Farrah Rochon - Forever's Promise

“What happened here? Did a rainbow try to eat your fingers?” She playfully tugged Kristi’s ponytail.

“More like the Easter Bunny,” Gayle said. “We’ve been dyeing eggs.”

“Ah, that also explains the wardrobe change.” Shayla gestured to the oversize Jimi Hendrix T-shirts both girls wore.

“I didn’t want them staining their school uniforms, so I drafted a couple of my son’s old shirts.”

“Yikes. I hope they weren’t his favorites.”

Gayle gave a halfhearted shrug. “Serves him right for leaving them here. I’ve been telling him to come get his stuff for ten years.”

Gathering the girls’ backpacks and neatly folded school uniforms from the table, Shayla said, “Thanks again for watching them on such short notice.” She waved goodbye as she ushered the kids out the back door.

They were halfway across the yard when Gayle called to them. “Wait a minute.” She came over, carrying a slim cardboard package and a carton of eggs. “Here’s the second dye kit and the rest of the eggs. They’re already boiled. I told the girls that maybe you’d dye a few with them tonight.”

Shayla managed a weak smile, squelching a groan at Kristi’s excited expression. She was having a hard enough time handling basic child care; she could not pull off arts and crafts, especially after the day she’d endured.

“Maybe later.” Like when her sister-in-law came home tomorrow.

They continued across the side lawn between her house and Gayle’s. She made a mental note to call the high school kid she’d hired to cut her lawn. The clover patches were ankle-deep. Then again, maybe she should leave the grass uncut and hold an Easter-egg hunt for the girls. That should score her some points in the cool aunt department, right?

“So, did you two have fun?” Shayla asked.

Kristi’s ponytail bounced up and down with her enthusiastic head nod, but Cassidy barely responded.

Shayla curbed the sigh that nearly escaped. In the eight months since she’d returned to Gauthier her chief goal had been to form a relationship with her nieces. To her utter disappointment, things were not going as planned. Kristi had warmed up to her after the first time Shayla had taken them out for ice cream, but it would take far more than a double scoop of chocolate-chip-cookie dough to break down Cassidy’s walls.

Her reluctance had only prodded Shayla to try harder. She would win Cassidy over. She owed it to her baby brother to forge a relationship with the family he’d left behind.

Shayla suffered through the familiar ache that struck her chest whenever she thought about Braylon. She pulled in a deep breath and slowly let it out, willing the threatening tears to remain at bay. She knew better than to let her mind wander there, especially when she was so drained. She would not lose it in front of the girls.

Shayla unlocked the door to the quaint, two-bedroom cottage, which surprisingly suited her just as much as her condo in a high-rise building in downtown Seattle had. She let the girls enter ahead of her, then locked the door behind them.

“Aunt Shayla?”

She nearly stumbled at the sound of Cassidy’s soft voice. Another thing she could count on one hand was the number of times her eldest niece had addressed her directly.

Shayla walked over and ran a tentative hand along Cassidy’s bouncy curls that were so much like her own. “Yes, Cass?”

“Can we dye the rest of the eggs?”

Shayla’s shoulders fell. Why, of all things, did she have to ask that?

“Oh, honey, I’ve been up since 4:00 a.m. I’m too tired to dye eggs right now.” She lifted a curl. “I’ll tell you what. If you and your sister watch one of your DVDs while I take a nap, we’ll dye the eggs a bit later. Is that okay?”

Cassidy nodded, but Shayla caught the disappointment in her eyes.

Great. The one time her niece asks for something, and she comes off feeling like the auntie from hell. But if she tried dyeing Easter eggs right now they would all end up looking like Kristi’s fingers.

She allowed the girls to pick a movie out of the collection of DVDs her sister-in-law had left for them. Once they were both settled on the rug in front of the television, she went into her bedroom, kicked off her tennis shoes, and crashed face-first on top of the still-made bed.

She wasn’t sure how much time had passed when she heard a faint voice call, “Aunt Shayla?”

She stirred, turning over and curling into a fetal position.

“Aunt Shayla, something’s wrong with Kristi.”

“What is it, baby?” she murmured.

“Kristi’s sick. She’s throwing up. And it looks...funny.”

Shayla blinked. Cassidy’s words registered and she jerked up, hopping off the bed.

“Where is she?”

Cassidy pointed. “In the bathroom.”

Shayla ran to the bathroom, her heart jumping to her throat when she came upon her three-year-old niece. Kristi’s shirt and the bathroom floor were covered in yellowish-orange vomit, and she was coughing, her thin frame jerking in violent fits and spurts.

“Oh, my God! What happened?”

Cassidy hunched her shoulders, her bottom lip trembling.

Was that bile? Was Kristi throwing up buckets of bile?

Oh, God.

She finally got the chance to look after the girls, and this happened? She’d be lucky if Leslie let her anywhere near them again.

She scooped Kristi into her arms and called for Cassidy over her shoulder. “Come on, Cass. Let’s get her to the doctor.”

Not wanting to waste time searching for tennis shoes, she slipped her feet into the slippers she’d left in the bathroom and grabbed her purse and car keys from the kitchen table where she’d dropped them earlier.

She suddenly remembered the medical authorization letter Leslie had given her before she’d left for Houston late Friday evening, just in case something happened. Not once did Shayla anticipate actually using it.

She snatched the letter from where she’d tacked it to the refrigerator, next to the list of emergency numbers Leslie had also insisted Shayla have at the ready. She considered calling her sister-in-law, but what would she tell her? She didn’t even know what was going on yet. She needed to get Kristi to the hospital ASAP. Then she’d call Leslie.

Gauthier didn’t have a hospital. In fact, the town had only recently acquired a health clinic that was staffed by volunteer doctors and nurses a couple of days a week. Thankfully, Maplesville, which was only twenty minutes away—fifteen if she didn’t hear any beeps on the police radar detector mounted to her dashboard—had a small hospital.

Shayla strapped Kristi into her booster seat and told Cassidy to buckle her seatbelt. Once she was behind the wheel, she maneuvered the rearview mirror so that she could see her nieces.

“Don’t worry, everything’s going to be okay,” Shayla assured them.

God, she hoped she was right.

* * *

“Do you feel any tenderness or pain when I press here?” Xavier Wright asked the twentysomething who’d walked into the E.R. with complaints of stomach pains.

“Not really,” she said. “Maybe a little higher.”

He gently pressed along her rib cage. “Here?”

“Just a little higher,” she said, adding a seductive purr to her voice.

Xavier bit back a curse. His teeth gritted as he backed away from the exam table. He didn’t have time to perform a breast exam, even though he knew that’s exactly what his latest “patient” had in mind.

“I don’t think this is appendicitis,” he said. “You may want to try a laxative.”

Her forehead scrunched as she frowned. Yeah, mentioning laxatives was always a good way to zap the sexy out of any conversation.

Xavier made a couple of notations in the patient’s electronic chart. “I’ll send a nurse in to discuss some over-the-counter medications that may help.”