Buch lesen: «The City Girl and the Country Doctor»

The City Girl

and the

Country Doctor

Christine Flynn

For my wonderful editor, Susan Litman, with thanks for her insights—and for asking me to be part of the crowd on Danbury Way

Special thanks and acknowledgment are given to Christine Flynn for her contribution to the TALK OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD miniseries.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Coming Next Month

Prologue

Every black skirt Rebecca Peters owned lay spread out on her bed as she stood in the closet trying to decide between a sexy little camisole and a more conservative sweater. She was seriously leaning toward conservative when the phone rang.

Still clutching the tops, she glanced at the caller ID on the phone on the nightstand a second before she snatched up the handset.

“Jack. Hi,” she said, holding the phone with her shoulder while she held up her two choices for her date with him. “I was just thinking about you. Did you decide where you want to go for dinner?

“Jack?” she asked after five seconds of dead silence.

“I’m here,” Jack Lever finally replied, hesitation heavy in his tone. “I came by to see you a while ago, but you weren’t home.”

“I was at the printer’s. They didn’t have my copies ready, so I had to wait.”

“Yeah, well, it’s probably better this way, anyhow.”

It was her turn to hesitate. “What’s better?

The faint rushing sound on the other end of the line sounded suspiciously like an uneasy expulsion of breath.

“Jack. You’re a lawyer.” He was also the stepson of the man she thought was her father, which was why she’d wanted to get to know him in the first place. Jack didn’t know that, though. No one did. But her reason for having come to Rosewood was beside the point at the moment. “Words are your business.” Now uneasy herself, she sank to the edge of the bed. “What are you trying to say?”

“That I don’t think it’s fair of me to waste your time,” he finally admitted. “You’re a great girl, Rebecca. But I’ve got a lot going on with work and my kids—”

“—and you don’t have time for a relationship,” she concluded for him. At least, not a relationship with her.

She heard him draw a breath. “Yeah,” came his relieved reply.

She couldn’t believe this was happening. She had only asked the other women on Danbury Way about the widowed father of two because she’d wanted to confirm his background. Never had she intended for Jack to misconstrue her interest and ask her out. Not on a date date, anyway. But one dinner had led to another and now here he was breaking up with her when she hadn’t planned on being attracted to him that way to begin with. All she’d wanted was to get to know him to seek his help meeting Russell Lever, his stepfather. Russell was the reason she’d come to Rosewood. He was her father. At least, she thought he was. Yet, not only had she not met Russell, she was being dumped. Again.

She was back on her feet. “Not a problem.” She absolutely refused to let him know that what he was doing mattered to her in any way. If she possessed any talent at all, it was her ability to appear unfazed by what wounded her. “You take care. Okay?”

“Yeah. Sure. You, too.”

“’Bye, Jack.”

Punching End Call before he could say goodbye himself, she stuck the handset back in its base and turned to gather her clothes.

She didn’t head for her closet, though. Once she’d snatched up everything, she simply stood there, hugging her skirts while hurt slowly spread through her.

For all her bravado, she didn’t feel unfazed at all.

Chapter One

In the front yard of her leased house on Danbury Way, Rebecca took another swipe at the leaves with her rake. She had no idea how many leaves an oak tree could produce, but the one gracing this particular patch of lawn was shedding them by the ton.

She was so not into yard work, but the job had to be done. It also gave her something to do while she forced herself to accept that she, Rebecca Anne Peters, a still-single, twenty-eight-year-old freelance fashion writer who possessed excellent taste in clothes and hideous taste in men, was never going to find the security and happiness all of her friends had found. Most of them, anyway. Angela Schumacher’s life was a bit of a struggle. But her best friends in New York were all now married, engaged or seriously involved and none of those options was ever going to be available to her. What had happened with Jack a few days ago had proved that in spades.

It wasn’t as if she’d fallen in love with the guy, she reminded herself as she attacked the leaves. She’d only liked him. So at least she’d been spared having her heart ripped out and handed back to her. Still, she’d been left feeling totally embarrassed and rejected.

The awful sensation seemed all too familiar. It also brought back the numb, hurt and sick feeling she’d been left to cope with after Jason Cargill had broken up with her six months ago. She’d spent two years dreaming of a future with that man only to have him inform her on their way home from a movie that they were over. Two months to the day he’d said he had never really loved her, he had married someone else.

She hated that she could still feel the painful sting of their ugly split. She hated even more that the awful sense of rejection she’d been living with was once again so acute.

Golden leaves scattered and crunched as she waded through them in her Ralph Lauren riding boots—the only boots she owned with a heel that wouldn’t sink into the grass—to start another pile. Rake in hand, she loosened the pumpkin cashmere scarf that matched her V-necked sweater and the warp thread in the brown plaid Burberry jacket she wore with her designer jeans and attacked the dead vegetation with renewed vigor.

The breakup with Jason had been like the starting bell of a downhill race into a single woman’s worst nightmare. Right on the heels of his betrayal had come the gorgeous weddings of two of her best friends and the birth of another friend’s beautiful baby girl. She’d been thrilled for them all. At least, she’d wanted to be, but each event had been an in-her-face reminder of all that she had always wanted so badly herself.

She figured she’d hit bottom when her apartment had been broken into and her CD player and television had been stolen. With her insurance about to go up again and her personal life going nowhere, she’d taken the break-in as a sign to get the heck out of Dodge—or midtown Manhattan, anyway—and make a new beginning for herself.

Finding her father had seemed the perfect place to start. If she could just meet him, she might finally have the family and security she’d never had growing up with just her mom. Then, she’d found herself actually getting interested in his stepson….

She forced her mental mutterings to an abrupt halt. She would not go there again. The only thing that mattered was that she had now been dumped twice in a row. Next time, if there ever was a next time, she would be the dumper. Not the dumpee.

Her determination gave way to a disheartened sigh as she looked from the charming two-story colonial she’d leased to the other impeccably neat homes in the cul-de-sac. Resolving to take the upper hand was all well and good. In the meantime, however, she was stuck alone in the suburbs in a too-big house with two hairy cats who hated her, two months left on her lease and not a clue what to do next. Unlike her neighbors, she had no kids, no husband and no interest in the state of her lawn. With so little in common with them, it was as clear as the early November sky that she didn’t belong here, either.

The sharp bark of a dog had her jerking around to look behind her. That excited sound also put an end to her little pity party when she noticed one of the little fur balls in her charge atop one of the brick columns flanking Carly Alderson’s long driveway.

She’d had no idea that the cat had escaped. Whenever she left the house, she always checked to make sure the little monsters, who’d come as a condition of the lease, weren’t anywhere near the door. Obviously, as preoccupied as she’d been with her totally messed-up life, she’d overlooked that precaution when she’d come out a while ago.

Of more concern than her lapse, however, was the cat’s behavior. It had its back arched and was hissing at Molly and Adam Shibb’s young black Labrador. Elmer, the dog, kept barking, his tail wagging as if he thought the racket might somehow convince the cat to come down and play.

It occurred to Rebecca that with Adam at work and Molly at her new prenatal yoga class, the puppy shouldn’t be out, either. Aware of his newly discovered talent for digging, and thinking he must have dug himself right out of the backyard, she turned to prop her rake against the trunk of the oak. Even as she did, she heard the dog’s bark change pitch and the cat screech.

She had no idea what had happened, but she’d no sooner turned back than she noticed that the cat was no longer atop its perch. It was part of the yipping, screeching tangle of fur at its base.

Adrenaline had barely turned the beat of her heart into sickening thuds when Elmer gave a shake that somehow sent the cat flying. As if landing on the run, the tabby raced in a streak of black-and-silver fur through the piles of leaves and up the rose trellis at the other end of the house.

Elmer had already turned tail and scrambled for home, the house on the other side of Carly’s mansionlike place. She could see his little butt wiggling as he shimmied himself under the fence near the front gate and back into the safety of his yard.

The breath she’d held had barely left her lungs before she darted through the leaves herself to peer up at the frightened feline clinging to the top of the latticework.

Her stomach gave a sick little lurch. On a good day, animals of any variety simply made her uneasy. One hissing at her with blood leaking down the side of its face flat-out frightened her.

Reminding herself that she was bigger than he was didn’t make her any braver.

She eyed the cat. The cat eyed her back. She couldn’t tell if this one was Columbus or if it was Magellan. Since she’d never been able to tell the cats apart, she also didn’t know which of the two had peed in one of her pink Prada pumps. But even if this one was the culprit, she couldn’t let him stay there and bleed.

The viney vegetation had turned brown with the frosts. Gingerly pushing the crackling foliage back so she wouldn’t get stuck on its thorns, she hooked one foot on the bottom rung of the wrought iron trellis and inched herself up. The cat inched exactly that much higher.

“You are not dying on my watch.” You little brat, she would have added, but she was too busy avoiding rose thorns to bother.

The cat ran out of trellis. He had nowhere else to go that didn’t involve a leap.

Rebecca had no desire to chase him all over the neighborhood. Catching him around the middle before he could spring over her head, she slammed the ten pounds of struggling fur against her chest, jumped at his indignant screech and promptly lost her balance. Had she not still had hold of the trellis with her other hand and somehow managed to turn and come to a stop with her back against the house, she would have landed with him in a heap in the flower bed.

Her reward for the rescue was the sharp sting of claws as they scraped the side of her neck.

Sucking in a breath, she flipped the cat around paws-out to avoid getting slashed again and hurried through the open garage and into the house.

Multitasking came as naturally to Rebecca as breathing. She’d been known to conduct a phone interview while scanning photo proofs for another article and still manage to slip a note with her sandwich preference to whoever was making a deli run for lunch. In an animal emergency, however, she was a tad out of her element.

Having no clue what she could do for the mewling cat on her own, she stuffed him and a towel into the carrier she’d noticed in the laundry room, made sure the other cat was inside and hurried into the garage. After shoving the carrier onto the passenger seat of her sporty little leased coupe, she backed onto the street and parked in front of Molly and Adam’s place.

A ten-inch pot of mums sat on the corner of their porch. Leaving the engine running, she grabbed the pot and ran to where the dog had dug the hole under the fence, shoved the pot into the hole to thwart another escape and hurried back to her car.

The Turners, who owned the house she currently resided in, had left a list of emergency numbers pinned to the kitchen bulletin board. At the top of the list had been the name, number and address of their veterinarian in the strip mall across from Fulton’s Hardware Store. Having ripped the list from the board on her way out, she headed for the animal clinic, using her cell phone on the way to tell them she was bringing in a cat that had been in a fight with a dog and was bleeding all over the place.

Within minutes she’d pulled into one of the three empty spaces near the All Creatures Animal Clinic, pushed her way through the door with the carrier and been ushered into an exam room by an abnormally calm, middle-aged veterinarian’s assistant wearing a pastel paw-print scrub top.

Rebecca was afraid she’d sounded every bit as panicked as she felt on the phone. That panic fed a high-energy state that was pretty much normal for her, anyway, but she didn’t know if it was her anxiety or because she’d mentioned blood that the woman immediately took the carrier from her. She barely had a chance to tell the kind-looking, copper-haired woman that she’d gotten there as quickly as she could before the assistant removed the still-displeased animal from the carrier and set him and the crimson-spattered towel on the exam table protruding from the middle of the wall.

“I didn’t see exactly what happened. I mean, I saw the cat on the column and the dog barking at it,” she explained to the woman as someone else entered the room behind her. “But I turned away for barely a second and all of sudden there was all this noise, then the cat was flying one way and the dog ran the other.”

“The dog had the cat in its mouth?”

The rich, deep voice had her glancing toward the man who’d stopped on the other side of the table. Seeing nothing but a white lab coat, she jerked her eyes past his broad shoulders to the lean, carved lines of his face. Dark, neatly trimmed hair brushed his broad brow. Intense blue eyes barely met hers before returning to his patient.

She was definitely upset. She barely noticed that Joe Hudson, DVM, according to the embroidery above his pocket, was drop-dead gorgeous. All that really registered was how gentle he was as his assistant held the animal and he ran his hands over the cat’s little body.

“I don’t know,” Rebecca replied, watching his long, lean fingers move expertly over fur. He wasn’t wearing a ring. She didn’t notice a tan line, either. “I guess he must have, to toss him like that.” She crossed her arms, tightened her hold. “It all happened so fast.”

“So the dog shook it,” he concluded, holding the cat’s head between his hands to look at its eyes. “How big was the dog?”

“Three times the size of the cat. Maybe four. Elmer’s a puppy, but he’s big already. Can you save him? The cat, I mean? Please?” she begged, struck by his incredible gentleness with the animal. “Like I told the woman I talked to on the phone, he’s not mine. He’s the Turners’. I don’t even know if it’s Columbus or Magellan,” she admitted, her agitation rising in direct proportion to how much the cat had calmed. It was getting too weak to move. She was sure of it. “I can never tell them apart. They’re the same color and the same size and their markings all look the same, so it’s impossible to tell which is which.”

“Why do you have the Turners’ cats?”

“Because I’m leasing their house while they’re in Europe. They’ve been gone for four months and have two to go. Taking care of the cats was part of the deal because they thought they’d be happier in their own environment. They said that as long as I kept their litter box clean and their food and water dishes filled they’d practically take care of themselves, so I’ve been doing that, but I really don’t know anything about animals at all because I’ve never had a pet,” she explained without taking a breath. “The buildings I’ve lived in wouldn’t have allowed them anyway,” she went on, uncrossing her arms, crossing them again. “I’ve only seen cats in alleys before and the only dogs I’ve ever been exposed to are the ones I’ve seen with dog-walkers in Manhattan.”

Joe’s first concern was to identify the source of the blood. Next was to check for telltale signs of internal injury or broken bones. The cursory skim of his hands over the cat’s body revealed nothing alarming. The feline’s eyes were bright and clear, the color of his tongue good. The majority, if not all, of the bleeding also seemed to be coming from its head, specifically the ear missing its tip.

His second order of business was to calm the incredibly attractive and stylish brunette who reminded him of a gnat on caffeine. She talked a mile a minute and her body language was all over the place. What it said—even more than how anxious she was about the cat—was that she was not at all comfortable in her present surroundings. Given what she’d just admitted about her nearly nonexistent experience with animals, he’d be willing to bet his veterinary degree that she wasn’t comfortable with the cat, either.

Not quite sure what to make of her, he spoke in the same easy tone he used to calm agitated animals. “Are you afraid of this little guy?”

She wore her shining, coffee-brown hair skimmed back in a low, tight ponytail. Her skin looked flawless. Subtle shades of gray eye shadow darkened her deep blue eyes. But it was her mouth that had his attention. Glossy and full, her lips fairly begged to be kissed.

Her mouth had opened to respond to his question, only to snap closed. Looking as if she didn’t want to admit to fearing anything, she lifted one slender shoulder in a shrug. “I don’t trust anything I can’t reason with.”

“Does that include small children?”

“Those I can handle. I think. I haven’t spent much time with the under-two set, but I hope for the opportunity someday. After I find a husband,” she qualified. If that ever happens, she added to herself. “In the meantime, what about the cat? He’s not going into shock or anything, is he?”

Joe stifled a smile. “He’ll be fine,” he assured her. “I’ll check him more thoroughly, but I really think he just needs his ear cauterized. And probably a couple of stitches. He may have nicked a vein.” That would be where most of the blood was coming from. Cartilage didn’t bleed much.

“Take him in and get him ready, will you, Tracy?” he asked the redhead wearing the paw prints. “I’ll be right there.”

With the efficiency of someone accustomed to dealing with anxious, agitated or otherwise unhappy animals, his assistant wrapped the towel around the cat to keep him immobile and tucked him under her arm like a football.

“He really will be fine,” she assured Rebecca with a smile, and hurried through the door with the squeak of athletic shoes on the shiny beige tiles.

“By the way,” came the deep voice from behind her, “that one is Columbus. With half of his ear gone, it should be easier now to tell him from Magellan.”

The vet had moved to the sink behind him and turned on the water. “It won’t take long to take care of him. But before that,” he continued, washing his hands, “let’s take a look at you.”

“Me?”

“Your neck. He got you good.”

Rebecca blinked at the strong lines of his profile as she touched the scratch.

“How did you catch him? Just curious,” he explained, drying his hands on paper towels. The open shelves above him held a small array of supplies. Grabbing a couple of items, he set them on the table between them. “Cats can be pretty quick.”

“I caught him at the top of the rose trellis. There was nowhere else for him to go.”

She had the impression of powerful muscles beneath his lab coat as she watched him walk over to her. Lean, hard muscle that came from hours pumping iron in a gym. Or working outdoors. She couldn’t honestly say she’d ever known a man who’d worked out that way, but the thought seemed more suited to him as he stopped in front of her.

She figured him to be a little over five feet, ten inches. At five feet six herself, and with the two-inch heels on her boots, she barely had to look up at him.

Catching her chin with his fingers, he tipped her head. “This definitely looks more like cat claws than thorns. Did he get you anywhere else?”

She swallowed. Hard. He smelled of antiseptic soap and a decidedly male aftershave she couldn’t begin to identify. All she knew was that it was something masculine. And warm. Like the amazingly gentle feel of his fingers as he touched them to the side of her neck.

“It was. Is.” She breathed out. “And no.”

Dropping his hand, he reached for a small white packet. “What’s your name?”

“Rebecca. Peters,” she added, in case he needed it for his records or something.

“Okay, Rebecca Peters. This is going to sting.”

The scent of antiseptic had barely reached her nostrils when she felt something cold touch just under her ear and curve toward her collarbone. An instant later, the sensation turned to burning.

She sucked in a breath.

“Ow!”

“Sorry,” he murmured, only to quickly repeat the process. “But I warned you.”

“Barely.” The burning sensation suddenly didn’t seem so acute. Or, maybe, she was just more aware of his fingers on her neck as he narrowed his eyes at the three parallel scratches. “Isn’t that for animals?”

“Not necessarily.”

Apparently satisfied with what he saw, he tossed the pad to the table. Without another word, he picked up a tube of antibiotic cream and dabbed it over the five-inch-long scratch.

“Here,” he said, handing the tube to her when he was finished. The little lines at the corners of his eyes deepened with his smile. “Put that on a couple of times a day. I’m going to go save the Turners’ cat. You can either wait or come back in an hour.”

He didn’t stick around to see what she decided to do. Leaving her staring at the tube in her palm, he simply walked out the open door.

Rebecca dropped the tube into her purse. She would come back, she decided, partly because, if she stayed, she’d have to wait in the waiting room with a huge Saint Bernard and some sort of rodent in a cage. But mostly because she didn’t want to sit there thinking about Joe Hudson’s incredible gentleness, the heat she’d felt when he’d touched her and, now that she knew the cat wasn’t hurt all that badly, how helpless he must think her for panicking when panicking wasn’t really like her at all. At least, it hadn’t been.

Hating how inept she felt on top of everything else, she decided she needed a latte, anyway.

Exactly one hour and one tall, double, skinny, sugar-free vanilla latte later, she walked back into the clinic to find the previous occupants of the reception area no longer there. They had been replaced by an elderly gentleman with a cat who was conversing with a woman who bore a strong resemblance to the Pekingese in her lap.

The veterinarian’s assistants apparently doubled as receptionists. This one, a perky blonde wearing a wide wedding band and a scrub top sporting kittens stood behind the counter looking up something on the computer. The moment the woman saw Rebecca, her glance skimmed from her scarf to her boots. An instant later, she smiled.

Apparently, she already knew who she was.

“Columbus did fine,” she said, over the ring of the phone. “But Doctor is with another patient. It will be a few minutes.”

With her smile still in place, she answered the call, leaving Rebecca to turn to the small waiting room.

Sitting wasn’t something Rebecca did well when she felt anxious or uncertain. Caught between a vague unease at the prospect of seeing Joe Hudson again and a more pronounced uncertainty over what nursing skills would be required to tend the injured cat, she was feeling a little of both.

Having already let alarm get the better of her that day, she wasn’t about to let anyone around her know she now felt anything less than in total control. She couldn’t remember how old she’d been when her mom had first started pounding in the lesson, but having grown up in the city, she’d learned early on that the key to survival was to mask any sign of weakness.

That didn’t mean she never felt vulnerable. She just rarely let the world know it. Especially on the street. Or when it came to her work, cutthroat as the fashion business could be. Or to men. With her self-confidence with that particular species in the subbasement at the moment, she felt a particular need for guard where they were concerned.

Since pacing off her internal energy wasn’t practical in the small, occupied space, she hiked the strap of her oversize bag higher on her shoulder and wandered over to peruse a collection of photographs lining the far wall.

The photos had caught her attention mostly because the beautifully framed and photographed scenes seemed so out of place in a room with posters of cartoon pets on the walls and brochures about heartworm medication on the counter. The quality of the incredible pictures of waterfalls, canyons, sheer cliffs and meadows of deer rivaled what she’d seen at professional showings in New York.

“Doctor Hudson took those,” she heard his assistant say. “He’s quite the outdoorsman, you know.”

Rebecca’s response was a smile. She hadn’t known that, though she supposed she should have guessed as much. There was a ruggedness about the good doctor that the men she’d known couldn’t have achieved no matter how dark the facial shadow they grew or how much flannel and denim they wore. That ruggedness wasn’t overt, though. It wasn’t rough or harsh or hard. It was more a solid, sturdy sort of masculine strength that she wasn’t terribly familiar with at all.

She turned back to study the collection. Behind her, she could hear movement and voices as someone entered the reception area to pay his bill. Still marveling at Joe Hudson’s work, it was a moment before she became aware of another set of footsteps. Turning, she saw the man whose work she was admiring give her an easy smile.

He carried the cat in one arm. In his other hand was the carrier he sat at the far end of the reception counter, out of the way of the teenager stuffing his receipt into his back pocket. A white bandage had been wrapped around the cat’s head, leaving only his little face and his right ear exposed. He was clearly too drugged to care that he also wore a white plastic collar that vaguely resembled a funnel.

Concern joined the uncertainty she already felt about her nonexistent veterinary nursing skills.

“It looks worse than it is,” the doctor assured her. “The actual wound is only about an inch and a half long. The collar will keep him from pawing the bandage off and pulling out the stitches.”

She wasn’t particularly relieved by that news. If anything, she felt as if she were bracing herself as he held out the cat. Holding her breath, she gingerly took Columbus from him. When the infinitely more manageable animal did nothing but lie limply in her arms, she released that breath, gave the man curiously watching her a tentative smile and nodded toward the pictures behind her.

“You have real talent,” she told him, over the murmurs of the other conversations. “For photography,” she clarified, in case he thought she was referring to his healing skills, though he clearly had talent there, too. “Those are beautiful.”

Joe’s interest in her underwent a subtle shift. She seemed marginally calmer than she had a while ago. And while she still didn’t look terribly comfortable with the animal she held, the absent way she stroked its neck as she cuddled it spoke of nurturing instincts she apparently didn’t even know she had.

“I took those on hikes around here. Except for the cliff shot. That was a climb in New Hampshire,” he told her. “Are you into climbing?”

“I’m not much for dangling over cliffs,” she admitted, managing not to sound totally horrified at the thought. “Actually, I’m not much of a nature person at all. The closest I’ve come to the wilds was a rock concert in Central Park.”

“So you’re into photography, then?”

“Not that, either. Not me, personally, I mean. I’ve just worked with a lot of photographers and recognize quality when I see it.”

“You’re a model.”

She couldn’t help but smile at his conclusion. Feeling flattered, she also felt a funny flutter in her stomach when he smiled back. “No, but thank you. I worked at a fashion magazine in New York, so I’ve worked with a lot of photographers. Still do, actually. I’m just freelancing now.”

His glance fell to her mouth. Her own faltered as her heart bumped her ribs.

The ringing of the phone had stopped. So had the conversation taking place between the Pekingese lady and the elderly man with the cat.

It was only then that Rebecca realized how close she and the doctor were standing, and that everyone but the animals was staring at them.

Clearing her throat, she took a step back.

“You should put the cat in the carrier,” he said, sounding far less self-conscious than she felt having been so totally absorbed in their conversation. “Here.”