Anyone But You

For Meg Ruley, Fred’s godmother and my partner in crime and lit-ra-chure

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Acknowledgment

My heartfelt thanks to Laurie Grant for her ER expertise

Chapter One

The last thing Nina Askew needed was Fred.

“I want a puppy,” she said to the brown-uniformed woman behind the scarred metal counter at Riverbend Animal Control. “Something perky.”

“Perky.” The woman sighed. “Sure. We got perky.” She jerked her head toward the gray metal door at the end of the counter. “Through there, one step down.”

“Right.” Nina shoved her short dark curls behind her ears, grabbed her purse and walked through the door, determined to pick herself out the perkiest birthday present on four paws. So what if yesterday had been her fortieth birthday? Forty was a good age for a woman. It meant freedom. Especially freedom from her overambitious ex-husband and their overpriced suburban castle which had finally sold after a year of open-house hell. There was something good: she was out of that damn house.

And now she was forty. Well, she was delighted to be forty. After all, that was the reason she was getting a dog of her own.

The attendant joined her and said, “This way,” and Nina followed her toward yet another heavy metal door. She was going to get a puppy. She’d always wanted a dog, but Guy hadn’t understood. “Dogs shed,” he’d said when she’d suggested they get one as a wedding present to each other. She should have known that was A Sign. But no, she’d married him anyway and moved into that designer mausoleum of a house. And then she’d spent fifteen years following her husband’s career around, without a dog, in a house she’d grown to hate. Sixteen years in the house, if she counted this last year in divorced-woman limbo, waiting for it to sell. But now she had freedom and an apartment of her own and a great, if precarious, job. The only thing she needed was a warm, cheerful body to come home to.

The attendant opened the door, and the faint barking Nina had heard before became frantic and shrill. Nina stepped into the concrete cell block and stopped, blown out of her self-absorption by the row of gray metal cages where dogs barked to get her attention. She let her breath out, horrified. “Oh, God, this is awful.”

“Spay your pets.” The attendant stopped in front of the next to last cage. “Here you go.” She jerked her head again. “Perky.”

Nina went to join the woman and peered into the cage. The pups were darling—some sort of tiny, bright-eyed, spotted mixed breed—climbing over one another and tumbling and whining and barking. Perky as hell. Now all she had to do was choose one…

She moved closer and glanced in the last cage almost by accident. Then she froze.

There was only one dog in the cage, and it was midsize and depressed, too big for her apartment and too melancholy for her state of mind. Nina tried to turn back to the puppies, but somehow, she couldn’t. The dog had huge bags under his dark eyes, and hunched shoulders, and a white coat blotched with what looked like giant liver spots. He sat on the damp concrete like a bulked-up vulture and stared at her, not barking, not moving. He looked like her great-uncle Fred had before he’d died when she was six. She’d liked her uncle Fred, and then one day his heart had gone, as her mother had put it, and that had been it.

“Hello,” she said, and the dog lifted his head a little, so she stooped down and reached through the cage doors to scratch him behind the ears. He looked at her and then closed his eyes in appreciation for the scratch.

“What’s wrong with him?” Nina asked the attendant.

“Nothing,” the attendant said. “He’s part basset, part beagle.” She checked the card on his cage. “Or he might be psychic. This is his last day.”

Nina’s eyes opened wide. “You mean…”

“Yep.” The attendant sliced her hand across her throat.

Nina looked back at the dog. The dog looked back at Nina, death in his eyes.

Oh, God.

She stood and shoved her hair behind her ears, trying to look efficient and practical in an effort to be efficient and practical. She did not need this dog. She needed a happy, perky puppy, and on his best day, this dog would look like a professional mourner. And he wasn’t even a puppy.

Any dog but this one.

She looked down at the dog one last time, and her hair fell forward, a curly black frame for his depression. He bowed his head a little as if it had grown too heavy for him, and his ears sagged with the bow.

She could not take this dog. He was too depressed. He was too big. He was too old. She took a step back, and he sighed and lay down, not expecting anything at all, resigned to the cold hard floor and no one to love him and the certainty of death in the morning.

Nina turned to the attendant, and said, “I’ll take him.”

The attendant raised an eyebrow. “That’s your idea of perky?”

Nina gestured to the puppies. “They’ll all be adopted, right?”

“Probably.”

Nina took one long last glance at the tumbling, chubby puppies. Prozac with four legs and a tail. Then she looked at the other dog, depressed, alone, too old to be cute anymore if he ever had been. “I have a lot in common with this dog,” she told the attendant. “And besides, I’d never sleep again knowing I could have saved him and didn’t.”

The attendant shook her head. “You can’t save them all.”

“Well, I can save this one.” Nina crouched to the dog’s level. “It’s okay, Fred. I just rescued your butt.”

The dog rolled his eyes up to stare at her.

“No, don’t thank me. Glad to do it for you.” Nina stood up and followed the attendant down the hall. At the end, she turned, and Fred moved forward, pressing his nose through the bars. “Hey, it’s okay,” Nina called to him. “I’m coming right back as soon as I get you sprung from this joint.”

Fred moaned and stumbled back into the depths of the cage.

“Oh, yeah, you’re going to cheer me up,” Nina said and went to sign the papers and pay the fee.

He didn’t get much happier when the attendant opened the cage and he waddled out into Nina’s arms, fragrant beyond belief. “You stink, Fred,” she told him, and then she picked him up and held him to her, telling herself that her silk suit was dry-cleanable, and that at least it was brown and so was a lot of Fred so the dog hair wouldn’t show. He looked up at her and she added, “And you weigh a ton.” He was like dead weight in her arms, round and bulky, and most of his weight seemed to be centered in his rear end, which gave him a definite droop as she balanced his hip on hers. Still, as much as he reeked, it felt good to have her arms wrapped around him. “I saved you, Fred,” she whispered into his ear, and he twitched as her breath tickled him, patient but not by any means enthused about the new turn of events.

He perked up a little when she carried him out into the May sunlight, but he seemed annoyed when she tried to balance all of his weight on one hip while she maneuvered open the door to her white Civic.

“I was planning…on getting…a puppy,” she told him, breathing hard as she used her other hip to push the car door farther open. “I wasn’t planning…on getting a…part basset…part beagle…part lead-ass.” She managed to heave him into the seat and close the door, and then she leaned against the car to get her breath back. Fred rocked back and forth as he situated himself on the blue upholstery, and then he turned and smeared his nose on the window. “Good.” Nina sighed. “Make yourself at home.”

She got in the Civic and stuck the key in the ignition. Fred put his paws on the window ledge and smeared his nose higher. Nina thought longingly of the puppies.” You’re making me ill.” She leaned across him and began to roll down the window halfway. “Don’t jump out. Things just got better for you.”

Fred turned at the sound of her voice, and as she stretched over him still cranking the window, he looked deep into her eyes. Nina stopped rolling and stared back into the warm brown depths. He really was a sweet dog. Of course he wasn’t being peppy. In his situation, she’d be cautious, too. He didn’t know anything about her. She didn’t know anything about where he’d been. Maybe his previous people had been mean to him. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that he needed love. Everybody needed love. Even she needed love. And now she had Fred.

Fred.

Nina closed her eyes. Terrific. She had Fred. Even her best friend was going to think she was nuts. “You bought a what?” Charity was going to say, and then when she saw Fred, middle-aged, broken-down and tired, she was going to—Nina looked into Fred’s patient brown eyes again and felt ashamed. “It’s okay, Fred.” She stroked the top of his head. “You’re my dog now. It’s okay.”

Fred met her eyes, squared his shoulders, and lunged at her, licking her from chin to forehead with one sweeping slurp.

“Oh, Fred.” Nina burst into tears and wrapped her arms around him. His body was fat and warm and wriggly, and Nina hugged him tighter, so glad to have someone alive in her life again and so relieved to finally be able to cry out the frustration and loneliness that she didn’t even care the someone had four legs and smelled like rank canine. “We’re going to be so happy, Fred,” she told him, sobbing. “We really are. We’re going to be wonderful together.”

Fred sighed and began to lick the tears from her face, which made Nina cry even harder. It was the best she’d felt in weeks.

She gave one final sniff and let go of Fred to put the car in gear so she could show him his new home and call his aunt Charity to come meet him.

“You have family now, Fred,” she told him. “You’re going home.”

ALEX MOORE WAS stretched out on a bed in an empty examining room in the Riverbend General ER, trying to forget his family and get some sleep before another emergency erupted when his older brother came in and dropped a brown paper bag with a six-pack of beer in it on his stomach.

“Hey!” Alex curled to absorb the blow and then saw it was Max and stretched back out again. Pain in conjunction with his family was nothing new. “I’m sleeping. Go away. And take that damn beer with you before somebody sees it.”

Max pulled the beer out of the sack and peeled off a can. He popped the tab and left the five remaining beers on Alex’s stomach as he collapsed into an orange plastic chair. The chair scraped and screeched on the floor, and Max’s purple silk shirt clashed against the green wall. Alex winced and closed his eyes, hoping Max would take the hint and leave.

Max didn’t. “You know, if you didn’t spend your nights chasing women, you wouldn’t get this tired during your shifts,” he said and sipped his beer.

Alex didn’t bother to open his eyes. “I did not spend my night chasing a woman. I took Debbie to dinner. She started talking about kids. I took her home. Story of my love life.”

“It’s because you’ve got that blond good-guy look,” Max told him. “You’ve got nice guy written all over you. Now me, I look like a rat.”

Alex kept his eyes closed as a hint. “Yeah, you do. Go away, rat.”

“Of course, it’s too late to pretend you’re a rat around here since everybody knows you. You should have changed the subject. ‘Speaking of kids, Debbie, how about some sex?’ You got to learn to be faster on your feet.”

Alex thought about snarling at him to go away and decided against it. He liked Max, and given his family, a relative he was usually happy to see was a rarity. “I don’t want to be faster on my feet. I just want to spend some nice quiet evenings with a woman who wants me more than she wants kids or a wedding ring. All the women I know have biological clocks and a burning need to commit. I want a woman who has a burning need to be with me and watch old movies and laugh. But right now, all I want is to sleep, which is why you’re leaving.”

Max swallowed some more beer. “It’s because you’re a doctor. Women always want to marry doctors.”

Alex opened one eye. “You’re a doctor. How come it doesn’t happen to you?”

“I try not to date anybody more than twice,” Max said. “It keeps the subject from coming up.”

“That’s real mature of you, Max.” Alex closed his eye again. “Now go away. For once there are no disasters out there, and I need some sleep.”

Max sipped his beer again. “This is your last day as a twenty-something, kid. How does it feel to be old?”

“You tell me,” Alex said. “You’re the one pushing forty.”

“Thirty-six is not forty,” Max said with dignity. “And you’re going to lose your hair before I do. It’s already creeping back from your forehead. I can see it from here.” He tipped the beer into his mouth this time and sucked up the last half of the can.

“Tell me you’re not still doing rounds.”

“Finished an hour ago.” Max pitched the can into a nearby wastebasket and slumped, as much as he could, in the plastic chair. “You off soon?”

“Three more hours. Go away.”

“So you ready for tomorrow?”

“It’s my birthday,” Alex said with his eyes shut. “It’s not something I have to get ready for. Other people have to get ready for it. You, for example. Go buy me something expensive. You make the big bucks.”

“Exactly,” Max said. “And you know why.”

Alex groaned and rolled away from his brother, who lunged to get the five-pack of beer as it tipped toward the floor.

“Hey!” Max said. “Avoid reality if you have to, but don’t spill the beer.”

Alex kept his back to him. “I’m not avoiding reality. I’m avoiding you. Go away.”

“I am reality, buddy,” Max said, and Alex heard the scrape of the plastic chair as his brother sat down again and the clank as he put the cans on the floor. “I ran into Dad just now. He was looking for you.”

Alex groaned again.

Max’s voice was sympathetic. “Yeah, I know. He wants to have dinner with you tomorrow.”

“No,” Alex said.

“I told him you would. Hell, it’s not like you could get out of it. He said to meet him at The Levee at seven. For drinks first.”

“Oh, hell.” Alex rolled onto his back again and stared at the stained acoustic ceiling. “You could have told him I was sick. You could have told him that you’d diagnosed me with something ugly and catching.”

“I’m a gynecologist,” Max said. “What was I supposed to tell him? You can’t do dinner because you got a yeast infection?”

“Would he have noticed?”

“Yeah,” Max said. “He was working, so he was sober.”

“Great. Just what I wanted on my birthday, to pour the old man into a cab at midnight.”

“I took care of that,” Max said. “I told him we had plans at nine. He understood.”

Alex gave him a withering look. “So I get to pour him into a cab at nine. Thank you.”

“It gets worse.” Max beamed at him, cheerful as always. “He said your mother’s coming to town tomorrow.”

Alex sat up. “My mother’s flying in for my birthday?”

“No,” Max said. “She’s flying in for a one-day seminar on the new laser technology. It just worked out that it’s your birthday.”

“Thank God.” Alex flopped back down on the pillow. “I thought she was going maternal on me.”

“She told Dad she wants to have lunch with you,” Max said. “Noon at the Hilton. Be on time, she’s speaking at one.” He picked up another beer from the floor and cracked it. “It’s a shame you’re still on duty. You could have one of these.”

“My mother,” Alex said to the ceiling. “An hour with my mother.”

“You’ve got an hour with my mother, too,” Max said after he’d taken another swig. “She wants to have a drink with you at four. She has surgery at one, so she figures she’ll be free by then.”

“I can stand an hour with your mother,” Alex said. “I think.”

“And I imagine Stella will be calling,” Max began.

“She already did.” Alex rubbed his hand over his eyes. “Breakfast tomorrow before she makes her rounds.”

Max winced. “Do you suppose she does everything in the morning because she’s the oldest?”

“No, she does everything in the morning because she’s a pain in the ass,” Alex said. “Even if she is my favorite relative.”

“Hey!” Max straightened in his chair. “What about me? I kept you from having to spend the entire evening justifying your lack of career to the old man. You owe me.”

“I have a career,” Alex said for the millionth time. “I’m a doctor.”

“Yeah, but you picked the wrong specialty,” Max said. “You have to pick upscale, not ER. They made me, now they’re going to make you. Cardiologist, oncologist, gynecologist—”

“No,” Alex said. “I like what I’m doing. Go away. I’m trying to sleep.”

A dark-haired little nurse poked her head in the door. “Hey, Alex, we need you. Accident coming in.” She disappeared again before he sat up.

Alex swung his feet around to the side of the bed and glared at Max. “If it hadn’t been for you, I could have had a whole fifteen minutes of unconsciousness.”

“That’s another thing,” Max said. “If you weren’t an ER specialist, she’d have called you Dr. Moore.”

The nurse poked her head back in. “Alex, let’s go. Oh, hi, Max. Didn’t see you there.” She frowned at him. “Get rid of that beer now.”

“Hi, Zandy.” Max lifted his beer to her. “You’re looking good.”

She was gone before he finished his sentence.

“The respect she has for you is awesome,” Alex said. “Must be because you’re not an ER specialist.”

“I dated her once,” Max said.

“That explains it.” Alex stood up and headed for the door. “Go away. I have to work.”

“Don’t forget tomorrow,” Max called after him. “Family day. The whole Farkle family.”

“Right,” Alex muttered under his breath as he strode down the green-tiled hall. “Dr. Farkle, and Dr. Farkle, and Dr. Farkle, and Dr. Farkle, and Dr. Farkle.”

“What?” Zandy asked him as she tried to catch up with him.

“Don’t ever go into the family business, Zan,” Alex said. “It’s hell being low man on the dynasty.”

“They trying to talk you out of the ER?” Zandy skipped a couple of times to keep up with him, her legs a good six inches shorter than his, so he slowed for her.

“Yep,” Alex said.

“Don’t do it.”

Alex looked down at her, surprised. “No?”

“No,” Zandy said. “You need this place. And it needs you. Ignore them. They’re all suits.”

Alex grinned at her. “Even Max?”

“Max is an ape,” Zandy said. “But you’re the good guy. Stay with us.”

“Well, I’m planning on it,” Alex began and then he heard the sirens and moved toward the doors, forgetting Zandy and Max and the whole Farkle family as he went to do what he loved best, saving lives on the run.

“YOU GOT a what?” Charity stood in the middle of Nina’s high-ceilinged apartment and stared at Fred, amazed.

“Charity, this is not just any dog.” Nina tensed, still doubtful herself about the wisdom of buying an animal for comfort. Charity wouldn’t buy a dog for comfort. She’d buy a red leather miniskirt at the boutique she managed, yank her long kinky red hair up on top of her head and tie it in a knot with a black stocking, and go out and find a new man. At least, that’s what she’d done the last time one of her relationships had pancaked on her, before she’d found Sean, her One True Love. Sean was actually her Twelfth True Love, but as Charity said, who was counting?

Since Nina’s chances of wearing a leather miniskirt were slim to none, she sighed and turned her attention back to Fred, sitting like a lump in the middle of her hardwood floor, looking up at her with bemused adoration. Fred was better than a leather miniskirt. He might not get her a new man, but he’d give her unconditional love. Fred was definitely better.

Charity didn’t see it that way. “You move out of that mansion on Lehigh Terrace and into this apartment in this Victorian hovel, on the third floor of this Victorian hovel, and there’s not even an elevator—”

“If you wouldn’t wear four-inch heels, two flights of stairs would not be a problem,” Nina murmured.

“—but that’s not bad enough, you’ve got to get a dog.” Charity blinked down at Fred. “That is a dog, isn’t it?”

Fred stood up, turned his back on her and walked away across the floor, his butt swaying majestically.

“Charity, I need Fred,” Nina said. “I feel better already. He has personality.”

Charity nodded. “That’s what I smell. His personality.”

“I didn’t want to give him a bath right away.” Nina watched Fred as he explored the living room, stopping to investigate her fig tree. “Don’t even think about it, Fred,” she warned him. Then she said to Charity, “I wanted him to feel at home first. He’s only been here an hour, but I had to call you right away. I knew you’d want to meet him.”

“If he’s been here an hour, he’s seen home.” Charity surveyed the apartment with disgust. “How you could move from your place to this…”

“I didn’t move from my place, I moved from Guy’s place.” Nina followed Charity’s eyes around the room, caressing the oak wainscoting and the tiny beige print wallpaper, the veneer fireplace and the fat ruby-upholstered couch and lopsided chair. “This is my place, the first place I’ve ever had that’s all mine. I loved it the first time I saw it. I’ve been here a month now, and I feel more at home than I did after sixteen years in that mausoleum of Guy’s.” The thought of Guy made her shake her head. “We should never have gotten married. We didn’t want any of the same things. I never wanted that house on Lehigh Terrace. He never wanted a dog.” Fred began to move again, and Nina felt the tension ease out of her shoulders as she watched the miscellaneous collection of independent canine parts that was Fred move past her on his way to the couch. “I always wanted a dog. And now I have Fred.”

Fred sniffed the couch again. He’d sniffed it several times since he’d arrived, but now he made a decision. His haunches quivered and tensed as he crouched, and then with a mighty leap he flung himself onto the overstuffed cushions, hanging there for a long moment, a triumph of hope over biology, only to slide slowly back to the floor and land with a soft thud as his butt failed to achieve lift-off.

He took it pretty well, considering.

Charity looked at her as if she were demented. “And you’re going to run up and down the stairs twenty-six times a night to water this animal, right? And what about during the day? You work, for God’s sake. I can just see Jessica’s face if you bring Fred into the office.” She shook her head, and her red ringlets bounced as they swung back and forth. “You’re nuts. I love you, but you’re nuts. Your divorce was just final, you’ve only been an editor for six months so there’s that stress and you’re settling into a new place. Why bring another headache into your life?”

Nina sighed and sat down. “Speaking of headaches, Jessica gave me a new book to work on. It’s worse than the last one.”

Charity looked disgusted. “Is she trying to bankrupt that press? She needs to publish something with some oomph in it.”

“No, she’s doing what her daddy did before her.” Nina watched Fred waddle over to them, the couch humiliation evidently forgotten. “She’s trying to keep the tradition going.”

Charity nodded. “Right into the toilet. She might as well call it the Boring Press.”

Nina closed her eyes. “I know it. The whole place is going to fold, and I’ll be out of work, and Jessica will kill herself because she’s brought the family institution to ruin. And I don’t know how to save it, so that depresses me. And I love this place, but it was lonely, and I was coming home so down about work and Jessica, and I just needed something warm to cheer me up.” She took a deep breath. “And that’s Fred. He’s already cheered me up. Just having him around cheers me up.”