Cassidy's Kids

“I don’t think it’s necessary for everyone to know,” she continued, “but I thought you should.”

Instantly filled with compassion, Ellie took in the other woman’s soft features. “You don’t remember anything?” she asked. She couldn’t imagine something so horrible. To have no control at all.

Sara shook her head. “A policeman found me in an alley, and I had no idea how I came to be there. He took me to a women’s shelter.”

“How frightening.”

Sara smiled sadly. “It was. I remember waking up, but I had no idea where I was. I only know that it was really dark. And my head hurt.”

Horrified, Ellie leaned forward. “You’d been attacked?”

“We don’t know.” Sara shrugged nonchalantly, but her eyes told a different story. Filled with fear, they testified to the seriousness of her predicament. “The shelter sent me to a free clinic to get checked over, and they couldn’t find anything wrong, other than the bump on my head. It had been bleeding, and I had a bit of a concussion, but nothing serious.”

“And they couldn’t tell how that bump came to be there?” Ellie was a stickler for details. She was never satisfied until she had all the answers. And this woman, with her sweet smile, looked like she deserved some answers.

“I could have been attacked, I suppose, but it’s just as likely that I fell, or that something fell on me.”

“She had nothing on her when she wandered into the shelter,” Shelby added. “No purse, no jewelry, nothing.”

Experiencing the woman’s pain almost as though it were her own, Ellie couldn’t let go. “So what are you going to do?”

“Work here, be patient, hope my memory comes back soon.” Sara’s tone implied there was little else she could do.

“Did you check, the missing persons’ reports?”

“Yeah,” Sara’s eyes clouded. “Apparently no one has reported me missing, at least not in Austin.”

“What about the papers?” Ellie asked.

“The police have no way of knowing how far back to check,” Shelby said, reaching over to give Sara’s hand a quick squeeze. “They’ve gone back a couple of weeks from the time of her appearance, and found nothing.”

As she sat there, Ellie put herself in Sara’s shoes. And suddenly the problems she’d been having with the press seemed almost a blessing. At least she had a life to report about.

“Where are you going to stay?” Ellie asked, as Mary Jane dropped off another diet cola and was gone.

“Mrs. Parker’s Inn,” Sara replied, her features more relaxed. “I’ve already seen the room—it’s quite nice, actually, and the house is cozy. I just needed to make certain I had a job before I moved in.”

Ellie was familiar with the boarding house. It was comfortable and within walking distance of the diner.

“Speaking of which, we better let you go get settled in so you can be back this afternoon,” Shelby said, standing.

Sara scrambled to her feet, as well, including both Ellie and Shelby with her genuine smile. “I’ll see you later, then. Nice to meet you, Ellie.” And she was gone.

As Ellie walked back to the clinic and the mounds of work waiting for her there, she couldn’t get Sara out of her mind or her heart. In losing her memory, Sara had in essence lost her life, lost everything that mattered.

After the previous night with Cody, Ellie couldn’t help wondering if she’d lost touch with things that mattered in her life, as well.

Except my goals, she reminded herself as she applied herself to the day’s work. She would be the best damn administrator Maitland Maternity had ever seen. Her goals might have changed through the years, but having them had always sustained her. They’d given her a reason to get up in the morning, led her to every success she’d ever had. She couldn’t forget that.

JANELLE MAITLAND WAS NOT a patient woman. And she’d been waiting every day for thirty years to claim what was hers. Looking in the cracked mirror of the seedy hotel room in this nameless little dirt-hole Texas town, she felt the unwelcome pressure of frustrated tears behind her eyes. She was a pretty woman, she thought. Her long dark hair and brown eyes screamed privilege. It wasn’t right that she had to suffer for her father’s weaknesses. She wasn’t the one who’d decided to leave the family clan, to squander her life and her share of the family fortune in Las Vegas. She’d had no choice in the way he’d forced her to grow up.

But she wasn’t a kid anymore. Her father was dead, which had turned out to be a really good thing. She had choices now, and she was damn well tired of waiting to exercise them. Why did everything have to take so long? She’d been waiting for Petey to get back from his makeover at the hairdresser’s for over an hour. She was hungry. She wanted lunch.

And not some damn take-out lunch, either. She was a Maitland. She deserved better.

ELLIE HEARD THE COMMOTION in the hallway before she actually saw them. She’d been poring over needle codes and standards, planning to upgrade the kind they’d been using at the clinic for more than ten years, when the first shrill “No!” reached her ears. Followed quickly by a babyish “Da-ee! Up!”

Before she could go to investigate, the sounds came closer, and three bodies materialized in her doorway. Sloan, carrying two of the loveliest baby girls she’d ever seen. Or attempting to carry them. Baby girl on the right apparently didn’t want to share her daddy’s arms and was attempting to push baby girl on the left back down to the floor.

“No!” the baby on the right screamed again. “Isha, down.”

To which the toddler on the left let fly with her rendition of “Up! Da-ee, up!”

“Ariel, Alisha, stop this instant.” Sloan’s voice could have carried a bit more conviction. He smiled apologetically at Ellie before taking a seat in front of her desk and settling the twins, still squabbling, one on each knee.

“Can I help you?” Ellie said, dumbstruck. What in hell was he doing here?

At the sound of her voice, the girls stopped fussing and stared.

“I wanted you to meet them,” Sloan said simply. “These are my daughters. Ariel—” he nodded to the baby on the right “—and Alisha. Alisha has the little swirled tuft in the middle of her hairline. I couldn’t have ordered up a better way to tell them apart.”

When Ellie looked at Ariel, she buried her face in Sloan’s chest. Alisha continued to stare, a leftover tear trembling on her lashes.

Ellie fell in love.

“They’re beautiful,” she said, forgetting that she wanted this man out of her life forever.

“They take after Marla.”

The prick of pain wasn’t overwhelming, as pain went, but it shocked Ellie back into the present in a hurry. The girls did take after their blond, beauty-queen mother. And Sloan had taken off after her, too. He’d asked Marla to his senior prom only a week after he’d introduced Ellie to the mysteries of making out.

“I really need your help, El.” Sloan’s eyes beseeched her.

“No.” She couldn’t. She wasn’t that strong. “I have no time as it is,” she said lamely. “I’m still getting settled in here. I’m going to school for my MBA. I haven’t even been out with my friends in weeks.”

No matter how compelling the argument sounded to Ellie, Sloan didn’t look convinced.

“Sounds familiar,” he said, smiling instead. “As I recall, you were in a similar predicament your sophomore year in high school.”

The year she’d met Sloan.

“You didn’t want to help with the homecoming float because you were in all the honor classes and were studying for early entrance into college, too. You hadn’t been to any of the parties with Beth since the beginning of the school year.”

And he’d talked her into helping with the float. It had been the start of the most wonderful—and most painful—time of her life. She’d felt valuable as a person, and as a woman, for the first time ever. In the end, though, she’d had her insecurities about her sexuality humiliatingly confirmed when Sloan had given her her first kiss and then told her the very next day that they couldn’t be friends anymore. He hadn’t even waited for the steam to clear before he’d asked Marla to the prom.

“You thanked me for showing you that there was more to life than books, Ellie.”

And he’d rewarded her gratitude with heartache. “I can’t help you, Sloan.” The babies were squirming, but she refused to look at them. She had to get rid of them before she turned traitor on herself, on all she’d learned, on all she’d painstakingly accepted about herself.