Straight from the Heart (8 page)

The ludicrous image made the corners of Rebecca’s mouth quirk. She clearly remembered the costume party Jace had dragged her to seven years before. She had ended up having the time of her life. Naturally, Jace had stolen the show with his impersonation of the well-known Dodger manager. Now Rebecca pressed a fist to her lips to keep from laughing.

It must have been the lack of sleep, she thought. She was suddenly feeling giddy instead of angry. Naturally she didn’t want to consider the possibility that her weird state of mind had anything to do with being alone in a room with Jace. She didn’t want to think he could disarm her so easily.

“Just a minor celebrity, huh?” she questioned. “Are you always so modest?”

“No.” He chuckled, picking up her paperweight and tossing it from hand to hand. “Are you always so pleasant to your patients first thing in the morning?”

“No.” Her green eyes glittered like peridots. “Sometimes I get PMS.”

For a moment they laughed together like old friends, and Jace took hope. Rebecca’s wounds were still tender, but they hadn’t totally scarred her heart. She could still laugh with him. She would love with him again in time, if he were lucky and careful. It was going to take just the right combination of pushing and coaxing and convincing her he had changed. He felt as if he were walking a tightrope over a mine field, but the reward at the end of the line was going to be worth it.

He’d spent half the night picturing them as a family—himself and Becca and Justin. Justin. He made a mental note to call his mother and ask her if he’d had freckles when he was six.

“Maybe we should start the day over,” he suggested. Immediately he thought of the way he would have liked the day to have started—with Becca in his arms. It had been pure masochism to lay in bed remembering what it was like to have her there beside him, to wake up with her cuddled against him. With an effort he pushed the image away.

It was a safe bet Becca hadn’t slept any better than he had. Of course, he’d given up betting, but the fact remained that there were shadows under her eyes and her temper was obviously on a short leash. He’d seen the light burning in her bedroom window until past midnight.

“Truce?” he asked.

For a long moment Rebecca stood considering the possibilities. Maybe if they declared a truce, the war inside her would stop raging as well. She could still keep her distance from him, and she wouldn’t constantly be wearing herself out with anger. She thought of the list she’d made of ways to handle the situation with Jace. Hadn’t her solution essentially been a truce? She had told herself to treat him as she would any old acquaintance and put the past behind her.

“Truce,” she said, nodding. “But you have to understand the ground rules, Jace. This is my ballpark, I’m the manager and the head umpire. It’s essential that I maintain a certain level of control. Do you understand?”

He understood. She was telling him to keep his distance. He nodded but reserved comment. Understanding and agreeing with her were two different things.

“Good,” she said. “Let’s go take a look at that knee.”

“Becca?” he asked as she reached for the doorknob.

“What?”

Jace shook his head and smiled engagingly. “You’re much too pretty to be an umpire.”

If Rebecca had thought all her problems were over just because Jace had agreed to behave himself, she soon found out she was mistaken. Jace sat on the examination table in a pair of navy blue running shorts, his muscular legs magnificently bare. Somehow she had managed not to think about the fact that she was going to have to touch him. Often.

She was going to have to put her hands on his thigh, feel the crisp hair against her palms, feel the flexing and relaxing of those muscles without remembering. If she let her guard down for one second and remembered running her hands over his thighs as they made love, she was going to be in major trouble. She was going to suffer spontaneous combustion and melt down into a puddle on the floor of the exercise room. That would more or less ruin her image as head honcho of the PT department.

She swallowed hard and went on staring at his knee, trying to school her thoughts and call upon the logic that had always ruled her brain.

“How’s it look?” Jace asked nervously. “Is the swelling down enough?”

“Huh?”

“Please, Becca, tell me I’m not going to have to see any n-e-e-d-l-e-s.”

“Oh!” She snapped back to the business at hand. “No, it looks much better today.”

Professionalism, Rebecca, she told herself. You’re a professional. Keeping the thought uppermost in her mind, she grasped Jace’s leg with hands that weren’t quite steady and slowly began to examine his knee. She relaxed as she performed a battery of familiar stability tests. This was her field; she knew it inside out.

“Have you been doing your isometric exercises?”

“Religiously. Am I ready to go on to weights?”

“We’ll see. Are you that anxious to get out of Mishawaka?”

“No,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “I’m that anxious to get back to baseball. I want you to understand what this means to me, Becca. The Kings’ management isn’t counting on me coming back. In fact, they’re pretty sure I won’t come back. They sent me down here hoping I would take it for the slap in the face it is and retire.”

“Why would they do that? I’m told you’re as good a third baseman as anybody in the game.”

“I’ve also been a pain in management’s rear,” he said, frowning darkly. “They aren’t any more willing to believe I’ve changed than you are.”

Rebecca examined his leg in silence as she tried to deal with her feeling of guilt. No, she wasn’t willing to believe he’d changed. The fact that her attitude hurt him was evident in his tone of voice.

“I’ve never had to work this hard for something I want,” he went on. “Maybe a couple of years ago I couldn’t have done it, but I can do it now. I’ll give a hundred and ten percent to prove it.”

He certainly sounded sincere. As his therapist Rebecca owed it to him to believe in him. As a woman she owed it to herself to be wary of him. How was she supposed to do both?

First things first, she thought, easing his leg back down to the table. “I’ll settle for a hundred percent. That extra ten percent could do more harm than good. I’ll put you on what I feel is the maximum program for you, Jace. Don’t exceed it. Your knee can take only so much strain.”

Jace nodded as he swung his legs up onto the table and straightened them out in front of him as she instructed. “You’re the boss.”

“Don’t you forget it.” She smiled at him, grasping his thigh just above his injured knee. “Tighten this muscle for me. Tighter. Tighter. Good. Relax.”

“What about dinner tonight?” he asked a bit too loudly.

Suddenly the PT room was silent. Not one machine clanged. Not one person so much as breathed. Every eye was riveted on the two of them.

“What about it?” Rebecca asked calmly.

“What do you feel like eating? Steak? Chinese? Italian?”

The density of the silence around them increased to deafening proportions.

She gave Jace a bland smile and congratulated herself on her brilliance. This was the moment she’d been waiting for. “Sorry, Jace. I don’t date patients—ever.”

Murmurs ran around the room, rising and falling like a wave.

Jace narrowed his eyes as he studied the look on Rebecca’s face. She thought she’d outfoxed him. Well, he’d gotten around that rule of hers once before; he would do it again.

“Ask anybody here,” Rebecca said. “They’ll tell you the same thing. I don’t date patients. It’s a very bad idea, as I once found out.”

“Times change, Becca,” he said softly. “People change. Policies change.”

“Not around here.”

He held her gaze with his own for a few long seconds. “We’ll see.”

Suddenly a hand encased in a sweat sock appeared under Jace’s nose. He jerked back in surprise and stared at the thing. The sock had a face painted on it—expressive brown eyes, a big nose with a little black mustache beneath it, red lips. A tuft of unraveled black yarn had been stitched on top to simulate hair.

“She doesn’t date patients, Jace the Ace,” the sock said in a funny little voice. “You’re out of luck, lame duck.”

Jace’s eyes darted from the sock to Rebecca. She was calmly looking over his shoulder at the owner of the hand puppet.

“Hello, Turk,” she said.

The man stepped around the table to stand beside her. He was tall and built like a licorice whip with the facial features of a goose. A silly-looking mustache wiggled under his nose like some exotic angora caterpillar. He stood with his right arm raised so his sock hand puppet was at shoulder level.

“Jace, meet Turk Lacey—” her gaze slid meaningfully to the sock—“and Mr. Peppy.”

“Nice to meet you,” Jace mumbled. He started to hold his hand out, then pulled it back. Turk probably wouldn’t like it if he touched Mr. Peppy. At any rate, he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

“Turk,” Dominique said, tapping the man on the shoulder. “I’m ready for you.”

Mr. Peppy’s eyebrows waggled lasciviously while Turk’s gaze wandered the room innocently. “And I’m ready for you, long tall lady.” The sock winked at Jace. “Catch you later, Super Cooper.”

Dropping Mr. Peppy to his side, Turk turned and fell into step beside the therapist. Dominique gave a little jump and leveled a no-nonsense look at the man. “Mr. Peppy had better watch his mouth, or he’s going to need darning.”

Turk merely shrugged one shoulder and wiggled his mustache.

“Friend of yours?” Jace asked Rebecca.

“Teammate of yours,” she said with a malicious smile. “I’m hoping he’ll be your roommate on the road.”

“Geez, Becca, you’ve developed a real sadistic streak,” he said, craning his neck so he could see Turk Lacey. Dominique was frowning prettily as she examined the man’s left shoulder in a way that indicated he had a rotator cuff injury. “He plays for the Mavericks?”

“He’s their ace relief pitcher.”

“That explains a lot.” He looked up at her. “Becca, the man talks through a hand puppet.”

“Oh, you noticed that, did you?”

Bob Wilkes rolled up beside Jace’s table in his wheelchair. “The guy’s got a slider that’ll blow your kneecaps off.”

Jace cringed at the reference.

“Oh, hey, sorry, Jace,” Wilkes said. He glanced up at Rebecca, then shook his head. “She really doesn’t date patients, but every guy in the place will wish you luck if you want to take a shot.”

“Bob,” Rebecca said through her teeth, “shouldn’t you be in the whirlpool—headfirst?”

He wheeled back out of her reach and winked at Jace. “She’s a tigress. See ya ’round, Acer.”

Jace managed to contain his mirth to a tight smile as Rebecca shot him a look. His eyes gleamed. “He’s got you pegged, Becca.”

“I’m amazed you didn’t bet him you could get me to go out with you,” she said dryly. “The odds should be irresistible to you.”

“I don’t gamble anymore.”

Rebecca stared at him in disbelief. “Let me get this straight. You’ve quit smoking, you’ve quit gambling. Does the sun still rise in the east, or have I missed that monumental change too?”

“The sun still rises in the east,” he said, his gaze as level as his voice. “You can be as sure of that as you can be of me getting a date with you.”

“Then we’d better alert the scientific community, because I’m not going to start seeing you again, Jace.” She dismissed the topic as if it didn’t make her pulse jump erratically and turned her attention back to his knee. “Try to raise your leg off the table against the pressure of my hand.”

Jace worked diligently through a series of exercises. Rebecca recited to him the names of the seven ligaments of the knee. She explained that he had anterior cruciate ligament damage and a torn meniscus, and outlined the kind of rehabilitation program she thought would work best to get his knee in maximum working order as quickly as was medically prudent.

The odd thing about the conversation was that Jace actually listened. He didn’t seem bored in the least by all her technical talk. Rebecca remembered trying to explain his shoulder separation to him. The only thing he’d been interested in was brushing his arm against her breast as she’d tested the joint for range of motion. Now he listened attentively and even interrupted her to ask questions about the amount and kind of exercise he should give the knee outside of the therapy room. He nodded as she explained the program of additional isometric exercises and light weight training he would be starting on.

Maybe, Rebecca mused, he had grown up after all.

“And how long are you going to keep feeling up my thigh?” Jace asked.

Rebecca looked down at his leg. Lord, she was doing it again! Her fingers had crawled up from his knee and were rhythmically kneading the sculpted muscle high on his thigh. Her face flushed fire engine red as she jerked back. Primly she said, “I was merely testing the tone of your quadriceps.”

“Hmmm…do you want to test the tone of any other parts of me?” he asked just loud enough for her to hear. “I could suggest one appendage in particular that seems to be developing excellent tone.”

Rebecca glared at him. So much for Jace’s maturing. So much for their truce. True to form, he had made a promise, then broken it at the first opportunity. She straightened up and stepped back from him. “I think this session is about over.”

Jace shrugged. “If you say so. What about that dinner date?”

“What about our truce?”

“I don’t consider asking for a date subversive behavior.”

She relaxed a little, more out of resignation than anything. He hadn’t changed, he never would. “Fifteen minutes in the whirlpool, then you can leave.”

“How about a massage?” he asked hopefully.

“Not today,” Rebecca said, turning away from him, unwilling to admit she was disappointed their truce hadn’t worked out the way she had hoped. It was best for her to remember he wasn’t trustworthy, she told herself.

“Shirking your responsibilities, Ms. Therapist?” he teased, hoping to goad her into touching him again. She may have pretended she wanted nothing to do with him, but her fingers told their own version of the story when they made contact with his body.