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CHAPTER ONE

emma

Friday Afternoon

Willow Creek, Louisiana

W hat happened to the beep-beep-beep of the feline heart monitor?

I needed the sound to make the last hour worth it… or… or…

I refused to think about it, to even consider losing the tabby on my table. This veterinary surgical space was my kingdom, and I was the queen. The last hour had gone perfectly. What the hell!

After the last suture, the room had gone deathly quiet. The scent of antiseptic still hung heavily in the air, and a minimal amount of blood streaked the formerly sterile pads beneath my short-haired patient with the kink in his tail.

My frown grew as I snipped the suture, and I glanced at the sensor taped to a shaved spot on Sully-Boy’s front leg, the striped barn cat on my exam table. The circular plastic end held on. So, if it was still attached…

A half second stretched into a slow-motion forever.

“There’s no heartbeat?” I demanded, framing it as a question, not believing a successful surgery was going to end like this. The surgical mask slightly muffled my voice. “No heartbeat?”

Riley, my red-headed surgical nursing assistant, chewed her bottom lip as she checked the lead, the cord, and the monitor. Finally, her gaze jumped from me to the monitor and back to me. “Confirmed.”

No, no, no. Not today. I wouldn’t let it happen.

I began compressions on the small chest while sending a silent prayer into the universe. If anyone’s listening, don’t make me tell her that her fur-buddy didn’t make it. Give him back to her.

The image of Callie, the ten-year-old girl in the waiting room, flashed in my head.

Her mother would forgive me, but the girl…

The tendon repair surgery on the cat’s rear leg had gone well.

I’d reconnected the mangled tendon in the feline leg easily and closed the site. What had sent Sully-Boy into arrest?

“Get the crash cart. Prep the emergency injection.”

“Yes, okay,” Riley said. This was her first time dealing with an actual patient in distress, but we’d trained for this. “Okay, okay, okay.” She started to mutter instructions to herself.

I gritted my teeth. The body didn’t move on its own, no up and down of the tomcat’s chest to put me at ease, and I couldn’t stop the spreading panic in the pit of my stomach. The tiny barn tiger wasn’t responding.

I risked another look at my nursing assistant. Her face was already stricken as she worked, and tears had already formed in the corners of her eyes.

In my brain, I replayed Callie’s handing of Sully-Boy over, her eyes earnest and trusting me to make her best friend well. The cat had gotten tangled in a barbed-wire fence. The rural tomcat always managed to escape his house, and he visited me nearly once every quarter.

I wouldn’t go back to the waiting room with the bad news.

Gently, I pressed up and down on the feline’s chest, waiting for some reactive sign of life. “Wake up, you stubborn-ass cat.”

Riley stepped closer with the adrenaline shot in her hand. “Ready.”

Compressions shifted his body on the surgical table, and time seemed to slow.

My movements turned intentional, and my perception heightened.

It was as though I could make out every strand of fur on the tomcat’s body, every muscle in the tiny heart, his life force struggling to hold on, clawing to remain. For Callie.

My grimace stretched the bottom half of my face, and a rush of desperate tears threatened to cloud my vision. “Come on, Sully-boy. You know you’re not ready to leave Callie. She loves you too much,” I muttered.

“Get back here, you asshole. You know Callie still needs you,” I growled.

In the corner a small beep resumed, and a tremor rolled through me. The adrenaline dump had probably taken years off my life.

“That was a close one.” I sighed as a deep relief spread through to my bones. “Stubborn old cat only likes to cause a ruckus, even when he’s unconscious.”

All the moisture at the corner of Riley’s eyes had escaped to her cheeks. “That was a close one,” she agreed.

“All in a day’s work.”

“What would we have told Callie?”

“We would have told her the truth. We always tell the truth,” I said even though I didn’t want to think about it.

“Even to little kids?”

“Especially to little kids. They’ve got a better bullshit meter than most grown-ups.”

Riley snickered. “I’d say that’s for sure true of Callie.”

“What a way to finish out a Friday, huh?” I smiled at her then. After helping two families say goodbye to their beloved, aged dogs, it’d been a tough week for the whole office. “At least we don't have to tell her Sully-Boy isn’t coming home today.”

“Don't say that. You’re really going to make me cry.” Riley wiped the sweaty sheen from her forehead with a spare bandage, chucked her gloves, and washed her hands. Then she offered a wobbly grin as she re-gloved. “What do you think happened?”

“Probably a bad reaction to being under the anesthetic. Note it in his file, so we can try a different anesthetic if we have to do this again.”

“Will do. What do you have planned for this weekend?”

“I'm going to the park to go hiking,” I said.

“Alone?” She gave me a sly look, her eyes half open, as though I had some news about my nonexistent love life.

“Absolutely alone. Who the heck wants to go hiking with me in humid Louisiana, even after a temperature drop?” I removed Sully’s breathing assistance, pleased to see his furred chest rise and fall on its own.

Other wires and monitors came off next. Then I moved the IV bag from the hook on the surgical bed to the transfer cart.

“You know that fancy young contractor guy?”

“Logan? What’s his last name?”

“Blackwood,” she answered. “He owns a construction company.”

The man sauntered into my brain like he owned the place and flashed an easy grin. Today, if I were a cat, he might’ve been catnip, but I didn’t have time for a relationship in the middle of building my veterinary practice.

“He stopped by up here to ask about you a couple weeks ago,” she added. “He won't leave the front desk ladies alone. You could go camping with him and maybe shut him up?”

“Uh, no.”

“Why not?” Riley grabbed the closest edges of the transfer sheet. She wiggled her hips. “I think you want Logan to be your Mr. Fuck Me Right and Mr. Right Now and Mr. Always Right. ”

She probably didn’t know I knew she was exaggerating his interest in me.

Shannon, my other nursing assistant who doubled as a front desk receptionist and office manager, had mentioned he stopped by one time and called the front desk one other time, not at all to the extent Riley implied.

The young woman wanted to play matchmaker, and I was a prime target for her attentions.

I snorted as I took hold of the other corners. “Are you kidding? Why would I go with him? I heard he's gone through a dozen women in town.” I paused a moment. “Lift in three, two, one…”

She raised the sheet. “There are only three in Willow Creek who aren’t paired off. I don't think that means much.”

Gently, we situated our patient onto the transfer cart.

For a moment, I didn't respond. Instead, I double-checked the sutures on the rear leg of Sully-Boy before covering them lightly with a bandage.

Why would I go into all the reasons why I didn't want to risk a relationship with Logan?

I had convinced myself he wasn't my type.

He wasn't going to be my type. There wasn't anything about him that made him different or more appealing than anybody else who had asked me out in the last six months. Yeah, so what if I was lying to myself?

“Sully-Boy’s good,” I said.

Riley didn't push the subject. “I’ll get that IV out and get him settled in recovery.”

She knew better than to argue with me about whether I should date for the sake of dating.

She was ten years younger than me, barely out of high school, and the world was her oyster.

My oyster didn't come out to see the world too much anymore, but that was okay with me.

I ran my own veterinary practice in Willow Creek.

Running a business was enough for anybody.

Throwing a budding romance when you were sometimes the only vet on call in the Louisiana parish was more than I cared to sign up for.

This is enough, isn’t it? I wasn’t missing anything from my life. Any feelings about something missing were simply because I hadn’t hooked up with anyone. My obsession with romantic movies didn’t hint at anything at all. It came down to biology. Nothing else.

I checked the pulse rate of the tomcat once more and then removed my mask.

He would be coming around soon. It might have been a little touch and go, but I was sure we'd be okay.

I'd call in the morning for an update on him before I left for my overnight hiking trip.

I had two nursing assistants who came in on the weekends to check on all the animals, and Sully-Boy would be fine after twenty-four hours of observation.

The plastic gloves snapped as I pulled them off and chucked them in the trash can. “I guess we're ready. I’ll let Callie see him before she goes home for the day.”

“You know she's gonna cry buckets when she sees him.”

“Yeah, but that's good for any girl. Sully-Boy is her heart animal, and a good cry can clean out all the pent-up feelings. It's a good thing he's been neutered, or she would never be able to keep him in the house. ”

Riley grimaced. “The news isn't always going to be good. He likes to be outside too much. Don’t you worry about that?”

“That's not a today-problem. Our job is to take care of their furballs, their fur babies, and their little loves so we can send them home. Motivated tomcats are especially hard to keep inside, especially when you live on a farm. It's not like they got him as a kitten. He came with the house. Since they got him neutered, at least, he doesn’t sit at the windows and cry for pussy.”

Riley snickered and then circled the transfer cart, identifying and counting everything before pushing it to the side. “Do you ever think about moving south to New Port Orleans? You could probably make more money in a bigger city.”

“Maybe, but I like my life here, and you like your job. Shannon does, too. And it's enough.”

Enough was perfect, wasn’t it? The familiar, lying twinge returned. There wasn’t more out there. Not for me. Willow Creek was my perfect life.

Sully-Boy’s eye popped open and closed again. The cat wasn't awake enough to try to get off the transfer table, but he was stable, and he'd finish coming out of anesthesia in the recovery cage. Then he’d be his spitting-at-everybody-but-Callie self.

Riley pushed the cart out of the surgical room, and the same wheel squeaked as it always did. We never remembered to oil it before we needed the damn thing.

Before stepping in the waiting area, I straightened my scrubs and checked for any blood or any lingering results of performing leg surgery on the feline. “I'm going out to let them know, and I'll send her back to Sully-Boy in a few minutes.”

“Sure thing,” Riley answered over her shoulder as she disappeared around the corner.

The metal swinging door swished back and forth behind me, and the girl and her mother both looked up with matching wide eyes, though, Callie’s eyes were twice as big as her mother’s, and it looked as though the ten-year-old expected the worst.

“Sully-Boy is fine. He's going to make a full recovery—” I began.

The sensor on the front door beeped, and Logan Blackwood rushed in, shaking his damned catnip all over my waiting room.