Ripped - Cassia Leo Page 0,15

you to the emergency room. They need to clean that leg up properly so it doesn’t get infected.”

She agrees to my terms, but by the time we reach my truck, she’s almost hopping on one leg from the pain. She tries to grab on to the top of the passenger door to pull herself up, but the door swings inward, almost closing on her tiny body.

I shake my head as I scoop her up and set her down gently in the passenger seat. She glances at me as I pull my arms out from underneath her, then she quickly looks away.

We drive in silence the four blocks to her and Yuri’s house. When I pull up in front of their bungalow, she slides out of the truck before I can make it around to the passenger side to open her door.

“I’m fine. Stop fussing over me,” she says as she scoots around me.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to take you to the hospital?” I ask as I watch her limping toward the front steps.

“I’m positive,” she insists. “You go back out there and practice. Yuri will take me.”

I glance back in the direction of the beach. “Eh… I think I’ll go to Wrightsville. Hopefully, the sharks there are a little less bitey.”

She smiles and suppresses a grimace as she climbs the two steps up to the porch. “See you tomorrow. Same time, same place.”

“See you then, shark bait.”

As I watch her disappear inside the house, I feel a strange need to stick around and make sure Yuri takes her to get medical attention. It’s not a large cut, but it’s probably a pretty deep puncture wound. There are a lot of organisms in the ocean that can infect that kind of injury.

I shake my head as I climb into the truck. Of course Yuri will take care of her. He’s taken care of Lena for the past twelve years. She doesn’t need me to make sure he does his job.

For a moment, I consider going home instead of practicing today. A shark attack is a perfectly good reason to take a day off. But I decide to continue on toward Wrightsville Beach. I can take a day off in December, after I become the next world champion.

Five

My eyelids flutter open, squinting through the morning sunlight that floods our bedroom. The first thing I hear is the sound of the shower running in the master bathroom. The first thing I see is Mila’s wispy dark-blonde hair just inches from my face. Man, I’m going to miss this little devil when I’m in California in less than two weeks, I think as I brush her hair off her glowing baby skin.

At two and a half years old, Mila’s hair is barely long enough for Lindsay to pull into two curly pigtails. Her hair has gotten progressively darker over the past two years. She’ll have my sandy-brown hair by the time she’s five. She’s lying on her back, the front of her Belle the Builder pajama shirt displayed proudly, mouth hanging open, eyeballs moving restlessly beneath her lids.

What are you dreaming about, little one?

I think I know the answer to that question. At least for Mila the answer would probably be puppies and pancakes. For Kaia it would be Jason Greene, the star of her favorite Disney TV show, Charmed Life. For Lindsay, it would probably be me, cooking dinner and doing the dishes. And for me, it would be a forty-foot wave with a barrel that never ends.

Well, the only one of us who’s having their dreams come true today is Kaia. I convinced Jason Greene to come to our house today for Kaia’s tenth birthday party so we could perform a skit together. I, of course, am going to play the part of Jason Greene’s onscreen love interest, Annie, and he will play his usual role of Grayson. I actually met the seventeen-year-old—and his bodyguard—last night in their hotel room so we could practice the skit. He seems like a good kid¸ and anyone who’s willing to go to such great lengths for my baby girl is okay in my book. Apparently, he’s a huge fan of mine, so it only took the offer of a brief cameo appearance on Charmed Life for him to agree to this.

I brush a wisp of sunlit hair out of Mila’s face and she scrunches up her eyebrows as she slowly opens her eyes. She squints at me through the hazy glow, then