Mistletoe Mommy

“Absolutely,” Brenna assured her. “Zoe and my cat, River, are the best of friends.”

Morgan laughed. “River? Cats don’t like water.”

“Try telling mine that. Now, I’m going in first. You guys give me a sec to put Zoe outside, okay? This will be less chaotic without her in the middle of everything.” She disappeared inside, then quickly returned. She ushered them into a living room where two overstuffed, dark green couches faced each other across a hardwood floor. “Come down the hall, and I’ll show you where we can get Ellie’s stuff set up.”

“It smells awesome in here,” Geoff said, inhaling deeply.

Adam had to agree. A blend of spices perfumed the little home, nearly making his stomach rumble.

“Slow-cook pot,” Brenna explained. Behind her, he could see into a kitchen. “Since I’m not home much during the day, I throw food in before I leave in the morning.”

“What did you fix today?” Eliza asked. Her question made Adam reflect guiltily that it had been a long time since lunch. He was accustomed to skipping a meal here and there if he had a long day of surgery, but the kids needed to eat more regularly.

“Chicken with a citrus marinade,” Brenna told his children, her expression resigned. The three kids had gone so wide-eyed in unspoken longing that Adam was reminded of the famous waif paintings by Margaret Keane, a Tennessee-born artist. “I don’t suppose you’d like to stay for dinner?”

“Heck, yeah!” Geoff wasn’t shy about accepting the invitation.

Adam was secretly glad for his son’s brashness. The polite response was probably to thank her for the offer but insist they couldn’t intrude more than they already were. The truth was, Adam had been enjoying her company. He was struck with the realization that it had been ages since he’d spoken to a woman who wasn’t a patient, fellow doctor, surgical nurse or his ex-wife. And her stepbrother claimed Brenna had no life? She wasn’t the only one.

“If that’s okay with you,” Eliza qualified, nudging her brother and jerking her head in Adam’s direction.

“Thank you,” he told Brenna. “We really appreciate that, really appreciate everything you’ve done for us today.”

“You’re welcome.” Her gaze met his as she smiled, and he felt a funny little twinge of loss when she broke the eye contact. She padded down the hallway, more hardwood covered with a slate-blue runner. Past a set of stairs were two doors on the left-an office and a bathroom-and one on the right. “Here we are, the guest room.”

That had no doubt been its original purpose. In here, the flooring was a tile that looked inexpensive and easy to clean. Instead of a bed and armoire, there was a love seat draped in a fuzzy mauve blanket, two carpeted towers like the kitty condo he’d seen back at the store, a large water bowl, a dog kennel against the far wall and a plastic container filled with chew toys. Up in the windowsill was a small television, and he suspected that Brenna kept on the Animal Planet channel or similar programming for visitors in this room. A cloth mouse dangled from a string looped over the doorknob.

Morgan looked delighted. “It’s a playroom for animals!”

Once they were all inside the room, which was barely big enough for five people, Brenna closed the door. “Go ahead, put Ellie down. We’ll let her explore for a minute. Can one of you go get her litter-box supplies?”

Adam shot his children a pointed glance. “I seem to recall lots of promises in the car about taking responsibility for your new pet?”

He got a trio of quick nods, and all three children started toward the bedroom door.

“Be careful not to let Brenna’s cat outside,” he warned.

“Oh, she spends her day on the screened-in sunporch,” Brenna said. “We’ll let her in soon.”

The kids slid through a partially open door while Ellie tiptoed around her new surroundings.

Adam’s conscience prompted him to ask, “You’re sure it’s okay if we stay for dinner?”

“As long as no one looks too closely at any of the furniture. I vacuum a lot to keep up with the animal hair, but I don’t spend a lot of time dusting. Just one of those things I unintentionally let slide because no one ever comes over.”

“Not even Josh? Or…a boyfriend?” He’d wondered since first seeing her yesterday if she was single. Though her stepbrother had all but confirmed it, Adam found that he wanted to hear it straight from her lips.

“Not for a long time,” she admitted. “Not since Kevin.”

“Dr. Higgs?” So he hadn’t been imagining the veterinarian’s reaction to her.

“Yeah. We dated for a while, but we wanted different things. My fault, probably. When you’re starting your own company, it can be pretty all-consuming. I barely had time and energy left over for myself, much less enough for another person.”

“Being a surgeon is a bit like that,” he commiserated. “From what little I saw on our walk-through, your house looks clean to me. And you smiled and waved at about a dozen people in the Diner. You’ve been working all day, and yet still managed to have a dinner waiting for you when you got home. I envy your balance.”

“Balance?” She laughed. “You should come to Sunday dinner and tell my family that. They’d laugh you out of the house. You heard what Josh said about me last night.”

“Yes, but he’s wrong,” Adam said, questioning his own vested interest. In a few weeks he’d be gone from Mistletoe, so what did it matter whether Brenna was able to balance romance in her busy schedule?

She arched an eyebrow. “He’s known me most of my life. You’ve only known me two days.”

“Still.” He smiled. “It’s always best to get a second opinion.”

IF ANYONE HAD told Adam that during his family vacation, he’d be having dinner two nights in a row with the same beautiful woman, he would have assumed feverish delirium and checked the speaker’s temperature. Or possibly have ordered a CAT scan.

Yet here he was in Brenna’s kitchen, instructing his kids to scrub in for supper. Since there were only four chairs at the oval table in her kitchen, she’d gone to grab the desk chair from her office. He asked Morgan to sit on the side closest to the wall since it was easiest for her to squeeze in; while he filled glasses with ice cubes, Geoff and Eliza seated themselves at either end. When Brenna returned, rolling the padded office chair up to the oblong table, Adam realized he’d be sitting next to her. Closely.

As tantalizing as the food smelled, when he was in such close proximity to Brenna, he didn’t notice the aromas of garlic or orange. Instead, it seemed as if he could only breathe in the heady smell of her, some kind of vanilla- based mixture that was sweet without being flowery or cloying. Her lotion or shampoo, maybe? Whatever it was, he liked it a lot. Much like Brenna herself, it was sexy without being blatantly obvious.

As dinner progressed, she finally struck a casual balance between trying hard-apologizing for any imagined housekeeping deficiencies, chatting a mile a minute about the town’s amenities-and holding herself courteously aloof, as he’d sensed her doing when they first arrived at the vet’s office. She regaled them with anecdotes about River, a long-haired tortoiseshell Manx with no tail. Unlike any other cat Adam knew, River would play fetch and loved to annoy the dog by taking off with Zoe’s smaller toys and hiding them in hard-to-reach places. As a child, Adam hadn’t owned a cat, but there’d been two big dogs in his home.

Smiling over long-forgotten memories, Adam recounted how their family German shepherd had been afraid of the yappy little poodle next door, and told the story of a dinner party that had been ruined when the pork roast that had been cooling on a counter disappeared entirely.

“Until that evening, I didn’t realize Mom even knew any bad words,” Adam reminisced. His parents were retired near Crossville now and owned a medium-size mutt they’d brought with them in February when they visited for Geoff’s birthday.

Adam frowned when he realized he hadn’t seen them since then-and he’d barely spent any time with them during that visit because one of his repeat patients had suffered a massive pulmonary embolism that week. His parents were generally more understanding about the demands of his career than his children, but the fact remained that Adam was struggling to prioritize between saving other people’s lives and being there for the people in his own life.

After dinner the kids checked on Ellie, then decided to take advantage of the beautiful summer weather by playing Frisbee in the backyard with Zoe.

“I could call them back in,” Adam offered, carrying three plates and a half-empty glass, “and get them to help us with dishes.”

Brenna shook her head. “Nah, we’d just be tripping over one another in this tiny kitchen. As it is, you and I keep…”