Page 87 of Dance for Me

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Chapter Fifteen

They let him in to see her at eight a.m. the next morning. Ostensibly for a few minutes, but Braun had other ideas. Once his ass sat in that damn ugly visitor’s chair, it wasn’t moving. Not for anything.

The blinds were pulled, shutting out most of the bright sunshine outside. He wanted to let it spill in, banish the gloom so she woke in warmth and light, but one look at her face told him it wouldn’t be the best idea.

Standing at the foot of her hospital bed, he raked his gaze over his subbie, feeling the same tightness in his chest that had plagued him all night. There was nothing he could do to help, and that irritated him deeply. Being useless wasn’t something he was accustomed to.

They’d stitched the gash on her head, shaving part of her scalp so they could treat it. The small bald patch made his heart ache; she had such beautiful hair.

It will grow back. It’s only hair.

The plastic surgeon couldn’t do anything for her fractured cheekbone until the swelling subsided but apparently, he didn’t think they would need to operate. A blessing, albeit a minor one. They would monitor it over the next few days and see how it looked when the swelling went down.

The rest of her face was a riot of reddened skin and nasty bruises spreading over the puffy flesh. She’d be able to open her eyes with effort.

Raw scratches marred her slender throat.

The nurses had tucked the blanket under her arms. One was weighed down by a cast, the other remained mobile, but both hands were bloodied, the joints ripped and painfully distended.

He hated to think what the surgeons must have needed to do to her body in order to stop the bleeding that threatened her life. Faraday hadn’t given him a lot of information on that, other than to say the hemorrhaging had come close to winning the life or death battle Bodie found herself fighting.

His woman was now a battle-scarred warrior, inside and out.

They’d told Braun that samples had been taken from under her nails.

He knew the results would come back as a match for her unlamented parents. They were lucky they were already dead. The urge to pound their cold, lifeless faces into mush hadn’t completely faded in the early hours of the long night.

He gripped the baseboard of the bed as he finally dared to look at the part of her he couldn’t bear to see. Her left leg was encased in a cast to mid-calf, wrapped in a bright and cheerful pink bandage, resting on a heap of pillows. Like that would make her feel better.

The right...Jesus, God, it was enough to drive a man to tears. Metalwork framed it from foot to knee, all manner of spikes and screws piercing delicate skin like olden day torture instruments.

Doctor Faraday had thrown words like spiral and closed and complete at him. The gist of the situation was, if he understood the jargon correctly, Bodie’s leg had been wrenched so viciously, the force caused the bone to fracture in a spiraling pattern down its length. Added pressure had then snapped the tibia into three pieces, shattering along the fracture.

Jasper’s quick thinking and reactions had realigned the larger chunk of bone into position, saving her circulation to the foot. But even he hadn’t realized the full extent of the damage he’d held in his competent hands.

“Be thankful the bone didn’t pierce the skin.” Faraday’s voice echoed hollowly in his mind. “Compound fractures, where the bone becomes exposed through the skin, are prime targets for infection setting into the limb.”

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