A Bet With Benefits (The Eden Empire Book 3)

by Karen Booth

  Jordan shrugged and then glanced around. “At least we’ll have the memory of a few good physical-therapy sessions.”

  “All you’ll be remembering fondly is the pain,” she practically snarled.

  “I’m a good listener if you ever want to...you know, talk instead of spar.”

  She swept him a suspicious look—unsure if he was joking or not. Better not to take chances. “As if I’d open up to a player like you,” she scoffed. “Forget it.”

  “Not even when you’re off duty?” he teased. “It could be therapeutic.”

  “When I need to unwind, I’ll book a vacation to the Caribbean.”

  “Let me know when you’re going. I’ll reserve a seat.”

  Argh. “It’s a vacation—as in, I don’t want to be irritated!”

  He quirked an eyebrow. “Irritated isn’t your natural state?”

  “No!”

  * * *

  “So where do we go from here?” he said. “You’re irritated...”

  As he said the words, Jordan watched Serafina with bemusement and not a little lust. With blond hair swinging past her shoulders and amber eyes, she was a knockout. He’d been around plenty of beautiful women, but Sera’s personality shone like an inner light. Of course, she directed snark at him, but he enjoyed tangling with her.

  She was a puzzle he was interested in solving. Because if he’d ever met a woman with a boulder-sized chip on her shoulder, it was Sera Perini.

  “Listen, I’ll make you a deal,” he joked. “I’ll try to behave if you stick around and help me out.”

  “You will behave,” she said firmly. “And your coupon is valid for today’s session only. After that, the sale is over.”

  His eyes crinkled. “Hard bargainer.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “But I guess I’m going to find out.”

  “True, but first you need to sit on the treatment table so we can take a look at that knee.” She paused. “Let me help you.”

  “No need.”

  Even though they were now related by marriage and had seen each other at the occasional family gathering, they’d never come close to touching. Not a pat, not a brush of the arm, and certainly not a peck on the cheek. Nada. It was as if by tacit agreement boundaries had been drawn, because they were more like warring in-laws than the friendly kind. And maybe because they understood that, it was dangerous to cross some unspoken line.

  Now, bracing his arms, he hopped up onto the table using his good leg.

  “Nice stunt,” she commented drily.

  He tossed her a jaunty grin. “More where that came from.”

  With a last warning look, she turned her attention to the paperwork he’d brought with him to the appointment and had dropped on the counter before she’d walked in.

  He took the opportunity to study her again. Today, she wore nondescript, body-concealing light blue scrubs. When she’d sometimes waitressed at the Puck & Shoot, the popular local sports bar, she’d usually kept her hair pulled back in a ponytail or with a headband and had had a black apron tied around her waist. But thanks to the fact that they were now related by marriage, he’d seen her in other getups: body-skimming dresses, tight-fitting exercise attire... She had an hourglass figure that was fuller on top, so everything flattered her. More than once he’d caught himself fantasizing about what it would be like to run his hands over her curves and skim his palms over her endless legs.

  Yet he didn’t know what to make of her. He was attracted as hell, but she was an in-law...and she didn’t like him. Still, the urge to tease her was as natural and unavoidable as breathing, and as irresistible as the impulse to win a hockey championship. And on top of it, he needed her physical-therapy skills. Already the companies behind his endorsement deals were getting nervous because he’d been off the ice. For the umpteenth time, he pushed aside the thought that his career could be over. He’d work like hell in therapy to make sure that possibility would never become a reality. Sure he’d made some savvy business investments with his earnings, but his plans depended on continuing to play.

  With a grimace, Jordan turned and stretched out his legs in front of him on the treatment table.

  Sera looked up, seemingly satisfied with what she’d gleaned from his intake papers. “So how did the ACL tear occur?”

  “A game three weeks ago against the New York Islanders. I heard a pop.” He shrugged. “I knew what it was. Cole’s been through this before.”

  His older brother had suffered a couple of knee injuries that had ended his professional hockey career. These days, Cole was the head of Serenghetti Construction, having taken over after their father’s stroke had forced Serg Serenghetti to adopt a less active lifestyle.

  “You’re lucky it happened at the end of the hockey season, and the Razors didn’t advance in the playoffs this year.”

  “I’ve never thought of getting knocked out in the playoffs as a lucky break,” he quipped. “Especially when I wasn’t there to help.”

  “It’s a tear, not a break,” she parried. “So who performed the ACL surgery on your knee?”

  “Dr. Nabov at Welsdale Medical Center, and it was last week. In-patient for a day. They insisted I stay overnight. I guess they didn’t want to take any chances with my recovery. Hockey fans, you know.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” Sera flipped through his paperwork again. “Did you sign autographs while you were there?”

  He cracked a smile and folded his arms over his chest. “A few.”

  “I assume the nursing staff went wild.”

  He knew sarcasm when he heard it and couldn’t resist teasing back. “Nah, they’ve seen it all.”

  “You’ve been icing the knee?”

  “Yeah. The staff at the hospital told me what to do postsurgery.”

  “Until you could get yourself into more expert hands?”

  He flashed a grin. “You. Right.”

  She might totally be his type if she wasn’t so thorny...and since she was related to him by marriage, a casual fling was out of the question. Still, there were layers there, and he enjoyed trying to peel them back.

  Sera set aside his paperwork and approached him, her expression all business. “Okay, I’m going to unwrap your knee.”

  For all her prickliness up to now, her touch was light as she removed his bandages. When the bandage was off, they both studied his knee.

  “Good news.”

  “Great.”

  “No signs of infection and very little bleeding.” She pressed on his knee as he remained in a sitting position on the table but leaned back propped up by his arms.

  “Am I hurting you?” she asked, not looking up.

  “Nothing I can’t handle.”

  “Manly.”

  “We hockey players are built tough.”

  “We’ll see.” She continued to press and manipulate his knee.

  “I’m your first. Otherwise you’d know.”

  “I’ve never been curious about how tough hockey players are.”

  “You’re mentally disciplined.”

  “We physical therapists are built tough.”

  Jordan smiled. “Built pretty, too.”

  “Behave.”

  “Right.”

  Then she reached over to the counter for an instrument. “I’m going to take some baseline measurements so we know where you are.”

  “Great.” He waited as she straightened his knee a little, measured, and then bent his leg and measured again.

  After putting the measuring instrument aside, she said, “Okay, not a bad starting point considering your knee has been wrapped since surgery. Our goal today is to improve your quad function and the mobility of the patella, among other things.”

  “What’s a patella?”

  She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Your kn
eecap.”

  “Of course.”

  “Let me know if I’m causing you too much pain.”

  Her tone was surprisingly solicitous, so he joked, “Isn’t that what you promised? Pain?”

  “Only the intended and expected variety.”

  He was a high-level athlete—he was used to pain and then some. “How many ACL tears have you treated?”

  “A few. I’ll let you know at the end if you were my best patient.”

  He stifled a laugh because she’d deftly appealed to his competitive instincts. He wondered if she used the same technique to cajole all her patients. Probably some played sports—since a torn ACL wasn’t too unusual an athletic injury—even if she’d never treated a professional hockey player like himself before. “Will you dock me points for irreverence?”

  “Do you really want to find out?” Methodically, she taped two wires to his thigh. “I’m going to set you up with some muscle stim right now. This will get you started.”

  In his opinion, they’d gotten started with the electricity when she’d walked in the room. But he sensed that he’d teased her enough, and she wasn’t going to take any more nonsense, so he kept mum for the next few minutes and just followed her directions.

  After the muscle stim, she taught him how to do patellar glides. He followed her instructions about how to move his knee to gain more flexibility. They followed that up with quad sets and heel slides, which she told him to do at home, too.

  Overall, he found none of it too arduous. But at the end of half an hour, she announced that his ability to bend his knee had gone from around ten degrees to eighty.

  He grinned. “I’m your best?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Superman. Your knee was wrapped in bandages that interfered with motion until now, so you were bound to make some significant improvement.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  “You’re impossible.”

  “No, I’m very possible if you’ll consider your options. Now, insufferable, that’s another thing...”

  Sera seemed to grit her teeth. “You’ll need weekly appointments.”

  “How long will my therapy last?”

  “Depends on how it goes.” Her expression was challenging—as if she’d been referring to his behavior, good or bad, as well as his recuperation. “Usually three to four months.”

  “Nothing long-term, then?”

  She nodded. “What you’re used to.”

  A fling. The words drifted unspoken between them. She’d met his double entendre and raised him. Ouch.

  Copyright © 2019 by Anna DePalo

  ISBN-13: 9781488046803

  A Bet with Benefits

  Copyright © 2019 by Karen Booth

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