Ken placed his cell phone in the palm of her hand. “I assume this is what you’re looking for.” He grabbed her elbow as she turned away. “Get back to me as fast as you can,” he pleaded, “I hate hospitals.”

When Chris returned, she found Ken Callahan slouched in a chair, his long legs stretched in front of him. His arm had been put in a sling, and he looked up at her anxiously over a cup of coffee. “You’ve been gone for hours-what took you so long?”

“I’ve been gone for five minutes.”

He smiled boyishly, slightly embarrassed. “Well, it seemed like hours. They’ve already taken X-rays.” He pointed to a Styrofoam cup on the table beside him. “I got you some coffee.”

Chris removed the lid and added a container of cream, then studied him as she sipped at the coffee. He had high cheekbones, a perfectly straight nose, and a few flecks of gray in the unruly profusion of wavy black hair. He had a wide mouth, which she could easily imagine set in ruthless determination, but right now he stared moodily into his coffee, the corners of his mouth turned down, and Chris wondered why he was looking so grim. “Is something wrong?”

“To tell you the truth…I’m scared to death. I’ve never been in a hospital before. And I’ve never broken anything that was mine. Will it hurt?”

Chris gaped in astonishment. He was serious. He really was scared. She smiled and shook her head. “I don’t think it will hurt.”

“Have you ever broken anything?”

“When I was a little girl we lived on a farm in Colorado-not a working farm, we just called it a farm because it was eleven acres, and it had a barn. When my parents bought the farm it came complete with a big old black horse named Looney. He was a great horse, but every now and then he liked to see me go over a fence solo. He’d run right up to a fence, plant his feet, and I’d go soaring off into the air. One time I crashed into a split rail and broke my nose.”