by Marie Jermy
The Andersons 2
Animal Instincts
When Rex Latimer joins the Greg Stephens Veterinary Practice, Ramona Anderson is fuming. Not only could Rex become her partner, but he's got the keys to the house attached to the practice—a house Ramona had plans to turn into a home for disadvantaged kids. Well, even though Rex is the hottest man alive, Ramona has news for him—he will not buy into the business and “Operation Accommodation” will be a success.
Fresh from a messy divorce, Rex is looking forward to a new life in Silver Creek, Montana. But what he doesn't bargain on is the green-eyed sex kitten that is Ramona. Their working relationship doesn't start well when he mistakes Ramona for the receptionist. Reggie the snake, however, rectifies that mistake. They soon find that house sharing also has its advantages.
But will the appearance of Rex's ex-wife pour cold water on the fire they've started?
Genre: Contemporary
Length: 50,019 words
ANIMAL INSTINCTS
The Andersons 2
Marie Jermy
EROTIC ROMANCE
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www.SirenPublishing.com
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A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK
IMPRINT: Erotic Romance
ANIMAL INSTINCTS
Copyright © 2012 by Marie Jermy
E-book ISBN: 1-61926-434-X
First E-book Publication: April 2012
Cover design by Jinger Heaston
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DEDICATION
For you, Mum
ANIMAL INSTINCTS
The Andersons 2
MARIE JERMY
Copyright © 2012
Chapter 1
A scowl knitted Ramona Anderson’s brow as she stared at the laptop screen. The e-mail from Greg Stephens, her partner and overall owner of the veterinarian practice where she worked, did not bear good news. Well, good news for Stephens maybe, but not for her. Not when Stephens was enjoying his golfing vacation in Florida so much he had recruited Dr. Rex Latimer to take his place and, if impressed, would invite him to buy him out.
Her scowl deepened as she leaned back in the chair and stared out of the office and treatment room. Damn Stephens! He knew she wanted to buy him out. She had the money, but for some reason, probably because Stephens was a sexist and misogynous relic, he refused to let her have the business lock, stock, and barrel.
She also had plans for the six-bedroom house attached to the practice. Plans that included working with her identical twin sister, Samantha, whose idea it was to turn the house into a summer camp for disadvantaged children. The idea was while living in the house the children could help with looking after the animals, and perhaps if their interest had been piqued enough, particularly the older ones, they might consider taking a career in veterinary medicine.
But now those plans were screwed. Stephens had given Latimer the keys to the house, telling him it was his.
A beeping from the laptop caught Ramona’s attention. It was another e-mail from Stephens. This time, when she opened and read the message, she turned the air blue with the kind of language that would even make her badass brothers, Ross and Matt, blush.
Stephens had asked—no, instructed—her to be on her best behavior toward Latimer and to accommodate him with anything he required. So not only had Stephens provided Latimer with a place to live, but he wanted her to suck up to him as well.
A devious plan began to take shape in her mind. According to her logic, if she owned half the practice, then by rights she owned half the house. So since “accommodating” was the word, she’d show Latimer, who in Stephens’s description was a “dedicated, talented, respected, and charming thirty-something-year-old man,” and who would be arriving that evening, just how accommodating she could be. She’d move in with him.
She had a vast array of tools at her disposal when it came to attracting a guy’s interest, her striking green eyes being one, her body with curves in all the right places, another. Equally, though, she had enough annoying bad habits to turn them off, particularly when it came to the bathroom.
When Ramona had lived at home, Ross, Matt, and her father, even her mother—Samantha had been more forgiving—refused to use the bathroom after her. If she had a dollar every time they’d complained about wet towels on the floor, caps and lids left off tubes and bottles, not to mention not even rinsing the bath out afterward, she’d be a millionairess ten times over. If her parents’ and brothers’ gripes were anything to go by, particularly Matt’s as he now lived with her and Samantha, Ramona would give Rex Latimer all of one week before he moved out.
A sly smile touched Ramona’s lips when she wondered what Latimer would do if she invited Samantha to move in. Even at the age of twenty-seven, they both thought it hilarious when people became confused, sometimes bordering on agitated, with trying to tell them apart. She then shelved the idea. The last time they had played their game of “twin swap,” it had fallen as flat as a day-old, opened can of cola.
Though identical in looks, they could be like oil and water, e
specially where attitudes toward men and sex were concerned. Samantha was a hearts-and-flowers kind of woman, who believed in the white-picket-fence, fairy-tale ending. Whereas Ramona, thanks to a string of relationships that ended when she found out the men were all two-faced, cheating SOBs—still, it could have been worse, she could have slept with Owen what’s-his-face if she hadn’t seen him with his wife—didn’t do romance, just sex. She didn’t do love, just sex. In fact, she didn’t do any emotion that closely resembled love. She just did sex.
However, there was no way Ramona would even contemplate having sex with Mark Raven, who they had played their game on. Not only was he interested in Samantha, but he was so not her type. He was too pretty looking. Give her Daniel Craig over Ben Affleck any day. Also, Raven always seemed to reek of garlic, something she hated with a vengeance.
Noting it was coming up to her nine o’clock appointment, Ramona closed the laptop lid and plucked two pencils from the penholder on the desk. It was another hot and sticky start to the day, and she didn’t exactly need her shoulder-length hair adding to her frustration. Coiling the tresses up at the back of her head, she inserted the pencils crossways to hold the hair in place and walked through to the reception. Emily Coy and her new puppy, Benji, were waiting.
Seeing her gave Ramona an idea, for when she wasn’t helping out at her mother’s coffee shop, Emily was a hairdresser and beauty therapist and had her own salon in town. “Hello, Emily, come on through. I don’t suppose you’ve got any free hair appointments for this afternoon, have you?” she asked as she picked Benji up and placed him onto the treatment table.
“I think so. Just a trim?”
“Nope, the full works.” Ramona smiled as Emily’s neatly plucked eyebrows rose skyward. She turned her attention to Benji, who kept turning around in order to lick her fingers. “I’ve been thinking about having my hair cut for ages now.”
“Define ‘ages’?”
“Oh, c’mon, Emily, anybody would think I’ve just asked you to decapitate me. And it’s not like my hair won’t grow back.”
“I know, but you’ve always worn it long. It might come as a bit of shock if I chop it all off.”
Ramona waved away Emily’s concerns and carried on with her examination. By early evening, however, and upon returning to the house she shared with Samantha and Matt, she began to regret her decision, her new hairstyle perhaps a little too radical even for her tastes.
“Whoa, Mona, is that you or a porcupine?”
Ramona looked away from the dressing table mirror toward the bedroom doorway. His police uniform pressed and fresh, even after a ten-hour shift, a devilish grin almost splitting his face in half, Matt made an over-the-top display of pushing his blue-black hair away from his forehead. She threw her hairbrush at him, which he deftly caught and pocketed.
“Yep, guess you won’t be needing this anymore.”
If he hadn’t made a quick getaway downstairs, Ramona would have quite happily shoved a horse tranquilizer up her brother’s ass. She went over and pulled a suitcase out from under the bed. After packing half her clothing and toiletries, she loaded the case into her truck, ready to take to the practice the next morning. She decided against taking it there and then. She wanted Dr. Rex Latimer to get comfortable before she put “Operation Accommodating” into effect.
The only problem Ramona could foresee with “Operation Accommodating,” indeed with anything else that life chucked her way, was that her face had a tendency to flame whenever she wanted to keep something to herself. It wasn’t that she told outright lies, because she didn’t. It was just that some feelings, thoughts, and opinions were private and should remain…well, private.
Oh, well, what the hell, she thought as she entered the house, she could always blame the current climate. There had been unbroken sunny, sultry, and sweaty days. Though if she wasn’t mistaken, with the heavy air and one final glance at the darkening sky before closing the front door, the mother of all storms was about to take center stage and sing soprano.
“You get a brain transplant, too, huh?” His eyes glued to a baseball game on the television, Matt lay stretched out on the sofa, his socked feet on the armrest, one arm behind his head, the other hanging down. He had removed his tie and freed half of the buttons of his shirt. His police badge and holstered gun belt were on the floor within touching distance of his fingers.
“At least I have a brain,” she tossed back, hiding her smile at her brother’s chilled, yet ready for action position. If some scumbag robber were to burst in, she had no doubts that Matt would have them arrested, cuffed, and Miranda’d before they had the chance to open their mouth and threaten them with bodily harm if they didn’t hand over their valuables. “Where’s Sammy?”
“Gone clothes shopping with Mom and Dad.” He grimaced, but his attention never strayed from the action on the screen. “They called in at the station before I finished. Asked me if I wanted to go, too. Pigs might fly. I’d rather cut off my left nut!”
This time, Ramona didn’t hide her smile. She’d often wondered if they were related at all. Matt was the only member of the Anderson family who didn’t like shopping, especially for clothes. Sports and fishing equipment, yes. But anything else… Well, it was as he’d said.
Matt even considered one thirty-minute trip, once a year, to be too much. She doubted any of his girlfriends had even persuaded him to accompany them to a lingerie store, and that was saying something. She knew her brother had an insatiable interest with women and their underwear, or rather getting inside them. “She say when she’d be back?” Ramona asked.
“Nope. You really moving out?” he asked, his eyes still glued to the screen, which had begun to flicker.
“Yeah, but don’t worry. I’m not going far. Just to the vet’s house. I’m not planning on staying long, either. Rex Latimer should be gone within the week, if not a couple of days.”
“Who’s Rex Latimer?”
“Stephens hired him. He’s a vet. My business partner, too. Unless I put a stop to it…” Her reflection in the mirror above the stone fireplace showed her sly expression was worthy of a fox when another tactic to “Operation Accommodating” sprang to mind. If she wanted a partner, she would do it on her terms, not Stephens’s. He should have consulted her face-to-face and not via a couple of impersonal e-mails. Just thinking about it pissed her off.
Finally, Matt’s attention focused on Ramona. A wary frown creased his brow. “And how do you intend to put a stop to it?”
“Don’t worry. It’s nothing illegal. Unless leaving the toothpaste cap off or wiping the floor with Budweiser constitutes as against the law?”
Realization dawning on what his sly sister had in mind, Matt turned back to his baseball game. “Then the man has my sympathies.”
Ramona smirked as she entered the kitchen for something to eat. For the first time since Stephens’s e-mail informing her of the imminent arrival of Rex Latimer, her pissed mood turned buoyant. Playing the guy like a yo-yo was going to be fun, but the real fun would be to see what he did when meeting Bud Watson for the first time.
* * * *
“So, this is Silver Creek,” Rex Latimer said to himself as he pulled the rental SUV off the road and surveyed the small town in front of him.
With a population just shy of eleven hundred residents, Silver Creek, halfway between Butte and Dillon in Montana, and awash with buntings and flags denoting a century since establishment, wasn’t exactly bright lights. But even he, New Orleans born and raised and citizen of Miami for the last five years, could sense it had spirit—community spirit—and that it had it in spades.
He glanced down at the hand-drawn map given to him by Greg Stephens, his new employer, and took his bearings. The main street, aptly called “Main Street,” was ahead of him, with, and from nearest to furthest away, Third, Second, and First Streets to his right, and Beaverhead and Silver Streets to his left.
There was a rather welcoming café on the corner of Third and Main. Though h
e was gasping for a coffee, it would have to wait until he’d checked out his new home and place of work. Re-starting the SUV, Rex turned left into Beaverhead Street, driving down until he came to the end, passing a nice-looking church and an even nicer looking park with children’s play area. He spared neither a second glance.
He pulled up outside a part-stone, part-timber constructed house with an adjoining red-bricked building, presumably the vet’s practice. Separate and just beyond, a sturdy yet weathered wooden stable block sat within an impressively large paddock, an equally weathered fence circling its perimeter.
Through the windshield, Rex stared at the house. He didn’t know why, but it felt like he had come home. He could actually visualize a wife kissing him by the front door and a brood of kids running around. He knocked a hand against his head to clear that image, grabbed his backpack, and alighted.
And stopped and stared.
If looking at the house made Rex feel like he’d come home, then the views before him told him he had come home. He walked over to the paddock fence, rested one boot on the bottom rail, folded both arms on the top, and took it all in.
Dusk was falling, casting the vast swathes of prairies, woodland, and the purple smudge of the Pioneer Mountains in the distance with a soft golden glow. With its scent of grass, wildflowers, and pine trees, the still, hot air hummed with electricity. He turned around. His back to one impressive view, he looked toward the town and took in another. The dark, dense, and forbidding cumulonimbus clouds that had practically followed him from Salt Lake City were way past the brewing stage.