McCormick's Creek Sweet Romance

by Jen Peters

  “There’s nothing in Frederick?” Mrs. Carlyle asked.

  “No, they use the Eugene shelters as well,” Robin said.

  Mrs. Carlyle smoothed the front of her nubbly jacket. “That’s terrible. That leaves families no alternative if they can’t find a home for their pet on their own. My nephew turned out to be allergic to their cat, so I understand that it happens sometimes.”

  Ms. Williams looked sideways at her. “In my experience, families will do what they need to to take care of their pets. But so many unwanted pets just get dumped, and they need homes. They can’t just survive on their own without getting hurt or causing problems.”

  Ms. Harrington-Jones huffed. “So what is your proposal, Ms. Cooper? I assume that’s why we’re here, not to debate the need for shelters in general.”

  This was it. Ree had to shine here. But the way the strident businesswoman was looking at her…

  “I—I, uh, I’m starting from scratch so I’m looking for a building to use—”

  “Lease or buy?” Ms. Harrington-Jones asked.

  “Uh, it depends on what we find. We have one lease possibility we’re talking to the town about, but we don’t know if that will go anywhere yet. A mortgage would give us permanence, but could be a heavy weight to carry, and… here, let me show you.” Robin pulled the sample building layout from her portfolio. As she handed it across the table, her elbow bumped her salad fork.

  Lettuce went flying, one piece onto the floor and one into Ms. William’s water glass.

  “I’m so sorry,” Robin said. “I’ll get it.”

  “Let me,” Ms. Williams said, tilting her head. She fished out the soggy lettuce leaf with beautifully manicured fingers and placed it carefully on the side of her plate. “You were saying?”

  Robin tried to gather her thoughts. “Oh, here.” She passed the paper again, taking care where her hands and elbows were. “This is a sample of what we need—animal pens, a meet-and-greet room, an exam room.”

  “You don’t have an office here,” Ms. Harrington-Jones said. “And are you staffing solely with volunteers? What are your monthly expenses?”

  Robin twisted the pen in her fingers, any thought of eating completely gone. “I’ll have an office at my home,” she said, trying to ignore the women’s frowns, “and I’ve got estimated expenses here.”

  She opened the portfolio with shaking hands, and again her fork went clattering to the floor. Without any lettuce this time, but still…

  She picked it up, then handed the financial sheet over. Every nerve in her body was jangling, and slow breaths didn’t seem to calm them. She wished Cliff were there to steady her. She didn’t even need his arm around her, just his presence somewhere nearby.

  She closed her eyes briefly while the three women discussed the expense amounts.

  “Rent seems low, but it’s a small town.”

  “That much for food?”

  “Don’t skimp just because they’re animals.” That from Mrs. Carlyle.

  Robin gathered her thoughts, then looked at them with her best presentation eye contact. “That’s only an estimate, because we don’t know what the building will cost each month. But you can see the amount we need to raise just to get started.”

  “Where’s the total?”

  Robin leaned forward to point, her hand trembling slightly, and disaster struck again. Her water glass tumbled, splashing over the ladies’ food and into Mrs. Carlyle’s tweedy lap.

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Robin gasped in horror. She tried sopping things with her napkin, looked up at their shocked faces, then dabbed some more.

  Her chest constricted. Her eyes filled and she blinked furiously. Sobs were coming, she could feel them as surely as she knew she had blown everything. She dabbed the napkin some more, choked on her breath, and finally stammered, “I’m sorry, I can’t do this anymore.” She grabbed her purse and stumbled out of the restaurant, leaving the maitre d’ gaping after her.

  She somehow made it through the rain and into her car before she collapsed in tears. Never again, she swore. Any normal person would have known what to do and say. Any normal person wouldn’t have been a nervous klutz anyway. Now her best hope was gone. If there were no donations from the ladies, there would be no grant from Mitchell Blake, which meant no animal shelter, just a lot of broken dreams.

  Her breath was coming faster and faster, and she realized she was on the verge of hyperventilating. Why wasn’t a paper bag included in a list of emergency supplies for a car? She tried to take deep breaths but they just got stuck halfway down her throat. Calm, she needed something to calm her. The rain, pounding on the windshield like a snare drum solo, wasn’t helping.

  Cliff. She scrabbled in her purse for her cell phone and punched his name. The phone rang on and on, mocking her until his voice mail picked up.

  She hit End. Somehow, sobbing a message he wouldn’t hear until later was pathetic, even if she knew she’d have been sobbing to him if he’d answered.

  She couldn’t drive home through her tears and she couldn’t stay in the restaurant parking lot for these oh-so-put-together women to walk out and find her. She started the car, turned the wipers on, and blinked through her tears enough to drive to the next parking lot over.

  And there she sat while the rain poured and time passed interminably. No word from Cliff, although surely he had seen her missed call by then. No answer from the text she managed to send before she finally headed back up the highway an hour later.

  So much for support when she needed it.

  Chapter 21

  Dark clouds rolled across the valley and up the mountains, cooling the air and giving Cliff some relief as he tamped the dirt around newly planted fence posts. He’d been up early, trying to get some work done before Robin was due back. He hoped the lunch went well, that the wealthy women would see the benefits of Robin’s proposal. And most especially, that Robin would do well with her presentation.

  He looked back up at the clouds, their color and shape, their movement. “Looks like we’re getting some rain,” he told Bandit. His grandmother’s dog was following him around today for some reason.

  If he could spend his days like this, he’d be content for the rest of his life. His own three Rs: Ranching, Riding, and Robin.

  The wind picked up, whisking his hat off his head and across the field. He chased after it, Bandit running and barking beside him. When he finally caught it, he slapped the dirt off and retrieved his tools. Time to go.

  He dashed to the house and climbed in the shower with just enough time to meet Robin as she came back into town. Soap, shampoo, and just a splash of aftershave. Got to keep his lady happy, after all.

  He poked his head into Uncle Phil’s office to tell him he was off, but found the older man frowning at the computer.

  “Anything I can help with?” Cliff asked, walking over to the him. Some sort of financial spreadsheet was on the screen, and bills were loosely stacked on the desk.

  “Mm mm,” Phil murmured, making notes on a scrap paper filled with numbers.

  Cliff paused, wondering if he had the right to ask, then went ahead anyway. “Are we having money problems?”

  “Huh?” Phil looked up, finally noticing Cliff. “Oh no, nothing I can’t fix. You off to see Robin?”

  “Yup. Got the posts set before the rain got going.”

  “Good work. Have fun now.” He turned back to his calculations.

  Cliff walked through the house, a niggling worry settling into a corner of his mind. But before he reached the front porch, Jory ran up. “Cliff, I need you. Phil! Come on!” And then he was dashing back to the barn just as quickly.

  “Uncle Phil!” Cliff shouted in case the older man hadn’t heard, then darted through the rain himself. His heart pounded as he watched a piece of the tin roof fly off the barn and tumble toward the horse paddock.

  The gusts lessened as he rounded the barn, but the damage was done. Three sheets of sharp-edged tin lay in the grass, and
Zeus was limping toward him, blood running down his hind leg.

  Cliff ducked between the rails. “Come on, boy, let me look at it.” The horse stopped and Cliff ran his hand along his body, slowly approaching the gash. It ran along his rump and around toward the back, just above his hock—long and deep and already bleeding freely.

  Jory appeared with sheet cotton and rolls of Vet Wrap. He tossed the Vet Wrap to the side and helped Cliff press the cotton against the wound. The chill in Cliff settled in to stay and he was desperate to push the edges closer together, to keep enough pressure on to slow the bleeding. It wasn’t anywhere near an artery, but he didn’t know how far it had cut into the hamstring muscles. He heard his uncle calling the vet.

  “Let’s get him into the barn, son. Dr. Jan will be here right away.”

  Water ran down Cliff’s neck as he walked—they were all soaked. The gusts had dropped to a breeze, but it didn’t help his mental state. The cut on Zeus’s rump was deep and would undoubtedly need stitches, maybe several layers of them, but it would be easy for a wound like that to become badly infected. There was just no way to wrap a horse’s haunch and keep it clean.

  And if the gash was deep enough for Zeus to be hamstrung? Cliff shied away from the thought. Zeus was his best friend, especially since his dad died. His link to home, to his past. He didn’t know if he could bear putting him down.

  He clipped Zeus into the cross ties, and the other two men kept pressure on the wound. Cliff stroked Zeus’s face and murmured soothing sounds while he waited impatiently for Dr. Jan.

  The vet finally arrived, although Cliff had to admit that fifteen minutes from phone call to arrival was faster than anyone could have expected.

  She gave a visual once-over, her eyes lingering on the horse’s hind legs from the ground up, then approached. “Let’s see what we’ve got,” she said, pulling the cotton away. She frowned. “You got yourself into a mess, didn’t you, Zeus?”

  It looked to Cliff like the bleeding had slowed, at least until Dr. Jan poured a saline solution over it and everything turned red again. He rested his forehead against the gelding’s white blaze and scratched under his jaw, willing the vet to give a good prognosis.

  An hour later, Zeus had been tranquilized, stitched and loaded with penicillin and a tetanus booster. Three cuts on his lower legs had been bandaged, one needing stitches as well.

  Cliff led the drowsy horse into a stall deep in fresh straw. He filled the water bucket and put half a flake of hay down, but couldn’t think of anything else to do for his friend.

  Dr. Jan left instructions for stall rest and wound care, and said she’d send the bill.

  “The tin’s all out of the pasture now, Phil,” Jory said, entering the barn as the vet left. He shook the water off his hat before he settled it back on his head. “The other horses are still a bit spooked, but fine.”

  Phil nodded and leaned against the barn wall. “What a day.”

  Jory nodded. “We’ve got to get up top and make sure the rest of the roof is fastened down well.”

  Cliff looked between the two. “But…I don’t understand how it could just blow off.”

  Phil and Jory spoke at the same time.

  “You’d be surprised at what high winds can do,” Uncle Phil said. “Thunderstorms, tornadoes, whatever.”

  “It’s needed replacing for a while,” Jory said. “We just hadn’t put it high enough on the priority list.”

  Cliff’s gut tightened. Zeus had been injured because of maintenance issues? Wind or not, Uncle Phil should have been taking better care of things.

  He started to say something, then caught a glimpse of his uncle’s face, pasty white and looking shamed. Any caustic comment he might have made would be like kicking a man while he was down, but he couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice. “Come on, Jory, let’s go fix things.”

  Chapter 22

  The rain had eased off to a drizzle by morning, but the gray skies just added to Robin’s sullen mood. She had never embarrassed herself as badly as yesterday. Large presentations might make her freeze, but evidently she wasn’t good one-on-one, either. The donor ladies would never want to see to her again. And would Mitch even recommend her to anyone else?

  And then there was Cliff. She understood that ranching was 24/7, but he could have called her. Even after the fact, even at midnight.

  Instead, she wrapped herself in a sweater and scarf, curled up on the couch with a cup of hot chocolate and Augie, and stared out at a rainy, gray Oregon day. The water dripped off the roof where the gutter must be clogged with leaves, making a puddle on the ground. Most of the outdoor dogs sprawled on the covered part of the deck, but Chance was barking at a squirrel in the tree.

  The way things were going, she might be collecting dogs at home forever. But she couldn’t not rescue a pup in need.

  The doorbell interrupted her reverie. She scootched Augie off her lap and padded to the door in slippered feet.

  Cliff stood on the other side, hat clasped to his chest with one hand, a pint of ice cream in the other. “I’m so sorry, Robin,” he said. “I want to hear all about it, and Ree said Ben & Jerry’s was the way to your heart.” He thrust the carton out to her.

  She stepped back so he could enter, but didn’t take the ice cream. “I thought you’d at least call.”

  Cliff sighed. “I know. But by the time things had settled down, it was way too late to call. So here I am.”

  She wrapped the end of her scarf in her hand. She wasn’t letting him off that easy. “So what happened?”

  He glanced at the ice cream in his hand, then back at her. “Bowls? Spoons? And a place to sit?”

  Robin sighed heavily, pointed to the couch, and tromped off to the kitchen. When she returned, Augie had settled comfortably in Cliff’s lap. “Traitor,” she said, putting everything on the coffee table.

  Cliff wiped his hands on his jeans. “Zeus got hurt.”

  “What? How bad?” All her belligerence vanished at the thought of that beautiful horse being injured.

  “That storm we had? It blew some of the corrugated roofing into the pasture and Zeus got cut pretty badly.” He told her about the panic he’d felt, about the vet stitching him up, about the difficulty of keeping it clean and infection away.

  Somewhere in his recitation, Robin had started dishing up the ice cream. Cliff had chosen well—nothing soothed the soul like rich chocolate.

  “So he’s going to be okay?”

  “He’s comfortable for now, and Dr. Jan will be back to check him tomorrow. She doesn’t think it’s deep enough to lame him for life.” Cliff’s face was pale and tense as he spoke. She didn’t want to think about him losing his last link with his past.

  “Anyway,” Cliff continued, “once we got him settled, we still had to fix the roof. And with the rain and all, we didn’t finish until midnight.”

  “I was still up,” Robin said. “Couldn’t sleep with everything that had happened.”

  Cliff’s hand stopped reaching for the ice cream. “What?”

  “I blew it. Of course.” She replayed the disastrous luncheon for him. “It’s the sort of thing you can’t recover from, and now I have no donors. And I doubt Mitch will recommend me to anyone else once he hears about this.”

  “Aw, honey, something will work out.” He pulled her close and she soaked in his warmth and solidity. They sat for a while, Augie spread across both their laps, and then Cliff sat up.

  He dished up the much-softened ice cream and said, “You’ve still got the town council. They’ll support you with the building and we’ll just have to raise the rest of the funds some other way.”

  Robin froze. “I won’t be able to do it, Cliff. I’ll freeze. I know it.” After the dreadful lunch with the donor ladies, and with all the bad memories of muddled presentations, she just couldn’t.

  “Look,” he said, setting the ice cream back down and taking her hand. “The council members aren’t strangers. You see them around town all the ti
me.”

  “I can’t. I can’t,” she said, twisting her scarf around her neck. “You don’t understand.”

  “I do understand. You’re scared. You’ve had bad experiences. But you can do this—I know you can. And I’ll be right there to help.”

  But Ree was caught up in visions of stumbling on the way to the podium, of not having her Power Point files, of her voice coming out in frog croaks. All alone, with five important people hanging on her every word, waiting for her to make mistakes so they could say no.

  “Look,” Cliff said, pulling her hand away before she could strangle herself with the scarf. “I’ve seen you with people, and you’re good with them individually. You just need to speak to each council member individually, as if you were sitting down having coffee.”

  “Yeah, like that went so well in Salem.”

  “Forget that! Look, this isn’t a grocery store or something where animals aren’t allowed. And you and Augie bring light into every room at the nursing home. So why don’t you bring him to the meeting? You can introduce him as part of your presentation. And then you can just focus on him when you get nervous.”

  Robin turned to him, stared into those brilliant green eyes, and felt herself relax. “That’s an amazing idea. Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “Because you’re too caught up in the bad things that have happened to look at the good that can take its place.” He kissed her on the cheek and pulled her close. She nestled her head in the soft place under his chin.

  Her phone rang, interrupting their quiet time. Reluctantly, she wrestled it out of her back pocket. “Hello?”

  “Robin? This is Tanesha Williams—we had lunch yesterday. How are you?”

  Robin stiffened as she stepped away from Cliff. “Ms. Williams. I’m—I’m so sorry I ran out on you.”

  Ms. Williams chuckled. Her voice was warm when she said, “I’ve had days like that, too. And while the other two might not see past it, I wanted to tell you I’m behind you. You haven’t given up, have you?”