Season of Wonder

by RaeAnne Thayne

  She focused on checking the ears of the little dog, gave him one more scratch and handed him back to Ruben. “That should do it. A clean bill of health. They seem to be two happy, well-adjusted dogs. You obviously take good care of them.”

  He patted both dogs with an affectionate smile that did nothing to ease her nerves.

  “My dad taught me well. I spent most of my youth helping out here at the clinic—cleaning cages, brushing coats, walking the occasional overnight boarder. Whatever grunt work he needed. He made all of us help.”

  “I can think of worse ways to earn a dime,” she said.

  The chance to work with animals would have been a dream opportunity for her, back when she had few bright spots in her world. Besides that, she considered his father one of the sweetest people she had ever met.

  “So can I. I always loved animals.”

  She had to wonder why he didn’t follow in his father’s footsteps and become a vet. None of his three siblings had made that choice, either. If any of them had, she probably wouldn’t be here right now, as Frank Morales probably would have handed down his thriving practice to his own progeny.

  Not that it was any of her business. Ruben certainly could follow any career path he wanted—as long as that path took him far away from her.

  “Give me a moment to grab those medications and I’ll be right back.”

  “No rush.”

  Out in the hall, she closed the door behind her and drew in a deep breath.

  Get a grip, she chided herself. He’s just a hot-looking dude. Heaven knows, you’ve had more than enough experience with those to last a lifetime.

  She went to the well-stocked medication dispensary, found what she needed and returned to the exam room.

  Outside the door, she paused for only a moment to gather her composure before pushing it open. “Here are the pills for Ollie’s nerves and a refill for Yukon’s eye drops,” she said briskly. “Let me know if you have any questions—though if you do, you can certainly ask your father.”

  “Thanks.” As he took the medication from her, his hands brushed hers again and sent a little spark of awareness shivering through her.

  Oh, come on. This was ridiculous.

  She was probably imagining the way his gaze sharpened, as if he had felt something odd, too.

  “I can show you out. We’re shorthanded today since the veterinary tech and the receptionist both needed to leave early.”

  “No problem. That’s what I get for scheduling the last appointment of the day—though, again, I spent most of my youth here. I think we can find our way.”

  “It’s fine. I’ll show you out.” She stood outside the door while he gathered the dogs’ leashes, then led the way toward the front office.

  * * *

  After three months, Ruben still couldn’t get a bead on Dr. Daniela Capelli.

  His next-door neighbor still seemed a complete enigma to him. By all reports from his father, she was a dedicated, earnest new veterinarian with a knack for solving difficult medical mysteries and a willingness to work hard. She seemed like a warm and loving mother, at least from the few times he had seen her interactions with her two girls, the uniquely named teenager Silver—who had, paradoxically, purple hair—and the sweet-as-Christmas-toffee Mia, who was probably about six.

  He also couldn’t deny she was beautiful, with slender features, striking green eyes, dark, glossy hair and a dusky skin tone that proclaimed her Italian heritage—as if her name didn’t do the trick first.

  He actually liked the trace of New York accent that slipped into her speech at times. It fit her somehow, in a way he couldn’t explain. Despite that, he couldn’t deny that the few times he had interacted with more than a wave in passing, she was brusque, prickly and sometimes downright distant.

  He had certainly had easier neighbors.

  His father adored her and wouldn’t listen to a negative thing about her.

  She hasn’t had an easy time of things but she’s a fighter. Hardworking and eager to learn, Frank had said the other night when Ruben asked how things were working out, now that Dani and her girls had been in town a few months. You just have to get to know her.

  Frank apparently didn’t see how diligently Dani Capelli worked to keep anyone else from doing just that.

  She wasn’t unfriendly, only distant. She kept herself to herself. It was a phrase his mother might use, though Myra Morales seemed instantly fond of Dani and her girls.

  Did Dani have any idea how fascinated the people of Haven Point were with these new arrivals in their midst?

  Or maybe that was just him.

  As he followed her down the hall in her white lab coat, his dogs behaving themselves for once, Ruben told himself to forget about his stupid attraction to her.

  Sure, he might be ready to settle down and would like to have someone in his life, but he wasn’t at all sure if he had the time or energy for that someone to be a woman with so many secrets in her eyes, one who seemed to face the world with her chin up and her fists out, ready to take on any threats.

  When they walked into the clinic waiting room, they found her two girls there. The older one was texting on her phone while her sister did somersaults around the room.

  Dani stopped in the doorway and seemed to swallow an exasperated sound. “Mia, honey, you’re going to have dog hair all over you.”

  “I’m a snowball rolling down the hill,” the girl said. “Can’t you see me getting bigger and bigger and bigger.”

  “You’re such a dorkupine,” her sister said, barely looking up from her phone.

  “I’m a dorkupine snowball,” Mia retorted.

  “You’re a snowball who is going to be covered in dog hair,” Dani said. “Come on, honey. Get up.”

  He could tell the moment the little girl spotted him and his dogs coming into the area behind her mother. She went still and then slowly rose to her feet, features shifting from gleeful to nervous.

  Why was she so afraid of him?

  “You make a very good snowball,” he said, pitching his voice low and calm as his father had taught him to do with all skittish creatures. “I haven’t seen anybody somersault that well in a long time.”

  She moved to her mother’s side and buried her face in Dani’s white coat—though he didn’t miss the way she reached down to pet Ollie on her way.

  “Hey again, Silver.”

  He knew the older girl from the middle school, where he served as the resource officer a few hours a week. He made it a point to learn all the students’ names and tried to talk to them individually when he had the chance, in hopes that if they had a problem at home or knew of something potentially troublesome for the school, they would feel comfortable coming to him.

  He had the impression that Silver was like her mother in many ways. Reserved, wary, slow to trust. It made him wonder just who had hurt them.

  “How are things?” he asked her now.

  For just an instant, he thought he saw sadness flicker in her gaze before she turned back to her phone with a shrug. “Fine, I guess.”

  “Are you guys ready for Christmas? It’s your first one here in Idaho. A little different from New York, isn’t it?”

  “How should we know? We haven’t lived in the city for, like, four years.”

  Dani sent her daughter a look at her tone, which seemed to border on disrespectful. “I’ve been in vet school in Boston the last four years,” she explained.

  “Boston. Then you’re used to snow and cold. We’re known for our beautiful winters around here. The lake is simply stunning in wintertime.”

  Mia tugged on her mother’s coat and when Dani bent down, she whispered something to her.

  “You can ask him,” Dani said calmly, gesturing to Ruben.

  Mia shook her head and buried her face again and after a moment, Dani sighed. “Sh
e wonders if it’s possible to ice-skate on Lake Haven. We watched the most recent Olympics and she became a little obsessed.”

  “You could say that,” Silver said. “She skated around the house in her stocking feet all day long for weeks. A dorkupine on ice.”

  “You can’t skate on the lake, I’m afraid,” Ruben answered. “Because of the underground hot springs that feed into it at various points, Lake Haven rarely freezes, except sometimes along the edges, when it’s really cold. It’s not really safe for ice skating. But the city creates a skating rink on the tennis courts at Lake View Park every year. The volunteer fire department sprays it down for a few weeks once temperatures get really cold. I saw them out there the other night so it shouldn’t be long before it’s open. Maybe a few more weeks.”

  Mia seemed to lose a little of her shyness at that prospect. She gave him a sideways look from under her mother’s arm and aimed a fleeting smile full of such sweetness that he was instantly smitten.

  “There’s also a great place for sledding up behind the high school. You can’t miss that, either. Oh, and in a few weeks we have the Lights on the Lake Festival. You’ve heard about that, right?”

  They all gave him matching blank stares, making him wonder what was wrong with the Haven Point Helping Hands that they hadn’t immediately dragged Dani into their circle. He would have to talk to Andie Bailey or his sister Angela about it. They always seemed to know what was going on in town.

  “I think some kids at school were talking about that at lunch the other day,” Silver said. “They were sitting at the next table so I didn’t hear the whole thing, though.”

  “Haven Point hosts an annual celebration a week or so before Christmas where all the local boat owners deck out their watercraft from here to Shelter Springs to welcome in the holidays and float between the two towns. There’s music, food and crafts for sale. It’s kind of a big deal around here. I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it.”

  “I’m very busy, with the practice and the girls, Deputy Morales. I don’t have a lot of time for socializing.” Though Dani tried for a lofty look, he thought he caught a hint of vulnerability there.

  She seemed...lonely. That didn’t make a lick of sense. The women in this town could be almost annoying in their efforts to include newcomers in community events. They didn’t give people much of an option, dragging them kicking and screaming into the social scene around town, like it or not.

  “Well, now you know. You really can’t miss the festival. It’s great fun for the whole family.”

  “Thank you for the information. It’s next week, you say?”

  “That’s right. Not this weekend but the one after. The whole thing starts out with the boat parade on Saturday evening, around six.”

  “We’ll put it on our social calendar.”

  “What’s a social calendar?” Mia whispered to her sister, just loud enough for Ruben to hear.

  “It’s a place where you keep track of all your invitations to parties and sleepovers and stuff.”

  “Oh. Why do we need one of those?”

  “Good question.”

  Silver looked glum for just a moment but Dani hugged her, then faced Ruben with a polite, distant smile.

  “Thank you for bringing in Ollie and Yukon. Have a good evening, Deputy Morales.”

  It was a clear dismissal, one he couldn’t ignore. Ruben gathered his dogs’ leashes and headed for the door. “Thank you. See you around. And by around, I mean next door. We kind of can’t miss each other.”

  As he hoped, this made Mia smile a little. Even Silver’s dour expression eased into what almost looked like a smile.

  As he loaded the dogs into the king cab of his pickup truck, Ruben could see Dani turning off lights and straightening up the clinic.

  What was her story? Why had she chosen to come straight from vet school in Boston to set up shop all the way across the country in a small Idaho town?

  He loved his hometown, sure, and fully acknowledged it was a beautiful place to live. It still seemed a jarring cultural and geographic shift from living back east to this little town where the biggest news of the month was a rather corny light parade that people froze their asses off to watch.

  And why did he get the impression the family wasn’t socializing much? One of the reasons most people he knew moved to small towns was a yearning for the kind of connectedness and community a place like Haven Point had in spades. What was the point in moving to a small town if you were going to keep yourself separate from everybody?

  He thought he had seen them at a few things when they first came to Haven Point but since then, Dani seemed to be keeping her little family mostly to themselves. That must be by choice. It was the only explanation that made sense. He couldn’t imagine McKenzie Kilpatrick or Andie Bailey or any of the other Helping Hands excluding her on purpose.

  What was she so nervous about?

  He added another facet to the enigma of his next-door neighbor. He had hoped that he might be able to get a better perspective of her by bringing the dogs in to her for their routine exams. While he had confirmed his father’s belief that she appeared to be an excellent veterinarian, he now had more questions about the woman and her daughters to add to his growing list.

  2

  After a long, difficult day, following a long, difficult week, all Dani wanted was to pop a batch of popcorn, sit on the sofa and watch something light and cheery with her girls for a few hours. As she stood at the kitchen sink of their three-bedroom cottage drying the last of the dishes Silver had washed after school, she thought that what she would really like was a long soak in the tub. By the time her daughters were in bed most nights, she didn’t have enough energy left to even run water in the tub.

  The kitchen was small enough that cleaning it never took long. The house Frank Morales had provided as part of her internship compensation wasn’t big but it was comfortable, with three bedrooms, a living room and a lovely glass-enclosed family room facing the lake, which had become their favorite spot.

  Someday she’d like to have a little bigger house, maybe with an actual dining room, but that would have to wait awhile. She had thousands of dollars in student loans to pay back first. Meantime, this house worked well for their needs.

  Her life could have been easier. Occasionally, she tormented herself by playing the old what-if game, wondering how things might have been different for her and her daughters if she had been able to ignore her conscience and taken money from Tommy.

  If she had accepted the ill-gotten gains her late ex-husband had tried to give for child support, she might have been able to start her professional life as a veterinarian with a clean slate, even with a little nest egg, instead of feeling swallowed by debt. But she would have had to sell her soul in return and she wasn’t willing to do that.

  Yes, she was tired of the constant scrimping and saving and striving, but at least when she finally made her way to bed each night, she could close her eyes with a clear conscience.

  Mostly clear, anyway.

  She set the dish towel over the oven handle to dry and made her way to the family room. Silver was, as usual, on her phone while Mia was doing more somersaults, this time on the carpet, while their ancient little mutt Winky watched from her favorite spot on the floor, blocking the heater vent.

  “Movie night!” Dani said cheerfully. “Who’s ready? I’ll make the popcorn. You two just need to pick a show.”

  “Yay! Movie night. My favorite!” Mia grinned from the floor.

  “I think we should watch a Christmas movie. What do you say? Elf, Grinch, Arthur Christmas or something off the Hallmark Channel.”

  The previous Christmas, during Dani’s rare moments off from school, they had binge-watched movies on the Hallmark Channel. Dani had felt a little world-weary to truly appreciate the sweet happy endings but Silver had adored them.

  I
t had been several months since Silver had been interested in anything sweet. Right around the time she’d dyed her hair and started begging for the tattoo Dani would not let her get until she was eighteen.

  “Elf,” Mia declared without hesitation.

  “Okay. One vote for Elf. What do you think, Sil?”

  “I think you’re going to have to watch without me.” Her daughter rose from the sofa with the long-legged grace she had inherited from her father. “I’ve got to go. Some friends just texted me and they want to hang out.”

  Dani felt her temper flare at Silver’s matter-of-fact tone but worked to keep it contained. “Are you asking me or telling me?”

  Silver’s jaw worked. “Asking, I guess. Can I go hang out with my friends?”

  At thirteen, she seemed to think she didn’t need permission these days for much of anything. Dani had a completely different perspective on the situation.

  “Which friends? And what did they want to do?”

  “Just friends from school,” Silver said, impatience threading through her voice. “Why do you have to know every single detail about my life?”

  “Because I’m your parent and responsible for you. I’m not asking for every detail but I have to know where you’re going and who you will be with. Those are the house rules, kid. You know that.”

  Silver didn’t appear to appreciate the reminder. “I thought you might lighten up a little once we moved to the middle of freaking nowhere. Instead, you’re worse than ever.”

  Oh, Dani so did not want to deal with this tonight. Not after the day she’d had. “You’re going to want to watch your tone and your attitude, miss, unless you would prefer to spend the night in your room instead of with any friends.”

  Her daughter glared for a moment and then, with her quicksilver moods lately, her expression shifted to one of resignation. “Fine. I’m going over to Jenny Turner’s house. She’s in my biology class. She was going to call some other friends so we could watch the latest Marvel movie that just came out. Is that okay with you?”