Nicole Helm - All I Am

It was a decent-size cabin in the middle of a forest. Definitely an escape from well-meaning people and their parade of casseroles and intrusive questions when he’d first gotten back on his feet. Then the cabin had become his life, his sanctuary. And, okay, maybe it still was. Maybe it always would be.

He’d never be normal, and he’d never be a veterinarian. Those were irrefutable facts.

He got out of the truck and let the dogs out to yip and prance around with Franco and Monster, the two dogs who hadn’t been trained well enough yet to go everywhere with him. The land around the cabin was his animals’ domain. Six dogs, three cats and one sheep with a limp.

He hadn’t been able to do the vet thing, what with the nerve damage in his arm and hand, making performing surgery, exams and just getting through vet school requirements impossible, but that hadn’t meant he’d lost his love of down-and-out animals.

He let the dogs run around outside, Monster and Franco attached to their runner, then trudged into his cabin. It had everything he needed. A big kitchen for the dog treat making, a room expressly for packaging, an office for the business side of things.

Though the office looked more like the aftermath of a frenzied police search. He headed to his computer. It was nearly six. The video call with Mom was his least favorite part of the week. Hearing about how great Palm Springs was. How amazing her new family was, how successful her little chain of all-natural grocery stores was. She thought she was proving she’d gotten her life together, that she was a mother he could be proud of now.

She couldn’t accept he’d always been proud of her, and the money she had now didn’t magically change, well, anything.

Phantom rested his snout on Wes’s knee, having not stayed outside with the rest of the—as Cara had put it—menagerie.

That almost made him want to smile.

The pinging sounded. Deep breath. Accept the video call. On the computer Mom had bought as a gift, in the cabin she’d bought as a homecoming present, surrounded by the debris of a business Mom helped fund.

He’d gone to Afghanistan because they couldn’t afford any of the colleges with decent vet programs. Community college had been an option, but the GI bill had seemed a better one at the time. Better than piles of debt that had seemed insurmountable to a kid who’d grown up in poverty.

Then a bomb had exploded and ended any vet dreams or the possibility of staying in the structure and comfort of knowing how to act in the army. And no amount of things Mom offered him or forced on him was going to change that.

“Baby!” Mom’s smile filled the screen, and he worked on matching it.

“Hey, Mom.”

Her smile dimmed. “You’re doing okay?”

It was the closest she ever got to mentioning his injuries. Four years later and she was still more uncomfortable discussing them than he was, which was really saying something.

“Sure. Found a new vegetable supplier a little closer to home.”

Her smile returned to full wattage. Talk about business. That she could do. That they could do, and did do, for twenty minutes before she started talking about her husband, her stepkids.

She paused, biting her lip, a sure sign of nerves. The same way she’d bitten her lip when he’d been a kid, and they hadn’t been able to afford anything. Not new shoes. Not school lunches. Not the colleges he wanted, even with government assistance.

“Maybe you could come visit.” It was the first time she’d suggested it in a long while. Maybe ever. He got invited to go on vacations with the new family, but he always declined. Usually because he wasn’t up to skiing or being shoved onto a cruise ship.

He’d never been invited to the actual house.

“There are a lot of steps and things to maneuver, but we can make it more—”

“I don’t know when I’d be able to get away, Mom. High market season for the next few months, you know.”

“Oh, right.” She bit her lip, and he refused, absolutely refused, to read anything into her expression.

He wasn’t handicapped, which made him a lot luckier than many of his fellow soldiers. If she wanted to treat him like he was, he’d keep far, far away.

“I miss you, baby.”

“Yeah. Miss you, too. Gotta go, though. Talk next week.”

She forced a smile and a sad little wave as she said bye, and he clicked off the connection.

Phantom’s nose pushed into his chest, and Wes gave in to the urge to rest his head on top of the dog’s.

CHAPTER THREE

CARA SHIVERED UNDER her bulky sweatshirt, breath huffing out in clouds as she yawned. “It’s so freaking cold.” It always took a few weeks to get into the more bearable mornings, and while she could stay home, what with the abundant help Pruitt Morning Sun now had, she was not about to get pushed out of being a part of it.

Why she felt that way was something she didn’t want to analyze.

Mia smiled. Dell rolled his eyes. Charlie, Dell’s brother, sipped his coffee. “Yes. It is. Why are all four of us here?” Charlie asked.

Cara looked away. Sorry, Charlie, but she wasn’t about to let the Wainwright brothers push her out. Maybe she wasn’t part of the farm, but she’d been a part of Mia’s booth from the beginning. That wasn’t going to change.

She hoped. She had to leave in about half an hour for the stupid interview Mia had set her up with. For making pies. At a real-life restaurant.

The cold dug deeper, and that little voice inside her head that was always right about things whispered, you’re going to screw it up.

“You come of your own accord,” Dell said to his brother. “Feel free not to. Less bitching I have to listen to.”

Charlie sighed heavily, but he didn’t say anything else. He sat on the truck bed, sipping his fancy coffee.

Cara stared at her knees, trying to focus on the cold and will the ominous feelings away. So what if she did mess up the interview? It was a dumb part-time job. One she’d have to quit her salon job over, and then she’d have to find another part-time job that would give her Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays off.

This was ridiculous. How had she let Mia talk her into this? How could Mia conveniently forget that if there was pressure involved, Cara was going to fold? And fold hard. If she dreamed it, she could not do it.

A little bolt of fur shot in front of her, followed by a few yips, then paws on her shins. Sweetness panted up at her expectantly, tail wagging on overdrive.

“Geez, when did you become the anti-dog whisperer?” Dell asked. “Are dogs going to attack you every market day?”

Cara bent down to pet Wes’s littlest dog, a shaggy piece of fur that gave no hint at breed. “She’s not attacking me. Hi, Sweetness. And you are, aren’t you? A bundle of sweetness.”

A shadow stepped over the sun, and it didn’t take a fortune-teller to know that when she looked up at the looming figure, she’d come face-to-face with beard and eyes. “Sorry about her. Apparently she’s got a thing for you.”

And what does her owner have for me? In another situation, like at the bar with her friends as an audience, she probably would have said it. “I don’t mind.” She gave Sweetness a scratch before standing up and moving away from the table where Mia and Dell were dealing with customers. “She escaped you to find me. I’m flattered.”

“You must smell like bacon,” Wes replied, following her and Sweetness to a cluster of trees outside the main row of tables.

“Or I’m irresistible.”

He made a strange kind of grunting sound. “Come on, dog.” His voice was low and grumbly as he patted his thigh to grab Sweetness’s attention.

It certainly caught Cara’s attention. It was a very nice, powerful-looking, denim-clad thigh. Get a grip. He might be hot, and that might usually be all it took for her to flirt with a guy, but she didn’t think she should get involved with someone rumored to be a hermit after being injured in the military.