What She Wants for Christmas

“As long as it’s not too gory.”

“You’re a vet. You’re used to blood and guts.”

“Not human blood.”

“You’d faint if I cut myself?”

“Probably,” she said cheerfully. “There’s a reason I didn’t become an M.D.”

“Why don’t I believe you?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you?”

He only laughed. She loved his laugh, a husky rumble that sounded just a little rusty, as if he didn’t laugh often enough. Well, he lived alone, so he probably didn’t. To keep their sense of humor intact, adults required children. Or maybe it worked the other way around: you required a sense of humor to stand your children.

THE WEEK SEEMED LONG without seeing Joe. It was funny, considering she hardly knew him. She watched for him in the grocery store and at stoplights. Logging trucks, a common sight in a town with two lumber mills, reminded her of him. She did see his sister, Jess, once to wave to, and Rebecca came out and took measurements. Teresa craned her neck every time she drove past the auto-body-repair place on Third. She felt like a teenage girl with her first crush. It felt like a first crush; falling in love with Tom had happened an eternity ago. The first flush of romantic feelings were unfamiliar but absurdly sweet.

The saving grace was that she was busy at work. Not doing farm calls; of necessity, Eric handled all of them. Which meant that the clients who arrived with a sick cat or an injured dog had to accept her or go to the other animal hospital in town, where, Eric had told her, the vets seemed to rotate more often than a horse threw shoes. Teresa was accepted. She brought an epileptic spaniel out of a prolonged seizure with phenobarbital, stitched up a Lab that had argued with a car, catheterized a cat with a blocked urethra and removed a fish hook from a dog’s lip. He’d apparently tried to snap up the fly when the owner was practicing casting.

As she calmly handled one emergency after another, it seemed to her that the staff was warming to her. They’d been pleasant but distant thus far: she was their employer, but that didn’t mean they had to like or respect her. She began to hope that they’d decided to do both.

On Friday morning, she had to put down a puppy with parvo. She comforted the owner, thanked the technician who was disposing of the body, then walked into the office and started to cry.

“Dr. Burkett?” someone said uncertainly.

She snatched a tissue and looked up.

Marilyn, the younger of the two technicians on duty, stood in the doorway. “I’m sorry. There’s a phone call—”

“That’s okay.” Teresa gave a wavery smile. “I just hate doing that. I should be colder, shouldn’t I?”

“No.” Marilyn’s smile trembled, too. Her own eyes, now that Teresa looked, were red.

Teresa took the call and saw another client a few minutes later. The routine marched on. But something had changed; for the first time, Marilyn and Libby, the other veterinary technician working that day, invited her to join them for lunch. It felt like a victory.

When Saturday night finally rolled around, Nicole whined only halfheartedly about having to baby-sit her little brother, who made only the obligatory objection to the words “little” and “baby-sit.” Joe knocked on the door promptly at seven, Teresa called goodbye to her kids and whisked out onto the porch.

Joe’s smile was the deliciously slow lazy one that muddled her insides. “Cabin fever?” he asked.

“Kid fever.” She smiled back. “Actually, they’re being good. Amazingly good. I figure if I make a quick escape, it might stay that way.”

Belatedly it occurred to her that, if she was imagining Joe as husband material, she ought to quit complaining about her children. After all, husband also meant stepfather. The way she’d been talking, he must think her kids were hell on wheels.

She made a point over dinner of bragging about them. Which, she realized in amusement, must mean she was thinking about him as a potential husband.

“Mark never seems to lift a finger, but he gets perfect grades. He’ll be starting in the gifted program, which I’m excited about. I know he gets bored sometimes.”

Joe only nodded. His face was annoyingly expressionless. She couldn’t decide whether she was boring him or whether he was only waiting for her to go on. Well, if he was bored—tough. She came as a package with her kids.

“Nicole’s a good student, too, but what she loves—besides boys, of course—is to dance. Ballet and jazz both.”

“There’s a dance school in White Horse, you know.”

“Is there?” She set down her fork. They were eating at a waterfront restaurant on Marine View Drive in Everett. Boats at a marina just below the big windows bobbed gently on quiet shimmering swells. “I hadn’t checked into it yet. I ought to get her started.”

“Two of my nieces dance.” Joe grinned ruefully. “I get to see the recital every year. Thank God they’ve progressed from the junior recital to the senior one. The first year, I thought the three-year-olds in their pink tutus were cute. By the second year, I was wondering why the hell their parents were paying for dance lessons when they were obviously too young even to learn how to stay in line, never mind how to pirouette.”

“I remember those days.” Oh, boy, did she. “Ragged rows of little girls—and an occasional boy whose friends hadn’t yet persuaded him it was unmanly to dance. Usually there’d be a couple who had some vague idea what to do, and one or two sucking their thumbs, frozen in terror. The rest would just kind of wander around.”

“One of my nieces was a thumb sucker. We have it captured for all time on videotape.”

“You sound like a fond uncle.”

His big shoulders moved uneasily, as though he didn’t know how to take compliments. “Yeah, I guess so. Tell you the truth, I’ve tried to stand in for Rebecca’s first husband and Jess’s ex. Neither of them was any great shakes as a parent. Alan especially—Rebecca’s boy—needed a man around sometimes. Before Rebecca remarried of course. I, uh, didn’t mind.”

Okay, so he hadn’t been bored; he liked kids. Definitely husband material. Except that he couldn’t be as good as he looked. Otherwise, why wasn’t he married? Teresa didn’t believe in that “waiting for the right woman” stuff. Just like animals, humans reached an age when they were ready to mate. Occasionally that urge got sidetracked—it often happened to vet students, because they were too busy and too tired for the dating rounds. But Joe must be in his mid-thirties at least. So what had he been doing, instead of marrying?

“How old are you?” she asked.

He looked startled, but answered willingly enough. “Thirty-six. You?”

“Thirty-five. And yes, before you count back, I had Nicole before I started veterinary school. I must have been nuts. Fortunately, while Tom may have had his flaws, he was a great father. We did wait to have Mark until I was done with my schooling, though.”

“Does Mark even remember his father?”

“Yes, but his memories are fading,” she said with sharp regret. “He was in his second day of kindergarten when I had to meet him at the bus with the news that his dad was dead. It’s natural that he’ll forget him. I mean, all you have to do is think back. If you’re like me, you can hardly remember your kindergarten days.”

“I remember them.” Before she could begin to speculate about what his flat tone meant, he added, “That must mean you just passed the anniversary of your husband’s death. Does it still hit you hard?”

“It has before, but not so much this year.” She made a face. “I was so damned mad at a farmer who decided he didn’t really need a vet when he saw me get out of the car, it carried me through the day.”

His mouth had an odd twist. “Anger is a useful emotion.”

“Mmm.” All she had to do was remember the days after Tom’s death. “Very.”

Joe glanced at his watch. “Still in the mood for a movie?”

“You bet. I even looked at the listings in the paper. I don’t suppose you like sword and sorcery?”

He lifted an eyebrow. “Swordplay usually leads to some blood and gore. Don’t I remember that being forbidden?”

“It’s different from a contemporary shoot ’em up,” she tried to explain. “Less realistic. In a fantasy, the blood doesn’t count.”

He loomed above her as he helped her out of her chair. More of that sense of being fragile and feminine that she usually hated. “I think you’re splitting hairs,” he said in amusement.

“Swirling capes and galloping horses are romantic.”

“The truth comes out! All women want is romance.”