What was wrong with him? He blinked hard and flipped his sunglasses over his eyes. He was as loyal as a dog. He hadn’t held onto the idea of him and Elaine during the more than ten long years she’d dumped him only to change his mind when she’d finally wised up and decided he was the guy for her.
It was his misbehaving body that was the problem, and he wasn’t going to admit what Mystery Kitty Owner with the paint splattered hands, tie-dyed clingy tank, handkerchief patched skinny jeans and tooled leather boots had done to rearrange his blood flow while operating a simple rescue.
Besides, what kind of person would name her cat Grey?
The same kind as his fiancée who already had their first two children named, even before their conception. Grey for the boy and Goldie for a girl.
Nope. It had to be a coincidence that her cat was named Grey Hart. But therein lay a clue, a lucky charm for him to hold onto. She would be the Girl with the Grey Hart Kitty, and he could tuck her safely away in his memory bank of people he’d saved and rescued—a happy place compared to the other vault of memories he’d rather not relive.
“Come on, Cinder, let’s race back to the firehouse,” Connor said, lengthening his stride. “Good job with the rescue.”
Chapter Three
She always started with the eyes.
Nadine mixed the palette with different shades of blue and dipped a brush onto the canvas. She held her breath—the moment her brush touched the blank canvas was like the birth of a new life. The first stroke was a sacred act, the beginning of all possibilities delineating a passage from the mind of the all infinite universe to a concrete expression of her being.
She colored around the iris, swishing the blue and flecking it with silvery highlights—then returned to the palette and mixed a darker hue of gray. No hero was one hundred percent light and bright. Every light contained spots of darkness, lurking behind the façade of perfection, like the dark blot of ink splattered on a blank canvas, but painted over by a layer of white.
The darkness added depth to the eye, until peering into the center was like gazing into a cold, mossy well. Nadine imagined leaning over, her fingers caressing the wet stone, and her stomach pressed on the cool ledge. She held a pebble suspended and flicked her fingers, letting it drop.
The ripples spread under thin, light strokes. She stopped to let the moment expand. Seeing so deep into someone’s soul was uncomfortable, dissonant, and scratched her spine the wrong way.
Whoever he was, he carried soul-rending pain. She couldn’t picture him rousing it up at a sports bar or hanging out with buddies at a NASCAR race. He wouldn’t be betting in a Super Bowl pool or line dancing as if he hadn’t a care other than the next pitcher of beer.
That eye had seen too much. She didn’t want to be clichéd and stick images from her imagination—fiery flames and faces dark with soot. Eyes red with sleeplessness, hair singed and crispy. Death by fire—unimaginable horror. Running into a fire to save lives—incomprehensible except for the brave or those with nothing to lose.
Somehow the flatness in Connor’s eyes was that of resignation. Either that, or she was in another one of her fanciful states—building a story around nothing. She wiped her hands on a towel and stepped back from the single eye, picturing the devilish smirk, the tousled hair, the slight wrinkles of his grinning face.
He covered it well. A young fire chief. Proud, cocky, no doubt a lady’s man, although he’d escaped her clutches faster than Greyheart after a squirrel.
“Connor Hart,” she mouthed his name, paying close attention to the way her tongue touched her palate and the shape her lips formed.
The front door to the apartment she shared with her mother slammed open.
“Deeny!” Her mother’s voice rose from the front room. “Are you painting again? I can smell it from here. What did I say about airing out the room? The fumes aren’t healthy.”
Nadine screwed the caps back on her tubes of paint. Quiet time was over.
Greyheart jumped off the top of the dresser bureau and dashed toward Nadine’s mother, his favorite lap to stretch across.
Mom’s tall frame filled the doorway, and she pointed a manicured finger at the canvas. “Why are you starting another painting when you have all these unfinished ones?”
She waved a hand across the crowded bedroom filled with easels and art supplies.
“Nothing is ever finished, Mom,” Nadine said. “Not until I’m truly in love with it.”
“You’re always changing what you love.” Her mother marched into the room and used air quotes to punctuate the word “love.”
“Change is the only thing I can count on,” Nadine replied. She took a brush and dashed it across a dab of black on her palette, mixing it with the azure.
With a series of bold squiggly strokes, she surrounded the eye with the gnarly outlines of the old oak tree where her hero’s journey began.
“Things are going to change around here.” Her mother swept her perfectly dyed and highlighted blond hair back with both hands. “I’m leaving your father and going back home to the farm.”
Nadine’s brush froze at the base of the tree. She pushed down hard, flattening it and letting the remaining paint ooze.
“Leaving Dad? But why?” Unsaid was the question, Are you leaving me, too?
Mom’s fists clenched, whitening her knuckles. “I’ve wasted enough time waiting for him to leave Maggie, and now this.”
Maggie was Nadine’s father’s wife and mother to his legitimate children, Nadine’s half-brother and half-sister.
“What did he do now?” Nadine stared at the expanding splotch of paint under her brush. It wasn’t as if her father was ever going to leave his wife. Heck, Nadine was almost twenty-five, and her mother had always been content to be the other woman, stashed away in their comfortable, although not luxurious apartment.
“He’s leaving his wife.” Her mother stomped her foot.
“Oh?” Nadine’s mouth dropped open. Now she was really confused. Mom had been waiting years for her father to leave Maggie and admit to the world that the woman he really loved was the woman who gave him his quirky, naughty Nadine. “Isn’t that a good thing?”
Mom swiped the back of her hand across her eyes and sniffed. “Not when he’s marrying a woman half his age. Remember when I told you he was being evasive? Canceling out on us and going to all those doctor conferences?”
“Uh, not really.” Nadine went into flight or freeze mode. Never in a million years had mother or daughter expected this development. All through the years, Nadine’s father had promised them they were the loves of his life, but that he was stuck with Maggie because of the children he had with her: Michael and Elaine, the two paragons of SAT scores, Ivy league universities, and followers in his footsteps, both medical doctors making tons of money.
“He’s been seeing your sister’s best friend, Dr. Emmeline Lu Su, proctologist.”
“A proctologist? You mean someone who sticks her fingers up where it don’t shine?” Nadine’s brush dropped onto the linoleum floor, and she clutched her stomach as bursts of laughter punched from her gut.
“You think that’s funny, huh?” Her mother’s voice barked in her ear. “Let’s see if you’re laughing when Dr. Emmeline Lu Su evicts us from this apartment.”
“Wait, wait. She can’t do that.” Nadine held up her hand like a stop sign. “Dad and you had an agreement.”
“Agreement canceled. His girlfriend’s mother needs a place to stay close to UCSF, and since he owns this apartment building, he can decide who lives in it. Unfortunately, I’m on the outs right now.”
“But you’ve lived here for eons!” Nadine crossed her arms and scowled.
Eons being from the time he knocked up Dolly Lee Hunter, Nadine’s blond-haired, blue-eyed mother from Tennessee.
“Doesn’t matter. The new girl won and I lost. I can’t even be upset because I’m not the wife he cheated on.” Her mother sighed loudly. “No legal standing whatsoever.”
“Where will we go?” Nadine resorted to whining when it looked like her mother wasn’t going to use a single inch of her backbone. “Let me talk to him. He can’t do this to us.”
“He can and he will. If I were you, I’d start packing. He’s promised to pay me a lump sum if I bow out gracefully, and I agreed. I reckon it’s time for me to go back home. The snow’s melting, the daffodils are sprouting, and I could smell the scent of fresh-turned earth.”
“Snap out of it, Mom.” Nadine brushed by her, almost stepping on Greyheart who meowed to be picked up. “Dr. Enema Loose Stools isn’t going to stick her finger anywhere up this apartment. I’m going to see to that.”
Chapter Four
Connor stepped around the scaffolding at his parents’ house and entered through the back door directly into the kitchen. He was the second oldest child at twenty-nine and the only one still living at home.
His mother turned from the stove and wiped her hands on her apron. She pointed to a video screen mounted above the counter.
“Saw you rescued a tree hugger today,” she shouted over the sounds of the nail gun and hammering noises coming from the construction upstairs.
His second sister, Jenna, the ditzy fashion designer had accidentally set fire to their house when she left an iron plugged in on Valentine’s Day. His bedroom had been damaged, and now, he was bunking in his father’s office downstairs.
“Who was the tree hugger?” Connor’s eldest sister, Cait, opened the oven and extracted a casserole. Hidden behind that innocuous question were a boatload of agendas and inferences. Cait was a busybody, and interference was her game. Being the eldest, she was also the double agent passing information to their parents, Pete and Kimberly Hart, two staunchly conservative Irish Catholic parents who loved and indulged their children while maintaining strict standards of behavior.
“She wasn’t a tree hugger.” Connor lumbered to the refrigerator and grabbed a beer. “She was climbing the tree to help her cat.”
Cait gave him a long, hard, knowing stare as she set the cheesy casserole on the kitchen table.
“What?” Connor felt his hackles rise. Shouldn’t he be able to rescue a pretty woman without his family getting ideas he’d break up with Elaine? “I was just doing my job.”
“Uh huh.” Mother placed a pan of cornbread on the table with a thump. “You were off duty and had men standing by.”
“And you claimed you had rapport with her to the reporters,” Cait observed, always ascribing hidden motives to everyone’s actions. “If I know you, Con, it means you were flirting with her.”
“I don’t flirt.” Connor could feel the heat steaming up his face. If Elaine heard about this rescue and the speculations his family were making of it, she’d give him a hard time. He was already in the doghouse for hiring a stripper for his buddy Larry’s engagement party.
“Could have fooled me,” Cait, ever the meddler, said in her big sisterly authoritative tone. “I saw the way you passed it off as a joke, that she was protesting you and your dog chasing her cat up the tree.”
“What I want to know is what the woman looked like to get our Connor all flustered,” Mom added as Dad walked into the kitchen.
“Seems he had a reason to be flustered.” His father winked. “Rex and Hugh said the damsel in distress was a perfect ten.”
His father was the former fire chief and not surprisingly, still plugged into the firehouse grapevine. Maybe it really was time Connor went off on his own, the way his brother Grady had done, traveling the world as a smoke jumper.
“Do tell.” Cait beamed at their father, her eyelids blinking a mile a minute. “Seems she has Connor’s boxers all knotted up.”
Connor twisted the cap off the ice cold beer and took a long swallow. It was better to ignore Cait than engage, especially since his below the belt parts had reacted to that long, leggy woman he’d rescued.
Hey, he was a connoisseur of beautiful women, all because Elaine had urged him to date other people while she was in college and med school. So he had, with a vengeance—except none of the dates had stuck, and he’d been left wondering if he’d ever get his first love, Dr. Elaine Woo, out of his system.
“The reporter made it seem as if she was protesting something. We know better, don’t we, Mom?”
“We do?” For once, his mother wasn’t as quick on the uptake as his slandering sister.
“Of course we do.” Cait swept by Connor in the small kitchen, bumping him. “The only reason our stick to the rules Connor broke protocol was because he didn’t want Chad and Jackson to charm the pants off Miss Tree Hugger.”
“Ahem,” Connor cleared his throat loud and long. “I have zero tolerance for sexual harassment in my firehouse. Chad and Jackson know that, and so does everyone else. No one is charming anyone’s pants off anywhere at Station 22.”
“The station of monks and nuns,” Cait huffed. “What about the bachelor auction? Don’t tell me you and Elaine aren’t doing the horizontal tan—”
“La, la, la, la.” Their mother covered her ears. “Cait, stop egging on your brother. He’s still living here under our roof.”
“And under our rules,” Dad added with a huff.
Cait rolled her eyes so far back, Connor wondered what emergency procedure he’d do if they’d gotten stuck. Obviously, she knew the firehouse gossip since her husband, Brian, was a four-year veteran and driver of one of the rigs.
Connor should have moved out a long time ago, but it had always been more convenient to hook up at the woman’s apartment—where he could do the loving and the leaving. Not that he’d loved anyone other than Elaine. Except she’d slept with his best friend and practically forced him to experiment with other women, saying that they’d fallen in love way too young and that they had to make an informed decision if they wanted their future marriage to last.
“So, what’s the deal between you and Elaine?” Cait’s inquisitive voice clattered along with the silverware she was setting on the table.
Now that the Elaine cat was out of the bag, Connor was in for it. Saturday night at the Hart family home meant family dinners and curious sisters analyzing and dissecting his love life. They were used to it. After all, he’d spent ten years wandering in the wilderness waiting for Elaine to come to her senses—which thankfully, she finally did when she’d bid big bucks for him at the Valentine bachelor auction. She’d even given him a puppy and they were finally on track to happily ever after.
The screen door banged as another set of footsteps clomped into the kitchen. With the front door part of the fire damage repair, all Harts passed through the kitchen and Connor should have ducked to the office with the beer already.
“Con, you’re here without Elaine?” It was his second sister, Jenna, and her boyfriend, Larry, who was also one of Connor’s best buddies.
“She’s on call at the hospital,” Connor explained, giving Larry a manly clap on the arm and a half-hug. “Hey, bud, you treating my sister well?”
“Never better.” Larry pecked Jenna on the cheek, causing her to blush bright pink.
Those two had moved fast, unlike him and Elaine, from barely knowing each other to engaged in a matter of months. He was glad for Larry, though. He was burned over fifty percent of his body and never expected to be dating again. Connor had to hand it to his spunky sister, Jenna, and her creative use of a basset hound puppy in bringing Larry out of his shell.
“Hey, Jenna!” Cait advanced on her sister with a clutching hug full of nervous energy. Whenever Cait had a bone, she worried it to death, and there was no bigger bone for Cait than Connor’s love-hate relationship with Elaine. “I was just wondering whether Connor and Elaine are going to get married before you and Larry. Have you two set a date?”
“Not yet,” Jenna said. “I’m trying to get my business off the ground, and Larry’s getting adjusted to staying at the firehouse again, which means I’ll have to get up to speed with dogsitting duties.”
“Dogsitting, ha! That’
s your Harley for you.” Cait laughed. “Does he still have to potty five times a day? With the amount he eats …”
“I’ll take him to the station when I’m on call,” Larry said. Unfortunately, none of the dogs could visit their parents’ house because their mother was allergic to furry pets. Turning to Connor, he added. “I got the deets on your mystery woman. Chad took a picture of her and when he posted it on Facebook, it automatically tagged her. Want to know her name?”
Larry’s scarred face was crinkled with an unmistakably amused smirk. Et tu, Brute?
Connor set his beer on the kitchen table harder than he needed to. “I’m not interested. She’s just some random artsy fartsy woman with the horse sense of an ant. Seriously, I don’t know why everyone’s bothering me about Elaine.”
“Maybe because she’s a sleaze and slept with your best friend?” Cait asked in a saccharine innocent voice.
“Or that she lied to you all those years, not telling you the real reason she couldn’t marry you?” Jenna added with a hint of red hot Irish anger.
“Oh, I know,” the squeaky voice of his youngest sister, Melisa, chimed in as the screen door slapped. “A two headed dog knows neither east nor west.”
She was a kindergarten teacher, and her boyfriend, Rob, was another one of Connor’s buddies, unfortunately, the one who’d slept with Elaine during medical school days.
Connor craned his neck to see if Rob was bringing up the rear, but like Elaine, Rob was a doctor and missed his share of Saturday night dinners. Now that he thought about it, so did Cait’s husband, Brian, leaving him to fend for himself as his three sisters scrutinized and dissected every aspect of his life.
Spring Fling Kitty: The Hart Family (Have A Hart Book 3) Page 2
