He blinked as some fragment of memory came to him, but he couldn’t move fast enough to pin it down. Before he could try to puzzle it out, Charlotte and her friend giggled again. A soft voice that didn’t sound like his mother warned them to be quiet so they didn’t wake Mr. McKinnon.
Mr. McKinnon. That was him. Weird. No. It wouldn’t be Charlotte out there. He tried to clear the fuzz out of his brain. Couldn’t be her. Charley was gone, had been gone for years.
Everybody was gone. Mom, Wyatt. Everybody.
So who was playing outside his window?
He’d have to figure that out another time, when he wasn’t so damn tired.
The next time he awoke it was to a cool, dim room and the musical murmur of women speaking softly.
“I gave him a pain pill as soon as he arrived, about four hours ago. I offered him two but he only took one.”
The voice was low, sexy, and he thought he could lie here in this dreamlike state and listen to it forever. He recognized it in some dim corner of his mind, but he was too hazy from the pain pill she was talking about to do anything about pulling the memory out.
“He’s been sleeping since then,” she went on. “I think he might have surfaced a few times but never all the way and never for very long.”
“You ask me, the man’s a damn fool to leave the hospital four days after breaking both legs.”
The second voice wasn’t nearly as sexy as the first. This one was honey-coated barb wire. “What’s he trying to prove? I mean, come on. It’s always the macho, good-lookin’ ones, honey. They make the worst patients and the worst husbands. Believe me, I’m married to one and have nursed more than my share of the other.”
The first woman laughed. “I’ll keep that in mind, Estelle.”
“You do that. You do that.”
Still not sure he wanted to let these women, whoever they were, know he was conscious, he peeked under his lashes and saw that Estelle was a sturdy woman who looked about fifty. She had skin the color of warm caramel and dozens of rainbow-colored beads in her swinging cornrows.
He wondered who she might be and what she was doing in his bedroom, until he saw the bright pattern of her nursing scrubs and the stethoscope around her neck. Ah. The nurse from the home health company. Who was she talking to?
The other woman stood just out of the range of his vision unless he twisted around, something he wasn’t sure he could do, even if he wanted to. Again, he thought he recognized the voice but couldn’t quite place it.
“I really hate to do this,” Estelle went on, “but I’m gonna need to check his vitals. That’s why they pay me the big bucks, to take care of stubborn cusses like this one who belong in the hospital but are too pigheaded to stay put.”
“I’ve been doing visual checks about every half hour while he sleeps. I’ve recorded all that for you.”
He managed to turn his head just enough to finally figure out who else was in the room—his very attractive next-door neighbor. Why had she been watching him while he slept? He wasn’t sure he wanted to know, or that he wanted to delve too deeply into why that idea made him forget all about the ache in his legs.
“Something tells me you’re no stranger to a sickroom,” Estelle said. “You seem to know your way around pretty well.”
If he hadn’t been watching her so closely, he would have missed the way his neighbor’s face froze for a moment—a funny, almost frightened look flashing through her eyes before those delicate features became a blank mask. “I’ve had a little experience.”
“Good. I think you’re gonna need it with this one. He’s gonna keep you hopping. Hate to do it but to check his temp and blood pressure I’ll have to wake him up. You want to do the honors?”
After a moment’s hesitation, his neighbor nodded and stepped forward, her arm outstretched as if to shake him.
“I’m awake,” he growled. He didn’t want either of them poking at him or prodding him, not when he had suddenly discovered a much bigger problem than a couple of women who talked about him when he was supposed to be sleeping.
He needed to use the bathroom.
Severely.
Somehow he would have to figure out a way to heft himself into that wheelchair and maneuver through that narrow doorway while preserving whatever shreds of his dignity might be left to a man as helpless as a blasted kitten.
No way on God’s green earth was he going to ask these two for help.
He sat up, ignoring the way the room whirled and spun. That’s it, he decided fiercely. No more pain pills for him.
Right now he would have given just about anything he owned for a few moments alone in a room with that bastard Lyle Juber. Gritting his teeth, he managed to find the control to the bed and lowered it so he was on the same level as the wheelchair. He pulled himself to a sitting position then inhaled sharply as several dozen knives sliced at him.
“Hold on there, cowboy,” Estelle said briskly. “Where do you think you’re going in such a hurry.”
“Bathroom,” he growled. “You got a problem with that?”
The nurse laughed. “Only if you fall and break your arms to go with that matched set of casts on your legs. Let me give you a hand, there.”
She quickly showed him the transfer board tucked next to the bed and instructed him on the easiest way to get from the bed to the chair.
“Lucky you’ve got all these muscles in your arms here,” she said. “You’re gonna need ’em the next few weeks while you can’t use your legs.”
He made some noncommittal sound, then wheeled into the bathroom. Once more he found himself grateful to his landlady for installing grab bars that hadn’t been there a week ago. She’d thought of everything, he thought. Or maybe she’d had help from his neighbor.
“We’ll leave the door open in case you need any help in there,” the nurse called out.
“The hell you will,” he snapped, slamming it shut behind him and driving the bolt home.
Everything took about three times as long from a wheelchair, he was discovering. By the time he finished what he needed to do and managed to maneuver close enough to the sink and could run some water to wash his hands and splash on his face, he felt a little more human. He was weak as a baby, though, both from the pills and from his injuries. Just that small amount of effort tired him out.
When he unlocked the bathroom and wheeled back into the bedroom, both women were waiting just where he left them. The nurse wore an I-told-you-so expression on her face but Lisa Connors just looked worried about him. He didn’t want to analyze why that soft concern in her eyes warmed him far more than it should.
He wanted to protest when the two women both stepped forward to help him transfer back from the wheelchair to the bed but he decided it wasn’t worth the headache. To his chagrin, he was too relieved to be back in bed to work up much of a fuss.
While the nurse checked his vital signs, he couldn’t keep his gaze from straying to Lisa Connors. She stood silently, taking notes as the nurse recited numbers to her. She looked cool and lovely, her eyes huge behind those wire-rim glasses. He couldn’t quite place a finger on what it was about her that attracted him so much. Really, with that choppy short brown hair, most people would probably consider her on the plain side. But there was a delicateness, a fragility, about her that appealed to some deep place inside of him.
“Everything