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instead she bit her lower lip.
    He seemed to be attempting to look inside her soul, and she broke eye contact with him, not wanting to see any more sympathy in the depths of his eyes. She had enough self-pity. She didn’t need anyone else’s.
    “Tough break,” he replied.
    “Yes, it was. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m feeling a bit tired. I’m going to lie down for a while.”
    With a need to escape whatever further conversation he’d planned to have with her, she scooted out of the room and into her bedroom, where she closed the door as tears stung her eyes.
    The phone call from Craig had upset her and she felt too fragile to have any meaningful discussion about her life in a wheelchair. There was nothing to discuss.
    She was in a wheelchair and therefore had no life.
    She wheeled herself over to the window and stared out at the backyard. She’d spent most of her childhood and teenage years in the yard, practicing leaps, stretching for a perfect arabesque, and dreaming about the big lights and city streets of New York.
    She’d had a small group of friends in high school, but none of them had understood her drive to succeed, to leave the small town and make a life doing what she loved. They had talked about getting married and having children, becoming hairdressers or schoolteachers right here in Grady Gulch.
    Her mother used to joke that she’d come out of the womb dancing. Dancing wasn’t just something Melanie had done; it had been the sum of her being. And she didn’t know how to be without it.
    She hadn’t seen any of her old friends since returning to town. Initially she’d been too busy nursing her mother for any kind of social life. Besides, she hadn’t seen the point in renewing old acquaintances since her intention was to bury her mother and head back to New York.
    Now she didn’t want to see any of those old friends or anyone else in town. They would all look at her with pity and she couldn’t handle that.
    Thankfully she didn’t have to worry about having any more intimate discussions with Adam. After she’d napped, she returned to the kitchen and heard no noise from the upstairs. A glance out the front window let her know Adam’s truck was gone, so he wasn’t home.
    It was ridiculous, the kind of tension his very presence wrought inside her. She was far too aware of him as a sexy male, when she needed to look at him objectively like the cash cow that was going to save her house.
    Still, it was hard to stay objective when he focused those gorgeous eyes on her, when the clean male scent of him eddied in the air around her and his energy filled the corners of the room.
    She was twenty-eight years old, and her reaction to Adam reminded her that although her leg and foot were dead, apparently her hormones were not. Not that it mattered.
    She spent the remainder of the evening watching television in the living room and then at nine o’clock once again went into her bedroom to prepare for bed.
    As she got into her midnight-blue silk nightgown, she wondered where Adam was and who he might be with. None of your business, a little voice whispered in the back of her brain.
    He was just a tenant, renting a couple of rooms. He had a life of his own and what he did, where he went had absolutely nothing to do with her. She had to somehow figure out how to rebuild her life without dance, without her mother for support.
    As she lay in the dark, her thoughts drifted to her mother. How she missed her. She’d scarcely had time to grieve for her before the fall down the stairs. Now what she’d like more than anything was to hear her mother’s laughter, see her beloved face wreathed with a smile one last time.
    How she wished she could hear her mother tell her that everything was going to be all right, that Melanie was strong enough to get through anything.
    Olive had been Melanie’s rock, a no-nonsense woman who had, despite her better judgment, bought into Melanie’s dreams of dancing and had