“Oh.”
He shouldn’t have said that. People always got that look on their faces when he spoke about this crap. No one back home really understood.
She squared her shoulders. “I’m so sorry. Are you a member of the Army Engineers K-9 team too?”
He continued to stroke the cat. “I was. As of yesterday, I’m officially a civilian.”
The words came out easy. It took everything he had to hide the emotions behind them.
“And you came here? Right before Christmas? Don’t you have a family someplace?”
He shrugged. “I have Nick’s last Christmas present-you know, the one he intended to send home to his grandmother. I need to deliver it.”
Her gaze pierced him for a moment. It was almost as if she could read all of his thoughts and emotions. A muscle ticked in her cheek, and she seemed to be weighing something in her mind.
She must have decided that he wasn’t a threat because she let go of a long breath and gave the kitten a little stroke. “Poor thing. She looks half starved.”
“How do you know it’s a female?”
“How do you know it’s not?”
He shifted the animal so he could actually inspect it. “Well, you were right. It’s a girl. Means she’ll have to be fixed. Is there an animal shelter somewhere?”
“Yes. In Allenberg. But it’s probably closed.”
His frustration with the situation mounted. “Uh, look, Annie, I just got in on the bus from Charlotte. I don’t have a car. And now I need to find a home for this kitten, as well as a place to stay for the night. It’s probably too late to go visiting at a nursing home twenty miles away.”
She buttoned up her coat. “Boy, you’re in a fix, aren’t you?”
“Is there a hotel somewhere?”
Her cheeks colored just the slightest bit. “Well, the only place in town is the Peach Blossom Motor Court. They would probably allow you to keep the cat.”
“I’ve heard about the Peach Blossom Motor Court,” he blurted and then remembered the story. “Oh, crap. That was stupid.”
Annie’s cheeks reddened further. “I guess guys in the army have nothing better to do than talk.”
“Yes, ma’am. And believe me, being in the army can be really boring at times. Guys talk about home all the time. I’m sorry. I should have kept my mouth shut.”
“Don’t be sorry. What happened between me and Nick the night of senior prom happened almost twenty years ago.”
“I guess he never told you about me, did he?” Nick asked.
She shook her head. “Why would he? He and I parted ways that night. He went off to join the army and see the world. I went off to college to see the snow. I guess I saw him that Christmas right after he went through basic training, but I wasn’t speaking with him at the time.” She hugged herself, and Matt noticed that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.
So the girl Nick had never forgotten was unmarried.
She gave him a smile that didn’t show any teeth. A few lines bunched at the corner of her eyes. She wasn’t young. But she was pretty.
And Matt knew that she was sweet. He had a lot of Nick’s stories filed away in his head. Nick had been a real good storyteller when things got slow.
Annie studied the cat sleeping in his hands and then nodded her head as if she’d come to a decision. “Look, you can’t stay at the Peach Blossom. It probably has bed bugs. It’s just an awful place. So you might as well come on home with me. I’ve got a perfectly fine guest room where you can sleep, and in the morning, we can figure something out. I’m sure I can find someone to run you up to Orangeburg, or I can do it myself.”
“How about a friend who wants to adopt Fluffy?” He held up the cat in his hands.
“Fluffy?” She gave him a funny look. “That is a stupid name for a cat.”
“Why? She’s kind of fluffy.”
“Yeah, but everyone names their cat Fluffy. There must be five Fluffys living here in Last Chance, and they all belong to single women. Please don’t name the cat Fluffy.”
“Okay, I won’t,” Matt said. “I thought you didn’t care about this cat.”
“Well, no, but you found it in a manger a couple days before Christmas, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, then, it needs a better name than Fluffy. Something holiday-related, like Noel.”
He looked down at the slightly scruffy kitten. “That’s a pretty pretentious name for this particular cat, don’t you think? Of course, if you were going to adopt it, you could name it anything you wanted.”
She scowled at him. “I’m not adopting any cats, understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Annie should have her head examined. She could almost hear Mother’s voice outlining all the reasons she should send Sergeant Matt Jasper off to the Peach Blossom Motor Court. Mother would start with the fact that he was male, and then move right on to the worry that he was secretly either a pervert or an ax murderer.
Mother had trust issues.
But Annie could not, for the life of her, believe that a man with Matt’s warm, dark eyes was either a pervert or a murderer. And besides, he knew how to handle the cat. His hands were big and gentle. And that uniform seemed to be tailor made for him.
She led him down the aisle and out the door and into the blustery December evening.
“Feels like snow,” he said.
She laughed. “I don’t think so. We don’t ever get snow here.”
“It seems like you should.” They headed across Palmetto Avenue and down Julia Street.
“Snow in South Carolina? Not happening.”
He shifted the cat in his arms. “Nick used to talk about Christmas in Last Chance all the time. I always kind of imagined the place with a dusting of snow.”
She snorted. “Nick sure could tell stories. But I can only remember one year when we got a dusting of snow. It was pitiful by snow standards. And it didn’t last very long.”
“Well, I’m from Chicago, you know.”
“So I reckon ya’ll have snow on the ground at Christmas all the time.”
“Yeah. But in the city it doesn’t take very long for the snow to get dirty and gray. I always kind of imagined Last Chance covered in pristine white.”
“Well, that’s a fantasy.” She reached her mother’s house on Oak Street. The old place needed a coat of paint, and a few of the porch balusters needed replacing. Annie ought to sell the place and move to Orangeburg or Columbia. A registered nurse could get a job just about anywhere these days. And her social life might improve if she moved to a bigger town.
But she’d have to leave home. She’d have to leave friends. She’d have to leave the choir and the book club, not to mention Doc Cooper and the clinic.
No wonder Miriam Randall had told her to get a cat. If she wanted to deal with her loneliness in Last Chance, a cat was probably her best bet.
She pushed open the door and hit the switch for the hall and porch lights. Her Christmas lights-the same strand of large-bulbed lights that Mother had used for decades-blinked on.
“Oh,” Matt said. It was less than a word and more than an exhalation.
“I’m afraid it’s not much of a display. Nothing like the lights the Canadays put out every year.”
She looked over her shoulder. Matt was smiling, the lights twinkling merrily in his eyes. A strange heat flowed through Annie that she recognized as attraction.
Boy, she was really pathetic, wasn’t she?
She shucked out of her coat and hung it on one of the pegs by the door.
“It smells wonderful in here,” Matt said. He strolled past her into the front parlor. His presence filled up the space and made the large room seem smaller by half. He made a full three-sixty, inspecting everything, from the old upright piano to Grandmother’s ancient mohair furniture.
Crap. Her house look like it belonged to a little old lady. Which, in fact, it had, until last spring, when Mother
