Warrick was about as skilled with crutches as he was on the basketball court. Not at all. He winced at the memory. He probably shouldn’t have tried a jump shot with Chad guarding him. It was about as hopeless as trying a jump shot against Shaquille O’Neal. Chad was a seriously big man.
As for the crutches, it wasn’t that he couldn’t get around on them. It was that he didn’t want to. The slowness of them did nothing but irritate him. He tossed one of them toward the couch in his office and proceeded to hobble, leaning on the remaining crutch. The air cast on his ankle was awkward, but he was able to walk on it.
“I’m pretty sure that’s not what they meant when they said ‘use crutches.’”
He knew Sara’s voice immediately by the way his body involuntarily reacted to it. She had one of those voices straight out of an old movie, throaty and sexy as shit. He cursed under his breath, reminding his body he didn’t appreciate the reaction to her.
Not to mention the kick to his ego at her seeing him like this. Why the hell did it bother him so much to have her see him as weak in any way? He shouldn’t care.
He turned as he got to his chair and sank into it, letting the other crutch drop to the floor beside him. Glaring at it made him feel better. It also let him ignore her a little longer while he willed his dick back into line.
“Here.” She held out an ice pack wrapped in a towel. “Charlotte told me to tell you, it’s time to ice and elevate.”
He grunted and took the ice pack, but tossed it on the desk instead of lifting his leg to ice it.
Sara tilted her head at him and he saw an uncharacteristic playfulness cross her face. At least, it wasn’t an expression she had around him very often. Maybe she was more at ease with her friends.
“I should have known you’d be a bad patient,” she said. She sat in the chair opposite him and settled in.
“Why is that?” He focused on pulling up the files he’d need for their meeting, keeping his eyes on the computer screen instead of her. He didn’t want to admit, even to himself, that he liked it when she teased him. He liked the feeling that maybe she liked him. What was he? A teenager?
The thought brought back a memory of him waiting behind the bleachers for Vicki to sneak out of study hall and meet him. The memory served as cold water, shaking him out of the stupor Sara had put him in.
“You just strike me as someone who’d never want to slow down long enough to heal. I was the same way after my injury. The physical therapists actually had to try to slow me down, instead of pumping me up to try one more rep of an exercise.”
He hadn’t ever heard her talk about her injury or her recovery. He turned her way. “Did it work? Did they get you to slow down?”
“Nope.” Her smile was wicked as she laughed, but she gestured to the ice pack. “You should still ice it.”
With an exaggerated glare that she rewarded with a laugh, he grabbed the ice pack, lifted his leg to the extra chair Charlotte had placed by his desk, and followed her direction. “You have a twisted sense of humor.”
He wondered what it had felt like for Sara to go through months of recovery and learning to use her prosthesis. He was frustrated from this little sprain. Embarrassed and worrying about what she might think of him. What was it like for her when she came home and had to face the loss of her hand? He couldn’t imagine the frustration she must have dealt with learning how to use a prosthesis to do things most people took for granted.
He almost asked, but they weren’t close enough for that question.
“What happened, anyway?” She asked. “There are all kinds of rumors going around. Everything from skydiving accident to a mishap with a mechanical bull.” Her eyes said she was enjoying this a little too much.
“Seriously?” Why on earth would anyone be coming up with that kind of shit, much less talking about his injury in the first place?
“Yup. Renee over in accounting is guessing it happened during kinky BDSM role playing that went awry, but she’s a little obsessed with Fifty Shades, if you ask me.”
Warrick stared blankly at Sara. He was sure his brain was attempting automatic shutdown so he didn’t have to acknowledge the fact his employees were imagining him in a BDSM dungeon. It wasn’t working.
“I—” He stopped and just stared at her. “What?”
This made Sara laugh harder.
He should make sure she knew it hadn’t been some crazy BDSM experiment gone wrong. Shouldn’t he? “Basketball,” he said abruptly.
And she laughed harder.