Jake (California Dreamy) - By Rian Kelley Page 0,43

come in from ten to two Friday, a shift she could easily fit in before showing up back at the pod for a brief turn providing break coverage. And then her heart skipped a beat when she saw a message from Jake. It had come in at seven-fifty the night before. She opened the message.

It was a photograph. Snow-capped mountains and wind-swept flurries dancing in the air.

Montana.

She wanted to type back a simple ‘yes.’

It didn’t matter that Thanksgiving was three months away.

She wanted to go to Montana with him, and if they were still together at the holidays, then they’d found a way to balance their lives. And discovered that there was more to them than the bump and grind.

She searched Google images and found a cartoon of the Tasmanian Devil on a snow mobile. He was wearing a helmet and was choked-up on the handle bars, his face scrunched into a ferocious frown of determination. She sent the picture to Jake, a slight tremor in her fingers as she pressed ‘send.’ It was a simple reply, but her commitment was unmistakable.

While she still had a few minutes left to her break, and clinging to her positive mood, Ivy entered the pass code to her bank account and transferred into her savings the funds she would have given to Holly. It may as well earn interest while it sat there. She wanted to believe that her sister was ready for full time work again, that she would soon put on a pair of running shoes and take her first new steps on the open road. But she had been so tired last weekend, and the doctor had reminded them that with every recovery there were setbacks and an end run.

There were also full recoveries, Holly had told him. And while she wouldn’t grow a new leg, she would get around as she had before with the new and improved model they had given her. Soon she would have what medical engineers called a sport leg. Last summer she and Holly had watched the Ironman Triathlon where a female athlete with a full prosthetic not only competed but had a respectable finish.

“Full recoveries are few,” the doctor conceded. “You may be one of them. You have the determination. But life after a catastrophic accident seldom resembles life before.”

People change. Some are defeated by their new circumstances. But some found a strength they never knew they’d possessed. They made of their lives greater successes than they’d experienced pre-accident.

Holly had grown tense and let her anger with the doctor show. “I won’t be limited by your attitude,” she’d told him. “Maybe you’re not the doctor for me.”

“It’s my job to encourage you, to celebrate your achievements, and to impart reality.”

Holly had it in her heart to run her first prosthetic mile by the two year mark. That was five months away. The doctor didn’t think she’d make it.

Holly had a saying she lived by now, “You can have wishbone and you can have backbone. Only one will get the job done.”

Ivy knew her sister could do it. It was a matter of faith and effort.

Anything worth achieving took backbone. That included relationships. And work ethic was one area where she and Jake were mutually compatible.

Chapter Fourteen

Ivy didn’t set the alarm. She had worked two split shifts the day before, leaving the senior center at two in the afternoon and arriving at Children’s at four where she’d put in six hours spread through various pods, providing break coverage. It was midnight by the time she got to bed, and then she had lain awake thinking about Jake. Okay, fantasizing, really. She was right when she told him that by Saturday morning she would be hurting for him. Her body remembered every one of his intimate touches and needed very little prodding from her brain to hit simmer.

She heard it again. It wasn’t the bleating of her alarm clock. But it was intrusive, peeling back layers of sleepy fog to get her attention.

Knocking. Someone was knocking on her door.

She sat up and pushed back the summer quilt. The light outside her windows revealed a muted dawn. This close to the water, mornings were always cloud-covered.

The knock came again, soft but insistent.

“Ivy?” It was Jake and his voice was a husky rumble through the solid wood door.

She answered it.

She was wearing white cotton boy shorts and a green tank top. But from the way Jake’s eyes moved over her, possessive and fiery, you’d think she was