You’re telling me, lady.
He wanted her to offer to touch him. To have a quick romp up on that table, get it out of their systems and get back to being the practical people they both were.
“Maddie likes Darin.”
He blinked. She folded her arms across those full, soft, very feminine breasts. He’d never known a man could be jealous of his own nose.
“She thinks Darin likes her, too.”
“I’m sure she’s right,” he was quick to assure her. And then he remembered that mother-hen way she’d protected the other woman the first day Darin had been in for therapy. “Darin’s a nice guy. He likes most people, as long as they’re decent and treat people well.”
“I’m not worried about Darin taking advantage of her,” she said, meeting his gaze and taking a step forward, arms still crossed.
He’d bet she’d drop those arms if she knew that the position was pushing her breasts up, making them appear even more lush than they were naturally, drawing his attention to them like never before.
“At least, I’m not worried that he’d be anything but decent with her,” she said. “The problem is bigger than that. She doesn’t just like him, she likes him likes him.”
“As in, a male/female attraction kind of like?” He asked the question, but couldn’t wrap his mind around the ludicrousness of it. “She does know that Darin’s not quite right, doesn’t she?”
Feeling like a traitor to the man who was right then outside with Luke and Craig working at whatever he could manage to do four weeks postsurgery and with stitches in his leg, he wanted to wash his mouth out with soap.
“I doubt she finds him anything but normal,” Lynn said. “Even if she’s noticed lapses, she’d likely just roll with them.”
Had she just opened the door to Maddie’s past? He worked his mind around a way to enter delicately. And then he said, “Did the bastard who put her here hit her in the head?”
Every time he saw the slender, pretty woman, he wondered about the man who’d hurt her. She seemed so fragile. So sweet and tender.
Not that any woman, no matter how strong, should be mistreated…
His thoughts tripped over themselves again, and Grant felt kind of like what he imagined walking in a mine field would feel like.
“I’m in scrubs in an examination room, but I’m not talking to you as a nurse right now,” she said. “I’m not talking to you in any official capacity. Though Sara might seek you out to do that.”
Feeling mines populating his mental field a dozen by the second, he watched her lean against a side wall, about four feet away from him. And cross her arms again.
“Maddie has HIE. Hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy.” The worlds rolled off her tongue like a foreign language.
“You said you weren’t a nurse right now.” He crossed him arms, too.
He’d wanted the door closed. Now he wanted it open.
“She suffered a lack of oxygen to the brain when she was born. She’s not mentally distressed, just…slow…in some areas.”
“Like Darin.”
“For different reasons, but yes, a lot of their symptoms are the same. Maddie can’t understand the value of a dollar, for instance. Or read nuances. Everything is black and white to her. She also has a hard time controlling her emotions. When something is bad, it’s all bad. When it’s good, it’s all good.”
“When she likes a man, she really likes him,” Grant said, not at all happy with what he was hearing.
“Right.”
The solution was obvious. “We’ll have Darin moved out of her therapy session. That should take care of it.”
“I think he likes her, too. The other day, he wouldn’t even come in my house without you. Until he saw Maddie there. She pulled him in and he was like a puppet on her string.”
“The short time Darin’s been here has already showed me that by keeping his life contained, I’ve isolated him too much. He needs to get out more.”
They’d watch the games in bars from now on.
“The reason they didn’t notice Kara running toward your hole in the ground on Saturday was because Darin had just told Maddie that he felt happy when she talked to him.”