Romance: Altered Engagement (Wild Hearts, Contemporary Romance Book 1)

by Nancy Adams

  At that moment, it dawned on Katie that Darren had not seen her since she'd gotten out of the hospital. He hadn’t even bothered to come to the house two nights before, to tell her she wasn't good enough for him anymore; he'd actually done that over the phone, and suddenly Katie felt a surge of anger well up inside her. She looked at him for a moment, and then dismissed him by turning back to the menu.

  Kylie saw him, too, but she didn't pay him any attention. A moment passed, and Katie wondered if Darren would have the nerve to come and speak to her, but he didn't, and after a moment she saw him walk past and to a table across the room. There were two older men there, and Katie thought she recognized one of them as being from that big law firm in St. Louis.

  Rob and Anna, of course, didn't know Darren and had no clue that anything had just transpired. Rob looked up at the girls and asked, “So, anyone ever had the London Broil sandwich, here?”

  Without thinking, Katie said, “Yeah, I have, and it's amazing! In fact, since you're buying, that's what I'm having!”

  Kylie closed her menu with a snap. “That's enough to sell me on it,” she said.

  “Ditto!” Anna said, and Rob smiled and said, “Well, then I'll make it unanimous. Is it really that good?”

  Katie nodded with her eyes closed. “Oh, yeah! Makes your mouth think it's having an orgasm...” She suddenly realized what she'd said, and opened her eyes to find all three of them staring at her. “Or—at least, that's what I've been told,” she finished meekly.

  Rob and Anna grinned, and Kylie leaned over and whispered, “You know you just scared him off for me, right? I am so gonna tell Mom!”

  The waitress came and took their orders, and they made small talk while they waited. Rob wanted to talk about his plans for Katie's next steps—literally—and laid out some ideas about how to get her right leg working in cooperation with her left. Katie was listening, but a part of her was still distracted by Darren, across the room. She had glanced his way a couple of times, and caught him looking at her; wouldn't it be ironic, she asked herself, if he was actually regretting his decision to dump her?

  Of course, if he wasn't, then he probably wouldn't be watching her at all, and it was pretty obvious that he was. Each time she let one eye look in his direction, she saw him staring at her, openly and unabashedly, and after the first few moments of gloating over his discomfiture, she actually started to think of it as being a little on the creepy side. After all, he was the one who said she wasn't good enough, right? What right did he have to even let his eyes rest on her?

  Their sandwiches came, but in this particular restaurant, a sandwich was more than just a slab of meat on bread; each of these sandwiches was made of an inch-thick steak of London Broil that was served on grilled flatbread and dripping in juices. Each of them weighed at least a pound, and there was no doubt that they would all be asking for take-out boxes before they got done. Katie picked hers up and bit into it, and then heard herself moan in epicurean delight.

  “Oh, this is good!” she said, and the other three all followed suit and then echoed her moan.

  Rob let his eyes open and looked at her, and for a split second, she thought he was going to say something romantic, but then he grinned. “I promise, I will never doubt you when you tell me how good something is, because the description you used for this sandwich is absolutely perfect and accurate! Wow! It really is like—what you said!”

  Something came over her then, and she couldn't help having just a little fun. “Hey,” she said, “did you really think I’d lie to you?”

  Rob and Anna both choked, and Kylie laughed so hard that she had to take a drink to wash down the bite she was trying not to choke on! The whole commotion got the attention of the people around them, and when Katie looked up again, she saw Darren staring straight at her.

  She looked him in the eye, and he started to smile, but then something in her gaze must have made him think again. He seemed to freeze and stare at her for a moment, but then he looked away, and she wondered why she didn't feel some kind of satisfaction when he did. It was as if he were regretting his choice, and she wanted to gloat, but something inside her was still feeling sorry for him, still caring for him, and suddenly she wished that the last six days hadn't happened.

  But they had happened, and life had changed. She would be forever a different person, now, and the scars of both the physical and emotional traumas that she had undergone would be with her for a long, long time. She glanced at Darren again, saw that he was still looking away, and wondered if she would ever find someone else to love, and then she caught a glimpse of Rob Christopher, and something in her wondered if perhaps he might be part of her future.

  Future. Only time would tell what the future would bring, of course, and she would have no choice but to wait and see.

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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 barel
y 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 wa
s 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.