Dirty: The Complete Series (Secret Baby Romance Love Story) (33 page)

“That sounds like a lot of fun!”

“I wish mom was still here,” Landon said
quietly. “Did mom like to bake cookies for Christmas, dad?” I felt my heart
give a lurch in my chest at the question.

“I think so,” I said; I had to give him
some kind of answer. “But you know buddy—I don’t remember her ever doing it.
Maybe she baked cookies with her mom when she was your age.”

“Do you think that we’d be baking cookies
if she was still alive?” I swallowed the lump in my throat.

“I think if she was still alive and you
wanted to bake cookies, she’d be on board.” I felt my eyes stinging with the
threat of tears and blinked a few times. “We could bake cookies, you
know…chocolate chip, or butter cookies. Your grandma has a great recipe for my
favorite oatmeal raisins.”

“I don’t like the raisins,” Landon said.
He has no idea that he just twisted the
knife in my heart. Don’t let him find out.

“Then we’ll do oatmeal-chocolate chip, how
does that sound? And maybe if we get permission you can take some with you to
school to share with the other kids.”

“That could be fun,” Landon said from the
back seat. I turned my attention onto the road in front of me, asking Landon to
go through his vocabulary words for the week to review them while we made our
way to the office; it was called Kid Care Pediatric Physical Therapy, and I
kept my eyes peeled to see the sign for it.

Chapter Three - Mackenzie

It was almost the end of the day, and I
was ready to leave; I had to wait to make sure my last patient either became a
no-show (if they were more than fifteen minutes late) or came in after all. It
was a new patient—a little boy by the name of Landon Willis, who according to
his chart had suffered a severe fracture two months before during an indoor
soccer game. It was a pretty straightforward case; mostly I would be helping
the little boy regain the range of motion and rebuild the muscle he lost while
the bone was healing, and make sure that there weren’t any long-term problems
with his mobility. Fortunately he had just missed shattering the growth plate
at the top of the bone—so he hadn’t had to have surgery.

“Girl, what are you sitting around for?” I
looked up from the computer where I was reviewing the case to see Amie leaning
against the counter a few feet away. I shrugged.

“My four-thirty isn’t here yet,” I said,
glancing at the time quickly. It was 4:32, and in another thirteen minutes I
could consider the patient a no-show. I could—in theory—make a run to the
coffee shop a block down from the building and maybe pick up some treats for
the other people in the office before making an early start on my Christmas
shopping.

“Which one is that?” Amie came to the desk
and peered at my screen. “Landon Willis, five years old.” I scrolled down to
let her see the x-ray on the file, sent to the office by the child’s primary.
“Oof, that is a tough fracture! Just missed the growth plate.”

“He’s lucky,” I said, nodding as I looked
over the X-ray again. “He’s been cleared for PT, and his father is supposed to
be bringing him in for eval today.” I shrugged, dismissing the file for the
moment.

“Probably one of those helicopter
parents,” Amie suggested. “Parents constantly trucking the kid to this or that
or the other thing.” Between the two of us—and the other therapists and therapy
assistants—we’d seen it all: kids whose parents were too busy for them, who
just dropped them off at the office and picked them up and signed paperwork
without even looking at it, kids who’d been born with birth defects like spina
bifida or hemiplegia or something else, whose parents thought their children
were made of glass. I’d chosen to work with kids because they were so
resilient; when I’d done my rotations, I’d worked with all kinds of people
needing physical therapy, from elderly patients to athletes to kids to regular
adults suffering from the long-lasting effects of an injury. Athletes were
almost as much fun as kids—they were used to the ache of working out, and
usually they were interested in the process of recovery—but I couldn’t stand the
fact that I would have had to regularly tell people in the prime of their lives
that they would have to change their careers completely. Kids, even when we
couldn’t bring them back up to what they’d been able to do before their
injuries, were more adaptable.

“It’s a five-times-per-week schedule,” I
told Amie, crossing my arms over my chest. I’d worn a thick thermal shirt under
my scrubs, but even still I’d definitely need to change before I left the
office; it was too cold outside, colder than it had been when I left my
apartment that morning. “If he can’t even make it to the eval session on time…”

I heard the bells at the door ringing and
stood up quickly to see who was coming in. Most of the other therapists were
working with patients in the therapy area, and the assistants were doing
paperwork. I saw a tall, broad-shouldered man with brown hair, clean-shaven and
wearing a tailored suit. In his arms he carried a young boy; the little boy was
maybe five years old, with big blue eyes and dark hair, paler skin than his
father but the same curve to his lips. The man had a pair of child-size
crutches tucked under his arm, dangling behind him as he hurried to the desk.

“I’m so sorry,” I heard him say quickly to
the office manager. “We’ve got an appointment for 4:30. I tried to make it on
time, but traffic was just terrible.”

“Name please?” I slunk back away from view
to let Alice handle the man.

“Willis—it should be Landon Willis,” I
heard the man say. Amie grinned at me.

“No luck for you, huh?” she wandered off to
the break area further back in the office, leaving me to get myself together
for the appointment. It irritated me that the guy was late for his son’s first
session—a lot of parents thought that the evaluation was really just a
formality, and when they started out with that attitude, they were almost
always chronically late, which mean that I ended up having to supervise two
patients at the same time at least four or five times a day.

I gathered up the charts I would need for
my evaluation of little Landon, and waited for Alice to call me up to let me
know that it was time to bring the boy back and start the process. The phone on
my desk rang and I picked it up quickly. “Yes?”

“Landon Willis is here,” Alice told me.
“He’s checked in, his insurance is verified.”

“I’ll come get him then,” I said, managing
as much enthusiasm as I could. I put the phone back in the cradle and strode
towards the door between the clinic and the waiting room, where Landon and his
father sat waiting. When I stepped through, holding the door open, I saw that
Landon had reclaimed his crutches and was bouncing them on the floor by the
rubberized bottoms. “Landon?” I looked at the little boy and he stopped what he
was doing, looking up and giving me the most evaluating look I’d ever seen from
a kid.

“We’re up, bud,” the man said, standing
quickly. He looked at me uncertainly. “Should I carry him back or…” I shook my
head.

“Let’s let Landon use his crutches for
this,” I suggested, holding the door open for them to come back. “We want to
get him back to normal as quickly as possible.”

The two came through the door and I led
them towards the clinic area, trying to decide how I felt. Landon looked to me
like the kind of boy who would run off the second he got the chance—the kind of
kid who needed extra supervision during his sessions to make sure he didn’t
overdo it.
Probably gets that trait from
good old Dad,
I thought as I stopped at the first station I needed to use
for the evaluation. Landon’s dad—the file said his name was Patrick—was actually
pretty good-looking, once I got over my irritation with him for being late; as
Landon monkeyed around on his crutches impatiently, Patrick watched his son
carefully.

“Okay,” I said, setting the chart down and
taking up a blood pressure cuff. “This is probably going to mostly be pretty
boring for you Landon, but I need to make sure I know where you are in terms of
your health right now, and how well you can do things like balance and stand
straight and all those other things.”

“He’s a very healthy kid,” Patrick told
me. I steeled myself for him to start complaining as I got Landon to sit down
in a chair so I could get a good pressure reading.

“Sometimes injuries can throw things all
around,” I said, fastening the cuff around Landon’s arm. “Having to change
habits, and not being as active, things like that…we just want to have a good
baseline for your son’s health before we get started on working with him.” I
glanced at Patrick and saw him nodding his approval.
Well, that’s a surprise,
I thought. I started the general health
evaluation, taking down Landon’s blood pressure, pulse, and taking him through
the different tests for respiratory capacity and everything else we needed to
know. I was glad to see that he wasn’t incredibly fidgety—I had been dreading,
at the end of my day, having to keep a five-year-old on task while we went
through what was admittedly a boring process.

“You’re doing great, buddy,” Patrick told
his son, taking the chair I pointed out to him while we started on the
functionality tests.

“This one is going to see how your balance
is,” I told Landon; as always I almost completely ignored his father except
when I had to explain to him the rationale behind what I was doing, or ask him
for help in positioning his son. I took Landon through the different tests:
checking his balance, checking his coordination, and his flexibility. He
chattered all the time, asking me about anything that popped into his mind; I
let him—after all, as long as he was making the movements and focusing enough to
not risk hurting himself, I was happy.

“How long did you have to go to school to
learn to be a therapist?”

“I had to go for years,” I told Landon.

“It’s very difficult to study for,”
Landon’s father informed his son. “They have to go to school and get a special
degree, and then they have to work with patients, and take tests.”

“So you must be really smart, Ms.
Mackenzie.”

I laughed.

“I like to think so! Do me a favor, Landon
and step up onto this platform—just the one leg. I want to see how you move. If
you need help or if something hurts, let me know, okay?” Landon nodded.

“Do you have a husband? Or kids?”

I blushed at the question—it was common
enough that I thought I would eventually stop blushing at it, but it was too
close to my parents’ concern for my love life for comfort.

“Nope,” I said, smiling at Landon and not
looking at his father at all. “I love to work with kids, but I haven’t found
anyone I want to get married to yet, so no kids for me.”

“Do you want to get married some day?”

 
I
nodded. “I think it’d be nice if I found someone,” I told Landon.

“Do you live with your mom and dad?”

“Nope—I live right here in the city, on my
own.” I grinned at Landon, patting his back as he stepped down from the
platform. “The other leg now, if you would?” Landon nodded and concentrated in
the task at hand, lifting his foot to step up onto the platform.

“Do you get to eat ice cream whenever you
want? Dad says I can’t, because I’ll rot my teeth out.”

“Well Dad is right—if you ate ice cream
all the time you’d lose all your teeth,” I said, glancing at Patrick in
amusement.

“Dad also says I can only watch one scary
movie a week,” Landon informed me. “Even though I never get scared!”

“What about that nightmare you had back in
June?” Patrick looked at me and grinned slightly—it lightened his face up, made
him seem more handsome. I pushed that thought aside.

“That was just because of something that
Pete said,” Landon protested.

“Whenever I had nightmares, I used to get
into bed with my mom and dad,” I told Landon. “And you know—they were always
caused by something I ate. I loved watching scary movies as a kid, too.”

“I get into bed with Dad sometimes,”
Landon told me. I knelt down and put the strap of a weight-bearing machine on
his ankle. “I don’t have a mom.”

The matter-of-fact way that he said it
made my heart lurch in my chest and I looked over to see how Patrick was taking
it.

“A lot of people don’t have moms,” I told
Landon. “Real quick, Landon, see if you can pull that up with just your leg.”

By the time I’d finished evaluating the
little boy, I was exhausted from all the chatter, but pleased. “He has very
good general health,” I told Patrick and saw the relief that flooded across his
face. “The prognosis is excellent. I think Landon here lucked out with where he
broke his leg. It’s going to take some aggressive therapy, but we can get him
back up to speed.”

“Just what I need,” Patrick joked,
tousling his son’s hair. “But you’re sure he’ll be able to do everything like
normal?”

“Possibly even better than before, if we
go about this right,” I said, smiling to reassure the man. “If you can get him
to do some exercises that I’m going to show you in between sessions—but don’t
overdo it—he’ll bounce right back from that break in no time.”