Accidentally Catty (24 page)

“Did you happen to see the way she was dressed, Beck? That wasn’t something from this era, or several gone by now.”

“Shaw,” he corrected with a smile. “I think, anyway. And I know that, too. I just don’t have an explanation for it.”

Her mind spun with the possibilities this created. “Do you think it’s the eternal-life thing? Maybe cougars have the same gift of eternity vampires and werewolves do.”

“That’s what Nina and Wanda suggested.”

“I just remembered something.”

He nodded his head. “Esmeralda Hunt, right?”

“What the hell was she doing there? None of this makes a lick of sense,” Katie said. “What could she have to do with the animal park, and why didn’t Delray know about it?”

Shaw laughed. “He was too busy obsessing over cheese? We need to talk to her as soon as possible. She never mentioned a word about Daniel Green when she came in with Delray, and you’d think, with the way things spread like wildfire here, she’d know you and the ladies are involved. So she’s either hiding something or at least knows something.”

Sympathy flooded her veins at the look of aggravation he gave when his lips thinned and his brow furrowed. “This must be very frustrating for you.”

His hand ran over his stubbled jaw with long fingers she imagined were on her instead. “I can’t even begin to tell you.”

“And it’s not helping that I’ve done nothing but breathe down your neck about it.”

“I don’t mind the breathing on the neck. That was actually kind of nice. It’s the hint of suspicion I find insulting.”

Fuck the suspicion. Who cared about suspicion when there was neck breathing that was kind of nice.
Oh, you Flirty-McFlirt, Katie Woods.
“Kind of nice?”

Now his eyes glittered with amusement. “As old women go, yes. It was kind of nice.”

“I’m not old. I’m older.”

“I noticed.”

“That I’m older.”

“No. That you’re not old. Naked, you don’t look old.”

Her face flamed with embarrassment. “I forgot about that.”

Shaw pressed a fingertip to her hot cheek, leaving the flesh of her shoulder cold and lonely. “Me? Not so much.”

“It’ll pass.”

Out of the blue, he asked another astute question. “Who made you feel this way, Katie?”

“What way?”

“That you’re not young enough, attractive enough?”

Her eyes skimmed the top of his shoulder to avoid his gaze. “I didn’t realize that’s how I came across.”

“Sure you did. You joke all the time about your age, and mine for that matter, but it’s never without that sarcastic edge to it.”

“That was hardly a joke. I am older than you, if we’re counting appearances. Almost forty-one.”

“And?”

Katie twirled the end of her matted braid. “And what?”

“Why is that such a deal breaker for you? What if I am twenty? Though I doubt it, not after seeing that picture of my mother.”

“Who we don’t know for sure is your mother—yet,” she reminded him, “and there’s no deal to break. I just don’t date younger men—especially if I could have been the one responsible for setting their bedtime.” But she might reconsider if he kept pressing his thigh against hers and filling up her frilly bed with his manly-man-ness.

“I’m going to go out on a ledge here. Have you tried dating younger men and had a bad experience?”

“It’s never been my bailiwick.”

“I have to tell you, if I were a lesser man, all these big words would intimidate me. But seeing as I’m a strong, self-assured, confident teenager, I’m just going to ask. Your who?”

Her eyes smiled. “My kind of thing—my territory. I’ve never dated a younger man because when I was still dating, a younger man was still jailbait. And as of late, I haven’t dated anyone since my divor . . .”

“Teeny told me a little about that divorce today. Quite the dick, your ex, eh?”

A big, hairy dick—metaphorically speaking. That was George. And leave it to Aunt Teeny to tell anyone who would listen. “What did she tell you?” Katie cringed while she waited.

He paused in thought while he went back to distractedly drawing circles along her forearm. “Let me get this right—she said, and I quote, ‘That good for nuthin’, dipped-in-money bastard should be hung and shot for what he put Katie through during that divorce. He’s the shit on my goddamned penny loafers.’ Those were her words, I believe.”

“And that’s her description for him in polite company.You should hear how she really feels,” Katie said on an uncomfortable laugh. This wasn’t something she wanted to talk to Beck about. Shaw . . . whatever. The pain brought when remembering her divorce had eased some in the days since she’d moved in with Teeny. She had no desire to rip the scab off. She was fresh out of Band-Aids.

“You didn’t let me finish. She said he should be drawn and quartered for what he did to your
career
. So what did he do to your career? I already know he’s the reason you moved in with Teeny. I just don’t know why. According to your aunt, you had a very successful career as a veterinarian in Manhattan.”

She’d had many successful things in Manhattan, none of which were real—they were only delusions of what she’d thought she had—and they certainly hadn’t been there for her when she’d needed them the most. “I had a good practice,” was all she offered.

But Beck-Shaw wasn’t having that. “And what happened to that practice that made you leave and come to Deliverance, as Nina so fondly calls it? Divorces happen all the time, Katie, as I recollect, and save the jokes about my memory. I can remember everything but the personal details about my own life. Anyway, divorces happen all the time. They don’t typically affect your clientele. Teeny said your husband was some rich, influential lawyer. What does that have to do with you as a practicing vet?”

The pit of her stomach, once warm with his caress boiled now with rage she always had trouble containing. This was a subject best avoided. “I thought we were trying to figure out Dr. Daniel Green and your sudden appearance at the animal park, not the mating habits of the senior citizen who’s pushing extinction.”

“Ah, well here’s the thing. I’m interested in you, Katie. I, unlike you, apparently have no inhibitions when it comes to age or expressing my interest. I’m uninhibited by baggage from past relationships because I don’t even know that I had any. Baggage or relationships. I like you. In fact, I like you so much, I want to take you back behind the skate park and knock you up, but not before we hit the malt shop and share a chocolate shake.”

Laughter bubbled from her throat and spilled out between her lips. “I’m not that interesting, and I can’t get knocked up—I’m infertile.” She gave him a mockingly forlorn sigh. “Thus ends our skate-park, chocolate-malt romance. And just when I had hope.”

His expression went from teasing to serious. “You can’t have children? Should I say I’m sorry?”

Katie shrugged. “Children were always a maybe for me to begin with. I was raised by parents who were pretty distant—definitely not an example of how I’d want a child of mine raised. That’s why Aunt Teeny is so important to me. She taught me to bake cookies—even if they were like hockey pucks. She read to me. She encouraged my love of animals. She let me tend every stray I could get my hands on, and she kept them here at the house until I visited again. Teeny was everything my mother, her sister, wasn’t. I spent all of my summers here with her in Piney Creek until I was fifteen while my parents vacationed in Europe or wherever.”

His smile was warm. “I like Teeny more and more. So, children?”

Children were a much safer subject than her divorce. “When George and I finally did try without success, we did a few tests and found out my fallopian tubes were blocked. They flushed them out, and still nothing. We were both so busy with our careers; I can’t see how we would have fit a child in anyway. Like I said, I had parents who left me with nannies, and butlers to take me to father-daughter dances. I didn’t want that for my child. So I let it go. I have no regrets, but sure, I wonder sometimes what it would have been like. Though, after my divorce, I’m glad a child wasn’t involved.”

“You’re still hedging. What happened in your divorce that made you run from a place like Manhattan to Piney Creek? You don’t have to tell me, but I figure I should know something personal about you before I have my way with you.” He wiggled his eyebrows playfully and in such stark contrast to his hard good looks.

Despite her protests, Beck-Shaw’s suggestion about having his way with her made her heart race and her womanly parts throb. He was flirting with her, and without warning, she was flirting back by tilting her head at an angle that left her without a double chin. “Do you really want to talk about my divorce?” Because wow, she really didn’t.

“Yeah, I really do,” he said, tracing more maddening circles on her arms.

“Fine. George wasn’t the man I thought I’d married. I knew that emotionally five or six years in, but I was too stupid to realize, morally, he was about as shallow as a dirty puddle. End of.”

“Was he unfaithful?”

Shit. What was it about this man that had her in some midnight confessional? Words spilled from her lips like water flowing from a fountain. “Oh, he was, but even something as awful as that couldn’t hurt me as much as he ended up hurting me.”

“What else tears a marriage apart short of maybe, I dunno, murder?”

Katie’s teeth clenched. “Murder’s close enough.”

His eyes widened, his fingers tightened on her arm. “Jesus Christ, Katie. He murdered someone?”

God, she so didn’t want to go here, but here she was. It wasn’t like he couldn’t Google her and find out anything he wanted to know.

Katie gulped, the words thick on her tongue. “Not someone, no. He murdered animals, innocent animals, and I helped.”

Shaw sat upright, leaning over her by placing one arm along each side of her waist. “Say again?”

“George ran underground dog-fighting rings,” she blurted, fighting the sob that threatened to escape whenever she said those words out loud.

Disgust shadowed his face, seeping into the lines of his frowning forehead. A disgust Katie knew well—had seen on hundreds of faces when George had been tried and gotten off with almost little or no punishment. “And you knew?”

A tear welled in her eye. Just one—a huge improvement on the thousands she’d shed over the last two years. The horrific nature of George’s life outside their marriage still had the ability to make her heart bleed with pain for the animals she’d all but given him to abuse.

“No. I
absolutely
didn’t know,” she said with the fierce conviction she was so familiar with when she’d denied all allegations over and over. “I had no idea. George and I owned various properties. A house in the Hamptons—one in the Caymans. The cabin where this all took place was his before we married. It’s in some remote region of Virginia. I knew of the cabin, but I thought it was where he went fishing with his lawyer buddies while they lived out their bromances. I was actually glad most times when he’d announce he was spending the weekend there. Our marriage had become stale. I knew it. I just didn’t want to admit it. We were drifting apart long before I found out about what he was up to. Never, ever, in a million years did I think the cabin was where he participated and ran something so sick.”

He stroked her cheek with his thumb, gentle, soothing. “I believe you. So how did that involve you helping him?”

Her chest tightened, constricting her lungs. “Whenever a client had an oops pregnancy that wasn’t caught in time, resulting in litters of unwanted kittens or puppies, or if I found a stray, I always posted notes on my bulletin board in my office and on my website in the hopes the animals would be adopted by another client or someone surfing the Web on adoption.” Oh, God. She couldn’t breathe from the memory of the kind of betrayal George had inflicted upon her. Raw hatred for him resurfaced in a harsh shot to her gut.

Shaw sneered with narrowed eyes. “And the son of a bitch used those strays and unwanted litters of kittens and puppies as . . . I can’t even finish that sentence. The fuck,” he spat through clenched teeth.

Katie pressed a finger to her trembling lower lip before she spoke again. “It’s worse than even that. He was having an affair with my receptionist, Danielle, who conned my clients into giving her the animals with the idea she’d found homes for them, and then she handed them off to George to do with as he pleased. God! It makes my stomach turn when I think about what he did not just to those animals but to the people who trusted me to help them find homes for animals they loved but couldn’t necessarily care for.”

“Now I see the connection. George gave you up as a sort of supplier, didn’t he?”

Her fists clenched with the anger George’s dirty dealings still summoned. “He’s a slimy prick.Yes!Yes, he said I knew all about it and Danielle backed him up. It was my word against his and hers. The only difference being, they had proof on George and Danielle, but nothing on me. And still, after all this time, I haven’t figured out why he was so determined to see me as ruined as he was. I don’t understand the motivation behind it. Maybe he figured he would lose all of his possessions to me if he was convicted and I wasn’t? George made a lot of money. I can only suspect he thought I’d get everything in the divorce he knew I was filing for.” A sob shuddered, but remained silent in her chest. This had been a bad idea. Very bad.

But Shaw gave her a gentle smile. “So what happened to your practice?”

“I almost lost my license over it, but worse, I lost clients I’d had, in some cases, for ten years. I loved my work. I loved my life, even if I didn’t really love George anymore. He took the respect I’d earned in the community and turned it into pickets and PETA rioting outside my office until I had to close my doors because my practice dwindled to nothing.”

Shaw gathered her in his arms, wiping the stray tears that fell.