Stray Hearts (2 page)

Kay stared at him, dumbfounded. He might as well have asked her to hang a halibut around her neck and dive into a shark tank. “An animal shelter? You want me to volunteer at an
animal shelter?”

Claire clamped her hand onto Kay’s arm and hauled her backward. “Excuse me,” she told Robert as she dragged Kay away. “I have to confer with my client.”

Claire pulled her around a corner. Kay shook loose and rubbed her arm. “For crying out loud, Claire! What are you—”

“Take the deal.”

“What?”

“You heard me. You’re broke. Hollinger says he’ll forget the five grand. All you have to do is smile pretty and pet a few puppies. How hard can that be?”

“You know how I feel about animals! I can’t go to a place like that!”

“Will you grow up? You’re not six years old anymore. The big bad doggies won’t get you.”

Kay knew her petophobia was irrational, but so was a fear of heights, and nobody made fun of that. Everybody thought you were cold, intolerant or just plain snooty if you didn’t rush up to pet a puppy, or let a cat jump onto your lap. And Claire had a lot of nerve giving her a hard time about it, since she and David, at the height of their sibling nastiness, had gone out of their way to turn her aversion into a full-fledged fear. That childhood fear had been tempered somewhat by the rationality of adulthood, but it had never really gone away.

“I can’t do it, Claire. Anything but that.”

“Look. All you have to do is dress professionally and tell them you have administrative experience. They’ll put you at the front desk and you won’t have to get near an animal.”

“No. They’d still be too close for comfort.”

Claire rolled her eyes. “Will you wake up? Robert is offering you an easy way out.”

“Easy for you, maybe. You don’t hyperventilate when you flip past a
Lassie
rerun.”

Claire put on her I’ve-had-enough look—the one that made her lips crinkle and her eyes turn into little slits. “It’s just a hundred hours, Kay. A lousy hundred hours, and Robert will be out of your life for good. Now, is that really such a big deal?”

Kay expelled a long, weary breath. For the first time since she’d left Robert, she truly regretted flushing her two-carat diamond engagement ring. “Do you really think they’d let me do administrative stuff?”

“Why not? Somebody has to.”

Kay tried to look at the situation logically. An administrative job. She could handle that, couldn’t she? The cats and dogs would be caged, of course, so it wasn’t as if they’d be slobbering all over her. And if she lived up to her end of the bargain, she’d never have to see Robert again. “Okay,” she said finally. “I’ll do it.”

“Wise decision.” Claire grabbed her by the arm again and led her back around the corner. “And keep up that disgusted expression. Let him think he’s really getting to you, or he might make it two hundred hours.”

Robert leaned against the banister at the head of the stairs, his arms folded across his chest with feigned nonchalance. Maintaining the disgust as Claire requested was hardly an effort.

“Okay, Hollinger,” Claire said. “You’ve got a deal.”

“Wonderful!” Robert said, his smile as phony as the caps on his teeth. “I’ll phone Dr. Forester at the shelter. He’ll be thrilled to have a new volunteer. And since you’re such an animal lover, I know the two of you will get along famously.”

Kay held up a finger in warning. “Hold on, Robert. I want to see it in writing. I don’t want you coming back later and telling me I still owe you money.”

“Why, of course. It will be a legal agreement I’ll have my assistant draw up the papers.”

“If she can stay out of your pants long enough.”

Robert’s jaw tightened. Kay knew it had taken him about fifteen minutes to fill her job, and his bed, with a certain little brunette.

“Jealousy is an ugly thing, Kay.”

“No, Robert. A forty-year-old man having sex in his office with a woman young enough to be his daughter—
that’s
what’s ugly.”

Robert’s eyes took on a nasty glare, and she could see how badly he wanted to bite back. But, as usual, he was the picture of self-control. She knew he’d never let a little thing like an actual emotion cloud his thinking. Instead, he took a single deep breath, stood up tall and tugged on his lapels in a gesture of dismissal. “I’ll send the papers to your office, Claire. I trust you’ll handle things from there.”

He turned and strode back across the courthouse lobby. Kay glared at him until the echo of his footsteps faded away.

To think she’d almost married him.

A little over a year ago when she was offered a job at Hollinger & Associates, then found herself being pursued by the big boss himself, it had temporarily disabled her common sense. She’d been blinded by three things: Robert was a successful attorney. He was attractive in an uptight, buttoned-down way. And he was financially secure. In short, Robert Hollinger possessed every attribute she’d been taught, from cradle to adulthood, that you were supposed to look for in a man.

So when she found Robert perusing her legs with far more interest than her résumé, she didn’t discourage the attention. They’d started dating, and before she knew it she was reading
Modern Bride
and wondering whether people would laugh out loud  if she wore white.

She remembered the moment over dinner at her parents’ house when she’d told her family about Robert’s proposal. Her father dropped his glass of Scotch, her mother’s eyebrows shot up as high as her recent face-lift would allow, and Claire nearly choked to death on an oyster. Then all three of them did in unison something she’d never seen before: they smiled at her. Kay smiled back, and for the first time in forever, she felt like part of the family.

Still, the closer she came to walking down the aisle, the more a warning buzzed around inside her head like a mosquito she couldn’t swat away.
But do you love him?

She’d asked herself that question more than once in the past several months. Too bad she’d never answered it. Then one Tuesday evening it had slipped Robert’s mind that he was engaged, and the answer to her question became very clear indeed.

“Listen to me,” Claire warned. “Until this thing is over, you’ve got to stop rattling Robert’s cage. I said give him a dirty look, not emasculate him. You’re lucky he didn’t take back the offer.”

“Lucky?” Kay slumped against the banister. She felt like a paratrooper about to be dropped behind enemy lines. The goal was survival. One hundred hours, and it would all be over with.

One hundred hours. It sounded like a lifetime.

“Doc, we’ve got a problem. Get over here
now.”

Dr. Matt Forester dropped the phone and hurried out the front door of his veterinary clinic, a tum-of-the-century Victorian house on a quiet, tree-shaded street in McKinney, Texas. He leaped directly from the porch to the yard and ran halfway to the sidewalk before the screen door slapped shut behind him. Buddy, a little brown dog who was part terrier, part beagle and part a lot of other things, galloped at his heels.

They dodged a kid on a bicycle and an elderly couple out for a late-afternoon walk as they ran toward the prairie-style house next door, which had been renovated to become the Westwood Animal Shelter two years before. Hazel Willoughby, the seventy-two-year-old manager of the shelter, ruled the place with an iron fist, and Matt knew if there was a problem she couldn’t handle he’d better move fast.

Matt skidded through the front door into the ex-living room of the house, which now served as a reception area. A redheaded teenage girl huddled against the far wall, staring down at something on the gray tile floor behind the counter. Hazel held out a pair of heavy leather gloves. “I’m getting too old for this. Doc. He’s all yours.” Matt took the gloves and moved slowly around the counter, his curiosity turning to astonishment as he came face-to-face with the biggest, baddest orange tomcat he’d ever seen.

Hazel peered over the counter. “I thought I’d give you a shot at him before I called the SWAT team.”

“SWAT team? Are you kidding? Tear gas and sharpshooters would only make him madder.” Matt pulled on the gloves. “Can somebody tell me why this kitty’s so cranky?”

“He’s a stray,” the redheaded girl said. “He was running loose in my apartment complex. So I put some tuna fish in a carrier and sort of caught him...”

“May I ask why you let him out?”

“Well, he hated the carrier, and he was making a terrible noise, so I thought if I opened the door...”

“Good move. Freedom has done wonders for his disposition.” Matt took a step toward the cat, who spat ferociously and planted his rear end even deeper into the corner he’d commandeered.

He crouched down closer to the cat’s eye level. “Hazel?”

“Right behind you, Doc.”

“Open the carrier. Slowly.”

Matt edged forward, hoping to close in on the cat before he made a run for it, but when the carrier door squeaked open he took off. As he streaked past, Matt lunged sideways and grabbed him around the middle with both gloved hands. The cat scrambled madly, his claws scraping against the tile floor, but Matt dragged him backward with one hand beneath his stomach and the other holding the scruff of his neck.

Hazel turned the carrier on end and wisely backed away. Matt lowered the spitting cat rear end first, but on the way in he managed to hook a hind claw on the edge of the carrier, pushed himself up and swatted Matt across the face. Matt gritted his teeth against the pain, unhooked the cat’s hind claw, then lowered him all the way in. He clanged the door shut and latched it, then tipped the carrier back down to the floor.

The redheaded girl took a tentative step forward, a stunned expression on her face. “Oh! I can’t believe you picked him up like that! He scratched you and everything!”

Matt yanked off the gloves. He touched his fingertips to his face and saw blood. His ex-wife was right. He should have gone to medical school. He’d be making three times the money and playing golf on Wednesday afternoons. And right now that sounded pretty damned good.

“I knew I brought him to the right place,” the girl gushed. “I couldn’t bear the thought of taking him to the pound. He’s so nasty I just knew they’d put him to sleep. But you don’t do that here...do you?”

“No,” he told the girl resignedly. “We try to find homes for all of them.”

He picked up the carrier and turned to the reception desk where Hazel now sat, a cigarette dangling between her lips.

“Hazel? A name, please?”

She lit the cigarette, took a long drag and blew out the smoke. “Clyde.”

“As in Bonnie and Clyde?”

"You got it."

Matt maneuvered the cat into an isolation cage, then washed his wound with antiseptic soap. He went to the fridge and shoved aside two bottles of serum and a urine sample before locating the six-pack he was after. He popped a top, took a long swallow, then carried the can out to the back porch.

The hazy brightness of the afternoon had settled into evening, knocking only a few degrees off the July heat. In true Texas style, they’d already had several triple-digit-temperature days, and undoubtedly there were more to come. Matt sat down on the step beside Hazel, who was finishing off another cigarette.

“Get your face cleaned up?” she asked him. “God knows where that cat’s been.”

“Yeah.” Matt tipped up the beer can and took another swallow. “Ungrateful little cuss. I offer him free room and board and he gives me another set of character lines.”

“He’ll come around.”

“I hope I live that long.”

Hazel eyed Matt carefully. “It’s one more deadbeat dad off the street. That’s the point, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. I guess it is.”

Hazel dropped her cigarette on the step and ground it out with her shoe. “You don’t seem real perky, Doc. What’s up?”

Matt drained the rest of the beer in a single, long chug, then set it on the step beside him. “The utility bill came today.”

“Comes every month.”

“Up to now I’ve been able to pay it.”

For a moment Matt felt a tightness in his stomach, followed by the same wave of nausea that passed over him every time he looked at an overdue bill or took in one more animal he might not be able to feed.

“I don’t know why you’re worried, Doc. With the grant from the Dorland Group—”

“No,” Matt said, holding up his palm. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

“But it’s a sure thing.”

“Only if I do what Hollinger wants me to. And I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.”

“What? Letting his ex-fiancée come here to volunteer in exchange for twenty-five thousand dollars? Sounds like a deal to me.”

Matt winced at Hazel’s bluntness. Maybe it was because she’d made it sound exactly like what it was—a bribe.

Robert Hollinger was chairman of the selection committee for the Dorland Group, a combination of several law firms that pooled their resources to offer grants to nonprofit organizations. Every year they chose one deserving charity and granted it twenty-five thousand dollars. Matt hadn’t thought he had a prayer of getting the grant, but he’d applied for it anyway, hoping for a miracle.

Then three days ago, to his complete surprise, he got a call from Hollinger. After a little small talk, he told Matt that he’d recently broken off his engagement with his fiancée, Kay Ramsey. He’d done it in the kindest way possible, of course, but instead of taking it like an adult, she’d sought revenge against him by ravaging his poor, helpless cocker spaniels. To hear Hollinger tell it, she was the lowest of the low—a confirmed animal hater—and Lizzie Borden with her ax couldn’t have done more damage to his dogs than she’d arranged to have done with a pair of clippers.

He’d brought a lawsuit against her and won, but in lieu of the monetary damages, he asked Matt, would it be possible for Kay to come to his shelter and volunteer a hundred hours as restitution? At first it all sounded very simple, but as they continued to talk, it became clear that Hollinger’s goal wasn’t restitution. It was revenge. And it dawned on Matt that if he carried out that revenge, the Dorland Grant was as good as his.