He was clearly going to hell for using an injured animal as an excuse for being excited to see Candy again. But he couldn’t help it. He’d considered using Jose as an excuse to see her anyway, but had vetoed the plan because the cat was Satan personified. Lee did feel awful the animal was actually hurt though.
Lee bent down to check on him and razor sharp claws whipped out of the grate.
Son of a...
* * *
The receptionist got them into an examination room as soon as the world’s angriest cat informed the rest of the patients in the lobby that the cat was inclined to murder. If Lee hadn’t been so pissed, it would have been funny how everyone moved to the opposite end of the room to avoid being near the carrier. A very butch-looking shepherd peed on the floor.
“I feel the same way, dude,” he told the dog. “He scares the shit out of me, too.”
“Another new pet, huh?” Candy breezed in the exam room, then stopped dead as soon as she saw him. “What happened to you?”
Lee pointed to the cat carrier from his position of safety across the small room. “I have Satan himself in there.”
She smiled. It was criminal how pretty she was. He held her gaze until she looked away. “Before we let him out, let’s clean you up. You need to be careful with cat scratches because they can get infected very easily. Regardless of what you think about cats, they’re very germy.”
“Germy?”
Another smile. “That’s a technical term. You have to spend many years in college before you’re allowed to use germy.”
There was a glass bottle of cotton balls and various bottles of liquid on the counter. She poured one bottle’s contents onto a ball and approached, reaching for his hand. He surrendered it immediately and dialed back his testosterone fueled reaction to her touch.
The antiseptic stung and he sucked in a breath.
“The one on your neck will hurt more, I’m afraid.”
“Jesus,” he exclaimed and jerked his head.
“Sorry. This one’s bad, though. You’ll need to keep an eye on it. I’d hate for you to develop cat scratch fever.”
“What? Is that a thing? What happens? Ted Nugent comes over to your house and shoots flaming arrows at you?”
Her pretty brows puckered on her forehead. “No. You get a fever and chills. Sometimes vomiting.”
“Seriously?” He was going to kill Marisol. Immediately after he killed her cat. “How do you fix it?”
“There’s a battery of very painful shots, usually administered through the abdomen.”
He watched her face in horror as she dabbed at his neck. She couldn’t maintain the lie, though, and as soon as her gaze darted up to his, he knew she was lying.
“You’re a mean woman, you know that?”
She stepped back. “You should still keep it clean so it doesn’t get infected.”
“Um kay.”
She put her hand on the cat carrier. “What happened with this guy?”
He explained about the door and his fears that Jose’s tail was broken. When she made to open the latch, he stepped back until he hit the wall. “Isn’t there an anesthetic you can give him or something? He’s seriously vicious.”
Candy raised one eyebrow. “How do you recommend I put him out? With a blow dart?”
“Look, I’m just saying he’s like a possessed thing.”
Her smirk grew. “Would you feel better if you left the room and I got one of the techs in here?”
“Yes.” He seriously would. But he couldn’t leave her alone with a Tasmanian devil. “No.”
“All right then, don’t scream like a girl and scare it and everything should be fine.”
The cat came out of the box like a bullet and the shriek Lee made was not a scream. Not technically.
* * *
Candace left the kitty in the back with a tech after she saw the injury. Lee was making the whole situation worse by freaking out. It was everything she could do not to laugh at him.
“So after the surgery I’ll give you a call to let him know how everything went. I’m going to keep him overnight so we can monitor him, but he’ll probably be ready to go home tomorrow.”
“Sounds good.”
She handed him several pieces of paper. “This is an estimate of the surgery, x-rays, and after care.” She rolled her hand to indicate other items on the bill. The amount was staggering.
His eyes grew huge. “This is how you pay for vet school, huh?”
She ignored him. She’d already taken off ten percent as a courtesy since he was doing the construction on her new clinic. “You can expect to hear from me in a couple of hours.”
“Right.” He nodded as if he didn’t know what else to say. “He’s going to live, right?”
“I have every reason to believe that he will. He’s an otherwise healthy animal. He’ll lose about two inches of his tail, but he’ll be back in fighting condition in no time.”
He rolled his eyes and shoved the papers in his back pocket. “Oh goodie.”
“I gotta ask, what are you doing with a cat? Especially that cat, who clearly hates you?”
“He’s not mine. I’m cat sitting for a friend, and she’ll kill me if anything happens to him.” He pulled a comical face. “Too late for that, huh?”
A friend who was a she. So, he did have a girlfriend. That was good. It let her subconscious off the hook. She wondered why in the hell he kept showing up in her office with borrowed animals if he had a girlfriend? This Lee carried himself with so much more confidence than the young man she’d known five years ago. That man hadn’t realized he was a prize. He’d been shy and a bit awkward in the beginning. She smiled inwardly when she remembered how she’d had to make the first move. Otherwise, he may never have done it.
Still, she was happy for him. He’d moved on. So had she. Well, if moving on meant that she never dated and spent her nights with her own cat. But she was an independent, career-focused individual who didn’t have to spend her every waking moment worrying about kids and a husband’s varying happiness. Being unencumbered had plenty to be said for it.
“This cat and I have a mutual and healthy animosity for each other. I steer clear of him and he stays the hell away from me. But my friend is out of town, and I was the only sucker available for cat sitting.”
Maybe knowing he had a girlfriend would make working with him easier. She could stop angsting about the weird feelings seeing him again had stirred up. This would be good. It was helpful, really.
Except she couldn’t get the girlfriend out of her mind. Not when she did the surgery and not when she spent the night on the pull-out sofa in her dad’s office so she could keep an eye on Jose and the other overnight patients.
What kind of woman did Lee pick these days, and why the hell did she care?
Chapter Nine
The first day of Lee’s imprisonment with the world’s meanest cat went better than expected. He’d picked Jose up from the vet the day after his surgery and brought him home. Candy had been very clear that the cat would need to be monitored and given medication for the next several days and Marisol wouldn’t be home for four more. He’d picked up a clean litter box and stuff at the pet store and collected a bag of food and the cat’s bowls from Marisol’s house. He’d stared at the stupid cat bed and a basket of toys long and hard, and he ultimately vetoed taking them. The cat had too much stuff already. Cat owners were weird, he decided. Worse than Yorkie owners.
Jose was most likely groggy from the meds, because Lee didn’t get much more than a halfhearted growl on the way home. Lee took the carrier up to one of the five empty bedrooms with all the rest of the cat nonsense, intending to let him recuperate up there. He opened the door latch on the crate and literally ran for the bedroom door, certain the animal would take the opportuni
ty to tear after him, claws bared. After listening at the door for a couple of long seconds, he opened it a crack and spied on the beast. Jose had only ventured as far as the opening of his box and was sniffing the air.
“Meow.”
“You feeling all right, dude?” Great. Now he was talking to a cat.
Lee held up a curved piece of plastic and grimaced. It was like a torture device—both for him and for the cat. There was no way he was going to manage to get it on Jose without bloodshed. “If you promise not to lick your tail, I won’t make you wear this collar. It looks awful, so be good.”
Jose gave Lee a baleful look, but didn’t look like he was interested in taking a chunk out of Lee’s leg when he ventured the rest of the way out of his crate.
“I’m going to work. Food is here and your litter box is over there. Don’t piss anywhere else.” He gave Jose one last look, then shut the door.
Lee hurried through his day and made it home a little after four to give Jose his afternoon medicine. After seeing his own wounds when he brought the cat in, Candy had taken pity on him and given him liquid medicine. That was fine by him. It wasn’t like he was in any mood to be a hero anyway, besides what he’d already done was above and beyond the call of pet sitting.
In truth, the issue was at least half his fault to begin with. Still, in all his previous experiences, he’d never had to spend seven hundred dollars for the opportunity to pet sit an animal who hated him.
He’d opened the door as quietly as possible, hoping to sneak up on the cat. Jose lay in the sun on the window sill, his shortened, bandaged tail hanging down. He seemed asleep, but Lee was too gun-shy to believe that. Jose was crafty and it could be an elaborate ruse to lure him in for a quick prison-style ganking with those talon-like claws. The cat lifted his head, gave a lazy blink and licked a paw before he turned away towards the window and ignored him.
“Alrighty then.” He pinched open the cat’s mouth and dropped the liquid in. Jose gave a vicious shake of his head but he didn’t attempt to maul him. Enemy relations seemed to be improving.
On the second morning, the cat had a lot to say but none of it sounded hateful. He expressed some interest in the door, albeit in a wary, cautious way since his and a door’s last mutual encounter had gone so poorly.
“Do you want out?”
“Meow.”
“See, I’m a bit leery of letting you out, you understand. Already I have to a lot to explain to your mom, and I’d really like her not to kill me.”
“Meow.”
Lee rubbed the cat with the toe of his shoe, sort of testing the waters. “What does that mean?”
“Meow.”
He opened the door and Jose wandered out into the hall. The cat took a leisurely amble, poking his head in rooms along the way to the stairs. His bandaged tail floated along behind him like a deflated balloon. Lee let him do his thing and investigate the house, hoping a little freedom would help broker whatever peace seemed to be flirting between them, and went to baseball practice.
When he came home later, Jose’s food bowl was empty whereas he hadn’t touched it much before. That had to be a good thing, right? Later that night Lee rolled over in bed and encountered a warm, fuzzy companion. Lee bolted awake but all Jose did was yawn and curl into a tighter ball.
Weird.
The next morning before he left for work Lee called and called for the animal, but the cat was nowhere to be found. He figured Jose’d found a cozy place to sleep and didn’t fret. Instead he filled up his food bowl and gave him fresh water. That evening he still couldn’t find the animal. What was he supposed to do with the medicine? The directions on the bottle gave clear instructions and now the damn cat was missing two doses.
Panic had him considering calling Candy when he still couldn’t locate the cat the next morning, but what could she possibly do about it? What if Jose’d gotten out again? Jesus, what was he going to tell Marisol? The next time someone asked him to pet sit he’d run far, far away. He couldn’t take this kind of stress.
He was doubled over looking under his bed when his cell phone rang and scared the crap out of him.
“Bennett,” he answered.
“Hi. It’s Candace. I’m wondering if you have time in your schedule to meet today. I have some questions about the new clinic.”
There was a ton of noise in the background. Where the hell was she? A rock concert?
“When did you have in mind?” he asked, the sound muffled while he held the phone to his head with his shoulder.
She hesitated. “Now? I’m at the site.”
“Actually, you calling right when you did is perfect because I desperately need you. Can you come to my house first? There’s a problem with Jose.”
“Of course, but I don’t have a car at the moment.”
He was desperate and worried about the stupid animal. He really couldn’t face his friend if anything worse happened. “I’ll come get you. Be there in ten minutes.”
* * *
Candace tucked her phone back into the armband designed to hold it while she was running. He didn’t tell her what he was so worried about, said he’d explain on the way. He’d sounded on the verge of frantic, so much so she didn’t even consider asking him to bring the animal to the clinic instead.
It was going to be hot today. She plunked herself down on an old bucket in the shade to wait. Too bad she didn’t have an iced coffee. There was a place down the street and she wondered if she had enough time to walk down there and back before Lee arrived. Probably not. Running by the construction site had been decided upon on a whim that morning, and she’d enjoyed the deviation from her regular route, even though it added about a half mile longer than she usually ran.
When Lee’s big blue truck pulled into the lot, she stood up and plucked at her leggings self-consciously.
Get over yourself.
“Hey,” he called, stepping out of the cab and slamming the door with effortless sexiness. A T-shirt molded over the peaks and valleys of his shoulders and pectoral muscles. Biceps honed from hard work stretched the short sleeves. He raised his hand to wave and—sweet Jesus—the hem of the material rode up exposing a tan strip of taut skin above his belt buckle.
She felt the flush of heat wash over her. He was too far away to actually see the line of soft hair that dusted his skin and traveled down below his waistband, but she knew it was there. The memory rushed over her and caught her by surprise.
The skin disappeared back under the shirt, but now she found herself staring at the way his jeans cupped him in the front. She wrenched her gaze away and followed the denim down strong thighs, down until the pants bunched where they met heavy work boots.
“What’s up with Jose?”
He opened the passenger door for her. “I don’t really know. I haven’t actually seen him for a day or so. When you called this morning, I was hunting for him all over my house.”
This was real cause for worry. Cats were notorious for disappearing when they were in distress. Unless an owner knew a cat very well, they often didn’t even know a cat was ill. “Could he have gotten outside do you think?”
He climbed back in on his side and fired up the truck. “No, I really don’t think so. We’ve been getting along better than we ever had.” He pulled his eyebrows together. “Do you think something bad has happened?”
She didn’t want to alarm him, especially since he seemed genuinely disturbed, but that was exactly her fear. “I’ll help you find him. That way I can evaluate him when he shows up.”
Lee exhaled a relieved breath and squeezed her hand. “That would be so great.”
Perfect. Trapped with a gorgeous, unavailable ex-boyfriend in a confined space that smelled like warm man and warmer cotton. What could be better?
Good grief. She was going to have to cave to her mot
her’s harassment and start dating again. There was no way she could withstand the constant onslaught of pheromones from this man and stay sane. Thank God the construction was almost finished.
Chapter Ten
Four Years, eleven months and twenty-seven days ago
Candace found the overnight delivery envelope on the counter next to a coffee cup. Lee had scrawled a messy note on the top in pencil. Julie asked me to give this to you. See you for dinner. XOXO
It was signed with the single letter L.
Her next door neighbor must have received it when Candace had been at the grocery store the day before. Inside was contact information and a welcome letter from the International Office. Key cards to her student residence were tucked in a smaller envelope. She plopped down on the couch and opened the twenty-eight page International Student Handbook for the University of Glasgow.
That stupid bar contest had made her dream come true and she still couldn’t believe it. She was going to finish her veterinary schooling at the same school where James Herriot had gone. It made her giddy.
She had read All Creatures Great and Small and the companion books in the series over and over until the spines of her paperbacks had quite literally disintegrated. She knew all Herriot’s stories by heart. Her entire life she’d dreamed of going to Glasgow for university, but it had been a pipe dream. Her father was a veterinarian and her oldest brother was finishing up his requirements to be one as well. There had never been any doubt that Candace would be a doctor, too. Her other brothers had different ambitions, but for Candace it was always the animals. She had been accepted into a great school for her undergraduate, and thanks to scholarships and grants she would be able to attend an excellent veterinary college, but Glasgow had always been out of reach. A veterinarian with six kids didn’t have extra money to pay for that kind of extravagance. It was a phenomenal school, one of the top one percent in the world. That also meant it was expensive.
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