Beautiful and intelligent and incredibly talented. She was exactly the kind of woman who would have had me drooling on my pillow before the accident.
But that was before.
She asked me a few questions as I worked my way through her system looking for evidence of the security breach. Computer questions. She was checking to make sure I knew what I was doing despite what I’d told her earlier. She still didn’t trust me.
And then she abruptly changed the subject.
“How long have you been in the chair?”
I glanced at her, my fingers stilling for a second. “What?”
“The wheelchair. How long?”
I shrugged, focusing on the computer monitor as my fingers began to fly over the keyboard again. “Just over two years.”
“Did you sever your spinal cord in the accident?”
I glanced at her. She was sitting in the chair now, leaning forward, her hands on her knees.
I wondered if she knew she was revealing quite a bit of her lovely cleavage with that position.
“No.”
“But it was the accident, right? The one that killed your parents?”
“You’ve obviously done your research, too.”
“Yeah, but the articles I read didn’t have much information on you.”
“My brother’s doing. He created something of a media blackout around me after the accident.”
“I guess he was a natural for this line of work then.”
I turned back to the computer, my fingers flying over the keyboard as I decided to ignore whatever else she had to say. However, I wasn’t prepared for what came next.
“Can you still have sex?”
I pushed back from the workstation and turned to face her.
“You are pretty curious, aren’t you?”
“Well, you know more about me than my closest friend in college knew, so it only seems fair.”
“Does it?”
“Can you have sex?”
I crossed my arms over my chest, offering her a dark look that I was hoping would stop the questions. But it didn’t. She just met my eyes and waited, her toe beginning to tap against the floor.
“Yes,” I finally admitted. “The paralysis begins in my upper thighs. Everything above that is still normal.”
“Have you? Since the accident, I mean.”
“I never asked you about your sex life.”
“I’m not in a wheelchair. But I’m sure you know all about the reasons I didn’t get along with my stepfather.”
I dropped my eyes at the memory of what I’d read in the two police reports she’d filed with the police department in her small town. The man was not kind. In fact, he was particularly brutal, but for some reason his brutality seemed reserved for just his eldest stepdaughter. The other two children denied ever suffering at his hands, and no other police reports were ever filed—either before or after Ricki left the home.
“Why just you?”
“Maybe there was something about my face he didn’t like.” She shrugged. “Why do people like that do anything?”
“Why didn’t your mother do anything?”
“Because we were practically living on the streets before she met him. He had a four-bedroom house, a good job, a couple of cars she had full access to. He was everything she’d prayed for since my dad died. Why give that up just for me?”
There was bitterness in her voice, but not as much as I might have expected. I watched her, watched the unpleasant memories dance over her face. It was like peeking through the crack in a wall. I was seeing a piece of her that I doubted she ever showed to anyone else.
“No,” I said softly.
“No what?”
“No, I haven’t had sex since the accident. Not a lot of women out there who want the work of sleeping with a disabled man.”
“Oh, I don’t know. We have a whole section on one of our dating sites reserved for people looking for someone with specific situations. People in wheelchairs is one of the subcategories.”
“Of course it is.”
I turned back to the computer, my fingers poised and ready to begin again.
“You should check it out. I bet you’d get a dozen dates in the first twenty-four hours,” she said. “You’re pretty good looking.”
I snorted. “Yeah, the handsome man with the dead legs.”
“Like I said, some people get off on that sort of thing.”
She stood up and wandered around the dark room, pausing by the thin, tinted window in the corner, looking down on the street below. I wondered what it was she saw.
“You seem tall.”
“Not so much anymore.”
“At least six foot.”
“Six four.”
She smiled. “I never liked to date guys who towered over me. Too intimidating.”