My One and Only(6)

And then inspiration struck. Someone he knew well had plenty of room.

“I’ve got an idea,” he said, slamming the hat back on his head. Without waiting for a response, Cooper charged off toward the elevator.

Haleigh yelled after him. “Where are you going?”

“I thought of another option,” he yelled back, and then stepped into an open elevator before she could demand more details.

Less than a minute later, the elevator opened to the neurology unit, and by a stroke of luck, Cooper found his target at the nurses’ station.

“Abby, I need your help,” Cooper said, giving his twin sister a pleading look.

“What are you doing here, Cooper? Did something happen to Mama?” Abby was out of her chair and rounding the desk before he could answer.

“Mama’s fine,” Cooper hurried to clarify. “I said I need your help.”

Abby’s black ponytail swung as she tilted her head, concern replaced with curiosity. “What did you do now?”

“A good deed. And it’s coming around to bite me in the ass, as usual.”

“Betty, I’ll be back in twenty minutes,” his sister told a fellow nurse as she motioned Cooper back to the bank of elevators. “Start at the beginning and don’t leave anything out.”

On their way to the cafeteria, Cooper brought Abby up to speed on the Jessi situation. As they stepped off, he stated the obvious. “You have to agree that I can’t take the pair home.”

“That would be weird,” she said. “But what do you want me to do?”

While attending nursing school at Austin Peay University in Clarksville, Abby had met a soldier six years her senior stationed at Fort Campbell and fallen hard for the army infantryman. Kyle Williams had been a nice enough guy, though a little too hard-core for Cooper’s tastes. Still, he made Abby happy, so the family accepted him.

Seven months ago, while serving in Afghanistan, Kyle had taken an extra duty shift, and with it a roadside bomb. Abby was devastated by his death and immediately withdrew from life. She worked her shifts at the hospital and volunteered with veterans’ organizations, but the rest of her world seemed to have stopped the day she’d gotten the news.

No one expected her to finish grieving at some designated time, but that didn’t mean people weren’t worried about her. Last week their mother had suggested that Abby needed something else to focus on. A project to get her out of the past and moving forward again. Jessi and the baby could be that project.

“Let her stay with you.”

His sister froze in place. “What?”

“You agree that I can’t take them home, but I can’t drop them at the edge of town and drive off either. You have that big four-bedroom house—there’s plenty of room for both Jessi and the baby.”

“Oh no.” Abby shook her head as she marched toward the coffee machines. “You are not putting some strange girl in my house. She could rob me blind. Or worse, leave the baby and take off for good.”

“She wouldn’t do that.” Cooper may not know the teenager well, but the protective way she’d held the bundle to her chest told him she’d never leave her little girl. “She’s on some mission to find her birth father and thinks he might live here in town. Based on what she told us, I highly doubt he’s still here, if he ever was, which means she’ll be moving on in no time. Probably won’t stay for more than a week.”

Abby remained silent as she poured three helpings of hazelnut creamer into her cup.

“Please, Abby. You know I wouldn’t ask you to do this if I could think of any other way.”

Tossing her stirrer in the trash, she continued to hold her tongue. Abby always did need an extra minute to process things, and he could practically see the wheels turning in her head. He just hoped they were turning in his direction.

“You do remember that I have one boarder already, right?”

He sure did. And that boarder was not going to be happy about his solution.

“You still have two other bedrooms,” he reminded her. “Help me out here.”

“I’ll need to meet her before I agree.”

Relief washed through him, and Cooper thanked his lucky stars that the sucker gene ran in the family.

“She’s still down in the ER. You can come meet her right now.”

With a glance at her watch, Abby sighed. “I can’t believe I’m even considering this.”

“It’ll be good for you to have someone else to focus on.”

Giving him the evil eye, his sister said, “Now you sound like Mama. Did she put you up to this?”

“Abbs, this all happened in the last hour,” Cooper said. “I haven’t had time to talk to Mama.”