Stray Hearts

by Jane Graves

  So when she found Robert perusing her legs with far more interest than her résumé, she didn’t discourage the attention. They’d started dating, and before she knew it she was reading Modern Bride and wondering whether people would laugh out loud if she wore white.

  She remembered the moment over dinner at her parents’ house when she’d told her family about Robert’s proposal. Her father dropped his glass of Scotch, her mother’s eyebrows shot up as high as her recent face-lift would allow, and Claire nearly choked to death on an oyster. Then all three of them did in unison something she’d never seen before: they smiled at her. Kay smiled back, and for the first time in forever, she felt like part of the family.

  Still, the closer she came to walking down the aisle, the more a warning buzzed around inside her head like a mosquito she couldn’t swat away. But do you love him?

  She’d asked herself that question more than once in the past several months. Too bad she’d never answered it. Then one Tuesday evening it had slipped Robert’s mind that he was engaged, and the answer to her question became very clear indeed.

  “Listen to me,” Claire warned. “Until this thing is over, you’ve got to stop rattling Robert’s cage. I said give him a dirty look, not emasculate him. You’re lucky he didn’t take back the offer.”

  “Lucky?” Kay slumped against the banister. She felt like a paratrooper about to be dropped behind enemy lines. The goal was survival. One hundred hours, and it would all be over with.

  One hundred hours. It sounded like a lifetime.

  “Doc, we’ve got a problem. Get over here now.”

  Dr. Matt Forester dropped the phone and hurried out the front door of his veterinary clinic, a tum-of-the-century Victorian house on a quiet, tree-shaded street in McKinney, Texas. He leaped directly from the porch to the yard and ran halfway to the sidewalk before the screen door slapped shut behind him. Buddy, a little brown dog who was part terrier, part beagle and part a lot of other things, galloped at his heels.

  They dodged a kid on a bicycle and an elderly couple out for a late-afternoon walk as they ran toward the prairie-style house next door, which had been renovated to become the Westwood Animal Shelter two years before. Hazel Willoughby, the seventy-two-year-old manager of the shelter, ruled the place with an iron fist, and Matt knew if there was a problem she couldn’t handle he’d better move fast.

  Matt skidded through the front door into the ex-living room of the house, which now served as a reception area. A redheaded teenage girl huddled against the far wall, staring down at something on the gray tile floor behind the counter. Hazel held out a pair of heavy leather gloves. “I’m getting too old for this. Doc. He’s all yours.” Matt took the gloves and moved slowly around the counter, his curiosity turning to astonishment as he came face-to-face with the biggest, baddest orange tomcat he’d ever seen.

  Hazel peered over the counter. “I thought I’d give you a shot at him before I called the SWAT team.”

  “SWAT team? Are you kidding? Tear gas and sharpshooters would only make him madder.” Matt pulled on the gloves. “Can somebody tell me why this kitty’s so cranky?”

  “He’s a stray,” the redheaded girl said. “He was running loose in my apartment complex. So I put some tuna fish in a carrier and sort of caught him...”

  “May I ask why you let him out?”

  “Well, he hated the carrier, and he was making a terrible noise, so I thought if I opened the door...”

  “Good move. Freedom has done wonders for his disposition.” Matt took a step toward the cat, who spat ferociously and planted his rear end even deeper into the corner he’d commandeered.

  He crouched down closer to the cat’s eye level. “Hazel?”

  “Right behind you, Doc.”

  “Open the carrier. Slowly.”

  Matt edged forward, hoping to close in on the cat before he made a run for it, but when the carrier door squeaked open he took off. As he streaked past, Matt lunged sideways and grabbed him around the middle with both gloved hands. The cat scrambled madly, his claws scraping against the tile floor, but Matt dragged him backward with one hand beneath his stomach and the other holding the scruff of his neck.

  Hazel turned the carrier on end and wisely backed away. Matt lowered the spitting cat rear end first, but on the way in he managed to hook a hind claw on the edge of the carrier, pushed himself up and swatted Matt across the face. Matt gritted his teeth against the pain, unhooked the cat’s hind claw, then lowered him all the way in. He clanged the door shut and latched it, then tipped the carrier back down to the floor.

  The redheaded girl took a tentative step forward, a stunned expression on her face. “Oh! I can’t believe you picked him up like that! He scratched you and everything!”

  Matt yanked off the gloves. He touched his fingertips to his face and saw blood. His ex-wife was right. He should have gone to medical school. He’d be making three times the money and playing golf on Wednesday afternoons. And right now that sounded pretty damned good.

  “I knew I brought him to the right place,” the girl gushed. “I couldn’t bear the thought of taking him to the pound. He’s so nasty I just knew they’d put him to sleep. But you don’t do that here...do you?”

  “No,” he told the girl resignedly. “We try to find homes for all of them.”

  He picked up the carrier and turned to the reception desk where Hazel now sat, a cigarette dangling between her lips.

  “Hazel? A name, please?”

  She lit the cigarette, took a long drag and blew out the smoke. “Clyde.”

  “As in Bonnie and Clyde?”

  "You got it."

  Matt maneuvered the cat into an isolation cage, then washed his wound with antiseptic soap. He went to the fridge and shoved aside two bottles of serum and a urine sample before locating the six-pack he was after. He popped a top, took a long swallow, then carried the can out to the back porch.

  The hazy brightness of the afternoon had settled into evening, knocking only a few degrees off the July heat. In true Texas style, they’d already had several triple-digit-temperature days, and undoubtedly there were more to come. Matt sat down on the step beside Hazel, who was finishing off another cigarette.

  “Get your face cleaned up?” she asked him. “God knows where that cat’s been.”

  “Yeah.” Matt tipped up the beer can and took another swallow. “Ungrateful little cuss. I offer him free room and board and he gives me another set of character lines.”

  “He’ll come around.”

  “I hope I live that long.”

  Hazel eyed Matt carefully. “It’s one more deadbeat dad off the street. That’s the point, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. I guess it is.”

  Hazel dropped her cigarette on the step and ground it out with her shoe. “You don’t seem real perky, Doc. What’s up?”

  Matt drained the rest of the beer in a single, long chug, then set it on the step beside him. “The utility bill came today.”

  “Comes every month.”

  “Up to now I’ve been able to pay it.”

  For a moment Matt felt a tightness in his stomach, followed by the same wave of nausea that passed over him every time he looked at an overdue bill or took in one more animal he might not be able to feed.

  “I don’t know why you’re worried, Doc. With the grant from the Dorland Group—”

  “No,” Matt said, holding up his palm. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “But it’s a sure thing.”

  “Only if I do what Hollinger wants me to. And I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.”

  “What? Letting his ex-fiancée come here to volunteer in exchange for twenty-five thousand dollars? Sounds like a deal to me.”

  Matt winced at Hazel’s bluntness. Maybe it was because she’d made it sound exactly like what it was—a bribe.

  Robert Hollinger was chairman of the selection committee for the Dorland Group, a combination of several law firms that pooled their resources
to offer grants to nonprofit organizations. Every year they chose one deserving charity and granted it twenty-five thousand dollars. Matt hadn’t thought he had a prayer of getting the grant, but he’d applied for it anyway, hoping for a miracle.

  Then three days ago, to his complete surprise, he got a call from Hollinger. After a little small talk, he told Matt that he’d recently broken off his engagement with his fiancée, Kay Ramsey. He’d done it in the kindest way possible, of course, but instead of taking it like an adult, she’d sought revenge against him by ravaging his poor, helpless cocker spaniels. To hear Hollinger tell it, she was the lowest of the low—a confirmed animal hater—and Lizzie Borden with her ax couldn’t have done more damage to his dogs than she’d arranged to have done with a pair of clippers.

  He’d brought a lawsuit against her and won, but in lieu of the monetary damages, he asked Matt, would it be possible for Kay to come to his shelter and volunteer a hundred hours as restitution? At first it all sounded very simple, but as they continued to talk, it became clear that Hollinger’s goal wasn’t restitution. It was revenge. And it dawned on Matt that if he carried out that revenge, the Dorland Grant was as good as his.

  Matt knew he should have called a halt to the conversation as soon as saw where it was heading, but Hollinger kept telling him how impressed he was with his grant application, and what a wonderful community resource the shelter was, and how it would be a shame for it to go under because of lack of financing. He kept repeating that twenty-five-thousand-dollar figure, with his glass-smooth tone and seamless persuasion making it seem as if they were just two old buddies doing each other a favor. By the time it was all over, Matt had agreed to oversee the hard-labor restitution of Hollinger’s wayward ex-fiancée, and Hollinger had agreed to use his influence with the committee to ensure Matt got the grant.

  “Plenty of other organizations have applied for that grant,” Matt told Hazel. “And Hollinger’s swaying the outcome.”

  Hazel made a scoffing noise. “You deserve it as much as anyone, so what’s the problem? How do you think most organizations get their funding? By knowing people in high places. One hand washes the other. It’s done every day.”

  But Matt didn’t like being the one doing it. Still, it was beginning to look as if the Dorland Grant was his only hope to keep the shelter running when just about everything else in his life had fallen apart. Lately he’d found himself dwelling on the words his ex-wife had tossed at him as she walked out the door for the last time: Good luck finding another woman who’ll put up with all this.

  He lay awake nights sometimes thinking about that as he watched his situation go from bad to worse. As if the expenses of the shelter hadn’t been enough, his ex-wife had come out on the winning end of a divorce decree that had stripped him naked. So he’d moved into the second floor above his clinic to keep from paying rent, telling himself it was just temporary. That had been a year and a half ago.

  “Think about it, Doc,” Hazel said. “We need you.” She nodded back over her shoulder. “They need you.”

  No matter how bad things got, that’s what always brought him back around. He was the only thing standing between thirty-some animals and the mean streets, and he couldn’t quit now.

  “Don’t worry, Hazel. I’ll do whatever I have to do to make sure the doors stay open.”

  And in spite of the bills he couldn’t pay, the supplies he couldn’t buy and the undomesticated tomcats who kept showing up on his doorstep, he meant every word of it. Even if it meant dealing with Kay Ramsey.

  The first Saturday morning after she made the deal with Robert, Kay stood in the doorway of the Cat Room of the Westwood Animal Shelter, wishing she’d followed her instincts. She should have run screaming from the premises the moment the old lady who ran the place said “cat,” but here she was, face-to-face with her worst nightmare: a room full of scary, creepy, menacing felines who, unfortunately, didn’t seem to be nearly as afraid of her as she was of them. One or two she might have been able to take. But a dozen?

  And planted right in the middle of the cat convention was Hazel Willoughby, the geriatric, polyester-clad manager of the Westwood Animal Shelter, holding out the most vile utensil Kay had ever seen—a pink plastic pooper-scooper.

  “As I told you before,” Kay said, trying to sound levelheaded and reasonable, “I have administrative experience. It seems a shame to waste my expertise—”

  “Nope. You’ll do what needs doing. And the cat boxes need doing.”

  No! This can’t be happening!

  She’d followed Claire’s advice to the letter. From her faux gold earrings to her mock leather pumps, Kay was a budget-controlled picture of polished professionalism. Her skirt and blouse screamed desk job, but to her dismay, Hazel seemed to have other ideas. Not only did she expect Kay to enter the Cat Room, she actually expected her to clean up after its occupants. And while she was wearing panty hose, no less.

  Hazel continued to hold out the pink utensil, and Kay continued to pretend it didn’t exist “I actually went to school to become a legal assistant. I do whatever needs doing. You know. From the front desk."

  “Can’t do much poop-scooping when you're sitting there.”

  “But you don’t understand—”

  “The longer you piddle around,” the woman warned, “the more there’ll be to clean up.”

  Kay didn’t doubt that for a moment. As her gaze circled the highly populated Cat Room, a shiver of apprehension trickled down her spine. Most of the animals were roaming free, hunched on carpet-covered perches like vultures, sprawled on the floor or lying on top of one another like piles of dirty laundry. She didn’t sweat the sleeping ones. It was the slinking, scurrying, meowing ones that filled her with dread.

  Then she glanced at the corner of the room and nearly gasped. A cat that looked like the feline version of a championship wrestler glared at her from—thank God—the confines of his cage. He had orange stripes, a tom ear, muscles like a tiger and an expression of disgust that could peel the paint off walls. An honest-to-goodness nightmare come to life.

  Before Kay could fully recover from being stared down by the Godzilla of cats, something furry brushed against her leg. She looked down to see a shifty black feline winding itself around her ankle. She gasped and yanked her foot away, shaking it wildly to dislodge any lingering remnants of cat, then spun around and fled back to the front desk with the old lady in close pursuit.

  “Get Dr. Forester over here,” Kay said.

  Hazel glanced out the window. Kay could see three or four cars still sitting on the street in front of the Westwood Veterinary Clinic, which was housed in a huge Victorian next door.

  “Doc’s still busy with patients,” the old lady said.

  “I don’t care. I—” Kay stopped, then took a deep, calming breath. “Please. I have to see him right now.”

  If the old lady said no again, it would leave her with only one option: to fall on her knees and beg for mercy. If that’s what it took to stay out of that seething sea of felines, she’d do it

  Fortunately, though, the old lady gave up the fight and picked up the phone. After a quick, muffled conversation, she hung up, sneered a little in Kay’s general direction, then sat down in a chair behind the counter and stuck her nose into a crossword puzzle book. A wicked-looking Siamese cat jumped into her lap, and she stroked him absentmindedly.

  Kay breathed a momentary sigh of relief. She glanced around as she waited, taking in every nuance of the rather unappealing decor. The shelter consisted of a partially renovated, oddly rearranged 1920s prairie-style house in a neighborhood she generally took pains to avoid. She had a passion for older homes, but this place was nothing short of decrepit

  Cheap orange plastic chairs lined the wall of the reception area, which had once been a living room, and beyond that she’d seen a kitchen performing double-duty as a storeroom. The Cat Room had once been a big bedroom, as had the Dog Room. She didn’t even want to think about what the other rooms might
contain.

  Surely the veterinarian in charge of this place would be easier to deal with than the old lady. He was probably some grandfatherly type—she could bat her eyelashes at him and make him feel sorry for her. That kind of ruse really wasn’t her style, but it would certainly do in a pinch.

  Finally Kay heard footsteps on the porch. She composed herself by squaring her shoulders and smoothing her skirt with her palms. But when the door opened, she took one look at the man who came inside and just about fell off her high heels.

  This was Dr. Matt Forester?

  Chapter 2

  Kay had assumed all veterinarians must be wizened old men with hair growing out of their ears and warts on their noses. But the man who’d just come through the door wasn’t in danger of becoming wizened for at least another forty years, and everything on him was growing precisely where and how it was supposed to.

  He strode toward the desk. “Hazel? I’m up to my eyeballs over there. What’s the crisis?”

  The old lady nodded toward Kay. “Meet your new volunteer, Doc.”

  He turned around, and when he saw Kay he grinned broadly, awakening a whole legion of laugh lines that were proof positive he smiled often. With a quick up-and-down shift of her eyes she took in all six highly attractive feet of him, from his long, jeans-clad legs to his narrow waist, then upward to a faded T-shirt stretched across a broad chest and a powerful pair of shoulders. His dark brown eyes were warm and compelling, drawing her in, and she felt her conviction slipping away. Then she mentally slapped herself back to reality. Hey, you. He’s an animal doctor. A-ni-mal. Remember?

  He stepped toward her, extending his hand. “Hi. I’m Matt Forester. And you’re...?”

  “Kay Ramsey,” Hazel said.

  His grin evaporated like a drop of rain on a parched desert floor. Not only did he stop short, he actually took a step backward, his hand falling to his side. He stared at her as if she were a bug under a magnifying glass, and a particularly dangerous species at that.