Free Chocolate Kisses and Love Filled Wishes: Kissing Bridge Mountain - Book 3 by Linda West

done it this time.
     
    She wondered about Tanner.
     
    He had been a mess last night. 
     
    He’d been so worried. He had left abruptly when they couldn’t locate a doctor to help get any straight answers.
     
    Kacey found it odd that he hadn’t called to find out what the doctors had determined was wrong with her legs.
     
    She knew he was shocked but somehow she felt slighted.
     
    She had spent the night lying awake, fearing the worst for her future and wishing she wasn’t alone.
     
    She could heal from broken bones, but if her spinal cord was affected in the fall, then her fate would be so much worse than she could imagine.
     
    A possible lifetime in a wheelchair.
     
    If she couldn’t walk, she couldn’t snowboard, and that would be worse than death. It had been the longest night of her life.
     
    For some reason, she had wanted to call Brody all that night. She wanted him to tell her that everything would be all right like he always did—bring her spirits up and remind her (in that goofy way he always did), “You’re Kacey Anderson, darn it!”
    Goodness knows they had each been through hospital stays and mends together before.
     
    They had been through sleeping on friends’ floors and having the bigwigs set them up in 5-star hotels.
     
    They’d seen each other through the Gold and through the sadness of loss, when Brody’s mother passed away. They had been each other’s strengths. Boy, how Kacey needed that strength now.
     
    She lay awake alone, staring at the ceiling, with that thought running through her head all night, until her doctor had arrived in the morning.
     
    Now as she sat in the wheelchair with the snow falling all around her, as she waited to be picked up, she wondered why she had ever come home again. 
     
    The weather was some of the worst she had ever seen in the main town of Kissing Bridge, nearly whiting out everything in sight. She shielded her eyes from the hurling sheets of white and caught sight of a blurry image coming through the snow toward her.
     
    The image was coming closer, closer…
     
    Out of the storm emerged Tanner.
     
    Kacey smiled.
     
    “You made it! I wasn’t sure you Texas guys could drive in the snow,” she joked.
     
    The truth was she wasn’t sure she’d ever see him again after the way he had looked at her in the hospital bed last night.
     
    It had been the look of the owner of a prize race horse that had just broken its leg.
     
    Sadly, Kacey thought, in a way it was exactly like that.
    But here he was.
     
    “You can count on me, Babe,” Tanner said. The smile he gave her didn’t quite make it to his eyes.
     
    He looked her over in the wheelchair and cringed in a covert way. 
     
    She smiled weakly.
     
    Kacey hadn’t been able to count on him actually.  She had been afraid—more afraid then she could ever admit—and he had gone home, without a word.
     
    But he was here now. Looking at her uncomfortably.
     
    She wasn’t sure how she felt.
     
    Tanner was acting strangely.
     
    Kacey noticed he shied away from getting close to her, as if what she had might be contagious. Suddenly, his eye lit with a great idea and he rushed back to his car and pulled out his equipment bag. He ran back to them and pulled out his camera from his bag and started pointing it at Kacey in the wheelchair.
     
    “What…what are you doing, Tanner?”
     
    He clicked away photos.
     
    “Smile, Honey,” he chirped happily.
     
    Click, click, click.
     
    Kacey was agape.
     
    Here she was in a wheelchair—broken and beaten—and he wanted to take shots of her?  He wasn’t going to ask how she was? What the doctor had said? If she was all right?
     
    “Tanner, what are you doing? Please stop shooting pictures of me! I’d rather not have people see me like this.”
     
    But Tanner didn’t stop. He kept shooting and ignored her pleas.
     
    “Listen, Kacey . . . I’ve been thinking about this all night. We might not have the life together as exploring