“Nope. I haven’t got a clue,” he informed her adroitly with a huge-ass grin on his face. “But hell if I’m not looking forward to it.”
She laughed. A really husky chuckle. “I see. So, you’re a leap before you look type,” she posited, moving again to head them toward the room that was their destination.
“Not exactly that. But in my previous job, I often had to make snap decisions that meant the difference between life or death, and I was never one to shy away.”
Now she blinked her big brown eyes at him. “That sounds…menacing. I know you were in the service like a lot of your brothers, but what the hell was your job?”
“I was a Navy SEAL,” he told her without hesitation.
When her mouth gaped open, he knew she was winding up to ask a slew more questions, but a voice from inside the infusion suite that Vincent instantly recognized, put a hold on that.
“Fluffo! You came back.”
Little Inez was sitting up tall with a smile that stretched from ear to ear.
“Of course I did, Inez,” he said as they walked in. He wanted to reach out and pat her cheek, but he didn’t know her that well.
Yet.
Instead, he opted to pull a colorful scarf “magically” out of his sleeve, which he flourished in her direction. She grabbed it up.
“I’ve also brought a friend,” he told her. “Her name is Lace.”
Inez wrapped the pretty silk material around her bald head and looked up at Lace, calculatedly.
“You have cancer, too,” she determined. “Do you have any hair?”
Out of the mouths of babes.
Vincent had been wondering how to bring that up, but Inez had taken the initiative first, and now it was out of his hands.
“Nope. No hair,” Lace said, and in a show of solidarity, she whipped off the scrubs cap that hid her pate.
She was back to looking like a mythical goddess.
“I had long, straight blonde hair all my life,” she continued, “but as soon as it started coming out in handfuls, I shaved it off.”
“Me, too,” Inez readily collaborated. “ExceptIdidn’t do it. The people I live with did. They didn’t like all my hair in the tub, so they got rid of it.”
Inez didn’t look butt-hurt at all, but Vincent was instantly pissed. It sounded like there’d been no discussion about her shearing. No soft-soaping. Just…hack it off.
He had to swallow down his anger as Inez shot Lace a huge smile. “The nurses told me it will all grow back.”
“Mine, too,” Lace agreed. “What color was yours?” She sat down in the nearest chair and easily engaged.
Vincent stood and marveled.
His back had definitely gone up when Inez had mentioned the way she’d been shorn, but Lace had simply moved on.
“Dark. Like Snow White.” Inez told her with a grin, pointing to a dog-eared book of fairy tales that rested on the table beside her.
“Oh. You like fairy tales?” Lace’s face lit up.
Inez nodded excitedly. “They’re my favorite. Not the ones with the bad endings,” she amended, “but all the others.”
“I love those, too,” Lace agreed. “Are you able to read them by yourself?”
Inez’s little face dropped a bit. “I can’t doallthe words, but I can sound out a lot of them. In a house I lived in before, one of my foster sisters would read to me, so I’ve got a lot of stuff memorized.”