“No. I can walk,” she insisted.
Despite the stress and turmoil of the day, she wanted to hug her brave, wonderful, independent daughter who had come so far. Grace stood up from her chair and moved with her careful, stiff-hipped gait down the aisle.
“Look for Row 14, and seats C, D and E,” she said to Grace.
“There’s a coincidence,” Shane said behind her. “I’m in Row 14 as well. Seat F.”
The jet had two aisles, with two seats by the window, four in the middle and two more across the other aisle. She and her daughters and Shane were assigned the middle seats.
Since the girls didn’t like to be separated, she took the aisle for herself and settled Grace beside her, with Sarah on the other side next to Shane. At least the girls would provide a little buffer between them.
It was a good plan, in theory—until their grandmother boarded and settled into the seat across the aisle from Megan.
“Grandma, guess what?” Sarah said. She leaned across her sister and Megan to launch into a story about her soccer game that week, all while other passengers filed past.
“You’ll have to wait to finish your story,” Megan told Sarah, when she saw her daughter growing frustrated at each interruption.
“Why don’t you change seats with her, my dear?” Jean suggested. “It’s a long flight, and you surely won’t be able to entertain the girls by yourself.”
She wanted to argue, but knew she’d sound ridiculous explaining that she couldn’t spend the four hours until their Los Angeles connection sitting by the brother of the bride.
She forced a smile. “Sarah, do you want to sit by your grandmother?”
“Yes!” her daughter exclaimed. Aware of Shane watching the interaction with interest, she and Sarah traded places.
“I think we’re settled now,” she said, after swapping Sarah’s backpack for her own tote bag. “Sorry for the chaos.”
“It’s fine. You must be a brave woman to trek nine hours to Hawaii for your ex-husband’s wedding.”
She was fiercely aware of him beside her, edgy and uncomfortable, which didn’t bode well for the long flight to LAX.
“Nick’s a good father and our girls love him,” she said. “It didn’t seem fair to deprive them of the chance to see his wedding just because it would be hard.”
The flight attendants made an announcement about boarding quickly and storing luggage. She could see Grace and Sarah both growing increasingly nervous about the flight. By necessity, she turned her attention to calming her daughters while the flight crew prepared the cabin for takeoff.
A short time later, they were in the air. “There. You made it, girls. That was fun, wasn’t it?” She forced more enthusiasm than she really felt, since she wasn’t all that crazy about flying herself.
“I forgot how it made my tummy tickle when we went to Disney World,” Grace said.
“I like it!” Sarah exclaimed. “Can we do it again?”
“You’ve got four more takeoffs before we’re done—one more today and two on our way home.”
The flight attendant came on a few moments later and announced that it was now safe to use electronic devices. Sarah immediately asked for Megan’s tablet.
“Hey, Grace, want to play a game?”
Grace was always willing to play, and soon the twins were engrossed in the game, blonde heads close together in concentration. Megan pulled out a magazine from her tote, still strongly aware of Shane beside her in the cramped space.
She was going to have to talk to him, to explain and apologize for her actions. Why not do it now, while her daughters were distracted? She opened her mouth but he beat her to it.
“So, for the last hour I’ve been trying to figure everything out. Was it because of your daughters?”
She could feel heat rush to her cheeks. “My...daughters?”
He made a face. “I called that fake number you gave me three times, hoping each time I’d made some kind of mistake dialing. The elderly-sounding gentlemen on the other end of the line was not amused, by the way.”
Oh, she had been such an idiot. If she could go back and relive any moment in her life, it would be that night in the ER. She hated working a shift on the night of a full moon. Everybody acted out of character, including her.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I was so stupid.”
From the moment he walked in with a gunshot wound—not on a stretcher but on his own two feet—she had known the handsome police officer in the bloodstained uniform was trouble. He’d been charming and sweet and obviously interested in her. Something about the late shift and the crazy night and the way he looked at her had her acting completely unlike herself. She’d been fun and flirty, laughing and teasing him.
And then he’d asked for her phone number and reality had crashed back down. She couldn’t go out with him. She didn’t even know the man, and he certainly didn’t know the real her, the stressed-out, overscheduled mother of twins.
Then she’d been called into a trauma, and in a panic she’d scrawled a fake number.
“So?” he asked now. “Did you brush me off because of your daughters?”
“If it’s any consolation, at the moment I did it I felt terrible,” she admitted. “As soon as the trauma crisis was over, I went back to give you my real number, but by then you’d been discharged.”
Under other circumstances, she might have been tempted to look up his information but that would have violated privacy laws and she could have been fired.
“You could’ve just told me you weren’t interested,” he said. “I’m a big boy. I can handle a little rejection—but for the record, I prefer outright rejection to that kind of sneaky thing.”
She winced. “I know. You’d think I was in high school or something. All I can say is, I messed up. I’m really sorry.”
CHAPTER TWO
SEEING THE EMBARRASSMENT in her gaze, Shane wasn’t sure what to think about Megan McNeil.
She was either crazy or had considerable grit to show up for her ex-husband’s wedding to another woman. He wasn’t sure which yet.
Even a month later, her rejection stung.
He had really liked Megan. Okay, he might have been a little woozy from pain medication—even a through-and-through round from a .38 hurt like hell—but he could have sworn they’d forged a connection.
His mind replayed their interaction. While she’d helped him out of his uniform she had been sweet and solicitous, a beacon of warmth on a bitter winter night that had turned to hell.
