Kitabı oku: «Christmas Kisses Collection», sayfa 4
Not giving her breath but stealing hers away.
“You think threatening me with more mouth-to-mouth is going to convince me to say yes?” She made the mistake of looking directly at him.
He stared into her eyes for long moments, that intensity back, then he nodded. “I know it is.”
Her eyes widened at his confidence.
“You want me as much as I want you, McKenzie. I’m not sure why you feel you need to say no or not date me, but I’m one hundred percent positive that it’s not because you don’t want to be with me or that you didn’t enjoy that kiss as much as I did.”
“That’s cocky of you.”
“Honesty isn’t cockiness.”
“Why should I want to be with you?”
He frowned. “We get along well at the clinic and hospital. You make me smile and I make you smile. We have a lot in common, including that neither of us is looking for a long-term relationship,” he pointed out. “I’m basically a nice guy.”
“Who I work with,” she reminded.
“That’s really your hang-up? That we work together?”
Sinking her teeth into her lower lip again, McKenzie nodded. It was, wasn’t it? It wasn’t because he scared her emotionally, that the way she reacted to him emotionally scared her silly, that she was afraid she’d get too attached to him and end up reminding herself of her man-needing mother?
Was fear what was really holding her back?
His gaze bored into her. “If we didn’t work together, you’d go out with me? Admit that there was something between us?”
“We do work together so it’s a moot point,” she said, as much to herself as to him, because she wasn’t chicken. She wasn’t afraid to become involved with Lance. If she were, that would mean admitting she really was like her mother.
She wasn’t.
“But if we didn’t work together, you’d go have frozen yogurt with me tonight?”
She closed her eyes then nodded. Lord help her, she would. Probably take some more of that mouth-to-mouth, too. She squeezed her eyes tighter to try to block out the image.
See, she wasn’t afraid of Lance. Her reservations were because of their jobs. She heard Lance stir, wondered if he was moving toward her, if he was going to go for more mouth-to-mouth, and, when she opened her eyes, was surprised to see that he was leaving her office.
Seriously, she’d essentially just admitted that she wanted to date him, to share kisses with him, and he was leaving? Not cool.
“Where are you going?” she asked, instantly wishing she could take her question back as she didn’t want him to know it bothered her he’d been leaving. Why had he been leaving?
“To leave you alone. We’re both adults, neither of whom wants a long-term relationship. When we’d both be going in with no long-term expectations and there’s no company policy against dating, that you’d use that as your reason doesn’t make sense unless the truth is that I’ve misread the signs that you return my attraction or you’re scared. Either way doesn’t work for me. Sorry I’ve bothered you, McKenzie.”
CHAPTER FIVE
MCKENZIE BOLTED OUT of her office chair and took off after Lance. She grabbed hold of his white lab coat and pulled him back into her office.
He couldn’t just leave like that.
She pushed her office door closed and leaned against it, blocking his access to leave until she was ready to let him go.
“Does that mean we aren’t going to be friends anymore?” Did she sound as ridiculous as she felt? He’d asked her out. She’d turned him down. Repeatedly. He’d told her he’d leave her alone. She’d stopped him. What did that say about her?
Dear Lord, she was an emotional mess where this man was concerned. She should have let him go. Why hadn’t she?
“You want to just be my friend?” His blue eyes glittered with steeliness. “I’m sorry, McKenzie, but I want more than that. After our kiss, it’s going to take time before I can rewire my brain to think of you as just a friend. We can’t be ‘just friends.’ At least, I can’t think of you that way.”
“Stop this,” she ordered, lifting her chin in defiance at him and the plethora of emotions assailing her. “All this because I won’t go get frozen yogurt with you? This is ridiculous.”
“Not just frozen yogurt, McKenzie, and you know it. I want to date you. As in you and me acknowledging and embracing the attraction between us. As in multiple episodes of mouth-to-mouth and wherever that takes us. I’ve been honest with you that although I’m not interested in something long term, I’m attracted to you. Isn’t it time you’re honest with yourself and me? Because to say our working in the same building is why you won’t date me is what I find ridiculous.”
“But…” She trailed off, not sure what to say. Way beyond her excuse of not wanting to date a coworker, McKenzie was forced to face some truths.
She liked Lance.
She liked seeing glimpses of him every day, seeing his smile, hearing his voice, his laughter, even when it was from a distance and had nothing to do with her. She liked catching sight of him from time to time and seeing his expression brighten when he caught sight of her. She liked the way his eyes ate her up, the way his lips curved upward. She didn’t want him to avoid her or not be happy when he saw her. She didn’t want to stop grabbing a meal with him at the hospital or hanging out with him at group functions. She enjoyed his quick wit, his easy smile, the way he made her feel inside, even if she’d never admitted that to herself. If he shut her out of his life, she’d miss him. She’d miss everything about him.
“You can date other women,” she pointed out, wondering at how her own heart was throbbing at the very idea of seeing him with other women. Not that she hadn’t in the past. But in the past she’d never kissed him. Now she had and couldn’t stand the thought of his lips touching anyone else’s. “You can date some other woman,” she continued in spite of her green-flowing blood. “Then we could still be friends.”
He shook his head. “You’re wrong.”
“How am I wrong?”
He bent his head and touched his lips to hers.
McKenzie’s heart pounded so hard in her chest she was surprised her teeth weren’t rattling. But her thoughts from moments before had her kissing him back with a possessiveness she had no right to feel.
She slid her hands up his chest and twined her arms around his neck, threading her fingers into his dark hair. She kissed him until her knees felt so weak she might sag to the floor in an ooey-gooey puddle. Then she kissed him some more because she wanted him to sag to the floor in an ooey-gooey puddle with her.
The thought that he might cut her out of his life completely gave desperation to how she clung to him.
Desperate. Yep, that was her.
When he pulled slightly away he rested his forehead against hers and stared into her eyes. “That’s some mouth-to-mouth, McKenzie.”
She shook her head. “Mouth-to-mouth restores one’s breath. That totally just stole mine.”
Why was she admitting how much he affected her?
He cupped her face in a caress. “I can’t pretend that doesn’t exist between us. I don’t even want to try. I want you, McKenzie. I want to kiss you. Your mouth, your neck, your breasts, all of you. That’s not how I think of my ‘friends.’”
Fighting back visions of him kissing her all over, she sighed. “You don’t play fair.”
His fingers stroking across her cheek, he arched his brow. “You think not? I’m being honest. What’s unfair about that?”
She let out an exasperated sigh, which had him touching his lips to hers in a soft caress.
Which had her insides doing all kinds of crazy somersaults and happy dances. Okay, so maybe she’d wanted to say yes all along, but that didn’t mean everything about him wasn’t a very bad idea. Just as long as she kept things simple and neither of them fell under false illusions or expectations, she’d be fine.
When he lifted his head, she looked directly into his gaze.
“I will go to the hospital with you and get frozen yogurt afterward with you, but on one condition.”
“Name it.”
She should ask for the moon or something just as elaborately impossible. Then again, knowing him, he’d find a way to pluck it right out of the sky and deliver on time.
“No more mouth-to-mouth at work,” she told him, because the knowledge that she’d dropped to her father’s level with making out at work and to her mother’s level of desperation already cut deep.
He whistled softly. “Not that I don’t see your point, McKenzie, but that might be easier said than done.”
She stepped back, which put her flat against the door. With her chin slightly tilted upward, she crossed her arms. “That’s my condition.”
“Okay,” he agreed, but shook his head as if baffled. “But I’m just not sure how you’re going to do it.”
Her momentary triumph at his Okay dissipated. She blinked. “Me?”
Looking as cool as ever, he nodded. “Now that you know how good I am at mouth-to-mouth, how are you going to keep from pulling me behind closed doors every chance you get for a little resuscitation?”
Yeah, there was that.
“I’ll manage to restrain myself.” Somehow. He was very, very good at kissing, but there was that whole self-respect thing that she just as desperately clung to. “Now leave so I can work.”
And beat herself up over how she’d just proved her parents’ blood ran through her veins.
McKenzie looked over Edith’s test results while she waited for Lance to come to her office. Her hemoglobin and hematocrit were both decreased but not urgently so. Her abdominal and pelvic computerized tomography scan didn’t show any evidence of a perforated bowel or a cancerous mass, although certainly there was evidence of Edith’s constipation.
Had the woman really spit up blood? If she had, where had the blood come from? Had she just coughed too hard and had a minor bleed in her bronchus? It wasn’t likely, especially as Edith had said it hadn’t been like throwing up.
McKenzie had ordered the gastroenterology consult. She suspected Edith would be undergoing an endoscopy to evaluate her esophagus and stomach soon. Then again, it was possible the specialist might deem that, due to her age, she wasn’t a good candidate for the procedure.
“You look mind-boggled,” Lance said, knocking on her open office door before coming into the room. “Thinking about how much fun you’re going to have with me tonight?”
“Not that much fun,” she assured him, refusing to pander to his ego any more than she must have done earlier. “I’m trying to figure out what’s going on with a patient.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“Not really.” At his look of disappointment, she relented. “One of my regulars came in today with a history of abdominal pain, constipation, and spitting up blood that she described as not a real throw-up, but spitting up.”
“Anemic?”
“Slightly, but not enough to indicate a major bleed. She always runs borderline low, but her numbers have definitely dipped a little. I’m rechecking labs in the morning.”
“Have you consulted a gastroenterologist or general surgeon?”
“The first.”
“Any other symptoms?”
“If you named it, Edith would say she had it.”
“Edith Winters?”
Her gaze met his in surprise. “You know her?”
“Sure. I used to see her quite a bit. She’s a sweet lady.”
“She has me a bit worried. It’s probably nothing. Maybe she drank grape juice with breakfast and that’s what she saw when she spat up. I don’t know. I just feel as if I’m missing something.”
“You want me to have a look at her for a second opinion?”
“Would you mind?”
“I wouldn’t have offered if I minded. I’ll be at the hospital with you anyway.”
“Good point.” She got her purse from a desk drawer, then stood. “You ready to go so we can get this over with?”
“‘This’ as in the hospital or the night in general?”
She met his gaze, lifted one shoulder in a semishrug. “We’ll see. Oh, and if you think you’re going to get away with just feeding me frozen yogurt, you’re wrong. I’m not one of those ‘forever dieting and watching her carbs’ chicks you normally date who doesn’t eat. I expect real food before frozen yogurt.”
Lance grinned at the woman sitting next to him in his car. Twice in less than a week she’d been in his car when he’d begun to wonder if she was ever going to admit there was something between them.
He understood her concerns regarding them working together, but it wasn’t as if they worked side by side day in and day out. More like in the same office complex and caught glimpses of each other from time to time with occasional prolonged interaction. With other women he might be concerned about a “work romance,” but not with McKenzie. She was too professional to ever let a relationship interfere with work.
Thinking back over the past few months, really from the time he’d first met her a couple years ago when she’d moved back to Coopersville after finishing her medical training, he’d been fascinated by McKenzie. But other than that he’d catch her watching him with a curious look in her eyes, she hadn’t seemed interested in anything more than friendship and was obviously not in a life phase where she wanted a serious relationship.
Not that he wanted that either, but he also didn’t want to become last month’s flavor within a few weeks. She didn’t seem interested in dating anyone longer than a month. It was almost as if she marked a calendar and when thirty days hit, she moved on to the next page of her dating life.
Although he had no plans of marriage ever, he did prefer committed relationships. Just not those where his partner expected him to march her down the aisle.
He owed Shelby that much. More. So much more. But anything beyond keeping his vow to her was beyond his reach.
Since his last breakup he definitely hadn’t been interested in dating anyone except McKenzie. If he was being completely honest, he hadn’t been interested in dating anyone else for quite some time.
Oddly enough, since she dated regularly and routinely, she’d repeatedly turned him down. Which, since she was obviously as attracted to him as he was her, made no sense. Unless she truly was more a stickler for not dating coworkers than he believed.
“Have you ever dated a coworker in the past?”
At his question, she turned to him. “What do you mean?”
“I was just curious as to why going on a date with me was such a big deal.”
“I didn’t say going on a date with you was a big deal,” she immediately countered.
“My references say that going on a date with me is a very big deal.”
“Yeah, well, you might need to update that reference because I’m telling you Mommy Dearest doesn’t count.”
He grinned at her quick comeback. He liked that about her, that she had an intelligence and wit that stimulated him. “Did you think about our kiss?”
“What?”
He grinned. He knew that one would throw her off balance. “I was just curious. Did you think about our kiss on your porch this weekend?”
“I’m not answering that.” She turned and stared out the window.
Lance laughed. “You don’t have to. I already know.”
“I don’t like how you think you know everything about me.”
“I wouldn’t presume to say I know everything about you by a long shot, but your face and eyes are very expressive so there’s some things you don’t hide well.”
“Such as?”
“Your feelings about me.”
“Sorry. Loathing tends to do that to a girl.”
There went that quick wit again. He grinned. “Keep telling yourself that and you might convince yourself, but you’re not going to convince me. I’ve kissed you, remember?”
“How could I forget when you keep reminding me?”
He laughed again. “I plan to keep reminding you.”
“I have a good memory. No reminders needed.”
“I’m sure you do, but I enjoy reminding you.”
“Because?”
“You normally don’t fluster easily, yet I manage to fluster you.”
“You say that as if it’s a good thing,” she accused from the passenger seat.
Seeing the heightened color in her cheeks, hearing the pitch-change to her voice, watching the way her eyes sparked to life, he smiled. “Yes, I guess I do. You need to be flustered, and flustered good.”
“Why am I blushing?”
“Because you have a dirty mind?” he suggested, shooting her a teasing look. “And you liked that I kissed you today in your office and Friday night on your porch.”
“Let’s change the subject. Let’s talk about Edith and her bowel movements.”
He burst out laughing. “You have a way with words, McKenzie.”
“Let’s hope they include no, no and no again.”
“Then I just have to be sure to ask the right questions, such as, do you want me to stop kissing you, McKenzie?”
She just rolled her eyes and didn’t bother giving a verbal answer.
There really wasn’t any need.
They both already knew that she liked him kissing her.
CHAPTER SIX
EDITH DIDN’T LOOK much the worse for wear when McKenzie entered her hospital room. The elderly woman lay in her bed in the standard drab hospital gown beneath a white blanket and sheet that were pulled up to beneath her armpits. Her skin was still a pasty pale color that blended too well with her bed covering and had poor turgor, despite the intravenous fluids. Oxygen was being delivered via a nasal cannula. Edith’s short salt-and-pepper hair was sticking up every which way about her head as if she’d been restless. Or maybe she’d just run her fingers through her hair a lot.
“Hello, Edith, how are you feeling since I last saw you at the office earlier today?”
Pushing her glasses back on her nose, the woman shrugged her frail shoulders. “About the same.”
Which was a better answer than feeling worse.
“Any more blood?”
Edith shifted, rearranging pillows. “Not that I’ve seen.”
“Are you spitting up anything?”
She shook her head in a slow motion, as if to continue to answer required too much effort. “I was coughing up some yellowish stuff, but haven’t since I got to the hospital.”
“Hmm, I’m going to take a look and listen to you again, and then one of my colleagues whom you’ve met before will also be checking you. Dr. Spencer.”
“I know him. Handsome fellow. Great smile. Happy eyes.”
Lance did have happy eyes. He had a great smile, too. But she didn’t want thoughts of that happy-eyed handsome man with his great smile interfering with her work, so she just gave Edith a tight smile. “That would be him.”
“He your fellow?”
McKenzie’s heart just about stopped.
Grateful she’d just put her stethoscope diaphragm to the woman’s chest, McKenzie hesitated in answering. Was Lance her fellow? Was that what she’d agreed to earlier?
Essentially she had agreed to date him, but calling him her fellow seemed a far stretch from their earlier conversation.
She made note of the slight arrhythmia present in the woman’s cardiac sounds, nothing new, just a chronic issue that sometimes flared up. Edith had a cardiologist she saw regularly. Perhaps McKenzie would consult him also. First, she’d get an EKG and cardiac enzymes, just to be on the safe side.
“Take a deep breath for me,” she encouraged. Edith’s lung sounds were not very strong, but really weren’t any different from her usual shallow and crackly breaths. “I’m going to have to see why your chest X-ray isn’t available. They did do it?”
The woman nodded. “They brought the machine here and did the X-ray with me in bed.”
Interesting, as Edith could get up with assistance and had walked out of the clinic of her own free will with a nurse at her side. Plus, she’d had to go to the radiology department for the CT of her abdomen. They would have taken her by wheelchair, so why the bedside X-ray rather than doing it in Radiology?
There might be a perfectly logical reason why they’d done a portable chest X-ray instead of just doing it while she’d been there for her CT scan, McKenzie told herself.
“Is there something wrong?” Edith asked.
“You’re in the hospital, so obviously everything’s not right,” McKenzie began. “It concerns me that you saw blood when you spat up earlier. I need to figure out where that blood came from. Your esophagus? Your stomach? Your lungs? Then there’s your pain. How would you rate it currently?”
“My stomach? Maybe a two or three out of ten,” Edith answered, making McKenzie question if she should have sent the woman home and just seen her back in clinic in the morning.
Maybe she’d overreacted when Edith had mentioned seeing the blood. No, that was a new complaint for the woman and McKenzie’s gut instinct said more was going on here than met the eye. Edith didn’t look herself. She was paler, weaker.
“Does anywhere else hurt?”
“Not really.”
“Explain,” she prompted, knowing how Edith could be vague.
“Nothing that’s worth mentioning.”
Which could mean anything with the elderly woman.
“Edith, if there’s anything hurting or bothering you, I need to know so I can have everything checked out before I release you from the hospital. I want to make sure that we don’t miss anything.”
McKenzie listened to Edith’s abdomen, then palpated it, making sure nothing was grossly abnormal that hadn’t shown on Edith’s CT scan.
“I’m fine.” The woman patted McKenzie’s hand and any moment McKenzie expected to be called dearie. She finished her examination and was beginning to decide she’d truly jumped the gun on the admission when Lance stepped into the room.
“Hey, beautiful. What’s a classy lady like you doing in a joint like this?”
McKenzie shook her head at Lance’s entrance. The man was a nut. One who had just put a big smile on Edith’s pale face.
“What’s a hunky dude like you doing wearing pajamas to work?”
McKenzie blinked. Never had she heard Edith talk in such a manner.
Lance laughed. “They’re scrubs, not pajamas, and you and I have had this conversation in the past. Good to note your memory is intact.”
“That your fancy way of saying I haven’t lost my marbles?”
“Something like that.” He turned to McKenzie. “I’m a little confused about why they did a portable chest X-ray rather than do that while she was in Radiology for her CT.”
“I wondered that myself. I’ll talk to her nurse before we leave the hospital.”
“We?” Edith piped up.
Before Lance could say or reveal anything that McKenzie wasn’t sure she wanted to share with the elderly woman, McKenzie cleared her throat. “I suspect Dr. Spencer will be going home at some point this evening, and I certainly plan to go home too.”
After real food and frozen yogurt.
And mouth-to-mouth.
Her cheeks caught fire and she prayed Edith didn’t notice because the woman wouldn’t bother filtering her comments and obviously she had no qualms about teasing Lance.
“After looking over everything, I’m thinking you just needed a vacation,” Lance suggested.
To McKenzie’s surprise, Edith sighed. “You know it’s bad when your husband’s doctor says you need a vacation.”
Edith’s husband had been gone for a few years. He’d died about the time McKenzie had returned to Coopersville and started practicing at the clinic. Edith and her husband must have been patients of Lance’s prior to his death. Had the woman changed doctors at the clinic because McKenzie hadn’t known her husband and therefore she’d make no associations when seeing her?
No wonder he’d been so familiar with Edith.
“What do you think is going on, Edith?” Lance asked, removing his stethoscope from his lab coat pocket.
“I think you and my doctor are up to monkey business.”
McKenzie’s jaw dropped.
Lance grinned. “Monkey business, eh? Is that what practicing medicine is called these days?”
“Practicing medicine isn’t the business I was talking about. You know what I meant,” the older woman accused, wagging her finger at him.
“As did you when I asked what you thought was going on,” Lance countered, not fazed by her good-natured fussing.
The woman sighed and seemed to lose some of her gusto. “I’m not sure. My stomach has been hurting, but I just figured it was my constipation. Then today I saw that blood when I spit up, so I wasn’t sure what was going on and thought I’d better let Dr. Sanders check me.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“Me, too,” the woman admitted, looking every one of her eighty years and then a few. “I definitely feel better now than I did earlier. I think the oxygen is helping.”
“Were you having a hard time breathing, Edith?”
“Not really. I just felt like air was having trouble getting into my body.”
More symptoms Edith had failed to mention.
“Any weight gain?”
“She was two pounds heavier than at her last office visit a couple of weeks ago,” McKenzie answered, knowing where his mind was going. “Her feet and ankles have one plus nonpitting edema and she says her wedding band,” which Edith had never stopped wearing after her husband’s death, “isn’t tighter than normal.”
While Lance checked her over from head to toe, McKenzie logged in to the computer system and began charting her notes.
“Chest is noisy.” Lance had obviously heard the extra sounds in Edith’s lungs, too. They were difficult to miss. “Let’s get a CT of her chest and maybe a D-dimer, too.”
She’d already planned to order both.
“I’ve added the chest CT and a BNP to her labs, and recommended proceeding with the D-dimer if her BNP is elevated.” McKenzie agreed with his suggestions. “Anything else you can think of?”
He shook his head. “Maybe a sputum culture, just in case, but otherwise I think you’ve covered everything.”
Not everything. With the human body there were so many little intricate things that could go wrong that it was impossible to cover every contingency. Especially in someone Edith’s age when things were already not working as efficiently.
They stayed in Edith’s room for a few more minutes, talking to her and trying to ascertain more clues about what was going on with her, then spoke with Edith’s nurse to check on the reason for doing the portable chest X-ray rather than having it done in the radiology department. Apparently, the machine had been having issues. Edith’s nurse was going to check with the radiologist and text McKenzie as soon as results were available.
“Anyone else you need to see before we go?” she asked Lance.
He shook his head. “I went by to check on the mayor prior to going to Edith’s room.”
“Oh,” McKenzie acknowledged, glancing his way as they crossed the hospital parking lot. The wind nipped at her and she wished she’d changed from her lab coat into her jacket. “How is he doing?”
“He’s recovering from his surgery nicely. The surgeon plans to release him to go home tomorrow as long as there are no negative changes between now and then.”
“That’s good.”
“You saved his life.”
“If I hadn’t been there, you would have done so. It’s really no big deal.”
“He thinks it is a big deal. So does his wife. They are very grateful you were there.”
McKenzie wasn’t sure what Lance expected her to say. She’d just been at the right place at the right time and had helped do what had needed to be done.
“He wants us to ride on his float in the Christmas parade.”
“What?”
“He invited us to ride on his float this Saturday.”
“I don’t want to be in the Christmas parade.” Once upon a time she’d have loved to ride on a Christmas parade float.
“You a Scrooge?”
“No, but I don’t want to ride on a Christmas float and wave at people who are staring at me.”
Ever since her fighting parents had caused a scene at school and her entire class had stared at McKenzie, as if she had somehow been responsible, McKenzie had hated being the center of attention.
“That’s fine,” he said, not fazed by her reticence. “I’ll do the waving and you stare at me.”
“How is that supposed to keep them from staring at me?”
“I’m pretty sure everyone will be staring at the mayor and not us.”
“I hope you told him no.”
The corner of his mouth lifted in a half grin. “You’d hope wrong.”
She stopped walking. “I’m not into being a spectacle.”
She’d felt that way enough as a child thanks to her parents’ antics. She wouldn’t purposely put herself in that position again.
“How is participating in a community Christmas parade being a spectacle?”
She supposed he made a good point, but still…
“Besides, don’t people stare at you when you run your races?”
“Long-distance running doesn’t exactly draw a fan base.” She started toward his car again.
“That a hint for me to come cheer you on at your next run?”
She shook her head. “I don’t need anyone to cheer me on.”
“What if I want to cheer you on?”
She shook her head again. She didn’t want him or anyone else watching her run. She didn’t want to expect someone to be there and then them possibly not show up. To run because she loved running was one thing. To run and think someone was there, supporting her, and them not really be, well, she’d felt that disappointment multiple times throughout her childhood and she’d really prefer not to go down that road again.
Some things just weren’t worth repeating.
“I tell you what, if you want to come to one of my races, that’s fine. But not as a cheerleader. If you want to come,” she challenged, stopping at his car’s passenger side, “you run.”
He opened the car door and grinned. “You’re inviting me to be on your team? I like the sound of that.”
“There are no teams in the races I run.”
“No? Well, maybe you’re running in the wrong races.”
“I’m not.” She climbed into the seat and pulled the door to. She could hear his laughter as he rounded the car.
“You have yourself a deal, McKenzie,” he said as he climbed into the driver’s seat and buckled his seat belt. “I’ll run with you. When’s your next race?”
“I just did a half marathon on Saturday morning.” She thought over her schedule a moment. “I’m signed up for one on New Year’s Day morning. You should be able to still get signed up. It’s a local charity run so the guidelines aren’t strict.”
