Читать книгу His Mistletoe Bride - Cara Colter - Страница 7
ОглавлениеCHAPTER TWO
LILA sat on the edge of the toilet in the bathroom, staring at the dark head bent over her foot.
Despite the fact Officer Taggert had perfected that policeman look of professional remoteness, he had actually flinched at the bathroom decor, which she knew to be fabulous: an imaginative creation of what Santa’s washroom would look like.
There was a fake window, framed in snowmen-patterned curtains, looking out over beautifully hand-painted scenes from the North Pole. The towels had Christmas trees on them, the soap had glitter, the toilet paper, one of her top selling items, was printed with Ho, Ho, Ho.
In fact, before he had arrived, Lila had been sitting at her desk, contemplating starting her first ever book, How to Have a Perfect Christmas, with a really fun chapter on bathroom decorating for the holidays.
But now, despite the cheer of the bright red and white paint and the merry decor, the atmosphere in the close quarters of the bathroom seemed mildly icy. Taggert was remote, determined to keep his professional distance though, really, it seemed a little too late for that.
She had already felt him, felt the hard, unrelenting, pure-man strength of him, and been as dazed by that as by the pain in her foot.
Dazed would describe her reaction to him, period—the reason she had stepped on broken glass.
After the initial fear had come something even more frightening. A feeling, unfounded because you could not know a person from simply looking at them.
But her feeling had been instant, and felt deeply.
The world is a better place because this man is in it.
She tried to thrust the thought away as soon as she had it. You could not know that about a complete stranger, even if he was wearing a police uniform. Despite making great strides since arriving in Snow Mountain, she was not sleeping well, and she knew her judgment was not what it once had been.
Naturally, now, she was doing her darnedest to be as perfectly poised and professional as he was, trying to act as though being picked up and carried down the hall by an extraordinarily appealing man was an everyday ho-hum kind of experience for her.
The dog seemed determined for them all to get cozy again. It had squeezed in between the toilet bowl and the sink, and was nuzzling her hand with its warm, damp nose.
“This really isn’t necessary,” she said again, her world is a better place feeling causing her to feel guilty about the secret she was determined to keep from him.
She was amazed that he had not seen the results of last night’s meeting crammed into the dark corner by the bathroom: protest signs, freshly painted.
Lila had found out this morning that it was necessary to have a permit to assemble in Snow Mountain, a ridiculous formality given the tininess of the town, she felt. She had also found out that it took a number of weeks to get a permit, and she needed to draw attention to the fact Town Council had voted to cancel Christmas at Snow Mountain, now.
The unpermitted protest was scheduled for the Thursday before Thanksgiving. The SOS team was nearly delirious with delight over the plan to close down Main Street right in front of the town hall until some funding was reinstated for the Santa’s Workshop display at Bandstand Park.
Her committee was not a bunch of hotheaded rebels, either, not the kind of people one would ordinarily expect at a protest. They were nice people, decent, law-abiding, hardworking people who were willing to stand up for what they believed in.
And they believed in Christmas.
Still, Lila was pretty sure her uncle would kill her if he knew. And this man in front of her? If the world was a better place because of him, it was probably because he would be exceedingly intolerant of schemes that fell even the teensiest bit outside of the law.
She shivered, still taken totally aback by her reaction of such total awareness to Officer Taggert. She, of all people, knew to be distrustful of instant attraction, since she had paid the horrific price of someone’s totally unwanted and unencouraged attraction to her.
She’d been reminded of the consequences of that just a few minutes ago, when she’d once again experienced that horrible startled reflex, a reflex she had assured herself was almost gone—until the door had slammed tonight.
She had known as soon as she’d arrived in
Snow Mountain that her doubts about opening the first storefront for her unexpectedly successful Internet Christmas company had been unfounded. It had been the right decision to pack up her life and move across the country.
Her healing, her return to normal, could begin here, in this sleepy little town nestled among forests and mountains.
Finally she was going to be able to overcome the block that she’d been experiencing ever since she’d been approached, because of the Internet success of her small company, to write How to Have a Perfect Christmas under the pseudonym, Miss L. Toe.
For weeks now, Lila had been experiencing excitement and hope instead of that horrible feeling of flatness, interspersed with anxiety. Except for the sleep problem, she was feeling so much better.
Snow Mountain had so much unrealized potential! It was a magical place, a town off a Christmas card. It was the place that could inspire her to write a great first book, to launch a great storefront for her Internet business.
But no lights? No Christmas display in the town square?
She remembered that display so clearly from the time her family had flown up here from their home in Florida to spend Christmas with her mother’s oldest brother, Uncle Paul, the year she’d turned ten. She still remembered that Christmas more vividly than any other. The magic of snow, and real Christmas trees, the feeling in that small town.
Maybe that’s what had pulled her back to this place when her world had fallen apart.
So, she just wasn’t having Town Council squash her dreams before they even got started! She was giving herself over to creating the perfect Christmas store and the perfect Christmas town and the perfect book on creating the perfect Christmas. It gave her a sense of safety and control over the things that had been snatched from her.
Her arrival in Snow Mountain had returned to her a belief that there were places in the world that were wonderfully old-fashioned, where children still walked to school and played in the streets without their parents hovering, where women never gave a thought to walking alone, where violent things rarely happened.
But then the wrench—Town Council practically canceling Christmas!
Still, despite that challenge to her control over creating the perfect Christmas, Lila was aware of beginning to feel safe again. Tonight was a perfect example: She’d left her door unlocked even after store hours.
Lila was aware that her initial reaction of panic to the unexpected arrival in her shop had faded. It had not faded because she knew the man who had changed her world forever was in jail, but rather illogically because Officer Taggert radiated the strength and calm—the certain forbidding sternness—of a man who could be relied on to protect, to keep the world safe, to uphold standards of decency.
At first, she’d felt anxious that maybe he’d heard a whisper about the planned protest, especially when he seemed so suspicious, probing. Minutes of the meeting, for Pete’s sake.
But it had soon become very apparent to her that, despite his offer to help, Officer Taggert’s heart was not in it at all. He’d been ordered here by her uncle, and had put in an appearance.
Unless he saw the signs on his way out the door, the protest was safe.
She felt the tiniest little shiver of apprehension that she was on the wrong side of the law, but her purpose was so right that she felt justified.
Then it occurred to her that maybe the shiver she was feeling was not apprehension, but a treacherous little stirring of something else, despite the deliberate remoteness of the man who shared the bathroom with her.
Appreciation, primal compared to her rather philosophical thought that the world was a better place because he was in it. It was an almost clinical awareness of a healthy female for a healthy male. It didn’t help that she had felt the strong bands of his arms around her, his easy strength as he had carried her to the bathroom.
He had seemed indifferent to their close proximity. But then again, he’d missed the protest signs, and he didn’t look like a man who missed much, so maybe he’d felt a forbidden little stirring, too. He was a healthy male after all.
Taggert was at least six-one of pure male perfection: sleek muscle, long legs, deep chest, broad, broad shoulders, all accentuated magnificently by the crisp lines of his light blue on navy police uniform.
His face was astounding, chiseled masculine perfection, unconscious strength in the set of his chin, the firmness around his mouth, the lines around his eyes. His eyes, which had initially been shaded by the brim of his hat, were now fully visible since he had removed the hat.
While the rest of him was pure cop, one-hundred- percent intimidating and authoritative presence, his eyes were the softest shade of brown, shot through with threads of pure gold. His eyes did not reflect the remoteness of his demeanor, though there were walls up in them, walls that guarded a mystery…and most likely his heart.
He carried himself with the utter confidence of a man who knew his own strength and capabilities perfectly. No swagger, only pure, unadulterated self-assurance.
Now he was on one knee in front of her, focused on her foot. His hair was short, but incredibly thick and shiny, the rich color of dark chocolate. She was amazed by a renegade desire to feel its silk beneath her fingertips.
His hands were unbelievably sure on her ankle, and she stifled a gasp when he pulled her sock away and held her naked foot in the warm, hard cup of his hand. The shiver of appreciation she’d felt graduated to a betraying tingle of pure awareness. She felt terrified in a much different way than she had felt terrified the last two years of her life when she had become the victim of a stalker. He was a man she had worked with, and whose interest in her had seemed so benign…at first.
“Really,” she managed to croak, “I can look after it.”
“Look, either I’m taking a look at it, or I’m taking you to the hospital. You choose.”
He glanced up, and she noticed just the faintest shadow of whiskers on his clean-shaven face, felt swamped by his closeness, his pure masculine scent.
“Are you all right?” he asked, genuine concern faintly overriding the professionalism in the masculine deepness of his voice. “You aren’t going to faint, are you?”
“Faint?” she managed to say, inserting proud outrage into her voice, a woman determined not to be seen as weak ever again. “I am not the fainting kind.”
But she had managed to sound more certain than she actually felt. Was she all right? Why did she feel as if she was standing in the open doorway of a plane, deciding whether to jump?
“I’ve been doing this a long time,” he said patiently. “There is no fainting kind. I’ve seen a Marine faint at the sight of his own blood.”
“Oh.”
“Can I go ahead then? Or do you want me to take you to the hospital?”
The eyes were intent on her face, the voice no-nonsense, though his offering her a choice relaxed something in her, even though, logically, she knew it was not a real choice and he was very much in control.
“Go ahead,” she squeaked.
“It’s not so bad,” he reassured her, lifting her leg so he could get a good look at the heel, gently swabbing away the blood with an alcohol pad. “I see a single cut, not very deep. I think there’s a little piece of glass still in there.”
He reached for tweezers, tugged, held up a tiny fragment of glass for her to see before he dropped it into the wastepaper basket that was painted like a toy drum.
“I’m just going to dress the wound,” he explained, his voice deep, soothing, as if he was talking to a small child. “I don’t see any more glass, no need for stitches. A wound to this part of the body just bleeds a lot.”
The voice of a man who had seen many wounds and much blood, without ever coming even remotely close to fainting; a man who would be just this coolly and reassuringly competent in crises of any magnitude.
He placed a cotton gauze on her foot, held it in place by winding a bandage over her heel and up her ankle in a crisscross pattern, all very professional, clinical, detached.
Not, apparently, being bothered by tingles the way she was.
“You’re obviously used to doing this sort of thing,” she said. “This is obviously your first trip to the North Pole, though.”
He looked surprised, and then he smiled.
It was just the tiniest hint of a smile, but it changed the stern lines of his face completely. She glimpsed for a moment something of his past: something reckless, devil-may-care, mischievous. Charming.
He got up, picked up his hat and brushed off his knee with it. He glanced around at the bathroom decor, his eyes resting briefly on a jar of bright candies labeled Jolly Beans, For Medicinal Use Only.
The smile that had tickled his lips evaporated, and she was aware whatever he had once been, he was not that now. He actually winced, as if such adorable corniness hurt his eyes. He stepped quickly out of the bathroom and back into the hallway.
All she could think of was he had nearly brushed against the protest signs, and for the first time in her life she was completely unworthy of trust.
He clamped his hat back on his head, pulled it low, so his amazing eyes were once more shadowed. Then he whistled for his dog, and let himself out the front door.
She limped after him and locked it behind him, aware that even though Snow Mountain itself felt safer to her than it had half an hour ago, she herself did not feel as safe, as if she stood on the edge of something scary. And wonderful.
But that she of all people, she reminded herself with stern warning, should know how very scary a brief encounter with a strange man could become.
It was the reason she’d sworn off real life and chosen to embrace fantasy instead. Her beautiful store, this beautiful town, her literary adventures—those were going to be enough for her. It was going to fill every void, make her feel safe, fulfilled, in control.
A woman would never feel one hundred percent in control around a man like Taggert. Never.
Determined to make the creation of a perfect Christmas her life mission, she marched back to her computer.
Suddenly decorating a bathroom seemed like a terrible place to start How to Have A Perfect Christmas. Terrible.
“You have to start somewhere,” she told herself, aware of a panicky little edge in her voice as she said it. She’d accepted the advance, and worse, she’d spent it. She had a deadline!
Obviously the writer’s block was coming, at least in part, from her insomnia. But it wasn’t helping one little bit that the place on earth most likely to be chosen for a poster of the perfect Christmas town had practically canceled Christmas. Once she looked after that, everything else was going to fall into place.
With a new sense of verve, Lila picked up the phone, took a deep breath and did the thing she had been debating about and putting off since the meeting last night.
“CLEM TV, Spokane,” a voice on the other end answered.
“Could I speak to Jade Flynn, please?” She named the reporter who seemed to do the majority of the human interest stories for the station.
“Can I tell her what you’re calling about?”
“The cancellation of Christmas,” Lila said firmly.
Brody Taggert joined the other men at the window of the Snow Mountain Police Department, took a sip of his coffee and looked across Main Street at the fracas outside of Snow Mountain Town Hall.
The protesters had completely blocked the street, and were enthusiastically waving lovingly hand-painted signs.
Elves Have Rights, Too! Say Yes To Christmas. Save Our Snow Mountain. Save Santa. As they marched around in a circle, they chanted, “Heck no, the elves won’t go.”
It was an unlikely-looking group of protestors—not a dreadlock or pierced body part on any of them. Lots of gray hair out there, with one glaring exception, of course.
Her hair, where it showed beneath the brim of her fur-trimmed Santa hat, was catching the sun, and looked like it was spun through with gold.
It seemed to him Lila Grainger was as eye-catching in that hat, bundled up in a pink oversize parka that made her look like a marshmallow, as she would have been in a furtrimmed bikini.
The CLEM TV mobile van from Spokane was pulling up. Bruce Wilkes from the Snow Mountain News was already happily snapping pictures.
“What are you going to do, Chief?” Randy Mulligan asked uncertainly.
Tag slid Hutch a look. Have a heart attack, came to mind. The chief looked apoplectic.
Of course, his niece, looking positively radiant, was in the very middle of the mêlée. When she separated from the other protestors to go and talk to Jade Flynn, who was getting out of the news van, it was more than obvious who was in charge of the protest.
Tag, instead of making the professional assessment ringleader, noticed that aside from the fact she looked cute as a button, she was still limping.
“You didn’t even catch a whisper of this when you went to see her?” Hutch asked Tag accusingly.
“No, sir. She told me they were going to ask Jamison to play Santa—”
“Like hell I’m playing Santa,” Jamison muttered indignantly, putting enough curse words between playing and Santa to do his Marine corps heritage proud.
“—and that they’d come up with a new name. That’s it.” Well, that wasn’t it. Tag had known she was up to something naughty. He could now clearly remember the guilty blush when she’d mentioned getting city hall to change their minds. He felt he’d probably been distracted by naughty thoughts of his own, especially after he’d carried her down that endless hall to her bathroom, and then spent agonizing minutes administering first-aid to the cut on her foot.
You didn’t admit to your boss you’d had naughty thoughts about his niece, thoughts that might have prevented you from seeing certain things coming, he told himself.
Besides, the grim news about Boo had been pretty fresh that night; Tag knew it had clouded his thinking, and still did, though he wore the mask of functioning perfectly.
“Go arrest her,” Hutch said, thankfully to no one in particular.
Randy Mulligan obviously thought of some urgent work he had to do. He stampeded from the room as if the Hells Angels had arrived in town and he had to personally deal with them.
“Arrest her?” Pete Harper said. “Are you kidding? You know how that’s going to look on the evening news? This town has barely recovered from the elf on fire last year.”
“How’s it going to look if I don’t arrest her and she’s my niece?” Hutch snapped. “Like I’m playing favorites, that’s how. If I don’t do something decisive right now every special interest group in Snow Mountain from the Grannies for Justice to Pals for Pooches is going to think they can shut down the town anytime they don’t get what they want. Pals for Pooches has been trying to get an animal shelter for a lot longer than Lila’s been trying to save Christmas.”
Unfortunately Tag could see his point.
“Well, I’m not arresting her,” Pete said. “My mother would kill me.”
His mother was out there right beside Lila, carrying a sign that showed a tombstone with Santa on it, RIP, and then Killed By Snow Mountain Town Council. Jeanie Harper was also dispensing cookies to the news crews, practically guaranteeing all stories would be slanted in favor of the protestors.
As if they wouldn’t be anyway.
“I ain’t arresting nobody, either,” Jamison said. He jerked his thumb at Pete. “His mother wouldn’t bake me cookies anymore.”
Pete shot him a look. “My mother bakes you cookies?”
“Go arrest her, Tag,” Hutch said wearily.
It fell neatly into that category of a job no one else wanted to do, and besides, he was the one who had missed the signs that this was going to happen. Now that he thought about it, hadn’t there been something stuffed in that dark corner of the hallway by her bathroom?
Oh, yeah, signs.
“You mean arrest her?” Tag hedged uncomfortably, “Or just take her aside, and try to talk some sense into her?”
Her uncle sighed. “She’s just like her mother. Talking sense to her is like trying to explain algebra to a chimp. Impossible. Besides, you think she’s going to give in quietly? What kind of news story would that make?”
Unfortunately Tag could see his point. He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, turned and lifted his jacket off the back of his chair, pulled on his hat. Boo, who had been snoozing under his desk, lifted her head and thumped her tail on the floor, hopeful for an invitation.
“Fat chance,” he told her sourly, while silently searching for signs of the dog’s deterioration. “I count on you to warn me about who I have to keep an eye on. You failed me on this one, Boo. You loved Lila Grainger.”
He realized he did not want to be using the word love in any sentence addressed to Boo, especially one that also included the name Lila Grainger. She was just that kind of woman, the kind who could storm a man’s defenses before he even knew he was under attack.
The kind of woman where you noticed the fact she was limping, rather than the fact she was leading an insurrection.
The kind of woman with a foot so enchanting, you overlooked the signs of revolt brewing all around you.
The dog sighed, put her head back down and closed her eyes. Almost easier to go out there and deal with that than the dog’s easy surrender to being left behind.
Moments later, he was shouldering his way through a crowd worthy of a big-city Santa Claus parade, with the same attitude of excited anticipation in the air. There hadn’t been this much excitement in Snow Mountain since the Snow Leopards, the high school football team, had made state finals three years ago.
Over the chanting, Tag could hear a tinny loudspeaker wailing out a sentimental rendition of the song, “You Light up My Life.”
It seemed as if the entire population of Snow Mountain—plus most of the surrounding area—had known about the demonstration. This was a town that could not keep secrets, so how it had stayed below the police radar was something of a miracle.
The air of celebration toned down a bit as he shoved his way through to the center of activity. He tried to tell himself he had probably been in worse positions, but he could not remember when.
By the time he arrived in front of Lila Grainger, he was very aware of the hostility the crowd had toward him.
She saw him coming. So did the news crews. Every camera, cell phone and video recorder within a hundred miles had accumulated in front of town hall. And every single one of them was pointed at him.
“Hello, Officer Taggert,” she said bravely, trying for, but missing, defiance. Hell, she was trembling slightly.
“Miss Grainger.”
Damn it. She looked adorable in the ridiculous hat. The oversize coat made her look even smaller than she was.
He leaned close to her, could smell that heady scent of wild strawberries, tried to avoid the mistake he had made last time of breathing in too much of it. He fought back a sudden impulse to ask her about her damned foot. “Miss Grainger, would you come with me?”
He said it quietly, for her ears only. She looked like the type that buckled under to authority, but of course the wild-strawberry scent should have warned him of, well, a wilder side.
She took a step back from him, fixed the incredible deep sea-blue of her eyes on him, and squared her shoulders. “Am I under arrest, Officer Taggert?”
Jeanie Harper gasped, which probably meant a life sentence of no more shortbread for Tag, her son or Jamison. This was not something he wanted to be held responsible for, but he was the new guy. The flak always landed on him.
The cameras were snapping, the film rolling. The news crew moved in closer, and Jade Flynn flipped her hair and moistened her lips, her timing for the story impeccable. Microphones shaped like huge foam hot dogs dangled over them.
“You need a permit to assemble,” he said quietly. “You’re obstructing traffic.”
“Am I under arrest?” she demanded again. She pointed her chin upward, stubbornly, but he could see she was shaking even more now.
And that she was all of five foot three and probably weighed about a hundred and ten pounds. He remembered that weight in his arms, struggled to keep his facial expression absolutely impassive.
Standing there in her Santa hat, she looked exactly like the girl who had probably not done one naughty thing in her whole life. She’d probably never even had a speeding ticket, never mind fur-trimmed bikinis.
She was just one of those people who became passionate about causes. Not that he wanted to be thinking about her and passion. What a waste. All that passion over a silly display in the park.
Though every time he drove by Bandstand Park, he had to admit he was aware of the black emptiness of it, instead of the lights, the little characters, Santa’s reverberating ho-ho-ho. Suddenly, without warning, he remembered Ethan coming home when he was about twelve with Santa’s hat, swiped from the park.
And he, the older brother, making him take it back, foreshadowing his career, which at this moment he hated.
“Are you arresting me, Officer Taggert?”
“Yeah,” he said reluctantly, “you’re under arrest.”
A discontented hum began in the crowd. Jeanie called out, “Shame on you, Brody Taggert.”
This was the problem with becoming a police officer in the small town where you had grown up. Jeanie Harper no doubt had memories of him raiding her garden, and knocking over her mailbox on Halloweens past.
He put a hand on Lila’s shoulder, intending to guide her out of the crowd, but she shrugged out from under his hand, and stubbornly presented her wrists to him.
He bit the inside of his cheek, whether to keep his temper or to keep from laughing he wasn’t quite sure. Miss L. Toe did look ludicrous, but since he had not laughed since Boo’s diagnosis, he figured it was his temper.
He heard Jade Flynn say to her cameraman, “Oh, boy. Be sure and get this.”
Everybody wanted a show to go with the storyline about the town that was canceling Christmas. And every show needed a villain. Jade Flynn didn’t care who looked bad. Lila looked like she might, but not enough to let go of this opportunity to get the publicity she wanted.
And he was the who that was going to look bad.
He stared her down, she was obviously frightened, but not enough to back down. She was willing to sacrifice herself to her cause. He noticed she still had little circles of fatigue under her eyes.
“Okay then,” he said, his voice deliberately flat, his expression hard. “Put your hands behind your back.”
She did and he took the cuffs off his belt, and snapped them around her wrists, which were so small he had to adjust the cuffs. He was nearly blinded by flashes, and he felt like an idiot. If she was humiliated it didn’t show one little bit in the proud tilt of her chin.
He told her she was being arrested for unlawful assembly and obstructing traffic, and told her her rights. She nodded that she understood, standing ramrod straight, her dignity intact while he felt his own was in tatters.
He spun her around, his hand on her elbow and marched her, her limp visible, through the crowd. He was aware of feeling as if he had to protect her from the crush of people, though it was him getting the looks. Several people clicked their heels and gave him straight-armed salutes.
Lila flinched more than he did from the insulting gestures.
As soon as he had his prisoner safely inside the police station, Hutch appeared.
“Was that really necessary?” he asked Tag of the cuffs.
Tag said nothing, but sighed inwardly. Who had ordered the arrest? Still, he was now aware this was something of a family dispute. No one ever wanted to be in the middle of that.
“Ask her,” Tag said, and unlocked her wrists.
“He was just doing his job, Uncle Paul.”
Tag shot her a look that clearly told her he didn’t need a one-hundred-pound waif in a Santa hat and a marshmallow coat to defend him.
“Get into my office,” Hutch said quietly to his niece. “Now.”
She sent Tag an imploring look, which he ignored. He’d done his bit, and he wasn’t the least bit proud of it, either.
“I’m not normally the kind of person who gets arrested,” Lila said to him, ignoring her uncle’s command, the only person Tag had ever seen do that.
“I kind of figured you for a virgin,” he said, their department’s lingo for a first-time offender.
It had slipped out, and it was a mistake. He knew it even before Hutch sent him a killing look and her blush went the color of a smashed raspberry.
Which of course made him entertain the extremely naughty thought that maybe she was every kind of virgin it was possible to be.
“Sorry,” he muttered. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
“Of course not,” she said soothingly. “We’re all rattled.”
The thing was, he shouldn’t be. He was no virgin. Of any kind.
“I hope we meet again,” she said formally, “under better circumstances.”
“Really? I was hoping the exact opposite.” He knew as soon as he said it, it was way too harsh, a defense against everything she was making him feel. Rattled. Off-kilter. Guilty. Worried about her foot.
Boo chose that moment to waddle out from under his desk. She plopped down at Lila’s feet and began humming.
Lila sat down on the floor beside the dog, wrapped her puffy pink marshmallow arms around Boo’s neck and burst into tears.
She’s exhausted, Tag thought, noticing the fatigue around her eyes again. And then, annoyed that he felt sympathy toward her, he told himself it was probably planning the little extravaganza outside that had exhausted her.
Then he noticed Hutch and Boo glaring at him with identical expressions of accusation. He threw up his hands in exasperation and went and found a cell to clean. Hopefully it would keep him busy until the crowd outside had dispersed, Lila had gone home, her uncle had cooled off and his dog had been returned to her senses.
Hopefully it would keep him busy long enough to forget the way he felt when he saw she was still limping.
