Island Promises. Leanne Banks

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      CHAPTER ONE

      MEGAN MCNEIL WAS already exhausted.

      By the time she’d herded two wildly excited seven-year-old girls, three carry-on bags, two backpacks, a wheelchair, a walker and a small cooler of medications that had needed to be hand-screened by security at O’Hare, she only wanted to curl up somewhere and take a nap.

      It didn’t help that she really, really didn’t want to be here in the first place.

      “We’re going to Hawaii. We’re going to Hawaii,” her daughter Sarah chanted in a singsong voice.

      Grace added her own verse. “We’re gonna swim in the ocean. And I can’t wa-ait.”

      A few passersby smiled at the identical twin girls and their exuberance.

      “Yes, we are,” Megan said, trying to tug her shoes on again and stuff all their stray possessions—hoodies, cell phone, laptop—back into the carry-on bags. “It’s going to be wonderful fun, isn’t it?”

      But first, they had to survive the nine-hour trip.

      When everything was carefully stowed again, Megan hung Grace’s bag on the back of her chair, helped Sarah into her backpack, grabbed her own carry-ons and checked their gate assignment one last time. Of course, it would be the farthest one from their current position. Nothing about this trip was likely to be easy.

      “All right, let’s go catch an airplane,” she said to her daughters.

      “I’ll push,” Sarah insisted—as she so often did on the rare occasions when Grace’s moderate cerebral palsy tired her so much she needed the chair for distances. Sarah moved behind her twin’s wheelchair to do the honors.

      “Thank you, sweetheart. We’re looking for Gate 21. Can you watch for that?”

      “I’ll find it, Mommy,” Grace offered, ever helpful. They made their way, weaving and dodging around other travelers until they finally found the right gate. Even if Megan hadn’t seen the sign, she would have figured it out by the preponderance of brightly colored Hawaiian shirts

      “Look! There’s Daddy,” Grace exclaimed, clapping her hands. She and Sarah both gave vigorous waves and Sarah called out to Nick.

      He and Cara stood surrounded by family members, but when he heard Sarah he immediately hurried over to them.

      “There’re my girls. I was starting to worry you wouldn’t make it!” He hugged Sarah tightly and kissed her cheek, then bent down to do the same for Grace.

      After he had greeted their daughters, he turned to give Megan a warm hug.

      “Thank you so much for doing this, Megs. It means the world to both Cara and me.”

      She hugged him back, gave him a kiss on the cheek and then stepped away. He looked good, she had to admit—smiling, relaxed and far happier than he had ever been during their short-lived marriage.

      “The girls are both over the moon,” she told him. “The beach and their dad’s wedding all in one trip. What could be more fun? I don’t think either of them slept a wink last night. I went in after midnight and had to put Sarah back in her own room or they would have giggled all night.”

      She didn’t add that she wasn’t looking forward to a nine-hour flight with two tired girls. She could only hope they would nap a little on the way.

      Before Nick could respond, his fiancée, Cara, approached them. She glowed with happiness. If she didn’t like the other woman so much, Megan might have been seriously annoyed at how great she looked, considering her own chaos of the last hour.

      Cara hugged her. “You’re here! I was worried you would miss the flight.”

      “We made it. No worries.”

      She was happy for Nick and Cara. She really was. The two of them made a beautiful couple, the handsome firefighter and his blonde, lovely bride. They were deeply in love and it was obvious to everyone who knew them.

      Nick had never looked at her the way he did Cara. Theirs hadn’t been a romantic destination wedding with all their closest friends and family, but rather frightened, hurried vows exchanged in her hospital room. She’d been on strict bedrest to avoid going into extremely premature labor with the twins.

      Megan and Nick really had barely known each other, had dated for only a few months—and had slept together exactly twice. While she had liked Nick, and had been lonely and a little lost at the time, they never really generated much spark.

      By mutual consent, they had both begun dating other people when Megan discovered she was pregnant, despite the condom Nick had used. As he was the only man she’d slept with in more than a year, she knew he had to be the father.

      More than eight years later, she could still remember her stunned devastation when that pregnancy test turned positive. At the time, she was still a year away from graduating with her RN, living on scholarships and financial aid and the carefully parsed-out proceeds of her parents’ life insurance policies.

      She could barely take care of herself, forget about another human being—and then came the further shock when an ultrasound revealed twin girls.

      She and Nick had considered giving the girls up for adoption. That had seemed the logical decision for two people who had no real foundation to build a life together—and never really wanted to take that step in the first place.

      But when she went into labor eighteen weeks early, everything drilled down to a fight for their daughters’ survival.

      They had decided to marry so she and the girls could be covered by his medical insurance policy as a Chicago firefighter. It had seemed the logical, wise decision.

      They’d never been in love, though they tried to pretend otherwise through the frightening weeks she’d been on hospital bedrest, each moment tense and anxious, then the long weeks while their girls were in the neonatal ICU, and afterward, when their life had become a blur of medical appointments and tests.

      Eventually, they couldn’t pretend anymore. By the time the girls were two and Grace had been diagnosed with prematurity-related cerebral palsy, both of them had realized they made better friends and coparents than husband and wife. Megan had always considered their divorce the very definition of amicable.