Caroline Anderson - A Single Dad To Heal Her Heart

‘Are you sure you’re OK, Matt?’

‘I’m fine,’ he said, and then they hit the track and he unlocked his hands and braced her as she slid down and put her feet on the ground.

He flexed his hands and shoulders and she watched the muscles roll under his damp T-shirt as he turned to her. ‘I won’t be long. Will you be all right?’

She lowered herself to a rock and dragged her eyes off his shoulders. ‘I’ll be fine. There’s no rush. I’ll just sit here and look at the view,’ she told him with a wry smile.

Mostly of him, as he turned away and headed down the track towards the farm at the end where the car was parked.

She studied him, his strong, firm stride, the straight back, his arms hanging loose and relaxed from those broad shoulders. Broad, solid, dependable. And sexy.

Very, very sexy.

Would they see each other again once they were back? She didn’t think so, despite this sizzle between them all weekend, because there was something about him, some reserve in his eyes, and when he’d kissed her he’d pulled away.

Would he have done that if he intended to follow through? Probably not, and she still didn’t feel ready for a relationship anyway after all she’d been through, but if nothing else they were good friends now and she’d known from that first day that she could rely on him.

He had a rock-solid dependability, carefully hidden under a lot of jokes and laughter, and if she had to be in this fix, she couldn’t have asked for a better person to help her out of it.

She just wished she hadn’t made it necessary.

* * *

‘We need to get this boot off.’

He’d propped her up on a sun lounger on the deck outside the lodge, and he was perched on the end by her feet, wondering how to remove it without hurting her.

‘They’re pretty old,’ she offered. ‘I don’t mind if you need to cut it off.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t think I will. I’ll take the lace out and see how we get on.’

He unthreaded it, peeled back the tongue as far as it would go and slid his fingers carefully inside. ‘How’s that feel?’

‘Not too bad. A bit easier now you’ve undone the lace.’

‘Let’s just see what happens if I try and ease your foot out. Yell if I hurt you.’

She gave a stifled snort. ‘Don’t worry, I will,’ she said drily, and he looked up and met those gorgeous clear blue eyes and saw trust in them. He hoped it wasn’t unfounded.

‘Right, here goes,’ he said, and gently cupping his hand under her ankle to support it, he eased the boot away.

She made a tiny whimper at one point, but nothing more, and then it was off and he lowered her foot carefully onto a pillow. ‘How’s that feel?’

Her breath sighed out. ‘Better. Thank you.’

‘Don’t thank me, I haven’t prodded it yet,’ he said drily, and began to feel his way carefully around the joint, testing the integrity of the ligaments.

‘Ow.’

‘Sorry.’ He prodded a little more, feeling carefully for any displacement, but if there was it was slight. ‘I don’t think it’s fractured, and it doesn’t feel displaced, so I think it’s probably only a slight ligament tear. You need an X-ray, though.’

‘It can wait till we get back, can’t it?’

He nodded. ‘I think so. There’s not much else going on with it, I don’t think, but we’ll get Dan to look at it when he comes back just to be on the safe side. In the meantime I’ll get you some ice and I can strap it, if you like. That should help.’

‘Please. And I could kill a cup of green tea—oh, and a banana, if there’s one left,’ she said, throwing a grin over her shoulder as he headed for the kitchen, and he gave a grunt of laughter.

‘I get the distinct impression you’re milking this,’ he said drily as he walked away, and he put the kettle on, discovered there were no ice cubes, wetted a couple of tea towels and put them in the freezer, and raided the first-aid kit for some physio tape.

* * *

‘Better?’

She nodded. ‘Much.’

It was, hugely better, which wasn’t difficult. Her boot had been pressing on the outside of her ankle, and removing it had made a lot of difference. So had the cold pack and the strapping that, considering he was a trauma surgeon and not a physio or an orthopaedic surgeon, was looking very professional. It still shouldn’t have happened, though, and she sighed.

‘What?’

She shrugged. ‘Just—I’m cross with myself. And sorry, because I really thought we had a good chance of winning until I took my eye off the ball, and now I’ve blown it and ruined your last day.’

He frowned, his eyes serious. ‘It’s hardly ruined. You’re alive, Livvy, and you might not have been. If your head had hit that rock instead of your ribs, it could have been a very different story. I’d take that as a win any day. And it doesn’t matter about my climb, or the challenge.’

‘Yes, it does, and I still feel guilty. If you’d teamed up with someone else you might have won, but now I’ve let you down.’

‘No, you haven’t.’

‘Yes, I have! I’m the weak link in the chain, Matt.’

He rolled his eyes. ‘You’re not weak! There’s nothing weak about you.’

‘I didn’t look where I was going on a narrow rocky path with a crumbling edge. That’s pretty weak from where I’m standing.’

‘You’re sitting. Well, lying, really, technically speaking.’

She was, still propped up on the sun lounger with her ankle wrapped in the thawing tea towel in a plastic bag, a cup of green tea in her hand and a packet of crunchy oat cookies on the table between them because apparently the bananas were finished. Ah, well. She took another cookie and bit into it.

‘You’re a pedant, did you know that?’ she said mildly around the crumbs, and he chuckled, his frown fading.

‘It might have been mentioned. How’s your ankle now?’

‘Cold.’

‘Good. How about your ribs?’

‘Sore. I might move the ice pack.’

‘Here, let me.’

He picked up the makeshift ice pack, turned it over and gestured to her to pull up her T-shirt. She eased it out of the way and he winced.

‘Ow. That’s a good bruise. Let me feel that.’

‘Why, because poking it is going to make it feel so much better?’ she said drily, but he just gave her a look that was getting all too familiar and tugged up her T-shirt a little further. And then he frowned and ran his finger across the top of her abdomen from side to side along her scar. Well, one of them.

‘What happened? Another accident?’

‘Yes, but not my fault, before you say it. I was in a car crash when I was nineteen months old. I had a ruptured spleen and a perforated bowel.’

‘Ouch.’ He turned his attention back to her ribs and prodded them gently and rather too thoroughly. ‘Well, there’s nothing displaced,’ he said, and she rolled her eyes.

‘I could have told you that. I don’t have a fracture, Matt.’

‘How do you know? It’s not possible to be sure.’

She sighed. ‘Because I’m inside my body and you’re not?’

One eyebrow shot up, his eyes locked briefly with hers and then he let his breath out on what could have been a laugh and tugged her T-shirt back down, and she realised what she’d said.

Colour flooded her face and she groaned. ‘Sorry—I didn’t mean that quite the way it came out.’

‘No, I don’t suppose you did.’ He got to his feet and picked up his mug, hefting the ice pack in his hand and avoiding her eyes. ‘This thing’s thawed. I’ll get you another one, then I’ll make some more coffee and sort my stuff out. Do you want another drink?’

She shook her head, half mortally embarrassed at her off-the-cuff remark, and half tantalised by the idea of Matt’s really rather gorgeous body so intimately locked with hers.