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She was so damn tired of fighting.
She’d delegated the two projects she’d just taken on, and she was trying very hard not to look into the fact that the two ladies who worked with her were so freaking surprised that she’d taken vacation. It was the first time in years, but still.
Five days. That was it. After the party, she’d go back to Dallas and that would be that.
Strawberry sounded particularly delicious this morning, so she grabbed that container and sat down on the single bar stool to eat. Three days in Devil’s Falls, and she was getting twitchy. She needed a good, long workout. Hope twisted to rub her leg. Running had been her outlet once upon a time, but that stopped being an option when she was eighteen. Now she used specific exercises and yoga to keep her knee from giving her too much grief—two things she hadn’t been doing since she showed up on Daniel’s doorstep.
She was pushing herself too hard, and she knew it—she’d had more than enough experience over the last decade to know her limits, and she was toeing the line. If she wasn’t careful, she’d have a whole lot in the way of sleepless nights in the future. The pain pills she kept as a last resort weren’t an option now that she was pregnant.
God, she hated those pills. They were like the physical representation of her weakness, a constant reminder that she wasn’t normal and never would be. Normal people didn’t have to worry about a body part inside her skin that didn’t originate with her, or about nerves that sometimes felt like they were on fire.
The problem was that Daniel had been working really hard not to pay too much attention to her leg, and she didn’t want to make him uncomfortable…
Hope straightened. “What the hell is wrong with me?” She was not doing this again. She’d put other people first for far too long, and he was the one who kept telling her he wanted to do right by her. Her scars were part of her, and if he couldn’t handle that, he had no business trying to elbow his way into her life.
She finished off her yogurt, dropped the container in the trash, and put the spoon in the sink. She’d deal with whatever work things had popped up overnight and then she’d take a relaxing bath. After that, she’d settle in with some tea and a few movies and see if a day off her feet helped. She kind of suspected it wouldn’t, but she had to try.
Things were going great right up until she leveraged herself into the bath filled to the brim with bubbles…and heard the front door open. Hope shot a panicked glance at the unlocked bathroom door, but if the heavy footfalls heading in her direction were any indication, she didn’t have enough time to fight her way to her feet and hope that she managed to get to the lock before the person in the hallway got to the door.
As soon as the thought crossed her mind, the door opened and Daniel poked his head in. “Hope? I’m just…” He trailed off, his gaze raking over her. “Well, fuck.”
She wasn’t sure what she should be trying to cover, so she didn’t cover anything. Her mangled knee clearly showed over the top of the bubbles, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it without curling into a ball. He has to deal with it eventually. “Did you need something?”
“Yeah, darling. I’m starting to think I do.” He stepped into the bathroom and closed the door behind him. “You usually take baths in the middle of the day?”
The question seemed innocent enough, though there was nothing innocent about the way he was looking at her. She lifted her chin. “Only when my knee is giving me grief.” It wasn’t strictly true. Normally, she listened to her body and avoided pushing it far enough that it knocked her on her ass. It was a rookie mistake, and she was paying the price now.
His attention focused there, his eyebrows coming together. “It’s giving you grief?”
Talking about it was strange. The only person she felt comfortable being completely frank with was her doctor. Her parents did their best to be supportive, but it was easier for them to ignore her injury and pretend it didn’t exist, which she was more than happy to play along with. Better for them to look at her like she’d never changed than for them to pity her. The guilt was even worse. She loathed guilt.
Hope braced herself for Daniel’s reaction. “It does more often than not, but it’s been worse than normal lately.”
“Why?”
She hesitated, but honesty had to be the name of the game when it came to her interactions with him. To do anything else was to cheat them both. “Because I’ve been kind of sucking at self-care lately—though, to be fair, it’s totally possible that hormones have something to do with it, too.” That’s going to make things more complicated, she realized. Pregnancy meant a big weight change, and even completely able-bodied women got clumsy. She was going to be doubly so because of her bum knee.
