Beauty & the Beasts

“Do I have a reputation?”

“You mean, do people talk about the fact that you’ve dated every nice-looking woman in the county? Yeah, I can safely say you have a certain reputation.”

His partner’s obvious enjoyment of his discomfort was almost the last straw—but he had to speak to someone. “A volunteer from that cat shelter, Ten Lives, came to see me.”

“So let me guess. She’s single and attractive. And she turned you down.”

“She told me she was tired of being judged on appearances.”

“My, you must have been subtle.”

“I asked her out to dinner!” Eric said in outrage. “I didn’t say, ‘Hey, baby, your place or mine?’ ”

“Look at it this way,” his partner said. “You won’t have time to date, anyway, not when your son gets here.”

The dull ache Eric had been trying to ignore sharpened to a knife stab. “He doesn’t want to come.”

Dear Reader,

I’m sure it won’t surprise you to hear that I, like Madeline in
Beauty & the Beasts,
have enough cats to make rolling over in bed at night a little difficult sometimes. Also like Madeline, I volunteer with a no-kill cat shelter, Purrfect Pals, which is the model for Ten Lives, although I’ve freely changed it to suit the story. Many of the cats in
Beauty & the Beasts
are real, in spirit if not details. Chevy and Ron lived in my fourteen-year-old daughter’s bedroom. The older cats like Mittens and Dusky are the ones that break my heart—and give me the greatest satisfaction when we find them loving homes.

When I write a novel, I’m always in love with my hero, and I always identify with my heroine. But this time it was the cats who moved me to tears and smiles. I hope you feel the same. I hope, too, that you take my message to heart: please, please, neuter and spay your pets. And if you have the time, or just a few dollars, help your local shelters and animal rescue organizations, especially those like Purrfect Pals that don’t euthanize unwanted animals.

Now go ahead, fall in love with Eric. Just save a soft spot for Chevy, Ron and the rest of the feline gang!

Sincerely,

Janice Kay Johnson

Purrfect Pals

230 McRae Road Northeast

Arlington, WA 98223

Beauty & The Beasts

Janice Kay Johnson

For Kathy,
with affection and admiration,
and for all the “pals.”

CHAPTER ONE

“O
KAY, GIRL, JUST RELAX
,” Dr. Eric Bergstrom murmured as he deftly parted the hair on the calico cat’s foreleg in search of a vein.

“How do you know where to get blood from?” the teenage girl asked, eyes wide. “I mean, since she’s got hair everywhere.”

Eric smiled. “I know where to look. The tricky part is getting any blood from a cat as dehydrated as this one.” He slipped the needle into the vein and eased the plunger out, allowing a trickle of red into the syringe. “Ah. Well, we’re in luck this time. Often the vein just collapses.”

“Is that enough blood?”

“I don’t need much.” He removed the needle. “This’ll let me check her kidney function. If they’re failing…” He hesitated.

The teenager’s face crumpled in distress, but she squeezed her lips together and nodded. She’d found the cat huddled in the family’s woodshed and rushed it straight to the vet. Her mother, she’d candidly told Eric, didn’t know about the cat yet, but she was sure Mom would let her keep Callie.

“That’s what I’ll call her,” she concluded, gently stroking the thin back.

Five minutes later Eric was surprised to find that Callie’s kidneys were functioning well. In this case, then, they’d take a fecal sample and check for internal parasites—coccidia was a good bet, he thought— and get her on an IV and a massive dose of antibiotics.

The girl left Callie in his care, and June, one of the technicians, carried the pitiful animal to their isolation room in the back to get started.

Eric scrubbed his hands, then stuck his head around the corner and in a low voice asked the receptionist, “Who’s next?”

She glanced around the waiting area, then turned in her chair. “Um…a Ms. Howard is here to see you. She says she’s a volunteer from a no-kill cat shelter. She wants to talk about the possibility of us providing veterinary service for them.”

He leaned a little farther around the corner so that he could see over the receptionist’s head into the room. A mother and two children waited with a bulldog on a leash. Faintly amused, he noticed that the youngest kid and the dog bore a startling resemblance. Near them a cat grumbled in a carrier beside a heavyset woman. At the counter a young couple was picking up their newly spayed spaniel pup. He smiled and nodded at them.

Only one woman waited alone, sans animal, apparently absorbed in a paperback book. And damned if she wasn’t a stunner, even in worn jeans and a sacky mud-colored T-shirt. Slender, with a mass of rich auburn hair she’d yanked back in a severe braid and the kind of swanlike neck that could make a
model’s career, she possessed a face to launch a thousand ships: incredible cheekbones, full lips and exotic thick-lashed eyes. She must be on her way to the shelter to clean; no woman who looked like that appeared in public without makeup and so unflatteringly dressed without a good reason. He’d give a hell of a lot to see her in a snug skirt and silk blouse, with her hair loose and tumbling over those slim shoulders.

He strode out into the waiting room. “Ms. Howard? I’m Dr. Bergstrom.”

The auburn-haired beauty glanced up, then marked her place in her book. Rising to her feet, she held out a hand. “It’s nice to meet you,” she said pleasantly. “I wonder if you could spare a few minutes.”

Her hand felt fragile in his. He let it go with reluctance. “Certainly. Why don’t you come back to my office.” He gestured for her to go ahead of him, wondering at the wariness in her eyes when she inclined her head.

With automatic masculine approval, Eric noted the sway of Ms. Howard’s hips and the grace of her carriage. She appeared to be about five foot ten.

In his too-small office he lifted a heap of files off the one chair facing the desk. “Please, have a seat.”

Her gaze took in the wall of veterinary reference books, the cabinets, the stacks of files—each with carefully squared corners—that covered his desk. Eric in turn admired her eyes, green flecked with gold. Her driver’s license probably called them hazel, but no word so mundane could describe a color that
made him think of shafts of sunlight touching a mossy forest floor.

He became aware that those eyes had settled on him in a way that made him suspect she was aware of his turn of mind and was less than pleased to have inspired it. Hell, maybe she was sick of men staring at her. He didn’t like thinking he was just like all the rest.

“Dr. Bergstrom,” she said briskly, “I’m a volunteer with a small no-kill cat shelter called Ten Lives. You may be familiar with it. There’ve been articles in the local paper, and we regularly do adoption days at some of the larger pet-supply stores between here and Seattle.”

He nodded. “Yes, I’ve seen mention of the shelter.”

“In the past, Dr. Heyer from Granite Falls has done our veterinary work. Unfortunately, as you may know, he’s retired.”

Eric cut to the chase. “I presume he gave you special rates.”

“Yes. We simply can’t afford to pay regular rates and keep our adoption fees reasonable.” She made a face. “Even if we charged exorbitant fees, we couldn’t pay your normal charges. We simply have too many cats that are living out their lives at the shelter. At best our expenses are steep.”

When he asked, she described the facility: the cats had the run of a house and a generous area outdoors, as well, that was fenced with chain-link. A separate building that used to be a garage housed feral cats, who had their own outdoor runs. The bedrooms were
used to separate newcomers and to keep kittens apart from the adult cats.

“We have cages, of course, to quarantine the cats initially and to keep sick ones isolated. The house has a small mother-in-law apartment where the woman who conceived and runs the shelter lives. We have a full-time housekeeper and quite a few volunteers who clean or take animals to the vet or whatever. I do a little of everything.”

He nodded, savoring the unusual experience of being pleased on both intellectual and sensual levels. He was aware of Ms. Howard as he hadn’t been of a woman in a long while. Damn, but she was lovely. Her wrists and hands were narrow, her fingers long, the movements they made graceful and unstudied as she gestured. The fact that she wore no fingernail polish surprised him, though he was more interested in the absence of a wedding or engagement ring. Her ivory cheeks flushed with her passion for saving these abandoned or mistreated animals.

But he took in what she had to say, too; he and Teresa Hughes, his partner, had been discussing how they could make a practical contribution to the reduction in the number of animals that ended up euthanized at the county shelter week in and week out. They tried to keep the cost of neutering down and offered the service free when they suspected that owners couldn’t afford to pay. But beyond that, the practicalities had stopped them.

“I’ll want to see the shelter,” he said abruptly, “and I’ll need to talk to my partner. Assuming she agrees and I’m satisfied with your facility, I can see
my way to giving you a couple of hours free every week. I could neuter male cats on the spot, for example, doctor any minor problems, draw blood. We can set a reduced rate for those that have to come to the clinic and for medications and surgery. Is that what you had in mind?”

She blinked, and he knew he’d surprised her. “It’s better than what I had in mind. I probably shouldn’t admit this, but Dr. Heyer didn’t volunteer any time free.”

Eric leaned back in his chair and linked his fingers behind his head. “His was a one-man practice. I know how that is. You work twelve-hour days, get called out in the middle of the night, and you’re still behind all the time. I can afford the luxury of volunteering an hour or two because I’ve taken in a partner.” He smiled crookedly. “Now I only work ten-hour days.”

“He was having a harder and harder time squeezing us in.” Ms. Howard wrinkled her nose, an effect that her physical perfection rendered charming. Hell, she probably looked magnificent brushing her teeth.

Letting his voice become a shade huskier, he asked, “Do you have a first name?”

She stiffened. “Yes, as a matter of fact I do.”

For a disbelieving moment, he thought she was going to leave it at that. Evidently she wasn’t interested in getting personal.

Apparently, however, she also remembered that she wanted him—in a manner of speaking—and she acceded with a stiff “Madeline.”

He tried to make his grin disarming. “Eric. You may see some of my partner, too, Teresa Hughes.”

Madeline Howard’s high brow creased for an instant before smoothing. “Oh! She’s Jess Kerrigan’s sister-in-law, isn’t she?”

“You know Jess?”

She gave him a cool look and he had a sudden suspicion that she was aware he’d dated Jess Kerrigan briefly after her divorce. Good God, maybe Jess had given her a play-by-play. He seemed to recall, thank God, that the relationship hadn’t amounted to much, dying a natural death from disinterest.