Yeah. Maybe.
Ingrid slid along the wall of the waiting room in a crab-like walk as though to avoid the cooties that would rub off on her if she touched one of the women. “They’re staying here? In the house?”
Katie flung the arm attached to her good hand around Ingrid’s trembling shoulders. “Yes, and if Nina wants to suck your blood, just yell for me. I’ll save you. Swear on my paw.”
Ingrid blanched, even surrounded by the laughter Katie’s comment evoked. As Kaih led the women to the living space she and her aunt shared, she held Ingrid back. “You know what I don’t understand, Ingrid?”
“Everything? I don’t understand anything anymore after tonight.”
“First, you’re some actress. You did a fantastically awesome job of pretending you didn’t know how Spanky got on the steps of the clinic.”
Guilt flew across her expression in the way of a wince. “I couldn’t even look you in the eye. I’m sorry I lied, but I just couldn’t stand to see him suffer. If I’d known what would happen . . . what he could do . . . I never . . .”
Katie was a firm believer in moving on. “Forget that, honey. I probably would have done the same thing if I’d seen him injured. But this is what I don’t get. I don’t understand how such a staunch believer in UFOs and alien life-forms and all that crazy sci-fi stuff you’re always reading and spewing can be so frightened of these women and their abilities. If anyone would think this was beyond all out-of-this-world expectation, I would have thought that would have been you. It was you who found the ad in that magazine. You read them all the time. If your nose isn’t buried in one of those magazines, it’s buried in a romance novel, and the last time I caught a glimpse of the back of one of those things, they had all sorts of creatures as the main characters. So for all your interest in otherworldly beings and the conspiracy theories you’re always spewing from those forums you follow online, what gives?”
Her breath shuddered as it escaped her lungs. “I’ve come to the conclusion that I liked the possibility of something like this existing a lot more than finding out it really does exist. It was fun to imagine it—with other people online—in my romance novels, but I don’t know if I one hundred percent believed all the junk they write in those forums. I think deep down I just thought they were kooks who needed somewhere to belong like I do.”
Just like Ingrid. Katie’s heart swelled in sympathy for her receptionist. Ingrid sought acceptance in everything she did. The product of foster home after foster home, she’d managed to finally escape the system, but it hadn’t escaped her. She put a cheerful smile on her face. “You belong here with me, and guess what?”
“The kooks were right?”
Katie popped her lips with a wink. “The kooks have merit. So let’s get some sleep, and maybe tomorrow this won’t seem as overwhelming.”
“Do fangs and fireballs ever not overwhelm you?”
Katie tipped her head back and laughed. “Point.”
“Did you see the things they did?”
“I did.”
“That lady Wanda turned into a werewolf right in front of us. Right there while I was sitting on a couch. And Oh-m-gee, the one called Nina is so strong, and—and mean. Cranky. Scaaaary. I can’t believe you’re not beyond freaked.”
“Oh, don’t get the wrong impression, kiddo. I’m not that tough. Of course I’m freaked, but we saw with our own eyes what’s possible. It’s the only explanation I have for my hand and my teeth. So what else is there to do but let them help me?”
Ingrid’s eyes had lost some of their panic and were replaced with a solemn hue. “I’m afraid.”
If Katie was about anything, she was all about owning her feelings. “Me, too.”
“Me three. Strike that. Afraid might be a shade heavy. How does hesitant with a healthy dash of stimulation overload strike you ladies?” Spanky had hung back after the crowd had gone with Kaih. His sudden reemergence left Katie’s heart thrashing as the unspoken question hung in the air.
Ingrid stiffened under the weight of Katie’s arm when Spanky loomed over them. She tightened her grip around her shoulders in reassurance. “Tonight has been nothing if not eventful.”
His raven eyebrow rose. “Which leaves me so jazzed for tomorrow.”
Ingrid snorted, relaxing a little into Katie, though her eyes still had trouble meeting his. “I’m really sorry we took you from the park. I swear we only wanted to help you. You really did have a big wound on your side. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do something to help you. I realize now it was impulsive and rash.”
He tightened the lab coat around his wide, tanned chest, cracking a smile at her meek receptionist. Whether he was more attuned to Ingrid’s wildly swinging emotions because he had the finely honed senses of a cougar, or he was just inherently a good person, Katie couldn’t say.
Due to his amnesia, neither could he.
But it was clear, he’d read Ingrid and her lifetime of insecurities when, with a gentle hand, he tilted her chin up and forced her to look at him. His eyes, so brilliantly blue sent a million messages to a frightened young woman. “Thank you. I think I’m glad you were rash and impulsive, though the jury’s still out. Anyway, Ingrid, I’m Spanky. The pleasure’s all mine.”
Ingrid beamed, two bright spots of red streaking her cheeks. “I think we need to find you a new name. Spanky makes me think of someone’s pet hamster.”
He held out his arm to her, offering to escort her down the long hallway leading to Katie’s aunt’s living room. “I’d be honored if you’d help me do just that. Maybe over morning tea? What say you and I go find a walk-in closet to lock that Nina up in to ensure the safety of our necks? There’ll be no bloodsucking on my watch.”
Ingrid’s hesitation lasted but a second before she hooked her arm through his. “Oh, you’re so on.”
Katie watched until their backs disappeared into the dim lighting of her living room before she took another breath. The way he’d held out his arm to Ingrid with a question, coupled with his intuitive perception of her fear, and his obvious wish to ease those doubts, stole Katie’s breath from her lungs.
In spite of his gruff exterior, he had a sensitive bone.
Well, yeah, Katie. He watches Project Runway and knows how to use reprehensible in a sentence.
Add to that, he was all sorts of sexy when he was in the act of being sensitive.
A thought struck her as she tried to at least make some sense of even a small portion of tonight.
Spanky was gay. He might not know it due to his memory loss, but his choice of television viewing said so. He was Tim Gunn approved.
If he was gay, that meant she could ogle every last inch of him till she turned blue in the face, and it would be as futile as her late teenage wish to create a love child with Ferris Bueller.
She blew out a sigh of relief. For all her heart palpitations, buttery knees, and stomach jitters, she found the idea that Spanky played for a different team left her with one less thing to worry about.
Well, then.
A reason to go on living.
CHAPTER 6
A sharp whistle startled Katie, who was deep in the midst of savoring a cup of coffee and distractedly doodling on her favorite morning ritual—a crossword puzzle. Though, she was stuck on a six-letter word for cat.
Katie had only five letters in it.
Yet her attention kept returning to the big bay window, overlooking the cement pathway that lead to the wide front porch steps of her aunt’s house, while she swirled coffee in her mouth. Today the coffee had a heightened pleasure to it, likely due to her new taste buds.
Even with the added layer of flavor, there was nothing like Aunt Teeny’s coffee.
With cream.
Yesterday, she’d liked her coffee black.
Today, she liked milk.
And apparently large game.
Huh.
Good thing at least her teeth had returned to normal, or she couldn’t say for sure the d
eer in the backyard that had caught her attention earlier would be safe from her gnashing pearly whites. They had called to her in the way of delicious, warm blood coursing through their veins and the promise of some soft squishy . . . Katie shuddered, fending off the offensive images and forcing herself to greet her aunt.
She swiveled around on the wooden chair with the green-and-red-plaid cushioning to find her aunt Teeny in her customary floral housecoat, trailing across the floor in pressure socks and sandals. An unlit cigarette hung from her wrinkled lips.
Dozer, an old yellow Lab mix and their fourth stray dog in four months, followed close behind her, plunking himself down on the blue-and-green braided rug to bask in the shafts of weak, buttery sunlight coming from the bay window.
Li’l Anthony wasn’t far behind, all five pounds of him. A pushy, arrogant, cranky, “hands off me, I don’t need no lovin’ ” mixed breed with a painfully infected ear that she’d found in the surrounding woods while walking one afternoon a couple of months ago. He was confrontational, a total bully who barked at everything that moved, but a snuggle bunny at night when he curled up next to her in bed.
Katie scooped him up and checked his torn but finally healed ear, then gave him a dreaded kiss on the side of his black muzzle. He squirmed his displeasure. “Hey, cranky. Where’re Petey and Paulie?” Petey and Paulie were the other two-thirds of what she fondly called the mob. They were a brother-and-sister pair of terrier mixes that had been abandoned out by the creek. Being younger dogs, they ganged up on poor Dozer at regular intervals. As a pack, their gang mentality was bark at high-pitched intervals first, pee on it later.
“Looky that, would ya? Nice-lookin’ boy there,” Aunt Teeny commented with approval, nodding her head in the direction of the opposite window where Spanky, in Kaih’s borrowed jeans that were too short, and too loose around the waist, chopped wood. She went immediately to the bin of dog food they kept in the open pantry and filled the dogs’ bowls. “You hire him to do odd jobs around the place?”
Katie’s eyes fell back to her coffee as she set Li’l Anthony down, clamping the mug with her one good hand, and resting the other between her jean-clad thighs with a wince. She’d spent the better part of a restless night trying to figure out a cover story for her aunt and anyone else who might ask about Spanky and the women who were still sleeping soundly upstairs.
Of all the stories she’d come up with, declaring him the help, the simplest of all fabrications, had never occurred to her. “Um, yup. I hired him to take care of some things around the house and the clinic. Winter’s coming. We need wood chopped and . . . and stuff done.” Lots of stuff. Li’l Anthony gave her a strange glare of disapproval. “Well, we do need stuff done,” she whispered to him.
“I can think of a coupla other stuffs he could do to me.”
Katie rolled her eyes, tucking her chin deeper into her lace ruffled shirt with the matching navy blue turtleneck with a shiver. “Aunt Teeny! He’s just a kid.”
She shrugged her small, hunched shoulders with a cackle and a toothless grin of depravity. “Don’t make no difference to me, Lady Jane. It all looks the same when you hit the sack. We all still got the same parts, just some of us come extra wrinkled. But I’d be willing to let him iron me.” She dropped down in the seat opposite Katie with her mug of steaming coffee. “What happened to your hand?”
She averted her eyes to stare at Yancey, sprawled on the back of the living room sofa, without a care and, quite possibly, her kin. Katie winced, pushing herself to focus. “Sprained. From lifting some of the cages in the office. No big deal.”
Teeny crinkled one eye at her niece’s hand, the cigarette hanging from her sunken lips.
Katie set her mug down and snatched the cigarette from her aunt’s lips. “Where do you keep getting these? I’ve scoured every inch of this house and come up dry. Yet every morning, you have another one. You’d better not have a stash, Aunt Teeny. No smoking. Dr. Gladwell told you you’re one cigarette away from your grave.”
Under the shed in a hole she had me dig.
Katie’s eyes widened, then she frowned when she scanned the kitchen. Did cougars hear imaginary voices in their heads?
Teeny poked her hand, bringing her attention back to the table. “You take my smokes, I’m gonna flirt with your hired hand, and I won’t wear a bra when I do it.”
Her aunt’s outrageous remarks weren’t just the bane of her existence but one of the reasons she got up in the morning. Teeny made it possible for her to survive in this small town where scorn was dished out by the shovelful. “You don’t wear a bra anyway. No smoking. No negotiation. No more back talk.”
Teeny propped her hand in her chin, using the other to adjust the sound on her hearing aid. “Yeah, yeah. I don’t see how it can make anything any worse. I’m seventy-two. I’m gonna die next week anyway. Why can’t I just do it with my Camels, for Christ’s sake?”
“Who’d protect me from Willard Brown if you up and die?”
“Willard’s just a blowhard with a big piehole.”
“And if not for you, his piehole would have kept Irma Rycroft from bringing Susie-Q in to see me. As I recall, he told her I was the devil and God would rain his thunder down on her in the way of famine and poverty if she brought that poor cat to me for treatment. He told her paying me for my services was like paying the devil to buy your soul.”
Willard is a bad, bad shit of a man. He kicked me once.
Katie’s head whipped around at the echo of words in her head. What the hell was going on?
“He’s a fruitcake, old Willard is,” Teeny, oblivious to Katie’s concern, said. “He’s been alone with his crazy thoughts for too long. Best he stays out in that cabin of his and keeps his trap shut. Don’t you worry about Willard or any of the other old cronies in this damn town. They’re a suspicious lot who’re too set in their ways, thinkin’ Piney Creek’s gonna go all citified if they let outsiders in. Not much’s changed here because they won’t let it. You breathed new life into the town. They just don’t know it yet.”
Oh, she’d breathed and that exhale had brought with it not just scorn upon her but her aunt, too. Add in her prior legal troubles and it made for a whole lot of unease among the people in town. Katie gave herself a mental shake—no more dwelling. She’d done nothing wrong back in New York. “Has Magda-May invited you back to the quilting circle yet?” The group of senior citizens and one diehard thirtysomething Nazi-feminist old maid had booted Teeny out the second they’d decided Katie had usurped Magda-May’s husband.
Dr. Cyrus Jules, DVM, the only veterinarian in Piney Creek until she’d arrived.
It had happened completely by accident. She’d known Piney Creek was small, but she hadn’t been prepared for the kind of shunning only a small town can give you until she’d “snatched the food right from their mouths” like the greedy, city heathen she was, as Magda and friends had described it.
Shortly after her arrival and quite by circumstance, she’d met Lizzie Johnson and her old hound dog Roderick, sitting in Lizzie’s parked truck just outside the feed store.
She’d stopped to pet Roderick and noticed he had a rather raspy cough. One that, according to Lizzie, wouldn’t clear up, no matter how many meds Dr. Jules gave her.
Katie’d suggested she bring Roderick by the clinic, free of charge, so she could run a simple test, and Lizzie had obliged. An X-ray revealed old Roderick had an enlarged heart, causing the coughing and gasping for breath.
You’d think she’d reinvented the wheel, if you listened to Lizzie tell the tale of Rod’s improvement with the proper medication. Unfortunately, what had been a simple act of concern for an aging dog that was suffering turned into a redneck version of the Sharks versus the Jets, if Magda-May had the chance to tell the story.
Katie had tread on Dr. Jules’s territory by correctly diagnosing Lizzie’s dog. Nobody remembered the correct part of the equation or that Roderick was breathing better for it. That she was right didn’t matter to the ladi
es in the Piney Creek quilting circle.
She’d taken business from Dr. Jules. Throw in her restraining order from the exotic animal park along with her checkered past, and she was a dirty bird from the city that’d come to milk Piney Creek residents dry with her highfalutin prices and fancy doctorin’.
Teeny snorted, smoothing the checkered tablecloth under her coffee mug with arthritic fingers. “Magda-May can bite my unwiped rear end. I don’t need her stupid circle or her ugly quilts. She always picks crappy colors for ’em anyway.”
Katie cringed and chuckled all at once. Her aunt’s reality television addiction had created a monster. “Aunt Teeny! Your language. Where do you get this stuff?”
Aunt Teeny snorted. “I’m just expressin’ myself, and I get it from watching all that reality TV. Never let it be said Teeny’s not in the know. As for Magda-May, she’ll be sorry I’m not in on that stupid quilt making. I was the only one with any damn taste.”
Remorse that it had taken her all of a week to leave her favorite aunt friendless and quiltless stung her gut. “I’m sorry, Aunt Teeny. I just couldn’t stand to see Roderick suffer. I didn’t mean to cause so much trouble.”
Teeny gave her a confused look by way of a wrinkled frown. “What bubble?”
I love Aunt Teeny. She can’t hear jack. I never have to worry I’m gonna get caught when I hump Dozer.
Oh, God. There were voices in her head. With Brooklyn accents.
That’s ’cuz I’m from Brooklyn. I got dumped here on the way to Michigan. A family road trip to Michigan. Some family. The jerks.
Katie fought a frightened whimper, jamming her finger into her mouth as Li’l Anthony scampered off up the stairs. Maybe she was just tired.
“Hey, girl, you listenin’? What bubble?”
Now she fought a sigh. Her aunt’s hearing, even with her hearing aids, was questionable. Today, as tired as she was, as worried as she was that not only did she have a paw but she wanted to thin the wildlife population by eating it, she struggled with her impatience. “Not a bubble, Aunt Teeny. Trou-ble,” she said with a purposeful inflection to the word. “I’m sorry I caused you so much trouble.”
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