Safe At Home

Tala Newsome knew that Dr. Pete Jacobi and his father had probably forgotten all about her. They were engrossed in their task—saving the life of the lion.

She leaned her head back against the bars and closed her eyes. She felt the gentlest caress on the top of her head. She blinked and yawned. The two men were still hard at work halfway across the big room.

There it was again. A fairy’s breath that ruffled her hair slightly. She rubbed her hand over her head and felt the bars behind her. Must be her imagination. She relaxed again, and a moment later felt a tug on her hair. She reached behind her and felt…

She stifled a scream, jumped up and spun around. An elephant’s trunk extended through the bars behind her. She froze as it slid gently over her face, down her cheek, then patted her shoulder as if to console her.

She gulped, moved back four paces and realized that she was looking into the faces of three large gray lumps clustered on the other side of the bars. Three elephants stood shoulder to shoulder, swinging their trunks gently back and forth.

“Hello, girls.” Tala heard the affection in Pete’s voice. “Just let me finish here and I’ll introduce you.”

Dear Reader,

What would you do if your truck nearly struck a wounded African lion on a country road at two in the morning? Not in deepest Africa, mind you, but in the Tennessee hills. I’d probably lock the doors and do a fast U-turn, but the heroine of Safe at Home has a stronger spirit. By morning she’s not only nursing the lion, but baby-sitting a trio of opinionated elephants, as well.

All because she needs help from a grumpy veterinarian who prefers animals to human beings.

Dr. Pete Jacobi doesn’t want Tala Newsome around his elephant sanctuary. She disturbs his mind and reawakens his heart to feelings he’s denied.

If that isn’t bad enough, widowed Tala comes complete with a son, a nearly adolescent daughter, an outrageous grandmother-in-law and a tough mother-in-law—none of whom intend to let some scruffy vet within a mile of Tala. Pete can’t cope with himself, much less an entire family.

Tala’s not coping very well, either. She’s broke, unable to understand her kids, trying to live up to her in-laws and fulfill her promise to her dead husband. Falling in love with Pete Jacobi is the last complication she needs.

But love doesn’t give a hoot about timing….

I hope you enjoy Pete and Tala’s story—and, of course, the elephants—Sophie, Sweetie Pie and Belle.

Carolyn McSparren

Safe at Home

Carolyn McSparren

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For the wonderful people at Y.E.A.R., the Yoknapatawpha

Exotic Animal Refuge, for bringing me nose to nose with

lions and tigers (pretty scary), and for The Elephant

Sanctuary who told me about the logistics of keeping

elephants. Any errors are mine, not theirs.

For Bruce Bowling, a veterinarian who puts up with

4:00 a.m. emergency calls.

Last but not least, for the nationwide large animal sanctuary

system that provides a peaceful retirement for some of

mankind’s rejects.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

SOMETHING TRIGGERED the alarm on the front gate. Pete Jacobi jerked awake, narrowed his eyes at the lighted alarm clock beside his bed. Two-thirteen in the morning. He’d been asleep less than three hours.

He groaned and raised his head. Icy rain still thrummed against his bedroom window. The powerful halogen motion detectors mounted under the eaves and by the front gate shattered the droplets into prisms.

If that was some local teenager trying to sneak in to test his nerve against the elephants, he’d picked the wrong weather for it. The girls were undoubtedly snoring contentedly in their enclosure. Or would have been until the noise woke them. They’d be pretty grumpy if any spotty adolescent kid from Hollendale tried to hoo-raw them tonight.

During the summer the girls often roamed the east Tennessee hills of the sanctuary most of the night, but they didn’t like really cold weather. Although when the trees started to ice up, and Pete tried to insist that they wear their earmuffs, they’d pay little attention to him. If they wanted them off, off they’d come.

He swung out of bed, jerked on the jeans he’d thrown on the floor, thrust his bare feet into the muddy rubber boots he’d dropped beside them. “Damn!” he snarled as his cold toes met the even colder rubber.

The lights and alarms should have spooked any normal intruder home to Hollendale by now. Pete shut off the alarm and heard in its place the insistent burping of the intercom he’d installed at the gate a couple of months earlier. Someone was still out there. He hit the talk switch. “Yeah?”

The voice that answered him was female and full of concern. “Please, you’ve got to help her! She’s bleeding.”

He jerked fully awake. “I’m a vet, not a doctor.”

“I need a vet. I’ve got to get her inside. She’s so cold already, I’m afraid she’ll die on the way to town. I think somebody shot her.”

He ran his hand over his hair and blinked to clear his eyes. “Okay, okay, lady. Relax. I’ll come open the gate.” He yanked his wet poncho from the hook beside the door and pulled it on over his shoulders. It felt as though he’d jumped into a vat of raw oysters. He took a deep breath, pulled open the office door and sprinted for the high-wire gates. His feet slipped and threw globs of mud onto his legs at every step.

She was hanging on to the far side of the gate with both hands. The moment she saw him, she turned and climbed into the front seat of a small pickup truck and slammed the door.

He clicked the padlock loose and began to pull the tall wire gates open. “Tomorrow I’m ordering an electric gate opener,” he snarled into the teeth of the wind. He wouldn’t, of course. Any extra money went to feed his girls, not to make his life easier.

The moment he’d shoved the left-hand gate open far enough for her to squeeze the pickup through, she floored the thing. He’d been intending to climb into the passenger seat beside her. Instead, her tires threw up a wall of icy muck that hit him square in the face. He yelped.

“Thanks a bunch!” he called after her as he closed the gate and hooked the open padlock over the hasp. He wiped his face with one hand and strode back to the office. She’d slammed on her brakes and now stood beside the bed of the truck. She was wearing a dark parka with the hood pulled forward over her face. He could tell nothing about her except that she was maybe five foot six and slim.

“Help me. I can’t move her.”

He leaned over the back of the truck expecting to see whatever dog or possum or coon she’d run over with her car. His mouth fell open. He turned to the woman. “Is she yours?”

“No. I found her on the road. She’s so still. She’s not dead, is she?”

He reached a tentative hand next to the animal’s rib cage. He felt a flutter. “She’s alive, but I don’t know for how long.” Without glancing at the woman, he said, “Go around the side of the building to the parking area and in through the small door. Inside you’ll find a button that raises the overhead door. I’ll drive her in.”

He realized as the woman started away that if she disappeared at this moment he would have no idea what she looked like or who she was.

He spun the tires getting the truck started, then moved it toward the growing oblong of light as the door lifted. He drove into the cavernous room, turned off the engine and stepped out of the truck. “Okay, close the door,” he said. “Sleet’s getting in.”

She punched the button again, and the door began to lower. He jabbed at the intercom button on the telephone mounted on the wall beside him.

“There’s no time to call anybody,” she said urgently.

He waved her away. After a moment, a sleepy voice answered.

“Dad?” he said. “Throw on some clothes and get over here fast. Bullet wound. No, the elephants are fine.” Pete glanced at the truck. “You are not going to believe this. Some crazy woman’s just dragged in a half-grown female African lion.”

“OKAY, BOY, what’s all this about a lioness?” Mace Jacobi slammed the door to the parking area behind him, shucked his parka and gloves and walked over to the pickup truck.

“Take a look,” Pete said. He’d hung his poncho beside the side door and slipped into a sweatshirt. He knelt on the lowered tailgate. “Can you believe this?”

Mace peered over his son’s shoulder. “Well, I’ll be damned!” He turned to the woman who hung over the side of the truck. Her fingers gently caressed the golden pelt of the animal. “She yours?”

“No. I almost ran over her on the road. At first I thought she was a big yellow dog, but the tail was too long, and she didn’t move like a dog. Then she turned and looked at me and her eyes went red in the headlights and…” She took a deep breath. “She just keeled over. I jammed on the brakes and slid all over the road. Almost wound up going over the side of Bryson’s Hollow.”

“Bryson’s Hollow?” Pete asked. “What’s a lone woman doing driving the Hollow road this time of night?”

“I live down there. Please, there’s no time for this. Can you help her?”

“Got to get her out of this truck and onto the examining table,” Pete said. “Can’t do it alone. Don’t know how you managed it.”

“I carry a big piece of plywood in the back of my truck. I dragged her onto it and used my trailer winch to haul her up.”

“Madam,” Mace said formally, “I take my hat off to you.”

“She could have bitten your head off,” Pete said. “Come on, Dad, she can’t weigh more than a couple of hundred pounds.”

“More or less. Madam, please be so good as to position your truck so that the rear end backs up to that steel table over there. No sense in carrying her farther than we have to.”

Five minutes later, Pete and Mace Jacobi had the unconscious cat on the steel table. She was limp, but the heavy bones and sinews of her body looked like steel cables under her fur.

“What can I do?” the woman asked.

“You’ve done your part,” Pete answered. “Dad, better get a full syringe of ACE ready in case she starts to come around. She’s going to be pretty pissed off when she does.”

“If she does,” Mace said as he slid his stethoscope onto the animal’s rib cage.

Pete gently probed the blood-matted pelt on her shoulder. “Doesn’t seemed to have nicked any major vessels, and it’s so damned hog-killing cold, the bleeding’s pretty much stopped. Somebody shot her all right. No obvious exit wound. Bullet must still be in there.”

“I’ll get the X ray.” Pete turned and nearly fell over the woman. “Why don’t you go sit down back there out of the way and let us work.”

She backed off as Pete rolled a heavy piece of steel equipment out of a cabinet in the corner by the office door.

“Listen, I can’t keep calling you lady. You got a name?”

“Newsome. Tala Newsome.”

Tala? Odd name. He wasn’t certain he’d heard her correctly. But Newsome he recognized. The Newsomes owned most of the county and half the businesses in Hollendale. Irene Newsome was on the county council Mace had dealt with when he built the sanctuary.

Tala Newsome shoved back the hood of her parka and began to unzip it. Her long black braid was soaked and hair stuck to her cheeks in pencil-thin tendrils. Her nose was red, her cheeks and lips denim blue. And her eyes…

He stopped in midstride as her eyes hit him like a cannon shot. Then his father’s voice jerked him back to the present.

“Don’t stand there, boy. She’s starting to warm up. Don’t need her jumping up and tearing our heads off.”

TALA SANK into a wooden kitchen chair propped against the metal bars that closed off the back section of the enormous room. The moment she sat down she realized how tired she was and how badly her shoulders ached.

Even without the lioness, the drive out to the farmhouse in Bryson’s Hollow was no picnic. After midnight with winter sleet pelting the road, it was downright treacherous. Nights like this she wished she still lived in town with Irene, Vertie and the kids.

But she couldn’t—not permanently. She’d tried staying in the big old Newsome mansion after Adam died, but as wonderful as Vertie and Irene were, she’d felt as if by leaving the farmhouse she’d somehow broken her last connection to her dead husband. She needed to be in Bryson’s Hollow for now. Maybe someday she could move on, but not now, not yet. Not with so much unfinished business and so many promises to keep.

Besides, if she’d stayed with the Newsomes tonight, she’d never have found the lion.

She blinked her eyes, shook her head to clear it, and watched the two men working in the circle of light over the steel table. The rest of the storeroom, or hospital, or whatever it was, lay in shadow.

The younger one, Pete, was doing the surgery. She’d known he was here, of course. The whole town knew about the elephant sanctuary, but she’d never seen him, not even at the grocery store.

He had a good face, a strong jaw and crinkles at the corners of his eyes. At the moment they looked more like frown lines than laugh lines, but he might have a nice smile if he ever bothered to use it.

Of course, who wouldn’t be grouchy being dragged out of bed at two in the morning in a sleet storm?

His father wasn’t grouchy, though. He’d been woken up as well, but he’d spoken kindly to Tala. He was almost courtly, and he’d taken time to smooth his iron-gray hair and beard. But then, Tala hadn’t given Dr. Pete Jacobi time to do much except throw on his clothes.

He looked a great deal like his father, only bigger. Much bigger. Like a professional football player. Or a big, brown grizzly. And when he’d stripped off that wet poncho, he had real muscles, and lots of chest hair. Broad shoulders…kind of a hunk…

In the semidarkness where she sat, she felt her eyelids grow heavy and jerked awake.

She ought to open the overhead door and drive back out into the night. She’d done all she could do for the cat, and she’d worked a double shift at the Food Farm tonight.

She needed sleep badly. She could simply unhook the padlock on the front gate and close it after her. The younger Dr. Jacobi hadn’t actually locked the thing, merely hooked it over the hasp. The men probably wouldn’t even notice she’d gone.

Except that the minute that door began to lift, the wind and rain would whip in again. And one of them would have to leave what he was doing to close it behind her.

Excuses. What she really wanted—needed—was to stay until they finished, until they could tell her whether or not the cat would live. She couldn’t bear the thought that it might die.

She’d been through too much death.

She leaned her head back against the bars behind her and closed her eyes. In an instant Adam’s face swam up from her subconscious. Didn’t often happen nowadays. She’d almost forgotten what having a husband was like, the sound of his laughter, the warmth of his arms around her…

She felt the gentlest caress on the top of her head as though someone had picked up a hank of hair between thumb and index finger. She blinked her eyes and yawned. The two men still worked halfway across the big room.

There it was again. A fairy’s breath that ruffled her hair slightly. She rubbed her hand over her head and felt the bars behind her. Imagination. Too little sleep. Too much excitement. She relaxed again, and a moment later felt a tug on her hair. She reached behind her and felt…

She stifled a scream, jumped up and spun around. An elephant’s trunk extended through the bars behind her. She froze. It slid gently over her face, down her cheek, then patted her shoulder, almost as though consoling her.

She gulped, moved slowly back four paces, and realized that she was looking into the faces of three large gray lumps clustered on the other side of the bars. There were six concerned eyes, not two.

The elephants stood shoulder to shoulder, swinging their trunks gently back and forth. She hadn’t heard them approach—not a single footfall or shuffle on the concrete floor of what must be their cage. Where had they come from? Dark as it was, she could swear they hadn’t been there earlier when she sat down.

She felt a sough of wind against her face. Around the corner of the enclosure in deep darkness she saw some kind of heavy plastic sway slightly. It looked like the barrier at a car wash. She fought down a giggle. She’d seen dog doors and cat doors, but never an elephant door.

The center elephant, by far the largest, with skin as heavily wrinkled as a hundred-year-old crone, reached out to her again. This time Tala put her palm up so that she could feel its soft breath on her fingertips. She reached out her other hand and stroked the long gray nose tentatively.

She felt her eyes begin to well with tears.

“Got the blasted thing!” Pete Jacobi shouted. Tala jumped, the elephants snuffled and swung away. The moment was over.

She turned to the light. Pete held up a round object in a pair of steel forceps. “Looks heavy—.357 Magnum at a guess. Came from a fair distance, otherwise there’d be more damage and one hell of an exit wound. Good thing it wasn’t a rifle. What nut would go after a lion with a handgun?”

“For that matter,” Mace answered, his head bent, his gloved hands busy with the wound, “who’d have a lion around here to go after in the first place?”

Pete turned to look at Tala and smiled. She felt her heart turn over. His eyes really did crinkle at the corners, and he had a nice, wide mouth. She started to smile back when she realized he was looking past her.

“Hello, girls,” he said. “Not real thrilled at the sleet?”

She heard an answering snuffle and stomp. “Let me get this wound closed and I’ll introduce you,” he said. Whether he planned to introduce her to the elephants or the elephants to her, she wasn’t entirely certain. She suspected his priorities were elephants first, human beings second.

Tala knew no more than anyone in Hollendale knew about the two veterinarians. She’d seen Mace buying groceries at the Food Farm, but she’d never actually met him, although Irene liked him.

Apparently the younger one seldom went outside the sanctuary, and when he did, he pointedly ignored any effort to make friends. A real sourpuss, her mother-in-law had called him.

But watching his fingers as he worked over the big cat, Tala knew she’d been right to stop here, instead of driving the lion into town to Dr. Wiskowski’s clinic. The way this vet smiled at his girls proved he wasn’t a sourpuss with animals.

“Have you thought what we’re going to do with her?” Mace asked his son. “We’re certainly not set up for big cats, and she’s got to be under constant supervision.”

“One thing at a time, Dad.” Pete’s hands made gestures over the cat’s shoulder. “While I’m closing, better give her a massive shot of antibiotics,” he said.

“Right.” Mace went to a drug cabinet along the wall, pulled a small key off a hook beside it, opened the cabinet and rooted among the bottles and jars. He held one up and squinted at it over the tops of his bifocals. “This ought to do.” Then he pulled a large syringe from a drawer under the cabinet and filled it with milky liquid from the bottle. He returned the remaining medication, carefully locked the cabinet again and hung the key beside it.

Mace held up a small piece of the lioness’s fur and slid the needle sideways into her neck. She didn’t stir.

“Shouldn’t she be waking up?” Tala asked.

“Bite your tongue,” Mace said.

“The longer she’s out of it, the safer for everybody,” Pete added. “I’d prefer not to give her anything to put her under again if I can help it. Her heartbeat’s a little weak. Big cats can lose a fair amount of blood without too much danger, but we have no way of knowing how much she bled before you found her, and it’s not as though we’ve got a handy donor to give her a transfusion.”

Mace peered down at the animal. “Neat. Couldn’t have done better myself. Okay, now what?”

“I’ve still got that old dog kennel you used for the beagles,” Pete said. “Won’t hold her if she decides to climb out over the top, but with that shoulder, I don’t think she’ll feel much like moving for a couple of days. We can hook it together in a few minutes, put down some blankets and a water dish and close up the room.”

“And pray she doesn’t wake up and destroy the place.”

Pete glanced at Tala. “You have any idea what you were getting into?”

“No. But I probably would have done it anyway,” she said. “Only I don’t know how I’ll pay you…”

“Don’t sweat it,” Mace said, smiling at her over the tops of his glasses. “Don’t often get a chance these days to work on a big cat. Kind of miss it.”

“We’ll work something out,” Pete said.

Mace turned to his son. “Come on, boy, let’s find those kennel panels.”

“Can I help?” Tala asked.

“Nope. Climb into your truck and shut the doors in case she wakes up before we get back. Leave the windows up.”

“She wouldn’t hurt me.”

“Yeah. Right,” Pete said, and looked down at the cat. “Let’s get her on the ground before we leave. Don’t want her coming to and falling off the table onto the concrete.”

“Get a blanket. We can lay her on that and then slide her onto it when we get the cage set up,” Mace said.

Thirty minutes later all three of them grabbed the blanket and slid the cat into the kennel. It was six feet high and built of sturdy steel cyclone fencing, but it had no cover, nor was it anchored to the concrete. One good bash by a large furry body could send it crashing to the floor.

At the moment, however, the cat slept. Pete filled a plastic bucket with water, set it in the corner of the pen and securely fastened the door to the enclosure behind him. “Keep your fingers crossed,” he said.

“You better get on home,” Mace told Tala kindly. “It’s nearly four in the morning. Your folks’ll be worried about you. Want to call them before you leave?”

“No one will miss me,” she said, and realized how pitiful she sounded. “I mean, I live alone at the moment.” She fought a yawn. She was suddenly desperately tired, so tired her knees started to give way.

She felt a sinewy arm around her waist, and grasped Pete’s shoulder.

“Hey! Don’t pass out now!” he snapped.

“She’s out on her feet,” Mace said. “No way can you drive home, my dear. Not along the Hollow road.” He turned to his son. “She’d better bed down here for a few hours.”

“Here?”

She pulled away from him. “I’ll be fine.”

“No, Dad’s right. You’re punchy. You’ve got no business driving as far as the gate.” Pete walked off toward the door at the front of the room. “Come on. You can have the sofa. I’d give you the bed, but I’ve messed it up already, and you fit on the sofa better than I would.”

“I couldn’t—I’ve—you’ve…”

“I won’t attack you.”