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“This should hold you for a few days, honey,” she said, heading for the kitchen as if she’d noticed nothing, although Britt knew she had to have seen Cody bent over her. Maybe she thought he’d just set her down.
“Brought in the chair,” came her father’s voice as he entered through the door her mother hadn’t closed, indeed carrying the now folded-up wheelchair with him. He set it down inside the door, looked from her to Cody. “I was afraid that might be a little rough rolling out there.”
“It was,” Cody answered, and Britt wondered if she was imagining the slight edge in his voice. And if she wasn’t, was it because they’d been…interrupted?
“Thanks, Cody, for getting her in with less pain, then,” her father said. “Along with everything else you’ve done.”
Her father bent to unfold the wheelchair back into functional shape. Britt glanced at her mother, busily rearranging her fridge to fit in what she’d brought.
“At least a knock on the door would have been nice,” she muttered.
“They’re worried about you,” he said, very quietly. She looked back at him just as he added, in a wry tone, “It would have been nice, though, yes.”
She steeled her nerve. “Nicer if they’d come five minutes later,” she said.
His brows rose. Was he going to pretend those moments had never happened? That it had been something other than it clearly had been?
“Five minutes?” His whisper was hoarse now. “Not sure that would be long enough.”
Her breath jammed up in her throat, and for a moment she felt almost light-headed. She could no longer blame the craziness of this—that it was Cody having this effect on her—on her injuries, or meds, or anything else. Part of her wanted to run, at least emotionally, from all of it.
But Britt Roth didn’t run.
She opened her mouth to speak, but when she heard her mother’s footsteps approaching, she stifled the words into a murmured, “Later.”
“Definitely,” Cody said in the moment before he turned to help her father, who had gotten the wheelchair caught on the edge of the area rug in front of the couch.
Dad parked the loathed thing at right angles to her seat and set the brakes, as the nurse had instructed, but looked at her doubtfully. “Are you going to be able to get into it like he said, with your wrist?”
“I’ve got one good arm, and the good leg’s on the other side, so I should be able to maneuver…”
Her voice faded away as her father took a seat in the chair opposite her, as if he were settling in for the rest of the day. She glanced at Cody, and thought she saw a muscle in his jaw jump. Looked at her mother who, oddly, was also looking at Cody. Then she turned her head to meet Britt’s gaze. A very slight, almost knowing smile curved her mother’s mouth.
And then, briskly, she was moving. “Come along, Rob. Brittany is fine now, she needs to settle in. Cody will stay a while, won’t you, Cody?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Cody said, very politely. And respectfully; he was a Texas boy, after all, and raised by Maggie Rafferty to boot.
Her father, looking a little puzzled, nevertheless stood up and followed his wife, who glanced back and said cheerfully, “We’ll check in on you later. Maybe we’ll even knock next time.”
Britt stared at the closing door. A moment later she heard Cody say, sounding bemused, “Do you think she knows—”
“Yes, I do,” Britt said, her mouth twisting wryly as she heard her parents’ steps on the porch. “And I have a suspicion she’s been…expecting it.”
“It?”
She looked at him then. Took a deep breath. Felt nerves jangle through her, like in the moment before starting a barrel run. What if she was wrong? What if he didn’t feel what she felt when they were close, didn’t feel the sparks when they touched?
Five minutes? Not sure that would be long enough…
His tense whisper echoed in her head, swamping her doubts. He felt it, all right. And was probably as bewildered by it as she was. How could they go from a lifetime of thinking each other their worst enemy to…this? It couldn’t be simply because she’d gotten hurt, because it had started before that, this easing of tension between them. To be honest, for her it had started when she’d been forced to realize how much she didn’t know about him, and what he did.
“She said once that someday I was going to grow up and see what was right in front of me…” Her voice faded away as she voiced her mother’s words. She stared at him, remembering what he’d just said, about what his mother had said to him about not seeing what was right in front of him. “I thought she meant it…metaphorically,” she said ruefully.
“And I thought my mother meant it literally, about my clothes on the floor.”
Britt was hit with an image of Cody stripping off his shirt and jeans, in such a hurry he just left them there. And tried to fight down her reaction to it, which was that she very much wanted to be the reason he was in a hurry to get naked.
And wondering, if it weren’t for her pitiful condition just now, if he would do it.
