Season Of Wonder

When they entered the comfortable waiting room—with its bright colors, pet-friendly benches and big fish tank—Mia faltered for a moment, then sidestepped behind Dani’s back.

She saw instantly what had caused her daughter’s nervous reaction. Funny. Dani felt the same way. She wanted to hide behind somebody, too.

The receptionist had given her the files with the dogs’ names that were coming in for a checkup but hadn’t mentioned their human was Ruben Morales. Her gorgeous next-door neighbor.

Dani’s palms instantly itched and her stomach felt as if she’d accidentally swallowed a flock of butterflies.

“Deputy Morales,” she said, then paused, hating the slightly breathless note in her voice.

What was it about the man that always made her so freaking nervous?

He was big, yes, at least six feet tall, with wide shoulders, tough muscles and a firm, don’t-mess-with-me jawline.

It wasn’t just that. Even without his uniform, the man exuded authority and power, which instantly raised her hackles and left her uneasy, something she found both frustrating and annoying about herself.

No matter how far she had come, how hard she had worked to make a life for her and her girls, she still sometimes felt like the troublesome foster kid from Queens, always on the defensive.

She had done her best to avoid him in the months they had been in Haven Point, but that was next to impossible when they lived so close to each other—and when she was the intern in his father’s veterinary practice, with the hope that she might be able to purchase it at the end of the year.

“Hey, Doc,” he said, flashing her an easy smile she didn’t trust for a moment. It never quite reached his dark, long-lashed eyes, at least where she was concerned.

While she might be uncomfortable around Ruben Morales, his dogs were another story.

He held the leashes of both of them, a big, muscular Belgian shepherd and an incongruously paired little Chi-poo and she reached down to pet both of them. They sniffed her and wagged happily, the big dog’s tail nearly knocking over his small friend.

That was the thing she loved most about dogs. They were uncomplicated and generous with their affection, for the most part. They never looked at people with that subtle hint of suspicion, as if trying to uncover all their secrets.

“I wasn’t expecting you,” she admitted.

“Oh? I made an appointment. The boys both need checkups. Yukon needs his regular hip and eye check and Ollie is due for his shots.”

She gave the dogs one more pat before she straightened and faced him, hoping his sharp cop eyes couldn’t notice evidence of her accelerated pulse.

“Your father is still here every Monday and Friday afternoons. Maybe you should reschedule with him,” she suggested. It was a faint hope, but a girl had to try.

“Why would I do that?”

“Maybe because he’s your father and knows your dogs?”

“Dad is an excellent veterinarian. Agreed. But he’s also semiretired and wants to be fully retired this time next year. As long as you plan to stick around in Haven Point, we will have to switch vets and start seeing you eventually. I figured we might as well start now.”

He was checking her out. Not her her, but her skills as a veterinarian.

The implication was clear. She had been here three months, and it had become obvious during that time in their few interactions that Ruben Morales was extremely protective of his family. He had been polite enough when they had met previously, but always with a certain guardedness, as if he was afraid she planned to take the good name his hardworking father had built up over the years for the Haven Point Veterinary Clinic and drag it through the sludge at the bottom of Lake Haven.

Dani pushed away her instinctive prickly defensiveness, bred out of all those years in foster care when she felt as if she had no one else to count on—compounded by the difficult years after she’d married Tommy and had Silver, when she really had no one else in her corner.

She couldn’t afford to offend Ruben. She didn’t need his protective wariness to turn into full-on suspicion. With a little digging, Ruben could uncover things about her and her past that would ruin everything for her and her girls here.

She forced a professional smile. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s go back to a room and take a look at these guys. Girls, I’ll be done shortly. Silver, keep an eye on your sister.”

Her oldest nodded without looking up from her phone and with an inward sigh, Dani led the way to the largest of the exam rooms.

She stood at the door as he entered the room with the two dogs, then joined him inside and closed the door behind her.

The large room seemed to shrink unnaturally and she paused inside for a moment, flustered and wishing she could escape. Dani gave herself a mental shake. She was a doctor of veterinary medicine, not a teenage girl. She could handle being in the same room with the one man in Haven Point who left her breathless and unsteady.

All she had to do was focus on the reason he was here in the first place. His dogs.

She knelt to their level. “Hey there, guys. Who wants to go first?”

The Malinois—often confused for a German shepherd but smaller and with a shorter coat—wagged his tail again while his smaller counterpoint sniffed around her shoes, probably picking up the scents of all the other dogs she had seen that day.

“Ollie, I guess you’re the winner today.”

He yipped, his big ears that stuck straight out from his face quivering with excitement.

He was the funniest looking dog, quirky and unique, with wisps of fur in odd places, spindly legs and a narrow Chihuahua face. She found him unbearably cute. With that face, she wouldn’t ever be able to say no to him if he were hers.

“Can I give him a treat?” She always tried to ask permission first from her clients’ humans.

“Only if you want him to be your best friend for life,” Ruben said.

Despite her nerves, his deadpan voice sparked a smile, which widened when she gave the little dog one of the treats she always carried in the pocket of her lab coat and he slurped it up in one bite, then sat with a resigned sort of patience during the examination.

She was aware of Ruben watching her as she carefully examined the dog, but Dani did her best not to let his scrutiny fluster her.

She knew what she was doing, she reminded herself. She had worked so hard to be here, sacrificing all her time, energy and resources of the last decade to nothing else but her girls and her studies.

“Everything looks good,” she said after checking out the dog and finding nothing unusual. “He seems like a healthy little guy. It says here he’s about six or seven. So you haven’t had him from birth?”

“No. Only about two years. He was a stray I picked up off the side of the road between here and Shelter Springs when I was on patrol one day. He was in a bad way, half-starved, fur matted. I think he’d been on his own for a while. As small as he is, it’s a wonder he wasn’t picked off by a coyote or even one of the bigger hawks. He just needed a little TLC.”

“You couldn’t find his owner?”

“We ran ads and Dad checked with all his contacts at shelters and veterinary clinics from here to Boise, with no luck. I had been fostering him while we looked, and to be honest, I kind of lost my heart to the little guy and by then Yukon adored him so we decided to keep him.”

She was such a sucker for animal lovers, especially those who rescued the vulnerable and lost ones.

And, no. She didn’t need counseling to point out the parallels to her own life.

Regardless, she couldn’t let herself be drawn to Ruben and risk doing something foolish. She had too much to lose here in Haven Point.

“What about Yukon here?” She knelt down to examine the bigger dog. Though he wasn’t huge and Ruben could probably lift him easily to the table, she decided it was easier to kneel to his level. In her experience, sometimes bigger dogs didn’t like to be lifted and she wasn’t sure if the beautiful Malinois fell into that category.

Ruben shrugged as he scooped Ollie onto his lap to keep the little Chi-poo from swooping in and stealing the treat she held out for the bigger dog. “You could say he was a rescue, too.”

“Oh?”