The job paid well for Rock Creek, which surprised her at first. Apparently she wasn’t the only one a little desperate. The vet seemed to have trouble getting the position filled. Not that she planned on asking why no one in town wanted to work for him.
Not yet.
“So are you accepting my offer to help you?” she asked Cole.
“How are you going to help him?” Sue Ellen demanded.
“By working as my receptionist,” Cole replied.
“No way! Stop right there. No way is my sister working in a crummy vet’s office. Not that you’re a crummy vet,” Sue Ellen hastily assured Cole. “I didn’t mean that. I just meant that your office is crummy. Not that it’s dirty, although it smells like dog urine in here.”
“That’s from my boots.” Leena looked down at her ruined footwear. “Oscar peed on one of them earlier. I tried to clean it off . . .”
Sue Ellen glared at Cole. “You allowed a dog to pee on my sister? Do you have any idea who you’re dealing with here? She’s
famous
! She is
not
someone to be peed upon!”
Cole shrugged, his mouth curved as if he were holding back a smile. If he laughed at her, Leena would have to punch him again. Instead he drawled, “I can’t guarantee it won’t happen again.”
“Then she is not working here,” Sue Ellen stated firmly. “Come on, Leena, let’s go.”
Leena recognized Sue Ellen’s bossy-big-sister mode. Sue Ellen was seven years older than Leena and she took her job as the elder sibling very seriously.
But Leena had no intention of being bossed around. Not unless it was by someone who was signing her paycheck.
Cole, curse his twisted soul, just stood there, arms crossed across his chest, a stupid grin on his face. She could read his mind.
Whatcha gonna do now, big girl?
Okay, maybe the “big girl” bit at the end was her own interpretation, but the challenging look in his admittedly sexy blue eyes was definitely being broadcast to her loud and clear.
“I’ll be back in the morning,” she told him firmly before heading for the door.
“The office opens at nine,” he called after her, “but staff should show up at eight thirty.”
“No problem.” Right. Talk about a huge lie. Leena had tons of problems. Boatloads of them. But at least she had a job. Now she just needed to find somewhere to stay.
“You’re staying with me, right?” Sue Ellen said. “You know that Mom and Dad gave me their trailer. I haven’t had a lot of time to redecorate it yet because I’ve been getting my real estate license. I’m sure I’m going to pass that test this next time around. Anyway, you can stay in your old bedroom.”
Just kill me now.
Leena reached through the open window of her blue Sebring, grabbed a paper bag from her front seat, and started breathing into it.
“What are you doing?” Sue Ellen demanded.
Leena just shook her head and held up her finger in the universal sign for
Wait a minute, I’ll be right with you
. Right after she had a nervous breakdown.
“She’s hyperventilating,” Cole said as he joined them in the parking lot.
“You’re a doctor, do something to help her!” Sue Ellen shoved him toward Leena, almost knocking her down in the process.
The second Cole put his hands on her waist to steady her, Leena instantly wished she was thinner. Or richer. Or both.
She lowered her hands, and the paper bag, to remove his fingers from her body before he measured her further.
The rustling crush of the bag mimicked her rustling heartbeat.
His hands left her waist, but only to move to her shoulders in order to pull her even closer.
“What are you do—mmmbbb!”
His lips covered hers, muffling the rest of her words and answering her question. He was kissing her. Gently, softly, seductively, but this was a kiss all right. No mistaking that.
He didn’t try to tongue-down right there in the middle of the parking lot, in front of her sister. No, he was just tempting her, exploring infinite possibilities before releasing her.
Just breathe, Leena told herself, inhaling a ragged gulp of air.
Grinning, Cole gently lifted the paper bag back to her mouth.
Leena batted it away and glared at him. If the man was amusing himself at her expense, he’d live to regret it, regardless of how awesome a kisser he was.
“Do you always kiss your employees?” Leena demanded.
Cole’s grin widened. “You’re not officially an employee until you fill out the paperwork tomorrow.”
“You were kissing my sister?” Sue Ellen stared at him in disbelief.
“Just practicing a little mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, ma’am.”
“Well, go practice it on someone else.” Leena lifted her chin to give him her best haughty queen-of-the-universe look. “I don’t need you rescuing me.”
“Yeah, so you said earlier. You’ve come to rescue
me
, right? You know, I think I could get used to that idea.” One final devastatingly sexy grin and then he was gone, sauntering around the corner of the building and out of sight—but not out of Leena’s mind.
Which left her with the sinking feeling she’d just jumped out of the frying pan smack dab into the fire.
Chapter Two
“So what do you think?” Sue Ellen bounced with excitement as she pointed, a la Vanna White, at a wall in the mobile home’s living room.
Leena stared in horror at the row of velvet Elvises hanging above a plastic-covered orange plaid couch.
“It still looks a little tacky, I know,” Sue Ellen added.
Leena sighed with relief. “You think? I mean, come on. Velvet Elvises?” She laughed. “Talk about tacky.”
Sue Ellen glared at her. “I was talking about the couch. It’s too orange. I haven’t had time to get new furniture yet.”
“Wait a second . . . Isn’t that Mom and Dad’s couch?” Leena recognized it now. Clearly she’d managed to wipe it from her memory banks along with the mustard-colored shag carpeting coating the living room floor.
“I haven’t redone things in here, other than add the artwork.” Sue Ellen again pointed to the Elvis gallery. “I can’t believe you thought they were tacky.” She shook her head. “Just goes to show what you know. You might be a famous model, but I’m the one with the interior design talents.”
“Since when?”
“Since I took a course over the Internet. I even have a certificate. See?” She reached over to pull a frame off the wall. “And I’ve almost got my realtor’s license. So not only can I find you a new home, but I can decorate it for you too. You know, a second home here in Rock Creek would be a great investment for you.”
Leena didn’t even have a first home, let alone a second one. She just wasn’t sure how to break that news to her sister yet.
Okay, so Leena had exaggerated her success a bit. That didn’t make her a criminal and it didn’t mean she deserved all the bad breaks coming her way lately.
Yes, it was true that Leena had claimed she was really,
really
successful when she wasn’t. But there had always been a slim slice of truth in each pie of exaggeration she’d served up to her sister. She’d just put a good spin on her situation.
Even now Leena just couldn’t confess her career was in the tank and that her agent had just let her go. Instead Leena had described her situation as a temporary reversal of fortune. That was her story and she needed to stick to it.
“So tell me what you’ve been doing in Chicago?” Sue Ellen eagerly asked. “Hanging out with all the famous people? Have you met Oprah?”
“No, but we’re members of the same health club.” Or had been until Leena couldn’t afford the fees any longer.
“What about guys?”
“What about them?”
“Are you seeing somebody special?”
Leena had thought Johnny Sullivan was special, but he turned out to be anything but. She thought he might have been Mr. Right—until she heard him talking to his buddies at a cocktail party after he’d had a few too many drinks.
He’d claimed afterward he wasn’t really serious about the other model he was bedding and that he hadn’t meant to say Leena had thunder thighs. Leena wasn’t buying either seriously lame excuse.
Believing
in vino veritas
, she’d immediately dumped him. Kicked him to the curb. Successful lawyer or not, the man was a dirtbag who’d hurt her. Cheated on her. Humiliated her.
“I know that face. Come on,” Sue Ellen coaxed her. “You can talk to me. I’m great at giving relationship advice. Just ask my friend Skye. I helped her and the town’s sheriff Nathan Thornton get together. They’re a very happy couple now. So sit down and talk to me.” Sue Ellen plunked down onto the couch and tried patting the seat beside her. But her hand stuck to the plastic covering, making a squishy sort of noise Leena remembered from her childhood summers, when her thighs would stick to the plastic.
She didn’t want to remember those days. She didn’t want to talk about her recent breakup with Johnny. So she did what she’d often done as a kid. She distracted Sue Ellen by moving the spotlight from herself onto her sister. “What about you? Are you seeing someone?”
“Why? What have you heard?” Sue Ellen’s expression was defensive. “I can’t believe someone already told you about the naked fireman.”
“They didn’t, but that sounds like an interesting story.”
“I was seeing this guy for a while. A fireman. He posed for one of those sexy calendars, you know, to raise funds. He was good at that. Raising things. Very well endowed, if you know what I mean. In the end, it turned out he was just a player, so I broke it off.”
Maybe Leena and her sister had more in common than she thought. “Other than the naked calendar deal, that pretty much wraps up what happened in my last relationship too. He was a player.”
Sue Ellen wiggled her eyebrows. “A well-endowed player?”
“Not well enough to put up with his games. Like you, I got tired of being played.”
“We deserve better. Or so Skye keeps telling me.”
“Who is this Skye person?”
“She’s one of my closest friends. She moved here a little over a year ago. You’ll meet her soon. I’ll have to throw a welcome-home party for you.”
Leena could only imagine the kind of party Sue Ellen would come up with. Probably have a dancing Elvis theme or something. Time to change the subject again.
Sue Ellen took care of that before Leena could speak. “What about Mom and Dad? Did you tell them you were coming home for a visit?”
“No.”
“They’d probably be jealous that you didn’t go see them instead of me. Not that they don’t have plenty to keep them busy down at Lighthouse Keys in Florida. You should see the mobile homes down there! They are huge. You’d never know they weren’t regular houses.
And the community center is gorgeous. Mom has volunteered to be the librarian there, you know. Plus she’s in charge of the special activities all year. They’re having a fifties-style record-hop party this month.”
“Yeah, well, Mom has always been a people person. That’s one of the reasons she did so well as a hairstylist.”
“The place where she used to work, Sherlock Combs, closed a few years ago. Like so many businesses in town.”
Leena had noticed that Rock Creek wasn’t exactly a boomtown. “What about Dad? How’s he doing?”
“Stubborn Irishman that he is, he likes stirring things up.”
Leena nodded. He’d been a pro at stirring things up those early years of her childhood, when he’d had a drinking problem. He’d been sober for nearly twenty years now, but Leena still had painful memories from that time permanently embedded on her mind’s hard drive. Memories of yelling and screaming, of dishes being smashed, of the taste of fear in her mouth as she huddled in the corner of her bedroom with her younger sister, Emma.
Sue Ellen had been a teenager during those days and hadn’t been home much, spending a lot of time at friends’ houses. She’d never spoken to Leena about their dad’s drinking. Neither had their mother. Da Nile wasn’t just a river—it was a coping tool for Leena’s older sister and mother. Total denial.
Her family excelled at avoidance. They were total pros. Leena had learned from the best.
She hadn’t seen her parents much since they’d moved down to Florida a few years ago. Since then they’d been busy with their new life. Oh, she’d talked to them on the phone every couple of weeks. Her dad always said the same four lines.
How’s it going? Everything okay? Good. Here’s your mom.
Her mom’s conversation always revolved around all their Florida friends, people Leena didn’t know.
“Hey,” Sue Ellen said. “Remember that time Mom and I came to visit you in Chicago?”
“Which time?” There had been several, each one worse than the one before.
“The last time.”
“Right.” Leena could never forget that last visit, no matter how hard she tried. Their mom had insisted on accompanying Leena on a photo shoot to see what it was like. She’d promised Leena that no one would even know she was there.
Yeah, right. That’s why her mom had ended up arguing with the hairstylist about Leena’s hair. Leena’s face turned red at the mere memory. What a disaster. Leena and her mom had been kicked off the shoot.
Leena hadn’t invited her family back to Chicago after that debacle, and she hadn’t come back to Rock Creek either. She’d always vowed that she wouldn’t return until she was on the cover of a national magazine. She’d come close once, but the cover deal had fallen through.
Instead Leena had stayed away, perfecting the avoidance and denial she’d learned at an early age. Her schedule kept her very busy so she didn’t have to lie when she said she didn’t have time to get together for Christmas or birthdays. She always sent presents. And e-mails. E-mail was Leena’s favorite means of communication with her family. She loved them; she just couldn’t cope with them.
Yet here she was, depending on her older sister for help.
A knock on the door interrupted Leena’s thoughts.