Cara/Cassidy Colter/Caron - Love's Nine Lives

She sighed heavily and pulled him more tightly into her bosom. “But, Conan, I have come to love my little brick library across from the town square. I’ve done so much with it in the two years I’ve been here! We have story time and a poetry club. The chess club meets there once a week. Why, the collection is marvelous for a small-town library! How could I leave it?”

Still, he could see her dilemma. How was a woman like her ever going to find companionship in a town where men drove pickup trucks with wheels nearly the size of her house?

At the animal shelter, of course!

Barring the sweater, hat and leash, it had not been an unhappy arrangement, really, until the last three days. Now Conan wasn’t so sure if it was going to work.

“I’ve got it,” she said suddenly, squatting down by the couch and running her hands tenderly through his fur. “I know how to make you happy.”

He sighed with relief. Their first fight over, then. Of course she knew how to make him happy.

She was reaching for the phone book. Oh, goody. That meant takeout. Perhaps she had just realized the calamari was calorie-reduced. With a nice little side of salt-and-pepper squid…He began to purr happily.

She was frowning at the phone book. “How do I find a contractor?” she muttered. “Every single one of them will take one look at me and realize I’m a woman alone. I’ll be overcharged for shoddy workmanship.”

What the heck was she talking about? What did any of that have to do with honey-glazed salmon?

“I’ll ask Fred, the maintenance man at the library,” she decided, closing the telephone book.

Conan willed her to reopen it to the Yellow Pages, Restaurants, but she did not.

Instead she picked him up as if he didn’t weigh anything near twenty-six pounds and waltzed around the room with him tucked next to her heart.

“Conan,” she announced, “you are getting a cat door!”

His disappointment was sharp. A cat door was a long, long way from the little tuna sushi rolls that he favored.

“I’ll have it installed in the back door and I’ll have the fence replaced around the yard and then you can go outside and play while I’m at work. I won’t have to worry about you going over the fence either.”

My God, she thought he was too chubby to drag himself over a fence?

He glared at her, but she was oblivious to his mood, dancing around, blabbering about drawing up specifications.

Her mood was hard to resist, however, and suddenly it struck him what he was being offered.

Freedom. The great outdoors in springtime.

She had bird feeders everywhere in that backyard! It would be like having his very own drive-through window.

I’ll have the McFinch, please.

Conan chuckled to himself. It came out as a deep, rich purr, and his mistress hugged him tighter.

“I knew I could make you happy,” she said blissfully.

Justin West hopped out of his truck and eyed the house. It was in the older part of Hunter’s Corner, a neighborhood called Honeysuckle, where small, postage-stamp-size houses sat on huge lots surrounded by the neighborhood’s namesake. At this time of year the air smelled sweet with the scent of the blossoms that hung heavy in the shrubbery.

This house was extremely well kept, the shingle siding painted sunshine-yellow, the trim, stairs and window boxes white. Cheerful red geraniums were already planted in those boxes. A front window was open and a lace curtain danced on the light spring breeze.

“Thanks, Fred,” Justin muttered.

Justin owned West’s Construction, a construction company specializing in framing new houses. The north side of town was building up phenomenally as more and more people left the cities looking for exactly what Hunter’s Corner, population fifteen thousand, had to offer—a small-town feel and flavor.

There was no Wal-Mart, no Starbucks, no multiplex theaters. The town was tidy, safe and neighborly. For amenities, it boasted a town square with a park that children still played in. There was a library, a swimming pool that was open in the summer, two grocery stores, one ice cream parlor and close proximity to the great outdoors and all its attractions. People here sat on their front porches, grew gardens, threw out a fishing pole in their spare time. Kids rode their bikes down the tree-lined streets and walked unescorted to school.

Justin West had more work than he knew what to do with.

He didn’t need the kind of job a tidy house in Honeysuckle implied—a little old lady who wanted a new washstand for the backyard. He’d be plied with cookies and tea—and get phone calls long after the job was done about imaginary popped nails or squeaks. When he arrived to investigate, there would be more cookies and tea and pictures of the new grandchild.

On the other hand, Fred had asked him to come and at least look at the job. And how could he say no to Fred?

In his seventies, Fred was still the town maintenance man, refusing to reveal his actual age or to consider retirement. He had also been Justin’s father’s best friend since the days when Hunter’s Corner had been little more than an autumn retreat for city boys who wanted to bag a deer or two. Fred had been there through all those lonely, hard years when the Alzheimer’s took hold, wrapped its tentacles around Justin’s father’s mind, changing him from a powerful man into a baffled, helpless child. Fred had never once said, “I’m too busy,” when Justin called in panic because he had to be at work and his dad was having one of “those” days.

His dad had gone finally, a bittersweet blessing. And now Fred was asking a favor of him, of Justin, for a lady friend.

Justin wasn’t going to return the friendship and loyalty that Fred had shown his father with I’m too busy, even though he was.

Justin took the front steps two at a time, knocked on the door—loudly, in case Fred’s lady friend was deaf. He thought it was nice that Fred had a lady friend. Fred’s wife had been gone for nearly fifteen years. And his best friend for just over a year. It was about time—

The door opened, and Justin reeled back, nearly stumbling off the step. He grabbed the handrail and steadied himself.

The woman smiling tentatively at him was shockingly beautiful, maybe particularly in contrast to his expectation that the door was going to be opened by someone old and wrinkled and deaf.

Justin gauged her to be in her mid to late twenties. She had hair the exact color of shiny new copper, pulled back quite severely off her face. But the severity of the hairstyle only emphasized the loveliness of her features: high cheekbones, a pert nose, a small tilted chin, a gloriously generous mouth. There was the slightest smattering of freckles over milky-white skin, and eyes that were huge and green as Smoky’s Pond on a summer afternoon. She was slender as a reed and petite, the kind of woman that gave a man the dangerous feeling that he was big and strong and that he had been put on this earth for the sole purpose of protecting those more fragile than himself.

She had an enormous orange cat in her arms that was comically bandaged around its head. Justin had a feeling it might be a mistake to laugh at the cat, which was glaring at him with baleful dislike. She juggled its bulk to offer a slender hand.

“Justin West?” she asked.

He took a steadying breath and accepted her hand. It was cool and soft and small—and packed a jolt like a shock from a circular saw with a bad connection in a rainstorm. He held her grip a fraction longer than might have been necessary. The cat shifted its weight, forcing her to withdraw her hand or let the cat slide down her front.

“I’m Bridget Daisy. Thank you for coming.”

So he did have the right address. She was Fred’s friend, though obviously not his lady friend in the way Justin had imagined. He glanced at her ring finger. Bare. Lord have mercy!