Because she was irrevocably altered.
Kat picked up the crutches and went into her tiny bedroom. She took off her sneakers, undid her jeans and pulled them off, then stood in front of her mirror, inspecting herself critically.
At first glance Zafir might not notice anything different about Kat—after all she stood on two legs, and was the same height she’d always been, with the same straight back. But then she imagined his gaze travelling down and stopping on her left leg. Specifically on the prosthetic limb that now made up her lower left leg, with its mechanical ankle and fake foot.
Even now Kat couldn’t recall anything about the accident itself on that fateful night. She only knew that one minute she’d been crossing the street and the next she’d been waking up, a day later, in a hospital, with a doctor informing her that they’d had to amputate below the knee to save her leg—which was kind of ironic, considering half of it was now gone.
She’d had flashbacks however, since then, of regaining consciousness and realising that her foot was trapped under the heaviest weight. People had crowded around her but she hadn’t been able to move or speak. And then she’d slipped back into darkness.
That was why she got claustrophobic now.
Sometimes people gave her a second glance, but they soon dismissed her when they saw her slightly limping gait and figured this woman with darker hair and no make-up couldn’t possibly be the Kat Winters.
A ball of emotion lodged itself in Kat’s chest, and before she could stop them hot tears blurred her vision. But she dashed them away angrily as she sat down on her bed and set about removing her prosthetic limb with an efficiency born of habit.
It had been a long time since she’d indulged in self-pity. That had been in the dark early days, when she’d fallen down in many graceless heaps while trying to get to the bathroom during the night, when she’d hurled her crutches across the room in a rising tide of fury at the hand she’d been dealt. Or when she’d locked herself away for long days, sunk in such a black depression that she’d thought she might never emerge into daylight again.
It was her oldest friend, Julie, who was also her agent, who had finally saved her. And the local rehabilitation centre. It was there that she’d learnt how to deal with her new reality and had been able to start putting things into perspective after meeting a man who had lost both his legs in a war, and a woman who had lost an arm, and an endlessly cheerful little girl who’d lost her limbs after meningitis... They, and many more, had humbled her, and reminded her that she was one of the luckier ones.
And gradually she’d clawed her way out of the mire to a place of acceptance, where this was her new reality and she just had to get on with it. And she had been getting on with it, perfectly well, until a Zafir-shaped storm had blown everything up again.
Kat could be honest enough with herself to acknowledge that—as much as the accident and its consequences had made her feel as if her life had shrunk—she’d been living in a kind of limbo, taking one day at a time. The accident had been so catastrophic that she’d been able to block out that last night with Zafir for a long time, but recently it had been creeping back, as if now she was ready to deal with it...
Maybe he was right, whispered a coaxing voice. Maybe you do have unfinished business. Perhaps if you took on the assignment you could lay more than one ghost to rest.
The ghost of the relationship she’d thought she had with Zafir, but which had never really existed...only in her romantic fantasies.
The ghost of the Kat Winters she’d been before—in awe and intimidated by nearly everything and everyone around her in spite of her high-flying career, and by none more so than Sheikh Zafir Ibn Hafiz Al-Noury. The ghost of her mother’s death and the constant feeling of failure Kat had grown up with when she hadn’t been able to save a mother who hadn’t wanted to be saved.
The thought lodged in Kat’s head, and as much as she wanted to dismiss it out of hand she was afraid that she couldn’t go back to fooling herself that Zafir was firmly in her past. She’d been too scared to really look at the repercussions of what had happened between them, but seeing him again this evening had roused more than one dormant part of her.
Not least of which was the reawakening of her sexual awareness. It was terrifying. The prospect of intimacy and what it would mean now was something she’d found easy to bury deep inside her since the accident. If she’d thought about it at all, she’d imagined that it would be with someone gentle, kind...patient.
Zafir was a force of nature—above such benign human virtues. He didn’t have to deal with imperfection. He walked amongst the brightest, the best, the most beautiful. He was one of them.
Panic skittered up Kat’s spine. There was no way she felt ready to trust Zafir on an intimate level again with her new self.
Resolutely shutting her mind to that scenario, she thought again of that fateful night and their fight.
Her conscience pricked when she remembered rushing out of his apartment—had she been too hasty? But once she’d known that he didn’t love her, the last thing she’d wanted to do was try to defend herself to someone who had only ever seen her as some kind of a commodity.
That’s how her mother had seen her—as a means to make money, capitalising on her daughter’s beauty. Zafir had been no different—he’d all but admitted he’d only proposed because she’d fitted into his life on a superficial level and nothing more. It had driven home to Kat how much she hungered to be loved for her whole self.
But she had the sinking feeling that her secret wounds would remain raw until she confronted Zafir properly and forced him to listen to her side of the story behind those lurid headlines.
Not that she wanted anything more than that... The prospect of more made panic surge again even as her blood grew hot.
She would deny that her attraction to him was as strong as ever with every breath in her body—she had no intention of ever letting Zafir see her like this. She looked down at her residual limb and ran a hand over it almost protectively.
Yet even as she entertained the possibility of acquiescing to his demand—purely on a professional basis—she balked at the thought. The prospect of going back into that world and being scrutinised terrified her. And doing it all with Zafir by her side? Scrambling her brain to pieces? Making all the cold parts of her melt again after she’d spent so much time rebuilding her defences?
No way. She couldn’t. She wasn’t strong enough yet.
At that moment Kat caught sight of her reflection in the mirror as she sat on the bed. Her eyes were huge. She looked panicked and pale... Something inside her resisted that. She sat up straight and took in the full reality of who she was now. A damaged woman, yes, and less whole than she’d once been, but actually in many ways more whole than she’d ever been.
She’d always known on some level that she wasn’t prepared to hide away as Kaycee Smith for ever, and Julie had been putting more and more pressure on her to come out of her protective cocoon, to let herself be seen again.
And now Zafir was asking her to take on a modelling assignment. That was all. No, it’s not, whispered a snide voice, and Kat’s heart thumped in response. Zafir had wanted perfection before, and he’d rejected her because she’d fallen from grace. She would never give him a chance to do that to her again.
She thought of the sum of money he’d mentioned and realised with a churning gut that it would allow her to pay Julie back. Her friend had helped support Kat through not only the first six months of her rehabilitation, but since then too, because Kat had only had the most basic of insurance. But also—and maybe more important—she realised that she would be able to help the rehabilitation centre that had been so instrumental in her recovery.
The St Patrick’s Medical Centre for Traumatic Injuries was currently facing the prospect