He crouched.
The drop of his weight — sudden, graceful, the quality of someone dropping into a low position with the same authority they occupied a standing one — and before she had finished processing the 'gorgeous' he was at her knee level, and his hands had found her right leg.
The prosthetic leg.
His hands on it.
Not the careful, tentative quality of hands that did not know how to touch something unfamiliar and were afraid of getting it wrong. The full, warm, attending quality of hands that had already decided this mattered and were treating it accordingly. Both palms wrapped around the titanium-composite below her knee — the cool, hard, shaped surface of it — and he lifted.
Slow. The easy, unbothered quality of a man lifting a weight that presented him no difficulty.
He raised her leg.
Toward his face.
She grabbed his shoulder.
