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,