'Joseph, let go. See if you can straighten it.'
He felt her fingers on his arm and forced himself to lie back, releasing the knee and leaving it flexed while his foot rested on the floor. Her hands grasped the backside of his calf, then one of them eased over his shinbone, forcing him to straighten his leg. He gasped and arched his chest higher. She laid the leg on the cool floor, touched it exploringly here, there, there, there. She made him work it back and forth, gently probing the muscles, the kneecap.
His initial shot of pain eased slightly. 'Well, what do you think, doc?' he asked.
'I think we'd better get some ice on it right away and, depending on how it feels within the next hour, have it X-rayed.'
She stood up, reached a hand down to help him. 'Can you use it?' He could, but he limped. She wrapped his arm around her shoulder and together they hobbled back to the dressing rooms.
'If you shower, use cool water, not hot, and I'll meet you back here as quick as you can make it.' He'd already pushed open the locker-room door. 'And Joseph?' He stepped and looked back over his shoulder. 'I really am sorry.'
'It's not your fault, Winn. I was playing stupidly, with all body and no brains. I deserved it.'
She thought it best if he didn't drive the truck because it had a floor shift, and until they found out how serious his injury was, the leg definitely shouldn't be strained. She stalled the old rattletrap three times before she'd even managed to back it out of its parking space. It chortled and chugged and nearly snapped their necks when she shifted from first to second.
But it made Joseph laugh. And when she heard him laugh, she was so relieved, she laughed, too. She talked him into letting her take him to North Memorial Medical Center, even though he said he didn't want to check into any emergency ward.
'All right, then I have another plan. But we'll have to sneak to do it.'
'Sneak?'
'Into P.T.-it should be deserted at this time of night-and we'll put an ice pack on your knee and wait to see if you think you need the X-ray.'
'Why should you have to sneak when you work there?'
'Because I could get fired if we get caught. The hospital is liable if you're using their facilities, and unless you're officially admitted, they have no legal recourse if something happens to you on our equipment. But it won't. I'll see to it.'
'But what if you get caught?'
She angled him a devilish corner-of-the-lip grin. 'You'll be indebted to me for life.'
A short time later they pulled up before the Abbott Street entrance, a back door used for patient pickup, which was deserted now at 7:00 P.M. and also was the closest route to Physical Medicine.
Just before Winn got out of the truck, Joseph reached out to lay his palm on the seat beside her. 'Winn?'
She stopped and turned to him.
'I'm sorry. You were right. I overstepped.'
Judas, but the man had eyes she couldn't get enough of. 'We'll see,' she answered cryptically, then the truck door slammed behind her.
It was quiet and dark in the rehabilitation room, and he stood in the doorway, interested in its every fixture simply because it belonged to her world, and he wanted to know as much about it and her as possible.
The room was like a narrow gymnasium with ceiling-to-floor windows at one end. Along the walls were various pieces of exercise equipment lined up: two sets of portable wooden stairs with handrails, two stationary bicycles, a refrigerator-freezer, low tables topped with blue mats, more mats on the floor and various ordinary wooden chairs.
She led the way to the far left end of the room. 'Sit here,' she ordered, 'on the table.' It was scarcely knee height and easy to fall back upon. She stood beside him and ordered him to stretch out on his back. He clasped his head as if about to do sit-ups and looked along his trunk to watch her untie and remove his tennis shoe, then the clean sock he'd put on only a half hour ago. He wore the red jogging suit again. He had six-inch zippers up each ankle. She slid the right one up, then pushed the pant leg past his knee until it drew tight around his thick thigh and stayed there.
Whatever he'd done, he'd done to the muscles just below his knee, and as she surrounded them with competent hands, she gently probed and tested.
'Relax,' she ordered. 'You're all tensed up with your head raised like that. I'm not going to hurt you.'
He fell back flat and answered all her questions, telling her what each touch felt like. Her fingers were gentle and her palms soft as she explored the muscles below the knee, then the knee itself, and finally worked her way up his thigh, probing. He tried to concentrate on the discomfort, because her hand felt so good, and because he was having difficulty disassociating the therapist from the woman. Her hands skimmed over the hair-roughened surface of his leg all the way to the top of his thigh.
At last, when he thought he was in mortal danger from the wonderful feeling of her hands upon him, she dropped them. 'It's not a hamstring, and it's not a knee. I think it's your triceps surae.'
'My what?'
'Triceps surae, the muscles found in the lower leg. You may have pulled one or more when you fell after hitting the wall.'
'How can you tell?'
'Three things. Pain, heat-it's hot right here…' She touched a sensitive spot lightly. 'And swelling. You've got all three.' She crossed to the refrigerator while he lay thinking about another swelling that she'd come awfully close to promoting. She returned with a flat pack that looked like a miniature inflated mattress and carefully wrapped it around his leg just below the knee and secured the Velcro patches.
'For the first forty-eight to seventy-two hours ice is best, then if it's still bothering you, we'll switch to heat.'
'We? Does that mean I'll see you again in the next couple days?'
She withdrew her hands from his leg immediately, then realized what she'd done and let her hands drop to her sides while sitting down on the edge of the table beside him, crossing her knees.
'If your leg is giving you pain, of course I'd be happy to help you work with it and save you the cost of outpatient care. But if it's not…'
He reached to take one of her hands and twisted their fingers together.
'And if it's not?'
She studied him silently, and from nowhere came the appealing one-eyed blink that he could read so well by now.
'Joseph, you're an extremely attractive man.' She rubbed the back of his hand with her thumb. 'But how many times in a woman's life does she meet an attractive man whom she must resist? Once I'm married, I'm not expecting never again to be face to face with men who raise my temperature a notch or two. It's bound to happen, but it's how I react to it that's important. I'm not denying I've… reacted to you. You're a very persuasive man, Joseph, and sexy to boot. But I'm involved in wedding plans that are so mind boggling I wouldn't even care to list all the people and dollars involved. My mother-' again her thumb brushed his hand softly '-well, my mother is a very frugal woman and always concerned about security-investing, saving, planning for the future. But this time she's throwing caution aside and going whole hog. Nothing's too good or too expensive for Pau -' She caught herself in time and finished, 'For us.'
But Joseph heard her slip. 'Just make sure you aren't making a mistake, Winn.'
She dropped his hand, placed hers on her thighs and pushed herself up to her feet. 'There's no such thing as a sure bet, but I know mother will be ecstatic when I marry Paul, and he'll be terribly good to me, and I'll have all the security she always wanted for me.'
'All the security she never had?' Joseph questioned.
Winn pondered silently, then answered, 'Yes. It's not hard to see through her. Security is her biggest hang- up.'
