Kaih’s angular chin lifted, his gaze met Nina’s head-on. “That was some guy who works at the animal park.”
Katie’s eyes narrowed. “And he was here, screaming at me like some deranged lunatic because?”
Ingrid, her face wet with tears, cowered behind Kaih. Her reply bordered on a screech. “He was here because we stole Spanky!”
CHAPTER 5
Katie whirled around, brushing her tangled hair from her face. “You did what?”
Kaih held up a long-fingered hand to quiet the perpetually panicked Ingrid, tucking her behind his back with a protective hand. “I can’t believe I let you talk me into this, Ingrid.”
He sighed long and harsh before he began. “First, we didn’t exactly steal him. Okay, we stole him. He was injured, Doc. At least when we saw him behind the fence he was. You know how Ingrid is. She’s an animal lover just like you. She loses sleep worrying about them. She’d been down at the park, checking on the animals as best she could since the restraining order was placed on us. I told her those binoculars and that lame hat and sunglasses couldn’t be classified as a disguise.” He shook his dark head in disgust. “Whatever. The point is, when I went to investigate what she was so upset about, Spanky had a huge gash in his side. He was bleeding, Doc, and unconscious. We couldn’t leave him like that. We also couldn’t alert anyone inside the park—because, you know—”
“Restraining order,” Katie supplied, her stomach a sea of nervous butterflies as Kaih let his story unfold.
“Restraining order?” Marty chimed in, her poodle lying over her shoulder now, exhausted from the commotion.
Kaih nodded. “Yeah, that. Long story.”
“So long,” Katie said with a tired sigh, biting her lip to fend off the outraged scream she wanted to holler at the top of her lungs at the injustice of anyone in this Podunk town placing a restraining order on her to protect an animal from her sinister clutches.
“Look, Dr. Woods, you know the care those poor animals get is on a par with crap. No one would’ve cared that Spanky was hurt anyway, and Ingrid can be pretty convincing when she’s crying all those big, fat tears and fretting he’ll end up with an infection. So we waited until sundown, and I picked that cheap excuse they call a lock on the gates. Then we ‘borrowed’ one of the animal park’s golf carts, and me and Ingrid’s retarded stoner of an on-again, offagain boyfriend, Clem, hauled him onto the cart and left him on the steps of the clinic. To be sure he wouldn’t wake up while he was in the golf cart, I gave him a tranquilizer. Then we left Clem to watch him while we went and had dinner with you. We knew you’d help him without thinking about the restraining order and Sheriff Glenn, and it was a low-down thing to trick you into doing.”
He glared at Ingrid, letting his dark eyes skim the floor with his guilt. “I did tell her, probably the entire trip back here, we were taking advantage of you and your good heart, but she kept saying you’d want to know, and if I know even a little about you, I know that much is true.”
Katie’s nod was in sharp agreement. Jesus. They knew her well. There was no way she could deny any animal in need of medical attention, restraining orders and the sheriff be damned.
She blew out a trembling breath. Shit. She’d done almost everything in her power to lay low since she’d left the city, but her laylow powers were clearly on the fritz.
She’d done nothing short of take out a billboard with her picture on it to announce that Katie Woods, animal lover-slash-veterinarian, had arrived. “Do you have any idea the kind of trouble we’ll be in when he goes to the sheriff’s office and accuses us of stealing Spanky? We have a restraining order against us, for gravy’s sake. That means we’re not allowed within a hundred feet of the entrance to the animal park.”
“Well, technically, you don’t really have Spanky, now do you?” Casey said, her brown eyes sparkling. “You have a man. A gorgeous, albeit a little dazed man, but still a man.”
Katie liked the way Casey thought. She’d labeled Casey a German shepherd. A quick thinker and always cautious and aware of her surroundings.
“I swear, Dr. Woods, I didn’t know!” Ingrid cried, cutting into Katie’s thoughts, her words jittery and disjointed. “How could I have known he was—a—a—man?”
Katie’s mind raced like someone had hit fast-forward on the button to her brain. “I think the real question here is, does the old man know Spanky’s a man? And if he does, how has he hidden something like that from everyone in town? For that matter, who is he? That certainly wasn’t Seamus Magoo.”
“I’ve only seen him a couple of times, and it was always with Spanky and the other cougars. I don’t know what he does at the animal park,” Kaih said.
Nina cracked her neck, the crunch of her bones popped and snapped. She aimed her gaze at Katie. “Didn’t I fucking tell you there’s always some drama? Never flippin’ fails. I’d bet my newly built-up tolerance to a whole bite of a Twinkie that this is a fuckload bigger than just an old guy looking for his kitty cat.”
Katie tended to believe Nina was right. Yet she chose not to panic. “Well, if he’s in charge of making sure the animals don’t escape, not only could he lose his job but if someone ended up hurt, he could be in much bigger trouble than just the loss of his paycheck. It would make sense he’d be upset.”
Nina cracked her jaw, her skepticism clearly written on her face. “Oh, no, lady. Something else is goin’ down. I don’t know what. I don’t know why. I just know I could smell it on him. He isn’t just afraid he’s going to lose his job because his overgrown kitty escaped and might devour a couple of eight-year-olds and a schnauzer. He said it himself. ‘You don’t know what you’ve done.’ ”
She’d forgotten that fact in the rush of words and panicked yelling. “Speaking of the overgrown kitty, how did Spanky take, you know, the shifting thing?” Katie fought a laugh. It was so wrong to laugh even a little at his undoubted shock and dismay, but if she had to be in this paranormal thing blind, then fair was fair. If he couldn’t remember anything after the show these women put on, it would at least be point of reference.
Marty twirled her hair, setting Muffin on the floor. She scurried to Kaih’s feet and nestled on his work boot. “Well, I don’t want to debase his manhood, because don’t get me wrong, he’s super-duper manly, but he didn’t quite take it the way you did, Dr. Woods. Of course, his circumstances are much different. He can’t remember who he is. Add that to the shock of seeing us shift, and I’m willing to cut him some slack. So I’m not ready to play his ‘girl card’ just yet.”
Wanda nodded with a sheepish wince. “He did squeal. But just a little, and to be fair, Marty did linger over him a little longer for true effect than she might have in an average shift.”
“So he smells good, okay?” Marty defended. “I’m married, not dead. Unlike Dracula.”
“He passed out like a little girl,” Nina supplied with a dry yawn, stretching her arms over her head and cracking her knuckles.
“I’ll have you know, this ‘little girl’ has a limit, and she reached it when the short one of you bunch set my toe on fire with her fingertip.” Spanky drawled, coming out of the examining room, pale and quite obviously shaken, though he squared his broad shoulders like he was preparing to do another round of battle.
Muffin appeared to realize there was a new man in her midst and instantly abandoned the Kaih ship for the Spanky luxury liner. She slipped between his legs and placed a paw on his bare leg.
He chuckled, scooping her up and tucking her under his chin. Katie’s heart picked up the pace at the sight of such a big, hardlooking man cuddling with a poodle. Muffin gave a sigh of girlish contentment, mirroring Marty’s.
Casey patted him hard on the back, making his shoulders jolt forward. “Oh, I did not set your toe on fire. It was just a little warm, big boy. I apologized. I did tell you I have trouble with my aim sometimes. I’m still in the stages of perfecting it.”
He came to stand near Katie, making her cheeks flush and her s
tomach jiggle. Her hope all this jiggling and flushing was simply an onset of the hormonal, perimenopausal variety gave her something to cling to.
She gave him a cursory glance, skimming his body as quickly as she could so as not to be called a jailbait-leering, old hag. “Quite the show, huh? You okay?”
“This is perfectly batty.”
Katie leaned in with a giggle she couldn’t contain. “Don’t say that too loud. The mean, dark-haired one can be touchy, and she has the kind of hearing I thought only the Bionic Woman had.”
“Tell a bloke about it,” was his wry reply. “I make one little off-color remark about Count Chocula, and she’s all teeth and testosterone.”
While the other women talked with one another in a huddle about what to do next, Katie waffled. She couldn’t very well let her only link to this cougar adventure walk out the door with no memory of who he was or why he’d been in the animal park to begin with, but what would she do with him?
How could she explain him to a town full of busybodies just looking to take yet another issue with her? She hadn’t even begun to garner the trust of the folks here in Piney Creek. The slow trickle of patients she’d acquired were only those in dire need.
Should they find out her employees had stolen a cougar, they’d run her out of town on a rail. Her arrival here in Piney Creek was already under severe scrutiny. The town and its people loved the animal park, and they loved Seamus Magoo. He was a portly, red-cheeked man who vaguely resembled Santa Claus, and she’d found out the hard way just how beloved he was to the folks of Piney Creek.
Shortly after her arrival, while eating dinner at the local diner and overhearing how spectacular the new llamas were, Katie’d suggested the animals might not be receiving the proper care they needed. In the end, you’d think she’d suggested old lady Worsham was blowing for cash from the frowns and all the huffing and puffing over plates of chicken-fried steak with white gravy.
Katie rocked back on her feet in thought. “So what to do with you . . .”
Spanky nodded his dark head, muttering out of the side of his mouth, “Indeed.”
“You’ll need a place to stay.”
“Preferably a place that doesn’t have a water bottle and a bowl attached to the side of its bars. I don’t want to be a demanding guest, but even we girls have our lines that cannot be crossed.”
“How are you with animals?”
He cocked his head at the irony of that question. “According to the lot of you, I am one.” Spanky hitched his jaw at Muffin for reference. The little dog stretched her head upward to revel in the rush of his warm breath ruffling over her hair. “How do you suppose I am with them?”
“Sorry. That was a dumb question. You can’t remember how you feel about anything.”
“But your taters. That I can remember,” he said on a sexy chuckle, drawing out the word tater to give it a southern twang.
Katie’s eyes fell to her feet to avoid his direct gaze. Good God, he made her cheeks flush and her heart race. “How do you feel about Muffin right now? Cougars are carnivores, if I’m remembering my training and my days of watching Mutual of Omaha right. Feel the tiniest bit like eating her whole?”
“She’s not my type. I like them much less hairy.”
“How would you know?”
“How would I know what?”
“Whether you like eating pampered poodles, hairy or not?”
Spanky frowned, the deep grooves of his forehead wrinkling. “I don’t know. I can only tell you the moment you suggested it, the very notion of hurting a small, innocent animal—especially one with a pink T-shirt that reads ‘Crazy Human Dog’—was instantly reprehensible.”
“That’s a big word.”
“Which one confused you? Crazy or human?”
Her eyebrow rose at his sarcasm. “Funny. Reprehensible.”
Spanky grinned. “I can haz big words, despite the fact that I’m just days away from my nursery school graduation.”
“Ba-dump-bump,” Katie acknowledged the slight full-on. “I deserved that. So, back to the original question.”
“Which was?”
“How do you feel about working with animals?”
“Does it mean I’ll work with you? You know, because you’re a cougar, of course. That definitely classifies you as an animal.” His words screamed the kind of doubt she understood.
“You’ll work for me until we can figure this thing out. I’m partially responsible for what happened to you today, at least in how you ended up here. I won’t take that lightly.”
He smirked. “I heard. It was vague due to the fact that I was still in the girlish stage of my faint, but I heard most of it. Busy staff you have.”
Katie gazed up into his youthful face with concern. “Did you hear that elderly gentleman when he barged in here? Did you recognize his voice?”
Spanky’s face was blank. “I heard a lot of yelling, but I haven’t a clue who he is.”
No. That would be like asking to wake up and find George Clooney on the pillow next to hers shortly after he’d brought her poached eggs on toast and Earl Grey tea. Her sigh was defeated. “Right. Either way, letting you stay with me isn’t totally altruistic. I need to know what to do next. You have the answer, even if you don’t know you do yet. If you do something crazy like go out there alone, I may never know what’s happened to me and how to learn to cope with it.”
“And we couldn’t have that.”
Her temper flared in a red-hot bolt of tired irritation. “I’m not holding you hostage, but I’d think you’d want to know what’s happened to you, too, and how you got into the animal park as a cougar but left it a fully grown man.”
“You do realize I’m thoroughly unconvinced I did this to you, don’t you?”
Katie bristled, tired and longing to be out of his close proximity and into the comfort of her big bed. “You can leave at any time.” She had the Internet. Who needed a hot stud when the information highway was a costly Verizon bill away? Surely there was information about cougar people.
Surely.
“But who would provide you with endless skate-park fodder?”
Chagrin replaced irritation. “You are very young.”
Spanky paused, but only for a moment. “I couldn’t tell you if I was young, old, or in between. I can’t get a clear picture in my mind of what I look like. I only know when the remark was made, it felt all wrong.”
How horrible to not have an image of yourself in your own mind, even if it was always off by twenty pounds and its boobs were at least a good two inches perkier than your bra said they were. Worse, how horrible to not know your image was smokin’. “Well, there’s nothing a good mirror can’t set straight. I have several in my house. Let’s go play eeny-meeny-miney-mo. Maybe it’ll jar something of value.”
Spanky barked a laugh. “And what will you do with your posse of paranormal?”
Katie looked at the women with concern. Nina’s eyes had grown round with fatigue as she blinked back what she’d called vampire sleep. Wanda’s clear, bright eyes were dull, too, and both Marty’s and Casey’s posture had begun to slump. “This clinic is the bottom floor of an enormous house I share with my aunt Teeny. She’s partially deaf, a little outspoken—okay, a lot outspoken—and probably slept through this entire fiasco. These women came all the way from the city. They’re tired. I’ll ask them to stay here. It’s the least I can do after all they’ve done. If the ladies are willing to double up, you can have a bedroom all to yourself.”
His tone became playfully smoky-seductive and low. “And if they’re not?”
“Well, the answer’s obvious. You can share my bed.”
“Really?”
“No.”
“I have suffered a great many trials and tribulations,” he said, giving her a comically tragic expression. One that made the grooves on either side of his mouth deepen and served to send an unfamiliar flutter of delight along her arms.
For self-preservation, Katie flun
g her hand, her growingheavier-by-the-minute hand, in his rugged face. The ACE bandage Kaih had helped put on it flapped at the edges. “Yeah. Me, too. So either you’re in or you’re out. Your choice. I’m going to go upstairs now to get some extra sheets and ready rooms for everyone. Let me know what you decide to do.”
She began to head toward the back of the clinic to the connecting stairs leading to the bottom floor of her aunt’s when he stopped her by nearly shouting, “Project Runway!”
Katie whirled around. “Come again?”
“Either you’re in or you’re out,” Spanky muttered, then smiled wide and luscious, clearly pleased with himself. “That’s from Project Runway.”
Marty cooed, smiling with a warm fondness directed at Spanky. “He watches Project Runway. I don’t care if he’s only twelve. He’s a well-bred twelve with immaculate taste.”
Wanda nodded, letting go of a yawn while her eyes rolled upward. “Nothing means more than your stamp of approval, Marty. Look, ladies, we’d better see if there’s a Motel Six or something in this town. I don’t think I’ll make it back if I have to drive, and Nina definitely needs to sleep.You all know from experience, if she doesn’t get her eight in some dark closet she turns into Vampire-zilla.”
“You mean she gets worse?” Spanky blurted, then winced at his outspokenness, shoving his hands into the lab coat in amused contrition.
Nina’s head shot up, her eyes pinning Spanky. “Crazy that, eh, Garfield? It gets worse times infinity,” she grunted, her voice weary but still full of the ever-present threat she made everyone aware she imposed.
“Please,” Katie interrupted. “Stay here. It’s the least I can do, and I have plenty of room. It’ll be much more comfortable than the motel in town. Believe me when I tell you, Motel Six is five star compared to the hotel run by Lurch.”
“How lovely of you,” Wanda said. “I, for one, am all in. I’m exhausted, and maybe some sleep is just what the doctor ordered for Spanky. Let’s hope tomorrow he’ll wake up and remember everything. Then we can leave you in his capable hands and still sleep at night.”
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