Not Quite Forever (Not Quite #4)(43)
Author: Catherine Bybee

Her health? “You’re killing me here, Monica. Is she dying?” He surged to his feet and started to pace. Could he do this a second time? Not Dakota. Please, God, not Dakota.

“No—”

“Her high blood pressure?”

“Is temporary.”

He paused, a thought tickled his brain. He stopped pacing, grasped the back of his desk chair.

“Her high blood pressure is temporary, Walt. A few months down the road . . .”

“Oh, hell.” Sudden onset high blood pressure, young woman of childbearing age . . . recent infection. “Bactrim. My dad put her on Bactrim.” She hadn’t been on it a week and he had . . . “I’m going to be a father.”

Monica was silent.

And he’d walked away before Dakota could tell him. Did she know when she’d cornered him in the ER? He couldn’t be sure, but even if she did, why would she have told him then? He swiveled his desk chair around and fell into it. “Where is she, Monica?”

“Home. She went to South Carolina.”

His head started rearranging his schedule, plugging favors, switching others, thinking about a position with Borderless Doctors that would make this easier. “I need a flight.”

“We can help with that, Walt. But before you pack a bag you need to know something else.”

There’s more?

“I’m listening.”

“Dakota hasn’t told anyone anything. She’s with her family nursing a broken heart. The only reason I’m telling you about the baby is because of the possibility of preeclampsia. I don’t think she understand the risks.”

“Has she seen an OB?”

“According to Mary she has. Either the doctor wasn’t clear, or Dakota downplayed her condition to Mary. I know she’s an adult. I know she has money . . . but she’s still a single pregnant woman. I’ve watched that happen in full living color. It’s scary, it’s lonely, and it’s completely irrational at times.”

His breathing came in short spurts. “Do you have an address?”

Monica came through. He would arrive on the East Coast just after midnight on yet another private jet. His favors to Monica and Trent were adding up fast. He would stay at the Savannah Morrison, which put him within spitting distance of Dakota. With a plan in motion, Walt paid his bills in advance for two months and closed his front door.

Thank God he didn’t have live plants. They wouldn’t survive.

He’d make this right.

All of it.

Dakota should have known the first day she wanted to join the world of the living she would wake up heaving. She’d escaped the nauseous part of pregnancy until the end of the second month. It hit fast and obnoxious the moment she opened her eyes. After tossing the nothing that was in her stomach, she crawled back into bed and buried her head only to be awakened by her sister an hour later.

Carol Ann bounced in the room, oblivious to Dakota’s condition. “You can’t mope around here another day. I won’t hear of it.”

“I’m not moping.”

Carol Ann sat on the edge of the bed. “Then what would you call it?”

Puking?

She couldn’t let on to her sister how she was feeling physically. Everyone would guess her condition in a nanosecond. She didn’t need that. Not yet.

“Fine.” Feeling green, and not at all ready to leave her bed, Dakota tossed off the covers and headed to the shower.

Carol Ann watched her with a smug look.

A shower, soda water, and a few dry crackers later, Dakota was ready to go. The weather had turned as much as it was going to in South Carolina. There was a slight nip in the air and a woman needed to shop. Or so the excuse was for getting together with some old high school friends while she was in town.

Louise was five foot nothing and still the tiny twig she’d always been. Then there was Sis. The three of them had always called her Sis even though her name was June. Maybe it was because Sis was an only child and always wanted sisters . . . or maybe she just hated her given name. Either way, they called her Sis and treated her thus.

“If it isn’t the elusive Dakota Laurens.” Louise opened her arms and placed a practiced smile on her lips.

“Hello Louise, long time.”

“Not because I moved away.”

Dakota would have laughed if she could do so without bringing up the crackers. Louise was destined to stay in their hometown until her parents died and left her their home. They all came from money . . . old Southern money that survived generations and wars. And it would be years before Louise lost her parents. Louise wasn’t going anywhere.

“California is great, thanks for asking.”

Louise offered a playful, but slightly hard slap to Dakota’s forearm. “You tease. You look . . . good.”

She looked like crap with makeup. She’d checked before leaving the house. Much as she tried to disguise her current level of pale and general yuckiness . . . it wasn’t working. Physically she was feeling worse, not better, since coming home.

Dakota placed her Southern smile firmly in place and did what she’d always done. “You never were a good liar, Louise.”

“I’m just trying to be polite.”

Yes . . . now Dakota was reminded why she left the South.

Sis rushed in from the parking lot and stood outside their rendezvous spot at the mouth of the shopping strip. “Sorry I’m late. I couldn’t get Junior down for his nap without a shot of whiskey.”

Carol Ann gasped.

“For me, not him!” Sis was a little less polished than Louise and Carol Ann, married the high school bad boy to spite her parents, and seemed to be happy.

“Dakota!” They hugged. “You look tired.”

Strange how refreshing honesty was. “There was a guy, he sucked, I’m here getting over him.”

Sis’s smile fell. “It’s always a man. Half the time I want to shoot Billy and the other . . . well, you write all those novels. You know what I want to do.”

Those novels. The reference to her day-in and day-out life reminded Dakota of why she’d left home. It had always been difficult to determine who truly supported her life, or if they smiled to her face only to talk behind her back. Carol Ann and Sis she could trust . . . Louise, not so much.

Sis wrapped a hand over Dakota’s shoulders. “I missed you. When Carol Ann told me you were back in town I nearly ran to your house. Then I realized there must have been something really wrong for you to come home. I know how much you wanted out of here growing up. I figured you’d let us know when you were ready to play.”