A Touch of the Beast. Linda Winstead Jones
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with Michael. Love hadn’t been enough to get past his demands. He’d been looking for a wife who would be there every night when he came home. A woman who would put his desires and career and worth above her own. The first and only time she’d challenged him outright, he’d responded with a fist.
He hadn’t let her go easily. For months she’d turned around and found him watching. He had never touched her again, but the way he’d followed her, the way he’d hung on…it wasn’t natural. It was no wonder that she was still skittish where men were concerned. Dating was just too risky.
Not that dinner with Donovan would be a date, mind you, but they would be eating together, and people were bound to notice and talk. Still, it had been two years since she’d sent Michael packing. Maybe it was time.
“Sure,” she said, her heart fluttering briefly.
Donovan obviously didn’t want to talk about the deer, and maybe that was for the best. As she watched his profile and tried to make sense of everything she’d seen of this man, she got the distinct feeling that she didn’t want to know all his secrets.
Chapter 4
Hawk almost groaned aloud when he reached the top of the pull-down stairs, flipped the switch that turned on the uncovered bulb that hung in the center of the room and peered into the attic. There were dozens of cardboard boxes stored here and there, most of them unmarked, all of them showing signs of years of wear and neglect. He glanced over his shoulder and down to where Sheryl stood at the foot of the rattletrap steps.
“You moved all these boxes up here by yourself?”
She shrugged and smiled.
In spite of the fact that she didn’t look strong enough to handle the task on her own, he wasn’t really surprised. Moving all these boxes from the clinic to this attic had been a tough job, but Sheryl Eldanis had energy. Not a too-much-caffeine kind of energy, but a real, pure strength and quiet enthusiasm. He didn’t imagine she’d ever considered a chore and wondered whether she could handle it. Besides, when he’d lifted her onto the mare he’d discovered that, petite or not, she had muscles. Even though his reason for being here was an important one, the man in him couldn’t help but wonder what she’d look like in something other than those baggy clothes. Or even better, in nothing at all.
He stepped into the center of the attic and turned around slowly. It was an ordinary enough attic, with bare wood floors and exposed beams and two windows that looked down on the front yard. The ceiling was high enough for him to stand here in the middle of the space, but if he moved more than a step or two to the side he’d have to duck.
And like most other attics, it was full of junk. Along with a broken lamp, a rusty birdcage and a rocking chair that had to be older than the house, there were newer boxes mixed in with the older ones he was interested in, most of them labeled with black marker. Kitchen. Bedroom. Linens. Winter clothes. Sheryl’s own things stored with the rest. Unlike her boxes, the ones he needed to search weren’t marked at all. Where to start?
Sheryl didn’t join him, but she climbed up the stairs to peer through the square opening in the attic floor. “If you need help, I can come back after I get the animals fed.”
“No,” he said, his eyes on one particularly nasty-looking stack of mildewy boxes. “I can’t even tell you what I’m looking for. I guess I’d better just dig in and see what I can find.” He grabbed a box at random and set it on the floor, then knelt down to open it. It smelled of musty old paper, and while there were a few file folders in the box, most of the paperwork was loose and completely unorganized.
“Okay.” Sheryl backed away slowly. “Holler if you need anything.” And then she was off to feed her animals. From what little he’d seen as he’d walked in through the kitchen and to the stairway, she had a few. Cats, dogs, a colorful parrot that had called him “meathead” as he’d walked past the living room downstairs.
Hawk had learned to tune down his abilities when he needed to, and he did that now. He adjusted the part of his brain that could see and feel and hear things others couldn’t even imagine and concentrated on the papers before him.
Somewhere in here was information that could help Cassie. The woman in the pharmacy hadn’t sent him on a wild-goose chase. What they needed had to be in one of these boxes; he couldn’t entertain any other possibility.
A fertility clinic. Even though he had never expected to find such a place in his background, he shouldn’t be surprised. All his life he’d wondered about his parents. Who were they? Why had they given their twins away? When he’d discovered his gift with animals he’d wondered if they’d known. Was that the reason they’d given him up? Now there were Cassie’s flashes of precognition to take into account. But how could their parents have known when they looked at their infant twins that they’d be different?
He hadn’t given his biological parents much thought in the past few years. In adolescence he had almost become obsessed with them, but eventually he’d decided to put them, and their reasons for giving him up, out of his mind. If his parents hadn’t wanted him, then why the hell should he care who they were and what they were like? It was easier to put them out of his mind than it was to wonder all the damn time. Cassie’s seizures had fired up his curiosity all over again.
Hawk took his time with the task before him, carefully studying each sheet of paper. Most of what he scanned didn’t make any sense to him. Chemistry had never been his best subject in school, and this… A lot of what he discovered were formulas and medical data. Much of what he found in the manila folders was private information, women’s medical files. He felt strange, perusing such personal information. But he couldn’t set aside the papers without checking each one. Notes were scribbled in the margins here and there. Names that meant nothing to him appeared more than once. He tried to drink it all in, just in case a name or a date came to mean something to him later.
Hawk tossed one useless folder aside and grabbed another. Maybe Cassie was right and he should’ve hired this chore out. He didn’t know what he was looking for, and besides, he didn’t spend his time at home sitting in a cramped room going through papers. He practically lived outdoors. He needed fresh air in his lungs, sunshine and moonlight on his face.
But this was not a job he was willing to hand over to anyone else, no matter what the cost might be. His secrets, and Cassie’s secrets, wouldn’t be safe with anyone else.
Not even an unusually pretty vet.
“You stink.”
Sheryl added water to Bruce’s dish. “Can’t you say ‘Polly want a cracker’ like a normal bird?”
“Bite me.”
Normally finding a home for a beautiful talking bird wasn’t a problem, but Bruce had been trained in a home where his primary teacher had been a teenage boy who thought it was funny to train the colorful parrot to insult everyone who passed by. “You stink” and “bite me” were actually not too bad, considering Bruce’s repertoire.
Sheryl’s mind was elsewhere as she fed the other animals. Two dogs, three cats and a bird. Some of them she’d brought to Wyatt with her; others she’d collected since her arrival in town. They’d all taken to the new house well, settling in as if they’d always lived here. She had a variety of animal beds here and there, and there was a small doggie door in the kitchen that allowed the animals to go into the fenced backyard at any time.
The pets she had accumulated over the years were her family. They loved without question or demand, and it was nice to have them waiting for her when she came in the door after a long day. They needed her; she needed them. And yes, they were her family. Like most families they were a bit dysfunctional. Bruce was temperamental and was given to bad language. Bogie was the shy ugly duckling, and Howie could be aggressive on occasion, like all Chihuahuas. There were times when Smoky and Princess tormented the dogs, as cats often do, but the situation never got out of control.
Laverne was independent and thought herself better than all the pets who had come after her, which was