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The next morning, Casey was apparently fully recovered and the sounds of him hopping up and down the hallway outside the bedrooms crowing a horrible repetitious little ditty about a song that never ends made Zane thinkhemight die.
He kinda wished he would.
Fire ants crawled beneath his skin, biting and stinging, a jackhammer was cleaving his brain, and the mere idea of food made his stomach lurch in lethal warning. He groaned.
Casey flung open his door. “I heard you awake in here! Morning!”
Zane groaned again.
“Aunt Jelly!” Casey shrieked, shooting white-hot spikes through Zane’s temples. “Hurry andcomequick!Zane’s sick now!”
“No,” he mumbled.
Jillian’s angelic face appeared in his blurry line of vision. A soft, cool hand touched his forehead. “Uh, oh, looks like you caught the dreaded bug.”
“I’m. Never. Sick.”
A rueful smile tilted her mouth. “Hate to break the news to you, Champ, but you’re definitely on the official flu roster.”
“Ugh.” He closed his eyes.What you get from hanging around with germy rugrats—the fucking plague.“Go. Away. Let me … die in peace.”
“Casey,” Jillian said. “Please go play with your cars for a little while in your room.”
“I wanna help take care of Zane.”
“You can help him the most by being nice and quiet so he can sleep. I’ll come take you downstairs for breakfast in a few minutes.”
“All righty.” The child’s footsteps skipped out.
Breakfast.Blech.Zane’s stomach convulsed and he sealed his lips. He wouldnotdo the Technicolor yodel. Especially in front of Jillian.
Those blessedly cool fingers stroked his forehead, brushed back his hair. “Just relax and go to sleep. Rest, Zane, and you’ll feel better.”
Amazingly, her gentle caresses vanquished the pain, and before long, everything went dark.
Trapped in the Twilight Zone from Hell, he slept in fitful snatches, waking too often to misery. But each time he awoke, Jillian was there. Cooling his pounding forehead and fevered skin with compresses, slaking his dry throat and soothing his churning stomach with sips of water and ginger ale, and calming his restless limbs by straightening rumpled sheets and fluffing twisted pillows.
Her soft, melodic reassurances chased away the rampant fear and the nightmare voice demanding he stop being a wuss and man up. Sympathy had been off-limits in their household, any weakness ruthlessly exorcised.
Nobody had ever taken care of him before.
He tried to push away Jillian’s empathy, fought not to succumb to her ministrations, but the woman was a velvet steamroller. She didn’t argue, didn’t push, just continued to quietly, implacably tend his hurts.
When Zane finally regained a semblance of sanity, the sky outside the windows was fading to purple twilight. He ran a tongue around his dry mouth and struggled to sit up, propping his shoulders against the headboard.
His door swung open and Jillian walked in, stopping beside the bed. “There you are. I figured you’d be coming around pretty soon. How’re you doing?”
“Fine,” he said automatically.
“Really? Because you look like you’ve been dragged through a knothole backwards.”
Exactly what he felt like. A rusty laugh escaped him. “Gee, thanks.”
Delicate, caring hands cupped his face, and the lower half of his body immediately proved even the plague couldn’t keep a good man down.
“Your fever’s broken, that’s good. Do you think you could eat a little chicken soup?”
