“Sorry. You want to go first?”
“You said we were a team. We’ll walk together.”
“Fine by me.”
“You can let go of my hand now.”
“Do I have to?”
She saw something dark under an azalea bush. “Is that him?”
“No, that’s a rock.”
Feeling foolish, she freed her hand from his and immediately missed the warmth of his touch.
Which reminded her of something she meant to tell him. “The local newspaper called right before closing. They want you to do a weekly column for them.”
“Answering pet questions?”
“Answering relationship questions, dating advice, that sort of thing. Because you’re one of the state’s sexiest bachelors. Don’t worry. I told them you couldn’t possibly do such a column.”
“Because I’m too busy with my vet practice?”
“No. Because you’re clueless about male-female relationships.”
“Whereas you’re an expert?”
“I never said that.” She kept walking, as did Cole. Beside her, not in front of her. “I’m certainly no expert.”
“No, you’re the high-maintenance model, and I’m the warm and fuzzy and sexy vet.”
“I’ve never been high maintenance.”
“Pedicures, manicures, facials . . .”
“That’s not high maintenance.”
“Then what is?”
“Making demands on others to take care of you. I don’t expect anyone else to take care of me. I never have. Even as a kid I—”
“You what?”
“Took care of myself. When other kids made fun of me I didn’t expect anyone else to stick up for me.”
“What about your parents?”
“My dad told me I had to learn to defend myself, and my mom told me I should get along better with others. They were trying to teach me to be independent.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Cole said quietly.
“Sorry that I stuck up for myself?”
“Sorry that you didn’t have anyone else to do it for you.” He tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear, his fingertips trailing against her cheek. “And I’m sorry I made fun of you that one time.”
“That’s okay.” She swallowed the sudden lump in her throat and put a little more space between them. “You learned your lesson. Besides, it made me tougher.”
“Right,” he scoffed. “You are the poster child of toughness.”
“I am.”
“That’s why you cried with Mrs. Morgan when her twenty-year-old cat died. And why you hugged eight-year-old Jordan when he got a new kitten.”
“He got
two
new kittens. Brothers. Seuss and Truman.” She ducked to search beneath a huge lilac bush. Nothing, but it sure smelled good.
As a kid, Leena had loved the small lilac bush next to their trailer, but it died when her mom poured half of her dad’s bottle of vodka and part of another of tequila into it—refilling both bottles with water.
Unnerved by the memory, Leena quickly straightened. “Hold on.” Cole gently plucked several loose lilac flowers from her hair.
She closed her eyes and gently swayed under the magical influence of his touch. The instant she realized what she was doing, she snapped her eyes open and stepped away. “No tortoise under there. Time to move on.” She marched toward the next shrub.
He ambled after her. “We never did discuss the fact that you think I’m PA’s sexiest bachelor.”
“The paper listed others. A neurosurgeon from Philadelphia, a firefighter from Mifflinburg, a district attorney from Pittsburgh.”
“Yeah, but you nominated me, not them. Because you think I’m sexy.”
“Because I wanted to aggravate you.”
“Which you did. Mission accomplished. And the reason you wanted to aggravate me is because I get to you.”
She paused to confront him. “Is this about the bet?”
This time Cole’s eye roll indicated how aggravated he was with her question. “Would you just get over the bet? It was a stupid mistake on my part.”
“How would you feel if Tameka and I made a bet about you and Algee?”
“Honored, but that’s just me.”
His rough velvet voice was getting to her, so Leena started walking again. “We’re supposed to be looking for Tommy’s pet.”
“We are. Nothing says we can’t talk while we look. You’re good with animals. Did you have a pet as a kid?”
“I had a cat. Missy. My dad ran her over and she died. He didn’t do it on purpose. But I vowed I’d never have another pet after that.”
“You didn’t want to feel that kind of pain ever again, huh?”
“Yeah. Which was fine with my parents. They weren’t that into pets.”
“My family was. We had two dogs and three cats and an iguana and tropical fish. We even had a baby raccoon for a few months. Good thing we had a big house because I was always bringing stray animals home.”
“Sounds like you were meant to be a vet.”
“Yeah. And you were meant to be a model.”
“Yeah.” Something she couldn’t afford to lose sight of. But it was all too easy to do that when she was so close to Cole. He gave off this it’s-gonna-be-okay vibe that was very sexy.
Forty minutes later they’d found a faded flip-flop, an empty large-size bag of M&Ms with peanuts, and a crushed Diet Pepsi can but no sign of Bob.
They moved on to the yard on the other side of Tommy’s house. No sign of Bob there either.
“What about that storage shed at the back there?” She pointed to the yard behind Tommy’s house. There were no fences between the properties, so they walked over to check it out.
“Do you want me to ask the owner for the key?” Leena asked.
“It’s not locked.” He opened the door and peered inside. There were no windows, so the interior was pitch dark. “Here, hold the flashlight while I move something . . .”
“You brought a flashlight?”
“Sure. I always have one on my key chain. Come closer. I can’t see yet.”
She cautiously moved forward. No way was she afraid of the dark, but after a photo shoot in Mexico a few years ago she had developed a thing for creepy-crawlies. Snakes were okay, but scorpions weren’t. She was pretty sure there weren’t any scorpions in PA, but she wasn’t 100 percent positive.
“Don’t move,” Cole said.
She froze.
“Aim the flashlight down here.”
Since her hand was shaking the beam was wobbly. Maybe a Mexican scorpion had hitched a ride on some gardening stuff and was hiding in here just waiting.
Cole bent and scooped up something off the floor right beside her foot. He was so close that his fingers brushed her bare toes in her Bongo sandals.
Leena didn’t faint. She didn’t scream, although she had been tempted.
He held up the tortoise in his hand. “Bob, I presume?”
She almost sank to her knees in relief. First, because it wasn’t a scorpion, and second, because she hadn’t stepped on Bob. She could just imagine the local paper’s headlines: “Plus-Size Model Squishes Boy’s Beloved Pet.” They’d probably add some snarky comment about how if she’d been a size zero, she wouldn’t have hurt the tortoise at all.
As she lowered the flashlight, the beam hit the grass-stained knees of her jeans. Luckily they were the pair she’d gotten at Wal-Mart.
“Look at me. I’m a mess.” An instant later, Cole kissed her. This time she couldn’t afford to melt. She had to protest. Otherwise he’d think she was a complete pushover. “What are you doing? I said to
look
at me, not kiss me.”
“What can I say?” He shrugged, his smile endearing. “I’m hopelessly addicted to messy women.”
“Then go kiss one of them, not me.”
“I don’t want to kiss anyone but you.”
Leena’s heart stopped at his words and the way he said them. The man was holding a tortoise in one hand and still he had the ability to make her knees melt with just a look or a word or a kiss. The combination of all three was enough to knock her off kilter.
“Let’s . . .” Leena had to pause to clear her dry throat. “Let’s take Bob home.”
Home.
Leena wondered where
her
own home really was: back in Chicago or here with Cole? The fact that the thought even crossed her mind scared her more than the threat of scorpions.
“Cole, you’re an angel.” The woman who’d just complimented him kissed his cheek.
Mrs. Weinstein was in her eighties. He could hear Leena in his head, mocking the fact that women of all ages loved him. Except for Leena. The one woman he couldn’t get off his mind.
“Those two special tables you built for my cat Tum-tum are working out just perfectly. The arthritis in my knees has gotten so bad that I can’t bend down to fill her food dishes or empty her cat box. But because of you, I now have one of those tables in the kitchen so that Tum-tum can jump up to eat and the other in the laundry room so she can jump up for her kitty box. She has more energy than I do, and the height of the tables is just right for me. I can’t thank you enough.”
“I’m just glad I was able to help. Tum-tum here is doing great. Her ears and teeth look good. No problem there.”
His problem was Leena and how to deal with her. How to convince her that the two of them needed to get together. That date bet had set him back severely. Not that she’d been flirting with him before that. No, she usually looked at him as if she found him amusing rather than sexy. But every so often, he caught her staring at him as if she wanted him as much as he wanted her.
That was sure how she kissed him. With passion and no regret.
The regret came later, when she was out of his arms.
She’d been so mater-of-fact when she’d talked about how she’d learned at an early age to stick up for herself because no one else would do it for her.
She always seemed so confident and in charge, yet she’d accused him of making fun of her on more than one occasion. It was almost as if she couldn’t really believe that he’d be interested in her. Why was that? She was a beautiful, smart, intriguing woman. Any man would be lucky to have her in his life.
Which got him wondering about the ass who’d broken her heart back in Chicago. He wasn’t usually a violent man, but Cole wanted to kick the bastard in the balls.
Cole reigned in his thoughts and refocused his attention on his work. His next patient was a huge, twenty-five-pound gray shorthair neutered male cat named Solomon. “How’s he liking the new light cat food?” Cole asked his owner, Jeanine, the secretary at the Dun-beck Funeral Home.
“He’s eating it.” She sounded surprised. “He’s lost a pound so far.”
“That’s good. We don’t want the weight reduction to be too sudden. If a cat this size loses too much weight, it can develop hepatic lipidosis, or fatty liver disease, so we have to watch out for that. Also, when owners change cat foods, they sometimes think that if the cat gets hungry enough it’ll eat the new food. It won’t. Cats can starve themselves into a serious condition. Which is why it’s such good news that he likes the new weight-management dry food.”
“I feel guilty for feeding him all those treats before.”
“Don’t. You’re both on the right track now. It’s not easy, I know. I’ve got a big cat myself. Midnight. He really looks huge next to his bud Buddy. They’re both black cats, but Buddy is wiry and small.”
“Those are the Morontos’ cats, right?”
Cole nodded.
“I heard you took in the Morontos’ cats when the family had to move out of town suddenly. They left them in a large cardboard box in front of your clinic with a note, right?”
“Yeah.” He still got a pang when he thought about that note, written in crayon by the youngest of the six Moronto kids:
Pleze take kare of our kats. Daddy is rong. They not bad luk.
The cats had been too spooked to be adoptable. So Cole had taken them in himself and worked with them. Both still raced under the bed when they heard someone else’s voice, but they’d finally bonded with him. And they accepted Tripod and Elf. The dog was outnumbered by cats and was totally bossed around by them. Not that Elf seemed to mind.
Cole’s next patient was an orange domestic longhair neutered male named Mouser. “Do you think its normal for my cat to suck his thumb?” Katy Gonzalez, the local postmistress, asked. “He only sucks on the left one.”
Cole checked the feline’s teeth and left paw. “Doesn’t seem to be hurting him any.”
“How fast can a cat run?” Katy’s nine-year-old son Matt asked. He loved trivia and wanted to be a vet when he grew up.
Cole grinned at the kid. “You trying to stump the vet again?”
Matt just grinned back.
“Domestic shorthairs have been clocked at thirty-one miles per hour,” Cole said.
Matt wasn’t about to give up yet. “Average cat heart rate per minute?”
“About 155 beats.”
“Average temperature?”
“That would be 102.5.”
Matt was still asking questions as Cole with Mouser’s carrier in hand, accompanied him and his mom to the reception desk to pay the bill.
“The doctor said that it’s okay for our cat to suck his thumb,” Katy told Leena.
“I told you so,” Leena said. “Mouser is probably suffering from separation anxiety from his mom cat. You found him when he was only a few weeks old, right? And you said that he purrs real loud when he sucks his thumb, so it must make him happy.”
“Yeah, but he’s three years old now.”
“Early childhood or kittenhood traumas can affect you the rest of your life.” Leena spoke with the authority of someone who had personal experience of early traumas.
“For a model, she knows what she’s talking about,” someone said from the waiting area. “She told me that my dog Max was lonely and wanted more outdoor play-time, and she was right.”
Cole already knew that often during her breaks, Leena went in the back to the clinic area and talked to the recovering dogs and cats. “You’re gonna be fine. Don’t you worry about a thing.” Her voice was always soothing, and he was probably a sleazebag for getting turned on by it.