by L. P. Maxa
“I can’t blame you for that, except I hoped you might have found a reason to stay, and not only because of Reggie.” Cabe turned away and scooped the puppy into his arms. “Not tonight, pal. Those siblings will play rough. You’ll lose the dressing. It’s too risky. You might not survive if that wound gets infected.”
Although Reggie’s little dog’s face appeared unhappy as he stared back at his family, her pup seemed content to stay in Cabe’s hold. And where Reggie might temporarily ache for their company, Phee feared the emptiness that replaced the heated connection she’d felt in the doctor’s embrace was permanent. Once more, he had returned to all business.
She needed to sort her emotions out about Cabe, Reggie, and the baby. She had no clue how to communicate her inner freak-out. It was remarkable that the little mutt had become her best friend, enough of a puzzle without trying to figure out if the sexy man a foot away was hinting at something more than a purely physical attraction for his patient’s owner. The puppy’s tail thumped against Cabe’s shirtsleeve, and with a yip, Reggie jumped from the vet’s arms and into Phee’s, slobbering and drooling to the tenth power.
She snuck a peek at Cabe over Reggie’s head and balked at the emotion that crossed his face. Her rejection, which she hadn’t intended, had hurt the handsome doctor. He seemed as morose as Reggie had a moment before.
Phee tried, but her muddled brain couldn’t focus on any immediate fix because she felt funny. The sudden queasiness shouldn’t have surprised her since puking had made it to her daily to-do list, but it did. Like the situation, she could not control her body’s reaction to pregnancy and launched her dinner and the small slice of carrot cake she’d had for dessert hours before all over her puppy, her gorgeous veterinarian, and the kennel floor.
###
He watched Phee sleep. Even if it killed him, he’d let her rest. And then? Well then, he’d let her go. She could be nothing less than exhausted, even discounting the pregnancy, given a good two hours in the woods, in the rain, and in a panic. Some rescuer. He dumped that stupid “we” business on her as if Fate had brought them together. As if, maybe, Reggie’s beautiful owner felt the same way.
Cassie would chastise him mercilessly for it, but Cassie was dead, and if the converse was true—if Cassie had survived the wreck of that death trap of a small plane she’d loved—then there would be no Phee.
Cabe could hear the teasing tone in his wife’s voice, “Way to go, McCain. Brilliant, except you crashed on approach”
In the five years since his wife’s death there had not been one single encounter, not one woman, who had awoken Cabe’s senses.
Until yesterday.
It happened the moment Fiona Kavanagh unleashed a malediction in his parking lot. Something slipped from his self-preservation, something Cabe had no control over. He hadn’t meant to suggest anything between them, until the kiss. That kiss fired every sense of longing and need he’d buried with his dead wife. And it was more than the sizzling heat that passed between them with physical contact. Cabel McCain’s heart re-inflated at the look of amazement, the light that sparked the jade green of Phee’s eyes, and all because of a single puppy. A creature that might have perished, alone, frightened, in pain, but for a fired, pregnant schoolteacher, who scooped Reggie up and took him home.
When he’d answered the phone earlier, he’d thought maybe a dam broke somewhere, leaving carnage in the wall of water’s wake. He’d been right, a dam had broken somewhere inside of him. And when it finally burst, the ever-present feelings of loss were suddenly diffused by the chance of love. And that had been when the “we” he’d been thinking emerged aloud.
Except he might as well have been Sasquatch for how well he’d handled that.
Now he had to figure out if he could love the snoring pregnant woman on his sofa, and if he could, how did he convince her she could love him back.
###
“What was I thinking?” His words echoed in the utilitarian room, and Phee was confident he’d no intention of delivering that thought aloud.
“Huh?”
Cabe started awake. He must have been dozing, his thoughts transcending to a spoken utterance as he came out of it.
“Do you mean now, or when I kicked you to the curb in the kennel?”
“You did, a little.”
Phee studied his worried face, afraid to say anything that could sever what she viewed as fragile threads of feelings that may not be strong enough to bring them together.
“I’m not sure what I was doing. But you don’t have to worry. I’m all better, and over it. Let it go.”
She stretched her arms over her head, pushed the blanket away, and hugged her knees to her chest. The whole thing was pretty damned romantic if she let it settle in. A boatload of puppies, rescuing Reggie, a drop-dead hunk of gorgeous veterinarian who she knew had a kind heart. Still, her brain was more pragmatic than her heart, and she knew he would not want her once the truth came out. At least the baby gave her an excuse for the puking then passing out. “Thanks for the toothbrush. I don’t know what happened. Excitement I guess.”
“Yeah? Well, you still need to be checked out. I shouldn’t have let you sleep, you know, a concussion can cause nausea and vomiting. Fiona, swear you did not hit your head when you slammed into that tree.”
Shifting on the sofa, she pulled her thermal t-shirt up past her belly button. “Slammed into it with my rib cage, not my head, see?” Was she deliberately baiting him? Admitting it wouldn’t bring them closer. She still didn’t know how to reignite the fire that consumed her with that kiss. Kiss? Monkey-sex-make-out session is what that was. Reason deserted her, and she longed for him to kiss the purple-yellowish bruise that circled from her stomach, above her hip, and part of her spine below her rib cage. Sadly, he’d turned his attention elsewhere.
“Cabe?”
“Yeah?”
“Could you look at me, please?”
“What’s Reggie up to?”
He didn’t look. Instead, his focus stayed on her dog. Reggie had popped up from a sound sleep and was puppy loping across the big room to Cabe’s lab coat, which hung over the desk chair. “Damned if I know, Doc, but if you care about that coat, you might want to grab the little monster.”
Cabe laughed. A belly laugh, the kind that would have made Phee feel as if she just finished fifty tummy crunches. Maybe it was the super baby hormones, but Phee fell in love with Cabe—for sure in love—at the sound of that laugh. Any further doubt disappeared when he jumped off the sofa, revealing his sleep attire—boxer shorts with different dog breeds prancing about, and a pair of beat-to-hell Uggs, leaving nothing much to imagine. That wasn’t entirely true, but the abs stacked neatly above a few curly hairs below his belly button sidetracked her guessing at the only parts of him that remained hidden from view.
He followed her gaze. “Sorry, but everything I had was soaked. It’s all hanging over the shower curtain rod for the time being.” He fumbled as he rushed to the desk chair and his lab coat.
Reggie had something in his mouth. They both watched as he deliberately pulled the item from the coat pocket with those little razor teeth that had poked holes in several parts of the skin on her arms over the past week.
Oddly, Cabe seemed dead set against the puppy having whatever it was. But Reggie gave him the slip, ducked under the coffee table, and tried to scramble up the side of the couch.
“Shit.”
She saw Cabe bite his tongue, probably to cut off another expletive.
The bruise on his shin where it slammed into the table was visible in seconds.
“Oh, Reggie, what have you done? Cabe, are you okay? Do you have ice? You should put ice on that now.”
An expression she read as too late flashed across his face. He seemed lost, yet she had no idea why. Still, she accepted the folded note as Reggie, his paws propped on the sofa’s edge, unceremoniously dropped it in her lap. Nondescript, it looked familiar. “What’s this, you little monster?” The pu
ppy licked her hands and fingers, and she grabbed him up and set him on the rumpled blanket, his tail wagging.
It was familiar. Phee knew it at the first fold. “My shit-canned letter. Ah. Why do you have it, Cabe?”
“Because yesterday I ran out to help you in the parking lot, but you’d gone, and I thought it was trash, so I picked it up. The letterhead jumped out at me, and…” He stammered, which seemed impossible given all she’d ever experienced around him was complete self-assurance. “I started reading…” She saw the anguish of the situation in his eyes, but it didn’t stop embarrassed anger from bubbling up. “I stopped, Phee. I folded it up, and it’s been making me nuts ever since.”
“Making you nuts, how? That you know, or that I’m unfit to teach pious snot-nosed kids how to speak and write proper sentences? Not to mention that I have no job, no money, and all the rest of that crap along with being pregnant with a child whose father I can’t tell you anything about, let alone his last name, or where he lives.”
“I’m not judging you, Phee.”
“Sure.”
“I’m not.”
It wasn’t her plan to make him beg, but she couldn’t think of anything to stop him from falling on his sword, so she pulled Reggie closer, biting the inside of her lip as if it would help stave off the inevitable water tap she’d become in the past two months.
“Besides, I thought maybe I could help. Then I was ashamed, and I vacillated back and forth between feeling like an asshole or your knight in shining armor.”
She wanted to blurt out how much she liked knights, especially GQ-looking veterinarian ones with their shirts off, in animal-shapes underwear. But no words came.
“I had a plan. To call you up, ask you out for a bite to eat, be your friend. But then last night happened. And now here it is, almost dawn, and I’ve screwed the pooch.” He dropped his head between his hands, elbows resting on his knees. “Sorry, Reggie. Nothing personal.”
Phee had to squeeze the soft pad of skin between one thumb and index finger, and even then tears still welled. But she wasn’t trying to stop crying, nope. She had to cause herself pain because if she didn’t, the only remaining option was to burst out laughing.
“I don’t deserve you anyway.”
“Whoa, whoa, hold on, buster.”
One of his eyebrows crooked up, and even if his “I’m a fuck-up” expression didn’t get her, the purple and blue knot on his shin would have. That and her funny bone, heretofore MIA, floated up to the surface with the realization that the two of them were ridiculous. Why shouldn’t they fall in love? She bit her lip harder.
“Did you seriously call me buster?”
“Well, yes. I seriously did.” She could blame it on being knocked up, but her feelings had nothing to do with being pregnant. For whatever reason, she felt stupidly happy and, with that acceptance, decided that horrible letter had no power to keep them apart. She burst out laughing.
Cabe’s face went through several phases of expression, then he flopped down on the far end of the couch, howling. Reggie stood between them appearing to act the part of a fight referee.
“So you know everything there is about me, and you believe we could be something to each other?”
His expression flipped to concern, then back to a broad smile. “Sweetheart, I think you and I need to be a ‘we.’”
“Well, besides the obvious, what do I know about you? Nothing. Zip. Nada. Zero. Except that you love animals, strike that, love dogs. I haven’t a clue how you feel about cats, chimpanzees, snakes, and babies.” She tried to stop that last bit about the babies, but it came out anyway.
“I’m a widower.”
She blanched, regained her composure, and remembered her manners. “I’m so sorry.”
“Everyone is.”
Silence replaced the laughter.
“How long?”
At first, she thought Cabe wouldn’t face her when he answered, but turning serious, he rested his left arm along the back of the couch, set his jaw, and inhaled. “Almost five years. Plane crash. Her plane. Cassie was also a vet, but she specialized in eye surgeries. As much as we loved each other, we didn’t always agree on managing our practice, and one day she decided rather than making people come to her, she’d take her skills wherever needed.”
Still basking because he’d again called her sweetheart, she almost stumbled over the announcement of Cabe’s having loved a woman with whom he had so much in common.
“So she learned to fly, and took cases anytime or place?”
“Hell or high water.”
“And that’s what she was doing when she crashed?”
He didn’t need to answer, and they lapsed into mutual silence. Maybe they would have sat like that for hours, but Reggie started to play, at first yanking on Phee’s blanket with those pointy teeth, and then for whatever puppy reason he needed, on Cabe’s boxer shorts.
“Hey, puppy, I was about to do that.”
The reaction was quick and definitive, and before she could process the motion, she found herself captured across Cabe’s chest. “Were you, Phee? If you’re teasing, tell me right now.” His voice vibrated from deep in his body, the fingers on his right hand touched her skin exactly as she’d imagined, and his other hand curled strands of her hair.
“Were you, Fiona?”
Cabe had the damned sexiest growl. It made her knees buckle, and with all leverage lost, she merely collapsed onto his now prone body. Breathless, she pressed an ear to his heart, listening to the thump-thump, knowing it pounded for her. “I’m pregnant.”
“We’ve established that.”
“Why would you want to add another burden to your life? What about the puppies, and Maggie, and your prac−” Cabe’s mouth found hers, and he was relentless. Like that trite phrase, he was kissing her stupid. But she pushed back, pulled away. “I can’t do this for the sex.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
“You’re angry.”
“Uh, no, Phee. I’m not angry. But I am desperately in need of you, a girl who had sex with at least one stranger and is being offered the opportunity to have better and lustful sex with a man she is at least acquainted with who now seems to be tendering a rejection.”
“Idiot.” She punched him in the gut, but Cabe was quick and, grabbing her hand, pulled her even tighter against him.
“Phee, I want you to listen carefully. There’s been no one in my life, or bed, for five years, and this man has every intention of tossing that pesky love thing into the equation.”
Phee couldn’t ignore his hardness against her belly. But it wasn’t the promise of crazy sex that had her engine roaring. Cabe’s words, the intensity reflected in those deep blue eyes, had her so close to capitulating. Softly, he brushed the skin of her forearm with two fingers, and the promise she read in his unwavering gaze, despite everything that had happened in the last few horrible months of her life, cinched it.
“Babies and puppies belong together, Phee.”
She raised an eyebrow, knowing she had no resistance left. “Right. That’s quite a line, doctor.”
“Well, it’s true. Ask anyone. You want me to wait while you make some calls? Try the Mayo Clinic.”
She punched him again, barely. His responding grin was the last straw. Phee let Cabe’s mouth communicate for a few minutes. First a deep kiss, her responding to his tongue, and his teeth nibbling her lower lip. Then one hand slipping under her shirt, cupping a breast, his thumb, gently rubbing at one nipple, already tender without the heat-infused sensation of his touch, heightened as he continued circling the swollen nub to the point of unbearable. She heard the moan that escaped her lungs on a rush of air, praying nothing stopped him from taking her, not only at this moment, but forever.
“I’ll wait until I prove it to you if that’s what you need. So either speak now or forever hold your peace.”
Breathless, she pulled from his grip, knelt over him long enough to rip the shirt that seemed an unnecessary barri
er between them over her head, then told him, “For a man claiming desparate needs, I gotta say, Doc, you talk too much.”
The intractable grin returned. Lazy eyelids couldn’t mask the desire firing on all four pistons as he pulled her flush to his skin. Further bantering was out of the question because Caleb covered her mouth with his, and Phee had no snappy comeback for the longing in his kiss.
Surrendering seemed the only viable option, so she did.
###
Oscar didn’t know everything about humans yet, but he had instincts, and entering his ninth week on earth, he understood that love was better than chicken gravy on kibble. He loved his mom, he loved Phee, and without any fancy thinking, he knew it was important that Phee love Dr. McCain, and vice versa.
Silly how Phee figured she rescued him that day by the river. The truth was, they saved each other. He studied his owner and the doctor a moment longer.
Since they were now busy saving each other, Oscar figured he’d best cover his ears with both paws and try to catch some rabbits in his sleep.
COCOA
Emily Mims
To Cocoa
And with many thanks to Dr. Dan Kirby, who has taken such good care of her and the rest of the Mims Pack.
Author’s Note
While Brittany and Lonnie are figments of my imagination, Cocoa and her story are real.
We rescued Cocoa out from under my mother’s car in 2013. She had no collar, had not been spayed or microchipped, had concrete callouses on her legs and a break in her tail. She was frightened of humans and terrified when anyone tried to take her out of a carrier, leaving us to draw our own conclusions regarding her former home.
To our immense relief, our attempts to find her owners did not meet with success, and she became ours.
It took gentleness and a bit of patience, but it wasn’t long before she was joining us on the sofa, begging for treats off the kitchen table, curling up beside us on the bed, and pestering the life out of the elderly poodles in residence, who clearly thought I was crazy for including this upstart teenager in their assisted-living program.