by Hope Ramsay
He couldn’t say no this time.
Granny pressed on. “Oh, and did I mention that the dog is a black puppy? Looks a lot like Duke. I’m guessing he’s some kind of Labrador mix, maybe twelve weeks old. Looks half starved.”
He expelled the breath he’d been holding. “I’m on my way.”
“I’ll leave the side door open.” There was no mistaking the smug tone in Granny’s voice.
The clinic on Magnolia Boulevard was only two short blocks from Momma’s house, so he sprinted the distance and jogged through the new facility’s door five minutes later. Jenna St. Pierre had invested beaucoup money in the place, buying only new equipment and the latest technology. In all likelihood, this small clinic wouldn’t need all this fancy equipment. That’s what referral centers like the one in Charleston were all about.
But the good news for the dog in question was that this facility could theoretically handle just about any kind of emergency.
He followed the sound of voices into Exam Room One where he got his first look at the dog. Granny was right; the puppy was the spitting image of Duke, Noah’s beloved dog of many years ago. The pup was lying inside some kind of wooden box with the words RELIGIOUS PROGRAMS SPECIALIST (FIRST CLASS) LIA DIPALMA stenciled across the front. What in the Sam Hill was a religious programs specialist first class? Some kind of holy roller?
He shifted his gaze to the woman who was down on her knees beside the box, stroking the puppy’s head, tears falling from her dark, coffee-bean eyes. “It’s going to be okay,” she whispered continuously, as if trying to convince herself. It wasn’t clear how much the dog was taking in. He had that faraway look animals get when the pain is overwhelming.
“Hello,” he said in his best veterinarian voice—heavy on the confidence with just the right amount of reassurance. “I’m Doctor Cuthbert. I’m an emergency vet down in Charleston. I’m up here visiting family this week.” He made eye contact.
Wow. Her eyes were darker than the dog’s but just as sad. He blinked, momentarily nonplussed. Awareness flowed through him. What the hell? The woman—Lia DiPalma, he assumed—wasn’t his type at all. She was tiny and built like a bird, with long, dark hair pulled back into a tight bun. Her gray T-shirt and Levi’s jeans were as no-nonsense as her hairdo.
And yet.
“I’m so glad you came,” she said in a watery voice. “I’m Lia, and I…found him. You know. In the middle of the road.”
He shook away the enchantment of her dark, sorrowful eyes.
“So he’s not your dog?”
“Of course not. Look at him. Some a-hole abandoned him before some idiot hit him.”
So clearly, she wasn’t a holy roller. Not with that mouth on her. But it was still a problem. The dog was homeless then. And Noah didn’t need X-rays to know that the puppy would need expensive surgery to save the leg, and possibly his life. This woman didn’t need reassurance. She was just a good Samaritan with a colorful vocabulary. She wasn’t the one responsible for the accident or the dog.
An ancient anger nipped at his insides. Nothing disgusted him more than having to deal with the injuries neglect and automobiles could inflict on dogs.
He lost this faux reassurance and asked, “So are you going to adopt him?”
“What?” She blinked.
“Are you going to give the dog a permanent home?”
Something hard sparked behind her tear-filled eyes. “I’m not in a position to give him a home,” she said.
Of course not. That’s what they all said. It irritated the crap out of him. The people who took on dogs and then neglected them. Or the ones who didn’t pay attention while they were driving.
“Right,” he said, letting his anger seep into his tone.
Granny pulled a tissue from the dispenser on the desk. “Here, honey,” she said in her best sweet-granny voice as she handed the tissue to the woman. “Don’t you worry. Accidents happen, and it’s not your fault that this puppy was abandoned out there in the woods.” She turned and glared at Noah. “Is it?”
He glared at his grandmother but said not one word.
Granny continued giving him her best evil eye. “And since you’re volunteering and we’re not exactly open, this isn’t going to cost anyone a dime, right?”
“No, ma’am,” he said. He knew good and well not to cross his grandmother.
However, he also knew good and well that just fixing the dog’s leg wasn’t enough. This puppy needed rehab, and for that, he needed a home. A foster home at the very least.
So this woman in front of him, with the sad brown eyes, might be a good Samaritan, but she wasn’t going to give the dog what he needed most.
And that irritated the crap out of him, even though he was painfully aware of the hypocrisy of his own feelings. If he cared so much, he could give the dog a home.
But he’d vowed never to love another dog after Duke. He would fix them and make them whole, but he wasn’t much different than the woman kneeling there by the wooden box.
He pushed that irritating thought out of his mind and began his examination. The hip was definitely broken, probably at the top of the femur. X-rays would tell how badly and whether there was any damage to the pelvis. There didn’t seem to be any other swelling in the belly that might indicate internal injuries. But the puppy probably had heartworms and parasites, which was one reason he was underweight. God alone knew what the dog had been eating recently.
“Let’s get some X-rays then.” He turned toward Granny. “Did you hire any vet techs who could come in on short notice?”
Granny shook her head. “Dr. Westin said he wanted to do the hiring, and we agreed to that in his contract. I don’t know of any vet techs living on-island.”
Great. Just great. He turned toward Lia. “I’m going to need your help,” he said.
Chapter Two
Dr. Noah Cuthbert appeared to know his stuff, and he was gentle with the puppy, but a total jerk to human beings. He’d wasted no time laying a huge guilt trip on Lia, as if the dog’s injuries were her fault, when all she’d done was rescue the pup from the middle of the road. She already had plenty of guilt to haul around. And furthermore, the good doctor had been nothing short of snippy and abrupt with Donna, the woman who had called him. Who, it turned out, was his grandmother.
He was some kind of hot-shot surgeon on the mainland, according to Donna, and he seemed to be duly impressed with himself. He certainly had the swagger that confident men possessed. Plus he was so casually gorgeous that it almost hurt to look at him.
He filled out his tight-fitting white T-shirt like a gym rat, and his face was over-the-top male, full of laugh lines and hollows and crags and a dimple in his chin. She could almost imagine him riding a wild mustang over the plains, except that he wore baggy Hawaiian-print shorts that hung low on his hips. They exposed his bronzed six-pack every time he reached up for something, like positioning the X-ray machine over the puppy’s broken hip.
Why, oh why had she noticed his abs? But really, who wouldn’t?
So irksome. She’d spent enough years in the male-dominated world of the U.S. Navy to know that confident, good-looking men were universally a-holes. And the good doctor had already made her feel about as small as an ant. She hadn’t asked for that dog to appear in the middle of the road into town. But once that happened, it wasn’t as if she could just drive on.
But saving the dog didn’t obligate her to give him a home, did it? She wasn’t sure she could even give herself a home. She had to talk to Chaplain St. Pierre before she knew the answer to that question. And even if she was able to talk herself into a home here, she wasn’t sure she could take on a dog. Not until she was sure things would work out. She didn’t want another Whiskers incident.
Twenty years had passed since her ill-fated decision to adopt a cat. She would not make that mistake again. If she ever took on a pet, she’d be ready for it.
No. The dog was better off without her. In fact, it was probably bad luck for her to eve
n be here helping the doctor with the X-rays. The way her life had been going recently, it would be a miracle if the machine didn’t blow up or spew radiation all over the building.
“Shouldn’t you be wearing a white coat or a lead apron or something?” she asked in her snarkiest voice when he brushed up against her side as they positioned the dog on the X-ray table. The snark helped to deflect the unmistakable awareness that gripped her libido. Damn.
He smiled, and the dimple in his left check came out to play. Man, the guy had some serious twinkle in his blue eyes. “We should both probably be wearing lead aprons. But don’t worry, it’s pretty low-dose radiation. I wouldn’t recommend doing it this way on a regular basis. But I think we can manage this time since it’s an emergency. Unless you want to go hunting through the boxes in the storage area for the lead aprons and white lab coats.”
The man could dish snark too. “No, it’s fine.”
“We’re going to have to go through the boxes anyway,” Donna said from behind them. “All of the surgical scrubs are in those boxes. The instruments too.”
The doctor huffed out an annoyed breath, rolled his eyes, and then took the X-rays, which showed up immediately on the computer screen attached to the machine. He stood there, studying the image, tapping his mouth with his manly index finger.
After an excruciatingly long moment, he pointed to the ghostlike images. “See there,” he said. “The ball at the top of the femur has separated and popped out of the hip joint. If the dog had been older, the trauma might have been more extensive. Older dogs often break their pelvises in cases like this. But because he’s a young dog, the joint just popped. So we just need to fix the hip.”
“Can you fix his leg?”
“I can perform something called a femoral head osteotomy. I’ll remove the ball and tighten the ligaments and create a scar tissue joint for that leg. We do this procedure in a lot of dogs with hip dysplasia. He might have a small limp as he gets older, depending on how big he gets. But I don’t think we’ll need to amputate.” He turned his blue-eyed stare in Lia’s direction. “But the thing is, he needs a home where he can get physical therapy. Without that, the prognosis might not be as good.”
Yeah. There it was again. What did he need from her, a big mea culpa on bended knee? What part of “I’m not the right person for this dog” did he not understand?
“Look, I’m not that person, okay? But I will work my tail off to find him a home.”
The doctor looked away, utterly unimpressed by her promise. He studied the X-ray a little longer before speaking again. “I don’t see any evidence of internal injuries. So I think we can wait until tomorrow for the surgery. I want to put him on some fluids and treat him for heartworms and parasites. We’ll get him vaccinated too. When I do the surgery, I’ll neuter him at the same time.”
“We’re going to have to open the boxes in the storeroom, Noah,” Donna said. “And they’re stacked floor to ceiling.”
The doctor expelled another frustrated breath and then turned his gaze on Lia. The twinkle had disappeared from his baby blues. “You’re free to leave anytime.”
It was a dismissal. And really, she needed to leave so she could visit Chaplain St. Pierre at his church office and explain why she’d come all this way to see him without letting him know she was coming.
It wasn’t as if he’d actually offered her a job. He’d just said that he needed a good church secretary because he wasn’t entirely comfortable with his new role as a pastor. His new life came with a bunch of church-related matters and politics that kept him busier than he’d anticipated. He’d been a navy chaplain for fifteen years—a job that was mostly outreach. But a pastor had to deal with a church, and paperwork, and a church board, and a building fund, and a whole crap-ton of stuff that made the U.S. Navy look like a cakewalk. He’d as much as told her that he needed her skills.
And she needed a place to stay and a job to do. So…
Besides, after the years they’d spent together serving in the navy, she felt as if she knew this town. Chaplain St. Pierre was always talking about Magnolia Harbor. It sounded like a nice place to live.
But at the same time, it wasn’t as if she could just abandon the dog. Or Donna and her irksome grandson. She’d made a vow never to walk away from a mess she’d created. Not that she’d created this mess in the first place, but really, from the doctor’s point of view, she had. She might not have injured the dog, but she was the one who’d come banging on the clinic’s door and insisting on someone giving her help.
And he’d answered that call, even though he was obviously on vacation. So, really, she had an obligation to help, even if she had no intention of adopting the dog.
“I can help with the boxes,” she said.
Dr. Cuthbert blinked. “You have no idea what you just signed up for.”
Lia shrugged. “I’ve been given crap duty assignments before, doctor. A few boxes do not intimidate me.”
* * *
It was almost 8:00 p.m. when Lia finally left the clinic, but the work in the storeroom was far from finished. Dr. Cuthbert had insisted on tackling the boxes without any rational plan of action. So instead of opening a box and putting its contents where they belonged, he flitted from box to box looking for only the stuff he needed to treat the puppy and prepare for the surgery. By the time they found the IV equipment, the store of basic medicine, and the surgical instruments and gowns, almost every box in the room had been opened but none of them fully unpacked.
The place looked like a hurricane had swept through it.
It bothered Lia to leave behind a mess like that, but she needed to go before it got too late. As it was, she’d missed the opportunity to visit Chaplain St. Pierre’s church. She’d have to go to the rectory now. And if she stayed any longer, even that would be out of the question.
As she left the clinic, she decided that she’d come back in the morning to clean up the mess that was clearly her responsibility now. On the day she’d joined the US Navy she’d vowed never to run away from a mess again. And she’d kept that promise. Until two weeks ago.
So this was an opportunity to get back on track.
She hurried to the parking lot and plugged Chaplain St. Pierre’s address into her GPS and headed off through the town.
After making a couple of wrong turns onto one-way streets, she finally found the rectory on Lilac Street in an older neighborhood of stately historic homes with wraparound verandas, cupolas, and tin roofs. The parsonage had none of that charm. It was like an afterthought—a small, single-story ranch house sandwiched between two mini-mansions. He had no lawn to speak of, just sandy ground covered in needles from the three large pine trees in the front yard.
But at least he had a real home instead of a berth aboard a ship, or a barracks on a base, or a tiny apartment shared temporarily with others.
She set the parking brake and took a deep breath, enjoying the pine scent for a moment as she rolled her neck to ease the tension. It was now or never.
Her future hung in the balance.
She walked up the footpath to his door and rang the bell. Time slowed to a crawl. What would she say when the door opened? In that long moment, the events of the last week seemed almost dreamlike. She’d been running on autopilot for days. Hanging on to a few words the chaplain had said over the phone. What if she’d screwed up again?
The door opened, and there he stood—all six foot three of him, with that café au lait skin and those dark eyes that had a way of seeing through the bull crap. Chaplain St. Pierre had the capacity to intimidate on sight, until you discovered he had a heart of gold beating in his chest.
He cocked his head and blinked. “Radar?”
Oh, that nickname. She hadn’t even realized that it came from an old TV show until her rotation aboard the USS George H. W. Bush. The marines she’d hung out with on that tour were huge fans of M*A*S*H and watched the reruns nonstop.
But Lia had a love-hate relationship with the character Rad
ar O’Reilly. She wasn’t a sweet Midwesterner from Farmville. And she’d never owned a teddy bear. But she was good at navy paperwork, and she did have a sixth sense about some things. A deep intuition about people that had been almost infallible, until a couple of months ago. Of course she didn’t finish people’s sentences the way Radar O’Reilly did, a fact she’d pointed out to Chaplain St. Pierre on numerous occasions. But it had never stopped him from calling her Radar.
So she didn’t fuss at him now. “It’s me,” she said. “I guess I should have told you I was coming, huh?” No. No. No. What an idiot, blurting out her insecurities like that.
“Well, yes. But I’m still glad to see you.” He smiled and opened his arms, and there it was, the big bear hug she remembered. His man-hugs were legendary. And they always made her feel better…safe.
Funny. Because, in the navy, bear hugs were actually discouraged, and it had been her job to keep him safe. If they went anywhere even slightly dangerous, she’d carried a standard-issue M4 carbine rifle. And he carried a Bible or the Book of Common Prayer. If the bullets started flying, it was her job to protect him at all costs.
Chaplain St. Pierre let her go. “What are you doing here?”
“Well, I know this is crazy. But a couple of weeks ago, when we talked by phone, you know, when I called to let you know that I’d left the navy, you said something about how you were drowning in paperwork. And, you know, organizing paperwork is one of the reasons you started calling me Radar.” She shrugged as her face grew hot. “I thought maybe there might be a job here, working as a church secretary.”
There, she’d said it. Of course she’d left a crap-ton of other things unsaid.
His eyes softened. That was good, right? And then he opened his door wide. “Come in.”
She strolled into a spacious living room with a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking a back patio, where a bunch of wrought-iron furniture had been set up in a circle, as if he hosted Bible study back there. That would be just like him.
