She slid Cruz a long look. “Been there, done that, remember?”
“I remember it was good.”
“Uh-huh.” They’d dated for approximately two weeks several years back, until they’d realized they were far more suited for this, for a friendship. “Except for the part where we drove each other crazy,” she reminded him.
“Yeah.” He blew out a sigh. “Maybe you could work on not driving me crazy.”
She laughed. Living in a small town had made it hard for her to find a guy she meshed with. There weren’t all that many to choose from in the first place, and the few that there were, she’d known a long time. Forever.
She loved Cruz, but they were day and night when it came right down to it. And the biggie: she wasn’t in love with him, and she never would be.
Ditto for him. He liked to be the center of a woman’s universe, and she had too many things in her orbit to give herself wholly. Luckily, they’d both survived the attempt, and so had their business. “Let me guess-Marie dumped your sorry ass again?”
He shrugged. “Little bit, yeah.”
Lulu bumped her head into Lilah’s thighs until Lilah bent and stroked the lamb’s ears. “What did you do this time?”
He sighed. “I forgot our anniversary.”
“What anniversary? You’ve only been dating a few months.”
“Not that kind of anniversary.” When he waggled a brow, she rolled her eyes.
“TMI. And just make it up to her. I’m sure you can figure out how.”
He was thinking about that when Lilah headed out. She lived in a small cabin next door, and when she slipped inside the small cozy place, she sighed. It was neat and clean and warm, and unlike just about everything else in her life, all hers.
But.
But even with the three years that had gone by, it was still too quiet without her grandma’s cheerful voice.
“Mew.”
Lilah looked down at the three-legged black cat winding her way around her ankles. There were rescues coming in and out of her life, waiting patiently for the right home, but Sadie was her favorite. Lilah knew that wasn’t fair, but tell that to her heart. Twice she could have placed Sadie with a foster home, but she hadn’t been able to do it.
Whenever there was even a hint of an animal being fragile, she had a hard time letting it go to an adoptive family. And though Sadie wasn’t fragile, she was special.
Okay, so the truth was, they were all special to her. She couldn’t help it, she just couldn’t make herself abandon anything, ever. After all, she knew what that felt like.
“Mew,” Sadie said, bumping her little head to Lilah’s calf.
Lilah scooped her up and nuzzled her close.
Sadie was deceptively small, and it made her look like a kitten even though she was full grown. The mistake was in thinking that she had a kitten’s temperament. She didn’t. She was ornery as hell.
“Miss me today?”
Sadie blinked up at her sleepily, the rumble of a purr thick in her throat as she leaned in-and bit Lilah’s chin.
“Gee, hungry?”
“Mew.”
Rubbing her chin, Lilah moved to the window. Brady’s truck might be gone, but the memory of his mouth on hers was not. He was a bit more attitude-ridden than I usually go for, but trust me, it worked for him.” She met Sadie’s narrowed gaze. “Hey, don’t judge me. It’s been a long time for me.”
And she’d been lonely.
The truth was, she needed… something.
Actually, someone. She needed someone. But Sunshine was small, and the problem wasn’t helped by the fact that Adam and Dell tended to watch over her like they were her big brothers, making it clear that anyone with less-than-honorable intentions were risking life and limb.
Which had left her with slim pickings and a secret yearning for a guy with some not-so-honorable intentions.
Like Brady…
She knew why Adam and Dell did it. They’d been the ones to help her pick up the pieces when she’d come back to Sunshine during her second year of college to quietly and completely fall apart. The reasons had been complicated, but in short, her grandma had died and she’d let a guy devastate her. It’d taken a while, but eventually she’d picked up the pieces and moved on. Gotten stronger. Adam and Dell knew this, but old habits were hard to break. “Is it so wrong to want a guy in my bed?” she asked Sadie.
Sadie just stared at her with those pale green eyes, and Lilah sighed. Much to her annoyance, she’d been fairly unsuccessful at getting any man she knew to cross Adam or Dell.
Cruz, for one.
But she didn’t count Cruz because she didn’t ache for him.
She wanted to ache, dammit.
Her thoughts drifted to Brady and she shivered. “He kissed me,” she told Sadie.
Actually, she’d kissed him first, and then he’d taken over. And oh boy how he’d taken over, with that bone- melting aggression that had seriously rocked her world. It’d taken her right off her axis, in a good way, a way she’d been unconsciously needing quite badly.
And she’d hit his truck. “God,” she moaned, and covered her face. “I am such an idiot.”
“Mew.”
“Okay, no opinions from the peanut gallery, thank you very much.” She pulled out her cell phone and speed- dialed Dell. The three of them had gotten tight a few years back, when the guys had bought the property down the road from hers and built the animal center. They had no family to speak of and she’d just lost her grandma so they’d created a tight-knit family of their own.
Dell’s phone went right to voice mail, so she tried Adam. Same thing. “I had an
The Belle Haven center was close enough to Coeur d’Alene and neighboring smaller towns like Sunshine to serve domesticated animals but it was also ideally located in ranching country to specialize in bigger animals, both wild and ranching-based as well. Dell ran the place with a growing staff and a reputation that had spread to the entire northern state area. Adam was in search and rescue. He trained and bred dogs for S &R teams across the country and was also extremely well known-much to his discomfort.
Lilah set her phone down and stripped on her way to the bathroom, passing her kitchen table in the process, which was still strewn with her laptop and books. She’d fallen asleep there sometime past midnight and had woken with a page from her biochem book stuck to her face.
She still hadn’t finished studying and had a paper due and a midterm coming up in both physics and animal biology, but that would have to wait. She let the baggy, grungy work clothes fall where they might. They’d suited their purpose this morning cleaning out stalls, but they sure hadn’t suited her purpose to meet an enigmatic stranger. She wondered what he’d thought of her, then told herself it didn’t matter.
Besides, he’d kissed her-so how put off by her appearance could he have been?
She let the water pound over her body and then turned to her shelf, filled with her guilty pleasure-soaps and scrubs of all scents. Coconut, she decided. She felt like being a coconut today.
As the warm scent permeated the bathroom around her, she relaxed, standing there under the spray for long moments, dragging it out as long as she could, in no hurry to get on with the rest of her day.
“Ack!” she screeched when the water went suddenly icy, as it did every day thanks to her ancient water heater. Shivering, she stepped out of the shower and onto the mat of her teeny bathroom, banging her knee on the
