Season Of Wonder. RaeAnne Thayne
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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?”
“He was a K-9 officer down in Mountain Home. After his handler was killed in the line of duty, I guess he kind of went into a canine version of depression and wouldn’t work with anyone else. I know that probably sounds crazy.”
She scratched the dog’s ears, touched by the bond that could build between handler and dog. “Not at all,” she said briskly. “I’ve seen many dogs go into decline when their owner dies. It’s not uncommon.”
“For a year or so, they tried to match him up with other officers, but things never quite gelled, for one reason or another, then his eyes started going. His previous handler who died was a good buddy of mine from the academy and I couldn’t let him go just anywhere.”
“Retired police dogs don’t always do well in civilian life. They can be aggressive with other dogs and sometimes people. Have you had any problems with that?”
“Not with Yukon. He’s friendly. Aren’t you, buddy? You’re a good boy.”
Dani could swear the dog grinned at his owner, his tongue lolling out.
Yukon was patient while she looked him over, especially as she maintained a steady supply of treats.
When she finished, she gave the dog a pat and stood. “Can I take a look at Ollie’s ears one more time?”
“Sure. Help yourself.”
He held the dog out and she reached for Ollie. As she did, the dog wriggled a little and Dani’s hands ended up brushing Ruben’s chest. She froze at the accidental contact, a shiver rippling down her spine. She pinned her reaction on the undeniable fact that it had been entirely too long since she had touched a man, even accidentally.
She had to cut out this fascination or whatever it was immediately. Clean-cut, muscular cops were not her type, and the sooner she remembered that the better.
She focused on checking the ears of the little dog, gave him one more scratch and handed him back to Ruben. “That should do it.