of another species entirely.”
She rolled her eyes. “Hold out your arm.”
He thrust it out. When she ran cotton-soaked disinfectant along the four deep scratches on his forearm, he hissed out a breath. “Ouch.”
“Baby,” she said, but bent over him to blow on the admittedly nasty scratches.
“Mmm.” This rumbled from his chest, and when she looked up at him, he smiled hopefully. “Are you going to kiss it, too?”
She straightened, a hand on her hip. “Are you flirting with me?”
His grin spread. “Well, now, that all depends. Did you like it?”
“I don’t flirt with clients,” she heard herself say coolly, and wanted to wince because she sounded just as distant as her friends back in Los Angeles had always accused her of being.
“See, now there’s our loophole.” He lifted his hands in a surrendering gesture. “I’ve never been in here before, so I’m not really a client.”
The cat butted her head against Mel’s hand for more petting. Mel stroked her for another moment, then scooped her up against her chest. The cat rubbed the top of her furry head against Mel’s chin and kept purring. “Bob is going to be fine,” she said, cuddling for another moment. “But she should be checked again after the birth.” She plopped the purring mom-to-be back into his arms.
Because she needed some space, she headed out into the reception area and toward the desk. “I’ll just need you to fill out a form for billing. You can leave it when you’re finished.”
“But…”
She stopped and glanced back at him. He was trying without much success to juggle both the annoyed cat and the clipboard with the form attached to it. “Yes?”
Unhappy at being jostled, Bob dug her claws into his chest. The man yelped.
With a sigh, she bent behind the receptionist’s desk and brought out a cardboard kitty transport box. “Here. Use this.” She helped him get Bob into it, again within extremely close proximity. She couldn’t help but notice how his T-shirt stretched across the muscles of his back when he moved, and how he smelled of citrus soap and wood, and man.
Not interested, she reminded herself. She was absolutely not going to be interested in a man who was nervous around cats and had a sinful smile. So she stepped back, laughing at herself. “Goodbye.”
He eyed the box with Bob in it as if it were a bomb ready to detonate. “Do you want to put disinfectant on my new scratch?” he asked, and rubbed his chest.
His T-shirt rose just a bit, revealing a strip of tanned, flat belly. She pictured herself lifting that shirt to treat his scratches and her mouth went dry. “I think you’ll live.”
He grinned a little knowingly.
“Goodbye.” Then, as she always did when someone got too close, Melissa walked away.
CHAPTER TWO
MELISSA SPENT the rest of the day busy at the clinic. Busy being relative, of course. She had only a few appointments, but coupled with her walk-ins for the afternoon, she figured she just might be able to pay the bills for the day.
That night she ate dinner alone in front of her television. She’d wanted Thai take-out, but there wasn’t any to be had. Sometimes she really missed Los Angeles, missed all the choices, the culture. Here, culture meant adding blue-cheese dressing onto a burger at the Serendipity Café, and even then, the waitress always gave her an odd look, as if she was massacring a perfectly good meal.
After making herself a quesadilla, she fed her reality-TV fix by watching The Stud. Watching twenty gorgeous women all competing in various humiliating “trials” for the attention of one man was both repelling and fascinating.
Who wanted a man that badly?
During the commercial breaks, she dug into her mail, most of which were bills, and more bills, except for the scented envelope. Staring at it, her heart kicked into gear.
Rose was trying again. She opened the pink envelope and spread out the flowered stationery covered in her mother’s writing. At forty-six, Rose had decided she wanted to be a part of her daughter’s life, the daughter she’d given up at birth for the ballet.
To be fair, Rose hadn’t suddenly decided—she’d been trying on and off for years. Melissa had deep misgivings about relationships in general; she had difficult with intimacy. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that was a product of being abandoned by Rose at age one, into the foster-care system. Moving from one foster-care family to another made it too painful to keep opening to people