Sitting wasn’t something Rebecca did well when she felt anxious or uncertain. Caught between a vague unease at the prospect of seeing Joe Hudson again and a more pronounced uncertainty over what nursing skills would be required to tend the injured cat, she was feeling a little of both.

Having already let alarm get the better of her that day, she wasn’t about to let anyone around her know she now felt anything less than in total control. She couldn’t remember how old she’d been when her mom had first started pounding in the lesson, but having grown up in the city, she’d learned early on that the key to survival was to mask any sign of weakness.

That didn’t mean she never felt vulnerable. She just rarely let the world know it. Especially on the street. Or when it came to her work, cutthroat as the fashion business could be. Or to men. With her self-confidence with that particular species in the subbasement at the moment, she felt a particular need for guard where they were concerned.

Since pacing off her internal energy wasn’t practical in the small, occupied space, she hiked the strap of her oversize bag higher on her shoulder and wandered over to peruse a collection of photographs lining the far wall.

The photos had caught her attention mostly because the beautifully framed and photographed scenes seemed so out of place in a room with posters of cartoon pets on the walls and brochures about heartworm medication on the counter. The quality of the incredible pictures of waterfalls, canyons, sheer cliffs and meadows of deer rivaled what she’d seen at professional showings in New York.

“Doctor Hudson took those,” she heard his assistant say. “He’s quite the outdoorsman, you know.”

Rebecca’s response was a smile. She hadn’t known that, though she supposed she should have guessed as much. There was a ruggedness about the good doctor that the men she’d known couldn’t have achieved no matter how dark the facial shadow they grew or how much flannel and denim they wore. That ruggedness wasn’t overt, though. It wasn’t rough or harsh or hard. It was more a solid, sturdy sort of masculine strength that she wasn’t terribly familiar with at all.

She turned back to study the collection. Behind her, she could hear movement and voices as someone entered the reception area to pay his bill. Still marveling at Joe Hudson’s work, it was a moment before she became aware of another set of footsteps. Turning, she saw the man whose work she was admiring give her an easy smile.

He carried the cat in one arm. In his other hand was the carrier he sat at the far end of the reception counter, out of the way of the teenager stuffing his receipt into his back pocket. A white bandage had been wrapped around the cat’s head, leaving only his little face and his right ear exposed. He was clearly too drugged to care that he also wore a white plastic collar that vaguely resembled a funnel.

Concern joined the uncertainty she already felt about her nonexistent veterinary nursing skills.

“It looks worse than it is,” the doctor assured her. “The actual wound is only about an inch and a half long. The collar will keep him from pawing the bandage off and pulling out the stitches.”

She wasn’t particularly relieved by that news. If anything, she felt as if she were bracing herself as he held out the cat. Holding her breath, she gingerly took Columbus from him. When the infinitely more manageable animal did nothing but lie limply in her arms, she released that breath, gave the man curiously watching her a tentative smile and nodded toward the pictures behind her.

“You have real talent,” she told him, over the murmurs of the other conversations. “For photography,” she clarified, in case he thought she was referring to his healing skills, though he clearly had talent there, too. “Those are beautiful.”

Joe’s interest in her underwent a subtle shift. She seemed marginally calmer than she had a while ago. And while she still didn’t look terribly comfortable with the animal she held, the absent way she stroked its neck as she cuddled it spoke of nurturing instincts she apparently didn’t even know she had.

“I took those on hikes around here. Except for the cliff shot. That was a climb in New Hampshire,” he told her. “Are you into climbing?”

“I’m not much for dangling over cliffs,” she admitted, managing not to sound totally horrified at the thought. “Actually, I’m not much of a nature person at all. The closest I’ve come to the wilds was a rock concert in Central Park.”

“So you’re into photography, then?”

“Not that, either. Not me, personally, I mean. I’ve just worked with a lot of photographers and recognize quality when I see it.”

“You’re a model.”

She couldn’t help but smile at his conclusion. Feeling flattered, she also felt a funny flutter in her stomach when he smiled back. “No, but thank you. I worked at a fashion magazine in New York, so I’ve worked with a lot of photographers. Still do, actually. I’m just freelancing now.”

His glance fell to her mouth. Her own faltered as her heart bumped her ribs.

The ringing of the phone had stopped. So had the conversation taking place between the Pekingese lady and the elderly man with the cat.

It was only then that Rebecca realized how close she and the doctor were standing, and that everyone but the animals was staring at them.

Clearing her throat, she took a step back.

“You should put the cat in the carrier,” he said, sounding far less self-conscious than she felt having been so totally absorbed in their conversation. “Here.”

While he held open the flap of the soft-sided carrier for her, she slipped the decidedly docile cat inside. He was zipping it for her when his assistant held up two white plastic bags, one large, one small and each bearing the name of the clinic in royal blue.

“It’s your towel,” the clearly curious woman explained. “And Columbus’s antibiotic.”

“Give it to him twice a day in his food,” the doctor added, back to business. “Like I said, he has a couple of stitches. They’ll dissolve on their own, but I’d like to see him next week to make sure he’s healing all right. In the meantime, call if he won’t eat or drink or if you have any questions.”

Looking vaguely distracted, he gave her one last smile and headed for the hallway. Rebecca promptly turned back to the assistant, made an appointment for next week, thanked the woman and walked out wondering what on earth all that had been about.

Joe Hudson was definitely not the urbane and sophisticated sort of man she was usually drawn to. He made his living taking care of animals. He was into the outdoors. He actually climbed mountains, and apparently enjoyed it. He had also somehow calmed her heart rate with his touch—and accelerated it all over again with his smile.

She ran her fingers alongside the scratch he’d tended, then promptly dropped her hand. Considering that she was only six months from a major breakup and seventy-two hours out on a minor one, she had no business thinking about him at all. Or anyone else, for that matter. The only man she should spare any mental energy on was the one she’d come to Rosewood to find. Given that her access to personal information about her father had been cut off, thanks to Jack, she needed to focus on some other way to meet the man who was proving to be as elusive as the emotional security she feared she’d never know.

If there was anything Rebecca could do it was focus. Once she set her mind to a task, nothing short of the Second Coming could stop her.

Or so she’d thought until a little after nine o’clock that night.

Chapter Two

Rebecca sat in the middle of the blue toile print sofa in the family room of her leased house. Across from her, the television in the carved country French armoire was off. So was the overhead light. The only illumination came from the brass candlestick lamp on the end table beside her and the glow of the laptop computer screen on the long maple cocktail table.

On the wall behind her hung a huge replica of a European railroad station clock and, as in the entryway, several framed photos of the Turner family she’d left up to keep her company. The quiet tick of that clock merged with the soft purr of the bandaged cat she had nestled beside her on one of the sofa’s blue-and-cream-checked throw pillows.

Columbus had now stirred a time or two, but he’d yet to waken for long. Whatever the vet had given him still hadn’t completely worn off. Or, maybe, he was just exhausted from his ordeal. Whichever it was, as docile and dependent as he was on her at the moment, she actually found him rather sweet.

Absently stroking his soft fur so he would know he wasn’t alone, she told herself she should turn off the computer. Or, at least, sign off the Internet. As rejected as she felt, and the more she considered what little she’d learned from Jack about his stepfather, she no longer felt as certain about wanting to meet the man as she once had.

That unexpected realization left its own kind of emptiness.

She had wanted to know her father since she’d first noticed in kindergarten that, unlike her, most of the kids had a mom and a dad. She’d been fascinated by the sight of a couple walking down the street with a child, or a dad skating with his son or daughter at the rink at Rockefeller Center, or a man holding the hand of a child. Those kids always looked so happy to her, so protected, so…complete.

She’d wanted a dad of her own. She’d told her mom that, too, but her mom had said she didn’t need one. Her mom had also refused to talk about the man who’d fathered her, so after a couple of tries, Rebecca stopped asking who he was.

She hadn’t stopped daydreaming about him, though. Or about being part of his family. In her mind, that family was huge and happy and everyone welcomed her with open arms. Other than through the state’s birth records, which she’d checked, futilely, years ago, she’d had no hint of where to start looking for him—until just before her ten-year high school reunion last May.

She’d been in the recesses of her mom’s storage closet looking for her yearbooks so she’d be sure to recognize everyone when she’d come across an old diary of her mother’s. It hadn’t been the sort with a lock and, at first, she’d absently flipped through it, thinking to show it to her mom and ask if she even remembered having it.

Then, the dates had caught her attention. So had the names and initials entwined in hearts on some of the pages.

Quickly calculating back, she realized that her mom would have been nineteen and in college when she’d poured her heart onto the neatly written pages. She also realized that she’d been madly in love with a business major named Russell Lever—and that the entries had been made around the time she would have been conceived.

She’d put the diary back and never mentioned having found it. The next day, though, she’d been online to adoption sites checking to see if anyone named Russell Lever was looking for his daughter.

She’d found nothing, but the need to track him down had led her to hire an attorney who had located a Russell Lever in the appropriate age range and tracked him to Rosewood. All the attorney had been able to tell her at that point was that the man was married and that he had a stepson named Jack.

It was right about then that her apartment had been broken into. Since she couldn’t afford to have the attorney gather more information for her and because she wanted out of the city anyway, she’d contacted a real estate agent in Rosewood to find her an apartment.

The agent had come back with several apartments, and the house on Danbury Way. The woman had admitted that the only reason she even mentioned the large house to her was because the lease was a spectacular deal—even less than what Rebecca had been willing to spend on far less space. The problem was that the lease came with cats, which was proving a challenge for the owners since they couldn’t find a lessee willing to pet sit.

Rebecca would have turned it down flat herself, had the agent not mentioned that her sister-in-law lived on the street and that there was a very attractive widower just a few doors down. A local attorney, she told her. Jack Lever.

The Fates were clearly watching out for her. Despite the cats, learning that a man who might well be Russell’s stepson lived on that very street removed any possibility of not leasing the house.

She’d had no intention, however, of waiting around for the Fates to dump either man in her lap. She’d been in Rosewood less than twenty-four hours when, armed with her map, she’d set out to drive by the address her attorney had given her for Russell Lever—only to discover that the address was inside a gated residential community.

She’d returned to her leased house to look him up herself. There had been no residential listing but she’d found Russell Lever Consulting Services in the yellow pages. The address was the one she already had.

Though she’d had no idea what sort of consulting he did, she decided that his office must be in his home. A quick check on the Internet proved him to be “an international management consultant specializing in maximizing profit potential in the purchase and liquidation of businesses and their assets.”

In other words, she’d thought, he helped companies buy up the competition and strip them bare.

She hadn’t been sure how she’d felt when she’d realized that. But she wouldn’t let herself judge the man she thought was her father. It had taken her nearly a week after that, though, to work up the courage to call his phone number.

She’d been informed by a recording that Mr. Lever would return her call if she would leave her name, number and the purpose of her call.

She’d been nowhere near ready to do any such thing. She wanted to see him first, just catch a glimpse of him if that was all she could manage. Uncertainty and nerves had become totally tangled up in the need for their first meeting to be perfect and she wanted whatever advantage she could get to make it that way. But advantages of any sort had been hard to come by.

Since she couldn’t get into the exclusive, gated development to catch a glimpse of him outside what had to be a gorgeous home, judging from those visible from the street, she’d decided to see if she could find out what kind of car he drove so she could spot him driving through those gates.

It took her a week and another fee to the attorney to come up with the make of his cars and their license numbers.

It took another week of sitting outside the gate for an hour or so at different times of the day to see one of the two Mercedes sedans he apparently owned drive past the guard and head toward town.

She didn’t follow.

The driver was a nicely coifed middle-aged blonde who might well have been Russell’s secretary. Or his wife.

It took another week for one of the guards to call the police on her because he finally noticed how often she’d been parked down the street. She told the female officer that the guard must have her confused with someone else. The officer said she didn’t think so and asked for her driver’s license, the papers on her car and wrote down her license plate number before citing her for parking too close to a fire hydrant.

That was when she decided she really did need to get to know Jack. Yet, despite the time they’d spent during their dinners together, he hadn’t told her much about his stepfather. As she’d found with most men, he’d been more than willing to discuss his own views and interests, which basically included politics and his own work. He’d also distracted her with truly fascinating stories about his cases, but he’d been reluctant to talk at all about the man who had raised him. He had, in fact, pretty pointedly changed the subject the only two times she’d managed to bring up his childhood. All she’d been able to gather was that his relationship with the senior Lever was strained at best and that the man had never had time for anything or anyone that didn’t involve work—including Jack.

She listened to the slow tick of the clock, stroked the cat every third beat. She had already concluded that having Jack for a stepbrother could prove a little awkward. Infinitely more important had been the realization that if Russell didn’t have time for the son he’d raised, the odds of the happy reunion she’d envisioned with him welcoming her into his family weren’t looking good at all. That was why she’d thought it might help her chances with the man if she learned something about the business he was in—which was why she’d starting researching on the Internet again.

There was just something about having to try that hard to gain acceptance or affection that made her feel even more lost and dejected than she already did.

Leaning forward, she reached for the mouse, clicked Close and shut the computer down.

The action did nothing to alleviate the huge void inside her.

Oddly, what helped a little was petting the cat.

Restlessness drove Rebecca out into the chilly air early the next morning—right through the newly fallen leaves that totally mocked the time she’d spent raking yesterday afternoon. It was barely eight in the morning, but she’d been up since five checking on Columbus and waiting for the newspaper. It seemed to be some sort of unwritten law that the newspaper always arrived late on the morning a person was up early.

Thinking it might have been delivered while she’d been in the shower and getting dressed, she hugged her arms over the black turtleneck sweater she wore with her slim black slacks and searched all the usual places it might be hiding. The paper rarely landed in the driveway or the front walk, and never on the porch.

She found it in the hydrangea bushes by the front window. She only knew the plants were hydrangeas because elderly Mrs. Fulton across the street had told her how beautiful they usually were when properly watered and cared for. The sweet, silver-haired woman with the unfortunate bouffant also mentioned something about adding iron sulfate or aluminum something-or-other to the soil to keep the blooms blue. Rebecca figured that for someone whose only exposure to plants had been to those tended by a plant service in the offices of Vogue, keeping them watered—and not killing them—was accomplishment enough.

Newspaper in hand, she backed out of the bushes and glanced down the street. The way her house was situated near the top of the cul-de-sac, she could see all of her neighbors’ driveways. Two doors down, she could see Angela Schumacher backing her van out of her drive. Thinking of how much that poor woman had on her plate, what with being a single mom to three children and working two jobs, she lifted her hand and waved. Angela, hurried as always, tossed a wave back. Directly across from Angela’s house was Jack’s. Since his garage door could open any moment, she was about to head back inside when she saw Molly Jackson-Shibb come out her front door and cut past Carly’s driveway toward her.

“I got your message,” she called, hurrying across the street in slacks and a long blue sweater that hid much of her basketball belly. “Elmer’s fine. And thanks so much for plugging that hole. Adam is going to fill it in before he leaves for work. How’s the cat?” she asked, meeting Rebecca in the street. “I would have called last night, but I had a meeting in the city that ran late and your lights were out when I got home.”

“Everything’s okay. Columbus is fine.”

Molly’s expression went from concerned to surprised. “You know which one it was?”

“The vet told me.” She hadn’t a clue how he’d known him from his brother, though. “He’s just missing part of his ear. The cat,” she explained, trying desperately not to be envious of the woman’s glow. At eight months pregnant, Molly looked absolutely fabulous. “Not the vet.”

Concern was back. “Elmer bit off his ear?”

“Only part of it. He probably thought he was a chew toy. Don’t worry,” she assured the woman who was as close to being a friend as anyone on Danbury Way, “it’s not good for the baby.”

Or so she’d heard, she thought. She’d probably have to be a single mom herself to know for certain. Only, Molly wasn’t single anymore. She and Adam had been married for a couple of months now and seemed more in love than ever.

Rebecca’s smile was genuine enough. Molly, though, seemed to catch the bittersweet edge behind it.

The mom-to-be tipped her head, pushed back her long, curly brown hair. “How are you doing?” she asked, sympathy heavy in her voice. “You did great at the party the other night, but it was kind of rough, huh?”

The infamous Halloween party, Rebecca thought. Jack’s nanny, Zooey, had thrown it for his two children. The week before, Zooey had invited everyone on Danbury Way, including her. Knowing she would have to see Jack, Rebecca had toyed with the idea of not going after he’d called off their date, but it was a neighborhood function and, trying to fit in, she hadn’t missed one yet.

Everyone on Danbury Way had been there. Just about everyone had known that she’d been interested in Jack, too—though not a single one of them had a clue why that interest had originally been there. Not even the slowly reforming workaholic waiting for her reply.

The really awkward part was that everyone had also seemed to know that Jack wasn’t seeing her anymore.

“It was a little uncomfortable,” she had to admit. “But not going to the party would have made a bigger deal out of the situation than it is. Jack and I only had a couple of dates,” she reminded her. “And there really wasn’t a lot of real chemistry there.”

“Not like there is between him and Zooey?”

Jack’s new nanny definitely had his eye.

“Nothing like that.” The easy little laugh she gave made it clear that she was far more embarrassed than hurt by the public’s knowledge of his lack of interest in her. “Most women would kill to have a man look at her that way. Except me,” she insisted, wishing the lost feeling she couldn’t shake would go away. “I’ve decided I’m swearing off men for a while.”

Including my father, she insisted to herself, only to have the thought interrupted by a silver, bull-nosed pickup truck coming up the street.

The unfamiliar vehicle had both women glancing toward it. Suddenly sidetracked, Molly’s brow pinched. “Who’s that?”

Rebecca narrowed her eyes at the approaching vehicle. “Dr. Hudson?”

She’d barely recognized Joe Hudson’s undeniably attractive features through his windshield before he swung the vehicle into her driveway and killed the engine. A moment later, the dark-haired vet in khakis and a leather bomber jacket stepped out and started toward them.

“Morning, ladies. Mrs. Shibb,” he called, nodding to Molly as he walked to where they watched him from the middle of the street. “How’s Elmer?”

Joe Hudson was apparently their vet, too.

“Generally?” Molly asked, smiling back. “Or in relation to yesterday’s fight?”

“Both.”

“He’s fine. Thank you.”

“Glad to hear it.” His easy smile shifted to Rebecca as he pushed his hands into the pockets of his pants. “I hope I’m not interrupting. I just came by to check on my patient.”

Rebecca wasn’t sure which had the greater hold at the moment, surprise at his unexpected visit, or dismay at the way her heart had jerked at the sight of him. Preferring to ignore the latter, she indulged puzzlement.

“I didn’t know veterinarians made house calls.”

His response was the shrug of his broad shoulders.

Molly lowered her head, whispered, “They don’t,” and stepped back to check her watch. When she glanced back up, speculation fairly danced in her eyes, but her voice returned to normal.

“Well, I have to go,” she announced. “Good to see you,” she said to the vet. “I’ll talk to you later,” she promised Rebecca.

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