by Judi Fennell
That would be the day. This was Jared Nolan, MVP two years running, she was talking about. The guy had the world at his feet; he didn’t have a thing to be nervous or unsure about. Never had, which was probably why he’d been able to dismiss her feelings so callously—er, easily; if someone had done that to him, it would’ve rolled off his back as easily as it’d rolled off his tongue.
But her? Notsomuch. His rejection had hurt.
Thankfully, the exam room door opened before Mac went down that road again, and Dr. Bingham entered.
The woman was gorgeous and everything Mac was not: five-nine, blonde, with a body to make swimsuit cover models green with envy even if she did cover it with a lab coat. Exactly the type of woman Jared went for.
Surprisingly, though, he didn’t seem to notice.
Even more surprising, Dr. Bingham didn’t seem to notice.
How could she not?
Mac didn’t have a clue. She might be over Jared, but she was honest enough to admit the guy was still hot.
“Hello. I’m Jennifer Bingham. Nice to meet you.” She shook Mac’s hand first and didn’t linger over Jared’s.
Seriously, was the woman blind?
“So what do we have here?” Dr. Bingham picked up one of the kittens, and held it close to her face, a quintessential chick move that would have Mac questioning Dr. Bingham’s motives except the woman didn’t break her veneer of professionalism.
She went over what and how to feed the kittens, how to get them to use the litter box, speaking to Jared as if he was anyone and not one of the hottest pro athletes of the day. He could have been a troll with three eyes for all the personal attention the vet gave him.
He’d never be a troll, with three eyes or otherwise.
The woman had to be blind.
“I’d like to see them back in a few weeks, but if you have any questions in the meantime, feel free to give me a call.” Dr. Bingham handed them her card. “This is my service; they’ll be able to get in touch with me anytime.”
Again, no innuendo, no come-on . . . Jennifer Bingham was unlike other women in this town, and it made her someone Mac could want to be friends with.
“Thanks.” Jared smiled at her as he pocketed the card, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. Wow. It must be true: Even with a beautiful woman in the room, Jared Know-It-All Nolan was out of his league. Because of kittens.
Mac was going to enjoy watching him try to take care of these things.
* * *
JARED was so screwed.
He maneuvered himself back into Mac’s sardine-can work truck and looked at the kittens in the hat box. They were too small. Too needy. Too dependent on him. If Mac hadn’t been in the exam room, he would’ve just turned them over to the doctor and left. He didn’t know how to take care of these things and he didn’t need this kind of responsibility in his life. Not when his entire focus had to be on rehabbing himself back to MVP status. Nothing less would do; he’d gone out on top and that’s the way he’d return.
But Mac had been there, looking as if she knew everything about raising kittens and had merely been humoring him by taking him along for the ride. No way was he going to admit defeat.
He looked over at her. At her cute nose, perfect lips, high cheekbones, long lashes that shielded eyes so green they ought to be called shamrock, and the ponytail he could never remember seeing her without. She was the same Mac Manley he remembered . . . but different.
“Take a picture; it lasts longer.”
Well that was different. Back then, she would have looked at him shyly out of the corner of her eye and given him that smile that lit up her face, thankful for the iota of interest he’d shown.
He winced inwardly. He could’ve been nicer. Should have been. “I don’t need a picture, Mac.”
She glanced at him, her teeth gnawing on her bottom lip. She’d always done that when she was nervous. Like when—
“Hey, do you remember when we put the zip line across the creek?”
She’d insisted on coming with them—or she’d threatened to tell their grandmother, which would have killed that afternoon right then.
“And you guys got stuck halfway across and had to pull each other with Sean’s belt to get to the other side?”
He settled the hat box onto his lap when she drove over a pothole and the kittens shifted inside. “But you made it across.”
“I didn’t weigh as much as you muscle-heads, so I didn’t drag the line down.”
She’d been nervous as hell to get on the contraption they’d made—they all should have been. That thing had been dangerous. But her brothers had brought her along, so Jared had had to go with it.
In hindsight, he appreciated that they’d cared about her enough to bring her. At the time . . . Not really. “That was a fun afternoon.”
“Until Johnny Heavers found that snake and chased me with it.”
“Your brothers took care of him for you.”
“Yeah. They did.” She smiled that same smile that she’d worn that day when Johnny had run home in tears with her brothers chasing him, leaving Jared alone with her.
He’d rather have gone after Johnny, but the guys had had the right since they were her brothers and someone had to stay with her. He’d been annoyed and probably not as nice to her as he should’ve been, but he’d always been careful not to complain around her brothers. Hadn’t wanted to test the friendship over their sister.
“Bryan shoved the snake down the back of Johnny’s shorts. Good thing it was a garter snake, because if it bit him, at least it wasn’t poisonous.”
Jared smiled. He’d wanted to get Johnny a time or two when they’d been kids. “Did it bite him?”
Mac shrugged. “I don’t know. “
“If I were Johnny, I’m not sure I’d admit it if it did, you know?”
She laughed. “I wonder what he’s doing these days. He was always causing trouble.”
“I heard he joined the circus as the snake handler.”
She rolled her eyes. “You are so not funny.”
“Oh I don’t know. I thought that was hilarious.”
“And you thought Mariellen Meselnick was hot, so that just shows what your opinion is worth.”
“Mariellen was hot.”
“Yeah, but not for what you were selling.”
Jared shook his head. “This conversation is so wrong on so many levels. I’m sure Mariellen married a nice guy and settled down to raise her two-point-five kids.”
“Actually, Mariellen married a woman and they each had a baby via surrogate. So your radar was totally off on that one.”
“Ouch. Way to wound a guy. Still, Mariellen and another chick? Now that’s hot.”
Mac rolled her eyes again. “Next topic.”
He smiled, enjoying one of the first non-confrontational conversations he’d ever had with Mac. “Okay, how about jumping off the boulders into the swimming hole?”
“I was never so scared in all my life. That was like a hundred-foot drop.”
“Actually, it was fifteen. I went back and measured a few years ago.”
“Seemed a lot higher then.”
One of the kittens nudged the lid of the hatbox, and his arm brushed hers when he went to close it. “A lot of things looked different when we were kids.”
“Yeah, they did.” She turned into the strip mall parking lot. “You hang here and I’ll run in to get the rest of what we need. It’ll be quicker and I can just park at the curb.”
And just like that, reality smacked him in the face. The trip down memory lane had taken his mind off the stupid injuries, but now, here he sat, kitten-sitting in the truck, having people do things for him that he ought to be doing himself.
He shifted his leg. Stupid ache wouldn’t go away. How the hell did he even hope to be able to play again if he co
uldn’t handle twenty minutes in a truck?
He set the box o’ kittens on the dash and opened the door. It took him longer than it should have to get out of the damn cab, but once he was out . . . thank God. He’d needed the air and once he stretched the kinks out, he started to feel better about not only his leg, his life, and his professional prospects, but even the kittens.
Then Mac walked out of the store with a bag of something on her shoulder and another bag of something under her other arm, a few other bags in one hand, and a big flat box in the other, looking like a beast of burden—and there went that good feeling. He ought to be carrying that for her.
He crutched over. “Here, give me some of those.” He reached out to take the bags and for the briefest of seconds he saw her smile.
But then she frowned. “Did you leave the door open?”
“Huh?” He took the first bag off her arm.
“Did you leave the truck door open?”
He worked the bag onto his wrist then turned around.
Hell. Kittens.
He actually made it back to the truck with his crutches before Mac could with all the other stuff, catching the calico fuzz ball before it fell off the seat onto the pavement.
“Seriously, Jared? Are you just humoring me that you’ll take care of them while trying to find a way to get rid of them? If you really want me to take them off your hands, just say so. There’s no sense killing them.”
The woman could make him madder than an ump with blinders on. “Knock it off, Princess. I saved this one, didn’t I? Of course I can take care of kittens.”
She smiled then. A big, beautiful . . . know-it-all smile. “Told you so.”
She dropped the bags and box at his feet, flipped her ponytail over her shoulder, and practically skipped around the truck to the driver’s side.
For a guy on crutches, he’d walked into that one easily enough.
He set the little adventurer back in the hat box with the gray one—the only smart one of the bunch—and scooped Moe and Curly off the seat to rejoin their siblings before hefting the bags into the flatbed.
There would be no getting out of kitten duty now. Not with Mac grinning the entire drive back.
Chapter Seven
THREE hours gone. Mac checked the cuckoo clock in Mildred’s dining room as she lugged the bag of litter through to the laundry room. Three more hours that she was going to have to spend in Jared’s company. For so long she’d tried to forget about the guy and now here he was, staring her in the face.
Testing her resolve.
Why’d there have to be kittens? Why’d she have to care that there were kittens? Why couldn’t Jared have broken the other leg instead so he could drive himself and the kittens to the vet without her?
Why’d he have to be so endearingly inept when it came to kittens?
Karma. The universe was paying her back for outplaying her brothers at poker.
She slid the heavy bag the last five feet, praying there wasn’t a loose floorboard or rogue splinter on the hardwood, but she just couldn’t carry this thing any farther.
She made it into the laundry room and propped the bag in the corner, then wiped her forehead and headed back out to get the litter box. Three litter boxes, actually. Dr. Bingham had suggested they get two full-sized ones for when the kittens got bigger, since they could be finicky about their toileting habits, and one low-rise one for them to use until they were big enough to climb into the others.
She put the litter-catch mat down, then set the boxes on it like a row of kitty townhouses. Sadly, there was very little room to do the laundry now. But since Jared was the only one staying here, how much laundry could he have?
Unless he has someone stay over.
She wasn’t going there. Jared’s love life was not something she wanted to think about.
“You need help in there?”
Why did he persist in asking if she needed help? Did he still see her as Liam’s kid sister who needed rescuing every time he was around?
If he only knew that he was the reason she’d been such a mess back then. She hadn’t been able to think straight when he showed up.
If she could tell Mac-Then what Mac-Now knew, this situation would be a lot different.
But hindsight didn’t do her one iota of good. Speaking of . . . “No, I’m good.” And she would be if she didn’t keep picturing the concentration on his face when Dr. Bingham had been teaching him what to do. Or if his gaze hadn’t darted to the kittens every couple of seconds. Or if he hadn’t snuck in some quick petting when he’d thought she wasn’t looking.
She’d been so used to Jared tormenting her that she’d rarely seen this tender side of him.
He was standing beside the sink when she walked back into the kitchen, exactly the spot she needed to go.
She was starting to get the warm-and-fuzzies for him. All on account of those darn kittens. Oldest trick in the book.
But Jared never played by the book. And he certainly wasn’t playing now. He’d made his disdain for her very clear on more than one occasion. Those warm-and-fuzzies were solely figments of her imagination.
Mac strode over, turned on the faucet, and squirted some soap onto her hands to wash the litter off. “What’d you do with them?”
Keep the conversation on the kittens. That was a safe subject.
Then again, she’d thought heading upstairs earlier would be safe, given that Jared was injured, so that showed what she knew. Kittens, kisses . . .
Great. Now she was thinking about that kiss again.
She caught herself looking at his lips.
Then she caught him catching her looking at his lips.
Those lips twisted into a smile. “What do you want me to do with them?”
He wasn’t talking about kittens.
And she didn’t like that he was laughing at her. Oh, not outright, but it was there. She knew because she’d been the recipient of his mocking laughter too many times not to know it when she saw it.
Well she was a big girl now and no longer love-struck. She could give as well as she got.
She leaned closer. Licked her lips. Let him think what he wanted about that. “What should you do with them?” She flicked her tongue over her lips again and lowered her voice almost to a purr. “Feed them.” She tilted her head up. “Cuddle them.” She nodded him closer. “Pet them.”
He sucked in a deep breath.
She was trying so hard not to smile as she leaned even closer and whispered, “Then put their butts in the litter box.”
She shook the water from her hands and refrained from tossing her ponytail over her shoulder, but she glanced at him as she walked out of the room. Let him see what it felt like to want. She knew all about it.
* * *
IT took Jared a couple of seconds to get his breathing back in gear. Teasing him like that . . .
He’d thought she was over her crush, but then he’d caught her looking at his lips and, well, he’d looked at hers.
And remembered what they’d tasted like.
He shouldn’t have kissed her. He should have kept his damn curiosity to himself and used the childhood memories of her as a shield.
“Uh, Jared?” Mac called down from upstairs. “The kittens need you.”
He exhaled. The kittens were mewing.
“I hear them.” He shoved himself off the counter, stuck a crutch under each arm, and headed into the front room.
The kittens hadn’t waited for the litter box.
Man, what was in that formula?
He decided against picking up the hat box, worried that the now-wet bottom would fall out, and instead picked up each kitten, gathered the hem of his shirt, and stuck it in his mouth, using it as a basket. Unfortunately, it gave him a way-too-up-close-and-personal experience with the kittens’ messy paws as h
e headed back into the kitchen with a shirt that was now toast.
Back at the sink—a big farmhouse style one with sides as high as skyscrapers to these little guys—Jared set each one on paper towels he layered over the porcelain. It wasn’t the most hygienic place to put them, but then hygiene had pretty much flown out the window since Mac had found them.
He was going to have to wash these little things. He sure hoped kittens were bathe-able.
Then the gray one slugged his white brother over the head, leaving behind a very distinctive—and stinky—paw print on his brother’s pristine fur, so they were going to be bathe-able whether they liked it or not.
He hiked his own ruined shirt over his head and used it to line the sink.
The little curiosity-seekers were inspecting the walls of their temporary home, leaving tiny, not-so-nice paw prints all over the place. They weren’t very steady on their legs; the vet had said that’d come with age and she’d guessed these were about three to four weeks old. They’d been well fed, so the mother had probably had her accident last night at the latest. There was a plus in there somewhere for Jared; at least the kittens weren’t hovering on the edge of starvation for him to bring back to life, but the downside was that he still had to keep them alive.
The black one, however, was hovering on the edge of the sink.
Jared plucked him—her, actually—off the rim and set her back into the middle of the sink, then turned on the water to let the bathing commence—
Holy hell! Four kittens moved faster than he’d ever thought they could, each one scrambling to get out of the sink. The black one actually made it this time and was heading over the edge, right to the floor.
Jared scooped her up, then rounded up the others, hugging them to his chest as they clawed their way up under his chin, leaving little bloody claw marks the entire way.
“That’s a good look on you.”
Of course Mac would be standing in the doorway, witnessing him at his worst. He didn’t have a leg to stand on in that department—oops. Not a good cliché to use.