Mother, Please! - By Brenda Novak & Jill Shalvis & Alison Kent Page 0,37
to keep up her grades and scrape together enough cash to live at the same time, she’d never imagined living amongst rolling hills and farmland, where there were more cattle than people, running one of only two vet clinics for miles and miles.
The people in town—and having grown up in Los Angeles she used the word town loosely—were all a bit…too friendly. They popped in on her uninvited, asked nosy questions and basically talked her ear off. Some even brought cookies, or amazingly delicious casseroles.
She’d waited to see what their angle was, but having been here for a few months now, no angle had materialized. Maybe she’d moved to Mayberry.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like people, but that she preferred animals. Animals accepted. Animals loved unconditionally. Animals never, ever, gave up their young because they wanted a career in the ballet and couldn’t be bothered to raise a baby.
Oops, a self-pity slip, she thought, as she got out of her car, smoothing down her plain black trousers and white blouse. She headed up the path to the large farmhouse that years ago had been converted into an animal clinic by Dr. Myers. He’d just retired to Phoenix to be with his elderly sister, and Melissa had leased it with an option to buy—not that she ever intended to do any such insane thing. But the place was cheap, at least to her LA standard, and with her college loan debt still hanging over her, she needed cheap.
That was what had brought her here, she told herself, curiosity about small-town living. The low cost of the lease. It had nothing, nothing at all, to do with the fact she’d been born here twenty-eight years ago.
And that her mother lived here.
She grimaced and shook her head. No. The truth was, she’d come here because in some deep recess of her heart she’d wanted to be close to the only family she had. Which really pissed her off when she thought about it too hard, so she tried not to think about it at all.
She unlocked the front door to the clinic, flipped on the lights and took a deep breath, which never failed to make her smile. Nothing like the smell of disinfectant to get her going in the morning.
The converted living room made a nice waiting room. She had chairs lined up beneath the windows, a shelving unit on the opposite wall filled with retail supplies such as bovine toothbrushes and doggy breath mints. The reception desk was tiny, not really a problem since she couldn’t afford a receptionist anyway.
She’d just stepped behind the counter and slipped on her white overcoat when the front door opened, the bell above it chiming loud enough to awaken the dead. On her first day, she’d taken it down, only to have everyone tell her that Dr. Myers had brought that bell all the way from Europe forty-five years ago, so she’d put it back up. Tradition in Mayberry—er, Martis Hills apparently ran bone deep.
The man coming inside had his back to her while he shut the door. He was tall, lanky, and wore the town’s usual uniform of soft, faded Levi’s and a white T-shirt. She repressed the sigh for days of old, when on any given day in Los Angeles she could feed her love for fashion by just looking around.
Then he turned and faced her, and oddly enough, every fond thought of the days of old fell right out of her head.
He looked to be thirtyish. His hair was light brown, almost blond. Probably sun-kissed by the hot summer sun, and given the sinewy, rangy look to his body, he probably worked hard farming his land like so many in the county did. He was slightly hunched over a towel-covered bundle that was me-owing loudly in protest.
“I’ve got something for you to fix up, Dr. Anders.” He let out a startlingly contagious smile.
That he knew her name didn’t surprise her. Just another product of living in a small place. Gossip ran wild here, and no one was safe from that. Especially a single city woman running a vet clinic. Often in the dark of the night, she’d lie awake and stress about money or a variety of other things including why she always managed to stick out like a sore thumb no matter where she was. But that was for the dark of the night.
Right now she had a patient, and she loved her patients, every one of them. When he handed