifth. Each step brought her closer to the opposite end of the bars, but she knew that it also got her closer to being out of that wheelchair forever. That was her goal; that was what was driving her today. She hated that thing, not so much because of the discomfort as because of what it represented. A wheelchair, to her, meant weakness, and if there was one thing Katie was determined not to ever show again, it was any form of weakness.
She made it to the end, and without saying a word she turned and started back, one foot after the other. Rob and Kylie kept cheering her on, and despite the fact that her arms were starting to hurt, she found herself laughing. She'd never reached the point of considering this to be fun, but it definitely beat sitting on her butt in that chair.
"Look at that, look at that, you're almost halfway back," Rob said. Katie looked up at him and smiled, and the smile she got in return made her think again about what it might be like to have him interested in her romantically, but like always, she pushed that thought aside. She'd happily settle for seeing him smile as he encouraged her, and secretly keep hoping that he would notice her little sister.
She made it! She reached the end of the bars where she had begun and started to turn to sit down, but something made her stay on her feet. She was standing as she had in the beginning, her back to the chair, the bars ahead of her, and without saying anything to Rob or Kylie, she simply started walking toward the other end once more.
"Oh, my God, Katie, are you sure?" Kylie asked her, but Katie just kept going. One foot after the other, one step following the one before, and before she knew it, she had reached the other end again. She turned, but this time it was a strain. Her arms were tired and aching, so when she turned around and started walking back, she was trembling. Still, she pressed on, and though it took her almost three times as long as the first trip through the bars, she made it back to the beginning. Rob and Kylie had to help her sit down in her wheelchair, where she sat gasping for breath, sweat pouring off of her face, exhausted but full of joy and excitement.