Книга - The City Girl and the Country Doctor

The City Girl and the Country Doctor
Christine Flynn






The City Girl

and the

Country Doctor

Christine Flynn







For my wonderful editor, Susan Litman, with thanks for her insights—and for asking me to be part of the crowd on Danbury Way


Special thanks and acknowledgment are given to Christine Flynn for her contribution to the TALK OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD miniseries.




Contents


Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Coming Next Month




Prologue


Every black skirt Rebecca Peters owned lay spread out on her bed as she stood in the closet trying to decide between a sexy little camisole and a more conservative sweater. She was seriously leaning toward conservative when the phone rang.

Still clutching the tops, she glanced at the caller ID on the phone on the nightstand a second before she snatched up the handset.

“Jack. Hi,” she said, holding the phone with her shoulder while she held up her two choices for her date with him. “I was just thinking about you. Did you decide where you want to go for dinner?

“Jack?” she asked after five seconds of dead silence.

“I’m here,” Jack Lever finally replied, hesitation heavy in his tone. “I came by to see you a while ago, but you weren’t home.”

“I was at the printer’s. They didn’t have my copies ready, so I had to wait.”

“Yeah, well, it’s probably better this way, anyhow.”

It was her turn to hesitate. “What’s better?

The faint rushing sound on the other end of the line sounded suspiciously like an uneasy expulsion of breath.

“Jack. You’re a lawyer.” He was also the stepson of the man she thought was her father, which was why she’d wanted to get to know him in the first place. Jack didn’t know that, though. No one did. But her reason for having come to Rosewood was beside the point at the moment. “Words are your business.” Now uneasy herself, she sank to the edge of the bed. “What are you trying to say?”

“That I don’t think it’s fair of me to waste your time,” he finally admitted. “You’re a great girl, Rebecca. But I’ve got a lot going on with work and my kids—”

“—and you don’t have time for a relationship,” she concluded for him. At least, not a relationship with her.

She heard him draw a breath. “Yeah,” came his relieved reply.

She couldn’t believe this was happening. She had only asked the other women on Danbury Way about the widowed father of two because she’d wanted to confirm his background. Never had she intended for Jack to misconstrue her interest and ask her out. Not on a date date, anyway. But one dinner had led to another and now here he was breaking up with her when she hadn’t planned on being attracted to him that way to begin with. All she’d wanted was to get to know him to seek his help meeting Russell Lever, his stepfather. Russell was the reason she’d come to Rosewood. He was her father. At least, she thought he was. Yet, not only had she not met Russell, she was being dumped. Again.

She was back on her feet. “Not a problem.” She absolutely refused to let him know that what he was doing mattered to her in any way. If she possessed any talent at all, it was her ability to appear unfazed by what wounded her. “You take care. Okay?”

“Yeah. Sure. You, too.”

“’Bye, Jack.”

Punching End Call before he could say goodbye himself, she stuck the handset back in its base and turned to gather her clothes.

She didn’t head for her closet, though. Once she’d snatched up everything, she simply stood there, hugging her skirts while hurt slowly spread through her.

For all her bravado, she didn’t feel unfazed at all.




Chapter One


In the front yard of her leased house on Danbury Way, Rebecca took another swipe at the leaves with her rake. She had no idea how many leaves an oak tree could produce, but the one gracing this particular patch of lawn was shedding them by the ton.

She was so not into yard work, but the job had to be done. It also gave her something to do while she forced herself to accept that she, Rebecca Anne Peters, a still-single, twenty-eight-year-old freelance fashion writer who possessed excellent taste in clothes and hideous taste in men, was never going to find the security and happiness all of her friends had found. Most of them, anyway. Angela Schumacher’s life was a bit of a struggle. But her best friends in New York were all now married, engaged or seriously involved and none of those options was ever going to be available to her. What had happened with Jack a few days ago had proved that in spades.

It wasn’t as if she’d fallen in love with the guy, she reminded herself as she attacked the leaves. She’d only liked him. So at least she’d been spared having her heart ripped out and handed back to her. Still, she’d been left feeling totally embarrassed and rejected.

The awful sensation seemed all too familiar. It also brought back the numb, hurt and sick feeling she’d been left to cope with after Jason Cargill had broken up with her six months ago. She’d spent two years dreaming of a future with that man only to have him inform her on their way home from a movie that they were over. Two months to the day he’d said he had never really loved her, he had married someone else.

She hated that she could still feel the painful sting of their ugly split. She hated even more that the awful sense of rejection she’d been living with was once again so acute.

Golden leaves scattered and crunched as she waded through them in her Ralph Lauren riding boots—the only boots she owned with a heel that wouldn’t sink into the grass—to start another pile. Rake in hand, she loosened the pumpkin cashmere scarf that matched her V-necked sweater and the warp thread in the brown plaid Burberry jacket she wore with her designer jeans and attacked the dead vegetation with renewed vigor.

The breakup with Jason had been like the starting bell of a downhill race into a single woman’s worst nightmare. Right on the heels of his betrayal had come the gorgeous weddings of two of her best friends and the birth of another friend’s beautiful baby girl. She’d been thrilled for them all. At least, she’d wanted to be, but each event had been an in-her-face reminder of all that she had always wanted so badly herself.

She figured she’d hit bottom when her apartment had been broken into and her CD player and television had been stolen. With her insurance about to go up again and her personal life going nowhere, she’d taken the break-in as a sign to get the heck out of Dodge—or midtown Manhattan, anyway—and make a new beginning for herself.

Finding her father had seemed the perfect place to start. If she could just meet him, she might finally have the family and security she’d never had growing up with just her mom. Then, she’d found herself actually getting interested in his stepson….

She forced her mental mutterings to an abrupt halt. She would not go there again. The only thing that mattered was that she had now been dumped twice in a row. Next time, if there ever was a next time, she would be the dumper. Not the dumpee.

Her determination gave way to a disheartened sigh as she looked from the charming two-story colonial she’d leased to the other impeccably neat homes in the cul-de-sac. Resolving to take the upper hand was all well and good. In the meantime, however, she was stuck alone in the suburbs in a too-big house with two hairy cats who hated her, two months left on her lease and not a clue what to do next. Unlike her neighbors, she had no kids, no husband and no interest in the state of her lawn. With so little in common with them, it was as clear as the early November sky that she didn’t belong here, either.

The sharp bark of a dog had her jerking around to look behind her. That excited sound also put an end to her little pity party when she noticed one of the little fur balls in her charge atop one of the brick columns flanking Carly Alderson’s long driveway.

She’d had no idea that the cat had escaped. Whenever she left the house, she always checked to make sure the little monsters, who’d come as a condition of the lease, weren’t anywhere near the door. Obviously, as preoccupied as she’d been with her totally messed-up life, she’d overlooked that precaution when she’d come out a while ago.

Of more concern than her lapse, however, was the cat’s behavior. It had its back arched and was hissing at Molly and Adam Shibb’s young black Labrador. Elmer, the dog, kept barking, his tail wagging as if he thought the racket might somehow convince the cat to come down and play.

It occurred to Rebecca that with Adam at work and Molly at her new prenatal yoga class, the puppy shouldn’t be out, either. Aware of his newly discovered talent for digging, and thinking he must have dug himself right out of the backyard, she turned to prop her rake against the trunk of the oak. Even as she did, she heard the dog’s bark change pitch and the cat screech.

She had no idea what had happened, but she’d no sooner turned back than she noticed that the cat was no longer atop its perch. It was part of the yipping, screeching tangle of fur at its base.

Adrenaline had barely turned the beat of her heart into sickening thuds when Elmer gave a shake that somehow sent the cat flying. As if landing on the run, the tabby raced in a streak of black-and-silver fur through the piles of leaves and up the rose trellis at the other end of the house.

Elmer had already turned tail and scrambled for home, the house on the other side of Carly’s mansionlike place. She could see his little butt wiggling as he shimmied himself under the fence near the front gate and back into the safety of his yard.

The breath she’d held had barely left her lungs before she darted through the leaves herself to peer up at the frightened feline clinging to the top of the latticework.

Her stomach gave a sick little lurch. On a good day, animals of any variety simply made her uneasy. One hissing at her with blood leaking down the side of its face flat-out frightened her.

Reminding herself that she was bigger than he was didn’t make her any braver.

She eyed the cat. The cat eyed her back. She couldn’t tell if this one was Columbus or if it was Magellan. Since she’d never been able to tell the cats apart, she also didn’t know which of the two had peed in one of her pink Prada pumps. But even if this one was the culprit, she couldn’t let him stay there and bleed.

The viney vegetation had turned brown with the frosts. Gingerly pushing the crackling foliage back so she wouldn’t get stuck on its thorns, she hooked one foot on the bottom rung of the wrought iron trellis and inched herself up. The cat inched exactly that much higher.

“You are not dying on my watch.” You little brat, she would have added, but she was too busy avoiding rose thorns to bother.

The cat ran out of trellis. He had nowhere else to go that didn’t involve a leap.

Rebecca had no desire to chase him all over the neighborhood. Catching him around the middle before he could spring over her head, she slammed the ten pounds of struggling fur against her chest, jumped at his indignant screech and promptly lost her balance. Had she not still had hold of the trellis with her other hand and somehow managed to turn and come to a stop with her back against the house, she would have landed with him in a heap in the flower bed.

Her reward for the rescue was the sharp sting of claws as they scraped the side of her neck.

Sucking in a breath, she flipped the cat around paws-out to avoid getting slashed again and hurried through the open garage and into the house.

Multitasking came as naturally to Rebecca as breathing. She’d been known to conduct a phone interview while scanning photo proofs for another article and still manage to slip a note with her sandwich preference to whoever was making a deli run for lunch. In an animal emergency, however, she was a tad out of her element.

Having no clue what she could do for the mewling cat on her own, she stuffed him and a towel into the carrier she’d noticed in the laundry room, made sure the other cat was inside and hurried into the garage. After shoving the carrier onto the passenger seat of her sporty little leased coupe, she backed onto the street and parked in front of Molly and Adam’s place.

A ten-inch pot of mums sat on the corner of their porch. Leaving the engine running, she grabbed the pot and ran to where the dog had dug the hole under the fence, shoved the pot into the hole to thwart another escape and hurried back to her car.

The Turners, who owned the house she currently resided in, had left a list of emergency numbers pinned to the kitchen bulletin board. At the top of the list had been the name, number and address of their veterinarian in the strip mall across from Fulton’s Hardware Store. Having ripped the list from the board on her way out, she headed for the animal clinic, using her cell phone on the way to tell them she was bringing in a cat that had been in a fight with a dog and was bleeding all over the place.

Within minutes she’d pulled into one of the three empty spaces near the All Creatures Animal Clinic, pushed her way through the door with the carrier and been ushered into an exam room by an abnormally calm, middle-aged veterinarian’s assistant wearing a pastel paw-print scrub top.

Rebecca was afraid she’d sounded every bit as panicked as she felt on the phone. That panic fed a high-energy state that was pretty much normal for her, anyway, but she didn’t know if it was her anxiety or because she’d mentioned blood that the woman immediately took the carrier from her. She barely had a chance to tell the kind-looking, copper-haired woman that she’d gotten there as quickly as she could before the assistant removed the still-displeased animal from the carrier and set him and the crimson-spattered towel on the exam table protruding from the middle of the wall.

“I didn’t see exactly what happened. I mean, I saw the cat on the column and the dog barking at it,” she explained to the woman as someone else entered the room behind her. “But I turned away for barely a second and all of sudden there was all this noise, then the cat was flying one way and the dog ran the other.”

“The dog had the cat in its mouth?”

The rich, deep voice had her glancing toward the man who’d stopped on the other side of the table. Seeing nothing but a white lab coat, she jerked her eyes past his broad shoulders to the lean, carved lines of his face. Dark, neatly trimmed hair brushed his broad brow. Intense blue eyes barely met hers before returning to his patient.

She was definitely upset. She barely noticed that Joe Hudson, DVM, according to the embroidery above his pocket, was drop-dead gorgeous. All that really registered was how gentle he was as his assistant held the animal and he ran his hands over the cat’s little body.

“I don’t know,” Rebecca replied, watching his long, lean fingers move expertly over fur. He wasn’t wearing a ring. She didn’t notice a tan line, either. “I guess he must have, to toss him like that.” She crossed her arms, tightened her hold. “It all happened so fast.”

“So the dog shook it,” he concluded, holding the cat’s head between his hands to look at its eyes. “How big was the dog?”

“Three times the size of the cat. Maybe four. Elmer’s a puppy, but he’s big already. Can you save him? The cat, I mean? Please?” she begged, struck by his incredible gentleness with the animal. “Like I told the woman I talked to on the phone, he’s not mine. He’s the Turners’. I don’t even know if it’s Columbus or Magellan,” she admitted, her agitation rising in direct proportion to how much the cat had calmed. It was getting too weak to move. She was sure of it. “I can never tell them apart. They’re the same color and the same size and their markings all look the same, so it’s impossible to tell which is which.”

“Why do you have the Turners’ cats?”

“Because I’m leasing their house while they’re in Europe. They’ve been gone for four months and have two to go. Taking care of the cats was part of the deal because they thought they’d be happier in their own environment. They said that as long as I kept their litter box clean and their food and water dishes filled they’d practically take care of themselves, so I’ve been doing that, but I really don’t know anything about animals at all because I’ve never had a pet,” she explained without taking a breath. “The buildings I’ve lived in wouldn’t have allowed them anyway,” she went on, uncrossing her arms, crossing them again. “I’ve only seen cats in alleys before and the only dogs I’ve ever been exposed to are the ones I’ve seen with dog-walkers in Manhattan.”

Joe’s first concern was to identify the source of the blood. Next was to check for telltale signs of internal injury or broken bones. The cursory skim of his hands over the cat’s body revealed nothing alarming. The feline’s eyes were bright and clear, the color of his tongue good. The majority, if not all, of the bleeding also seemed to be coming from its head, specifically the ear missing its tip.

His second order of business was to calm the incredibly attractive and stylish brunette who reminded him of a gnat on caffeine. She talked a mile a minute and her body language was all over the place. What it said—even more than how anxious she was about the cat—was that she was not at all comfortable in her present surroundings. Given what she’d just admitted about her nearly nonexistent experience with animals, he’d be willing to bet his veterinary degree that she wasn’t comfortable with the cat, either.

Not quite sure what to make of her, he spoke in the same easy tone he used to calm agitated animals. “Are you afraid of this little guy?”

She wore her shining, coffee-brown hair skimmed back in a low, tight ponytail. Her skin looked flawless. Subtle shades of gray eye shadow darkened her deep blue eyes. But it was her mouth that had his attention. Glossy and full, her lips fairly begged to be kissed.

Her mouth had opened to respond to his question, only to snap closed. Looking as if she didn’t want to admit to fearing anything, she lifted one slender shoulder in a shrug. “I don’t trust anything I can’t reason with.”

“Does that include small children?”

“Those I can handle. I think. I haven’t spent much time with the under-two set, but I hope for the opportunity someday. After I find a husband,” she qualified. If that ever happens, she added to herself. “In the meantime, what about the cat? He’s not going into shock or anything, is he?”

Joe stifled a smile. “He’ll be fine,” he assured her. “I’ll check him more thoroughly, but I really think he just needs his ear cauterized. And probably a couple of stitches. He may have nicked a vein.” That would be where most of the blood was coming from. Cartilage didn’t bleed much.

“Take him in and get him ready, will you, Tracy?” he asked the redhead wearing the paw prints. “I’ll be right there.”

With the efficiency of someone accustomed to dealing with anxious, agitated or otherwise unhappy animals, his assistant wrapped the towel around the cat to keep him immobile and tucked him under her arm like a football.

“He really will be fine,” she assured Rebecca with a smile, and hurried through the door with the squeak of athletic shoes on the shiny beige tiles.

“By the way,” came the deep voice from behind her, “that one is Columbus. With half of his ear gone, it should be easier now to tell him from Magellan.”

The vet had moved to the sink behind him and turned on the water. “It won’t take long to take care of him. But before that,” he continued, washing his hands, “let’s take a look at you.”

“Me?”

“Your neck. He got you good.”

Rebecca blinked at the strong lines of his profile as she touched the scratch.

“How did you catch him? Just curious,” he explained, drying his hands on paper towels. The open shelves above him held a small array of supplies. Grabbing a couple of items, he set them on the table between them. “Cats can be pretty quick.”

“I caught him at the top of the rose trellis. There was nowhere else for him to go.”

She had the impression of powerful muscles beneath his lab coat as she watched him walk over to her. Lean, hard muscle that came from hours pumping iron in a gym. Or working outdoors. She couldn’t honestly say she’d ever known a man who’d worked out that way, but the thought seemed more suited to him as he stopped in front of her.

She figured him to be a little over five feet, ten inches. At five feet six herself, and with the two-inch heels on her boots, she barely had to look up at him.

Catching her chin with his fingers, he tipped her head. “This definitely looks more like cat claws than thorns. Did he get you anywhere else?”

She swallowed. Hard. He smelled of antiseptic soap and a decidedly male aftershave she couldn’t begin to identify. All she knew was that it was something masculine. And warm. Like the amazingly gentle feel of his fingers as he touched them to the side of her neck.

“It was. Is.” She breathed out. “And no.”

Dropping his hand, he reached for a small white packet. “What’s your name?”

“Rebecca. Peters,” she added, in case he needed it for his records or something.

“Okay, Rebecca Peters. This is going to sting.”

The scent of antiseptic had barely reached her nostrils when she felt something cold touch just under her ear and curve toward her collarbone. An instant later, the sensation turned to burning.

She sucked in a breath.

“Ow!”

“Sorry,” he murmured, only to quickly repeat the process. “But I warned you.”

“Barely.” The burning sensation suddenly didn’t seem so acute. Or, maybe, she was just more aware of his fingers on her neck as he narrowed his eyes at the three parallel scratches. “Isn’t that for animals?”

“Not necessarily.”

Apparently satisfied with what he saw, he tossed the pad to the table. Without another word, he picked up a tube of antibiotic cream and dabbed it over the five-inch-long scratch.

“Here,” he said, handing the tube to her when he was finished. The little lines at the corners of his eyes deepened with his smile. “Put that on a couple of times a day. I’m going to go save the Turners’ cat. You can either wait or come back in an hour.”

He didn’t stick around to see what she decided to do. Leaving her staring at the tube in her palm, he simply walked out the open door.

Rebecca dropped the tube into her purse. She would come back, she decided, partly because, if she stayed, she’d have to wait in the waiting room with a huge Saint Bernard and some sort of rodent in a cage. But mostly because she didn’t want to sit there thinking about Joe Hudson’s incredible gentleness, the heat she’d felt when he’d touched her and, now that she knew the cat wasn’t hurt all that badly, how helpless he must think her for panicking when panicking wasn’t really like her at all. At least, it hadn’t been.

Hating how inept she felt on top of everything else, she decided she needed a latte, anyway.

Exactly one hour and one tall, double, skinny, sugar-free vanilla latte later, she walked back into the clinic to find the previous occupants of the reception area no longer there. They had been replaced by an elderly gentleman with a cat who was conversing with a woman who bore a strong resemblance to the Pekingese in her lap.

The veterinarian’s assistants apparently doubled as receptionists. This one, a perky blonde wearing a wide wedding band and a scrub top sporting kittens stood behind the counter looking up something on the computer. The moment the woman saw Rebecca, her glance skimmed from her scarf to her boots. An instant later, she smiled.

Apparently, she already knew who she was.

“Columbus did fine,” she said, over the ring of the phone. “But Doctor is with another patient. It will be a few minutes.”

With her smile still in place, she answered the call, leaving Rebecca to turn to the small waiting room.

Sitting wasn’t something Rebecca did well when she felt anxious or uncertain. Caught between a vague unease at the prospect of seeing Joe Hudson again and a more pronounced uncertainty over what nursing skills would be required to tend the injured cat, she was feeling a little of both.

Having already let alarm get the better of her that day, she wasn’t about to let anyone around her know she now felt anything less than in total control. She couldn’t remember how old she’d been when her mom had first started pounding in the lesson, but having grown up in the city, she’d learned early on that the key to survival was to mask any sign of weakness.

That didn’t mean she never felt vulnerable. She just rarely let the world know it. Especially on the street. Or when it came to her work, cutthroat as the fashion business could be. Or to men. With her self-confidence with that particular species in the subbasement at the moment, she felt a particular need for guard where they were concerned.

Since pacing off her internal energy wasn’t practical in the small, occupied space, she hiked the strap of her oversize bag higher on her shoulder and wandered over to peruse a collection of photographs lining the far wall.

The photos had caught her attention mostly because the beautifully framed and photographed scenes seemed so out of place in a room with posters of cartoon pets on the walls and brochures about heartworm medication on the counter. The quality of the incredible pictures of waterfalls, canyons, sheer cliffs and meadows of deer rivaled what she’d seen at professional showings in New York.

“Doctor Hudson took those,” she heard his assistant say. “He’s quite the outdoorsman, you know.”

Rebecca’s response was a smile. She hadn’t known that, though she supposed she should have guessed as much. There was a ruggedness about the good doctor that the men she’d known couldn’t have achieved no matter how dark the facial shadow they grew or how much flannel and denim they wore. That ruggedness wasn’t overt, though. It wasn’t rough or harsh or hard. It was more a solid, sturdy sort of masculine strength that she wasn’t terribly familiar with at all.

She turned back to study the collection. Behind her, she could hear movement and voices as someone entered the reception area to pay his bill. Still marveling at Joe Hudson’s work, it was a moment before she became aware of another set of footsteps. Turning, she saw the man whose work she was admiring give her an easy smile.

He carried the cat in one arm. In his other hand was the carrier he sat at the far end of the reception counter, out of the way of the teenager stuffing his receipt into his back pocket. A white bandage had been wrapped around the cat’s head, leaving only his little face and his right ear exposed. He was clearly too drugged to care that he also wore a white plastic collar that vaguely resembled a funnel.

Concern joined the uncertainty she already felt about her nonexistent veterinary nursing skills.

“It looks worse than it is,” the doctor assured her. “The actual wound is only about an inch and a half long. The collar will keep him from pawing the bandage off and pulling out the stitches.”

She wasn’t particularly relieved by that news. If anything, she felt as if she were bracing herself as he held out the cat. Holding her breath, she gingerly took Columbus from him. When the infinitely more manageable animal did nothing but lie limply in her arms, she released that breath, gave the man curiously watching her a tentative smile and nodded toward the pictures behind her.

“You have real talent,” she told him, over the murmurs of the other conversations. “For photography,” she clarified, in case he thought she was referring to his healing skills, though he clearly had talent there, too. “Those are beautiful.”

Joe’s interest in her underwent a subtle shift. She seemed marginally calmer than she had a while ago. And while she still didn’t look terribly comfortable with the animal she held, the absent way she stroked its neck as she cuddled it spoke of nurturing instincts she apparently didn’t even know she had.

“I took those on hikes around here. Except for the cliff shot. That was a climb in New Hampshire,” he told her. “Are you into climbing?”

“I’m not much for dangling over cliffs,” she admitted, managing not to sound totally horrified at the thought. “Actually, I’m not much of a nature person at all. The closest I’ve come to the wilds was a rock concert in Central Park.”

“So you’re into photography, then?”

“Not that, either. Not me, personally, I mean. I’ve just worked with a lot of photographers and recognize quality when I see it.”

“You’re a model.”

She couldn’t help but smile at his conclusion. Feeling flattered, she also felt a funny flutter in her stomach when he smiled back. “No, but thank you. I worked at a fashion magazine in New York, so I’ve worked with a lot of photographers. Still do, actually. I’m just freelancing now.”

His glance fell to her mouth. Her own faltered as her heart bumped her ribs.

The ringing of the phone had stopped. So had the conversation taking place between the Pekingese lady and the elderly man with the cat.

It was only then that Rebecca realized how close she and the doctor were standing, and that everyone but the animals was staring at them.

Clearing her throat, she took a step back.

“You should put the cat in the carrier,” he said, sounding far less self-conscious than she felt having been so totally absorbed in their conversation. “Here.”

While he held open the flap of the soft-sided carrier for her, she slipped the decidedly docile cat inside. He was zipping it for her when his assistant held up two white plastic bags, one large, one small and each bearing the name of the clinic in royal blue.

“It’s your towel,” the clearly curious woman explained. “And Columbus’s antibiotic.”

“Give it to him twice a day in his food,” the doctor added, back to business. “Like I said, he has a couple of stitches. They’ll dissolve on their own, but I’d like to see him next week to make sure he’s healing all right. In the meantime, call if he won’t eat or drink or if you have any questions.”

Looking vaguely distracted, he gave her one last smile and headed for the hallway. Rebecca promptly turned back to the assistant, made an appointment for next week, thanked the woman and walked out wondering what on earth all that had been about.

Joe Hudson was definitely not the urbane and sophisticated sort of man she was usually drawn to. He made his living taking care of animals. He was into the outdoors. He actually climbed mountains, and apparently enjoyed it. He had also somehow calmed her heart rate with his touch—and accelerated it all over again with his smile.

She ran her fingers alongside the scratch he’d tended, then promptly dropped her hand. Considering that she was only six months from a major breakup and seventy-two hours out on a minor one, she had no business thinking about him at all. Or anyone else, for that matter. The only man she should spare any mental energy on was the one she’d come to Rosewood to find. Given that her access to personal information about her father had been cut off, thanks to Jack, she needed to focus on some other way to meet the man who was proving to be as elusive as the emotional security she feared she’d never know.

If there was anything Rebecca could do it was focus. Once she set her mind to a task, nothing short of the Second Coming could stop her.

Or so she’d thought until a little after nine o’clock that night.




Chapter Two


Rebecca sat in the middle of the blue toile print sofa in the family room of her leased house. Across from her, the television in the carved country French armoire was off. So was the overhead light. The only illumination came from the brass candlestick lamp on the end table beside her and the glow of the laptop computer screen on the long maple cocktail table.

On the wall behind her hung a huge replica of a European railroad station clock and, as in the entryway, several framed photos of the Turner family she’d left up to keep her company. The quiet tick of that clock merged with the soft purr of the bandaged cat she had nestled beside her on one of the sofa’s blue-and-cream-checked throw pillows.

Columbus had now stirred a time or two, but he’d yet to waken for long. Whatever the vet had given him still hadn’t completely worn off. Or, maybe, he was just exhausted from his ordeal. Whichever it was, as docile and dependent as he was on her at the moment, she actually found him rather sweet.

Absently stroking his soft fur so he would know he wasn’t alone, she told herself she should turn off the computer. Or, at least, sign off the Internet. As rejected as she felt, and the more she considered what little she’d learned from Jack about his stepfather, she no longer felt as certain about wanting to meet the man as she once had.

That unexpected realization left its own kind of emptiness.

She had wanted to know her father since she’d first noticed in kindergarten that, unlike her, most of the kids had a mom and a dad. She’d been fascinated by the sight of a couple walking down the street with a child, or a dad skating with his son or daughter at the rink at Rockefeller Center, or a man holding the hand of a child. Those kids always looked so happy to her, so protected, so…complete.

She’d wanted a dad of her own. She’d told her mom that, too, but her mom had said she didn’t need one. Her mom had also refused to talk about the man who’d fathered her, so after a couple of tries, Rebecca stopped asking who he was.

She hadn’t stopped daydreaming about him, though. Or about being part of his family. In her mind, that family was huge and happy and everyone welcomed her with open arms. Other than through the state’s birth records, which she’d checked, futilely, years ago, she’d had no hint of where to start looking for him—until just before her ten-year high school reunion last May.

She’d been in the recesses of her mom’s storage closet looking for her yearbooks so she’d be sure to recognize everyone when she’d come across an old diary of her mother’s. It hadn’t been the sort with a lock and, at first, she’d absently flipped through it, thinking to show it to her mom and ask if she even remembered having it.

Then, the dates had caught her attention. So had the names and initials entwined in hearts on some of the pages.

Quickly calculating back, she realized that her mom would have been nineteen and in college when she’d poured her heart onto the neatly written pages. She also realized that she’d been madly in love with a business major named Russell Lever—and that the entries had been made around the time she would have been conceived.

She’d put the diary back and never mentioned having found it. The next day, though, she’d been online to adoption sites checking to see if anyone named Russell Lever was looking for his daughter.

She’d found nothing, but the need to track him down had led her to hire an attorney who had located a Russell Lever in the appropriate age range and tracked him to Rosewood. All the attorney had been able to tell her at that point was that the man was married and that he had a stepson named Jack.

It was right about then that her apartment had been broken into. Since she couldn’t afford to have the attorney gather more information for her and because she wanted out of the city anyway, she’d contacted a real estate agent in Rosewood to find her an apartment.

The agent had come back with several apartments, and the house on Danbury Way. The woman had admitted that the only reason she even mentioned the large house to her was because the lease was a spectacular deal—even less than what Rebecca had been willing to spend on far less space. The problem was that the lease came with cats, which was proving a challenge for the owners since they couldn’t find a lessee willing to pet sit.

Rebecca would have turned it down flat herself, had the agent not mentioned that her sister-in-law lived on the street and that there was a very attractive widower just a few doors down. A local attorney, she told her. Jack Lever.

The Fates were clearly watching out for her. Despite the cats, learning that a man who might well be Russell’s stepson lived on that very street removed any possibility of not leasing the house.

She’d had no intention, however, of waiting around for the Fates to dump either man in her lap. She’d been in Rosewood less than twenty-four hours when, armed with her map, she’d set out to drive by the address her attorney had given her for Russell Lever—only to discover that the address was inside a gated residential community.

She’d returned to her leased house to look him up herself. There had been no residential listing but she’d found Russell Lever Consulting Services in the yellow pages. The address was the one she already had.

Though she’d had no idea what sort of consulting he did, she decided that his office must be in his home. A quick check on the Internet proved him to be “an international management consultant specializing in maximizing profit potential in the purchase and liquidation of businesses and their assets.”

In other words, she’d thought, he helped companies buy up the competition and strip them bare.

She hadn’t been sure how she’d felt when she’d realized that. But she wouldn’t let herself judge the man she thought was her father. It had taken her nearly a week after that, though, to work up the courage to call his phone number.

She’d been informed by a recording that Mr. Lever would return her call if she would leave her name, number and the purpose of her call.

She’d been nowhere near ready to do any such thing. She wanted to see him first, just catch a glimpse of him if that was all she could manage. Uncertainty and nerves had become totally tangled up in the need for their first meeting to be perfect and she wanted whatever advantage she could get to make it that way. But advantages of any sort had been hard to come by.

Since she couldn’t get into the exclusive, gated development to catch a glimpse of him outside what had to be a gorgeous home, judging from those visible from the street, she’d decided to see if she could find out what kind of car he drove so she could spot him driving through those gates.

It took her a week and another fee to the attorney to come up with the make of his cars and their license numbers.

It took another week of sitting outside the gate for an hour or so at different times of the day to see one of the two Mercedes sedans he apparently owned drive past the guard and head toward town.

She didn’t follow.

The driver was a nicely coifed middle-aged blonde who might well have been Russell’s secretary. Or his wife.

It took another week for one of the guards to call the police on her because he finally noticed how often she’d been parked down the street. She told the female officer that the guard must have her confused with someone else. The officer said she didn’t think so and asked for her driver’s license, the papers on her car and wrote down her license plate number before citing her for parking too close to a fire hydrant.

That was when she decided she really did need to get to know Jack. Yet, despite the time they’d spent during their dinners together, he hadn’t told her much about his stepfather. As she’d found with most men, he’d been more than willing to discuss his own views and interests, which basically included politics and his own work. He’d also distracted her with truly fascinating stories about his cases, but he’d been reluctant to talk at all about the man who had raised him. He had, in fact, pretty pointedly changed the subject the only two times she’d managed to bring up his childhood. All she’d been able to gather was that his relationship with the senior Lever was strained at best and that the man had never had time for anything or anyone that didn’t involve work—including Jack.

She listened to the slow tick of the clock, stroked the cat every third beat. She had already concluded that having Jack for a stepbrother could prove a little awkward. Infinitely more important had been the realization that if Russell didn’t have time for the son he’d raised, the odds of the happy reunion she’d envisioned with him welcoming her into his family weren’t looking good at all. That was why she’d thought it might help her chances with the man if she learned something about the business he was in—which was why she’d starting researching on the Internet again.

There was just something about having to try that hard to gain acceptance or affection that made her feel even more lost and dejected than she already did.

Leaning forward, she reached for the mouse, clicked Close and shut the computer down.

The action did nothing to alleviate the huge void inside her.

Oddly, what helped a little was petting the cat.



Restlessness drove Rebecca out into the chilly air early the next morning—right through the newly fallen leaves that totally mocked the time she’d spent raking yesterday afternoon. It was barely eight in the morning, but she’d been up since five checking on Columbus and waiting for the newspaper. It seemed to be some sort of unwritten law that the newspaper always arrived late on the morning a person was up early.

Thinking it might have been delivered while she’d been in the shower and getting dressed, she hugged her arms over the black turtleneck sweater she wore with her slim black slacks and searched all the usual places it might be hiding. The paper rarely landed in the driveway or the front walk, and never on the porch.

She found it in the hydrangea bushes by the front window. She only knew the plants were hydrangeas because elderly Mrs. Fulton across the street had told her how beautiful they usually were when properly watered and cared for. The sweet, silver-haired woman with the unfortunate bouffant also mentioned something about adding iron sulfate or aluminum something-or-other to the soil to keep the blooms blue. Rebecca figured that for someone whose only exposure to plants had been to those tended by a plant service in the offices of Vogue, keeping them watered—and not killing them—was accomplishment enough.

Newspaper in hand, she backed out of the bushes and glanced down the street. The way her house was situated near the top of the cul-de-sac, she could see all of her neighbors’ driveways. Two doors down, she could see Angela Schumacher backing her van out of her drive. Thinking of how much that poor woman had on her plate, what with being a single mom to three children and working two jobs, she lifted her hand and waved. Angela, hurried as always, tossed a wave back. Directly across from Angela’s house was Jack’s. Since his garage door could open any moment, she was about to head back inside when she saw Molly Jackson-Shibb come out her front door and cut past Carly’s driveway toward her.

“I got your message,” she called, hurrying across the street in slacks and a long blue sweater that hid much of her basketball belly. “Elmer’s fine. And thanks so much for plugging that hole. Adam is going to fill it in before he leaves for work. How’s the cat?” she asked, meeting Rebecca in the street. “I would have called last night, but I had a meeting in the city that ran late and your lights were out when I got home.”

“Everything’s okay. Columbus is fine.”

Molly’s expression went from concerned to surprised. “You know which one it was?”

“The vet told me.” She hadn’t a clue how he’d known him from his brother, though. “He’s just missing part of his ear. The cat,” she explained, trying desperately not to be envious of the woman’s glow. At eight months pregnant, Molly looked absolutely fabulous. “Not the vet.”

Concern was back. “Elmer bit off his ear?”

“Only part of it. He probably thought he was a chew toy. Don’t worry,” she assured the woman who was as close to being a friend as anyone on Danbury Way, “it’s not good for the baby.”

Or so she’d heard, she thought. She’d probably have to be a single mom herself to know for certain. Only, Molly wasn’t single anymore. She and Adam had been married for a couple of months now and seemed more in love than ever.

Rebecca’s smile was genuine enough. Molly, though, seemed to catch the bittersweet edge behind it.

The mom-to-be tipped her head, pushed back her long, curly brown hair. “How are you doing?” she asked, sympathy heavy in her voice. “You did great at the party the other night, but it was kind of rough, huh?”

The infamous Halloween party, Rebecca thought. Jack’s nanny, Zooey, had thrown it for his two children. The week before, Zooey had invited everyone on Danbury Way, including her. Knowing she would have to see Jack, Rebecca had toyed with the idea of not going after he’d called off their date, but it was a neighborhood function and, trying to fit in, she hadn’t missed one yet.

Everyone on Danbury Way had been there. Just about everyone had known that she’d been interested in Jack, too—though not a single one of them had a clue why that interest had originally been there. Not even the slowly reforming workaholic waiting for her reply.

The really awkward part was that everyone had also seemed to know that Jack wasn’t seeing her anymore.

“It was a little uncomfortable,” she had to admit. “But not going to the party would have made a bigger deal out of the situation than it is. Jack and I only had a couple of dates,” she reminded her. “And there really wasn’t a lot of real chemistry there.”

“Not like there is between him and Zooey?”

Jack’s new nanny definitely had his eye.

“Nothing like that.” The easy little laugh she gave made it clear that she was far more embarrassed than hurt by the public’s knowledge of his lack of interest in her. “Most women would kill to have a man look at her that way. Except me,” she insisted, wishing the lost feeling she couldn’t shake would go away. “I’ve decided I’m swearing off men for a while.”

Including my father, she insisted to herself, only to have the thought interrupted by a silver, bull-nosed pickup truck coming up the street.

The unfamiliar vehicle had both women glancing toward it. Suddenly sidetracked, Molly’s brow pinched. “Who’s that?”

Rebecca narrowed her eyes at the approaching vehicle. “Dr. Hudson?”

She’d barely recognized Joe Hudson’s undeniably attractive features through his windshield before he swung the vehicle into her driveway and killed the engine. A moment later, the dark-haired vet in khakis and a leather bomber jacket stepped out and started toward them.

“Morning, ladies. Mrs. Shibb,” he called, nodding to Molly as he walked to where they watched him from the middle of the street. “How’s Elmer?”

Joe Hudson was apparently their vet, too.

“Generally?” Molly asked, smiling back. “Or in relation to yesterday’s fight?”

“Both.”

“He’s fine. Thank you.”

“Glad to hear it.” His easy smile shifted to Rebecca as he pushed his hands into the pockets of his pants. “I hope I’m not interrupting. I just came by to check on my patient.”

Rebecca wasn’t sure which had the greater hold at the moment, surprise at his unexpected visit, or dismay at the way her heart had jerked at the sight of him. Preferring to ignore the latter, she indulged puzzlement.

“I didn’t know veterinarians made house calls.”

His response was the shrug of his broad shoulders.

Molly lowered her head, whispered, “They don’t,” and stepped back to check her watch. When she glanced back up, speculation fairly danced in her eyes, but her voice returned to normal.

“Well, I have to go,” she announced. “Good to see you,” she said to the vet. “I’ll talk to you later,” she promised Rebecca.

The woman was clearly intent on getting details of the good doctor’s visit. Rebecca hated to disappoint her, but there would be none. She’d meant what she’d said. She truly was swearing off men. In the romantic, physical and emotional sense, anyway. The platonic friendship she’d formed with Molly’s husband was okay. And for support services, they were allowed. But those were her ground rules.

“Sure,” she murmured to Molly, pretty sure she’d covered her bases, and watched her clearly curious friend head back across the cul-de-sac.

“If this isn’t a good time, I can come by later. I was just on my way to the clinic—”

“It’s fine,” she said quickly. The man was there to check on the cat. That fell squarely into the service category. The least she could do was be gracious to him. “I put on another pot of coffee a while ago. It should be ready if you want some.”

Another pot? Joe thought. “That would be great.”

Joe watched the beautiful brunette in the black turtleneck sweater, slim black slacks and high black heels give him a cautious smile before she led him up the walkway of the rather large, two-story colonial-style house that looked pretty much like all the nicely tended homes in the upper-middle-class cul-de-sac—except for the mansionlike structure taking up two lots next door, anyway. But his attention wasn’t on the house or the neighborhood so much as it was on this particular resident.

He honestly did want to know how the cat was doing. He knew he could have one of his assistants make the usual follow-up call to make sure everything was going all right. But he wanted to know how she was coping, too. There had been no mistaking her uneasiness with the little guy yesterday. Between what he suspected was a fear in general of animals and her total lack of knowledge about the care of an injured one, stopping by to check on both seemed like the most practical thing to do.

Rebecca opened the storm screen and the front door, only to immediately bend in a graceful stoop and hold her hand low as if to intercept a potential escapee. Apparently, finding no cat waiting to run out, she straightened to hold the door for him and closed it when he’d stepped inside.

“The Turners have unique taste,” she said, to explain the eclectic collection of Asian and Mediterranean objets d’art mixed among the chintz prints and colonial Williamsburg furnishings. She preferred a sleeker, more urban style herself. Less clutter, cleaner lines. “They travel a lot.

“Columbus has been hiding out in one of the guest rooms,” she continued, leading him past the entry wall of Turner family photos and into a short hallway. Turning into the last door, she knelt beside the high four-poster bed and lifted the edge of the frilly rosebud print bed skirt. “I don’t know how he jams himself under there with that collar, but he’s still under here if you want to try to get him.”

Joe’s glance moved over her slender, incredibly appealing shape. She had the lithe body of a dancer, all gentle, feminine curves and long, long legs. She was also dressed like a cat burglar. Even the wide and intricate black belt snugged low on her hips was the color of coal.

“Has he been there since yesterday?”

“Only since about midnight. That’s when the tranquilizer or whatever it was you gave him wore off and he jumped down. Before that, I had him on the sofa with me.”

It sounded as if she’d slept on the sofa to keep an eye on the cat. Or, maybe, he thought, to keep the cat company. Either way, it seemed she wasn’t as uncomfortable with the animal as he’d thought she was. Or, maybe, he thought, dead certain he hadn’t misread her fear, her sympathy for its injuries had outweighed that unease.

The other gray cat wandered in. Striped silver and black like its sibling, Magellan held up his tail in a high, slow wave and did a lazy figure eight around Joe’s legs before poking his nose under the skirt to see what had his keeper’s attention.

Noting the other cat beside her, Rebecca eased back as if she didn’t trust what it might do and rose to her feet.

“You’re welcome to get him out if you can,” she said, leaving behind the subtle scent of coconut shampoo as she passed him at the door. “He’ll just run off if I try.”

Ignoring the faint tightening low in his gut, he nodded toward the bed. “Has he been eating or drinking?”

“Both. He turned up his nose at the cat food, but polished off half a can of tuna. I’ll get your coffee. How do you take it?”

“Black.”

“I’ll be in the kitchen, then. When you’re through, just turn left at the end of the hall.”

Rebecca watched him acknowledge her with a nod before she closed the door in case the cat decided to make a run for it. Despite Molly’s insistence that vets didn’t make house calls, she was truly relieved that this particular one had decided to make an exception. The cats hid from her all the time, and seemed to take particular delight in pouncing out and scaring her witless. Yet, regardless of the way they terrorized her, she needed to know the injured one was okay.

Two minutes later, coffee poured and waiting on the counter that divided the big colonial kitchen from the sunny breakfast nook, Joe walked in with both cats bouncing at his heels.

Her first thought was of the Pied Piper. The animals never followed her around that way. But, then, the man filling the room with his reassuring presence had a definite knack with the four-legged set. Yesterday, she’d actually seen Columbus visibly calm at his touch.

He seemed to have that gift with two-legged species, too. When he had touched her, she’d felt that calming gentleness herself.

Preferring not to think about that odd phenomenon, she focused on his patient. “How is he?”

“He’s doing fine. How about you? How are you doing with him?”

“He’s really doing okay?”

“He really is,” he assured, echoing her phrasing.

“Then, I’ll be better now.” She had checked on the cat every half an hour since she’d awakened at five to make sure he was still breathing. Apparently, she wouldn’t need to do that anymore. “Thanks.

“Tell me,” she hurried on, watching Columbus paw at the cone collar he clearly hated. “When I brought him in, how did you know which one he was?”

“We have a picture of each patient in their file,” he explained. “Tracy pulled the Turners’ files right after you called. I knew this one because the two darker gray marks above his eyes remind me of horns. The marks on Magellan look more like exclamation points.” He glanced toward the piles of papers on the table in the breakfast bay, then to the coffee cooling on the counter. “Mind if I have that?”

She was still dwelling on the markings. “Of course, Dr. Hudson,” she murmured, handing the mug to him. Horns. How appropriate, she thought, now eyeing the cat. The little devil probably was the one who’d ruined her shoe.

“It’s Joe.”

Her glance jerked from the cat who’d just curled up near the other in a sunbeam.

“My name,” he said, since she looked so preoccupied. “Call me Joe.” Without waiting for a reply, he turned his attention to the table with its stacks of photographs, envelopes and papers. “You were already working.”

“I was just getting ready to.”

“You said you’re freelancing?”

“For the magazine I used to work for,” she explained. “I have proposals out to a couple of others, too. I wrote for accessories and American fashion. Still do. But I like doing research pieces.”

Mug in hand, looking curious, he nodded his dark head toward the stacks. “May I?”

She lifted her hand toward the table, told him to go ahead. Even as she did, her glance darted from the blue chambray shirt visible beneath the open brown leather jacket that looked more comfortably worn than fashionably distressed, down the length of his neat khakis and landed on his brown, tasseled boaters.

Her mental wheels spinning, she watched him sip his coffee as he frowned at a collection of glossy photos.

He was exactly the sort of man she was writing about in her make-over-your-mate project; intelligent, handsome and sexy, but, she suspected, clueless about fashion beyond denim and khaki.

“Would you be interested in helping me?”

One dark eyebrow rose as she moved beside him.

“One of the articles I’m working on requires men’s opinions. It’ll be really easy,” she hurried to assure him, since he was already looking skeptical. “I have a questionnaire that’s multiple choice and photos that just need to be listed in order of preference.

“Not those,” she muttered, seeing his skepticism grow as he glanced back at the photos of brooding and gaunt males. From his frown, it seemed glaringly obvious that the runway look was something he just didn’t get. But, then, some designers did go a tad over the top. “Those are for a menswear article and are a little…”

“Bizarre?”

Her expression held tolerance. She would be the first to admit that she knew nothing about animals. It was only fair to cut him some slack on the fashion front. “I was going to say cutting-edge. It’s like any of the runway fashions,” she pointed out, warming to her subject. “Everything from hair and makeup on down is exaggerated. The designer is going for a statement. A theme, if you will. You rarely see exact copies on the street, but elements show up on the racks the next season. Or the next,” she hurried to explain, “depending on which part of the country you’re in. Buyers buy differently for different markets. But that’s not the article I need help with.

“I have photos of other designers and more mainstream lines, too,” she said, reaching across the table to pluck a manila envelope off a stack. “Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Versace. Issey Miyake. Armani. He’s my personal favorite.” She turned with a smile. “Levi Strauss.”

She’d already put those photos in each of the five hundred manila envelopes stacked across the back of the table. This morning’s project was to add the last of the photos to the questionnaires already in them and start making her rounds of men’s clothing stores and the men on Danbury Way—with the exception of Jack. That was one man’s opinion her article would have to go without.

“Is this why you came to Rosewood?” Joe asked, watching her punch the metal tab on the envelope through the hole in its flap. “To outfit the suburban male?”

“My job is merely to enlighten.”

His glance skimmed from the animation in her lovely blue eyes to her slicked-back hair. She was truly, classically beautiful, yet nearly everything about her confused his idea of what he usually found attractive in a woman. The severely restrained hair said “don’t touch.” The stiletto heels that put her nearly eye level with most men, including him, seemed to say “don’t mess with me, I’m not vulnerable to you.” She wasn’t soft, yet she was indisputably feminine. The black clothes that covered her from neck to pointed toe weren’t provocative at all by themselves, yet on her, they were as sexy as hell.

“That wasn’t my question,” he said mildly.

Her animation slipped with the quick blink of her lush lashes. “I came here because it’s where I thought I needed to be.” Purposefully looking back to hold his glance, she tipped the envelope toward him. “So,” she continued, clearly intent on sticking to what she felt comfortable with, “are you game?”

He didn’t know what intrigued him more; her contradictions or the effect of her scent, her smile. Seeing no need to figure it out now, he gave her a shrug. “I have no idea how much help I’d be, but sure. I’ll be glad to. You’ll just have to explain all of what you just said. Only not right now,” he continued, taking one last sip of his coffee. “I have to get to the clinic. How about Saturday afternoon?” he asked, setting the mug on the counter. “I’m hiking near the meadow where I took some of the pictures you were looking at. Hang on to that,” he said with a nod to the envelope she held, “and if you want, you can come with me and we can talk on the way.”

“Hike?”

She wasn’t sure if it was the activity she questioned or the invitation itself. Either way, there was no masking her incredulity.

“It’s not much of one,” he assured her. “There’s absolutely no dangling from cliffs involved. It’s more of a walk in the park. Do you have other plans?”

She hesitated. “Not exactly…”

“Then I’ll pick you up at one thirty. The clinic doesn’t close until one.” She was vacillating. He could see it. Not wanting to give her a chance to point out that she hadn’t actually accepted the invitation, he glanced to the pointed toes of her heels. “Wear sturdy shoes. And thanks for the coffee.” He backed toward the door. “I’ll see myself out.”

Joe turned then, checking to make sure he didn’t have cats at his feet as he left the house. As candid as she seemed to be, he felt certain that if Rebecca hadn’t wanted to go with him, she’d have been fast on his heels with a reason or an excuse for not being able to join him. All she’d done was stay where she was, looking temporarily speechless.

He had the feeling she wasn’t often at a loss for words.

He climbed into his truck and immediately frowned at the file folders on the passenger seat. He had no business taking Saturday afternoon off to go hiking. He had a mountain of paperwork to fill out for a small business loan to expand his clinic. With any luck, and the kind of hard work that kept him from second-guessing the decisions he’d made, this time next year, he would have started construction on a bigger clinic that would include an animal hospital so he could offer his clients round-the-clock care.

He should also run up north and help his dad and brother finish weather-stripping the barn before the snows set in. But that would take more than an afternoon. Aside from that, nearly every time he’d gone back home lately, his mom had managed to have her latest candidate for her future daughter-in-law stop by.

It had taken his mom a while to forgive him for breaking up with Sara Jennings after he’d graduated from veterinary school, but ever since then she’d been on an on-again, off-again mission to find him a spouse. But he wasn’t in the market for a wife. He had too much he needed to accomplish before he even thought about taking on the responsibility of a committed relationship.

That didn’t stop him from wondering about Rebecca Peters, though. He couldn’t help being drawn by her attempts to care for animals that clearly made her uneasy, and the compassion that somehow pushed her past the worst of her discomfort. She was dealing with them, and her fear, far better than he had anticipated. There was no denying the physical pull he felt toward her, either, but he hadn’t been with a woman in months, so that chemistry was easy enough to explain. What had him most curious as he left Danbury Way, though, was the suspicion that she wasn’t all that happy with the reason she was in Rosewood.

There had been no mistaking the unease that had slipped into her expression when he’d asked what had brought her there, or how quickly she’d shied from the subject. Since she was still doing the same type of work she’d done in the city, he didn’t think the move was job-related, though he’d be the first to admit that he knew zip to squat about what it was she did for a living. Or why. All he knew for sure was that it had been a long time since he’d met a woman who so thoroughly intrigued him. He also knew for a fact that he’d never met one who seemed so clearly out of her element.

He just had no idea how totally out of her element she was until two mornings later when he picked her up for their day in the Catskills.




Chapter Three


He really shouldn’t be taking the afternoon off.

That thought had occurred to Joe more than once in the past couple of days. On any given weekend, the only spare time he had was Saturday afternoon. His Sundays were committed to chores around the house he was slowly renovating, and maintaining the five acres of property that provided elbow room for him and his pets. Sunday afternoon, weather permitting, he also tried to squeeze in an hour or so at Rosewood Park with his dogs to keep them socialized, before heading back home to finish whatever he’d left undone or clean up the mess he’d made doing it.

His weekday evenings inevitably seemed just as crowded.

With his current time constraints, he’d thought about calling Rebecca and asking her to just drop the questionnaire by the office so he could work on his loan application. The only reason he hadn’t was because he wasn’t in the habit of backing out on any sort of commitment—unless an emergency arose and he had no choice.

Poor planning on his part did not constitute an emergency. The good news, however, was that he’d only be gone for a few hours.

It was with that mental concession that he pulled onto Danbury Way.

The moment he did, he noticed the guy in front of the house on the corner stop mulching leaves with his lawn mower and follow his progress into Rebecca’s driveway. On the other side of the street, an older woman leaned on her rake, peering at him from beneath the rim of her purple gardening hat. Two trim, middle-aged gals in matching jogging suits pulled their attention from the Gone With the Wind-like mansion at the end of the street to check out his truck, him and the stylish woman emerging from the door of the Turners’ house on their way by.

He had the distinct feeling that not much got past the residents in this particular neighborhood as he headed to where Rebecca stepped off the low porch. The joggers had already continued on, their pace uninterrupted but their necks cranked back so they wouldn’t miss anything. He had no idea who else still watched them, though. His concerns were with more practical matters as he watched Rebecca tuck her keys into a small, backpack-style leather purse while trying not to drop the manila envelope that probably held her questionnaire.

Between the quilted, rust velvet, elaborately embroidered vest she wore with her matching scarf, mustard-colored turtleneck and slim, embellished jeans, she looked more like an ad for trendy autumn wear than someone actually planning to hike.

“Hi,” she called, walking toward him.

“Hi, yourself.” He forced himself not to frown at her boots. They looked very much like those she’d worn the first day they’d met, sturdy enough but with heels way too high and totally impractical for a walk in the wilderness.

Thinking she looked a little preoccupied, he decided to deal with first things first. “How’s the patient?”

“He hates me. They both do.”

“That good, huh?”

“I don’t know why else they leap out at me the way they do. I was getting out of the shower and Columbus jumped at me from behind the toilet.” The little monster had startled her so badly, she’d screamed. It had served him right that his cone collar had gotten him jammed between the cabinet and the wastebasket. “Magellan did it last night when I got up to turn off the TV.”

To keep an image of her body, naked and dripping, from forming, he kept his focus on her face. “Did they hiss at you?” he asked, his forehead furrowing with the effort. “Or swipe at you with their paws?”

“No,” she replied, as if scaring her were quite enough.

“Then, they’re probably just playing. ‘Pounce’ is like a game with cats.”

“Playing? I thought they were trying to stop my heart.”

He tipped his head, nodded toward his truck. “Why don’t you tell me what else they do while we’re driving. Maybe I can explain the behavior so you can deal with it better.”

“Would you?”

The phenomenon was interesting. He’d never felt gut-punched when a woman simply smiled at him. But that was what he felt when he saw the gratitude in her beautiful blue eyes. “Be glad to.”

As if aware that she’d just betrayed some vulnerability, she quickly looked away. He couldn’t begin to imagine why she should be uncomfortable needing help with something she didn’t understand. He just knew she did in the moments before he nodded to her boots.

“Can you walk any distance in those?”

Rebecca glanced at her feet, then to the rugged, lug-soled hiking boots Joe wore with his comfortably worn jeans and a gray fleece shirt. Her chunky heels were barely two inches high, practically flat as far as she was concerned. Thinking it couldn’t possibly be that difficult to walk through a meadow, she gave a shrug. “I can run in stilettos if I have to.”

Pure doubt creased his features. “You can?”

“I did it all the time in New York. Chasing down cabs,” she explained. “But you know, Joe, I never actually agreed to do this hike thing,” she reminded him, wanting to keep the record straight. “If you want, we can just go for a latte while I explain what I’m looking for on my questionnaire.”

“It’s too nice a day to be cooped up inside.”

“We can sit at a table outside, then. Latte and Lunch has café—”

“I don’t care for stuff in my coffee.” His eyes narrowed on hers. Like every other time he’d seen her, she had her hair smoothed back from her face and clipped tightly at her nape. On any other woman, he would have given little thought to the simple style. On her, it seemed to enhance that don’t-touch-me sophistication—and made him want to set it free.

Minutes ago, he would have taken her up on her offer to stay in town, simply because of the time it would save. Seeing her again, listening to her logic, the hike became something he wouldn’t miss for the world.

“You’re not nervous about hiking, are you?”

Joe watched her open her mouth, only to see her close it again. Like the other day in his office when she wouldn’t directly admit to being afraid of Columbus, he sensed now that she didn’t like to admit that there was something she couldn’t handle.

“Of course not,” she finally said.

“Good.” He didn’t know if it was stubbornness, determination or simple obstinacy that pushed the woman. All he knew was that he wanted to see how far it would take her. “Because I promised Bailey he could go for a run.”

“Bailey?”

They’d reached his truck. With the patterns of leaves reflecting off the windows, it was hard to see inside—which was why Rebecca hadn’t noticed that Joe wasn’t alone until he opened the driver’s door.

“He’s a sweetheart. I promise. Come on, boy.”

The simple command had barely followed his assurance before seventy pounds of blissfully panting German shepherd leaped to the ground and planted himself on his haunches by the open door.

From the corner of his eye, Joe saw Rebecca stiffen. “He’s totally harmless. Honest.” He curled his fingers around her wrist, drawing her attention from the dog to him. Aware of how skittish she was about animals, he wouldn’t have brought the dog had Bailey not been the most gentle canine on the planet. “He’s just going to say hi. Okay?”

Rebecca couldn’t have imagined anything that would have made her tear her eyes from the large amount of tan-and-black fur sitting six feet away. But Joe’s touch had done just that. She wasn’t sure, either, if it was the odd, calming effect that touch had on her or the quiet reassurance in his deep voice that had her giving him a barely discernible nod.

“Okay, Bailey,” she heard him say, “come meet Rebecca.”

As if pulled by a string, the dog immediately popped up on all fours, walked over to her and sat back down again. She’d barely felt Joe’s hand slip away before the dog held up its paw and, tongue lolling, blinked his bright eyes at her.

“He wants to shake.”

This was a bit more than she’d bargained far. There was only one reason that she hadn’t already backed out of this nondate with the man standing almost protectively beside her. And it was a nondate as far as she was concerned. Joe was her support system for the cats. Even before he’d offered to explain their behavior, she’d figured that as long as she had to be with them for another two months, it would be infinitely easier on her if she would ask him to do just that. As far as subjecting herself to the wilds was concerned, her less-than-enthusiastic willingness to face the experience was strictly for self—and job—improvement.

Those who knew her would say that if she was inspired by anyone, it would be some iconic fashion designer such as Coco Chanel or Yves St. Laurent. But the bit of inspiration she’d always remembered had come from a quote Mrs. Morretti, who owned a little Italian restaurant not far from where Rebecca had grown up, kept taped to the mirror above her cash register.

You must do the thing you think you cannot do. Eleanor Roosevelt.

Regardless of the fact that both Mrs. Morretti and Mrs. Roosevelt could have used some major style advice with their respective wardrobes, Rebecca had found the challenge pushing her off and on over the years. It pushed her now.

A hike held all the appeal of a root canal for her. Going would be the self-improvement part of the program. As for the job perspective, she figured the hike might help her better understand the suburban male, and thus better understand his apathy toward fashion. If she could find an angle, she might even be able to get another article out of it.

Trying not to look as tentative as she felt, remembering that Eleanor’s advice applied to the dog, too, she swallowed hard, reached down and when he didn’t bare his teeth, shook his paw.

“Nice…dog.” Not sure what else one said to a canine, she straightened as Bailey pulled back his paw and watched him look to his owner.

Joe gave him a pat on the head and motioned him back into the truck.

“It won’t take long to get to the trailhead,” he said, walking her around the blunt nose of the vehicle to the passenger’s door. “Less than half an hour or so. I brought granola bars, trail mix and water. If you want anything else, we can stop at the market on the way out of town.”

Not wanting to alter the experience with a request for a bagel and a latte, Rebecca told him that whatever he normally took with him was fine. Waving to Mrs. Fulton across the street, she climbed into the cab of the truck and promptly stiffened again.

Bailey, looking expectant, had claimed the console in the middle. The dog also apparently knew he couldn’t stay there. The moment Joe climbed in on the other side, the dog turned in the confined space, brushing her forehead with his long tail and settled on one of the small jump seats behind them.

She hugged the door. “You seem to be good with them. Animals, I mean.”

His deep chuckle sounded easy and oddly relaxing. “I hope so. I’d starve if I wasn’t. You never had any pets growing up?”

She couldn’t tell if he’d asked because he couldn’t imagine such a possibility, or because he didn’t want to talk about himself. Having never met a man who didn’t consider himself his favorite subject, she decided he simply found her lack of animal companionship as a child somewhat incomprehensible. Or, maybe, unfortunate.

Having been under a bit of stress when she’d first met him, she couldn’t quite recall if she’d mentioned the impracticalities of pet ownership in the city, or if having one had simply never occurred to her or her mom. If she had, he didn’t seem to mind if she repeated herself as they left Danbury Way with her neighbors still watching and headed for the Catskills.



Except to go shopping in Albany, Rebecca hadn’t been outside Rosewood since she’d arrived. She had also never in her life set foot in a national or state park. She knew there were people in the city who kept summer homes or lodges in New England where they “escaped” during the summer or skied in the winter. She wasn’t one of them. Neither were her friends, though Carrie Klein, her onetime roommate and unfortunately no relation to Calvin or Anne, had dated a stockbroker with a great little place in the Hamptons. Her vacations were always to the fashion meccas of the world. Rome. Milan. Paris. Stateside, she stuck with Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Or the beach. She liked to be where there was room service, cabs and at least some semblance of nightlife.

She didn’t consider herself spoiled. Heaven knew there had been times that the only reason she could afford to go out with her girlfriends from work was because the happy hour hors d’oeuvres were free so she didn’t have to pay for a meal. The designer clothes she wore came from sample sales, or sales at Barneys or Saks, but mostly from the Vogue clothes closet, which housed cast-off items from photo shoots.

Roughing it meant having to walk thirty blocks in the rain because she couldn’t get a cab. Though she wasn’t about to mention it, within five minutes of leaving Joe’s truck to follow a narrow dirt path through the woods, she would have preferred a walk in a downpour from Union Square to East 59th to the trek she was on now.

The trail was too narrow to walk side by side, so she followed Joe into the forest with bushes brushing her on either side. She kept shifting her focus between the bright orange day pack slung across his strong back to the vegetation attacking her legs and snapping beneath her feet. The dog had run ahead. He returned now with a short piece of tree branch in his mouth. Obviously, he didn’t mind the taste of dirt.

“How far is it to the meadow?” she asked.

She watched Joe take the limb from the dog and toss it ahead of them. With the dog making the bushes rustle as he took off after his new toy, she glanced down in time to avoid tripping over a skinny tree root sticking up through the leaves and pine needles. Seeing bits of bush clinging to her jeans, she brushed them off.

Joe glanced at her over his shoulder, waited for her to catch up. “Only a couple of miles.”

“Miles?” They were going miles?

“Only a couple,” he repeated. “It’s an easy walk.”

Easy was a relative term. In the interests of job research and self-improvement, however, she trudged on.

“Why do you do this?” she asked, falling into step beside him as the trail mercifully widened.

“I like being outside.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m cooped up inside most of the week.”

“Why else?”

Joe adjusted the weight of his day pack. “Because it’s a great way to unwind. It puts you back to basics.” Her inquisitiveness reminded him of his four-year-old nephew. Why was his favorite word.

“So it’s a primitive thing? Like you’re feeding your inner pioneer or something. You know,” she coaxed, when a frown creased his face, “like your inner child.”

He knew all about the inner child. His little sister was a psychologist who’d blithely informed him after a family dinner last year that his lack of a serious romantic interest was probably his inner child’s fear to commit. That remark had only fed his mother’s fears that, unlike his married siblings, he was going to wind up old and alone, which was no doubt why she’d resumed her efforts to find him a suitable mate.

He loved his family. He just wished they’d stay out of his love life.

“It’s not that complicated,” he assured her. “I just like being where you can hear the wind in the trees and get some exercise.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to join a gym?”

“Why pay to run on a treadmill when you can do this for free?”

She swiped at something small and pesky buzzing past her ear. “Because there are no bugs?”

“These aren’t bad at all. You should be out here during mosquito season.”

“Thanks, but I think I’ll pass. I’m not crazy about things that suck blood.”

“So you don’t date lawyers?”

“Not anymore,” she muttered.

From the corner of her eye, she saw Joe glance toward her. The smile that deepened the vertical lines carved in his cheeks faded with his curiosity.

“Burned bad?”

The only lawyer she’d ever dated had been Jack. “Barely singed,” she murmured, though the experience had definitely contributed to the void that didn’t feel quite so awful at the moment. Marveling at that, she started to smile at the man beside her, only to notice that the path had turned—and that there were no longer any trees on their left.

They were now parallel to a ravine. With Joe between her and the edge of that rocky drop-off and a wall of trees to her right, she deliberately edged toward the foliage.

“Do heights bother you?”

Clutching the insulated water bottle he’d given her, she quickly shook her head. Heights normally didn’t bother her at all. “I used to work on the thirty-second floor. My apartment was on the tenth.” There had also been glass or a guardrail between her and all that space.

It only looked to be about ten feet to the bottom. A single story. Still, with all the rocks down there, a fall would hurt. Joe, however, seemed totally unfazed by how close he was to the edge as he told her that this section of the trail was short, only an eighth of a mile or so. Short or not, she needed to pay less attention to how he actually enjoyed being so far from civilization and more attention to where she was putting her feet.

Narrowing her focus to the path, she concentrated on where she stepped while he pointed out a squirrel darting up a tree and Bailey trotted ahead of him. It was only when the trail curved again, trees once more hugging both sides of it, and the path angled what seemed like straight up that she let herself be distracted by the scream of her thigh muscles and the rustling in the bushes.

She wanted to know if there was anything carnivorous in these woods. He told her there probably was, but that on the carnivore side, he’d personally never encountered anything bigger than a fox. What she’d heard was probably just a rabbit.

A few hundred yards later, a raccoon streaked across her path. She didn’t scream. The hand she clamped over her mouth after she gasped prevented it. It was the same way she usually reacted to the cats.

Joe said nothing to minimize, patronize or otherwise imply that she was acting like a girl. He just identified the little masked beast, stuck a little closer to her and called Bailey back to walk with them since the dog had been responsible for flushing out the critter to begin with.

His attitude remained patient, almost…relaxed, she thought. Still, she had the feeling when he glanced toward her at times, that he was mentally shaking his head at her. Or, most likely, having second thoughts about having brought her along. Even if he wasn’t, she was.

With her heart rate finally back to racing only from exertion and not from fright, and with Joe within grabbing distance, she reminded herself of her purpose for subjecting herself to his little slice of heaven and let herself be distracted by the crumbly-looking silver-green stuff growing on some of the trees and fallen logs.

“What is that?” she asked, pointing to a patch lit by a sunbeam.

“Lichen.”

Whatever that is, she thought. “It’s a great color. Perfect for a shimmery fabric like dupioni or charmeuse.”

“It’s made up of an alga and a fungus.”

“Algae?”

“That’s plural. Alga is singular. The plant is thallophytic.”

She eyed him evenly. “I have no idea what thallophytic is.”

He eyed her back. “I have no idea what you just said, either.”

His mouth wasn’t smiling. Only his eyes were. But any thought of explaining silk fabrics to him evaporated with her next heartbeat.

“It means it’s a plant with a single-cell sex organ. There’s another explanation, but then we’d have to get into gametes and haploid chromosomes.”

His glance had slipped to her mouth, causing her pulse to jerk and pick up speed all over again.

She absolutely did not want him to know that he affected her. Not wanting him to have any effect on her at all, she simply turned away and moved on, slapping at bugs as she went.

“What’s dupioni?” he called after her.

She kept going. “It’s a silk fabric, woven with slubbed yarns. You’d get a nice drape in the ten momme range.”

“What’s mummy?”

“It’s a Japanese unit of weight used to measure and describe silk cloth. That’s not how other fabrics are assessed, but then we’d have to get into weight grades and thread counts.”

Joe hung back. Watching her go, his attention moved from the totally impractical little purse strapped to her back to the sweet curve of her backside, to the long length of her legs. His glance had barely reached the heels he couldn’t believe had carried her this far when she gave a little jump to the side and frowned at a stick she must have thought was a snake.

He couldn’t help wondering when she was going to tell him she was done, that she’d had enough of the nature thing and that he could take her home now. She wasn’t having a good time. But when he caught up with her, she didn’t say a word other than to remark about the intensity of the fall colors and the crystal-blue sky. She did, however, look visibly relieved when they finally entered the wide meadow and he led her to a spot by the wide stream cutting through it.

Surrounded by green pines and sugar maples the color of fire, he watched her sink to a flat boulder. Beside her, the water bubbled white as it tumbled over a dam of rocks.

“Who’d have thought,” she murmured, over the water’s burble and splash. “A spa.” Watching the bubbles, she casually slipped off her boots to reveal socks that matched her rust-colored vest and rubbed one arch. “You have no idea how I miss massages and seaweed wraps.”

He hadn’t a clue what a seaweed wrap was. Some kind of sushi, maybe. Massage, however, he definitely understood.

Slipping off his backpack, he lowered himself to the rock across from her. With his boots planted a yard apart he pulled the pack to him and took out two granola bars.

He handed her one. “What else do you miss?”

Thanking him, she peeled the wrapper back halfway, took a bite and continued rubbing. “Thai takeout at two in the morning,” she said as soon as she’d swallowed. “There’s this place around the corner from where I used to live that makes the most amazing shrimp soup with lemongrass, and their Pad Thai is to die for. And shopping the sample sales. And all the theaters and the clubs and my friends.” She lifted the granola bar, started to take a bite, stopped. “I think I even miss the sirens.”

She’d never known quiet could be so…silent…until she’d moved to Rosewood. She glanced around her. Out here, it was quieter still.

“What about you?” she asked, not wanting to taunt herself with anything else she could have mentioned. “If you were to move from Rosewood, what would you miss?”

Two-thirds of his bar was already gone. As he considered her question, the last third disappeared.

With his forearms on his spread knees, he watched her work at her arch.

His expression thoughtful, he nodded to what surrounded them. “Access to this. My friends. My practice.”

Leaning forward, he reached out and circled his hand around her ankle.

“Let me do that,” he said, and propped her sock-covered foot up on his knee. Pushing his thumbs into her heel, he rotated them in tiny circles to the middle of her arch.

Rebecca slowly slid to the ground to lean against the rock. If she’d intended to protest, she forgot all about it as her toes curled.

“My patients’ pets,” he continued as if he’d had no break at all in his thoughts. “The lakes where I boat. High-school football games in the fall. Basketball in the winter. Baseball in the spring. We have some pretty good teams,” he informed her, still rubbing. “We could use some new turf on the football field, though. It’s going to be a mud bog when it starts to rain.”

She’d thought his touch calming before. Now, with even the muscles in her shoulders going limp, she thought it purely…magic.

“Did you play sports in high school yourself?”

“Some. Basketball mostly because the season didn’t interfere with my chores at home.”

“In Rosewood.”

He shook his head. “Peterboro. It’s a little farming town north of here. When I went to college, I played a little in undergrad,” he continued before she could ask anything about his home, “but I gave it up in graduate school.”

“Where did you go to college?”

“Ithaca. Cornell,” he clarified. “Excellent veterinary school.” He switched feet, started rubbing the other one. “Where did you go?”

“Fashion Institute of Technology. Excellent bachelors’ and graduate programs. You’ve probably never heard of our basketball team.”

He kneaded her toes. “Can’t say that I have.”

“Do you miss it?” she asked, praying he wouldn’t stop. “Playing, I mean.”

“I still play a little. I help coach sometimes at South Rosewood,” he said, speaking of the youth center in what was considered the poor side of town. “The director there is a client. And a few of us have a pickup game once a week at the community center. Anyone who wants to play can come in and start playing on either team. Adam Shibb plays with us.”





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