On Wings of Love Read Free Page B

fur. When would the pain go away? When would he feel normal again?
    Enough.
    He opened his eyes as the almost full moon peeked over the horizon. A light breeze kicked up some of the litter by the chain link fence. With the onset of dusk, he retreated back inside his airplane. Then he settled back in the seat Ruth had occupied because it gave him quicker access to the front.
    Her warmth and scent lingered, creating an unwanted longing for female conversation he’d thought was buried behind three years of bitter emotions. He closed off the tap feeding the thoughts and forced them back to the dry recesses of his brain.
    With over an hour before Brad, Ruth and the medical team came back, he decided to rest.
    As best he could under the circumstances. Noah closed his eyes and almost immediately fell into that bottomless nightmare that had become a part of him.
    “Just sign here, Mr. Barton.” A jumble of words wavered before his eyes.
    “No!”
    “There is nothing else we can do, sir. Your son is brain-dead. But there is something you can.” The bright red lipstick worn by the garish woman dressed in hospital garb reminded him of an old Japanese movie. The one dubbed over in English where the lips moved independently of the words.
    “You want to carve up my son and dole him out like pineapple slices,” Noah spat back. Guilt over not being able to do enough to save his son coursed through him like a jolt of electricity.
    “Sign the paper, Noah. It’s what Michelle would have wanted.” His sister spoke softly and rubbed his back. “You know it’s the right thing to do.”
    The clipboard dangled in front of his vision. The line marked with an X tormented him but not as much as the shame. He’d failed his son. A hand he recognized as his own grabbed the pen and scribbled his name.
    “Thank you, Mr. Barton. This will save someone’s life.”
    But what about my life?
    Noah jolted awake to find Houston licking the tears from his face.

Chapter Two
    “A re you okay, Ruth?” Nancy asked as she strapped herself into the seat in the rear of the ambulance to ride back to the waiting airplane.
    “I’m fine. Just a little tired.”
    Exhaustion seeped into her pores again. Child donors were always the hardest. And not very common, which was why so many sick children died while waiting for organs. A fact she tried to change with each donation she coordinated, but sometimes she felt like a hamster trapped inside one of those wheels getting nowhere fast. There weren’t enough organs to go around.
    She stared out the tiny window in the back over Nancy’s shoulder. No need to let the staff know this particular donation had affected her. She wouldn’t fall apart in front of the team that depended on her to be the calm one. The reliable one. Boy, did she have them fooled.
    But that wasn’t what made her unusually quiet. Her silence stemmed from the glimpse she’d caught of the donor’s parents’ faces as she passed them in the hallway on the way to surgery. A look her own parents had onceworn when they realized one of their children was dead. Grief curled around Ruth’s heart and opened the door for memories to flood in, carrying debris and fallout from an earlier time.
    She’d hoped and prayed for a miracle for her sister that never came. Sometimes she didn’t understand God’s ways. But she never questioned His intentions, which was why she followed His calling and dedicated her life to making sure every possible donation was a success.
    Digging into her purse, she grabbed two pain relievers and plopped them into her mouth with hopes that they would deaden the pain emerging behind her eye again. The heart Dr. Cavanaugh carried in the cooler was two decades too late to help her twin, but another child would have a second chance at life.
    “How about you? How are you holding up?” Ruth asked Nancy. The fatigue lines bracketing the first assistant’s mouth mirrored her own. The surgery had gone well once they’d finally