Diamond In The Ruff

“I was a lot younger back then and I guess I looked more like a blond swizzle stick than anything else,” he told her.

She didn’t remember the face, but the smile and now the voice nudged at something distant within her mind. Recognition was still frustratingly out of reach. The young man’s voice was lower, but the cadence was very familiar. She’d heard it before.

“Your voice is familiar and that smile, I know I’ve seen it before, but...” Maizie’s voice trailed off as she continued to study his face. “I know I didn’t sell you a house,” she told him with certainty. She would have remembered that.

She remembered all of her clients as well as all the couples she, Theresa and Cecilia had brought together over the past few years. As far as Maizie was concerned, she and her lifelong best friends had all found their true calling in life a few years ago when desperation to see their single children married and on their way to creating their own families had the women using their connections in the three separate businesses they owned to find suitable matches for their offspring.

Enormously successful in their undertaking, they found they couldn’t stop just because they had run out of their own children to work with. So friends and clients were taken on.

They did their best work covertly, not allowing the two principals in the undertaking know that they were being paired up. The payment the three exacted was not monetary. It was the deep satisfaction that came from knowing they had successfully brought two soul mates together.

But the young man before her was neither a professional client nor a private one. Yet he was familiar.

Shrugging her shoulders in a gesture of complete surrender, Maizie said, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to take pity on me and tell me why your smile and your voice are so familiar but the rest of you isn’t.” Even as she said the words aloud, a partial answer suddenly occurred to her. “You’re someone’s son, aren’t you?”

But whose? she wondered. She hadn’t been at either of her “careers”—neither the one involving real estate nor the one aimed at finding soul mates—long enough for this young man to have been the result of her work.

So who are you?

“I was,” he told her, his blue eyes on hers.

Was.

The moment he said that, it suddenly came to her. “You’re Frances Whitman’s boy, aren’t you?”

He grinned. “Mom always said you were exceedingly sharp. Yes, I’m Frances’s son.” He said the words with pride.

The name instantly conjured up an image in Maizie’s mind, the image of a woman with laughing blue eyes and an easy smile on her lips—always, no matter what adversity she was valiantly facing.

The same smile she was looking at right now.

“Christopher?” Maizie asked haltingly. “Christopher Whitman!” It was no longer a question but an assertion. Maizie threw her arms around him, giving him a warm, fond embrace, which only reached as far up as his chest. “How are you?” she asked with enthusiasm.

“I’m doing well, thanks.” And then he told her why he’d popped in after all this time. “And it looks like we’re going to be neighbors.”

“Neighbors?” Maizie repeated, somewhat confused.

There’d been no For Sale signs up on her block. Infinitely aware of every house that went up for sale not just in her neighborhood, but in her city as well, Maizie knew her friend’s son was either mistaken or had something confused.

“Yes, I just rented out the empty office two doors down from you,” he told her, referring to the strip mall where her real estate office was located.

“Rented it out?” she repeated, waiting for him to tell her just what line of work he was in without having to specifically ask him.

Christopher nodded. “Yes, I thought this was a perfect location for my practice.”

She raised her eyebrows in minor surprise and admiration.

“You’re a doctor?” It was the first thing she thought of since her own daughter was a pediatrician.

Christopher nodded. “Of furry creatures, large and small,” he annotated.

“You’re a vet,” she concluded.

“—erinarian,” he amended. “I find if I just say I’m a vet, I have people thanking me for my service to this country. I don’t want to mislead anyone,” he explained with a smile she now found dazzling.

“Either way, you’ll have people thanking you,” Maizie assured him. She took a step back to get a better, fuller view of the young man. He had certainly filled out since she had seen him last. “Christopher Whitman,” she repeated in amazement. “You look a great deal like your mother.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” he said with a warm smile. “I was always grateful that you and the other ladies were there for Mom while she was getting her treatments. She didn’t tell me she was sick until it was close to the end,” he explained. It was a sore point for him, but under the circumstances, he’d had to forgive his mother. There hadn’t been any time left for wounded feelings. “You know how she was. Very proud.”

“Of you,” Maizie emphasized. “I remember her telling me that she didn’t want to interfere with your schooling. She knew you’d drop out if you thought she needed you.”

“I would have,” he answered without hesitation.

She heard the note of sadness in his voice that time still hadn’t managed to erase. Maizie quickly changed the subject. Frances wouldn’t have wanted her son to beat himself up over a decision she had made for him.

“A veterinarian, huh? So what else is new since I last saw you?” Maizie asked.

Broad shoulders rose and fell in a careless shrug. “Nothing much.”

Habit had Maizie glancing down at his left hand. It was bare, but that didn’t necessarily mean the man wasn’t married. “No Mrs. Veterinarian?”

Christopher laughed softly and shook his head. “Haven’t had the time to find the right woman,” he confessed. It wasn’t the truth, but he had no desire to revisit that painful area yet. “I know Mom would have hated to hear that excuse, but that’s just the way things are. Well, when I saw your name on the door, I just wanted to drop by to say hi,” he told her, adding, “Stop by the office sometime when you get a chance and we’ll talk some more about Mom,” he promised.

“Yes, indeed,” Maizie replied.

As well as other things, she added silently as she watched Christopher walk away, anticipation welling in her chest. Wait until the girls hear about this.

Chapter One (#ulink_b7cb47b2-0168-5f29-9c04-cc9026030be3)

Okay, how did it get to be so late?

The exasperated, albeit rhetorical, question echoed almost tauntingly in her brain as Lily Langtry hurried through her house, checking to make sure she hadn’t left any of her ground-floor windows open or her back door unlocked. There hadn’t been any break-ins in her neighborhood, but she lived alone and felt that you could never be too careful.

The minutes felt as if they were racing by.

There was a time when she was not only on time but early for everything from formal appointments to the everyday events that took place in her life. But that was before her mother had passed away, before she was all alone and the only one who was in charge of the details of her life.

It seemed to her that even when she was taking care of her mother and holding down the two jobs that paying off her mother’s medical bills necessitated, she had usually been far more organized and punctual than she was these days. Now that there was only one of her, in essence only one person to be responsible for, her ability to be on top of things seemed to have gone right out the window. If she intended to be ready by eight, in her mind she had to shoot for seven-thirty—and even that didn’t always pan out the way she hoped it would.

This morning she’d told herself she would be out the door by seven. It was now eight-ten and she was just stepping into her high heels.

“Finally,” she mumbled as she grabbed her bag and launched herself out the front door while simultaneously searching for her keys. The latter were currently eluding detection somewhere within the nether regions of her oversize purse.

Preoccupied, engaged in the frantic hunt that was making her even later than she already was, Lily wasn’t looking where she was going.

Which was why she almost stepped on him.

Looking back, in her defense, she hadn’t been expecting anything to be on her doorstep, much less a moving black ball of fur that yipped pathetically when her foot came down on his paw.