Before she could stop it, Grace felt her eyes roll and she scooted back and went to fish the crutches out. “Just until you get on your feet and have taken a few practice steps. Ease into it. Let your arms carry you until you find the right stride. And don’t be afraid to call it off if you come to your senses.”
Another moment without arguing. He took the crutches and carefully began to crutch-walk, easing onto the poor tortured foot. While he did that she got him the next round of over-the-counter painkillers.
“I think I want the stretchy tape.”
“I think you do too,” she murmured.
As bad as it was, the stretchy tape would add a tiny bit more support but it was kind of like painting the door when the house was falling down. But maybe it would help or have a placebo effect.
“I’ll get it. You take these, and I’ll send the anti-inflammatories with you. You can take them when the movie is playing—take water with you if you don’t have drinks or whatever. I don’t know how premieres are. Do they run the refreshments counter during one?”
He gave her a strange look but swallowed the pills down without water.
“Don’t do that with the medicine. It needs to be taken with food.”
“I’ll handle it. Whatever is necessary to make this work. Now get out, I need to get dressed.”
She handed him a blister pack with the appropriate dose, then headed for the door to the foyer area and yet more exceptionally tasteful shades of beige. She snagged her tablet as she walked out to where they’d been staging the reporters, out of sight of Liam and his crutches.
“Manage and document his dosing schedule so they can’t screw it up, and add it to his chart.” Along with his inability to heed much of her advice, and her rigorous objections to him walking on it.
Not that it would matter to anyone, but it made her feel a little better. The tablet accepted her words without argument.
* * *
Liam braced himself as the door swung open and he stepped out.
The first official step of the night, and it would have to be on his bad ankle. One thing he couldn’t control was the direction from which cars arrived to drop off passengers at the red carpet. But it figured that he’d have to get out of the car on his bad ankle.
With a deep breath, he stepped down and used his arms as much as possible to haul himself from the car. Smooth.
Luckily for him, he had actually managed to control when he arrived, delaying his arrival until there were already plenty of people there to look at. Maybe the effort it took to get up would be missed.
Maybe the effort it took to keep his face a calm mask would also be missed. If he was lucky. But since his fall Liam had felt anything but lucky.
The gait that Grace had returned to his suite to demonstrate and practice was unnatural, but nothing he hadn’t had to do before.
He had to use the hip and knee, propel himself forward with the other leg as much as possible to disguise the fact that he wasn’t really pulling off heel-to-toe locomotion anymore.
She had made it look easy. But she’d probably had to do that walk a thousand times for other patients.
In this whole mess, she was the one bit of luck on his side. Not just that she hadn’t pushed him out of her office immediately, and not even that she had agreed to come with him—those were things he could actually put down to James Rothsberg’s influence as everyone wanted to please their boss at least a little bit. But his luck was that she still smiled at him on occasion.
After that night had gone down, at first he’d stayed away, hoping to give her some time to get over it, but soon enough he had been so busy with all the menial gigs actors did to get by before their chosen career began to pay off that he’d put checking on her at the bottom of his list of things to do.
He’d been unable to ever ask Nick about how she was.
Neither could he have asked Mr. or Mrs. Watson—David and Lucy. Or gone directly to Grace either.
Eventually, giving her time had become just plain staying away. And he’d kept busy enough not to do anything but acknowledge that the situation had made him sad. There had always been another low-wage gig to go to, until those low-wage menial gigs had become low-wage acting gigs, and then higher-wage acting gigs as his skill had increased...
The long hours of daylight meant that he had to do the walk under the kind of light that mandated he use those skills and give an exceptional performance now.
If it weren’t for the amount of radiation he’d sucked up being reassured that he hadn’t broken it, and his desire not to have any more X-rays at present, he might go back to the hospital and demand another set of films. How anything could feel this bad and not be broken was beyond him.
He’d known he and Grace had been broken by that night, but only here, in his own time, when she was nowhere around since he’d forced his way back into her life, had he even realized that he was angry about it.
It had been there in his expression in the mirror, but he’d put it down to pain. But the truth was...as conflicted as he had felt in that moment, and as guilty as he’d felt since then, he’d also felt anger that he’d lost her over it.
Not angry at her, not even angry with himself, just angry and frustrated.
No more than ten steps in and he’d been noticed. Cheers started in a wave, from the first to spot him, the advance warning system for the crowd, until it was all heads and flashbulbs.
And he could feel his brows furrowing. It wasn’t the time for that, it was time for smiles.
This would be easier if...he didn’t have to do it.
Wave. Smile. Stop for pictures. Shake hands. Don’t show the pain grinding up his leg or the conflict churning through his gut. It had all worked out for the best anyway, Grace deserved someone who could stay forever, and his relationships came with an already determined expiration date. Something he couldn’t do to her, even if he could get past all the family conflicts.
When this was over, when he got back to the hotel, Grace would take care of him. She might lecture him, but she’d do it with her gentle hands and a level of exasperation that told him she still gave a damn. Even if the mortification of that night had stayed with her more strongly than he would have liked, she still gave a damn about him.
That was something to feel lucky about. Something to feel grateful for.
Even if it would make things harder.
THE TIME BETWEEN Liam leaving and the time that Grace had managed to make it to the theater swelled to the point that now, despite the fact that she’d not arrived for forty-five minutes after Liam had, she wedged herself through the crowds enough to catch sight of him still working the carpet.
Granted, he wasn’t running up and down the length of it, but he did move from one side to the other, shaking hands, taking pictures, signing anything that people thrust at him.
Shopper Tom, or as she called him now, Tom, had come barging into Liam’s suite about three minutes after Liam and his crew had left, then had insisted on making Grace try on clothes to figure out what gave the best fit. Were these shoes the right size? Did these slacks ride too high at the hem to wear with the heels he’d picked up for her to pair them with?
Did she even know how to walk in heels?
What about this color?
How did she like blouses to hang—did she prefer a very close fit that showcased her figure or did she want to go for the