“Yes, well, I worry about silly things, like how I’ll buy groceries if I can’t go to work.”
Reaching inside the pen, he stroked the skunk’s striped back. “Pokey, meet Chloe. She’s a little paranoid, but she’ll get over it.” As he said that, Ben realized that he honestly believed she might. The skunk arched its spine for petting, much like a cat. “There, you see? He just wants breakfast.”
Tensed to bolt, she inched closer. Judging by the wary looks she kept shooting his way, Ben wasn’t sure which of them made her more nervous, him or the skunk. Time, he assured himself. They’d had a nice few minutes on the deck this morning, and though it had taken some doing on his part, she’d finally relaxed. With twice-daily exposure to him, she’d soon stop being so skittish. He burned to know why there were shadows in her eyes in the first place. Her husband, probably. Only somehow the pieces to the puzzle didn’t quite fit. She didn’t strike him as the type to stay in an abusive marriage. . . .
He turned his attention to replacing the newspaper lining the bottom of the cage. When he glanced back up at her, he forgot what he was about for a moment. She’d left her hair down today, and it cascaded to her slender shoulders in a wild array of curls. With the morning sun behind her, the tendrils caught the light and blazed like sun-struck copper, creating a brilliant nimbus around her head. He understood now why Shoshone warriors of old had been so fascinated by redheads. She was beautiful. The kind of beautiful that made a man yearn to touch—and lay claim. His grandfather definitely would have approved.
“What?” she said.
Caught staring, Ben tried to think of an excuse, but his mind had gone as blank as a sheet of copy paper. “I, um—nothing. I’m sorry.”
She plucked at her pink knit top, which should have clashed with her hair but didn’t. It also clung to her breasts, revealing delightful details. Wise move, plucking it away from her chest that way. He didn’t know if it was the breeze or an instinctive female reaction to a man’s heated regard, but something had hardened her nipples.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
Hell, no, he wasn’t okay. He wanted her. And five years of denial was making it damned hard to convince his body that he could wait.
“I’m sorry. I just went spacey for a second.”
She moved closer to the cage. She was wearing that soft, musky scent again today. “I can’t believe you call him Pokey.”
“He isn’t navigating very fast with that foot.”
“Still.” She crouched beside him to study the skunk. “He’s too elegant for a name like that.”
Her top gaped away from her chest as she leaned forward to gingerly pet the animal, giving Ben a glimpse of perfectly shaped, creamy breasts. He could now say with absolute certainty that there were freckles below her collarbone. A man could entertain himself for hours, connecting the dots. “What name do you suggest?”
She studied the skunk for a moment. “Sir Galahad.”
“Sir Galahad? Aw, come on. You can surely do better than that.”
“It’s better than Pokey.” She thrust a finger through the wire and wiggled the tip, which brought the skunk hobbling toward her. “There, you see? He’s grateful. Pokey? That’s demoralizing.”
Ben took another gander at her breasts, which were edged with the scalloped lace of her white, front-clasp bra. It had been a while since he’d fumbled with hooks and eyes, but he remembered the gratification that came when man triumphed over frustration.
“Yeah, well, when you work with as many animals as I do, you run out of clever names. Not that Galahad is particularly original.”
“How about Winston?”
He was starting to wish she’d stop bending forward that way. “Winston works.”
“Winston it is, then.” Scratching the skunk’s sloped nose, she said, “He’s darling.” She leaned farther forward, God help him. “You are, yes, you are,” she crooned. “Now I feel silly for being afraid of you.” She glanced up. “If you start calling him Winnie, I’ll help him get even.”
Ben chuckled in spite of himself. “Winnie’s a girl’s name. I wouldn’t insult him like that.”
“What happened to his foot?” she asked.
“The bastard with the .22 shot him.”
“In the foot?”
Ben nodded. “He’s got good aim, I’ll say that for him.” He was okay now, he thought. She had straightened to look at him. That helped. Tops like that should be outlawed—along with front-clasp bras. “Whoever he is, he’s either had formal training with weapons, or he’s spent a lot of hours practicing.”
Ben tossed out the skunk’s water, added fresh from the jug Chloe had carried out, and set the dish back in the cage.
“Why are you convinced it’s a man?” she asked.
He considered the question for a moment. “Women are vindictive.”
“Watch it, buster.”
He chuckled and shook his head. She made his heart feel light. “Well, it’s true. I mean it as a compliment. Women need a reason. Even if it’s only an imagined reason, they usually don’t do stuff like this unless they have one.” He gestured at the skunk. “What do you suppose he ever did to make some woman shoot him in the foot?”
She watched Winston eat for a moment and then rose to a standing position. “Shooting an animal in the foot is—” She broke off and shook her head. “Only a very sick person would do such a thing.”
“Exactly.”
He bent to retrieve the cat food. Chloe collected the jug.
“Now I understand why you’ve posted such a large reward. Whoever’s doing this has to be stopped. It’s terrible.”
“I just hope somebody calls me.” Ben studied the woods. “And the sooner I get a call, the better. He could be out there right now.” He centered himself on the thought. His blood pressure, which he felt certain had been clear off the chart a moment before, dived to an acceptable level. “Sometimes, I hear the shots. Other times not. When I do, I always go looking for the animal.”
“Oh, Ben.” Her voice rang with sadness. “When you can’t find them, it must make you feel so helpless.”
Her comment jerked his gaze to her face. Her brows were knitted in a frown, and her eyes were filled with shadows. “Yes, it does. I know if I hear a shot that there’s probably a wounded animal out there, needing my help.” He nodded toward the trees. “One night last week, I searched with a flashlight until almost midnight. They can’t call out to me like a person. I have to be fairly close to sense that they’re there. I keep zigzagging, afraid that I’ve missed them. It’s hard to give up. If the injury allows, I know they’ll come to me the next day, but I hate like hell to let them suffer all those hours.”
When he looked back at her, he saw that she was studying him with bewilderment. “What?” he asked.
She smiled and shook her head. “Nothing. You just—” She gave her head a harder shake. “Nothing.”
Ben went back over what he’d just said—and realized that he’d relaxed his guard and revealed too much. “Here in my woods, I know most of the animals.” Pointing to the deer feeders and salt lick, he added, “As you can see, they come in for treats. They’ve grown used to me.”
“Ah.” She nodded. “That explains why they approach the house, then. And they probably talk among themselves, don’t you think?”
His attention sharpened. “Talk?”
She turned toward the woods again. “Like in the Caldwell books, they communicate. When you help one animal, it tells all the others. Pretty soon, they know to come here if they’re hurt. I wonder what their word for vet is?”
Dangerous ground. “Beats me.”
“If they come to you, they must understand you’re a vet,” she said. “They know you have magic in your hands and will make them feel better.” She tapped the toe of her sneaker on the wood. “The blue jays have loud, raucous voices. Maybe they go around telling all the animals in the forest about you.”
Ben stared hard at her profile. Was she se
rious—or pulling his leg? She suddenly turned toward him. Her cheeks went pink with embarrassment. “Now you’re laughing at me.”
“No.”
“Sure you are.” She shoved her slender hands into her jean pockets. “Animals talking. I’m sure it’s a chick thing that only another woman would understand.” She shrugged. “I honestly think they talk.”
Ben didn’t just think; he knew. She bent her head to stare at her toes. Then she rocked back on her heels, angled him a teasing look, and said, “I’m glad I’m not a man.”
“What?”
“You’re all so pragmatic and boring. Didn’t you ever watch Bambi?”
A few minutes later, Ben was standing at the stove again, fixing his mother a cup of hot chocolate. Sometimes, he felt as if invisible chains bound him to the kitchen. As he stirred the flavored milk over a medium flame, he watched Chloe put fresh bedding in Rowdy’s box. In the family room, Jeremy sat on the love seat with his puppy.
Didn’t you ever watch Bambi? Recalling Chloe’s question, Ben bit back a smile. He was doing a lot of that lately. Strange. How could a man go for five years living a humorless existence, and then suddenly feel like laughing so often? Chloe. Such a simple answer, wrapped in such a complicated package.
She cared, he thought. She truly did care about the animals, not in a purely scientific way, but about how they felt and suffered. He’d seen it in her eyes. That, too, felt strange. His ex-wife Sherry would have shrugged, yawned, and bent to peer through her microscope again.
Ben heard Chloe say something and glanced up to see her crouched by the raccoon’s cage, one finger thrust through the wire to scratch the animal’s head. Apparently she’d shelved her concerns that the raccoon might bite.
“Hey, Rēvo,” she said softly. “Feeling better now that you’ve eaten?”
Ben tapped the spoon on the edge of the pot. “Rēvo?”
“Yeah, he looks like he’s wearing shades. Rēvo works. He’s got a classy look about him.”
It was true, he decided. Rēvo worked, and so did she. The kitchen, filled with lemon-yellow sunlight, seemed brighter with her in it. After building this house, he’d tried to make it homey. One wall of the living room held a collection of Shoshone artifacts, neatly arranged, around paintings of the area done by local artists. Over the last three years, he’d picked up other pieces of art. His mother’s penchant for crocheting had provided cozy touches, as well: afghans, decorative pillows, doilies, and lap throws.
At a glance, the place looked like a home, but the plaster and wood had always been ominously silent. When he moved from room to room, no memories whispered, and the air felt empty. It sounded crazy, even to him, but that was how he felt, that the house had no life.
Chloe was changing that. She lent the rooms traces of her essence, making them feel friendly. When she laughed, the sound seemed to linger.
“Does Einstein need a towel over his cage?” she asked, jerking Ben from his musings.
He stared blankly at her. “Who?”
“Einstein.” She hooked a dainty thumb at the owl.
Ben found himself about to smile again. “Who named him Einstein?”
“Me. Owl seems unfriendly. He looks smart, don’t you think? All he lacks is a mortarboard with a tassel.” She studied the bird. “Isn’t he nocturnal?”
Ben nodded. “I don’t cover his cage, though.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s accustomed to sleeping outdoors. In the wild, he just perches on a limb where it’s shady.”
She leaned across the counter to move the owl’s cage forward to get him completely out of the sunlight. “There, that’s better, isn’t it, Einstein?”
The owl made a tutting sound and lifted his wings as though to thank her. Chloe gave the top of his cage a pat. “Good night, wise guy. Sleep tight.”
As she started from the kitchen, she stopped at the end of the counter where Ben had left a stack of manuscript pages by the cookie canister. He circled the work island to grab the papers and shove them in a drawer.
“Personal stuff,” he muttered.
Her brows lifted. She threw a curious glance at the drawer. Then she shrugged and left the room. Ben gazed after her, wanting to kick himself for leaving the printout lying in plain sight. If he was going to have her in his home, he had to start being more careful.
Chapter Eleven
When Chloe and Jeremy returned to Ben’s that afternoon, he greeted them at the door with a barely discernible hello. Jeremy whispered back, “How come you’re being so quiet? Is your mom sleeping?”
Ben motioned the child back out, joined them on the porch, and eased the door shut. “My mom’s taking a nap, but that’s not why I’m whispering. Buddy, a raccoon friend of mine, is just waking up from surgery.” Ben gave Chloe a long look laden with meaning. “He got hurt yesterday, and it’s taken him all this time to find his way to my house. I like to keep things quiet the first day after an animal has an operation.” Placing his hands on his knees, he leaned down to get eye to eye with the child. “Buddy’s a wild animal, and his head is fuzzy from the sleeping medicine. He isn’t used to people.”
“Oh,” the child said solemnly. “We might scare him, huh?”
Chloe rested a hand on Jeremy’s shoulder. “Would it be better if we skipped this afternoon, Ben?”
“No, I just wanted to explain the need to keep our voices down.” He reached behind him to open the door. “Imagine, if you will, waking up in a lion’s lair—with the lion pacing all around you and roaring.”
Jeremy’s eyes grew huge. “We aren’t lions, and we don’t roar.”
“To Buddy, we’re as scary as lions, and our voices sound like roars.”
Jeremy tiptoed behind Ben into the house. As they entered the kitchen, the child crouched down some five feet from Buddy’s cage. In a stage whisper, he asked, “How did he get hurt?”
Chloe threw Ben an uncertain look. To her dismay—or was it relief?—he knelt beside Jeremy to field the question. Curling an arm around the boy’s shoulders, he murmured, “Buddy was shot, Jeremy.”
“With a gun?” At Ben’s nod, Jeremy glanced back at the animal. “But how come?” he whispered. “Raccoons aren’t to eat, and he’s not big enough to hurt anybody.”
“There’s a sickness in some people. They do bad things we can’t understand. There’s no justifying it, no explaining it. They’re just very mixed up.”
Jeremy leaned closer to Ben. “Do you think the person who shot him got his head hit by a ’peller blade?”
Ben glanced at Chloe, his expression bewildered.
“My daddy got his head hurt,” Jeremy whispered. “He fell out of our boat, and the ’peller blade got him. Before it happened, he was real nice, and he loved me and my mom lots. But afterwards, he got mad all the time and did bad things.”
Ben’s black brows drew together in a frown. He stilled his big hand on Jeremy’s narrow back. “I’m sorry, Jeremy. That must make you feel sad.”
“My mom says he’s lost and can’t find his way back to us no more.” Jeremy’s face looked pinched, and the ache in his eyes made Chloe’s heart twist. “The last time he got real mad at me, all I did was spill my milk. Not on purpose or nothing. But he yelled and grabbed my neck.”
The child’s eyes went bright with tears. He stared for a long moment at the raccoon. Then his mouth started to quiver. “He squeezed so hard, I couldn’t breathe. My mom tried to make him stop.” He gulped and expanded his lungs as though remembering how it had felt. “He got mad and hit her in the face. She’s lots littler than him, and he made her fall and cut her eyebrow.”
Chloe felt as if a fist had slammed into her stomach. I couldn’t breathe. He squeezed so hard, I couldn’t breathe. The doctor had told her Jeremy’s breathing attacks stemmed from some kind of emotional trauma, but until now, she’d never made the connection between the child’s symptoms and what he had lived through that night. Oh, dear God. Roger had tried to strangle him, and J
eremy had been having breathing problems ever since.
Chloe wheeled away, her only thought to find a place where she could be alone for a moment. She circled the cages at the end of the bar, passed through the family room into the sunroom, and stepped out onto the deck through the French doors. At the railing, she curled her hands over the wood, cocked her knee against a lower slat, and bent her head as she struggled against tears.
She felt so stupid. So awfully, horribly stupid, and completely inadequate as a mother. It all fit. I couldn’t breathe. As the truth sank in, she had trouble breathing herself. It hurt. What had happened that night had traumatized Jeremy so badly that he was reliving the incident over and over again. His wonderful daddy, the man who’d once tossed him in the air and tickled him, had flown into a mindless rage and tried to kill him over a glass of spilled milk.
The sunlight caressed Chloe’s shoulders with gentle warmth, and the breeze dried her tears. She hauled in a deep breath and slowly released it. Oh, God, what have I done? I should have left the very first time Roger grew violent. I never should have let Jeremy go through all that. At the time, she’d felt duty bound to remain with her husband and take care of him. It had seemed so wrong to file for divorce and abandon him when he’d needed her so much. In sickness and in health.
Now her son was paying the price for her misplaced loyalty.
“You okay?”
Chloe jumped at the sound of Ben’s voice. Keeping her head bent, she saw his big, dark hand come to rest on the railing next to hers.
“I’m fine,” she managed to squeeze out. It was a lie, of course. “Is Jeremy all right?”
“He’s a little upset. Nothing to worry over. I left him in the family room with Rowdy. They’re having a cuddle session on the love seat.”
“Oh.” She wished he’d go away and leave her alone. “That’s good.”
“Can you talk about it, Chloe?” he asked.
She shook her head. “It’s, um—no, I don’t think so.”
How could she talk about what had been not only the end of her marriage, but a defilement of everything she’d believed in and come to trust as well?