Animal Magnetism

Three

L ilah Young forced herself to cross the yard and get all the way to the front door of the kennels before allowing herself to glance back at the truck.

He was still there: Brady Miller, pilot, photographer, kisser extraordinaire, slouched behind the wheel, hair still messed up from her fingers, watching her.

Letting out a low breath, she pressed a hand low to her abdomen. “Sweet baby Jesus,” she whispered.

“Quack,” Abigail said.

With a low laugh, Lilah opened the door and managed a smile at her business partner, Cruz Delgado. “I’m back. Again.”

Cruz’s perfectly toned hard body was still where it had been two minutes ago when she’d come running in-sprawled flat on his back in the center of their greeting room, with Lulu on top of him.

Lulu was a lamb that thought she was a puppy. She belonged to one of their clients who was out of town for a few days, and she sometimes needed a little extra TLC in the middle of her day. Okay, all of the time she needed a little extra TLC. Lulu was a ’ho for TLC. “How many times do I have to tell you,” Lilah said to the lamb. “Cruz is mine.”

From the floor, Cruz grinned, then pushed Lulu off of him and sat up. His silky dark hair fell into his face, but he shoved it back, flashing laughing melted-chocolate eyes Lilah’s way. “She was feeling lonely. We were playing tag. She won.” He rose to his feet, scooped Abigail up, and disappeared into the back. When he returned without the duck, he took the box from Lilah’s arms next and smiled down at the three sleeping babies. “They were good for you?”

“Not even close, the little heathens. Don’t get me started.”

Cruz looked out the window at the truck turning around in the front yard. “So where’s your Jeep?”

She didn’t really want to talk about it, not when she could still hear Brady’s truck’s motor, just the sound making her nipples hard. “The Jeep’s on Main. Don’t ask. Today’s crazy enough. We have a full house, and I have a message that there’s a new rescue at Belle Haven.”

She and Cruz had rotating shifts that allowed the kennel to be open for enough hours in the day to be effective. They traded off between two shifts-six A.M. to two P.M., and noon to eight P.M.-with part-time help from high school kids on the weekends and as needed.

Lilah typically took the early shift because Cruz didn’t do early. But he had a gig tonight in Coeur d’ Alene, where he moonlighted as a bass guitarist in a cover rock band, so he’d come in at six o’clock.

Along with the kennels, Lilah was the go-to person in town when there was an abandoned animal. There was no official humane society in the area, so if an animal needed temporary shelter, she was it. This came mostly from her inability to bear seeing anything suffer and the fact that she got far too attached to every animal she met. The rescue part of the business was extremely nonprofit and depended on grants and donations, so Lilah-along with Cruz-worked hard to keep the kennels afloat.

Their only source of income. A typical workday began at the crack of dawn with the day’s client files spread out in front of her. She reviewed all the pets coming in or going out and decided where they would be kept. The facility had several sections: the outside pens, the inside pens, and the inside playroom, where the friendly, well-adjusted animals could hang out together under careful supervision. The not-so-friendly and grumpy older clients, were separated out from the pack and dealt with individually. It was usually those animals that claimed Lilah’s heart the fastest.

Part of the morning’s record-keeping process always involved reviewing any other important events such as vet appointments, client visits, and employee notes. In today’s case, there’d been an abandoned dog dumped off at Belle Haven, the veterinary center a half mile down the road.

Belle Haven was run by her two closest friends, Adam and Dell. They were holding the dog for her. She’d pick him up and care for him until she placed him in a foster home. But first she looked herself over. “I got up too late to grab a shower. I’m going to go take a quick one now before I head to Belle Haven.”

“Need me to soap your back?”

She slid Cruz a long look. “Been there, done that, remember?”

“I remember it was good.”

“Uh-huh.” They’d dated for approximately two weeks several years back, until they’d realized they were far more suited for this, for a friendship. “Except for the part where we drove each other crazy,” she reminded him.

“Yeah.” He blew out a sigh. “Maybe you could work on not driving me crazy.”

She laughed. Living in a small town had made it hard for her to find a guy she meshed with. There weren’t all that many to choose from in the first place, and the few that there were, she’d known a long time. Forever.

She loved Cruz, but they were day and night when it came right down to it. And the biggie: she wasn’t in love with him, and she never would be.

Ditto for him. He liked to be the center of a woman’s universe, and she had too many things in her orbit to give herself wholly. Luckily, they’d both survived the attempt, and so had their business. “Let me guess-Marie dumped your sorry ass again?”

He shrugged. “Little bit, yeah.”

Lulu bumped her head into Lilah’s thighs until Lilah bent and stroked the lamb’s ears. “What did you do this time?”

He sighed. “I forgot our anniversary.”

“What anniversary? You’ve only been dating a few months.”

“Not that kind of anniversary.” When he waggled a brow, she rolled her eyes.

“TMI. And just make it up to her. I’m sure you can figure out how.”

He was thinking about that when Lilah headed out. She lived in a small cabin next door, and when she slipped inside the small cozy place, she sighed. It was neat and clean and warm, and unlike just about everything else in her life, all hers.

But.

But even with the three years that had gone by, it was still too quiet without her grandma’s cheerful voice.

“Mew.”

Lilah looked down at the three-legged black cat winding her way around her ankles. There were rescues coming in and out of her life, waiting patiently for the right home, but Sadie was her favorite. Lilah knew that wasn’t fair, but tell that to her heart. Twice she could have placed Sadie with a foster home, but she hadn’t been able to do it.

Whenever there was even a hint of an animal being fragile, she had a hard time letting it go to an adoptive family. And though Sadie wasn’t fragile, she was special.

Okay, so the truth was, they were all special to her. She couldn’t help it, she just couldn’t make herself abandon anything, ever. After all, she knew what that felt like.

“Mew,” Sadie said, bumping her little head to Lilah’s calf.

Lilah scooped her up and nuzzled her close.

Sadie was deceptively small, and it made her look like a kitten even though she was full grown. The mistake was in thinking that she had a kitten’s temperament. She didn’t. She was ornery as hell.

“Miss me today?”

Sadie blinked up at her sleepily, the rumble of a purr thick in her throat as she leaned in-and bit Lilah’s chin.

“Gee, hungry?”

“Mew.”

Rubbing her chin, Lilah moved to the window. Brady’s truck might be gone, but the memory of his mouth on hers was not. He was a bit more attitude-ridden than I usually go for, but trust me, it worked for him.” She met Sadie’s narrowed gaze. “Hey, don’t judge me. It’s been a long time for me.”

And she’d been lonely.

The truth was, she needed… something.

Actually, someone. She needed someone. But Sunshine was small, and the problem wasn’t helped by the fact that Adam and Dell tended to watch over her like they were her big brothers, making it clear that anyone with less-than-honorable intentions were risking life and limb.

Which had left her with slim pickings and a secret yearning for a guy with some not-so-honorable intentions.

Like Brady…

She knew why Adam and Dell did it. They’d been the ones to help her pick up the pieces when she’d come back to Sunshine during her second year of college to quietly and completely fall apart. The reasons had been complicated, but in short, her grandma had died and she’d let a guy devastate her. It’d taken a while, but eventually she’d picked up the pieces and moved on. Gotten stronger. Adam and Dell knew this, but old habits were hard to break. “Is it so wrong to want a guy in my bed?” she asked Sadie.

Sadie just stared at her with those pale green eyes, and Lilah sighed. Much to her annoyance, she’d been fairly unsuccessful at getting any man she knew to cross Adam or Dell. Fairly, because certain guys were just good at being sneaky and getting around the watchdogs.

Cruz, for one.

But she didn’t count Cruz because she didn’t ache for him.

She wanted to ache, dammit.

Her thoughts drifted to Brady and she shivered. “He kissed me,” she told Sadie.

Actually, she’d kissed him first, and then he’d taken over. And oh boy how he’d taken over, with that bone-melting aggression that had seriously rocked her world. It’d taken her right off her axis, in a good way, a way she’d been unconsciously needing quite badly.

And she’d hit his truck. “God,” she moaned, and covered her face. “I am such an idiot.”

“Mew.”

“Okay, no opinions from the peanut gallery, thank you very much.” She pulled out her cell phone and speed-dialed Dell. The three of them had gotten tight a few years back, when the guys had bought the property down the road from hers and built the animal center. They had no family to speak of and she’d just lost her grandma so they’d created a tight-knit family of their own.

Dell’s phone went right to voice mail, so she tried Adam. Same thing. “I had an I Love Lucy moment,” she admitted in her message. “A doozy. I’m going to shower, then head over to get the rescue dog and I’ll tell you guys about it then. Oh, and I’m sort of going to need a little help with the Jeep.”

The Belle Haven center was close enough to Coeur d’Alene and neighboring smaller towns like Sunshine to serve domesticated animals but it was also ideally located in ranching country to specialize in bigger animals, both wild and ranching-based as well. Dell ran the place with a growing staff and a reputation that had spread to the entire northern state area. Adam was in search and rescue. He trained and bred dogs for S &R teams across the country and was also extremely well known-much to his discomfort.

Lilah set her phone down and stripped on her way to the bathroom, passing her kitchen table in the process, which was still strewn with her laptop and books. She’d fallen asleep there sometime past midnight and had woken with a page from her biochem book stuck to her face.

She still hadn’t finished studying and had a paper due and a midterm coming up in both physics and animal biology, but that would have to wait. She let the baggy, grungy work clothes fall where they might. They’d suited their purpose this morning cleaning out stalls, but they sure hadn’t suited her purpose to meet an enigmatic stranger. She wondered what he’d thought of her, then told herself it didn’t matter.

Besides, he’d kissed her-so how put off by her appearance could he have been?

She let the water pound over her body and then turned to her shelf, filled with her guilty pleasure-soaps and scrubs of all scents. Coconut, she decided. She felt like being a coconut today.

As the warm scent permeated the bathroom around her, she relaxed, standing there under the spray for long moments, dragging it out as long as she could, in no hurry to get on with the rest of her day.

“Ack!” she screeched when the water went suddenly icy, as it did every day thanks to her ancient water heater. Shivering, she stepped out of the shower and onto the mat of her teeny bathroom, banging her knee on the toilet, which was the last straw. “Shit!”

Sadie, sitting in the sink prissy as could be, smirked.

“ Shit doesn’t really count as a bad word,” Lilah said in her own defense as she grabbed a towel. “It’s practically a legitimate adjective.”

Sadie lifted her back leg to wash her lady town.

“Yeah, yeah.” Lilah bent for her clothes and shoved her hand into the front pocket to pull out a dollar. She walked it to the kitchen and dropped into her swear jar on the counter. The jar had been Mrs. Morrison’s idea, the owner of a parrot who’d stayed with Lilah for a week last month when Mrs. Morrison had gone on a Mexican cruise. When she’d come home, her parrot had a new vocabulary made up of “crap,” “shit,” and “Dammit, Cruz!”

The jar had at least fifty bucks in it.

When it reached two hundred, Lilah was going to splurge on a spa day. At this rate, she’d have it by next week.

She pulled on fresh jeans and a scooped-necked T-shirt, then dropped two pieces of bread into her toaster, one of them being the heel because she needed to go grocery shopping, a chore she put up there with cleaning out the crates at the kennels. When the toast popped up, the lights in the kitchen flickered and went out. She’d blown the fuse again. She swallowed the very bad four-letter word on the tip of her tongue because she was broke and grabbed a new fuse from the stack in the drawer.

The cabin needed work more than she needed her next breath of air, but for now, with business loans hanging over her head and school debt looming, Lilah was like a drowning victim going down for the last count. She replaced the fuses as they blew-which was all the time-because it was still cheaper than trying to redo the entire electrical in the place, something that needed to be done sooner than later. Just thinking about it had her chest tightening.

Save the stress, she told herself, for when you have a spare pint of double-fudge ice cream to go with it. Sighing, she looked at the toast. She had to skip the butter because it was healthier that way-and also because then she could justify the ice cream later. But she did add strawberry jelly, because hey, that was a fruit.

Stepping outside, she started walking to Belle Haven. The trail was drenched from the heavy rains of the night before, and the rough terrain gave beneath her boots like live sponges. She loved being outside after any rain, and she inhaled deeply the scent of wet nature. Her very favorite scent of all.

The lake was backed by rolling hill after rolling hill, and beyond those, the towering peaks of the Coeur d’Alene’s, the colors so deep and mesmerizing the whole setting looked like a painting.

The trail ended at the center. The building itself was a two-story sprawling place, with several pens and a large barn alongside, with several more smaller buildings for equipment. Lilah walked through the parking lot and saw Adam’s and Dell’s trucks. Adam’s was freshly washed and shiny as always, and Dell’s was covered in a fine layer of dust and filled with work equipment, sporting gear, and whatever other stuff he’d put in there and forgotten. She might have smiled. After all, just being here filled her with a warm peace. Except that right next to their trucks sat a third.

This truck’s back bumper was cracked and dented, as if someone in a Jeep-a very tired, overworked someone-had rear-ended it.

Oh God. Brady was parked in the lot next to her best friends as if he belonged in their world right alongside them.

And that’s when it hit her. Where she’d heard his name before. An odd mixture of dread and anticipation mingled in her gut along with something else that she couldn’t quite put her finger on, something that she didn’t know what to do with. She walked through the front entrance and waved at Jade, the receptionist on the phone behind the big welcome desk. There was a wide-open space that greeted both two- and four-footed clients alike, and a comfortable seating area spread out strategically to encourage people to hang out in front of the huge wall of windows overlooking the land and the animals on it.

Three horses were out in one of the paddocks, a sheep in another, and on the outskirts stood a flock of geese who’d waddled over from the lake to watch the goings-on.

Inside, several people sat in the waiting room along with their dogs and cats and, in one case, a caged bunny.

Lilah walked through, heading to the offices, stopping to take a quick look out into the glorious day, the first without rain in two weeks. What she would give to be sitting on a blanket in front of the lake, the water lapping at her feet, a good book in her hand-and not her animal biology book. But it’d been a long time since she’d had enough wriggling room to just hang out and be.

“Never gets old, does it?”

She turned at the masculine voice that was as familiar to her as her own.

Dell slung a friendly arm over her shoulder. He was an outrageous but harmless flirt and could make ninety-year-old women preen and get infant girls to bat their eyelashes. One reason was his easy good looks. He was six foot two and still built like the football quarterback that he’d once been. He had the warm mocha skin that spoke of Native heritage and the sharp eyes to match. His black hair framed a striking face. He wore his sleeves rolled up, his shirt unbuttoned at the collar and untucked over a pair of well-worn jeans, and he would have looked like a college kid except for his eyes. His eyes said he’d seen too much for his barely three decades.

But his smile was pure devil. It never failed to crack her up that he broke hearts right and left and had no clue to his own power. He was the heart and soul of Sunshine, and the rock of all of them.

“I tried calling you,” she murmured, turning into him for a hug.

“I was in surgery. I called you back-you didn’t get my message?”

“No.” She pulled out her cell, which now showed one missed call. “Must have been in the shower.”

“It’s okay.” They were out of view from the people that were waiting on him, and he smiled into her eyes. “We have news.”

“About…?”

Dell turned her toward the hallway, where Adam was coming out of his office. Leaner than Dell, Adam was built more like one of those cage fighters, tough and edgy and hard-except for that face.

An angel’s face. Her angel. Dark disheveled hair, strong features, and like Dell, a devastating smile when he chose to use it.

The man with Adam had the same badass smile-as she already knew all too well. She watched Brady walk toward them and had to acknowledge their odd attraction as something low in her belly quivered. She kept herself cool on the outside, but on the inside she was thinking that a half hour ago he’d kissed her till she purred.

“Remember when Adam and I lived in that foster home on Outback Road?” Dell asked her quietly.

“Yes. With the man who eventually left you the money to buy this land.”

“Sol Anders,” Dell said. “He took on Adam and me, but he had another kid first.”

Lilah hadn’t known them then, but Dell had told her about the other boy. He’d been a few years older than Adam and he’d graduated early and gone off to the military.

Brady, Of course. She’d heard his name before, but she’d just not connected it to her gorgeous stranger. And it wasn’t as if Brady had visited-he hadn’t, not once in the past few years since she’d been close friends with Dell and Adam. “The missing foster brother.”

“Not missing,” Dell said. “He was Special Forces, then working out of the country. We’ve been trying to get him to come see our operation for a long time. Now he’s finally here.”

Brady hadn’t yet spoken; he was just now getting close enough to them to do so, but she felt the weight of his assessing gaze. And in fact, all three men were looking at her. There was so much freaking testosterone in the room that she could scarcely breathe. Brady had the same tough, sharp always-aware-of-his-surroundings demeanor as Adam and Dell, and the three of them together-good Lord.

Three magnificent peas in a pod.

She’d never really understood what had kept Brady away all this time. Neither Dell nor Adam had ever said. Guys, she’d long ago discovered, weren’t exactly forthcoming with emotions and details.

As she stood there absorbing that shock, Adam shifted close to greet her with his usual-a tug on her hair. “Hey, Trouble.”

“Hey.” She couldn’t object to the nickname. She’d earned it. Hell, she’d earned it this morning alone.

Adam ran his hand down her arm to her hand, which he squeezed, then gestured to the man whose truck she’d hit, the man who was so yummy he’d reminded her hormones that they could still indeed do a heck of a tap dance. “Lilah,” Adam said. “This is-”

“Brady Miller,” she murmured.

Brady’s mouth curved in a slight ironic smile, his eyes lit with the same. He bowed his head slightly in her direction. “Lilah.”

Dell divided a surprised look between them. “You two know each other?”

Brady lifted a brow in Lilah’s direction, clearly giving her the floor.

Great. She hated having the floor. “Well, it’s a funny story, actually.” She managed a weak smile. “We, um”-she lifted a shoulder-“had a little run-in this morning.”

Brady was hands in pockets, rolled back on his heels. He was obviously enjoying himself, the bastard, and damn if something deep within her didn’t react to all that annoying charisma and male confidence.

“You had a little run-in,” Dell repeated, and shook his head. “What does that mean exactly?”

“It means… ” Crap. “Okay, so it’s more like I ran into him.”

“Explain,” Adam said. No words were ever wasted when Adam spoke.

“Literally,” she said. “I ran into him. As in, I hit his truck with my Jeep.”

Brady’s mouth twitched, though his eyes remained sharp.

But not as sharp as those on the two men that Lilah thought of as her brothers as they took in both Lilah and Brady, more specifically Brady and the way he was looking at her.

Which was a little bit how a tiger might eye his prey after a long, cold, hungry winter.

Oh good Lord. She definitely hadn’t put on enough deodorant for this. And even more unsettling? Just this morning she’d have sworn she was completely happy and settled with her life. Sure she was overworked and stressed and about an inch from financial disaster at all times, and yeah, she’d been battling that vague sense of loneliness, but compared to lots of people she had things good.

So she couldn’t explain this new restlessness.

But then her gaze locked with Brady and she had to revise. She could explain.

It was all his fault.