Page 76 of Big Island Neighbors
Before Rory, she had enjoyed managing big groups of kids aboard cruise ships. These days, she was too perennially tired tocare for anybody beyond her one daughter, at least on a regular basis.
She didn’t know how ‘Olena did it. She wasn’t an overly warm or affectionate person, but the kids seemed to respect her no-nonsense attitude. And while she didn’t coddle them, she had a seemingly limitless supply of patience. She was firm, but Lani had never seen her lose her temper.
“Where are the lambs?” one of the girls asked.
“We don’t have any lambs,” Lani told her.
“You do too! You have big ones. Where are the babies?”
‘Olena said, “They have goats, Shoshana. The lambs are next-door.” She gave Rory a stern look. “And they were supposed to be a surprise.”
Rory grinned and shrugged, unrepentant.
Once lunch was over and all of the many containers were packed away in their respective lunchboxes, the whole group trooped through the front gate and into Tara’s yard.
Tara waited for them out front with Gretchen by her side. Her younger dog barked at a window. She had locked him inside with Cody, away from all of the excitement.
Lani grinned to see Rory hop with excitement at the prospect of seeing the lambs again, even though she had just seen them the day before. They lined the kids up two by two and walked them through the yard, but lost all momentum when they spotted the two parrots in the aviary.
“I need to pee!” Kiana said.
“Come on, I’ll take you next-door,” Lani told her.
“But I want to see the baby lambs!” she whined as she danced in place.
“Kiana, you go with your auntie before you shishi in your pants,” ‘Olena told her quietly.
“Come on, let’s run,” Lani said. “We’ll go to my house real quick, and then will run back to see the lambs.”
“You promise?”
“I promise. Come on.”
They raced around the side of the house, but Lani slowed and put a hand on Kiana’s shoulder when a strange man came through the front gate.
No, not a strange man, she realized a moment later. Tara’s husband.
Lani had only ever seen him from a distance. When he met her eyes, his gaze was cold.
“I’m looking for my wife.”
23
Tara
She was holding a lamb and surrounded by kids when Cody came into the back pasture.
His skin was ashen, and the look on his face made her pulse jump. She quickly handed the lamb off to Emma and went to meet him.
“What’s wrong?”
“Dad‘s here.”
“Here?” Her stomach dropped. “Now?”
The muscles in Cody‘s jaw stood out as he gritted his teeth together. He nodded, and then said, “I thought you might want to talk to him before the girls see him.”
“Good idea.” She turned to look at Piper and Paige, who were now leading the impromptu class and answering all of the kids’ questions about sheep.
