hidden his good humor from her because her eyes narrowed.
Smart girl.
He waited as she turned her attention to Lady, examining her in the same manner he had—thoroughly. So he saw the exact second she realized what he’d already discovered. Her mouth curved, then her teeth chewed into that bottom lip to try to hold it back, but her hazel eyes were laughing when they met his across the length of Lady’s body.
The moment was brief but oddly electrifying, broken when Sally dropped to her knees beside them. “What is it?” she asked, sounding deeply concerned.
“Mrs. Feinstein,” Emily said. “You said you adopted Lady two weeks ago?”
“Yes, I’ve got a friend who’s got a cousin whose sister-in-law’s brother breeds Tibetan mastiffs. Lady was the last in a long line of winning show dogs. I don’t have her paperwork yet. It’s been delayed for some reason. It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to show her, no matter how expensive she was. I just love the breed because they look like teddy bears. No ugly reproductive parts showing all the time.” She shuddered distastefully.
Emily bit her lip harder.
Wyatt rubbed Lady’s tummy, and the dog went boneless on its back, spread eagle. Lady did indeed resemble a teddy bear. In fact there was so much hair everywhere the dog might have been a stuffed animal from a child’s room.
Except for the huge erection between its hind legs, sticking straight up in the air.
Sally stared at it. “What in the Sam Hill is that?”
“A penis,” Wyatt said.
“I was really hoping you were going to say tumor,” Sally said. She paused. “Why does my girl dog have a penis?”
“Lady isn’t a female. And there doesn’t appear to be a thing wrong with him—other than he hasn’t been neutered.”
Sally shifted her shocked gaze from dog to vet. “Lady’s not a she.”
“Not in the slightest.”
Tired of being flat on his back, Lady leapt to his feet and panted happily at them. Then he tried to hump Emily.
Wyatt rose, pulled Emily up with him, and then Sally.
Lady wasn’t bothered by being disrupted in mid-hump. He went back to dating the chair.
“We could take care of this for you,” Wyatt told Sally. “Dr. Connelly is doing the surgeries today, I could check and see if there’s an opening for Lady.”
“Good gracious,” she said faintly, a hand to her heart, still staring down at Lady like she’d just discovered she was the owner of a green-striped pig. “Yes, please. I’d like to get this . . . taken care of.”
* * *
Wyatt took Emily through two straight hours of patients before giving them a moment to breathe in the staff room, where they inhaled the plate of sandwiches Jade had put out for them. They stood at the counter, and though Wyatt didn’t know about Emily, he was giving the whole ignoring her thing a good ol’ college try.
Mike broke their uneasy silence when he poked his head in and held out their next file. Wyatt gestured for Emily to take it. She reached out for it and a birthing glove fell from beneath her white lab coat.
Mike grinned. “You don’t have to hoard those, Doc, we keep ’em in every exam room.”
When he was gone, Emily looked at Wyatt. “You could have told me I had another stuck to my butt.”
“That would’ve suggested that I’d looked at your butt.”
She pulled off her coat and one last glove fell from her. She made a noise from deep in her throat that suggested she blamed him.
This wasn’t a surprise. Something else having sisters had taught him—blame was easily assigned to the nearest male in the room.
They went back to work and saw twenty-seven more patients before the end of the day. He sent an exhausted Emily home with the rest of the support staff, and then went to Dell’s office, where Dell and Adam were waiting on him.
Adam was Dell’s brother, and while not a vet, he helped run Belle Haven. He was a search and rescue expert, an S&R instructor, and taught all the local dog obedience classes.
“How did the new girl do today?” Dell asked.
“She’s smart,” Wyatt said.
Dell nodded. “And?”
Sweet. Cute. Hot . . . “Good with people and animals,” he added.
Dell smiled. “We already know all that, it’s why we took her. Tell me something I don’t know.”
“She’s a quick thinker, and knows her stuff when it came to the domestic animals.”
Dell nodded.
Adam hadn’t moved. He remained sprawled back in his chair, as still as a cat, just as intelligent as his brother. “But?” he said.
“I already know,” Dell said. “We all know. She’s not used to this kind of work, she’s a city vet. She startled when you treated Sergeant and he nearly took off her hand.”
Sergeant was a bad-tempered sheep who’d come in today with a stomachache. “Sergeant has nearly taken off all our hands at one point or another,” Wyatt said.
“How about Crazy Charlie?” Dell asked. “He throw her off her game?”
Crazy Charlie had come in with his even crazier parrot who tended to shout all sorts of racial obscenities.
Like owner, like parrot.
Turned out, Emily wasn’t all that good at corralling her emotions. Annoyance, embarrassment, fear. Wyatt had seen each and every one of them as she felt them. So had everyone else.
She was going to have to do better there. “She’s finding her footing,” he said.
Adam arched a brow, but didn’t say a word.
Dell smiled. “You’re defending her.”
Wyatt shrugged. “You like her, too, or she wouldn’t be here. You already know she was worth it.”
Dell nodded. “But it’s good to know you feel the same.”
“Yeah,” Wyatt said. “I feel the same.” Aware of Adam’s quiet, knowing gaze, he left and went to his office to handle the mountain of paperwork waiting for him.
He was still at work at seven o’clock, stomach growling, hunched over his computer when his cell phone buzzed an incoming text from Zoe, his older sister.
So as it turns out, the gas stove isn’t working. No worries, the fire department said all is well now.
Jesus. He grabbed his keys and headed out. Someday in the near future, home would be the house he built on the land he’d purchased earlier in the year—ten acres out near the lake on the outskirts of town. For now, home was the place he and his two sisters Darcy and Zoe shared, the house that the three of them had inherited from their grandparents.
And home might actually be the wrong word. Money pit. Yeah, money pit was definitely right. The huge, rambling old Victorian was falling off its axis, but it was the only home the three of them had ever known. The plan was to fix it up just enough to get out from beneath it. They’d divide the profits, and each would go on their merry way with their lives. But it had been a year and they were still stuck with each other.
Zoe was the oldest at thirty-two. The classic oldest, she was driven, bossy, and a perfectionist. Wyatt, the middle child, was only eleven months behind her, and the baby, Darcy, had just turned twenty-six and . . . well, she was as crazy as they came. Not three-day-emergency-hold crazy so much as . . . uncontrolled, uninhibited, and scary as hell.
The three of them had grown up quickly, and at the mercy of their foreign diplomat parents, whose jobs had taken them all over the world. Liberia for two years. Bolivia for three. Jordan. Hungary. Indonesia . . . It was mostly a blur now, but the lifestyle of being ripped away from everything you knew every few years, or even every few months, had left its toll in varying ways on each of them.
In Wyatt’s case, all he’d ever dreamed about was putting down roots and staying somewhere long enough to be on a sports team, and maybe get a pet while he was at it.
The bright side to his early years had been his grandparents. Born and raised in Sunshine, they’d never left. He and his sisters had often been sent here for summers. Though both grandparents were
gone now, they’d left their legacy—the deed to the money pit.
The deed was worth squat.
The house was worth squat.
But the memories of the time spent here was deeply rooted, and as the commercial went—priceless. After all the years of forced upheaval, Wyatt was here in Sunshine to stay.
He pulled into the driveway just as the sun was setting behind the Bitterroot mountains. There was nothing like fall in the mountains. A brilliant cornucopia of colors in every hue flashed beneath the last of the sun’s rays. He parked his truck and noted that there were no fire trucks. A bonus—the house was still standing— Well, somewhat. All good signs, he figured.
Zoe opened the door as he hit the top step. “’Bout time,” she said.
“Fire?” he asked.
“There was no fire. I just was getting tired of waiting on you.”
He glared at her, but she was unaffected. It was hard to intimidate someone who’d seen him wear a Superman cape to bed until he was eight.
“Dammit,” she said. “You look exhausted.”
“I’m fine.” If fine was half a minute from falling asleep on his feet.
She narrowed her eyes and studied him, her fingers clutching a pad of paper that he knew held the dreaded “to-do” list.
The list had to be tackled, was being tackled, one item at a time. Nightly. By the person least done in by their life that day. He and Zoe had a little who-was-busier competition going. She was a pilot at the small, local airport, and worked long hours. Wyatt worked long hours. So usually, it was a toss-up.
“How was your day?” she asked casually. Too casually.
But this wasn’t his first rodeo. He knew how to stay on the bull. “Delivered two baby sheep, expressed anal glands, cast a leg, cut the nuts off a sheperd,” he said. “You?”
“Crop dusted, and dropped the mayor at Yellowstone for an interview.”
They stared at each other, waiting to see who would crack first.
“Jesus,” came a disgusted voice from the couch. “Whose penis is bigger?”
Zoe hugged the list to her chest. “Mine is.”
Wyatt snatched the list from her for pride’s sake, for his entire male race.
Darcy, prone on the couch, cackled.
Wyatt pushed his way in and stood in the center of the living room, hands on hips as he studied his baby sister, still recovering from her accident nine months earlier, and the five surgeries she’d required in the time since. “Thought we agreed, you’re using your powers for good these days,” he said.
“But evil is so much more fun.”
Four
Emily was hanging upside down from the pull-up bar across the foyer doorjamb when her sister walked in the front door, stifling a little scream.
“Jesus,” Sara said, hand to her chest. “You look like a vampire.”
“Vampires don’t sleep in the open daylight,” Emily said. “How do you use this thing every night? I’ve only managed one stomach crunch.”
“That’s because your idea of exercise is reading in bed until your arms hurt from holding up your Kindle,” Sara said.
Unfortunately true. She righted herself and jumped down. “But I want a stomach as flat as yours.”
“Then you need to do more than hang upside down,” Sara said. “Burn some calories.”
“Calories,” Emily said on a sigh. “The evil tiny creatures that live in my closet and sew my clothes a little tighter every night.”
Sara laughed and pulled off her sweatshirt, shedding a layer of sawdust as she did.
“Hey,” Emily said. “Did you hear anything funny when you drove up?”
“Like the sounds of my sister vampire snacking on the mailman?”
“Ha-ha,” Emily said. “No, I mean I keep hearing some odd howling. I don’t know if it’s a dog or coyotes—”
Sara dropped her sweatshirt to the couch. She wore cargo shorts, heavy-duty work boots, and a men’s wife-beater tank that showed off her tats. Her short, spiky hair was still dusted in sawdust—as was most of the rest of her. She’d come to Idaho with Emily as a show of support, the both of them putting on a show of being psyched for the wild, wild west that they’d imagined Idaho to be.
Emily was still missing Los Angeles.
Sara, not so much. She’d recently had her heart run over—and backed up on and run over again. She was open to the idea of staying if it turned out that Sunshine, Idaho had a place for a rock chick, broken-hearted lesbian who’d collected degrees like some women collected shoes and yet chose to be a carpenter instead of using any of those degrees.
Sara kicked off her badass boots and more sawdust flew everywhere, drifting slowly to the floor of their rental house.
“Meow.” This came from Q-Tip, the ancient fuzzy gray cat who’d come with the rental. She’d appeared out of the shadows on move-in day, looking deceptively sweet—until she’d bitten both Sara and Emily within the first half hour for having the audacity to try to pet her.
No one wanted to claim the old cat, and the landlord had suggested they take her to the shelter. Sara, who wasn’t crazy about cats, and bleeding from the bite, had been on board.
But Emily had looked into Q-Tip’s eyes and known the truth. Q-Tip was old, grumpy, and set in her ways. No way was anyone going to adopt her, which left only an incomprehensible future ahead of her.
Emily had refused to do it, and so they now owned a cat. Correction, they were now owned by a cat.
Sara, a forgiving soul, reached down now to pet Q-Tip hello. The cat accepted this like it was her due . . . for about three seconds. Then she bit Sara’s hand—not too hard, more like a warning—and then, head high, the feline moved a few feet off and began to clean herself.
“Queen to peasant,” Sara said, shaking off the bite as she looked at Emily. “We feed her again why?”
“Because when we don’t, she yells at us.”
“Ah, that’s right,” Sara said. “So . . . how was your first day on the job?”
“Terrific,” Emily said.
“Really?”
“No. Guess who my supervisor is?”
“Uh . . . a werewolf?” Sara asked. “A zombie?”
“Wyatt.”
Sara blinked, looking confused. “Who?”
“My one-night stand.”
Sara stared at her then thrust both hands high in the air. “Score!” she yelled.
Q-Tip jumped about a foot, glared at Sara, and stalked off down the hall.
“No,” Emily said to her sister. “Not score. How’d you like it if your one-night stand was suddenly your supervisor?”
“My supervisor is a six foot three, three hundred and fifty pound, hairy, chunky, twice married, serial hetero male,” Sara said.
“You know what I mean.”
Sara moved to the kitchen, pulled open the fridge, and stared at the contents.
Q-Tip came running in, belly swinging to and fro. She could hear food coming from five miles away.
“Chicken or spaghetti?” Sara asked Emily. “And what did you do when you saw him?”
“Spaghetti,” Emily said. “And I made a fool of myself.” She