“You damn near killed your dog!”

When the woman he was addressing didn’t react, Dr. John McIntyre Thorn raised his voice. He was not about to put up with bad manners. After all, he’d just spent several hours of his Saturday night saving her pet’s life.

“I said you damn near killed your dog. Don’t you care?”

The instant he touched her shoulder, she jumped and swung around to face him.

“I saved your dog’s life in there. What kind of blockhead ignores a distended stomach and a dog that’s almost in a coma from the pain?”

She stared at him for a moment, then raised a hand and cut him off. What the hell was the matter with her?

“Please speak slowly and form your words carefully,” she said. “I caught ‘blockhead’ and ‘coma,’ but that’s about all. Since I doubt you’d think my dog is a blockhead, you must think I am.”

“Yes, I think you’re a—”

Again the hand in front of the chest. “Call me anything you like. But please tell me that Kevlar is going to be all right.” She seemed to be staring at his mouth.

Then it hit him. He was the idiot. And he called himself a doctor. “You’re deaf,” he said softly.

“Hearing impaired is the politically correct term, but I prefer deaf. It’s short and ugly,” she said, meeting his gaze unflinchingly.

Dear Reader,

Since the first CREATURE COMFORT book was published, readers have been asking me to write Mac Thorn’s story. But how could I find the right woman—or in this case, the wrong woman—to jar him out of his lonely world? Then Kit Lockhart showed up with her young daughter, Emma, and suddenly Mac had not one difficult relationship, but two. Serves him right.

John McIntyre Thorn is the brilliant but irascible chief of veterinary surgery at Creature Comfort, the largest veterinary clinic in West Tennessee. Mac loves animals. He’s not at all certain he likes human beings.

Kit Lockhart is guaranteed to drive him crazy. She recently lost her hearing in an accident and can’t hear his tirades. She has her hands full coping with her new disability, an ex-husband who won’t grow up, and a difficult daughter. She’s not looking for a new relationship.

Ten-year-old Emma is confused and angered by her mother’s condition. She’s even angrier that the people who can hear her don’t seem to be listening. And she’s had about as much change as she can handle. The idea of a stepfather horrifies her.

Mac, Kit and Emma have each built a protective wall around themselves, but their havens are not happy places. Can love break through the barriers and meld them into a real family?

I hope you like their story.

Carolyn McSparren

Listen To The Child
Carolyn McSparren

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The Memphis Zoo is one of the best in the country and employs an exceptionally fine staff of veterinarians and technical assistants. They took the time to show me around and answer my questions. The zoo and staff in Listen to the Child came strictly out of my head and bear no resemblance to the real people I met—except that they’re also superb at looking after the creatures in their care. I especially want to thank Dr. Michael Douglas, Karen Jackson and Linda England.

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the fine zoos around the world who are trying to create a happy and challenging environment for their charges, and to the people who are working so diligently to preserve endangered species.

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

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

“WILL HE LIVE?” Nancy Mayfield asked.

John MacIntyre Thorn tightened the final suture closing the incision along the little brown-and-white corgi’s flank. “No thanks to that idiot who brought him in,” Mac snapped. “Another hour and that kidney would have burst. We’d have had to deal with peritonitis. He can live a full life on one kidney. If we can keep him from getting infected, and if his numskull owner doesn’t kill him before he gets well.”

Mac gently stroked the corgi’s head. The anesthetized dog could feel nothing, but that didn’t matter to Mac. “You’re going to be fine, little guy,” he whispered.

“We’re going to keep him in ICU a day or two, aren’t we?” Nancy asked.

“Yeah. At least a couple days, maybe longer. The longer we keep him, the less chance there is of anyone screwing up what we’ve done.”

“I don’t think she realized—”

“It’s her job to know when her dog’s in pain, blast it! Hydronephritis hurts.”

“But dogs don’t always show they’re in pain. You know that.”

“A decent owner ought to recognize a sick dog the way she’d recognize a sick child—she may not know what’s wrong, but she sure as hell should realize something is.” He stripped off his latex gloves and dropped them in the waste bin in the corner. “I suppose you want me to speak to her.”

“Uh…that might not be the greatest idea right now. Why don’t you have a cup of coffee? Calm down a little.”

“Calm? I’m calm! Who says I’m not calm?”

“Sure you are.”

He ignored her. “She in the waiting room? What’s the fool woman’s name, anyway?” He pushed through the swinging doors of the Creature Comfort Veterinary Clinic’s operating room and marched down the hall without waiting for an answer. Nancy raced to keep up with him as he barged into the waiting room.

There were only two people in the reception area. Alva Jean Huxtable—usually the day receptionist at Creature Comfort, West Tennessee’s largest state-of-the-art veterinary clinic—was working the Saturday-evening shift as a favor to the night receptionist, Mabel Halliburton. When she looked up from the magazine she’d been reading, her eyes widened, and she managed to give the impression she was ducking for cover without moving anything but her shoulders.

The other woman stood looking out over the parking lot. She wore cowboy boots with heels that added a couple of inches to her five-foot-ten or so frame. From her short haircut and broad shoulders, Mac might have taken her for a man until he saw her narrow waist and the way her rear end filled out her jeans. Definitely female.

She moved, and the fluorescent light flashed on her hair. Dark red. Not a color one saw every day.

Nancy grabbed at his sleeve, but he jerked away. “Your dog’s probably going to live, no thanks to you.”

The woman didn’t react. She stared out the window without so much as turning her head. Well, damn! He was already mad as hell over the corgi. He didn’t plan to put up with bad manners from this woman who should be down on her knees thanking him for sticking around after hours on a weekend to save her dog’s life. Few veterinary surgeons could have done the job as neatly and with as little trauma to the animal.

“Hey, Miz… Um.”

“Her name’s Kit Lockhart,” Alva Jean said from behind the reception desk, “but I don’t think—”

“Miz Lockhart, you damn near killed your dog.”

Still no reaction. Okay. No more Mr. Nice Guy.

“I said you damn near killed your dog. Don’t you care?”

The instant he touched her shoulder, she jumped and swung around to face him.

She had green eyes. Not jade green or leaf green, not even gold green, but the clear green of emeralds. He’d seen maybe one or two sets of eyes that color in his entire thirty-seven years.

What the hell was the matter with her? Nancy grabbed his arm again, and again he shook her off. “I saved your dog’s life in there. What kind of blockhead ignores a distended stomach, gums that are damn near white, and a dog that’s almost in a coma from the pain?”

She stared at him for a moment, then raised a hand and cut him off in midsentence. “Please speak slowly and form your words more carefully.”

“What?”

“I said, please speak slowly and form your words carefully. I got ‘blockhead’ and ‘coma’ but that’s about all. Since I can’t imagine you think my dog is a blockhead, you must think I am.”

“Hell, yes, I think you’re a blockhead…”

Again the hand in front of the chest. “Call me anything you like, but please tell me that Kevlar is going to be all right.”

“I already did.”

“Please repeat.”

“I said, he’s…going…to…be…okay. Can you understand that?”

She nodded. She relaxed and closed those miraculous eyes for an instant. “Thank God. I was scared to death I’d waited too long to bring him in for treatment. I’ve only had him a couple of weeks. He really seemed fine this morning, just a little listless. I didn’t realize there was anything wrong until this evening. I came as soon as I figured it out.”

“I removed the distended kidney.”

“You had to remove his kidney?”

“He can live forever on one healthy kidney.”

“Lord, I hope so.” She’d been watching him carefully and nodding throughout his speech. “Can I see him? Please?”

“He’s still unconscious.”

“I just need to see he’s okay. Touch him.”

So she did care. “Okay, you’re not callous, you’re just stupid. Wouldn’t have mattered to the dog. He’d have been dead either way.” He turned. “Yeah. I guess you can see him now.”

He felt her fingers on his arm. “Say again?”

He looked over his shoulder at her. She stared hard at him.

Then it hit him. He was the idiot. And he called himself a doctor. If he hadn’t been so damn mad at her… “You’re deaf.”

“The politically correct term is hearing impaired, but I prefer deaf. It’s short and ugly.”

“Nobody told me.” He glared at Nancy.

“I tried, Mac, so did Alva Jean.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He ran his hand over his hair. Nancy told him again and again that he never listened. In this particular instance, obviously she was right.

“You’re good at lipreading.”

“I’m nearly perfect with people I know well. With strangers, it’s tougher. If you keep looking at me and…”

“Speak slowly and carefully.”

She nodded. “Right.”

“So, is this recent?”

“Not quite a year yet. I used to be a cop.” This last was said with an offhandedness that didn’t conceal the underlying bitterness.

“Total loss? No residual hearing at all?”

“Nearly total. Ninety percent. I can sometimes hear thuds. Kevlar is my hearing ear dog.” She swallowed convulsively. Those emerald eyes filled with tears. “Maybe he whimpered in pain, but I couldn’t hear him. I’d die if I let anything happen to him. I truly didn’t know he was sick. I’m so sorry.”

Now he felt like a toad. “Didn’t they teach you anything about dogs when you got him?”

“Teach me anything?”

He nodded.

“They taught me how to work with Kevlar, all the things he can do for me. But they didn’t teach me about kidney infections. I brought him in when I first got him and let Dr. Hazard check him out and bring his shots up to date. He was fine. What could have caused this? Why didn’t Dr. Hazard catch it then?”

Mac took a deep breath and spoke carefully. “He was born with a narrow ureter that finally kinked. Everything backed up, and his kidney became like a water-filled balloon. Sooner or later it would have simply burst. He also had some built-up scar tissue and some stones. Only an ultrasound and X rays would have caught the disease at the chronic stage. The other kidney is fine. He shouldn’t have another occurrence.”

She kept nodding. Her eyes flickered from his eyes to his mouth. Disconcerting.

“I got most of that. Will he need a special diet?”

“Small meals and dog food formulated to handle kidney problems. Nancy will talk to you about that before you leave with him.”

Now she did look up at him. “How long will he have to stay here? I mean, I’ve only had him two weeks, but I already depend on him.” She dropped her eyes. “And I like him.”

He touched her arm. “Come on. They’ll have moved him to ICU by now. You can see him.”

She eyed him with suspicion. “Are you making some kind of exception for me?”

This time Nancy touched her arm. She said slowly and with a smile, “No special treatment. Dr. Mac is an equal-opportunity offender.”

Back in the ICU, the little dog lay on his good side on an air mattress in the middle of the floor. Cages holding dogs and cats were stacked almost up to the ceiling, and despite the low light, several animals woke and began to bark or whine when Mac opened the door to let Kit in.

She went down to her knees on the mattress and began to stroke the dog and croon to him softly. After a moment Mac recognized the melody—an old Scottish folk song, some kind of lullaby. His Highland-born grandmother had sung him songs like that when he was a child.

“Kev’s such a burly little dog,” she said. “He seems like such a tough little character, and now this.”

He reached down and squeezed her shoulder to reassure her.

She looked up at him. “Will there be somebody here with him tonight?”

“Dr. Liz Carlyle will be here all night. As soon as he starts to wake up, she’ll move him to one of the cages.”

“Doctor something will put him in a cage? Is that what you said?”

“Close enough.” He offered her his hand, but she stood up easily without assistance. She was as lithe as a dancer.

“Thank you for letting me see him. Can your receptionist call me a cab?” She walked out ahead of him, but turned her head to watch his reply.

“You need a cab?”

She stopped in the hall and faced him. “I can drive legally, but I try not to drive at night without Kevlar. During the day I keep a close eye out for ambulances or police cars bearing down on me, but after dark, I rely on Kev to alert me. My mother brought us over tonight.”

“Won’t she come back to get you?” He was beginning to learn the cadence of speaking to her.

“This late—it would be complicated. A cab will be fine. But unfortunately, I can’t call one myself. I can give them the address, but if they ask directions, I won’t be able to hear.”

He’d never have thought of that. “In the rain and this far out, a cab could take a while. Where do you live?”

“I have a town house in Germantown.”

He made a decision that ordinarily he wouldn’t make in a hundred years. He never, ever, got involved with clients. Their animals, yes. But not the clients. “I live in Germantown, too. I’ll drop you. We can go now before another emergency comes in.”

She looked confused. “I got about a quarter of that. But you don’t have to take me home.”

“Come on.”

He picked up one of the telephones on the wall and told Alva Jean he was leaving. “Nancy gone yet?”

“Uh-huh. And Dr. Carlyle is on her way to check the patients. What about Mrs. Lockhart?”

His stomach lurched. Alva Jean had called her Mrs. initially, but then she always called women Mrs. until she knew different. In the last few minutes, he’d grown used to thinking of her as a woman alone, unmarried. It suddenly seemed important to him that there not be a husband lurking somewhere.

If there was, why wasn’t he picking up his wife?

He’d find out somehow on the drive home.

“I am driving Mrs. Lockhart home.”

“You are?” Pause. “You just better be sweet to her, Dr. Mac.” She hung up.

He stared at the telephone in his hand. Alva Jean didn’t exactly cringe when he walked by her desk, but she seldom said anything more to him than to announce his appointments. He’d have been less surprised if Kevlar had stood on his hind legs and roared like a lion. He glanced at Kit Lockhart who waited patiently. Sweet? He’d never been sweet in his life. He certainly wasn’t about to start now.

AT FIRST he found the silence in the car disconcerting. Because she couldn’t see him in the darkness, there was no way to speak to her. He felt frustrated because he wanted to talk. He wanted to ask her how and when she’d gone deaf, and what, if anything, could be done to correct it.

He was amazed to discover he wanted to know everything about her. There was an irony here, he realized. Most of the women he knew talked too much. They seemed uncomfortable with companionable silence. But then, he wasn’t exactly the companionable type. And until now, he was the one who decided when he needed silence.

But this woman could tune him out simply by turning her head. That gave her control of the situation. He loathed loss of control.

His entire life was based on keeping an iron grip on himself and his environment. If things started to get out of hand, he bellowed until somebody fixed them. He tried to use his bellow sparingly so it wouldn’t lose its effectiveness, but he’d found over the years that sometimes a little shouting worked wonders.

Most of his colleagues here in Memphis had learned to ignore his tirades. Nancy Mayfield had worked with him so long she knew he was a marshmallow inside. Rick Hazard, the managing partner of Creature Comfort, laughed at him. Apparently even Alva Jean was losing her fear.

Not good. His reputation as a terror was his only protection from the world. Without his shell, the only defense a snapping turtle had was to bite. Mac didn’t like biting.

He could bellow his head off at this woman. She wouldn’t care any more than if he’d whispered.

“Second driveway from the corner on your right,” she said.

He’d been so deep in his own thoughts that her voice startled him. “Sure,” he said automatically.

The moment he stopped his Suburban, she opened the door and jumped out, then turned to him. “Thank you for helping Kev. I’ll be by to see him first thing tomorrow morning.”

“He’ll still be groggy.”

She pointed at the ceiling of the SUV. “Lean into the dome light, please. Then tell me again.”

He started to growl, but realized that wouldn’t impress her, either, so he did as she asked, then repeated his statement and added, “Come late morning or early afternoon.”

She nodded. “Thanks again.”

“I’ll walk you to your door.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said…”

She shook her head. “I got it. Don’t bother.” She grinned. “I can handle myself.” She strode up her walk with an athlete’s arrogant swing.

He clicked off the overhead light, but didn’t start the car until she’d unlocked her door and gone inside.

INSIDE, Kit leaned against the front door and flung her shoulder bag across the room onto the sofa so hard that her wallet and makeup spilled onto the carpet. She picked everything up, stuffed her bag again and set it on the chest at the side of the room.

She leaned both hands on the top of the chest and took some deep breaths. Some tough cookie she was, breaking down every time she got safely home from one of her encounters with what she was coming to think of as “them.” People who could hear.

At least Dr. Thorn didn’t dole out great gobs of pity. She’d had her fill of that. She looked at the mirror above the chest and grinned at the streaks of mascara running down her cheeks. “First purchase tomorrow morning—waterproof mascara,” she said. She wiped her cheeks with the flat of her hands. Better.

Not being able to hear her own voice resonate inside her head was perhaps the oddest thing she’d had to adjust to. That, and the continual whistling sound.

The stairwell lights went on, and a moment later, her mother came down the steps and stopped directly in front of Kit. “Darling, how’s Kev?”

Kit headed for the kitchen. She badly needed a cold beer. “He’s going to be okay, but they had to remove a kidney.”

She got the beer and turned, realizing her mother had probably reacted to the news. Now Catherine Barclay sat at the kitchen table and held out her hand to her daughter. “Emma’s been terribly worried.”

“I’ll tell her the minute she wakes up tomorrow.”

“Tell me he’s okay.” Emma appeared in the doorway, blinking in the light.

Kit nodded. “He’ll be home in a couple of days.”

“What was wrong with him?” The ten-year-old padded into the room and leaned against her grandmother’s shoulder.

“His kidney went bad. They had to remove it.” Kit saw the alarm in Emma’s eyes and held up her hand. “Whoa! I promise he’s fine. Everybody’s got two kidneys and can get along with one.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely. Now, go back to bed. Sunday school tomorrow, remember.”

“Do I have to?”

Kit could almost hear Emma’s patented whine in her head. There were occasional blessings about being deaf. Not having to listen to Emma’s histrionics was a definite plus, but as Emma grew more used to her mother’s deafness, she was becoming more and more adept at pantomiming her emotions.

“Yes, we have to go to church tomorrow. Now, back to bed, please. It’s late. And take Jo-Jo with you.”

Emma reached down and picked up the bobcat-size yellow tabby that was winding himself around her ankles. “I think he misses Kev.”

“One less creature to terrorize.”

Emma waved one hand over her shoulder as she wandered into the shadows while Jo-Jo looked back at them.

Her mother reached out to get Kit’s attention. “She worries about you. I had the devil’s own time getting her into bed tonight.”

“She’s taking advantage of you. Worrying about me is a great excuse to stay up late. She managed to get to bed on time when I was with the T.A.C.T. squad. If she worried then she never showed it.”

“She was too young to realize how dangerous your job was. Small children trust that their parents will always be there—hale and hearty. First she lost her father when you divorced him, then your accident proved you’re breakable. She’s afraid she might lose you to something worse than deafness.”

“She hasn’t lost her father. She sees more of Jimmy now than she ever did before the divorce. At least he’s on scheduled visits, when he deigns to show up.”

“Not the same thing.”

“And as for Emma’s worrying about me, she’ll have to deal with it. I used to worry about you all the time when you were on the job. Every time a cop got killed I’d think, ‘That could be my mother.’ Didn’t stop you being a cop, and it hasn’t stopped you being a P.I., either.”

Catherine took a deep breath. This was hardly a new discussion. “Being a P.I. is not dangerous. I spend most of my time combing through financial records.”

“Any situation can turn dangerous,” Kit said. “That was the first thing you taught me, remember? Always keep your guard up? Anyway, Emma doesn’t have to worry I’ll get caught in a shoot-out or anything. Not anymore.”

“That’s not the point.” Catherine took the half-full bottle of beer out of her daughter’s hand, poured the remainder down the sink and dropped the bottle into the recycle bin. “Until you were hurt, losing a child was something that happened to other parents. Then when your father and I got called to the hospital, I realized I could actually lose you.” Her mother’s voice clouded.

This wasn’t the way Kit and her mother ever spoke to one another. Her mother’s sudden emotion made Kit uncomfortable. She tried to laugh. “I wasn’t at death’s door, Mom.”

Her mother raised her eyes. “You certainly looked as though you were. I’m sure you looked half-dead to Emma. Suddenly the impossible—being abandoned by her mother—became possible. You don’t get over that quickly.”

“So on top of everything else I’m supposed to feel guilty that I got blown up, because I scared my parents and my child? I know this is hard for her, Mom. At first she fell all over herself being helpful—mommy’s little nurse. Treated me as though I was some sort of invalid. Brought me tea in bed. Refused to let me out of her sight. But that gets old fast when you’re ten. Now I embarrass her.”

“Yes, you probably do.” Catherine sounded defeated. “You and I never could communicate. I don’t suppose you and Emma can actually talk all this through, can you?”

“That would just make things worse. She’s adjusting at her own pace. I’m not going to rub her nose in my infirmity. God, Mom, remember when I shot that guy and had to go to the shrink? Now every time I hear anybody say, ‘And how did that make you feel?’ I want to hit something. I’m not going to do that to Emma.”

“She’s your child.” Catherine walked to the kitchen door. “Time for me to go home.” She turned to face Kit. “I almost forgot to tell you. Vince Calandruccio called. Said to call him at the Dog Squad tomorrow morning to tell him about Kevlar.”

“Vince is a good guy. A lot of the guys I worked with on the job have stopped calling to check up on me, but Vince keeps coming over and bringing Adam, of course. He never goes anywhere without his dog.”

Catherine nodded. “You look wiped out. Go to bed. And if you don’t make it to Sunday school, don’t sweat it. I’m sure God will understand.”

“Thanks for watching Emma, Mother.”

“You’re welcome.” Catherine picked up her purse and walked through the door.

Suddenly Kit felt so exhausted she wasn’t certain she could drag herself up the stairs to her bedroom. The doctors had warned her about that. After any kind of stress and particularly after a long session of reading lips, her energy could suddenly bottom out. And sometimes she lost her balance. The doctors said that was the physical trauma of the blast and the psychological trauma of nearly winding up both deaf and blind.

She didn’t like to remember what a close call that had been. The scar that bisected her right eyebrow and touched the corner of her eye was barely noticeable thanks to a great plastic surgeon. And her vision in that eye was almost normal, thanks to an ophthalmologist in the trauma center who’d removed splinters from her eye without damaging it.

The doctors told her she’d never remember the blast itself, but she’d heard the story of her accident so many times she almost felt as though she could.

She’d come through plenty of hostage situations and drug takedowns without a scratch. It was embarrassing to lose her hearing and her job with the police department in what amounted to a comedy of errors.

Keystone Kops, Vince Calandruccio called it.

Start with one rookie who kicked in the back door of a crack house a second too early so that Kit had to cover him to keep him from getting his ass blown off. Add another cop at the front door with a flash-bang grenade who didn’t know Kit was already in the vestibule. Toss in a commander who waited a couple of seconds too long to rescind his order to lob in the flash-bang.

What do you have? Kit Lockhart standing practically on top of the damn grenade when it went off.

She still had to watch herself on the stairs. Her depth perception wasn’t perfect, but it was improving.

Unfortunately, Emma had eyes like a hawk, ready to spot the least sign of weakness in Kit.

Life was better with Kevlar. Emma seemed willing to hand over some of the responsibility she felt to him. Thank God he was going to be all right.

Kit leaned against the wall at the top of the stairs for a moment, panting.

“Oh, this is not a good thing,” she said as she bent to catch her breath. “It is high time we went back to working out, Kit, my girl. You’ve been lazy too long. You’re getting soft.” She walked into her bedroom, shucked off her sweater, then pulled off her boots and dropped them beside her.

Lord, she hoped the noise they made wouldn’t wake Emma! She slipped down the hall and peered into her daughter’s bedroom. Emma lay curled up asleep. From the crook of the little girl’s knees, Jo-Jo raised his flat head and looked at Kit for a moment before subsiding into sleep again. Kit crossed to the bed and bent to kiss Emma’s forehead, damp with nighttime perspiration.

On her way back to her own bathroom, she jabbed hard at the heavy punching bag in the corner of her bedroom. “Ow! Wimp. Next time wear gloves.” She kicked at it. “Wonder how Dr. John MacIntyre Thorn keeps up those muscles. He certainly wouldn’t risk injuring his hands on a punching bag.”

In the bathroom, she began to cream her makeup off. Then stopped and leaned both hands on the sink. Thank God for those hands of his. Please, let him really have saved Kevlar.

ACROSS THE HALL, Emma opened her eyes. It was much easier to feign sleep now when her mother couldn’t hear her breathing.

She heard the sound of her mother’s fist as she thwacked the heavy bag, then her exclamation. She couldn’t understand the rest of the words.

Her mother never used to talk to herself—not out loud. Emma wasn’t certain she even knew she was doing it since she couldn’t hear her own voice.

Weird.

Even weirder to think that she could play her stereo all night. Her mother wouldn’t know about it unless Emma woke the neighbors, and they called to complain.

At first she’d thought being able to get away with stuff behind her mother’s back was cool—her friend Jessica definitely thought so. But it wasn’t. She’d always relied on her mother to set boundaries. Before, when she played her music too loud, her mother told her to turn it down.

Before, her mother knew when she was playing a video game in her room when she was supposed to be doing homework just by the pinging sound the game made. All the way from the kitchen, too.

Emma hated feeling guilty when she took advantage of her mother’s deafness. She hated having to find her mother and look at her to tell her something instead of just yelling from upstairs or the back yard. It made every word they said to each other too important. Why couldn’t they just go back the way they were before the stupid accident?

CHAPTER TWO

MAC SLEPT LATE on Sunday morning. He deserved a little extra time after having worked on that corgi until nearly ten o’clock on Saturday night.

His first thoughts on waking were of Kit Lockhart. Mrs.? He hadn’t asked her last night, but he definitely wanted to know whether she had a husband.

Not that he was likely to see her again once Kevlar was fully recovered. His life was entirely too busy to complicate with women, and definitely not with women who unnerved him.

Even though it was a Sunday on which he was not officially on call, he dressed, grabbed a doughnut and an espresso from the drive-through and drove to the clinic to check on his patients.

He went straight to the small-animal ICU. Bigelow Little, the kennel man and general clinic help, was on his knees in front of the corgi’s cage.

“Hey, Dr. Mac,” Big said. “He come in last night?” Big stood up.

At six foot four Mac was used to being the tallest person in the room, but when Big was around, Mac knew how Chihuahuas must feel around Irish wolf-hounds. Big was immense—nearly seven feet tall, and half as broad. Not an ounce of fat on him. He looked capable of breaking Mac in two, but was in fact the gentlest soul on earth.

“Removed a kidney. We had any bodily functions this morning?”

Big grinned and ran his huge hand over his cropped white-blond hair. “Yes, sir. Downright apologetic about it, though. Acted like he’d done dirtied in the churn.”

“You had him out?”

“Cleaned up after him is all. Didn’t know what you wanted me to do.”

“If you have time, you might try walking him around in here. He’s pretty sore, but he needs to use those legs. Don’t want him throwing a blood clot.”

“I’ll do it.”

And he would. Big Little had been the greatest find the clinic had made since it opened. An inmate at the local penal farm, Big had been one of the members of the first team to work the new beef-cattle herd at the farm. Dr. Eleanor Grayson, now Eleanor Chadwick, had been the veterinarian in charge of that program, and had picked Big out immediately as having a special rapport with animals.

When Big was pardoned, Creature Comfort had hired him at once. Now he had a small apartment on the grounds behind Dr. Weinstock’s laboratory, and acted as night watchman as well as a jack-of-all-trades in the clinic. If anyone could coax Kevlar to walk, Big could.

Mac checked his other patients, then went to look over his schedule for Monday. He wondered when Kit Lockhart would come to visit Kevlar today, and realized he hadn’t told Big she was deaf. He started to go back, but Rick Hazard stuck his head out of his office door and called him.

“You keeping banker’s hours?” Rick said.

“It’s Sunday, dammit.” Mac bristled. “And I was here late last night removing a kidney.”

Rick raised his hands. “Whoa! I’m just kidding. How come you didn’t let Liz Carlyle handle it? She was on call for small animals last night.”

Liz Carlyle was an excellent vet. At the moment she was working on an advanced degree in veterinary ophthalmology and her surgical skills were top-notch.

“I trust her, but I trust me more.” Besides, Kevlar’s kidney problem was an interesting and delicate case and a welcome change from neutering dogs and spaying cats. “I didn’t have anything better to do.”

Rick nodded. “Like you don’t have anything better to do this morning. Hey, podner, you ought to get a life.”

Mac forced a smile. “I have a life. And I have patients in ICU. Where else would I be? You’re the one who’s usually on the golf course by now.”

“That’s where I would be if I weren’t on call here. Eighteen holes, then a late brunch with Margot at Brennan’s, a long post-brunch snooze in front of the television set and a late supper.”

“And you think I should get a life?”

“Actually, I think you should get a wife.”

“You sound like my mother. Don’t.” Mac pivoted on his heel and walked back to his office, then stopped and turned. “Look, since I’m here already, I’ll handle the calls, if any, until Liz gets in. Will that give you time for your golf game?”

“Heck, nine holes, at least. Forget what I said about getting a life. You just go right on being a lonely workaholic as long as you want.”

After Rick dashed for the parking lot and his golf clubs, Mac propped his feet on his desk and picked up the copy of the Sunday paper he’d brought with him. He might take in a matinee this afternoon, maybe try a new restaurant tonight. Or he could work out at the gym. He had plenty of friends at the gym.

Except they seldom showed up on Sunday.

More annoyed by Rick’s gibes than he was willing to admit, he pulled open his desk drawer and took out a dog-eared black leather address book. He’d take someone to dinner tonight, maybe wind up spending the night.

He wasn’t quite certain when he’d given up sex. It hadn’t been intentional. Recently he hadn’t been seriously involved with any woman. He never had been able to master the bed-hopping techniques of some of his bachelor colleagues. Sex should entail real emotional attachment.

Talk about getting old!

He ran his eye down the names in his address book. Cindy was married—pregnant, he thought. Marilyn had moved away to Seattle or someplace. Jennifer would probably be free, but her endless prattle about social functions would give him a migraine. Claire would hang up on him.

Sarah Scott and Eleanor Chadwick, the two large-animal vets, were both happily married, and Sarah had a baby. Mac couldn’t barge in on either of them on a Sunday. Bill Chumney, the exotics vet, was out in the Dakotas somewhere building a census of black-footed ferrets, and Sol Weinstock was at the international equine clinic in Lexington, Kentucky, working on his experiments with EIA vaccine.

Mac wandered back to the kennels. The cages were cleaned and all the animals had fresh water and food.

“You about done, Big?” Mac asked.

“Uh-huh. Got the little guy out and walked him around some. He’s a real happy fellow, isn’t he?”

Mac nodded. “You doing anything this afternoon?”

Big turned his seraphic smile on Mac. “Me’n Alva Jean are taking her kids to the zoo.” He looked hard at Mac. “Hey, why don’t you come along? They got that new baby gorilla out. Ain’t nothin’ cuter than a baby gorilla.”

Mac shook his head. “Thanks for the offer, but no. I’m here until two. Then I’ll probably take in a movie.”

“You ought to come with us. Alva Jean wouldn’t mind.”

Alva Jean had recently been through a nasty divorce. The last person Mac might have expected her to take up with was Big Little. Well, maybe not the last. She’d walked out on her husband because he had smacked her and the two children around. It took a great deal to rile Big Little, and he would as soon raise a hand to a woman or child or animal as he would take up brain surgery. At least with Big she’d be physically safe from her husband.

Unfortunately, if the husband tried to hurt either his ex-wife or his children again, he wouldn’t be safe from Big.

Mac had no intention of spending all afternoon with this unlikely pair, and definitely not with Alva Jean’s two small children in tow.

It wasn’t that he disliked children, exactly, but they always acted like—well—children.

He avoided them even in his practice. Nancy usually spoke to distraught parents about Bobby’s rottweiler or Betty’s kitten.

You could count on animals to act like animals, so he preferred to devote himself to them and not to the owners who caused so many of their problems.

He said goodbye to Big and walked back up the hall to his office. His footsteps echoed on the tile floor. All the treatment rooms were soundproofed, so once he had closed the door on the kennel, he could no longer hear the whines and barks of the patients. The clinic felt almost eerily quiet.

As he reached the door of his office, the front-door buzzer sounded.

Good. An emergency. Maybe something to get his teeth into, to keep him from feeling as though he was the last human being on earth.

He walked into the reception room and peered through the glass doors.

His heart bounced into his throat. It was that Lockhart woman. He’d know that hair anywhere.

He opened the door for her.

“I’m here to see Kev.”

“Yeah. Come in.” He stood back and held the door.

She turned away from him and called, “Hey, Em, it’s okay.”

The passenger-side door of an elderly but well cared for red Jeep opened and a slight figure jumped out and ran up the stairs.

A child! A tall, skinny girl in oversize jeans and sweatshirt. Obviously Kit Lockhart’s child. There couldn’t be half a dozen people in the city with hair that extraordinary dark red. As she bounced up the steps, he saw that she had missed out on her mother’s green eyes. Hers were hazel.

She might be a beauty someday. At the moment she was as uncoordinated as a day-old foal.

He took a step back.

“Is he okay? Can we see him?” the child asked. “We brought him some of his toys.” She held out a brown paper sack.

“Whoa, girl. This is my daughter, Emma. Emma, this is Dr. John MacIntyre Thorn. He’s the man who saved Kevlar’s life.”

“Uh-huh. Can we see him now?” She slipped past him.

“Um, yes. Please follow me. And be quiet.”

Fat chance, he thought. He’d learned about the habits of prepubescent girls from growing up in the same house with his younger sister, Joanna. They invariably squealed every chance they got. No doubt this one would do the same.

As they came to the door of the ICU, he pointed to the Quiet sign. He pushed open the door and stood aside. The child shoved past him, then stood stock-still a foot inside the door. He nearly tripped over her.

“Oh,” she whispered into the immediate stirring of whimpers and meows.

“Kevlar’s over there on the bottom tier.”

She went to the corgi and dropped to her knees in front of his cage. “He’s Mom’s dog, really,” she said, pressing her open palm against the wire. “He works for her. Can I get him out and pet him?”

“Carefully. Don’t let him run around. Just hold him and pet him. You can give him his toys before you leave.”

“Thanks,” said Kit as she joined her daughter on the floor. “Hey, Kev,” she crooned. He came into her lap, licked her chin and settled quietly while mother and daughter bent those extraordinary red heads over him.

Mac felt the need to talk, to tell them about the incision, the prognosis, how beautifully the dog was doing—anything to interrupt this tableau that pointedly excluded him. But he couldn’t speak to Kit—she couldn’t see his lips. He had no idea how to speak to the child.

Emma solved the problem for him. She stood up awkwardly, but with the fluidity of young joints, and began to wander around the room while her mother continued to pet Kev. He watched her long fingers caress the dog’s pelt, and felt a shiver down the back of his neck.

“What’s wrong with this little dog?” Emma asked.

“What? Oh—let’s see.” He prided himself on knowing his patients. “That’s Chou-Chou. A bichon frise. Cataract surgery on the left eye. We’ll do the right one in about six months.”

“He was going blind?”

“You know about cataracts?”

“My granddad had them. What about this one?”

“Her name’s Rebel. She’s a boxer. Had a flipped intestine. Not all that rare in large dogs. But it kills quickly if it’s not surgically corrected.”

She poked a finger into the next cage where a large black-and-white cat slept and shivered from time to time. “This one?”

“Her name’s Folly. She got hold of some antifreeze. There’s been so much liver damage we may not be able to save her.”

“Oh, poor kitty! We have a cat named Jo-Jo, but he never goes outside.”

“How does he get along with Kevlar?”

“When Mom brought Kev home, Jo-Jo spent four days under the towels in the linen closet. Then he decided that if Kev was going to stay, he’d better get used to him. Now they’re good buddies.”

Mac had fallen into step beside Emma as she checked every cage. He found himself explaining all his cases almost as though he were talking to an adult.

Exactly as though he were talking to an adult, actually. Emma seemed to understand what he said, and when she didn’t, she asked for explanations.

He discovered he was enjoying himself.

“Hey, Em, let Dr. Mac off the hook,” Kit said as she unfolded from the floor with the same ease her daughter showed but with much more grace. She held Kevlar against her chest. “He’s got stuff to do.”

“Doesn’t look like he’s got any other stuff at all,” Emma said.

“Emma Lockhart!”

He laughed. “She’s quite right. I was reading the Sunday paper and getting ready to check the large-animal patients in the back when you arrived.”

“Large animals?” Emma asked suspiciously. “What kind?”

He shrugged. “Cows, sheep, horses—”

“Horses? You got horses?”

Kit groaned. “You just hit the hottest button you could. This child has never even been on a horse, but she is horse crazy.”

He glanced at Emma’s shining face. “I don’t work on the large animals so I don’t know if we have a horse in the clinic at the moment,” he said. “I haven’t checked the charts.”

“Could we see? Could we, please?”

If she’d whined, he probably would have said no, but she sounded enthusiastic and excited.

“I don’t see why not.”

“Listen,” Kit said, “you don’t have to…”

He didn’t attempt to answer her, but took Kevlar gently from her arms, put him back in his kennel and gave him his toys. “Here, boy, play with these.”

“Bye, Kev,” Emma said. It was obvious she was eager to get going.

“See you tomorrow, sweetie,” Kit said. She touched Mac’s arm so that he faced her. “When can he come home?”

“Tomorrow, if he doesn’t develop an infection. But he won’t be up to par for a couple of weeks.”

“Can he work for me?”

“So long as it doesn’t entail running up and down stairs too often, I doubt that you could keep him from working.”

“Come on!” Emma’s exasperation was aimed at her mother.

Mother and daughter followed Mac down the hall toward the heavy door that separated the large-animal area from the small. The room beyond was cavernous, with a broad central hall. On the left were offices, operating rooms and storage areas. On the right was a large open pen for cows, and past that were raised padded cells for animals coming out of anesthesia. Past the padded stalls were a number of smaller stalls that could be used for recuperating animals.

Mac picked up a clipboard from a hook beside the first office door and ran his eye down the list of patients. “You’re in luck.”

“You have a horse?” Emma practically danced a jig.

“Not just a horse. Follow me.”

They followed him past the enclosed stalls. As the space opened out, both Emma and Kit said “ooh,” as he knew they would. If he’d expected Emma to run to the stall, he was mistaken. She froze as though afraid to approach.

The big gray Percheron mare didn’t raise her head from the bale of hay she munched. The black foal, however, scrambled awkwardly to its spindly legs and leaned against its mother’s broad side.

“What’s wrong with her?” Emma whispered.

Mac started to tell her, then looked at Kit and raised his eyebrows. He wasn’t quite certain how much this child would or should know about the processes of delivering babies. Kit, however, nodded at him and kept her eyes on his mouth.

“The filly’s fine. It’s the mother we worked on. See those sharp little hooves the baby has?”

Emma nodded.

“Well, when the baby was coming out, one of those hooves tore the inside of the mare. She was bleeding so badly we had to bring them both into the clinic to stitch her up.”

“Wow.” It was a long-drawn-out whisper. “Could I touch the baby?”

“I doubt you’ll get that close to her. Stand here quietly, stretch out your hand and don’t move.”

Emma did as she was told. After an interminable two minutes in which Emma’s hand didn’t wobble, the foal reached out a velvet nose and touched her fingers. Then it bounced away and nearly fell down.

Emma broke into delighted laughter. “She has whiskers! They tickled my fingers.”

“Now it really is time to go, Emma,” said Kit. “I mean it. Don’t forget your dad’s picking you up at two.”

He saw Emma’s shoulders drop. “Yeah, okay. All he wants to do is watch football on TV, then he goes to sleep on the couch and snores. I get sick of video games.”

Kit glanced at Mac, who looked away quickly. “Maybe he’ll take you to the park. Thank Dr. Mac and let’s go.”

As he locked the front door behind the pair, he felt a pleasant glow. He hadn’t done too badly with the child. Obviously unusually intelligent and mature. And her mother was either separated or divorced. He’d bet on divorced.

The child would be off at her daddy’s tonight.

He wondered if he could think up a reason to call Kit up and maybe take her to dinner.

Call her up? Just how in the hell did he expect to do that? Even if she had a light on the phone and picked it up, she wouldn’t be able to hear a word he said.

“EM,” Kit called up the stairs. “Your dad’s here.” Then she turned to the tall, handsome man who stood just inside the door. “You’re late, Jimmy. It’s almost three.”

He grinned sheepishly and shoved an unruly shock of sandy hair back from his forehead. Once that gesture and that grin had won him forgiveness for every lie he told, but they no longer had the power to charm her.

“Sorry, babe. Saturday night, you know how it is.”

You bet she did. Cop bars, pitchers of beer, too much laughter invariably leading to some sort of confrontation. She’d dragged Jimmy away too many times not to remember.

Jimmy’s shifting eyes and even broader grin told her that Emma had come down the stairs behind her. That was one of the things she most hated about her deafness—Godzilla could walk up behind her and she’d never know until he bit her head off.

Emma grabbed her mother’s arm and turned her around so that she stared directly into Emma’s eyes. “Mom, will you be all right by yourself?”

“I think I can just about handle it, thank you.”

“You going to Granddad’s for dinner?”

“I can probably manage to microwave something all by my very own self.” But she smiled to show she was kidding.

“Oh, Mother,” Emma said. “Come on, Daddy. Can we go to the park?”

“Yeah, well, about that…” He pointedly turned away so that Kit couldn’t read his lips. She could, however, see Emma’s face and the look of resignation that came over it.

“Jimmy, playing video games while you sleep on the sofa is not much fun for a child. Couldn’t you do something Emma wants to do for a change?”

He turned back to face her. This time he didn’t smile. “Hey, she’s my kid too, okay? You don’t run my life any longer, okay?”

Kit bit down a reply. Not in front of Emma. “When will you be back? Emma has school tomorrow.”

“Yeah, I do remember about school. Eight, maybe nine.”

“Try seven, maybe eight. She has to be in bed by nine.”

He didn’t say anything else as he herded Emma out the door and into the front seat of his yellow Mustang.

Kit leaned on the door. The psychologists said that divorced parents weren’t supposed to let the child hear them snap at one another or say nasty things about each other. They were especially not to fight over the child. Kit tried hard.

Emma was too smart. When Kit and Jimmy had finally put an end to a marriage that both had known—almost from the start—was a mistake, Emma had been devastated. She’d been Daddy’s girl. Jimmy could do no wrong. The breakup was all Kit’s fault.

Kit knew that the divorce rate for cops was higher than for the rest of the population, but when she and Jimmy met at the police academy and married soon after they graduated, she’d never expected to become a part of that statistic. Now she wasn’t even a cop any longer—just a pensioned-off ex-cop. Jimmy would probably ride a squad car until he retired. That had been part of the problem—she’d had too much ambition to suit Jimmy, while he hadn’t had nearly enough to suit her.

Now Emma had endured two years of Jimmy’s canceled visits and his endless succession of empty-headed girlfriends. They either treated Emma like an interloper or fawned all over her to get close to her father. Just when she’d get used to one girlfriend, the girl would disappear to be replaced by a clone. There were so many that Kit had stopped asking their names, merely calling all of them “New Girl.”

Kit was having a harder and harder time convincing Em to spend Sunday afternoons and alternate Friday nights and Saturdays with her father. Jimmy kept promising that they’d go to see the latest movies, then reneging when New Girl preferred to see something R-rated that was unsuitable for Emma.

Occasionally, he simply got in a baby-sitter and left. At first Emma had refused to admit she’d been left with the sitter. Finally, however, she’d confessed in a welter of tears.

It was far worse, though, when Jimmy dumped Emma at his mother’s Germantown condo for the day. Kit carefully avoided saying anything negative about Mrs. Lockhart to Emma, even if there were times she had to bite her tongue. Jimmy’s mother didn’t keep to the same rules.

Mrs. Lockhart had never liked Kit. Not that she would have liked any woman who married her son. She’d been civil to Kit until the divorce. After Kit threw Jimmy out, Mrs. Lockhart switched from kid gloves to brass knuckles. And used Emma as her punching bag.

Kit remembered the Saturday afternoon when Emma came home from her grandmother’s with her eyes red from crying, slammed the door on her father and announced, “I won’t go to Meemomma’s ever, ever again.”

Since the scene took place shortly before Kit’s accident, she could hear the frustration and fury in her daughter’s voice. It had taken an hour of cajoling for Kit to get the whole story about the afternoon. By that time she was even angrier than Emma.

“All she does is bad-mouth you, Mom.” Emma switched to a Mississippi Delta twang that was such a good imitation of Mrs. Lockhart that Kit was startled. “If your momma took care of her family like a decent woman, your daddy would still be living at home instead of that puny little apartment. I told Jimmy when he said he was gonna marry her, I said, ‘She’s a mean ’un, you mark my words. Never cook you a decent meal or iron your shirts or keep a halfway decent house.’”

Kit had to laugh in spite of her anger. “Don’t you ever let her hear you do her that way, Emma Lockhart. Don’t let your daddy hear you, either.” She wrapped her arms around her daughter and pulled the child into her lap. She could hear Emma’s sniffles against her shoulder. “I don’t care what she says about me, Emma, but you shouldn’t have to listen to that stuff.” She smoothed her daughter’s hair. “She loves you, sweetheart, and she loves your daddy. She’s unhappy, is all.” What Kit actually wanted to say was that the woman was a harpy. “I’ll tell your dad she upset you.”

“No, Mom, you can’t! He’ll just get mad at me for telling. She goes on and on about how Daddy’s perfect, and you’re some kind of monster who goes around shooting people. She says you spent all his money and now he’s poor because he has to pay child support when you already make more than he does. She says I’d be better off living with her. I don’t want to live with her, Mom! I’d die. Where she lives smells like old people, and she hates cats.”

“Don’t you worry about that, baby. I wouldn’t let you live anywhere but with me.” Besides, Jimmy never wanted custody of you. She could never tell Emma that.

Emma touched her mother’s cheek in that way that melted Kit’s heart. It generally got her everything from a new doll to an ice-cream cone before dinner. “You can tell Daddy I don’t have to go back there ever again, right, Mom?”

Kit wished that were possible, but Jimmy would never agree, and once Emma was out of her sight and under his care, he could drop her anywhere he wanted. All she could do was talk to him and tell him that Mrs. Lockhart was making Emma unhappy. If he held true to form, he’d talk to his mother, but it wouldn’t change her behavior for more than one visit. Kit cuddled Emma and rocked her as she had when she was a baby. She ought to feel some sympathy for Mrs. Lockhart. She’d had a hard life. She’d had Jimmy when she was well into her forties in some unpronounceable Delta town in Mississippi.

Apparently, Jimmy’s father had spent his days over coffee at the local diner and his nights playing poker and drinking illegal booze with his farmer buddies. His wife had not only worked the farm pretty much by herself, she’d canned, sewed and baked biscuits from scratch three times a day.

Her experience should have made her applaud Kit’s desire to become a police officer and not be dependent on her husband. Instead, she resented anything Kit did that didn’t involve pampering Jimmy. Kit cursed the day Mrs. Lockhart had rented out the Mississippi farm and moved to a retirement condo in Germantown.

“Daddy keeps saying he’s going to take Meemomma and me down to the farm in Mississippi so I can ride a horse. He says he wants me to see where he grew up.” She sighed. “’Course, he never does.”

Until Kit’s accident, Emma had used the sudden and unexplained onslaught of stomachaches or even extra homework to keep from going with her father. Since Kit’s accident, she’d tried to use “looking after Mom” as an excuse.

Of course, Jimmy blamed Kit when Emma didn’t want to stay with him. He would never admit that after so many broken promises, a child like Emma would simply stop asking to be disappointed.

Kit knew Jimmy loved Emma, but she didn’t fit into his lifestyle.

He didn’t seem to realize that all too soon she’d be a teenager and then an adult, and he would no longer fit into her life.

Kit hadn’t wanted to ask him about his support check this afternoon. It was two weeks late. Before, when Kit had been making good money with the police department, the money hadn’t mattered so much. Now, even with her disability pension, she had to watch every penny. Jimmy’s check could at least buy Emma a new pair of Nikes from time to time.

Pushing herself away from the front door, she went to the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator and reached for a beer, then stopped and took a diet soda instead. Her mother was right. She didn’t have a problem with alcohol now, but boredom could very well lead to a major one if she didn’t watch herself. Besides, she really didn’t like the taste of beer.

Drink in hand, she walked from the kitchen to the den, where she turned on the television and stretched out in the recliner. She had closed captions on a number of channels, but there never seemed to be anything she wanted to watch. She tried to practice lipreading, but the faces were too often turned away or backlit.

So how to spend the afternoon? Running? Didn’t appeal to her. Besides, it was probably going to rain again any minute.

Riding her bicycle? Without Kev in the basket to warn her about traffic, she was asking for trouble.

The flower beds in the backyard badly needed to be cleaned up and weeded for spring, but she couldn’t get up any enthusiasm for that, either.

She needed a job, dammit! A job that she went to and worked at and then came home and rested from. A job that paid actual money and gave her actual satisfaction. She’d never been a stay-at-home housewife and mother.

What was she going to do with the rest of her life? Live on her pension? Sure, if she wanted to sweat every bill. She’d never wanted to be anything but a policewoman from the time she was five years old.

When the single thing that defines you as a person is taken from you, who the hell are you?

CHAPTER THREE

MONDAY MORNING Mac met Mark Scott walking down the hall of the clinic with his little black-and-white mutt at his heels.

“Morning.” Mac bent down and scratched Nasdaq’s ears while the little dog wagged its whole body. “I need to talk to you. Ten o’clock.”

“Okay,” Mark said, looking at Mac suspiciously. “Please don’t tell me you’ve discovered the newest piece of equipment to make you the perfect surgeon and it only costs two million bucks. I get enough of that from my beloved wife.”

“Sarah simply believes in buying the best for our clients,” Mac said with a perfectly straight face.

Mark rolled his eyes. “She’d been after me to buy the best from the first day she walked into this place. She made my life a living hell until I gave her what she wanted.” He grinned. “I got payback, though. She’s not only made me the perfect wife, she’s given me the perfect daughter. Not a bad trade-off for an ultrasound and a laser. So what do you want?”

As business manager of Creature Comfort as well as vice president of Buchanan Industries, Mark split his time between his cubbyhole in what had once been a storage room at Creature Comfort and a palatial office on the top floor of Buchanan Towers. Since Coy Buchanan—Rick Hazard’s father-in-law—had bankrolled Creature Comfort in the beginning, it was only right that Mark keep an eye on the clinic’s bottom line. However, clinic revenue had increased so much in recent months that he was around less and less these days.

“I do not want equipment.” Mac looked down at Nasdaq. “And put that dog on a diet.” He turned his back on Mark and walked toward his office.

He met Nancy coming out of his office with a sheaf of files in her hand.

“Oh, there you are,” she said, and thrust the files at him.

“And I’m supposed to do what with all this?”

“That’s a leading question, Doctor. Drink the coffee I just put on your desk and read them. You’re spaying a couple of cats at nine.”

“Great,” he muttered. Spaying cats, neutering dogs, stitching up gashes and pinning broken bones of animals whose owners let them loose in traffic. Was that all his life had become? He’d wanted to make a real difference. At least Sarah and Eleanor got to work on a variety of animals. The only time Mac saw the inside of a horse was when one of them needed his help, which, given their levels of proficiency, they seldom did. He badly needed a new challenge.

Maybe he should do what Liz Carlyle was doing—go back to school for a year and pick up an additional specialty.

He had a specialty, blast it. He was the best damn veterinary surgeon in the South—possibly the United States.

Yet he spent his nights watching television and his days spaying cats.

Maybe he should sign on for a tour of duty at one of the big African parks—they always needed vets. He could certainly afford six months of little or no money. Ngorongoro, maybe, or Kruger.

His partner, Rick, would have a heart attack if Mac even suggested a six-month leave of absence. He had responsibilities to the clinic.

“Your kitties are waiting for you,” Nancy said from the door.

“Shaved and prepped?”

“No, Doctor, I thought I’d leave all the prep work to you,” Nancy said with a sniff. “Of course they’re prepped. Come on, get your rear end in gear. You’ve got a full schedule, as you might know if you’d bothered to read what I left you.”

“Someday I’m going to fire you!” he called after her.

“One can but hope.”

He grinned. Anytime he started feeling sorry for himself, Nancy brought him up short. No matter how he snapped and snarled occasionally, he was doing the thing God had put him on this earth for, and doing it well.

Nancy, on the other hand, had been an up-and-coming professional Grand Prix show jumper on the verge of the big time—long-listed for the Olympics. Then the degeneration in her cervical vertebrae progressed so far and so fast that riding became agony for her.

Three operations had relieved most of the pain, but she could never ride again. She seldom talked about her neck, and when she did, she joked about it. But every time a horse came into the clinic, whether it was a small pony or that Percheron mare with the foal, she would go back to the stalls on her lunch hour to pet and hug it. Her eyes were always suspiciously red afterward.

Mac and Nancy worked steadily, and as usual, once he was immersed in surgery, he lost track of everything except the creature in front of him.

He didn’t hear the door to the surgery swing open behind him. “Thought you said ten o’clock,” Mark Scott said.

“Damn!” Mac looked over his shoulder. “Give me five minutes.”

“Go on, Doctor,” Nancy said. “I can close for you.”

He nodded and stripped off his gloves and mask as he followed Mark into his office.

“Okay, what do you want money for?”

“Marriage has made you suspicious,” Mac said as he slumped into the chair across from Mark. “How’s the kid, by the way?”

“Since Sarah’s been bringing her to work, you probably see more of her than I do.” Mark’s lean face split into a smile that could only be described as beatific. “Smartest child ever born, and the prettiest, which you’d know if you ever bothered to play with her.”

“Can we change the subject? I have a proposition for you.”

Mark rubbed his hand over his hair. “What is it?”

“I want to hire two more vet techs—one surgical and one nonsurgical.”

“We have Nancy for small animals and Jack for large animals.”

“They take vacations and get the flu. They are human, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“Sure, but I never imagined you did. We job out when we need extra help. There are plenty of people out there looking to work with animals for zilch money, which is what we pay.”

“I’m aware of that,” Mac said. “I want somebody I can train from the ground up to do what I want done in the way I want it. Nancy reads my mind. I need someone else who can do the same thing.”

“The woman’s tougher than I thought if she can stand to probe into that mind of yours.”

“I want to start advertising today, put the word out among the other clinics for somebody who has some experience and wants more—somebody willing to do the scut work.”

Mark sighed. “Okay, let me run the numbers. If they work out, you got it.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. I’d appreciate your starting with a part-timer until I’m certain the practice can bear the freight of a full-time surgical trainee. Maybe Alva Jean or Nancy knows somebody who’d be interested.”

Mac stood up. “I’ll ask. Now, Nancy needs me back to remove a steel pin from a Labrador’s hip. It’s starting to push through the skin and cause an abscess.”

“Thank you for that pretty picture. Come see us sometime. I’ll tell Sarah to bug you.”

“Yeah, right.”

He worked straight through lunch, which meant Nancy did too. At four o’clock she watched him finish off the final suture in the ear of a Border collie that had misjudged the distance between his ear and the horn of the ram he was herding. The ear had been nearly torn off and was bleeding profusely when the farmer carried him in.

Now the owner came out of the waiting room twisting his John Deere cap in his hands. “He gonna be all right?”

“Fine,” Mac said. “He’s groggy, but you can take him home. He’s had antibiotics and I’ll give you some more. The sutures should dissolve in ten days or so.”

“Poor old Ben.”

“He’s not old—I’d say under two,” Mac said.

“Little over a year. No, I meant this might set him back a tad when he faces down his next ram. You have never seen a more embarrassed dog than ole Ben was when that ram tossed him ass over teakettle down the pasture.”

“Well, we saved the ear, so he won’t bear the scars of his encounter.”

“Thanks, Doc. Wouldn’t think of running livestock without my dogs. I’m too old, too lame, and they’re a damn sight smarter than I am.”

As Mac turned to go back to his office he came face-to-face with Kit Lockhart. The wind had tossed her hair, and the sunlight from the west-facing window turned her eyes to emeralds.

Coming this close to her had a visceral impact on him that unnerved him.

“Can I take Kev home?” she asked.

He stepped back from her and composed his face. “Haven’t had a chance to check him out today, but I would have heard if there was a problem,” he said, speaking slowly and letting the sun fall on his face. “Come on back.”

He noticed she held a harness with a bright orange pad that said Working Dog on it. A much smaller version of the gear he’d seen used on Seeing Eye and helper dogs.

She caught his eye. “Kevlar’s on duty all the time,” she said. “The harness is for his protection so people don’t distract him in public.”

“Does it work?”

She grinned. “Almost never. Everybody still wants to pet him.”

As he started back toward the kennel, Mabel Halliburton called out to him, “Dr. Mac? When you have a minute I need to ask you something.”

He nodded.

Kevlar had been moved from ICU to the regular recovery kennel area in the next room. He opened Kevlar’s cage and picked him up, carefully avoiding the incision along his flank. He set him down on the examining table in the center of the room, and reached for a thermometer.

Kit stood silently while he checked the dog over. Kevlar whimpered a little when Mac touched his incision, but the chart indicated that all Kevlar’s kidney tests were normal.

“No fever,” Mac said. He had raised his head to look at Kit when he spoke. “He needs to stay quiet for a while, and he probably won’t feel like doing much running around for some time.”

“When should I bring him back here?”

He wanted to tell her tomorrow—just so he could see her again. But that was stupid and juvenile. Besides, she’d never fall for it. He heard himself saying, “You’re on my way home. I’ll be happy to check him out in two or three days. I’ll give you a call…” He felt his face flame.

She laughed. “Just come by. If the Jeep’s in the driveway, I’m home. What symptoms should I worry about with Kev?”

“Worry about a sudden rise in temperature, inability to urinate, whimpering…never mind that one—Emma can tell you if he cries. If he does, get in touch with me immediately.”

“Can I use a regular thermometer?”

“Right. But tie a string around the end of it before you insert it. You don’t want it to get lost. Normal for a dog is about a hundred and one. You should worry about general malaise. I’ll send you home with a bag of special dog food, but you can get it cheaper at your local pet store.”

“One thing, Doctor. I know this is going to cost a fortune. I really hate to ask, but is there any way I can space out the payments over time? Or even do some work here at the clinic to help pay my bill? I’m strong as an ox and I’m not afraid of hard work. And I’m really good with computers.”

Now her face was the one that was flaming. He could tell she hated asking him. The Saturday surgery and the aftercare would add up to a hefty sum. She was probably on disability if her accident was work-related. Maybe she was hanging on with welfare and ADC.

He realized he had no idea what she did or how she had been hurt.

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll work something out.”

Nancy came toward them. “Little guy going home with you? Big’s going to hate that. He’s fond of him.”

“Big’s fond of everything that walks, flies or swims.”

Nancy touched Kit’s arm so that Kit looked at her. “I overheard what you two were saying.”

Kit sighed. “Money’s pretty tight. I’ll pay my bill, I promise, but sometimes I can’t pay all at once. I wish I could get a part-time job, but I really don’t even know where to look. I have to pick Emma up at school unless I make arrangements. It’s not easy finding a job where I don’t have to hear. I can’t clerk in a convenience store or anything.”

“What do you do all day now?” Nancy asked.

Kit’s blush intensified. She had that clear, pure redheaded skin that showed the movement of every corpuscle. “I…get my daughter off to school, and pick her up, do housewifely things and exercise and shop.”

“You’re probably getting bored.”

“Getting bored? I’ve been bored out of my mind for the last three months. I can only take so much daytime television, even with closed captioning. And I never did learn to knit.”

Mac realized he’d been cut out of the conversation completely. Kit could concentrate on only one person at a time. He felt annoyed that Nancy had butted in until he heard what Nancy had to say next.

“You said you could use a computer?” she asked.

“I type about a hundred words a minute, actually. You have no idea how much paperwork I had to fill out before my accident.”

“Impressive speed.”

“But anybody can use a computer.”

“Not Dr. Mac,” Nancy said. “He’s a dinosaur.”

Both women looked at him with pity. He made a face at them and pulled Kevlar closer.

“So how would you feel about scrubbing cages and mopping floors?” Nancy continued.

“Since when have you been the Creature Comfort human resources manager?” Mac asked.

“You’ve been muttering about hiring a part-timer. And Mabel’s been telling everybody for a month that if she doesn’t get somebody to take the computer work off her hands she’s going to quit.”

“When did she say that?”

“Oh, about every day. But you veterinary types never listen to us peons.” She turned to Kit again. “You could come in after you take your daughter to school, and leave in the afternoons in time to pick her up. You’ll probably start by scrubbing cages or taking the animals for walks. We never know from one day to the next what we’ll be doing. Are you physically all right? Except for the hearing, I mean?”

“Absolutely.” Kit’s face lit. “But could I bring Kev?”

“Don’t see why not. He doesn’t fight with other dogs, does he?”

“No, and he loves cats. He lives with one.”

Nancy turned to Mac. “Well, how about it, Doctor?”

“We’ll have to discuss it at the staff meeting tomorrow morning,” he said, although he knew in his heart he would press to have Kit hired. It had nothing to do with the fact that she stirred his blood. She was a woman who needed a hand up. Maybe it was time to be Mr. Nice Guy. It would certainly make a change.

“Well, peachy,” Nancy said, lifting her eyes to heaven. “You do that.” She took Kit’s arm. “In the meantime, Dr. Mac’s got one more cat to spay.”

Kit gathered up Kevlar, put his harness on him gently and lowered him to the floor. He sat at once and looked up at her expectantly. “Home,” she said.

He stood and walked off at her heel.

“Now that’s the kind of dog to have,” Nancy said.

“Pretty high-handed, aren’t you?” Mac jabbed.

“Absolutely. You know how she went deaf?”

“No idea.”

“Me neither. But I’ll sure find out.”

Mac pressed his palms against his eyes. “Okay, where’s this cat?”

“There isn’t one. I just said that because if you don’t have at least some peanut butter crackers and potato chips out of the machine, you’re going to pass out facedown in somebody’s intestines.”

“What about you?”

“I brought myself a healthy lunch. Turkey sandwich and an apple. I just finished. You might consider packing yourself a lunch. Or don’t you do that sort of thing?”

“Even I, Miss Mayfield, can make a turkey sandwich,” he said and headed for the conference room.

As he munched his peanut butter crackers, he remembered that he’d promised to drop by Kit’s house in a couple of days to check on Kevlar. In the meantime, he could consult with his partners about trying her out on a part-time basis. The scrubbing and cleaning part of the job required no special skills. She said she had the computer skills already. Why not give her a chance?

MAC HAD PROMISED to check on Kevlar. Tonight— Wednesday—was the night. He nearly lost his nerve when he saw a dark-green van parked behind Kit’s Jeep. Then he told himself that since this was a purely professional call, and since he couldn’t have telephoned ahead to let Kit know he was coming, he’d simply ring the bell and assume she wasn’t having a party.

The instant the bell sounded, he heard Kevlar’s bark from inside the door, and a moment later, Kit opened it.

“Dr. Thorn?” She sounded surprised.

He felt tongue-tied and dry-mouthed. Ridiculous. He drew himself up to his six feet four. “I’m checking to see that you’re looking after Kevlar properly.”

“Oh, really. See for yourself.”

“I don’t want to intrude. You have company.”

“Hey, Doc,” a male voice called from the living room. A stocky young man with a buzz cut stuck his head around the corner of the door. “It’s me, Vince Calandruccio. Adam’s daddy.”

A moment later the largest black German shepherd Mac knew—and he knew plenty—stuck his head around the door as well.

Mac grinned and said, “Hey, Adam, how’s the arthritis?”

At a hand signal from Vince, Adam came forward, carefully sidestepping Kevlar, who stood quietly beside Kit. Mac dropped to one knee and began to ruffle the shepherd’s ears.

“Adam moves a whole lot better, Doc, since you put him on that new stuff. You should have seen him do the police obstacle course last Friday. Fast as he was when he was a pup, weren’t you, boy?”

Mac looked up and saw that Kit was getting only a few words of their conversation because Vince was behind her and Mac had bent his head over Adam. He stood, looked at Kit and spoke slowly. “Since Kevlar seems to be doing well, I’ll be on my way.”

“How would you know?” Kit said. “You’ve barely looked at him.”

“Hey, no, Doc,” Vince said. “Stay long enough to have a beer.”

“I don’t want to interrupt.”

“Interrupt, hell. Me’n Kit been friends since police academy. She worked the Dog Squad for a while until they found out what a great sniper she was.”

“A sniper?” He turned to stare at her. “A police sniper?”

“First woman in the T.A.C.T. squad. First woman sniper,” Vince said proudly. “Best in the business. Take out a gnat’s eye at a thousand yards. You ever get into a hostage situation, Doc, you better pray they send our gal Kit out to save you.”

“Not any longer.” Kit sat in a wing chair beside the fireplace. Kevlar immediately jumped into her lap, turned in a circle and settled down. “Men are supposed to be better snipers than women because their pulse and heart rate are slower, but mine used to be so low that every time they took it they wondered if I was actually alive.”

She shrugged her shoulders as though it didn’t matter, but Mac could tell it mattered terribly. “I could probably train hard enough to get it down again, but my depth perception’s all screwed up.” She touched the scar that bisected her eyebrow. “Besides, who needs a sniper who can’t hear the order to fire?”

Mac had never registered that Kit’s sardonic look came from the thin scar that raised her left eyebrow slightly. “The scar is barely visible. Good stitching.”

“As good as yours?” She raised that eyebrow at him.

He lifted his shoulders. “Close.”

“So how ’bout that beer?” Vince headed for the kitchen with easy familiarity.

Adam followed his master with his eyes, but didn’t rise from his place beside the couch.

When Vince came back with the drink, Mac took the beer, which he really didn’t want, and sat opposite Kit so that she could see both his face and Vince’s. “Where is your daughter?” he asked.

“Upstairs doing homework.”

Vince stretched out his thick legs in front of him and leaned his head on the back of the sofa. “Doc, as long as you’re here, how about some advice.”

Mac nodded.

“See, you’re keeping Adam here going fine, but he’s seven years old now and close to retiring as a police dog. The canine unit likes younger dogs.” Vince reached down and scratched behind the dog’s ears. “He’ll be going home with me for good when he does. See, right now we either get dogs from Germany—that’s where Adam came from—or from a guy in Ohio who breeds German shepherds specifically for police departments.”

“I know that.”

“He assesses the pups and does basic training for the first two years, then if he thinks a dog’s a good candidate, he recommends we buy it. So far he’s been a hundred percent on the nose. We’re paying upward of ten thousand bucks a pup, then we have to complete the training and train the handlers ourselves.”

“Ten thousand dollars?” Mac said. “Isn’t that a bit steep even for a good shepherd?”

“Not for these guys,” Vince said. “The imported Belgian Malinois cost even more. Thing is, I think with the right female, I could breed some pretty good pups from old Adam here.”

“Possibly.”

“I got my eye on a great big old girl from outside Leipzig in what used to be East Germany—that’s where Adam came from. I’ve got permission to breed her to him if I can get her over here. I could undercut the guy from Ohio and still make one heck of a profit, even if I only sold one pup a litter to a police department and the rest for pets.”

“So what do you want from me?”

“Think Kit here could manage a kennel?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I want to set up a kennel on some land I’ve got over in Hardeman County. If I can persuade Kit, we could go in together on the female and split the profits. I could keep working while she looked after the kennel.”

“It would certainly be worth investigating,” Mac said, trying to keep the dismay out of his voice. He wanted to keep Kit in his sight, not fifty miles away. “Since Kit will be working at Creature Comfort now, she should certainly be getting some excellent training.” He spoke to her. “Do you have any experience running a kennel?”

“Of course not. The whole idea is crazy, Vince. Where would Em go to school? What about Jimmy’s visitation rights? This house?” She turned to Mac. “Who said for sure I’ll be working for Creature Comfort? Did I miss something?”

“We talked it over at the staff meeting. Nancy put in a good word for you and they agreed to hire you part-time. It’s all settled. I thought we might discuss salary tonight.” He glanced at Vince. He liked Vince but he wished he’d take the hint and leave.

“Hey, it’s okay if you don’t want to go in with me. Maybe it’s too soon,” Vince said. “I’m still going to try to buy that female, though. I can raise a litter of puppies in my backyard, see how it goes. I’m glad you’re going to be getting out of the house more, Kit. When are you going to come down to the gym and start working out with the boys in blue again?”

“Don’t forget I’m not in blue any longer.”

“That doesn’t matter. You’ll always be one of us. You know that. Well, old Adam and me have to get home.”

Vince stood and Adam came to attention beside him, eyes on his face. Vince gave him a hand signal, and he fell in beside his master.

Kit walked into the front hall with Vince.

Vince hugged her and kissed her on the cheek. “Bye, sweet thing. Come on down and see us, y’ hear?”

Mac felt a jolt of adrenaline when Vince hugged Kit. Were they really just friends? He didn’t want there to be anything between them—between Kit and anybody.

As Kit stood in the door and waved goodbye to Vince and Adam, the telephone on the hall table rang. He could see the red light blinking, but Kit was facing away from it.

Instantly Kevlar jumped up and bumped her hand. She turned, saw the light and picked up the telephone. “Just a minute, whoever you are. This is the wrong phone. Hang on.” She said to Mac, “The phone I use is upstairs in my bedroom. Excuse me.”

He started to tell her goodbye, but she turned and took the steps two at a time before he could. Incredible legs. Great rear end too. He’d never much liked muscles in a woman, but the thought of those legs locked around him started a chain reaction that he’d prefer Kit not see when she came downstairs. He went back to the living room to wait for her.

It was a comfortable room with bookshelves packed with current fiction on either side of the fireplace. A few pieces of furniture that his mother would probably approve of, but mostly an accumulation selected with taste but without much money. He had picked up a picture of a much younger Emma, when he heard Kit coming downstairs.

“Sorry. Jimmy wanted to change his night to have Emma sleep over. One of these days I am going to kill him.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Jimmy Lockhart, Emma’s father, my ex-husband. He rides a patrol car. He makes me so mad. He thinks having Emma sleep over is something he does when one of his bimbos cancels.” She sank into the recliner. “God, I’m sorry. You don’t need to hear my problems.”

“At Creature Comfort we all interact like family.” He felt his face flaming. Of all the stuffy, stupid things to say! “Now, I really must go. Thanks for the beer.”

“When do you want me to show up at Creature Comfort?”

“Would next Monday be too soon?”

“Not at all. We can talk about how much I can pay toward my bill out of my salary.”

“Don’t worry about your bill.”

She put her hand on his arm to turn him to face her. “Can’t lip-read your back, Doctor.”

“Sorry. I said, don’t worry about your bill.” God, he loved the way she watched him, the way her lips parted and almost spoke the words as he did.

If he didn’t look out, he was going to grab her and kiss her.

And probably wind up flat on his back with a karate chop to the throat.

“Uh, see you Monday.”

He practically fled from the house. As he jumped into his car, he saw the curtains behind one of the upstairs windows flutter. Emma. He started the car and burned rubber getting away.

CHAPTER FOUR

WHEN KIT OPENED the door to the Creature Comfort conference room early the following Monday morning, Nancy looked up from the comics section of the morning paper. “I wasn’t sure you’d show up.”

“Neither was I,” Kit replied, taking her outstretched hand. “I nearly lost my nerve. I’m not sure I can do this job without a good set of ears.”

The early-morning mist still hadn’t lifted from the Creature Comfort parking lot, although the weather was supposed to clear later in the day. About time. Everybody was sick of the unending late-February rain. Even the jonquils beside the roads looked dispirited.

Kit had dropped Emma at school, then had driven straight to Creature Comfort. Until the accident, she’d loved being surrounded by people. Now she realized that for eight months she’d seen almost no one except her doctors, the audio-clinic staff and her immediate family—if she could still consider Jimmy Lockhart family. She felt shy and out of place. These people knew one another well, worked together all the time. Could she possibly fit in? Would she see conversations around her that she couldn’t interpret? The speech pathology people had warned her against becoming paranoid. It was easy to imagine others were gossiping about her.

Nancy bent to ruffle Kevlar’s ears, then tilted her face up so that Kit could read her lips. “Around here you may find it a plus not being able to hear. All the barking and yapping gets to you after a while. Come on, I’ll show you around and introduce you to the staff that’s here. Later I can fill you in on them over lunch. Did you bring your lunch?”

“You’re going to have to speak more slowly,” Kit said. “I only got about half of that.”

“Oops. Sorry. Did–you–bring–your–lunch?”

Kit laughed. “Not that slowly! The way it works is that I catch some of the words and fill in the blanks from what seems logical. B’s and P’s and M’s look almost alike, but if somebody says, ‘How about you blank me after work?’ the chances are she’s saying ‘meet’ me after work, not ‘beat’ me after work. Not unless you’re talking to somebody deeply weird.”

“As the Mad Hatter told Alice in Wonderland, we’re all mad here,” Nancy said as she shoved through the doors to the kennel. “And overworked, as you’re about to see.”

With Kev trotting at her heels, Kit followed Nancy to the large-animal area.

Nancy knocked on the first door on her left, waited a moment, then opened it and stood back for Kit to follow.

A pretty woman in a lab coat sat behind a desk piled high with reports. A happy baby toddled around the edges of a large playpen beside her desk.

Nancy pointedly looked back so that she was facing Kit. “Dr. Sarah Scott, this is Kit Lockhart. She’s going to be working part-time with us in the small-animal area. Kit, this is Dr. Sarah Scott, head of our large-animal section.”

The baby bounced up and down. “And this,” Nancy said, “is Nell, known to all and sundry as Muggs.”

At the mention of her nickname, the baby opened her mouth and began to make what must be crows of delight. Kit stiffened. She’d never be able to hear her own grandchild’s voice—assuming she ever had a grandchild!

Sarah came around her desk with her hand outstretched. “Hi. Welcome to the nuthouse.”

“Thanks. Can’t be any nuttier than what I’m used to.”

“Keep that thought.”

Nancy took Kit’s arm and led her down the hall. At the far end a wizened elf of a man was giving the Percheron mare a shot in her neck.

“Jack Renfro. He does for Sarah and Eleanor Chadwick, our other large-animal vet, what I do for Mac.” She paused. “But not half as well.”

He pointed a crooked finger at her. “None of that now, missy.” He took Sarah’s hand. His felt like old leather and twisted twigs. “Happy to meet you, lass. Nancy told me already we’re to have you with us part of the day.”

“We also have Kenny Nichols part-time,” Nancy told Kit. “He comes in after school three days a week. He’s off to Mississippi State to do pre-vet as soon as he graduates. You’ll meet him and Dr. Chadwick later.”

Kit learned that Bill Chumney—the veterinarian who handled exotic animals—was on assignment in the Black Hills and wouldn’t be back for several weeks. And Dr. Weinstock was off in Kentucky doing something with horses for the next month.

As she followed Nancy back through the door that separated the small-animal area from the large, she hoped she’d run into Dr. Thorn. Nancy had made a few comments about his bearish reputation, but so far Kit had seen nothing from him but kindness. He might be a little gruff, but he had been charming to Emma and had taken the trouble to make a house call on Kevlar on Wednesday evening. She wanted to thank him for giving her the chance to work again. Besides, he was the first man she’d met since her divorce who attracted her. Big, competent men always had. She’d actually thought Jimmy was competent.

She felt certain Dr. Thorn was the genuine article.

“I THOUGHT YOU WANTED to train another surgical assistant,” Rick Hazard said as he poured himself a third cup of coffee and took it back to the conference table.

“Kit’s bright,” Mac said. “She could learn.”

“That’s about the only job she can’t do around here. She can’t hear you and she won’t be able to read your lips through your face mask.”

Mac flushed. “So Nancy will train her to take over the other duties—dispensing meds, draining wounds, aftercare, checking on ICU patients. Big still gets confused sometimes and doesn’t want the responsibility. Except for the occasional parrot, our clients don’t generally communicate in words. I think Nancy can bring her along fast.”

“I just wish you’d let me at least interview the woman before you brought her on board.”

“Mark approved the expenditure. You agreed to try her at the staff meeting. Don’t go back on your word now.”

Rick raised his hands. “Don’t get huffy. I’m sure she’ll be fine. When can I meet this paragon?”

“This afternoon. According to Nancy, she had an appointment scheduled with her doctor. She’ll be back for a bit after that. Nancy already had her fill out employment forms, so she can start learning her responsibilities this afternoon and really get started tomorrow.”

“Fine. I’ve got a lunch meeting scheduled with Mark and my esteemed father-in-law at Buchanan Industries’ corporate dining room.” Rick crumpled up his cup and lobbed it expertly into the trash. “I can meet her this afternoon.”

“Money problems?” Mac asked. He knew that Coy Buchanan was a tough old coot whose only soft spot seemed to be his daughter, Margot.

“For once, apparently not. Creature Comfort’s more than meeting objectives.”

“Good. Then maybe we can afford another trained vet tech on staff and a couple of clerks.”

“Whoa!” Rick said. “We may be meeting our objectives, but we’re still not rolling in money.”

As he followed Rick out of the staff lounge, Mac said, “Kit Lockhart will be bringing her dog to work with her.”

“Another one?” Rick stopped with his hand on the doorknob. “We’ve already got Mark’s Nasdaq running around, and Big sneaks Daisy in every chance he gets. The last thing we need is another—” He stopped in midsentence. “Oh, damn, I forgot. He’s a helper dog, isn’t he?” He shrugged. “I guess she needs him.”

“He’s well-behaved. I promise he won’t eat the patients.”

“SOMETIMES I WISH the Internet had never been invented.”

Dr. Reuben Zales rubbed his hand across his completely bald head and took a deep breath. “I’ve read the same articles you found on that site, Kit, and a great many more in medical journals. The operation they’re talking about is experimental, and I mean very experimental. At the moment it’s far, far too risky.”

Kit leaned forward and put her hands on the edge of his desk, palms up as though in supplication. “But it sounds perfect for me, Reuben.”

“Sure it does. And maybe in five years, or even two or three if they have good results, we’ll look into it.”

“But it said—”

“I said I am familiar with the Internet site, Kit.”

She couldn’t hear his tone, but she suspected there was an edge of exasperation creeping in. He didn’t like to have his judgment questioned. He admitted he was conservative. Maybe it was a good thing all she got was the words.

He ran his tongue over his lips. It was a constant gesture, almost a tic, and it drove Kit crazy because he spoke while he did it. What she read came out like some archaic Far Eastern language. “Stop that,” she snapped.

He looked at her blankly.

“The tongue thing. I can’t hear you when you do that.”

“What tongue thing?” He dismissed her comment at once. He obviously wasn’t even aware he did it. “Okay. Let’s make it simple. Yes, regular cochlear implants can be miracles. For some people, not for you. You know that. We’ve consulted and discussed a dozen times. The operation you found on the Internet is far more than a simple cochlear implant. I can do those all day with excellent success rates and almost no complications. What you’re talking about is a cochlear implant with a computer chip and wires into the brain—almost like an antenna hard-wired into your head. Yes, it might work. Yes, it would be wonderful, and no, not yet. You could wind up with seizures or God forbid a brain hemorrhage or throw a clot from the operation itself.”

“But the success rate is eighty percent…”

“According to the Internet. It might be eighty percent out of a total of ten patients. Even eight hundred out of a thousand means two hundred failures. Listen, ten years ago bone marrow transplants were very dangerous. They still are, but the success rate and the new techniques make them much less so. We transplant hearts and kidneys and implant pacemakers and defibrillators like garage mechanics. Now. But we didn’t when we started. Let those geniuses practice on some other people before they work on you.”

“But—”

“You are young, smart, tough, healthy, quick and you’ve made incredible strides in lipreading. You have closed captioning on your television. Your computer lets you talk on the telephone—”

“Only at my own computer in my own house.”

“Still. And now you’ve got Kevlar…”

The little dog that lay beside Kit’s chair raised his head and wagged his stumpy tail when he heard his name.

“You’re functioning better than nine-tenths of my patients.”

“That’s because I’m working so hard at pretending this deafness thing is only a small inconvenience. Reuben, you deal with deaf patients every day, but you don’t have a clue what it’s really like to be locked into this silent world. If I thought it would last forever I don’t know what I’d do—I can wait if you make me, but I miss hearing Emma’s voice. And music. Emma hates having me like this. She doesn’t say much, but she’s stopped having her friends for sleepovers, and she practically dives into the car when I pick her up at school for fear some of her classmates will come over to chat with me. God, Reuben, what if I can’t hear her say ‘I do’? What if I never hear my grandchildren laugh?”

He threw up his hands. “I wasn’t aware that she was engaged. Obviously we’d better fly you to Boston this evening.”

“All right. So she’s only ten years old. But all I can see is this blasted silence stretching away until the day I die. Sometimes I don’t think I can take it any longer.”

“By the time Emma is married and pregnant—in that order, I hope—you’ll have had the operation. You’ll hear your grandchildren laugh.”

“Promise?”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“But you think?”

“Yeah. They’ll probably have something even better by then. So far I’m told that with the successful procedures, the patient only gets hearing like a scratchy old Caruso record.”

“Reuben, at the moment I’d kill for a scratchy Caruso.” She looked at her watch. “Oh, Lord, if I don’t get out of here I’m going to be late getting back to my new job.”

“Job?”

She picked up Kevlar’s leash. “I’m working as a grunt at Creature Comfort, the vet clinic.”

“Lisa takes Biff and Shorty there. Great place.”

“They saved Kevlar’s life. He had to have a kidney removed.”

“He’s okay now?”

“Fine. Thanks to Dr. Thorn. Do you know him?”

“Lisa’s mentioned him. Great with his hands, very, very bad with his bedside manner. If you’re going to work there, it’s probably a good thing you can’t hear him.”

“So I’ve been told. Okay, Reuben. If you’re absolutely dead set against it, I won’t risk that operation right this minute. But you have to promise me you’ll research it and talk to the guys in Boston. Try to figure out the absolute first minute it’ll be safe for me to have it.”

“That I’ll do, but don’t expect me to fly you off to Boston tomorrow.”

In the parking garage she strapped Kevlar into his car seat so that he could see out the windows, strapped herself in and started to back out of the parking space. Kevlar put a paw on her arm. She braked and checked her rearview mirror again. A red Corvette, nearly too low to the ground to be seen, flashed by and raced down the ramp.

“Whew! Too close, Kev. Thanks. I didn’t see him.”

The dog wagged his tail and grinned. She drove out more sedately. She’d never realized how much she relied on sound. Before, she’d have heard that idiot’s tires squeal around the corner even before she saw him. Thank God for Kevlar.

“You know, boy,” she said as she drove toward Creature Comfort. “I may be a risk-taker, but I’ve never been foolhardy. I always called for backup when I needed it, and followed my commander’s orders. The screwup with the flash-bang didn’t happen because I went off half-cocked.”

She turned onto the interstate that led to Germantown.

“Mom taught me that the important thing for a cop is to go home alive at the end of the shift. Take as few risks as possible, but be aware that the risks are always present. Now I’m stuck in a situation where I can’t even assess the danger.

“The last thing I want is to stick Emma and my parents with somebody who has seizures or is half-blind. Emma’s had too much put on her as it is. No wonder she’s scared. A ten-year-old shouldn’t have to play momma’s little helper. Momma’s supposed to help her.”

Kevlar leaned over as far as his car seat allowed and licked her ear.

“Okay, so you’re momma’s little helper.” She laughed and wiped her ear. “You better keep your mind on your work once we get to the clinic. Stay away from the big dogs that could scarf you up as a morning snack.”

WEDNESDAY MORNING of her first week she’d come in earlier than usual because Emma had some sort of early breakfast thing at school. Kit stuck her head into the first treatment room because the light was on.

Liz Carlyle hovered over a tiny red dog that lay on its side on the table. She looked up when Kit opened the door and said, “Thank goodness. Come on in here, will you? Nobody else is in yet.”

Kit came in and sent Kevlar to the corner of the room to lie down.

Liz looked up at Kit and said slowly, “She’s a Brussels griffon. Her owner dropped her off just before midnight. She couldn’t stay. She’s got kids at home. These little folks almost never have more than one pup per litter, but I think she’s got two squeezed in there. If she doesn’t deliver at least one in the next five minutes I’ll have to cut her.”

Kit nodded. “I’ve never been around anything like this.”

“Just don’t faint or scream,” Liz said. “Hey! I think we’ve finally got some action!”

The pup looked more like a wet, red gerbil than a dog. At Liz’s instructions, Kit wrapped it warmly in a towel and jiggled it until it began to breathe. Meanwhile Liz ignored her as she gently pried the second pup out of its mother with the tips of her fingers. As Kit bundled that one against her chest, Liz began to work furiously over the little dog. Five minutes later Kit held a third pup.

“Enough!” Liz said and turned to Kit. “Can you handle all three of those guys while I carry the mother to the whelping box?”

Kit nodded again. “Sure.”

“You’re going to have to sit beside them and watch until everybody’s suckling.”

Once the pups and mother were installed in the warm box, Liz put her hand on Kit’s arm. “I heard Rick come in. I’ll tell him what’s going on. He can take over. I’ve got to get some sleep.” She pressed the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

Liz looked down at the little dog that was already nuzzling her tiny pups into place against her nipples. “Three pups! That’s practically a record.”

An hour later Nancy came in and sank onto her haunches to look at the pups. “Ooh, they’re teensy.” She grinned at Kit. “That’ll teach you to come in early.”

In the next week and a half, Kit taught abandoned kittens how to nurse from a baby bottle, sat with a Labrador puppy that had been hit by a car, until it came out of anesthetic, and helped deliver a baker’s dozen of puppies from a Great Dane. Whenever a small animal needed a baby-sitter, everyone seemed to turn to Kit. Even Dr. Sarah requested her services to stay beside a foal whose crooked front legs had been straightened and splinted.

“Pups from tiny to giant,” Kit told her father over dinner Friday night.

“Can I see the puppies?” Emma asked. “I’d a lot rather see the puppies than spend the night with Daddy.”

“They’ve gone home, baby,” Kit said. “But the way things are happening, I suspect there’ll be plenty more. Seems like this is the season for babies. Dr. Carlyle says those three Brussels griffon puppies she delivered last week are worth at least a thousand dollars each and the Great Danes yesterday will sell for about eight hundred. The owners want good vets to deliver as many healthy babies as possible, not to mention saving the mother if she gets into trouble.”

After Emma reluctantly left to spend the night with her father, Kit sank into the wing chair in her living room opposite her father.

“So, you like this job?” Tom Barclay asked.

“Love it so far. Nice people, good hours, and nobody seems to mind that I can’t hear.”

“How about that Dr. Thorn who saved Kevlar? You work with him at all?”

“Good grief no, Dad. As a matter of fact, I seldom see him. He’s always in surgery with Nancy.” She moved uncomfortably in her chair.

“I’ve heard he has quite a reputation with the ladies.”

“Really?” Kit tried to sound casual.

“He dated the daughter of one of Catherine’s clients. She decorated his apartment.”

Kit shrugged. “He’s management, Dad, I’m definitely labor.”

“He’s not married. You ought to start thinking about dating again.”

Kit put up her hands. “Please, Dad. No men in my life ever, ever again. Jimmy gave me enough problems for a lifetime. Besides, I’m a deaf woman with a kid. Hardly marketable goods.”

“A good man wouldn’t care.”

“Find me a good man. So far I’ve come up empty.”

Her father stood and Kevlar jumped off Kit’s lap to stand beside him. “Your mother ought to be home from her meeting by now. See you at church on Sunday?”

“Maybe.” She kissed her father’s cheek and let him out the front door. As she watched him climb into his car, she said to Kevlar, “My father, the incurable romantic. The eye of an eagle. But he can’t possibly know Mac Thorn turns me on. Come on, Kev, let’s hit the treadmill.”

KIT FELT HIM before she turned and saw him. She didn’t react to other people that way. It wasn’t that she smelled him. She’d learned to identify the odor of her mother’s familiar perfume and her dad’s scent of wood chips and sawdust. She smelled Emma’s little-girl scent sometimes, but Mac Thorn didn’t have a discernible scent. No aftershave, not even that antiseptic odor that lingered around some of the doctors who’d treated her in the hospital.

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