by Caro Carson
Get a grip, she chided herself. He’s just a hot-looking dude. Heaven knows, you’ve had more than enough experience with those to last a lifetime.
She went to the well-stocked medication dispensary, found what she needed and returned to the exam room.
Outside the door, she paused for only a moment to gather her composure before pushing it open. “Here are the pills for Ollie’s nerves and a refill for Yukon’s eye drops,” she said briskly. “Let me know if you have any questions—though if you do, you can certainly ask your father.”
“Thanks.” As he took the medication from her, his hands brushed hers again and sent a little spark of awareness shivering through her.
Oh, come on. This was ridiculous.
She was probably imagining the way his gaze sharpened, as if he had felt something odd, too.
“I can show you out. We’re shorthanded today since the veterinary tech and the receptionist both needed to leave early.”
“No problem. That’s what I get for scheduling the last appointment of the day—though, again, I spent most of my youth here. I think we can find our way.”
“It’s fine. I’ll show you out.” She stood outside the door while he gathered the dogs’ leashes, then led the way toward the front office.
* * *
After three months, Ruben still couldn’t get a bead on Dr. Daniela Capelli.
His next-door neighbor still seemed a complete enigma to him. By all reports from his father, she was a dedicated, earnest new veterinarian with a knack for solving difficult medical mysteries and a willingness to work hard. She seemed like a warm and loving mother, at least from the few times he had seen her interactions with her two girls, the uniquely named teenager Silver—who had, paradoxically, purple hair—and the sweet-as-Christmas-toffee Mia, who was probably about six.
He also couldn’t deny she was beautiful, with slender features, striking green eyes, dark, glossy hair and a dusky skin tone that proclaimed her Italian heritage—as if her name didn’t do the trick first.
He actually liked the trace of New York accent that slipped into her speech at times. It fit her somehow, in a way he couldn’t explain. Despite that, he couldn’t deny that the few times he had interacted with more than a wave in passing, she was brusque, prickly and sometimes downright distant.
He had certainly had easier neighbors.
His father adored her and wouldn’t listen to a negative thing about her.
She hasn’t had an easy time of things but she’s a fighter. Hardworking and eager to learn, Frank had said the other night when Ruben asked how things were working out, now that Dani and her girls had been in town a few months. You just have to get to know her.
Frank apparently didn’t see how diligently Dani Capelli worked to keep anyone else from doing just that.
She wasn’t unfriendly, only distant. She kept herself to herself. It was a phrase his mother might use, though Myra Morales seemed instantly fond of Dani and her girls.
Did Dani have any idea how fascinated the people of Haven Point were with these new arrivals in their midst?
Or maybe that was just him.
As he followed her down the hall in her white lab coat, his dogs behaving themselves for once, Ruben told himself to forget about his stupid attraction to her.
Sure, he might be ready to settle down and would like to have someone in his life, but he wasn’t at all sure if he had the time or energy for that someone to be a woman with so many secrets in her eyes, one who seemed to face the world with her chin up and her fists out, ready to take on any threats.
When they walked into the clinic waiting room, they found her two girls there. The older one was texting on her phone while her sister did somersaults around the room.
Dani stopped in the doorway and seemed to swallow an exasperated sound. “Mia, honey, you’re going to have dog hair all over you.”
“I’m a snowball rolling down the hill,” the girl said. “Can’t you see me getting bigger and bigger and bigger.”
“You’re such a dorkupine,” her sister said, barely looking up from her phone.
“I’m a dorkupine snowball,” Mia retorted.
“You’re a snowball who is going to be covered in dog hair,” Dani said. “Come on, honey. Get up.”
He could tell the moment the little girl spotted him and his dogs coming into the area behind her mother. She went still and then slowly rose to her feet, features shifting from gleeful to nervous.
Why was she so afraid of him?
“You make a very good snowball,” he said, pitching his voice low and calm as his father had taught him to do with all skittish creatures. “I haven’t seen anybody somersault that well in a long time.”
She moved to her mother’s side and buried her face in Dani’s white coat—though he didn’t miss the way she reached down to pet Ollie on her way.
“Hey again, Silver.”
He knew the older girl from the middle school, where he served as the resource officer a few hours a week. He made it a point to learn all the students’ names and tried to talk to them individually when he had the chance, in hopes that if they had a problem at home or knew of something potentially troublesome for the school, they would feel comfortable coming to him.
He had the impression that Silver was like her mother in many ways. Reserved, wary, slow to trust. It made him wonder just who had hurt them.
“How are things?” he asked her now.
For just an instant, he thought he saw sadness flicker in her gaze before she turned back to her phone with a shrug. “Fine, I guess.”
“Are you guys ready for Christmas? It’s your first one here in Idaho. A little different from New York, isn’t it?”
“How should we know? We haven’t lived in the city for, like, four years.”
Dani sent her daughter a look at her tone, which seemed to border on disrespectful. “I’ve been in vet school in Boston the last four years,” she explained.
“Boston. Then you’re used to snow and cold. We’re known for our beautiful winters around here. The lake is simply stunning in wintertime.”
Mia tugged on her mother’s coat and when Dani bent down, she whispered something to her.
“You can ask him,” Dani said calmly, gesturing to Ruben.
Mia shook her head and buried her face again and after a moment, Dani sighed. “She wonders if it’s possible to ice-skate on Lake Haven. We watched the most recent Olympics and she became a little obsessed.”
“You could say that,” Silver said. “She skated around the house in her stocking feet all day long for weeks. A dorkupine on ice.”
“You can’t skate on the lake, I’m afraid,” Ruben answered. “Because of the underground hot springs that feed into it at various points, Lake Haven rarely freezes, except sometimes along the edges, when it’s really cold. It’s not really safe for ice skating. But the city creates a skating rink on the tennis courts at Lake View Park every year. The volunteer fire department sprays it down for a few weeks once temperatures get really cold. I saw them out there the other night so it shouldn’t be long before it’s open. Maybe a few more weeks.”
Mia seemed to lose a little of her shyness at that prospect. She gave him a sideways look from under her mother’s arm and aimed a fleeting smile full of such sweetness that he was instantly smitten.
“There’s also a great place for sledding up behind the high school. You can’t miss that, either. Oh, and in a few weeks we have the Lights on the Lake Festival. You’ve heard about that, right?”
They all gave him matching blank stares, making him wonder what was wrong with the Haven Point Helping Hands that they hadn’t immediately dragged Dani into their circle. He would have to talk to Andie Bailey or his sister Angela about it. They always seemed to know what was going on in town.
“I think some kids at school
were talking about that at lunch the other day,” Silver said. “They were sitting at the next table so I didn’t hear the whole thing, though.”
“Haven Point hosts an annual celebration a week or so before Christmas where all the local boat owners deck out their watercraft from here to Shelter Springs to welcome in the holidays and float between the two towns. There’s music, food and crafts for sale. It’s kind of a big deal around here. I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it.”
“I’m very busy, with the practice and the girls, Deputy Morales. I don’t have a lot of time for socializing.” Though Dani tried for a lofty look, he thought he caught a hint of vulnerability there.
She seemed...lonely. That didn’t make a lick of sense. The women in this town could be almost annoying in their efforts to include newcomers in community events. They didn’t give people much of an option, dragging them kicking and screaming into the social scene around town, like it or not.
“Well, now you know. You really can’t miss the festival. It’s great fun for the whole family.”
“Thank you for the information. It’s next week, you say?”
“That’s right. Not this weekend but the one after. The whole thing starts out with the boat parade on Saturday evening, around six.”
“We’ll put it on our social calendar.”
“What’s a social calendar?” Mia whispered to her sister, just loud enough for Ruben to hear.
“It’s a place where you keep track of all your invitations to parties and sleepovers and stuff.”
“Oh. Why do we need one of those?”
“Good question.”
Silver looked glum for just a moment but Dani hugged her, then faced Ruben with a polite, distant smile.
“Thank you for bringing in Ollie and Yukon. Have a good evening, Deputy Morales.”
It was a clear dismissal, one he couldn’t ignore. Ruben gathered his dogs’ leashes and headed for the door. “Thank you. See you around. And by around, I mean next door. We kind of can’t miss each other.”
As he hoped, this made Mia smile a little. Even Silver’s dour expression eased into what almost looked like a smile.
As he loaded the dogs into the king cab of his pickup truck, Ruben could see Dani turning off lights and straightening up the clinic.
What was her story? Why had she chosen to come straight from vet school in Boston to set up shop all the way across the country in a small Idaho town?
He loved his hometown, sure, and fully acknowledged it was a beautiful place to live. It still seemed a jarring cultural and geographic shift from living back east to this little town where the biggest news of the month was a rather corny light parade that people froze their asses off to watch.
And why did he get the impression the family wasn’t socializing much? One of the reasons most people he knew moved to small towns was a yearning for the kind of connectedness and community a place like Haven Point had in spades. What was the point in moving to a small town if you were going to keep yourself separate from everybody?
He thought he had seen them at a few things when they first came to Haven Point but since then, Dani seemed to be keeping her little family mostly to themselves. That must be by choice. It was the only explanation that made sense. He couldn’t imagine McKenzie Kilpatrick or Andie Bailey or any of the other Helping Hands excluding her on purpose.
What was she so nervous about?
He added another facet to the enigma of his next-door neighbor. He had hoped that he might be able to get a better perspective of her by bringing the dogs in to her for their routine exams. While he had confirmed his father’s belief that she appeared to be an excellent veterinarian, he now had more questions about the woman and her daughters to add to his growing list.
Don’t miss Season of Wonder
by RaeAnne Thayne,
available October 2018
wherever HQN books and ebooks are sold!
Copyright © 2018 by RaeAnne Thayne
Keep reading for an excerpt from Unmasking the Maverick by Teresa Southwick.
Unmasking the Maverick
by Teresa Southwick
Chapter One
The poor kid from Prosperity, Texas, who hated fixing other people’s trash for a living had come full circle.
On the upside, his father would be proud. But Brendan Tanner had a lot of mileage on him since those resentful teenage days. The Corps had a way of turning an ungrateful kid into a buttoned-up, battle-hardened marine. And it was the best thing that ever happened to him.
Now he was in Rust Creek Falls, Montana, fixing a broken toaster. He was living at a place called Sunshine Farm. After seeing something online about it being a welcome place to get a fresh start, he’d reached out to Luke Stockton, one of the owners, and the cowboy had invited him to stay as long as he wanted. The name made him smile, although the upward curving of his mouth felt a little rusty. In the last eighteen months there hadn’t been much to smile about.
It disappeared when he heard a sudden high-pitched squeal. Those battle-hardened marine instincts kicked in and he automatically took a defensive stance, then realized the sound was a child’s laughter. Slowly he released his breath. The reflexes were still sharp, but apparently so were the bad memories.
The kid in question burst through the open door of his temporary barn workshop and came to a stop in front of Brendan. The blond, blue-eyed little guy stared up at him and chewed on his index finger.
“Hey, buddy. Where’s your mama? Did you go rogue?”
The kid babbled something that could have been a foreign language for all Brendan knew, then pointed to his tall rolling toolbox. It had belonged to his father, one of the few things he’d brought with him from Texas. When word got out that he was handy, he’d found a use for the tools. Something told him this kid could put them to use, too, but there would be hell to pay.
His next thought was all about heaven when the prettiest redhead he’d ever seen appeared in the workshop doorway.
“Jared! There you are, you little stinker.” The reprimand was spoken with such affection that it wasn’t a scolding at all. Then she smiled at Brendan. “Hi.”
“Ma’am.” He nodded and touched the brim of his Stetson. She was a little breathless, probably from running, but it was just about the sexiest thing he’d ever seen. “I wondered where his mom was.”
“Oh, I’m not his mother. Aunt by marriage. My sister Fallon married Jamie Stockton, who was a widower, and she became a mom to his triplets—Jared, Henry and Kate.”
Brendan watched her grab the kid when he made a move toward the toolbox. Instantly the boy started squirming to escape. If Brendan was in her arms, escape would be the last thing on his mind.
Then it sank in. Triplets. “There are two more like him?” he asked.
“Triple joy.” She laughed and held on to the little wiggle worm. “Or triple trouble. It changes from moment to moment.”
“Dat.” Jared pointed a stubby little finger at a screwdriver sitting on the workbench. “Want dat.”
The kid’s determination increased his twisting to get free, but to her credit the redhead hung on. Brendan had trained in hand-to-hand combat in the Marines and wasn’t sure he could have managed to wrangle the boy. He’d never been around kids, but even he knew giving this small human a sharp tool was a bad idea—no matter how determined he was to have it. He could offer to supervise, but there were too many ways for the situation to go sideways. Then he had an idea.
Underneath the workbench was a basket of broken toys. Eva Stockton, the wife of Luke, who owned Sunshine Farm, had given it to him. She’d said she kept them around for her niece and nephews and asked him to repair any he could. The kids were hard on them, she’d said, and after meeting Jared he understood what she meant.
He pulled the stash out into the open. “Maybe he’d like to look
through these?”
“You’re a lifesaver.” The woman looked at him as if he’d hung the moon.
The lifesaver part was truer than she knew, Brendan thought. He’d saved lives, and buddies had saved his, too. They shared a bond unlike anything he’d ever known, the tight-knit family he’d never had. A brotherhood forged in battle. But a different sort of skirmish ensued when the redhead set little Jared on his feet. The toolbox was forgotten as he started in on the toys.
“Car!” Jared held one up that was missing a wheel. He squatted down and set it on the hard-packed clay floor and made the universal sound effect used by boys to simulate an engine revving.
“Here’s to the short attention span of a two-and-a-half-year-old.” The woman’s eyes were big and blue and beautiful. The laughter shining there was really something special. “He hasn’t seen those broken toys for so long they’re like brand-new to him.”
“I haven’t had a chance to check them out and see if they’re salvageable.”
“Eva and Luke are keeping you busy?”
“Understatement. Fix a broken clothes dryer and suddenly you’re a Jedi knight who can use the force to put Humpty Dumpty back together.” He shrugged. “And they tell all their friends.”
“So, do I call you Sir Jedi? Or do you have a name?”
He nearly winced. Obviously his social skills were as rusty as his smile. “Brendan Tanner.”
She held out her hand. “Fiona O’Reilly.”
He took her hand and something crackled up his arm, shocking the words right out of his head. He barely managed to mumble, “Nice to meet you.”
While his brain was frozen, the rest of him was hot as a Texas sun on the hard-packed plains.
Before it turned awkward, Jared struck again. He’d emptied every last toy from the basket. Apparently the process of taking them out was playing with them and he was on to bigger and better things. Like the toolbox he’d temporarily forgotten. He opened a metal drawer, the one with various saw blades.
Without thinking it through, Brendan grabbed him up before he could touch anything and hurt himself. There was an instant screech of protest.
