Harvest Moon (Brook Haven Romance Book 1) (2 page)

Drake woke up to the
sound of Hooter barking his fool head off … again. He looked at the lit-up
numbers on the clock radio next to the bed: 3:22. He mumbled a curse under his
breath. Hooter had the worst timing. Drake had been immersed in a dream about a
dark-haired angel with ice-blue eyes. Her name was Sophie, and he hadn’t been
able to get her out of his head since he’d met with her the afternoon before.

This was the third
night this week the dog had woken him in the middle of the night. The other two
times, he was tired but only mildly annoyed. Tonight, he’d been just about to
kiss the angel in his dream when the shrill sound of the dog’s barking pierced
the night. He and Hooter had been together since they were both kids and he
loved the old dog, but after tonight, he wasn’t sure the relationship could
recover.

He waited a few minutes
to see if Hooter would stop barking on his own and when he didn’t, he forced
his tired body up out of the bed and slipped into his boots. Grabbing his hat
and a light jacket off the hook next to the door and a flashlight that sat up
on the shelf in the kitchen, he stepped outside onto the porch. He shone the
light around and caught the glint of yellow off Hooter’s shiny coat, then held
the light steady and saw his canine friend standing at the end of the driveway
facing away from him.

Drake put his fingers
in the sides of his mouth and whistled. Hooter gave him a cursory
over-the-shoulder glance and then went back to his incessant barking. For a few
seconds Drake considered going back inside, popping in a pair of ear plugs that
he used for target shooting, and going back to sleep. However, he could see out
of the corner of his eye that the light in his Uncle Mac’s little house up the
road had come on and he knew there’d be no going back to sleep for him. With a
grumble and a curse, he set off down the long dirt road to where Hooter stood,
expecting to find him with a snake or a possum cornered against the mailbox.

Drake lived on his
family’s old farm. His grandparents had owned it first and then Drake’s parents
after that. He was a late-in-life baby for his parents. Before that, they’d
taken care of his mother’s brother Mac for several years after he’d been in a
bad car accident. He was a paraplegic and had to go through a lot of extensive
therapy before he was able to live on his own. By the time Mac was doing well
enough to spend more than a few hours a day in his own house, his mother and
father were both well into their thirties.

Drake’s mother told him
once that his father had tried to discourage her desire for a baby then, but
she wasn’t having it. She’d just turned forty when she found out she was
expecting. As it turned out, his father was as happy, if not happier, than she
was when he found out about it.

Drake was born on his
mother’s forty-first birthday, and his parents both doted on him. His father
taught him how to hunt and fish and work on cars. He was also the reason Drake
did what he did for a living - his father could build or fix anything, and
although he wasn’t technically a handyman, the neighbors all seemed to call him
when they needed something. His father never said no, and Drake loved following
him around and watching him work.

His mother taught him
more than he could list, but mostly he had her to thank for his easygoing
attitude about life. She was an animal lover and a nature enthusiast, and she
instilled her love of those things into her son. She also had a big garden on
the farm where she grew fresh vegetables. Every Sunday morning, she’d pick
whatever was ripe and in season and then wash and package it all up in plastic
containers so that it was ready to eat. Then she’d load it all into the back of
the old pickup that Drake still drove today and take it into town to sell at
the market. Mostly, what she did was hand it out for free to those in need. She
had a regular spot out in front of the church, and she came to be known in town
simply as
the vegetable lady
.

She didn’t just hand
out the vegetables. She also had a section of her garden where she grew herbs, which
she’d use to make salves and lotions. She would sit for hours and just talk to anyone
who seemed to need it at the time. She handed out advice when she was asked for
it, and she never judged.

Drake still kept the
vegetable garden growing, and he still took the vegetables into town on Sundays
to the market. He also had his mother’s recipes for the herbal salves and
remedies, and he’d taken to making them too because he’d gotten so many
requests. Sometimes his Uncle Mac would go into town with him and sell statues
and carvings he made in his shop.

Sundays were the only
days Drake refused work. To him, going to the market was a way to keep his
mother’s memory alive. To the people in the community, it was a service many of
them had come to depend on.

When he made it to the
end of the road, he tried once again to get Hooter to hush. The dog gave him
another quick glance but kept one eye on whatever was in the grass underneath
the lilac bushes at the edge of the road. Drake saw the bush wiggle slightly
and he heard the rustle of the deep grass. Whatever Hooter had found was still
alive.

Drake wished he’d
grabbed his rifle just in case. The last thing he’d shot was a timber
rattlesnake that had somehow found its way onto Uncle Mac’s back porch. Shooting
things, however, was contrary to his very nature, and he’d only done it when
the situation had demanded it.

With a deep breath and
a small prayer that whatever it was wouldn’t snap off his arm or inject him
with venom, he reached down and moved the bush. Two sets of eyes glowed up at
him. Reluctantly, he lowered his flashlight so it illuminated the frightened
faces of two baby red foxes. One of them had what looked like a dog bite on his
hind quarters, and the other looked more than a little bit reluctant to leave
the injured one to fend for himself.

“Well, look what you
found, Hooter. Hi guys. Where’s your mama?” As if Hooter understood, he once
again began to bark and wag his tail the way he did when he wanted Drake to
follow him. Drake let the bush fall back down gently to cover the babies and
followed the yellow Lab three or four feet up to the road. It was an old
country road that led to town in one direction and dead-ended where the forest got
too dense on one side and the altitude too high on the other. Drake’s place sat
about two miles from the forest, so other than mild traffic to and from his place,
the road was hardly ever used.

Hooter pointed him
toward what had agitated him. Drake shone his light onto the black asphalt and
found the fox mama. She’d been hit by a car, and from the looks of it, it hadn’t
been that long ago. Drake briefly wondered what someone was doing on this road
in the middle of the night.

He spent some time
walking back and forth to the barn to get what he needed to move the poor dead animal
out of the road. He put her in a plastic container to bury her later, and then
he went back to see about the kits. They were still there under the bush; they’d
curled up together and gone to sleep.

Drake opened the cat
carrier he’d brought back with him and with one big hand, he scooped them into
it. They woke up as he did and before he closed the small door and latched it,
they were both howling at him in an extremely annoying, high-pitched way. He
tried making soothing sounds as he carried them back to the house, but they
were agitated and having none of it. As he sat the small carrier down on the
porch, he heard his phone ringing from inside the house. It was almost five
a.m., way too early for anyone to be calling him except Uncle Mac.

“I’m sorry. Did Hooter
wake you?” Drake answered.

“Nah, you know I don’t
sleep much. I just wanted to make sure everything’s all right up there.”

“Hooter found a couple
of baby foxes … their mother didn’t make it across the road.”

“Aw … ya know I almost
called you about all that racket goin’ on out there.”

“Um … you did just call
me, Uncle Mac.”

He laughed. “My legs
don’t work, but my mind still does. I meant before, when that car or whatever
it was kept racing up and down the hill. You didn’t hear it?”

“No, I guess I was
sleeping pretty soundly.”

“You must have been.
Sounded like a V-8 to me, and they had to be goin’ over a hundred miles an
hour. They raced back and forth three or four times, and each time they’d get
ready to turn around, they’d smoke the brakes. I think they may have even been
hitting the E-brake.”

“Did you see the car?”

“Nah, from where the
house sits, I can hear the road but I can’t see it.”

“Okay. It was probably
teenagers, but I’ll keep an eye out.”

“You need any help with
those kits?”

Drake looked down at
the agitated little creatures, and in spite of himself, he thought about how
cute they were. “I’m not sure what to do with them to be honest.”

“Well, the first thing
they probably need is some hydration. Maybe you should call Sam. Are you
working today?”

“Yeah, I’m supposed to
be over at the Harvest Moon Inn at seven.”

“Well, if you can’t get
ahold of Sam, bring them to me and I’ll sit for ya.”

Drake laughed. “Sit for
me, huh? So you think I’ve already adopted them?”

“I know you. You’re too
much like your mama to turn those babies out on their own. The coyotes would
eat them in a heartbeat. This farm used to be a menagerie of the animals my
sister collected.”

Drake laughed. He knew
that was true. As a kid, he could bring home any stray he found in the woods
and his mother would never turn it away. He looked back down at the bloody back
leg of the injured kit. “Yeah, it looks like one of them may have gotten a bite
before Mama Fox hid them under my bush. She was headed back across the road. It
makes me wonder if there’s more on the other side.”

“You’re gonna go look,
aren’t you?”

“I might just take a
peek for curiosity’s sake.”

Mac was laughing when
he hung up. Drake checked the time again. It was closer to five-thirty. He put
on a pair of thick gloves and reached into the door of the holder for the
injured kit. It began howling and screeching as he pulled it out, and the
little booger was even trying to bite him. He took him into the bathroom and
washed and cleaned up his leg. He bandaged it with medical tape, the whole
while struggling just to hang on to the wiggly little creature. After he
finished cleaning him up, he called his friend Sam.

“Drake, what’s up?” Sam
sounded groggy, like he had been awakened from a deep sleep.

“Hey, Sam, I’m sorry to
call so early—”

“You forgot that I’m in
California, didn’t you?”

“Oh, damn it! Yeah, I
did. I’m so sorry. It’s a lot earlier than I thought. I can—”

“It’s okay, Drake, I’m
up now. What’s going on?”

“Someone ran over Mama
Fox and I found two of her kits.”

“Oh man. Do you have a
syringe and a heating pad?”

“Um, I’ll have to look
for them both, but I think so.”

Sam was the town
veterinarian and had grown up in Brook Haven with Drake. He had told Drake he
was going to California for a convention that week, but Drake had been so busy
with work it had slipped his mind.

“Okay, so here is what
you need to do.”

Drake spent another
precious half hour on the phone with his friend. By the time he did what he
needed to do and dropped the kits off with his uncle, he was running a half
hour late already. In spite of that, he just had to stop and look around a
little bit across the road. He didn’t see any signs of more kits. Unfortunately,
that probably meant something else had already gotten them. As he drove through
town on his way to the bed and breakfast, he was sorely tempted to stop at
Huckleberry’s and grab a cup of coffee but decided he didn’t have time. He
looked at his watch and told himself he was already late enough.

As soon as he drove up
close to the house, he saw the beautiful owner kneeling on the front porch with
a hammer that was so big he was surprised she could hold it up. He tried to
shake off the remnants of the dream he’d had about her the night before as he
stepped out of the truck. He realized it was to no avail, however, when she
glanced over her shoulder at him and he got another look at those cool blue
eyes.

“Good morning.”

“Morning,” she said. Her
tone was a little short. He wondered if she was angry with him for being late.
Maybe he should have called.

“I’m sorry I’m late—”

“It’s fine.”

There was no mistaking
that she really was annoyed. “Really, I’m sorry. I had some unexpected company
this morning—”

“It’s really fine. It’s
just that my mother forgot about the rotten boards we talked about. She fell
through the porch this morning—”

“Oh my God! Is she all right?”
Now he really felt bad.

“Yeah, she twisted her
ankle a bit, I think.” She began hammering a long nail into the piece of
plywood she’d covered the hole with. As she hammered, the wood around the nail
split further and he heard her mumble a curse.