“You’ve done some work on it.”“While I was giving you space,” Wes said, his voice wry. “I guess something positive came out of it.”A startled type of joy tingled in her chest—he’d taken her advice. She felt strangely…validated. Though hundreds of clients had paid her big bucks just to get her take on a project, the fact that Wes had done it warmed her in a way no paid project ever had.“So, what do you think of the knee hinges?” she asked.“They’re good.” He reached around her and worked one of the hinges open, tilting the apparatus so they could look directly into the space. “This one is the spring design, because that’s what I had on hand. But I added electromagnetic mechanisms to the ones at the hip to try them out. It’s a supersimple unit I rigged from a car starter.”Rubi shook her head, a slow smile growing. “If I said your ingenuity was making me hot, that would be weird, right?”“Honey, if it makes you hot, and I’m doing it, that’s not weird.”He could make her smile so easily.Inside the hinge, the space was small, maybe three inches in diameter, with two rings of metal layered on top of each other, springs hooked to the discs and something small and mechanical at the center.She recognized the rings as the pivoting pieces.
