Beauty & the Beasts (2 page)

“Yes, we’re friends.” Obviously disinclined to chat, Ms. Howard rose to her feet. “I won’t take up any more of your time. When would you like to see the shelter?”

She wasn’t interested; he ought to let her off the hook. But he couldn’t make himself. Stubbornness had awakened, along with awareness. If she was married or involved, okay, he could accept that. Otherwise, he wanted to know what she had against him.

He stood, too, hands flat on the desk. “When’s good for you?”

“I don’t necessarily have to be there.”

Smoothly Eric said, “Look, I need to have one person to be my contact. I’d appreciate it if you are there, since you were the one who approached me. I may have questions.”

He’d won another battle, if not the war, because after a brief internal struggle, visible on her face, she said with reasonable grace, “I can make myself
available almost any time. One of the beauties of working for myself.”

Maybe she
was
a model. “What do you do?” he asked.

“I own a women’s clothing store in Everett. Madeline’s.”

“I’ve driven by it.” He wouldn’t have noticed it at all, except that the clothes in the window and the delicate gold script above it whispered
elegance
in a way he might take for granted in downtown Seattle, but didn’t expect to see in a blue-collar town like Everett. “How long have you been open?”

“Four years.”

“So you know something about long hours, too.”

Ruefully she nodded. “I lost money for a year, then broke even for another one. But I’ve built up a steady clientele, and the store is doing very well these days.”

“Good for you.” He smiled with deliberate lazy charm and circled the desk, going to the door. With one hand on the knob, he paused. “How would late tomorrow afternoon be? You could show me around the shelter, and then we could have dinner afterward.”

Madeline’s head tipped to one side and she subjected him to a disquietingly thoughtful scrutiny. “Are you asking me for a date?”

He leaned back against the door and crossed his arms. “Yeah, I think that’s the idea. Are you married?”

“No.”

Ah. “Then…?”

“Thank you, but no. I’m afraid dinner is out.” Her gaze never wavered. “Tomorrow afternoon would be fine, though. Four o’clock? Five?”

“Five’s good.” He didn’t move. “Why not dinner?”

“You’re not used to a polite refusal?”

“It wasn’t all that polite.”

“Then I apologize. I’m afraid I’m just not interested.” Her poise would have put a presidential candidate to shame. Except, Eric noted, for the pink that again tinged those aristocratic cheekbones.

He frowned. “You’d made up your mind about me before you came here. Is that because I dated Jess?”

She pressed her lips together. Even tight, they weren’t any less kissable. “You do have something of a reputation.”

Eric was stung. He grunted and stepped away from the door. In the act of opening it, he asked, “Do you always listen to gossip?”

Instead of fleeing, Madeline said, “Tell me—why did you ask me out?”

“Because you’re beautiful and I’m attracted to you.” He paused for only a heartbeat, although it was long enough for him to see he’d blown it. Frost had glazed her eyes. “Besides,” he added, “I figure we have at least one thing in common—we both love animals.”

She gave him a smile as chilly as her gaze. “If you’d said that first, I might have agreed to dinner. Unfortunately what you really judge on is appearances,
and frankly I’m rather tired of that. Shall I see you at five o’clock tomorrow, Dr. Bergstrom?”

He could read her thoughts; she was wondering if his offer of veterinary service had been contingent on her willingness to go out with him. Knowing the possibility had even crossed her mind steamed him.

“Yes,” he said tautly. “You will.”

He walked her out, then led the family with the bulldog into an examining room. Kneeling, Eric stroked the dog’s head. He was a handsome fellow, if you liked a face that appeared to have met a car bumper.

Madeline Howard, Eric reflected, would give him hell for that thought.

Somebody ought to tell her that men and women usually did judge on appearances when they first met Sexual response was physical; goddammit,
sex
was physical. A man didn’t get hard because a woman was generously endowed with compassion.

Maybe ugly men turned her on.

“Is something wrong with Soldier?” the mother asked anxiously.

He jerked back to the present company. Drool hung like an icicle from the corner of Soldier’s mouth. Eric straightened and reached for a tissue.

“No, no,” he said reassuringly. “Is he having problems?”

“I don’t think so.” Her youngest, who’d been attempting to scramble onto the windowsill, succeeded. Exasperation replaced the doubt in her voice. “Jeremy, you promised to stand right here next to me.” With a firm hand she deposited the teetering boy
back on the floor just in time to save him from falling one way or the other. Probably out, taking the new screen with him. To Eric she said, “Soldier just needs his shots.”

Feeling like a fool, Eric carried on about what an outstanding example of his breed Soldier was. The dog’s owner was too busy corralling Jeremy to listen. Only the older boy, perhaps five, listened solemnly. Eric made quick work of checking the bulldog’s ears and gums and then slipping the needle under the loose skin at the dog’s neck.

As he saw them out, he thought of suggesting that she put the leash on the youngest kid, instead of the dog. He needed it more.

“Yeah, Ms. Howard,” he muttered to the empty examining room, “and the kid’s uglier, too. Sue me for noticing.”

Behind him one of the technicians coughed. “Doctor, your son is on line three.”

“Here?” Jarred by alarm, he retreated to the phone in the dispensary. He talked to Garth once or at most twice a week, always evenings. The boy lived with his mother two states away, in the San Francisco Bay area. He had never before called Eric at the clinic.

Picking up the phone, he said, “Garth?”

“Uh, hi, Dad.” The boy didn’t sound in pain and his voice wasn’t choked with sobs.

“You’re okay?”

Sounding surprised, his son said, “Yeah, sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“And your mom? She’s not sick, or—”

“No. I’m…well, see, I’m calling from school so she won’t know I talked to you.”

“You mean, you’re feeding quarters in?” Eric frowned and leaned a hip against the cabinet. “Why don’t you let me call you back?”

“No, that’s okay. I wrote down Mom’s callingcard number. She won’t mind.”

“When she gets the bill, she’ll know you phoned me.

“Nah,” Garth said without hesitation. “She doesn’t look at her bills that closely. I’ve made long-distance calls before.”

Who the hell had Garth been calling long-distance without his mother’s knowledge? But Eric didn’t ask; he was in the awkward position of a divorced father who hadn’t seen his son in almost nine months; he wasn’t really part of Garth’s life and he had no business interfering in the boy’s relationship with his mother. Maybe, Eric thought, he was misinterpreting things, anyway.

“I’ve got patients waiting,” he said. “What do you need to talk about?”

For the first time a small silence ensued. Then in a rush his twelve-year-old son said, “The thing is, there’s all kinds of stuff happening here this summer. But Mom says I
have
to visit you. I figured, if I talked to you, you wouldn’t mind if I didn’t come. It’s not like we had anything really special planned. I mean, what would I do every day? Here, I’ve got friends to hang with, and Mom needs me, you know. She just doesn’t like to say that to you.”

Eric’s stomach felt as if the morning’s stack of
pancakes, eaten at a Rotary Club breakfast, was turning to concrete.
Mom says I
have
to visit you.
God. He’d lost his son.

“Dad?”

He couldn’t think of a damned thing to say.

“It’s not like I don’t want to see you. It’s just, the whole summer…”

Eric found his voice. “Let me think about this. Maybe talk to your mother—”

That provoked some real emotion. Panic. “But you can’t! She’ll be mad I called you. Why should you have to talk to her? It’s just between you and me, right?”

“Wrong. You know your mother and I don’t make decisions about you without consulting each other.” He and Noreen hadn’t been able to salvage their marriage, but they’d continued to share concerns about their son. Until recently, Eric realized, frowning again; he hadn’t spoken to his ex for more than a “Hi, is Garth around?” in quite a while. And something was clearly going on.

Or had she simply not wanted to tell him that distance had killed his relationship with his son?

Striving to sound dispassionate, he said, “I won’t tell your mom what you said. I’ll just discuss this summer in general, okay? But I’ve got to warn you, I was counting on some time with you.”

“Yeah, but it’s really important…”

“We’ll talk in a couple of days. Now, get to class.”

Feeling sick, Eric stayed where he was for a moment after putting down the phone. Because of his
son, he’d hung on to his marriage longer than he should have. Even after the divorce, he’d stuck it out in a lousy job situation at a clinic in the Bay area because he wanted to be where he could see Garth often. Only when those overnight visits became unsatisfactory did he convince himself that having his son for the whole summer every year would be better, that it was time to make a change.

He couldn’t win. Maybe there was no way a father who didn’t live with his kids could be anything but irrelevant to their lives.

In frustration, he drove his fist against the wall just hard enough to hurt. The pain was a welcome distraction from the deeper anguish.

“Eric.” His partner laid a hand softly on his shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

When he lifted his head and turned to face Teresa, she let her hand drop. Snug black leggings showed under her white lab coat, which was beginning to strain just the littlest bit over her stomach now that she was four months along in her pregnancy. She’d remarried the year before, not too long after she’d bought into the practice and moved to White Horse. Today her dark hair was French braided, and she wore tiny gold studs in her ears. Her forehead creased with worry.

He said the first thing that came into his head— the first thing that had nothing to do with his son. “Do I have a reputation?”

“A reputation?” Teresa’s eyebrows rose. “I hope so! My livelihood depends on it. If people don’t think you’re almost as good a vet as I am—”

“Not that kind of reputation,” he interrupted. “I mean socially. As a lady’s man.”

“Ah.” Humor warmed her brown eyes and she leaned comfortably against the wall, waiting until a technician had walked down the hall and gone into the nearest examining room. “You mean, do people talk about the fact that you’ve dated every nice-looking woman in the county? Yeah, I think I can safely say that you have a certain reputation.”

He growled, “I never dated you.”

“I would have said no.”

“Why?”

“Because we work together,” she answered immediately. “We’d have fouled the nest, so to speak. Besides…you weren’t any more interested than I was, were you?”

She was right, but he’d never understood why. “I don’t chase everything in a skirt,” he said grumpily.

“No, only the pretty ones.”

Her obvious enjoyment of his discomfort was the last straw. He uttered a profanity.

Teresa’s grin faded. “Do you want to tell me what’s wrong?”

“When we have a spare fifteen minutes.”

“We have it right now. Not a soul waiting. I have some calls to make, but I can do that later.”

They retired to his office, marginally larger than hers, and she ate a cup of yogurt and wistfully watched him drink a mediocre cup of coffee.

“My doctor insists that a little caffeine won’t hurt the baby, but I don’t like the way they keep changing their minds. When I was pregnant with Nicole and
Mark, it was taboo.” She sighed. “I’ll live. Now. Tell me what set you off.”

“You know that cat shelter, Ten Lives? A volunteer came to see me.” He told her what Madeline Howard had proposed and his own offer. “You have any problem with my giving away our services?”

“You know I don’t.” She set down her yogurt and leaned forward, face alight with enthusiasm. “We can offer care at cost—”

“Yeah, but what’s that? We have overhead, staff salaries and benefits…”

After some amiable bickering, they settled on charges he figured wouldn’t break the bank. He was half hoping she’d forgotten their earlier conversation, but no.

“So let me guess.” Teresa licked her spoon, then smiled. “This volunteer is single and attractive. And she turned you down.”

“She told me she was tired of being judged on appearances.” He shook his head.

“My, you must have been subtle.”

“I asked her out to dinner!” Eric said in outrage. “I didn’t say, ‘Hey, baby, your place or mine?’”

“When’s the last time a woman turned you down?”

“For dinner?” He had to think. “I don’t know, I don’t usually ask unless I think there’s interest on both sides…”

“Never,” Teresa concluded with quick glee. “And your ego’s bruised.”

Maybe she was right. Maybe that was all that was
wrong. It wasn’t as if he’d had a chance to fall for Madeline Howard’s inner beauty.

Except, dammit, he
had
glimpsed it. He’d made up his mind to ask her out, not when he first saw her, but while she was telling him about the shelter and the cats the volunteers were able to save. The color in her cheeks, the sparkle in her eyes, the verve with which her hands shaped their plans. Inner beauty, or outer?

“Look at it this way,” his partner said, pushing herself to her feet. “In another few weeks, you won’t have time to date, anyway, not with Garth here.”

The dull ache of loss he’d been trying to ignore sharpened to a knife stab. “He doesn’t want to come,” Eric said starkly.

“Oh, no.” Real compassion in her eyes now, Teresa sank back onto the chair. “You didn’t say anything.”

“I just talked to him. I don’t know what the hell to do about it.”