She placed her hands flat on the floor and stepped back first with her good foot, then her booted. Once she was sure of her balance, she pressed her palms into the floor. Her body leaned into an inverted V, her hips lifted toward the ceiling, and she was careful to press her shoulders away from her ears.
After studying her, her new cat executed a stretch of her own, mimicking the downward dog pose. Sophie giggled lightly under her breath. Best not to tell the feline the name of the actual yoga pose. Then, on her other side, Haydn whined and stood for a moment, then bent into a similar stretch.
Now all three of them were in downward dog.
“Seriously?” Brandon’s voice made Sophie jump.
She stood too quickly, and the blood rushed out of her head. “Whoa.”
Brandon was suddenly there in front of her, hands gently gripping her upper arms and steadying her. “Too fast. Aren’t you supposed to stand up out of those positions slowly?”
“Everything about yoga is in its own time.” But her mind wasn’t on what he’d asked her or even what she’d answered. Instead, she was picturing mathematical representations. “I figured out a name for her.”
“Yeah?” Brandon nudged her toward the couches.
Too excited to resist, she grinned at him as he sat her down and had her lift her right leg to rest on the length of the couch. “Yes! Tesseract! I’ll call her Tessa for short.”
The cat in question hopped onto the couch and walked up onto her chest, butting Sophie’s chin with her head in an imperious demand for petting.
“I’m almost afraid to ask.” Brandon sat on the couch next to her. “You like math and all, but how did you come up with that one?”
“Well, I was starting my yoga routine, taking it nice and easy.” Sophie wanted to express her thought process before she forgot how she’d come to her epiphany.
“So I was a single point of origin. Then Tessa followed my lead. She became a second point with a line of action between us. Two-dimensional. Then Haydn joined us and made us three-dimensional. Then you came along and added a fourth dimension to us.”
Brandon stared at her a long time. “But when Haydn joined you, you became a triangle, not a cube.”
“Okay, so the mathematical logic gets fuzzy there, but my abstract thought process saw the point turn into a line between two points, then the line become two parallel lines connected to become a square, and the square become two squares connected at the corners to become a cube, and then you surprised me and the cube became two cubes connected at the corners to become a hypercube.” She drew in a deep breath. “It totally made sense at the time.”
Brandon chuckled. “Okay, your brain did geometry. For fun. Because a dog and a cat joined you. I’ll admit I’ve never seen that before, by the way.”
She leaned into him, exceedingly happy with herself. “No?”
“It’s good to see Haydn put weight on the prosthetic and use it to his advantage. A stretch like the one he was doing with you wouldn’t have been as doable without his prosthetic on.”
“Mmm.” She looked over at Haydn, who was now lying on his belly in the middle of the carpet. “Maybe you should incorporate yoga into his physical therapy.”
Brandon stiffened against her. “I don’t think so.”
She sat up and turned to face him. “Why not?”
“You’re talking about a dog doing yoga.” Brandon shook his head.
“There are articles out there on the benefit of yoga and massages for dogs.” She was sure she’d seen some online in the past few months.
Brandon raised both eyebrows, probably because she’d made the statement so vehemently.
She narrowed her eyes at him as he remained silent, though. “I’ll cite my sources as soon as I can get online again.”
And just like that, she remembered she couldn’t go online because someone was out there trying to find her so he could kill her.
*
Forte watched the joy bleed out of Sophie’s expression. Her smile faded, and her gaze dropped away from his. There were other minute changes. Her eyes dilated slightly as her thoughts turned inward and the sweet, natural blush on her cheeks when she was tweaked into being angry with him faded. Her shoulders drooped and she absently rubbed her upper arms from the chill of thoughts rather than the temperature of the room.
“Hey—”
His current disposable phone rang. Cursing, he held the phone to his ear and used his free arm to gather Sophie in against his side. She came to him unresisting and curled up against his body.
“Forte,” he growled into the phone, but, hell, anyone calling this phone could take it.
“Ky here.” Ky’s voice held a note of wary reserve.
“Yeah.” Forte wasn’t in the mood to go for camaraderie at the moment.
“I’ve got an update on our friend’s former employer.” Ky matched his tone. Apparently, he’d had a bad day. “We’ve had attorneys buzzing around since we began a direct investigation. They’re trying everything and anything to make things difficult, and it’s a huge pain in the ass.”