The doctor folded her arms. “Just about,” she agreed, wrinkling her well-shaped nose in thought. “You don’t much like being touched, do you?”
Dar scowled a little at being so easily read. “Not much, no,” she admitted. At least this doctor—Alison was her name?—wasn’t the usual condescending, iceberg type. “Sorry.”
“That’s all right, Ms. Roberts,” Dr. Alison reassured her. “Some people don’t. We’re so used to just grabbing what we want and pulling, we forget that sometimes. Could you tilt your head up and to the right?”
Dar complied, watching the woman make adjustments to the machine. The doctor was taller than Kerry but couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds, so thin that Dar was sure she’d blow away if the air conditioning cycled too strongly. Her white lab coat hung loosely on her, and the wrists that extended from it seemed barely wider than two of Dar’s fingers. The machine whirred again.
“Okay.” Dr. Alison looked down at Dar. “We’re done.” She pushed the machine arm back and leaned against the padded table on which Dar was lying. She had hazel eyes and a high forehead made all the more so by a hairstyle tightly pulled back into a knot. “Why don’t you sit up and let me take a look at your shoulder, okay?”
Dar obliged, tensing her abdominal muscles and pulling herself upright, then swinging her legs over the edge of the table. She hopped off and stood upright, startling the doctor, who took a step back.
“Oh.” Dr. Alison made a face, then smiled. “Somehow, patients always look shorter lying down. I didn’t expect you to be that tall.” She gestured toward a side room. “Why don’t we go in there so you can sit?”
Dar followed her in silence, taking a seat on a lower, but also padded bench in the examination room. She was still wearing her sling, but they’d allowed her Tylenol for the nagging headache, and she felt pretty good at the moment. “Well?”
Dr. Alison had been reviewing something on a computer terminal, and now she looked up over the screen at Dar. “Well, you want the bad news first or the good news?”
“Bad,” Dar replied instantly.
“You know, Ms. Roberts, I thought you were going to say that,” the doctor laughed. “Okay, well, the bad news is that you’ve got a lot of swelling in that shoulder. Aside from the bone bruise, you also strained some of the tendons and muscles around there, and everything’s pretty tense.”
Dar ran that over in her head and decided it didn’t sound life 280 Melissa Good threatening. “Okay.”
“You’re going to need to do a lot of physical therapy to get the blood moving in there and get the damaged bits out,” Dr. Alison told her. “It’s going to hurt.”
Pain was something Dar could live with. She’d worked through enough injuries in her years of martial arts, after all, and while she never enjoyed the process, she knew ways of getting past it. “And?” She watched as the doctor left her console and came over, carefully unsnapping the sling to release Dar’s arm.
“I need to see what kind of range of motion you have, okay?” Dr.
Alison waited for Dar to nod, then she took hold of Dar’s wrist and slowly lifted her arm. “Let me know when it starts to hurt.” She first flexed the arm at the elbow, then gently pulled upward, getting no reaction from her wary patient. “Okay, that’s what I thought. Now I’m going to move it out to the side; I think that’s where the problem is going to be.”
Dar nodded and shifted a little, straightening up as the other woman carefully extended her injured arm out to the side, then started to lift it. About halfway, Dar let out a sound somewhere between a cough and a hiss, and the motion stopped.
“Okay.” The doctor examined the angle. “Well, that’s not too bad, actually.” She sounded surprised. “Given what I saw in the pictures, that’s pretty darn good.” She put Dar’s arm back down and started poking at her shoulder, touching and prodding the skin with absorbed interest. “You have a very well developed deltoid here.”
Dar’s brow lifted and she eyed the woman warily. “Thanks.”
“I don’t think I’ve seen a structure like this on a female in a while,”
Dr. Alison added. “You’re not doing steroids or other anabolics, are you?”
Dar glared at her. “Absolutely not.”
“Just asking,” the doctor replied mildly. “No offense intended, Ms.
Roberts. A lot of people do, you know. In my line of work, I deal with an enormous number of athletes. It’s a standard question.” She walked over and checked her screen. “You have an incredible bone density, did you know that?”
How was she supposed to know that? “No,” Dar replied.
“Well, you do.” The doctor typed something. “That’s a good thing.
It’s what kept you from getting hurt worse. You take calcium supplements?”
Dar’s brow creased. Supplements? “No, I just drink milk.”
“Can’t stand the stuff myself.” Dr. Alison shook her head. “Well, good for you, Ms. Roberts. You weight train, correct?”
“Yes.”
The doctor nodded. “Okay, I just need to get some stats on you so I can send them to the therapist. Could you take your shirt off, please?”
It suddenly occurred to Dar why she’d always been more Red Sky At Morning 281
comfortable with male doctors, an interesting moment of self-revelation that almost made her start laughing. “What stats does a therapist need?” she asked, standing up and pulling her T-shirt off over her head one-handedly. It left her in a pair of gym shorts and nothing else.
“Oh, height, weight, limb len—” Dr. Alison stopped speaking for a second as she looked up. “Wow.”
Dar’s eyebrow went right up.
“You have great body structure,” the doctor continued enthusiastically. “You have almost perfect symmetry, did you know that?” She picked up a tape measure and trotted over. “Outstanding.”
Dar didn’t know whether to feel like a show horse on parade or what. She held her arms out when told and felt the tickle of the tape measure as it was run across her back.
“I thought so. Seventy-four inches.” The doctor towed Dar over to a scale. “Let me get your height and weight.” She pushed the height bar up and stood on her tiptoes to let the top of it rest on Dar’s head.
“Seventy-two and three-quarters. Yep, I knew it.” Next, she ran the weights across and nudged the smaller one back and forth until the arm balanced in the center. “One fifty-six.” She nodded and scribbled. “That about normal for you?”
“Give or take a few, yes,” Dar replied. “Why?”
“Just curious.” After measuring Dar’s upper and lower arms, Dr.
Alison finished her writing. “Okay, we’re done.” She looked up, reviewing Dar with an air of scientific satisfaction. “Very nice bones, Ms. Roberts. Congratulations.”
Dar picked up her shirt and slipped it on. “Thanks,” she muttered.
“But I think it’s my father’s fault.”
“Really?” Dr. Alison smiled. “Are you a daddy’s girl? Everyone tells me I am.” She straightened her papers and slid them into an envelope. “I hate that. Don’t you?”
Dar picked up her sling and looked at it, then glanced up at the doctor. “No,” she said. “I’ve always considered it a compliment.”
“Well, you’re just a lucky woman, then.” The doctor held a hand out and gripped Dar’s. “Good luck, Ms. Roberts. Keep up what you’re doing, and I guarantee you’ll be rock climbing into your seventies.” She nodded briskly. “Any questions for me?”
Dar cocked her head. “Yeah, one,” she drawled. “If you think what I’m doing is so great, why don’t you do it?”
Dr. Alison blinked. She glanced at herself, then at Dar. Then she laughed, a touch sheepishly. “I’m a doctor.” She grinned and shrugged.