A Family For Christmas. Tara Taylor Quinn

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       CHAPTER THREE

      CARA SWALLOWED THE water held to her lips. Whenever the doctor was in the room, she mustered up the wherewithal to speak as though nothing was wrong. Years of practice protecting Shawn—but mostly she had been protecting...

      No, she couldn’t go there—had honed her ability to continue on through the pain. As though it didn’t exist.

      Sometimes she wondered if pain was just a figment of the imagination. Thought a lot about the power of mind over matter.

      She could deal with living in a body that hurt with every move she made.

      It was the emotional stuff that she wasn’t so sure about. Wasn’t even sure she wanted to try anymore.

      What was the point?

      Except that...she wasn’t dead. Shawn had left her for dead. As she’d traipsed through the Nevada wilderness, hungry, hurting, nearly freezing to death at night until she’d found a ditch to huddle in, finding not even a path on which to walk, she’d accepted that she was going to die.

      Had come to peace with doing so.

      So why wasn’t she dead? Why was she lying on a nice mattress under a soft comforter, wearing a makeshift hospital gown?

      The doctor had cut the sleeves off a man’s shirt and instructed her to put it on backward, buttoned only halfway up. He’d said nothing about her undies, and though she’d have liked a change, she’d left them on.

      She’d shuddered a time or two as he ran his practiced hands over her body, feeling for breaks, discussing his findings. Her ankle was a little swollen—her doing. As was the bruise on her knee and the bit of swelling on her right wrist. The cuts on her arms and face—all of which he’d carefully cleaned, covered with some kind of ointment and then bandaged where applicable—were compliments of Shawn. The arm abrasions had come when she’d held them up to protect her face.

      He’d tended to the bruises and cuts on her legs, too. Left there by the steel-toed tips of the boots her husband wore when he wasn’t surfing. Since moving to the West Coast he’d begun to fancy himself as some kind of cowboy surfer dude.

      In the beginning, she’d thought he looked damned cute in his tight jeans and Western shirts unbuttoned to the navel. But somewhere along the way, everything about Shawn had ceased being a turn-on.

      According to him he was the one who’d brought joy back to her life, which had been something she hadn’t felt since before her mother got sick and life had become a series of doctors. With her father’s contacts, there’d been a never-ending stream of them. Over and over he’d put her mother through examinations and treatments. All he’d really done was deliver them boatloads of dashed hopes. And...

      No, she knew better than to open a door that she’d spent years nailing shut.

      Funny, here she was, ready to go herself, and she’d been rescued by a doctor, of all people.

      What did that mean?

      “Get some rest...” Dr. Walsh had finished tending to her and was pulling the sheet and comforter up to her chin. She’d practically choked getting down the antibiotic and painkiller he’d given her.

      A huge believer in accountability and in Karma, Cara decided against thinking for the next few hours. Just long enough to sleep.

      Sleep brought clarity, which she needed to figure out what her still being alive meant.

      It had been so long since she’d really slept. Without senses on alert. Without fear.

      She had nothing else to fear now.

      And she really just wanted to sleep.

      For as long as he’d let her.

      * * *

      HE WOKE HER in the late afternoon. Checked her vitals. Shone the light in her eyes again. Gave her more to drink. Cara complied with words of thanks. Hoping to slip back into the forgetfulness of sleep.

      “You need to eat.”

      Her burning throat was barely handling the liquid, not that she wanted him to know that. “I’m not hungry.”

      “I wouldn’t expect you to have an appetite,” the doctor’s kind voice came back at her. “But you’ve gone over twenty-four hours, at least, without sustenance, and I have no way of starting an IV here. So...you eat...or I make a call.”

      “You call, I die.” Without forethought she played on the guilt he’d exposed earlier. Men sometimes gave you tells.

      Still, her words were thick. She was groggy. She couldn’t believe she still had fight in her. Probably just habit. It would dissipate.

      Dr. Simon Walsh was trying to save her life.

      She had no life to live. No intention of walking back into the world again. Ever.

      Odd that, having made that determination, Karma had seen fit to deliver her up to a doctor. There was that fact staring her in the face again. Even after sleep. Did fate have a shadow side?

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