Page 31 of Silent Threat
She rolled her eyes. “I’m an ecotherapist. Ninja therapy is a completely different branch. I could never do that. I don’t even like wearing black.”
The tight set of his mouth softened again. He didn’t look quite as lighthearted as earlier, but he wasn’t back to full resistance either. Annie relaxed into her seat.
Recovery had two components: physical and psychological. As far as she was concerned, the latter was more important. She was always fully conscious of that during a therapy session. In a session, she would never tell anyone they couldn’t do something, like she had just done to Cole. She’d slipped. Cole was out here, in her real life, and it threw her off.
The patients at Hope Hill weren’t locked up. Annie ran into them in town all the time, chatted, even had coffee with a few. But they hadn’t hung around her like Cole, hadn’t gone home with her.
He was more intense, more take-charge than the others. He didn’t exactly ask. He went ahead and did what he wanted. Maybe the need to dominate was a Navy SEAL thing. Would those qualities help or hinder him in his recovery? She hoped for the former.
“Did you always live in Broslin?” he asked.
“Lived here as a kid, moved away, then moved back recently.”
“Big family?”
“One grandfather and one cousin.”
“How do they feel about the nature-therapy thing?”
She grinned. “You make it sound like I’m a pole dancer.”
His gaze sharpened. A hungry-bear look came into his eyes, and it sent a shiver of awareness down her spine.
“Ecotherapy is a legitimate branch of therapy, based on scientific study,” she rushed to say as they stopped at a red light. “Paoli Hospital is not that far from here, up on Route 30. They did one of the early studies there. The ward where their gallbladder patients recover has an odd arrangement. Half the rooms have windows that look at a brick wall, and the other half look at a courtyard with trees. The patients in the rooms that look to the courtyard were able to go home a day early, on average. They needed one dose of heavy drugs postsurgery to deal with pain. The brick-wall patients needed four.”
He didn’t say anything. Looked thoughtful. At least he was no longer laughing at the concept.
“Japan and Germany have done a bunch of similar studies,” she added. “Nature therapy has been long accepted and used there. In Japan, they call itshinrin-yoku, forest bathing.” And because Cole didn’t stop her, she kept going.
By the time they reached her house, the contractor’s truck waited by the curb, next to the dumpster. As Cole pulled into the driveway, Ed Sanders came around the back.
The contractor was in his midfifties, in good shape, hair that sexy salt-and-pepper gray. He wore his trademark overalls stamped with the red company logo designed by his wife. He lifted a calloused hand in greeting. “Hey there.”
After Annie introduced the two men, Ed fitted her with a hardhat from the back of his truck and took her around back, leaving Cole to unload the feed bags. Nothing she could say to him would stop him anyway.
“How bad is it?” She eyed the blue tarp tacked to where the bathroom wall used to be.
“Not good.” Ed looked upset on her behalf. “You ought to look up whoever inspected this house when you bought it and ask for your money back.”
“The thought had crossed my mind. The house isn’t going to collapse, is it?”
“Not from this damage, but let me look inside before I give you a definitive answer.”
She had the keys, so she let him in the back door, into the kitchen that also stood in shambles.
He walked through, making sympathetic noises. “Natalie saw the show. She said it was something.”
Natalie, his wife, was a soft-spoken, lanky black woman who ran the Broslin Ballet School. She was about five years older than Annie, always impeccably put together, graceful, and kind. She donated free dance lessons to foster kids.
Back in July, Natalie had Annie bring two orphaned baby goats over to the dance school so the girls could copy the goat kids’ frolicking for two hours as a movement lesson. Annie had never laughed so hard in her life. She had a feeling neither had some of the girls. She had the video on her animal-sanctuary website. That single video had received twice as many clicks as all her other posts put together.
Ed thought Natalie hung the moon and the stars. That Annie still believed in true love was at least half due to the two of them.
Ed scratched his neck. “So I take it Kelly’s crew ain’t coming back to fix this mess?”
Annie winced. “They aren’t really a crew. They were picked more for decoration. Kelly pulled them together for the show.”
“Were they insured and bonded?”
