Heather’s heart fluttered when she walked into the shelter’s reception area with Adrian’s long, strong fingers wrapped around hers. She had grabbed his hand without thinking, but the second their palms connected, an unexpected flash of adrenaline rushed through her. She let go to close the door behind them, then shoved her hands in her pockets.
Reva and Abby came into the room, each holding one end of an extra-large metal crate that they’d set up to house the feral cat. Abby was looking down, struggling to keep her wavy brown hair from falling into her face without letting go of the heavy crate. Short-stepping forward to accommodate Reva’s backward steps, Abby looked up and stopped walking. “He doesn’t have the cat.” She set her end of the crate down.
Reva, who couldn’t see them standing behind her, spoke to Abby. “But the cat said—”
“Nope.” Abby shook her head. “You were wrong.”
Reva eased her side of the crate down on the polished-wood floor, then turned to look. Her shoulders drooped. “Oh. What happened?”
“Jasper happened,” Heather said with exasperation. “I’m sorry.”
Reva shook her head. “Poor cat. How scared he must have been.” The unspoken worry: They’d never be able to catch him after this. He would be much more wary from now on. “Jasper didn’t hurt him, did he?”
“No. Jasper’s a big goofball who wants cats to stand still so he can get to know them. He just doesn’t know how to go about making new friends.”
Reva nodded, but her mouth was tight, disappointment clear in her expressive hazel-green eyes. “We’ll have to work on that. Apparently, Georgia needs a refresher course in manners around cats as well.”
The twins blasted through the front door. “We put Jasper up,” Josh yelled, his voice loud in the empty room of hardwood floors and freshly painted taupe walls with white trim. The furniture that had been ordered for the reception area hadn’t yet been delivered.
“Thank you,” Heather said, lowering her voice in the hope that her son would also lower his. She didn’t want to fuss at him any more than she’d already fussed today (pretty much the whole drive from the elementary school to here). “Would you and Caroline please go get a snack from the fridge?”
Josh’s face fell. “But I wanna—”
Caroline took her brother’s hand. “Yes, ma’am.”
The kids went into the shelter’s kitchen, and Heather heard the sounds of Caroline talking quietly to Josh and the refrigerator door being opened. Erin seemed to have disappeared. “Do y’all know where Erin went?”
Reva touched Heather’s arm, a gesture of comfort. “She’s next door, throwing the ball to Georgia, who has also been banned from the shelter for the rest of the day. Jasper wasn’t the only dog who let his baser instincts take over today.” Then she looked over at Adrian. “How’s your car?”
“I don’t know.” Adrian made a sound of frustration. “Not good is my guess.”
“I’m so sorry,” Reva said. “Let me know what I owe you for repairs.”
“My insurance will take care of it.”
“Well.” Reva patted his shoulder. “We’ll discuss that later. You need to do something about those scratches so they don’t get infected. And after that, we have a meeting to attend.”
“I’ll finish getting the conference room set up,” Abby said. The shelter’s conference room had been the dining room of the old house. Reva and Abby had furnished it just last week with an antique Persian rug and a lovely old dining table and matching chairs they’d found at an estate sale. “What should we do with this big ol’ crate?”
“Let’s leave it set up,” Reva said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and catch the cat again soon.”
Adrian picked up the crate and set it against the wall where it would be out of the way. Heather tried not to notice the way the muscles in his shoulders and back shifted under his ripped T-shirt. “Reva, would you mind taking the twins next door so Erin can watch them? I’ll help Adrian take care of those scratches.”
Adrian held up a hand. “No need—”
“Cat scratch fever is a real thing,” Reva interrupted in her sternest tone. “And you don’t want it. Let Heather help you.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Adrian’s amiable smile made his deep-blue eyes sparkle. He really was too good-looking, if such a thing was possible.
In the kitchen, Reva herded the kids—who were sitting at the kitchen table eating yogurt pops—out the door with the promise of cookies. Heather pointed to the chair Josh had just vacated. “Sit.” She made sure that her voice sounded strong, capable, no-nonsense. “Take off your shirt.”
She turned on the faucet, and while the water warmed, she located the first aid bin. She took a washcloth from the drawer next to the sink, filled a big bowl with steaming water, then dropped the cloth in. Before she turned around with the bowl in one hand and the first aid supplies in the other, she steeled herself for what she already knew would be a compelling glimpse of gorgeous man.
Oooh, mama. Her imagination didn’t do him justice.
Perched on the chair across from him, she poked through the contents of the first aid box, setting out a bottle of Betadine, a tube of Neosporin, a roll of gauze, and a dispenser of first aid adhesive tape. She wrung out the cloth, then dispensed some Betadine into its folds.
Finally, she met his eyes. Closer than she’d ever been to him before, she noticed that one of his dark-blue eyes had a chocolate-brown occlusion across the top third of the iris. Sitting this close, she could see the shadow of his beard beneath the clean-shaved skin of his square jaw and strong chin with a slight cleft in the center. He smiled at her, a gentle, soft smile that brought out the dimples in his lean, tanned cheeks. Then he closed his eyes and leaned forward. “Do your worst,” he said. “I can take it.”
As gently as she could, she cleaned the scratches then took the bowl to the sink and dumped it. When she turned back, he was watching her, his eyes heavy-lidded, his long dark lashes obscuring the brown spot in his left eye.
She smiled.
He didn’t.
He just watched her with that smoldering, sexy gaze.
She felt like a gazelle being studied by a lion. Her cheeks heated.
Snatching the tube of Neosporin off the table, she moved to stand behind Adrian, where she could escape his steady gaze. Her fingers shook as she twisted the lid of the slippery tube.
“You okay back there?” he asked, a hint of laughter in his voice.
She dangled the tube over his shoulder. “I can’t get it open.”
Wordlessly, he reached back, took it, uncapped it, and plunked it into her outstretched hand. She applied a bead of the medicine to one of the scratches, dragging her fingertip lightly down his bare skin. He shivered.
Now there was nothing but the intimacy of her skin touching his. She smeared the antibiotic cream on the angry red welts, then covered the worst gouges with gauze and tape. Self-sticking bandages would have been easier, but the scratches were too long for those.
She came around to sit in front of him. Keeping her eyes focused on each scratch as she applied the cream, she managed to get through the process without blushing. She finished applying cream to the last remaining wound and reached back for the gauze.
He covered her hand with his, pinning it between his palm and his warm, hairy chest. “That’s good enough.”
Startled, she knocked the gauze onto the floor. “Huh?” She would’ve leaned down to grab the gauze—Weren’t medical supplies subject to the three-second rule?—but he didn’t release her hand.
He kept her hand pressed to his chest. She could feel his steady heartbeat, his slow breaths in and out, his warm skin heating her palm. Her heart started doing that fluttering thing again.
“That tape isn’t gonna stick. It’s fine to leave it uncovered.”
“Oh.” She drew her hand back and put it in her lap. “Okay.” She realized with a shock that until now, with the exception of a few brief handshakes, she had never touched a man’s bare skin—other than her husband’s, of course.
No wonder she’d felt so unsettled.
She was still pondering when Adrian leaned in close…
Her fluttering heart flopped over in her chest. Anticipating the kiss, she sat frozen in place, unable to protest or flee when…
He reached past her to take his shirt off the table, then leaned back to slip it over his head. Her lungs started working again about the time his head emerged from the neck of the shirt.
A slow, sexy grin grew slowly out of the knowing smirk on his lips.
Heart hammering, cheeks flaming, her breathing more shredded than his shirt, Heather pushed her chair back and bolted for the bathroom.
***
Reva herded Heather’s twins through the swing gate between the shelter and Bayside Barn. She left them in her kitchen with a plate of cookies, a pitcher of Kool-Aid, and strict instructions to mind their big sister and stay put. Then she closed the doggie door in the laundry room and told Georgia to stay put too. Georgia had always had a strong desire to play Miss Manners with the cats—and with other dogs—but that trait had gotten out of hand today when she chased the feral cat.
While Reva walked back to the shelter and across the parking lot, she had a telepathic conversation with Georgia, promising to let her out at the end of the workday when the two gates—one drive-through and one walk-through—between the shelter and Bayside Barn had been closed for the night. She also delivered the bad news that Georgia would be denied permission to go back to the shelter until the feral cat had been caught.
Georgia pouted, sending a mental image of herself turning her back and sticking her little nose in the air. Reva had no doubt that Georgia would also choose to sleep on the couch instead of the bed tonight. Fair enough. Bad behavior had consequences.
Reva stood by Adrian’s car and assessed the damage. Not as bad as she’d feared; it looked like none of the scratches were deep enough to require a new paint job. She would insist on paying for Adrian to take the car to the dealership and have the scratches buffed out or whatever they did to restore the factory finish. If it was too much to pay out of pocket, her homeowner’s insurance would pay, since it was her dog who’d done the deed.
With that settled in her mind, Reva scanned the heavily wooded area on the other side of the chain-link fence. The strip of vine-covered trees and shrubs was dense but not wide because it bordered the road that dead-ended at an old boat launch into the marshy bayous that edged Magnolia Bay. She didn’t feel that the cat was hiding in that narrow strip of land. She didn’t sense him in the marshland between here and the bay either. She felt that he was somewhere high and dry. Probably across the road in the vacant lot between here and the next block of estates. Or maybe he was hiding across the street from Bayside Barn in the Cat’s Claw forest.
“Where are you?” she asked. Closing her eyes, she reached out with her intuitive abilities and imagined the cat’s black-and-white face with its amber eyes, its wide, testosterone-muscled cheeks, and its tattered, battle-torn ears. Slowly, his image shifted, showing her mind an image of his entire body, though it was shrouded in darkness. Hiding under something.
No…in something. A dilapidated structure of some kind. There were plenty of those: the fallen-in house that had been consumed by the Cat’s Claw vines across the street, the various sheds out back of the aging estates on this road and the next. “Oh, well.” She sent a mind message to the cat. “You’re safe enough for now. But you’ll be safer if you’ll let us take care of you.”
She leaned against the front bumper of Heather’s car (she knew better than to lean against Adrian’s beloved hunk of metal) and spent a few more minutes conversing telepathically with the cat. She tried unsuccessfully to assure him that, contrary to his unfortunate experiences today, it would be better for him to come back to the shelter and allow himself to be brought inside than to remain untethered to humans.
She showed images of the inside of the shelter, in particular the upstairs area that would house the shelter cats. He would be the first resident, the first to climb the treelike cat towers, the first to use the cat doors that led into the two-story outdoor play enclosure full of interesting places to play and climb and hide.
No luck, though. In the image he sent of his reaction to all this, he turned his head away from her and licked his paws. He wasn’t impressed.
“Well, then,” she asked. “What would it take?”
He showed an image of Adrian cradling the cat loosely in his arms.
“Well, all righty then. I’ll tell him.”
Not wanting to disturb the planning meeting that had already started, Reva hung around outside the shelter, watering the potted ferns that hung above the white porch railing, then pulling a few weeds that had dared to spring up in the new flowerbeds around the old-growth gardenias.
After a while, she heard the planning committee folks go outside to look at the cats’ outdoor play area. She joined the group and stood at the back, listening to Abby’s fiancé, Quinn, who was the project’s contractor, explain what he’d done so far and what he still had to do.
While Quinn pointed out the way he had attached the cats’ two-story play enclosure to the outside of the old house and installed several cat doors in the exterior wall, Reva noticed Abby watching Quinn with a half smile on her face. Reva couldn’t help smiling too. Her niece had found a keeper. Quinn was kind, hardworking, and good to Abby. He wasn’t hard to look at either; tall and good-looking, with silky light-brown hair that somehow always managed to be a bit too long.
“Quinn,” Heather said. “Where’s my hose connection going to be?”
“I haven’t run that line yet, so you get to choose.”
While Quinn and Heather conferred about hose connections and site drainage, Abby told Adrian and Reva about her plans for the enclosure’s landscaping and climbing structures. Despite Abby’s animated hand gestures, Adrian’s gaze kept drifting to Heather, who stood with her back to him, her hands on her curvaceous hips while she nodded at something Quinn was saying. It seemed that Adrian couldn’t keep his eyes from lingering on Heather.
“Hmmm,” Reva murmured. “Isn’t that interesting?”
“Oh, definitely!” Abby agreed. “Not only will it give the cats plenty of enrichment and exercise, it doubles the amount of space they’ll have.”
“Um-hmm,” Reva agreed. But she hadn’t been commenting about the cats.
***
After the meeting broke up, Adrian hung around and talked to Quinn while Reva and Abby went back inside to clean the conference room and lock up. Halfway listening to Quinn, Adrian watched Heather walk through the gate between the shelter and Reva’s house to collect her kids.
He really hadn’t meant to scare the bejesus out of her by leaning in so close. Yes, he admitted he was teasing her, just a little, by coming in close enough to kiss while reaching for his shirt. She was such an easy mark, though, that it was hard to resist. All he had to do was look at her and lower his eyelids a fraction to get her to blush. He realized too late that he shouldn’t have pushed the envelope quite so far. He’d been half-hoping she’d lean in too and invite a kiss for real, but instead, she had jumped up like a scalded cat and rushed out of the room, leaving him to clean up the mess from her Florence Nightingale routine.
Only fair, he supposed.
Next time, he’d be more aware of her subtle cues. He had only wanted to flirt, not to embarrass her. She hadn’t met his eyes since the almost-kiss; for the entire meeting and the site tour that followed, she’d managed not to look at him.
He figured that hiding back here with Quinn until Heather left would save her further embarrassment and that by next week’s meeting, she’d be over it. He’d thought about apologizing, but (a) that might make things worse, and (b) he wasn’t sorry he’d invited an opportunity for kissing. If anyone needed kissing in a bad way, it was Heather. That woman was wound tighter than Dick’s hatband.
“See?” Quinn was saying. “We subdivided the existing three-car garage into kennels and added a doggie door on the exterior wall of each one. Every kennel will have a separate chain-link dog run and 24/7 access to the outdoors. Heather says that’ll cut down on cleaning. And Reva says it’ll provide natural house-training for the dogs because they’d rather do their business outside if they can.”
“That’s genius,” Adrian said.
A second later, he was tackled from behind. He stumbled but managed to stay upright as Josh grabbed his hand and walked up his jeans. What had seemed, at first, to be a good attempt at a run-up-the-wall back flip ended with Adrian’s shoulder possibly out of joint and Josh rolling in a giggling heap on the ground, leaving red-dirt footprints as high up as Adrian’s hip.
“Josh!” Heather ran toward them, her eyes wide with alarm. “What are you doing?” She snatched her son up by the arm. Adrian tried not to look at her heaving bosom as she spoke to her son in a curiously firm tone for such a soft voice. “That was not okay.”
Quinn put his hands up. “Uh-oh. Family drama. I think I hear Abby calling me.”
Quinn quickly absconded, brushing past Erin and Caroline, who were standing behind Heather.
“Erin, please go get Jasper out of the kennel and put him in the car.” The five-star-general aspect of Heather’s personality emerged, apparently banishing her embarrassment more effectively than anything Adrian could have done to talk her out of it. “Caroline, please go with your sister and close all the gates securely behind you. Josh, please stand exactly where you are and tell Mr. Crawford how sorry you are that you ambushed him.”
Erin and Caroline went off in the direction of the kennels, and Josh looked up at his mother, innocently blinking his wide blue eyes. “What’s ‘ambushed’ mean?”
That didn’t cut it with Heather. “I will show you how to look the word up in the dictionary when we get home. And to make sure you remember the meaning, I’ll get you to write it down five or ten times. Now. You know what you did, and you know it was wrong. Please apologize.” The unspoken threat behind her polite wording hovered in the air.
Josh looked down at his feet and drew a line in the clay-rich red dirt that had been hauled in to level the construction site outside the existing buildings. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.
Heather crossed her arms. “I’m not sure anyone heard you, and when you apologize, you are supposed to look the person in the eye and say what you’re sorry for. Let’s try that again.”
Adrian knew how excruciating this kind of chastisement in front of others would feel to any kid, much less one who wasn’t yet knee-high to a grasshopper. And he owed something to Heather after taking his natural tendency to flirt a little too far.
He knelt down in front of Josh. “It’s okay. I know you didn’t mean anything by it. But your mother is right. When you…” He struggled to find a small enough word for accost, invade, violate. “When you sneak up on someone without their permission, it’s…” Shit fire; again, he struggled to come up with a ten-cent word to explain a five-dollar concept. “It’s a… It’s a good thing to apologize.”
Josh looked down at his feet, continuing to scrub lines in the dirt with the toe of his shoe.
“Josh…” Heather said in a warning tone.
Adrian held out both hands, and Josh grabbed hold. Adrian squeezed the kid’s fingers lightly, giving encouragement. “I’m right here, and I’m not mad. Just say what you need to say, and I promise, it’ll be fine.”
“Um…” Josh’s voice shook, then faltered.
Adrian looked down at the boy’s short little fingers clutching his much longer ones. Josh’s hands were so small, still bearing the marks of babyhood in the dimples above each knuckle. Adrian looked up into Josh’s ice-blue eyes that he must have gotten from his father. “It’s okay, buddy,” Adrian said, even though it seemed that the hint of understanding he showed made the kid’s bottom lip tremble with emotion.
Josh clutched Adrian’s hands and stared into his eyes. “I’m sorry, Mister…” He glanced up at Heather, obviously unable to remember Adrian’s surname, since he’d probably only heard it this once.
“Hey.” Adrian brought Josh’s attention back to him. “You know what? You can call me Ade, like Quinn does, because he’s my buddy from way back. We can dispense with the Mister.”
Josh’s blond brows drew together for a second while he looked off to the side (probably wondering about the word dispense); then he looked into Adrian’s eyes again. “I’m sorry I sneaked up on you and climbed up your legs.” The words tumbled out in a rush, and then he leaned close and whispered into Adrian’s ear. “I hope I didn’t hurt you. I didn’t, did I?”
Adrian patted Josh’s back. “No,” he said quietly. “You didn’t hurt me.”
“I’m glad.” Josh’s small body relaxed in relief. “I wasn’t thinking.” He wrapped his arms around Adrian’s neck and held on. “I was just so happy you were still here so I could say goodbye before we left.”
Adrian’s heart cracked open at the kid’s raw honesty. A kid, he realized, who hadn’t been able to say a last goodbye to his father because Dale had died so suddenly that goodbyes weren’t possible. Nobody had ever mentioned to Adrian what, exactly, had happened to Dale, and Adrian hadn’t felt comfortable asking for details that weren’t given freely. He only knew from talking to Quinn and Abby and Reva that Dale’s death was so unexpected and upsetting that the whole family was still struggling with PTSD along with their grief.
Heather reached down to touch Josh’s shoulder. “That was a good apology, Joshua. I’m proud of you.”
Josh nodded, then pulled away from Adrian just far enough to look at him. “I’m glad you’re okay.” His face brightened. “You want to come to dinner? My mom cooks great.”
“Maybe one of these days.” Adrian smiled at Josh, then chanced a look at Heather. Her pink lips were curved in a soft smile.
“You could come tonight,” Josh insisted. “Friday is spaghetti night. Mama makes toasty cheese bread then. And salad, but you don’t have to eat it if you don’t want to. I have to at least try it, but she won’t make you do that.”
“Josh,” Heather said softly. “I have a Zoom meeting with Sara tonight so we can prepare for Monday’s PTA meeting. And we need to get going.”
“Well, when can he come?” Josh asked, a mulish expression on his face.
Heather blushed. “I don’t know, Josh. We’ll have to figure that out later.”
“Promise?” Josh whined. He sent an imploring look to Heather, then to Adrian. “Do y’all promise you’ll figure it out?”
Heather sighed heavily. “I promise. Now let’s go. I can’t be late for the meeting, and I still have to cook your dinner.”
Josh looked back at Adrian. “You promise too? You’ll come to dinner? Soon?”
Adrian tried to give Josh a reassuring smile, but it felt pasted on. Family dinner night at Heather’s was a fate he hoped to avoid. He was happy to flirt—and to follow that wherever it led—but he didn’t want to put down roots. He had to say something though, and making idle promises didn’t sit right. “I’ll try.”
It was the best he could do, and even that felt like too much commitment.
He stood and received Josh’s fervent hug.
Heather blushed. “Sorry about all this.” She took Josh’s hand and urged him to take two steps in the direction of the car, even though he reached out for Adrian dramatically; a brilliant career in the theater definitely awaited. She dragged her son another few staggering steps. “See you next Friday, Adrian.”
“I’ll be here.” He watched the struggle, almost halfway wishing he could help, but mostly glad he didn’t have to.
Erin and Caroline led Jasper through the gate from the kennels to the parking lot, and Heather stooped down to get her son’s attention. “We really do have to go now. Please say goodbye, Josh.”
“Goodbye, Josh,” the kid mimicked with a silly, clownish look on his face. Unlike his twin sister, Josh was not a wilting flower. But it was clear that his manic appeal for attention covered deep insecurity and sadness.
Adrian waved, his face carefully expressionless. “See you next week.” Because his presence seemed to ignite Josh’s veering emotions, Adrian turned back toward the shelter, planning to hide out of sight by the kennels until Heather left, then hightail it to his car and get the hell out of Dodge.
***
That evening, when Heather and the kids got home from the meeting at the shelter, she couldn’t help noticing Charlie, Dale’s lonely and pitiful horse, standing alone in the field behind the house with his head low. With his head down like that, the retired racehorse—who had loved nothing more than to run like the wind with Dale on his back—was reduced to a sad brown blob of misery in the distance.
She wondered for the millionth time whether they should get Charlie a goat or a donkey for company, but it wasn’t fair to ask Erin to take on even more responsibility. She already had to feed the poor thing, scoop his stall out every evening, and deep-clean his stall every weekend. Dale had done those jobs because Charlie had been his horse, but Charlie, like everyone else in the family, had lived a diminished existence ever since Dale died.
“Erin,” she said as they sat in the car and waited for the garage door to creak open. “Please go out to the barn and take care of Charlie before you do anything else, okay?”
“Dammit, Mom,” Erin groused. “I have a ton of homework to do.”
“And the whole weekend to do it,” Heather replied, ignoring the fact that Erin had just said dammit. There were some arguments she didn’t have the strength for, and right this minute, Erin’s little outburst was one of them.
Heather parked the car in the garage and got out before her temptation to be a better mother got the best of her. It was fine, she told herself, to let Erin’s bad language slide, just this once. “Get all your stuff out of the car,” she said over her shoulder. “I don’t want any Monday-morning hysteria about not being able to find something you left in the car.”
In the kitchen, Caroline and Josh fed the dog while Heather set a pot of salted water and a skillet on the stove. Erin hefted her backpack onto the granite-topped island then slammed out the door on her way to feed Charlie Horse.
Heather thought about the weeks she and Dale had spent picking out that countertop when they built this house. They’d gone to every granite store in the state of Louisiana (and a few in Mississippi) until they found a beautiful slab in the subdued browns and grays Dale could live with that also contained the interesting striations of silver and crystal formations she insisted upon.
Everything, everything—from the distressed-leather wall treatment she had chosen to the unimaginative white ceilings and trim she’d let him have—everything reminded her of him. And every time she noticed or remembered anything about the building of this house, she sent up a prayer of thanks that Dale had insisted on buying more life insurance than she’d thought they could afford.
Dale’s life insurance had paid off the house and covered the bills for a year so she could continue being a stay-at-home mom. That gift had allowed her to keep their lives as consistent as possible. Taking a job would change a lot, but at least they could afford to keep living here.
Heather sighed and went back to smashing the browning ground beef and seasoned sausage in the skillet into ever more tiny chunks. The time of respite and recovery she had resolved to give herself and her kids was now over, and time continued to march onward.
Dale’s birthday would have been next Wednesday. The first missed birthday after Dale died came when they were all still shell-shocked, so the kids hadn’t remembered. This time, though, they might. Heather wondered if she should plan something to commemorate the date—maybe a visit to the cemetery followed by a special dinner.
Jasper nosed her leg, looking for a handout, his little stub tail wagging. She handed him a chunk of cooked carrot, which she’d been chopping finely enough to hide in the spaghetti sauce. He took it from her fingers so gently that it warmed her heart.
Jasper nosed her leg again. “Ever hopeful,” she said to his pleading brown-and-blue-marbled eyes. She gave him another carrot and stroked the whirlwind-shaped cowlick in the middle of the white blaze at the bridge of his nose.
Aside from the cowlick, Jasper was a perfectly marked red merle Australian Shepherd. The pure-white blaze that started at the tip of his nose went up his forehead to widen between his ears and join up with the ruff around his neck. His feet and legs had white socks edged in copper, and the rest of his thick wavy coat was speckled in shades from the lightest honey to the darkest brown.
“You’re gonna like working at the shelter, aren’t you, Jasper?”
The dog panted, smiling. Always happy, always spreading joy. Jasper was actually one of the reasons Heather had decided to take the job at the shelter. Where else could she work that would allow her to bring her kids and the dog?
The only fly in her ointment at the shelter was Adrian Crawford and her conflicted feelings toward him. Because sometimes, when she noticed him looking at her with those deep, dark midnight-blue eyes or when he brushed past her with his overtly masculine presence (because even in those leather loafers he wore sometimes, there was no denying his masculinity), she would remember that she wasn’t just Dale’s widow; she was a woman.
And every time it happened—those little wisps of connection that clung to her skin like strands of spiderweb for hours afterward—she felt as guilty as if she’d just woken from an erotic but disturbing dream in which she had cheated on Dale.
Her husband, the love of her life, was gone. She knew that it wasn’t possible to cheat on a dead man. But her newly awakening womanhood felt as uncomfortable as the pins-and-needles feeling of a gone-to-sleep limb whose circulation was just beginning to flow again. In a way, it felt good. But it also hurt, maybe more than she could bear.