“Conan, please.”
He curled his tail more tightly around his body and squinched his eyes shut, feigning sleep. Unless she was offering sautéed shrimp, she could forget it.
“Conan, just try one little bite.”
Something disgusting was wafted in front of his nose.
Diet cat treats. Ha, as if the words diet and treat could be used successfully together. He opened one eye, glared at his mistress and then snapped it shut again.
“Conan, you know what the vet said. You are a tiny bit overweight.”
The vet was a horrible old man who smelled overwhelmingly of dogs. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the good doctor’s body odor and breath gave away an even more treacherous secret: vegetarian.
The veterinarian was a dog-loving vegetarian, and she was going to take diet advice from him? The man knew nothing about the delicacies of dealing with a cat, that had been obvious.
He heard his mistress walk away, so Conan opened one eye, placing an orange-colored paw carefully over it so he could watch her unobserved.
He felt momentarily contrite. Her copper-colored hair, usually so neatly put back into a bun, was hanging loose around her face. Her green eyes were wide with worry, and there was a wrinkle in her normally unblemished forehead. She was still in her pajamas, something unheard of, even if it was Sunday morning.
She was obviously distressed, and it made Conan realize that she really was not as confident or mature as her primly done hair and straight-lined business suits suggested. Really he was partly to blame for that visit to the vet.
Okay, fully to blame. He’d been a free-roaming tabby his entire sorry life, until he’d found himself in lockup and had been rescued by her late last fall.
At first he thought he must have used up his ninth life, even though he’d been counting pretty carefully and thought he was only on seven. For it had seemed, after being adopted from the Hunter’s Corner Pet Shelter, that he must have died and gone to heaven!
Miss Bridget Daisy was one of the few people he’d ever met who really deserved to own a cat. First the name: Conan. Celtic for “mighty one,” she’d explained to him after days of making lists and debating over just the right name. Really, what could have been more suiting? The mighty one. Perfect.
And then the food! She was constantly delighting him: roasted chicken livers, succulent steak bits and his all-time favorite, sautéed shrimp.
Okay, okay, things were not perfect, even in heaven. When winter had come she had presented him with a sweater with his name on it. And a horrid little hat. A guy should have had way more pride, but he had a weakness for the shrimp. Miss Daisy might look innocent, but she knew how to play a guy’s weaknesses.
Right now, having been shrimp-deprived for three whole days, he’d probably wear a tutu for one small morsel of seafood, any variety.
But the biggest problem with coming home to Miss Daisy hadn’t been the clothes, as humiliating as they were. No, it had been the fact that she wouldn’t let him outside without a leash. A leash! Of course, in the winter, who wanted to go outside anyway? Winters were made for snoozing on the couch. But spring changed everything…
Which brought him to the visit with Dr. Veggie, the vet.
Conan had been perched in one of his favorite places—on the back of her couch—minding his own business, really.
And then the bird had landed at the feeder, a location that had seen dismally little traffic over the winter but was looking more promising now. The front-yard feeder was shaped like a little house, with shutters and cute signs all over it that said things like Open for Business and Birds Welcome. As if birds could read! The expression birdbrained had not manifested out of thin air.
The bird at the feeder had been a purple finch, something Conan adored even more than shrimp, if that was possible. He felt finch had the most delectable flavor—slightly wild and faintly smoky with just a touch of bitter aftertaste, probably from the feathers.
In no time at all, focused with hunter intensity on the bird, Conan had totally forgotten the window. He had gone into a crouch, his tail switching, his eyes narrowed on the prey. He’d waited, knowing the bird would make a mistake, land on the ground, greedy thing, wanting that one more tiny seed….
There it was. His moment. Even as he’d launched himself, he’d heard her voice in the background.
“Conaaaan, nooooo!”
Too late.
He’d bounced back off that window as if he was a tennis ball spiked from a racket and lay on the floor dazed, blood—important blood, his—splattering the carpet around him.
Hence the unfortunate meeting with Dr. Veggie, a white-haired antiquity with more wrinkles and creases than that Shar-Pei monstrosity Conan had been forced to share the waiting room with. Conan had hated the little winter balaclava Miss Daisy had made for him, but he hated this more—his whole head wound with white tape, his ears poking through two holes in the top, his face completely surrounded in white as if he were a nun wearing a wimple.
It was horrible. And was there a little sautéed shrimp to help him through his most humiliating moment? No, there was not.
Because the evil dog lover had pronounced him overweight. Nothing so scientific as a scale either. Just prodding with those poochie-smelling fingers that had been God knew where else that morning!
Miss Daisy could be counted on to be thorough, though. She had taken him home and put him on her bathroom scale. He should have known her gasp of dismay did not bode well for his culinary endeavors. She had actually thought the scale wasn’t working.
“Twenty-six pounds! Conan, I don’t think that’s possible.”
Of course it wasn’t possible. He was a little portly, not fat. It was not at all his fault. His mother had also been big-boned.
But then Miss Daisy had weighed herself, and it seemed the scale had been correct after all.
So now he lay curled on the couch, looking like a cat extra for The Mummy and feeling slightly crazed from food deprivation. It was a low point in his life, he decided. He’d had a sniff of the diet food she’d put out and decided it was worth sulking for a few more days to see if he could make her come around.
He heard her pick up the phone and perked up slightly.
Maybe she was giving in. Would the pizza joint be open at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning? He got the pepperoni nicely gobbed with melted cheese, and she got the inedible portions—tomato paste and crust. There was simply no figuring humans.
“Dr. Thornfield?”
Conan groaned and put his head back down.
“It’s Bridget Daisy. I’m sorry to bother you at home. I’m calling about Conan.” There was a long pause. “No, no, his head seems fine. No, no blood seeping through the bandages. Of course it doesn’t stink!”
The man was gross. Couldn’t he word things more delicately than that?
Her voice went very low, as if she didn’t want Conan to hear, but he was a cat, which meant superior hearing. Superior everything, come to that.
“I think he’s depressed,” she whispered into the phone.
Yes! Depressed. Treat immediately with vanilla ice cream, with just a little shrimpy-poo on top.
Miss Daisy was quiet for a moment and then when she spoke, her voice had an unfamiliar icy note in it.
“I can’t believe you said that! You think I need to occupy myself? A husband? A child?”
Conan winced and barely staved off a painful flashback from his former life. Oh, no, he did not care for husbands or for children, and look how quickly she had taken the dieting advice!
But he needn’t have worried. Her voice was now quite loud, shrill even.
“What a totally unprofessional thing to say! I thought you were a man of education and refinement. I can see now I was wrong. You are—”
Conan held his breath, waiting, delighted. You give it to him, Miss Daisy, he thought. He was streetwise enough to have various phrases at hand that he would have loved to hear her use on the evil dog-loving, diet-prescribing Dr. Veggie.
“You are—” her voice quivered with righteous anger “—hopelessly old-fashioned!”
Disappointment washed over Conan. Sheesh. Hopelessly old-fashioned? What about You are a dog-breathed poop eater? What about You are a birdbrained worm slurper? Sometimes Conan wondered if there was any hope at all for Miss Daisy.
She marched into the living room. “Why,” she said, her voice still quivering with indignation, “he’s just another barbarian. Just like all the rest of them in this town.”
Ah, yes, Conan had heard quite a lot about the town’s barbarians. That was how Miss Daisy referred to the male population. Beer-swilling barbarians whose idea of culture was growing in the bottom of their lunch pails. According to Miss Daisy, every single man in Hunter’s Corner, Ohio, loved duck hunting and fishing and playing pool. The name of the place should have given her a clue. Redneck heaven.
Duck hunting usually involved dogs of some sort, so Conan was against that, but he thought she might have been too quick to write off fishing. A nice freshly caught trout, braised in butter and garlic, was nothing to turn up one’s nose at!
He had no opinion on pool, but if it was one of the reasons Miss Daisy had ended up at the animal shelter seeking companionship, he could hardly condemn it.
She never really said she was lonely, but Conan could tell. She’d told him most of her life story his first night in residence, curled up together on the sofa, her popping little soft-centered nondiet cat treats into his mouth as she talked.
She was from Boston and had a master’s degree in library science. When she’d been offered the position of librarian here, in this northeastern corner of Ohio, right after completing university, she had jumped at the opportunity.
“Of course,” she had told Conan that night, “I always thought I’d move on. To a bigger place, a city bursting with art and live theater and music. To a place with corner cafés that serve lattes, quaint little bookstores filled with old treasures and outdoor flower markets.”
She sighed heavily and pulled him more tightly into her bosom. “But, Conan, I have come to love my little brick library across from the town square. I’ve done so much with it in the two years I’ve been here! We have story time and a poetry club. The chess club meets there once a week. Why, the collection is marvelous for a small-town library! How could I leave it?”
Still, he could see her dilemma. How was a woman like her ever going to find companionship in a town where men drove pickup trucks with wheels nearly the size of her house?
At the animal shelter, of course!
Barring the sweater, hat and leash, it had not been an unhappy arrangement, really, until the last three days. Now Conan wasn’t so sure if it was going to work.
“I’ve got it,” she said suddenly, squatting down by the couch and running her hands tenderly through his fur. “I know how to make you happy.”
He sighed with relief. Their first fight over, then. Of course she knew how to make him happy.
She was reaching for the phone book. Oh, goody. That meant takeout. Perhaps she had just realized the calamari was calorie-reduced. With a nice little side of salt-and-pepper squid…He began to purr happily.
She was frowning at the phone book. “How do I find a contractor?” she muttered. “Every single one of them will take one look at me and realize I’m a woman alone. I’ll be overcharged for shoddy workmanship.”
What the heck was she talking about? What did any of that have to do with honey-glazed salmon?
“I’ll ask Fred, the maintenance man at the library,” she decided, closing the telephone book.
Conan willed her to reopen it to the Yellow Pages, Restaurants, but she did not.
Instead she picked him up as if he didn’t weigh anything near twenty-six pounds and waltzed around the room with him tucked next to her heart.
“Conan,” she announced, “you are getting a cat door!”
His disappointment was sharp. A cat door was a long, long way from the little tuna sushi rolls that he favored.
“I’ll have it installed in the back door and I’ll have the fence replaced around the yard and then you can go outside and play while I’m at work. I won’t have to worry about you going over the fence either.”
My God, she thought he was too chubby to drag himself over a fence?
He glared at her, but she was oblivious to his mood, dancing around, blabbering about drawing up specifications.
Her mood was hard to resist, however, and suddenly it struck him what he was being offered.
Freedom. The great outdoors in springtime.
She had bird feeders everywhere in that backyard! It would be like having his very own drive-through window.
I’ll have the McFinch, please.
Conan chuckled to himself. It came out as a deep, rich purr, and his mistress hugged him tighter.
“I knew I could make you happy,” she said blissfully.
Justin West hopped out of his truck and eyed the house. It was in the older part of Hunter’s Corner, a neighborhood called Honeysuckle, where small, postage-stamp-size houses sat on huge lots surrounded by the neighborhood’s namesake. At this time of year the air smelled sweet with the scent of the blossoms that hung heavy in the shrubbery.
This house was extremely well kept, the shingle siding painted sunshine-yellow, the trim, stairs and window boxes white. Cheerful red geraniums were already planted in those boxes. A front window was open and a lace curtain danced on the light spring breeze.
“Thanks, Fred,” Justin muttered.
Justin owned West’s Construction, a construction company specializing in framing new houses. The north side of town was building up phenomenally as more and more people left the cities looking for exactly what Hunter’s Corner, population fifteen thousand, had to offer—a small-town feel and flavor.
There was no Wal-Mart, no Starbucks, no multiplex theaters. The town was tidy, safe and neighborly. For amenities, it boasted a town square with a park that children still played in. There was a library, a swimming pool that was open in the summer, two grocery stores, one ice cream parlor and close proximity to the great outdoors and all its attractions. People here sat on their front porches, grew gardens, threw out a fishing pole in their spare time. Kids rode their bikes down the tree-lined streets and walked unescorted to school.
Justin West had more work than he knew what to do with.
He didn’t need the kind of job a tidy house in Honeysuckle implied—a little old lady who wanted a new washstand for the backyard. He’d be plied with cookies and tea—and get phone calls long after the job was done about imaginary popped nails or squeaks. When he arrived to investigate, there would be more cookies and tea and pictures of the new grandchild.
On the other hand, Fred had asked him to come and at least look at the job. And how could he say no to Fred?
In his seventies, Fred was still the town maintenance man, refusing to reveal his actual age or to consider retirement. He had also been Justin’s father’s best friend since the days when Hunter’s Corner had been little more than an autumn retreat for city boys who wanted to bag a deer or two. Fred had been there through all those lonely, hard years when the Alzheimer’s took hold, wrapped its tentacles around Justin’s father’s mind, changing him from a powerful man into a baffled, helpless child. Fred had never once said, “I’m too busy,” when Justin called in panic because he had to be at work and his dad was having one of “those” days.
His dad had gone finally, a bittersweet blessing. And now Fred was asking a favor of him, of Justin, for a lady friend.
Justin wasn’t going to return the friendship and loyalty that Fred had shown his father with I’m too busy, even though he was.
Justin took the front steps two at a time, knocked on the door—loudly, in case Fred’s lady friend was deaf. He thought it was nice that Fred had a lady friend. Fred’s wife had been gone for nearly fifteen years. And his best friend for just over a year. It was about time—
The door opened, and Justin reeled back, nearly stumbling off the step. He grabbed the handrail and steadied himself.
The woman smiling tentatively at him was shockingly beautiful, maybe particularly in contrast to his expectation that the door was going to be opened by someone old and wrinkled and deaf.
Justin gauged her to be in her mid to late twenties. She had hair the exact color of shiny new copper, pulled back quite severely off her face. But the severity of the hairstyle only emphasized the loveliness of her features: high cheekbones, a pert nose, a small tilted chin, a gloriously generous mouth. There was the slightest smattering of freckles over milky-white skin, and eyes that were huge and green as Smoky’s Pond on a summer afternoon. She was slender as a reed and petite, the kind of woman that gave a man the dangerous feeling that he was big and strong and that he had been put on this earth for the sole purpose of protecting those more fragile than himself.
She had an enormous orange cat in her arms that was comically bandaged around its head. Justin had a feeling it might be a mistake to laugh at the cat, which was glaring at him with baleful dislike. She juggled its bulk to offer a slender hand.
“Justin West?” she asked.
He took a steadying breath and accepted her hand. It was cool and soft and small—and packed a jolt like a shock from a circular saw with a bad connection in a rainstorm. He held her grip a fraction longer than might have been necessary. The cat shifted its weight, forcing her to withdraw her hand or let the cat slide down her front.
“I’m Bridget Daisy. Thank you for coming.”
So he did have the right address. She was Fred’s friend, though obviously not his lady friend in the way Justin had imagined. He glanced at her ring finger. Bare. Lord have mercy!
“Come in.”
He stepped by her, aware of a lovely fragrance, light and sweet, as he moved directly into her living room. The room increased his sense of being big and male, clumsy and uncouth. There were trinkets, potted plants, a vase of fresh flowers on the floor at the edge of the couch. If he breathed, he was going to break something.
“Have a seat,” she suggested.
Where? Everything in the room was small and frail-looking, not man-size at all. The tiny sofa was set on curvy legs and was covered in a fabric that looked suspiciously like ivory silk that would be destroyed by his just-finished-work-for-the-day jeans and T-shirt.
His gaze caught on an old leather wingback that looked slightly sturdier than her other furniture. The chair was rump-sprung, as if it was the favored spot of someone with a little more meat on their bones than her. Justin beelined for it, but her delicate cough stopped him just short of sitting down. He glanced back at her.
She smiled apologetically. “That’s Conan’s chair.”
Conan? He felt a wave of relieved disappointment. Ring fingers didn’t really tell the story these days. But he should have known a girl like her came with a guy named Conan. Muscle-bound. Big. Territorial. Couldn’t the roommate build her washstand or whatever she wanted?
She moved by him and set the cat in the chair. “Isn’t that right, Conan?”
Conan was the cat? The cat inspected the spot carefully, turned two full circles, then plopped himself down. The chair groaned, and the cat gave Justin a look of naked dislike, as if it was somehow his fault the chair was making noises. Then Conan dismissed their visitor by delicately lifting his tail and beginning his bath.
“I didn’t want you to get hair on your clothes,” Miss Bridget Daisy told him.
He looked down at his clothes. Like a little cat hair would hurt? But she gestured to the sofa, and he reluctantly perched on the corner, trying to make as little contact with the highly soilable silk as possible.
She took the far end of the same sofa, and now that she wasn’t hiding behind the cat, he could see she was wearing a businesslike suit in an unflattering color that flattered her nonetheless. Despite her slenderness, she had curves in all the right places. When she sat down, the tight skirt edged up, revealing the most adorable little kneecap.
“Sorry?” he said, realizing she was saying something.
“Thank you for coming on such short notice. Fred said you were very busy. How do you know him?”
“He’s my godfather. He and my dad were best friends since they were kids.”
She folded her hands primly over that delicate little knee and regarded him solemnly. “How long have you been building, Mr. West?”
“Justin,” he corrected her. “Uh, ever since I can remember. It’s a family business. Between my grandad, my dad and me, we’ve built just about every building in town.”
“Oh.” She looked very pleased by that. She slid a little clipboard out from behind one of the cushions and made a mark on it. “So is your work guaranteed, then?”
He realized, stunned, that he had somehow become an involuntary participant in a job interview. He ordered himself to wake up and quit looking at her kneecap, to take charge of this situation by letting her know in no uncertain terms he wasn’t going to be insulted with an interview. That’s not how it worked.
He came in, looked at the job, gave her a price. Take it or leave it. Unfortunately her eyes were every bit as distracting as her kneecap.
“I stand behind my work,” he said shortly.
“Of course you’d sign something saying that?”
Devastating kneecaps and eyes aside, he could feel himself starting to get annoyed. “What kind of job do you have?” he asked. He hadn’t even said he’d do the job, and she was talking about signing something? He had houses to build. He was doing her a favor by being here!
Almost shyly she reached behind her pillow again and came out with a thick manila folder, which she passed to him. The shyness—her dropping her thick lashes over the amazing green of her eyes rather than holding his gaze—made him bite back his annoyance and take the folder.
“This is my project prospectus,” she told him happily, meeting his eyes briefly before looking away. Was she blushing?
He tore his eyes away from the heightened color in her cheeks and felt the weight of what had been passed into his hands. It was thicker than the Hunter’s Corner telephone directory. What the hell was her project? A new shopping mall? The Taj Mahal comes to Ohio?
He opened the cover of the folder. A full-color eight-by-ten glossy of the cat was clipped to the first page. In the photo the cat was wearing a knitted purple sweater and he looked none too happy about it either.
Justin shot Bridget Daisy a wary look. Was she nuts? What a shame that would be, but of course that would explain why a woman this gorgeous but single had gone undetected on the Hunter’s Corner bachelor radar. Not that, God forbid, he was on the lookout for single women. After having had responsibility for his ailing father since high school, Justin West was enjoying freedom.
Getting tied down would not be his idea of a good time.
An evening with those kneecaps, though, no strings attached…
He looked hurriedly down at her “prospectus.”
“I’ll go make us tea while you have a look at that.”
“Great,” he muttered, but kissed his fantasy of an evening with her kneecaps goodbye. Tea? If the offer had been for a beer or, better yet, a whiskey, there might have been hope, but he could see there was not. She was not his kind of woman.
While she busied herself in the kitchen, he reviewed a two-page letter that invited him to study the Statement of Work—in brackets, SOW—for the installation of a Cat Door and Yard Fence and then sign the Contract for Work (COW) if he was in agreement with the SOW.
With growing consternation he studied her invitation. Lettered from A to I, she required a firm price, payment schedules, commencement dates and completion dates, warranties of workmanship and materials, proof of insurance, four references and any other information he felt might be pertinent.
He listened to the kettle whistle in the kitchen, eyed the door, thought of Fred and took a deep breath. He opened page one of her twelve-page Statement of Work.
On page three he got it suddenly. He peeked up from the document and saw her in her kitchen arranging cookies on a plate.
He slid a look around the living room. There had to be a hidden camera somewhere. The guys loved a practical joke, and this was a good one. Imagine them roping Fred into playing a part in getting him here. Pure genius, that one. This probably wasn’t even her house. She was an actress, maybe even a professional one, though Justin wasn’t sure how you went about finding someone like that in Hunter’s Corner. He decided he’d play along until she said, “Smile, you’re on…”
She came back in with a silver tea tray and set it on the coffee table. The teacups looked as though they held about a thimbleful of tea, which suited Justin just fine. He wasn’t much of a tea drinker. He watched, reluctantly fascinated, as she poured. He didn’t think the queen could do it any better.
“Have you had a chance to look things over?” she asked eagerly, passing him a cup and a saucer. When he took it, the tea sloshed out of the cup. The cup was flimsy, as if it was looking for an excuse to shatter, and his fingers did not fit through the wispy little handles the way hers did. He could only hope it was a prop.
“This is a complicated job,” he said solemnly. He took a sip of tea and tried not to wince at the bitter, weedy flavor, since he was sure that would entertain the guys more when they reviewed their videotape. He set the cup down, locked his hands together and leaned intently toward Bridget.
“You probably didn’t know that the construction of the door affects the integrity of the structure of the house. It won’t be cheap.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said sadly.
God, she was good. The guys must have the tape running. He hoped so. Because he planned to have the last laugh when they all looked at it together later.
“For instance, this—” he flipped randomly to page four of the SOW “—about R28 insulation? That would make the depth of the cat door at least eight inches. And heavy. Not even Mr. Hefty over there could push it open.”
“Mr. Hefty?” she said. Her voice had a little squeak in it that seemed quite genuine and her eyes sparked with indignation that looked real.
“Not to worry,” he assured her. “All problems are surmountable. We’d have to install an electronic opener.”
“For a cat door?”
“Well, you’re the one who specified R28,” he pointed out not unkindly, playing to the camera that he just knew was in here somewhere.
“I didn’t realize that would make the door quite so cumbersome,” she admitted.
She talked like a girl with a college education. Yeah, majoring in drama. She was frowning and looking anxious.
Playing it perfectly. And the Academy Award goes to…
He ignored the distressed look and flipped to another page of the SOW. “And this part here, about preventing rodent infestation? You have to take it further than that. You have to think of skunks and raccoons. Even a small break-and-enter artist—one of those young kids who hang around the park at night—might be able to squeeze through.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” she said nervously.
“No, ma’am. I can see that. Twelve pages of SOW and you missed the obvious. Luckily I have a solution.”
“You do?” she said hopefully.
“Yes, ma’am. I think we could rig a computer system that identifies your cat, and your cat only, by his nose print.”
She went very still. Comprehension dawned in her eyes. After a long time she said very softly, “Are you making fun of me, Mr. West?”
“Hell, yeah!” She winced when he said hell. “The game’s up. I know the guys put you up to this. A twelve-page prospectus for a cat door! Ha-ha.”
He slapped his knee, but noticed uncomfortably that Miss Bridget Daisy was not laughing.
