The Billionaire's Best Friend (The Sherbrookes of Newport) by Christina Tetreault

hadn’t been what had sent him out, though. Exercise in general and especially running usually helped calm him. Yet tonight it hadn’t. In fact, he felt angrier now than before he left because he realized that while he wanted to get past the wall Lauren threw up between them, he needed to respect her wishes. He couldn’t force her to let him back into her life. The best he could hope for right now was a change of heart on her part.
     
    ***
     
    Lauren wiped her feet on the welcome mat and closed the door behind her. “Jared call you back yet?” she asked when she spotted her sister across the room.
    “ He’s meeting us at the hospital,” Kelly said, her face contorted with pain.
    “ Do you have everything you need?”
    Kelly nodded as she gripped the back of a chair and groaned. “My bag has been packed for two weeks now.”
    “ Let’s go, then.” Lauren snatched her sister’s jacket off the coat tree and pulled open the door. “Is this your bag?” she asked, pointing to the small suitcase on the floor. When Kelly nodded, she grabbed it. “Be careful. The stairs are a little slippery,” Lauren called over her shoulder. The concrete stairs were coated with about an inch of snow. According to yesterday’s forecast, the rare late March snowstorm was only supposed to drop about three to four inches of snow, but judging by the way it was coming down, she expected the estimate to go up.
    “ I cannot believe it is snowing. It’s almost the end of March.”
    “ Yeah, well, it looks like everything is on its own time schedule this year.” Lauren opened the car door for her sister. “The baby isn’t supposed to be here yet, either.”
    After Kelly made herself as comfortable as possible in the passenger seat, Lauren slammed the door closed and walked around to the other side. “I hope you and Jared decided on names finally.” Lauren pulled out onto the deserted street that hadn’t yet been touched by a plow. The last time she’d asked, her sister and brother-in-law still had not narrowed down their original list of fifteen names.
    “ We picked Patrick if it is a boy, and if it’s a girl it’ll either be Beth or Alexa.”
    Lauren kept up a steady stream of chatter during the long ride from Kelly ’s to the hospital. Most days the ride from Kelly’s house to the hospital only took about ten minutes. Today the ride took almost twenty because it seemed as if every nervous driver in Massachusetts was on the road. “You would think these people have never seen snow. I could walk to the hospital faster than this,” Lauren complained, once again stuck behind a slow-moving car. In the distance, she could see the hospital. “There’s sand on the road already, it’s not that slick.”
    “ You know how some people get,” Kelly said, sounding short of breath.
    “ You’re doing great. Hang in there.” Lauren pulled into the hospital driveway but drove past the parking garage and headed straight for the front entrance and valet parking. She opened the door while putting the car into park. “I need a wheelchair,” she called out. Immediately, the young parking attendant, who had approached the car, bolted into the hospital as another came around to help Kelly into the wheelchair.
    “ You ready to do this?” Lauren asked, pushing her sister through the glass doors and into the hospital’s lobby.
    Kelly groaned in response, her arms crossed around her middle.
    Without pausing, Lauren moved toward the elevators. “I’ll take that as a yes. What floor?”
    “ Third,” Kelly said, her voice somewhere between a groan and a whimper.
    An hour later, Lauren sat in Kelly ’s hospital room where she would eventually give birth and stay for a few days. So far though, not much had happened. After checking  in, the doctor on duty had done a quick exam. A nurse had hooked up a monitor to track the baby’s heartbeat then left. So far, no one had returned. From the window, Lauren could see that the snow had