“Ever try gymnastics?”

Kerry suffered a flash of memory of her childhood, the arduous 278 Melissa Good hours spent trying desperately to balance on a four-inch chunk of wood.

“When I was younger, yes,” she admitted. “My parents thought it would make me graceful.” She adroitly dodged a pipe sticking out of one of the stairs.

“They were right,” Curt laughed. “Hey, I just have to drop this bag off...you interested in sharing a pop?”

Fortunately, Kerry was from the Midwest and realized he was talking about a soda, not proposing something indecent. “Wish I could.” She softened the words with an honest smile. “Thanks for asking.”

They’d reached the bottom floor, and he shifted his bag to his other shoulder and held a hand out again. “Maybe next time, okay?”

Kerry took it and returned his firm handshake with one of her own.

“Sure.”

He turned, pulled the door open, then ducked through and let it close behind him. Kerry regarded the door for a moment, then turned and leaned against the wall, folding her arms over her chest as she rested a moment before starting her climb back up. That was interesting, she mused, examining the sensation. It was nice, once in a while, to have someone think you were attractive, wasn’t it?

Other than your partner, of course, Kerry amended hastily. She’d never suspected Dar of thinking otherwise, had she? She thought about that, then blushed a vivid crimson, remembering a certain night not that long ago when she’d looked up from working on a report in her home office to find Dar watching her from the doorway, eyes half-closed, her thoughts very evident by her expression. No, she was pretty confident that they were both very much attracted to each other. But it was nice to have a stranger give your ego a pat on the head once in a while.

Kerry pushed off the wall and started up the steps. Besides, she grinned, he sure was a cutie. In fact, she thought, he reminded her of someone. Now who...ah. She nodded. That’s right—Josh. She’d gotten an e-mail from him that morning, saying he’d accepted her offer and was going to come to Miami.

Sorting through various other issues, Kerry kept jogging upward, catching her wind and falling into an easy rhythm as her body adjusted to the exertion.

THE MACHINE BUZZED softly. Dar kept her eyes firmly closed and spent the moments roundly cursing herself for being a stubborn jerk for not taking Kerry up on her offer of company. This was the third round of scans, and her nerves were beginning to twitch badly, wanting out of the machine and away from the cold, impersonal hands that invaded her personal space and moved her body.

Hands gripped her chin and she jerked, her eyes snapping open and pinning the doctor standing over her with an angry glare.


Red Sky At Morning 279

“Okay, Ms. Rob—” The tall, willowy woman stopped speaking and removed her hands. “Sorry, did I startle you?”

Dar took a breath and forced her irritation down. “No. I thought this was about done.”

The doctor folded her arms. “Just about,” she agreed, wrinkling her well-shaped nose in thought. “You don’t much like being touched, do you?”

Dar scowled a little at being so easily read. “Not much, no,” she admitted. At least this doctor—Alison was her name?—wasn’t the usual condescending, iceberg type. “Sorry.”

“That’s all right, Ms. Roberts,” Dr. Alison reassured her. “Some people don’t. We’re so used to just grabbing what we want and pulling, we forget that sometimes. Could you tilt your head up and to the right?”

Dar complied, watching the woman make adjustments to the machine. The doctor was taller than Kerry but couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds, so thin that Dar was sure she’d blow away if the air conditioning cycled too strongly. Her white lab coat hung loosely on her, and the wrists that extended from it seemed barely wider than two of Dar’s fingers. The machine whirred again.

“Okay.” Dr. Alison looked down at Dar. “We’re done.” She pushed the machine arm back and leaned against the padded table on which Dar was lying. She had hazel eyes and a high forehead made all the more so by a hairstyle tightly pulled back into a knot. “Why don’t you sit up and let me take a look at your shoulder, okay?”

Dar obliged, tensing her abdominal muscles and pulling herself upright, then swinging her legs over the edge of the table. She hopped off and stood upright, startling the doctor, who took a step back.

“Oh.” Dr. Alison made a face, then smiled. “Somehow, patients always look shorter lying down. I didn’t expect you to be that tall.” She gestured toward a side room. “Why don’t we go in there so you can sit?”

Dar followed her in silence, taking a seat on a lower, but also padded bench in the examination room. She was still wearing her sling, but they’d allowed her Tylenol for the nagging headache, and she felt pretty good at the moment. “Well?”

Dr. Alison had been reviewing something on a computer terminal, and now she looked up over the screen at Dar. “Well, you want the bad news first or the good news?”

“Bad,” Dar replied instantly.

“You know, Ms. Roberts, I thought you were going to say that,” the doctor laughed. “Okay, well, the bad news is that you’ve got a lot of swelling in that shoulder. Aside from the bone bruise, you also strained some of the tendons and muscles around there, and everything’s pretty tense.”

Dar ran that over in her head and decided it didn’t sound life 280 Melissa Good threatening. “Okay.”

“You’re going to need to do a lot of physical therapy to get the blood moving in there and get the damaged bits out,” Dr. Alison told her. “It’s going to hurt.”

Pain was something Dar could live with. She’d worked through enough injuries in her years of martial arts, after all, and while she never enjoyed the process, she knew ways of getting past it. “And?” She watched as the doctor left her console and came over, carefully unsnapping the sling to release Dar’s arm.

“I need to see what kind of range of motion you have, okay?” Dr.

Alison waited for Dar to nod, then she took hold of Dar’s wrist and slowly lifted her arm. “Let me know when it starts to hurt.” She first flexed the arm at the elbow, then gently pulled upward, getting no reaction from her wary patient. “Okay, that’s what I thought. Now I’m going to move it out to the side; I think that’s where the problem is going to be.”

Dar nodded and shifted a little, straightening up as the other woman carefully extended her injured arm out to the side, then started to lift it. About halfway, Dar let out a sound somewhere between a cough and a hiss, and the motion stopped.

“Okay.” The doctor examined the angle. “Well, that’s not too bad, actually.” She sounded surprised. “Given what I saw in the pictures, that’s pretty darn good.” She put Dar’s arm back down and started poking at her shoulder, touching and prodding the skin with absorbed interest. “You have a very well developed deltoid here.”

Dar’s brow lifted and she eyed the woman warily. “Thanks.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen a structure like this on a female in a while,”

Dr. Alison added. “You’re not doing steroids or other anabolics, are you?”

Dar glared at her. “Absolutely not.”

“Just asking,” the doctor replied mildly. “No offense intended, Ms.

Roberts. A lot of people do, you know. In my line of work, I deal with an enormous number of athletes. It’s a standard question.” She walked over and checked her screen. “You have an incredible bone density, did you know that?”

How was she supposed to know that? “No,” Dar replied.

“Well, you do.” The doctor typed something. “That’s a good thing.

It’s what kept you from getting hurt worse. You take calcium supplements?”

Dar’s brow creased. Supplements? “No, I just drink milk.”

“Can’t stand the stuff myself.” Dr. Alison shook her head. “Well, good for you, Ms. Roberts. You weight train, correct?”

“Yes.”

The doctor nodded. “Okay, I just need to get some stats on you so I can send them to the therapist. Could you take your shirt off, please?”

It suddenly occurred to Dar why she’d always been more Red Sky At Morning 281

comfortable with male doctors, an interesting moment of self-revelation that almost made her start laughing. “What stats does a therapist need?” she asked, standing up and pulling her T-shirt off over her head one-handedly. It left her in a pair of gym shorts and nothing else.

“Oh, height, weight, limb len—” Dr. Alison stopped speaking for a second as she looked up. “Wow.”

Dar’s eyebrow went right up.

“You have great body structure,” the doctor continued enthusiastically. “You have almost perfect symmetry, did you know that?” She picked up a tape measure and trotted over. “Outstanding.”

Dar didn’t know whether to feel like a show horse on parade or what. She held her arms out when told and felt the tickle of the tape measure as it was run across her back.

“I thought so. Seventy-four inches.” The doctor towed Dar over to a scale. “Let me get your height and weight.” She pushed the height bar up and stood on her tiptoes to let the top of it rest on Dar’s head.

“Seventy-two and three-quarters. Yep, I knew it.” Next, she ran the weights across and nudged the smaller one back and forth until the arm balanced in the center. “One fifty-six.” She nodded and scribbled. “That about normal for you?”

“Give or take a few, yes,” Dar replied. “Why?”

“Just curious.” After measuring Dar’s upper and lower arms, Dr.