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your hand.”
“Yeah, that’s what he wants.”
“And you don’t want that?”
“I hate this whole process.”
Brooke got the distinct feeling she would, too, before it was all over. “Well, let’s see if we can make this as pleasant as possible for both of us. If you’re going to return to surgery, then—”
“I don’t want that mentioned again. Ever.”
He sat forward, skewering her with his unwavering gaze, giving her a good dose of his pain. Not physical pain. She could handle that. It was her job to make it all better, and sometimes that meant making a patient physically hurt from the effort. But emotional pain… That was another thing altogether. She was a sucker for sympathy, and right now she didn’t want to be sympathetic to a God complex in action. But she was. It went beyond his looks. His aura of power. He couldn’t mask the frustration in his eyes, those windows to the soul that Brooke had learned to look through to find the person beneath the facade. And this particular person was totally torn up inside.
Straightening her spine, Brooke tried to affect her usual cheerful disposition. “Okay, so we’ll work on stretching those tendons, and then we’ll see what’s what.” She reached for his hand to remove the splint, but he pulled away.
“I’ll do it.” With slow, stilted movements, he took off the splint while Brooke waited patiently. At least this was a positive sign, wanting to do it himself. Some of his pride was still intact. And that could mean more grief for her.
While Brooke allowed him this act of independence, she considered his predicament. A doctor who had lost the function of his dominant hand—his instrument of healing. A skilled surgeon who could very well find himself without a career if he didn’t mend.
He had the right to be a little ticked off. Anger was sometimes a good thing. A great motivator. Considering the fact that during the accident he’d damaged the flexor tendons in three of his fingers, he needed some motivation for the long haul to recovery. The question was, would Brooke be up to it? If he didn’t fire her first.
Gently she took his hand into hers. His fingers were large, well-defined, yet rigid because of the accident. “Have you been doing your passive motion protocol at home?”
He shrugged and looked away. “When I find the time.”
Oh, boy. He was going to test her to the max.
Brooke conducted a visual search and homed in on his wrist. The dense scar, to say the least, was ugly. She touched it, and he flinched. “Still ultrasensitive there, I take it.”
“No kidding.”
Ignoring his sarcasm, she examined his thumb.
“Do you feel that?”
“No.”
She moved on to his pointer finger. “Here?”
He pulled his hand away quickly, startling Brooke. “Look, I’ve already been through this,” he said, fire and frustration in his tone. “I’ve got no sensitivity on the volar surface of my thumb, no feeling on the second finger and diminished sensitivity on the third. My tendons are a bloody mess, and a whole army of therapists can’t do a damn thing about it.”
Brooke put on her calm face and waited to see if he was finished with his outburst. When he seemed to relax somewhat, she forced another smile and spoke through it. “Dr. Granger, I realize that you probably know as much if not more than me about your condition. I know this is a horribly painful thing to go through. I also know that if you don’t opt to continue therapy, you might never be able to pick up anything smaller than an orange, much less a scalpel.”
She stared at him straight on, surprised he had yet to protest since she’d mentioned another S word. When he didn’t respond, she continued. “So if you’re willing to cooperate, then I’ll do my best to assist you. But I can’t do this alone.”
“And I can’t do this at all.”
Brooke expected him to vault out of the chair and head out the door, but he didn’t. What was holding him here, if he was so bent on nixing therapy? Why was he wasting her time? Anyone’s time, for that matter?
That wasn’t relevant. It was her job to put him through the motions. Her job to see to it that he at least attempted to accomplish something. Her job to hang on to her cool.
While Brooke applied moist heat to his wrist as well as electronic stimulation to try and alleviate some of the scar tissue, he didn’t say a word. She administered myofacial massage and stretching exercises to relax his tendons, and still he didn’t speak. In fact, he didn’t react at all except to flinch now and then. Even when she tried to engage him in mundane conversation about the unseasonable weather, he replied in one-word responses. She might as well talk to the wall.
“Okay, time for something new,” she said, trying to spark his enthusiasm. His posture wasn’t the greatest, but she thought it best not to scold him too much. “Just sit up a little straighter and we’ll try this for a minute.”
He moved maybe a microinch. She put the small red foam ball in his palm. “Can you try to grip this?” she asked.
After staring at the ball like it was some alien entity, he let it slip from his grasp without even trying. It rolled onto the floor beside the table. Brooke quietly retrieved it, barely avoiding knocking her toe on his cast. Again she placed the ball in his palm. Again it rolled away, this time under the table before Brooke could thwart its escape.
Drawing in a cleansing breath, she leaned down and felt around for the offending object. Not finding it, she bent farther underneath the table, grabbed up the ball, and promptly bumped her head on the edge when she straightened.
She rose and found the not-so-good doctor staring off into space. Obviously her near concussion meant nothing to him. Not even worth a “Is your head okay?” or “Hope you didn’t break the table.” Just absolute detachment, as if he wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. At the moment so did she.
When Brooke awakened that morning to the first cold front of the season mixed with bone-biting rain, the second flat tire in a week and a dead coffeemaker, she’d been primed for a typical Monday. But she didn’t deserve this, even from the man who had once been the doctor of her dreams.
Anger began to seep into Brooke’s pores. No matter how hard she tried to plug up the hole in her resolve so the frustration wouldn’t escape, another fissure took its place. She was known for tolerating difficult patients. Known to never lose her composure. But today had been the mother of all bad days, and right now she was feeling anything but composed. What else would explain the sudden need to respond to his apathy with a curtness totally foreign to her?
Brooke choked the ball in her fist and leveled her gaze on him. “Dr. Granger, since you seem to be having a problem with cooperation, it just occurred to me that maybe you’re having a temporary bout of self-pity. At least, I hope it’s only temporary, because if you want to see something to feel sorry for, then hang around for my next patient. A twenty-five-year-old father of two with a fractured C-6 vertebrae.”
She paused only long enough to take a deep draw of air. “He comes here in a wheelchair with his kids on his lap and a smile on his face even though he’ll never take another step. Never make another baby. Never even make love to his wife in the same way again. But he’s not moaning over his situation. He’s going about the business of living, even though he has little opportunity to get better. You do.”
For a moment he looked as though she had struck him. He opened his mouth, then let it drop shut. Awkwardly he stood, looming over her like a sturdy oak able to survive the greatest of storms, his face flashing anger. But his eyes looked vulnerable. So very, very vulnerable.
“I don’t need your lecture, Ms. Lewis. I’ve spent the last eight years of my life operating on sick people, many of them kids, and with every one that I lost, part of me died right with them. But I kept