Accidentally Catty (10 page)

Spanky barked a laugh. “And what will you do with your posse of paranormal?”

Katie looked at the women with concern. Nina’s eyes had grown round with fatigue as she blinked back what she’d called vampire sleep. Wanda’s clear, bright eyes were dull, too, and both Marty’s and Casey’s posture had begun to slump. “This clinic is the bottom floor of an enormous house I share with my aunt Teeny. She’s partially deaf, a little outspoken—okay, a lot outspoken—and probably slept through this entire fiasco. These women came all the way from the city. They’re tired. I’ll ask them to stay here. It’s the least I can do after all they’ve done. If the ladies are willing to double up, you can have a bedroom all to yourself.”

His tone became playfully smoky-seductive and low. “And if they’re not?”

“Well, the answer’s obvious. You can share my bed.”

“Really?”

“No.”

“I
have
suffered a great many trials and tribulations,” he said, giving her a comically tragic expression. One that made the grooves on either side of his mouth deepen and served to send an unfamiliar flutter of delight along her arms.

For self-preservation, Katie flung her hand, her growingheavier-by-the-minute hand, in his rugged face. The ACE bandage Kaih had helped put on it flapped at the edges. “Yeah. Me, too. So either you’re in or you’re out. Your choice. I’m going to go upstairs now to get some extra sheets and ready rooms for everyone. Let me know what you decide to do.”

She began to head toward the back of the clinic to the connecting stairs leading to the bottom floor of her aunt’s when he stopped her by nearly shouting,
“Project Runway!”

Katie whirled around. “Come again?”

“Either you’re in or you’re out,” Spanky muttered, then smiled wide and luscious, clearly pleased with himself. “That’s from
Project Runway
.”

Marty cooed, smiling with a warm fondness directed at Spanky. “He watches
Project Runway
. I don’t care if he’s only twelve. He’s a well-bred twelve with immaculate taste.”

Wanda nodded, letting go of a yawn while her eyes rolled upward. “Nothing means more than your stamp of approval, Marty. Look, ladies, we’d better see if there’s a Motel Six or something in this town. I don’t think I’ll make it back if I have to drive, and Nina definitely needs to sleep.You all know from experience, if she doesn’t get her eight in some dark closet she turns into Vampire-zilla.”

“You mean she gets worse?” Spanky blurted, then winced at his outspokenness, shoving his hands into the lab coat in amused contrition.

Nina’s head shot up, her eyes pinning Spanky. “Crazy that, eh, Garfield? It gets worse times infinity,” she grunted, her voice weary but still full of the ever-present threat she made everyone aware she imposed.

“Please,” Katie interrupted. “Stay here. It’s the least I can do, and I have plenty of room. It’ll be much more comfortable than the motel in town. Believe me when I tell you, Motel Six is five star compared to the hotel run by Lurch.”

“How lovely of you,” Wanda said. “I, for one, am all in. I’m exhausted, and maybe some sleep is just what the doctor ordered for Spanky. Let’s hope tomorrow he’ll wake up and remember everything. Then we can leave you in his capable hands and still sleep at night.”

Yeah. Maybe.

Ingrid slid along the wall of the waiting room in a crab-like walk as though to avoid the cooties that would rub off on her if she touched one of the women. “They’re staying
here
? In the house?”

Katie flung the arm attached to her good hand around Ingrid’s trembling shoulders. “Yes, and if Nina wants to suck your blood, just yell for me. I’ll save you. Swear on my paw.”

Ingrid blanched, even surrounded by the laughter Katie’s comment evoked. As Kaih led the women to the living space she and her aunt shared, she held Ingrid back. “You know what I don’t understand, Ingrid?”

“Everything? I don’t understand anything anymore after tonight.”

“First, you’re some actress. You did a fantastically awesome job of pretending you didn’t know how Spanky got on the steps of the clinic.”

Guilt flew across her expression in the way of a wince. “I couldn’t even look you in the eye. I’m sorry I lied, but I just couldn’t stand to see him suffer. If I’d known what would happen . . . what he could do . . . I never . . .”

Katie was a firm believer in moving on. “Forget that, honey. I probably would have done the same thing if I’d seen him injured. But this is what I don’t get. I don’t understand how such a staunch believer in UFOs and alien life-forms and all that crazy sci-fi stuff you’re always reading and spewing can be so frightened of these women and their abilities. If anyone would think this was beyond all out-of-this-world expectation, I would have thought that would have been you. It was you who found the ad in that magazine. You read them all the time. If your nose isn’t buried in one of those magazines, it’s buried in a romance novel, and the last time I caught a glimpse of the back of one of those things, they had all sorts of creatures as the main characters. So for all your interest in otherworldly beings and the conspiracy theories you’re always spewing from those forums you follow online, what gives?”

Her breath shuddered as it escaped her lungs. “I’ve come to the conclusion that I liked the possibility of something like this existing a lot more than finding out it really does exist. It was fun to imagine it—with other people online—in my romance novels, but I don’t know if I one hundred percent believed all the junk they write in those forums. I think deep down I just thought they were kooks who needed somewhere to belong like I do.”

Just like Ingrid. Katie’s heart swelled in sympathy for her receptionist. Ingrid sought acceptance in everything she did. The product of foster home after foster home, she’d managed to finally escape the system, but it hadn’t escaped her. She put a cheerful smile on her face. “You belong here with me, and guess what?”

“The kooks were right?”

Katie popped her lips with a wink. “The kooks have merit. So let’s get some sleep, and maybe tomorrow this won’t seem as overwhelming.”

“Do fangs and fireballs ever not overwhelm you?”

Katie tipped her head back and laughed. “Point.”

“Did you see the things they did?”

“I did.”

“That lady Wanda turned into a werewolf right in front of us. Right there while I was sitting on a couch. And Oh-m-gee, the one called Nina is so strong, and—and mean. Cranky. Scaaaary. I can’t believe you’re not beyond freaked.”

“Oh, don’t get the wrong impression, kiddo. I’m not that tough. Of course I’m freaked, but we saw with our own eyes what’s possible. It’s the only explanation I have for my hand and my teeth. So what else is there to do but let them help me?”

Ingrid’s eyes had lost some of their panic and were replaced with a solemn hue. “I’m afraid.”

If Katie was about anything, she was all about owning her feelings. “Me, too.”

“Me three. Strike that. Afraid might be a shade heavy. How does hesitant with a healthy dash of stimulation overload strike you ladies?” Spanky had hung back after the crowd had gone with Kaih. His sudden reemergence left Katie’s heart thrashing as the unspoken question hung in the air.

Ingrid stiffened under the weight of Katie’s arm when Spanky loomed over them. She tightened her grip around her shoulders in reassurance. “Tonight has been nothing if not eventful.”

His raven eyebrow rose. “Which leaves me so jazzed for tomorrow.”

Ingrid snorted, relaxing a little into Katie, though her eyes still had trouble meeting his. “I’m really sorry we took you from the park. I swear we only wanted to help you. You really did have a big wound on your side. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do something to help you. I realize now it was impulsive and rash.”

He tightened the lab coat around his wide, tanned chest, cracking a smile at her meek receptionist. Whether he was more attuned to Ingrid’s wildly swinging emotions because he had the finely honed senses of a cougar, or he was just inherently a good person, Katie couldn’t say.

Due to his amnesia, neither could he.

But it was clear, he’d read Ingrid and her lifetime of insecurities when, with a gentle hand, he tilted her chin up and forced her to look at him. His eyes, so brilliantly blue sent a million messages to a frightened young woman. “Thank you. I think I’m glad you were rash and impulsive, though the jury’s still out. Anyway, Ingrid, I’m Spanky. The pleasure’s all mine.”

Ingrid beamed, two bright spots of red streaking her cheeks. “I think we need to find you a new name. Spanky makes me think of someone’s pet hamster.”

He held out his arm to her, offering to escort her down the long hallway leading to Katie’s aunt’s living room. “I’d be honored if you’d help me do just that. Maybe over morning tea? What say you and I go find a walk-in closet to lock that Nina up in to ensure the safety of our necks? There’ll be no bloodsucking on my watch.”

Ingrid’s hesitation lasted but a second before she hooked her arm through his. “Oh, you’re so on.”

Katie watched until their backs disappeared into the dim lighting of her living room before she took another breath. The way he’d held out his arm to Ingrid with a question, coupled with his intuitive perception of her fear, and his obvious wish to ease those doubts, stole Katie’s breath from her lungs.

In spite of his gruff exterior, he had a sensitive bone.

Well, yeah, Katie. He watches
Project Runway
and knows how to use
reprehensible
in a sentence.

Add to that, he was all sorts of sexy when he was in the act of being sensitive.

A thought struck her as she tried to at least make some sense of even a small portion of tonight.

Spanky was gay. He might not know it due to his memory loss, but his choice of television viewing said so. He was Tim Gunn approved.

If he was gay, that meant she could ogle every last inch of him till she turned blue in the face, and it would be as futile as her late teenage wish to create a love child with Ferris Bueller.

She blew out a sigh of relief. For all her heart palpitations, buttery knees, and stomach jitters, she found the idea that Spanky played for a different team left her with one less thing to worry about.

Well, then.

A reason to go on living.

A sharp whistle startled Katie, who was deep in the midst of savoring a cup of coffee and distractedly doodling on her favorite morning ritual—a crossword puzzle. Though, she was stuck on a six-letter word for cat.

Katie
had only five letters in it.

Yet her attention kept returning to the big bay window, overlooking the cement pathway that lead to the wide front porch steps of her aunt’s house, while she swirled coffee in her mouth. Today the coffee had a heightened pleasure to it, likely due to her new taste buds.

Even with the added layer of flavor, there was nothing like Aunt Teeny’s coffee.

With cream.

Yesterday, she’d liked her coffee black.

Today, she liked milk.

And apparently large game.

Huh.

Good thing at least her teeth had returned to normal, or she couldn’t say for sure the deer in the backyard that had caught her attention earlier would be safe from her gnashing pearly whites. They had called to her in the way of delicious, warm blood coursing through their veins and the promise of some soft squishy . . . Katie shuddered, fending off the offensive images and forcing herself to greet her aunt.

She swiveled around on the wooden chair with the green-and-red-plaid cushioning to find her aunt Teeny in her customary floral housecoat, trailing across the floor in pressure socks and sandals. An unlit cigarette hung from her wrinkled lips.

Dozer, an old yellow Lab mix and their fourth stray dog in four months, followed close behind her, plunking himself down on the blue-and-green braided rug to bask in the shafts of weak, buttery sunlight coming from the bay window.

Li’l Anthony wasn’t far behind, all five pounds of him. A pushy, arrogant, cranky, “hands off me, I don’t need no lovin’ ” mixed breed with a painfully infected ear that she’d found in the surrounding woods while walking one afternoon a couple of months ago. He was confrontational, a total bully who barked at everything that moved, but a snuggle bunny at night when he curled up next to her in bed.

Katie scooped him up and checked his torn but finally healed ear, then gave him a dreaded kiss on the side of his black muzzle. He squirmed his displeasure. “Hey, cranky. Where’re Petey and Paulie?” Petey and Paulie were the other two-thirds of what she fondly called the mob. They were a brother-and-sister pair of terrier mixes that had been abandoned out by the creek. Being younger dogs, they ganged up on poor Dozer at regular intervals. As a pack, their gang mentality was bark at high-pitched intervals first, pee on it later.

“Looky that, would ya? Nice-lookin’ boy there,” Aunt Teeny commented with approval, nodding her head in the direction of the opposite window where Spanky, in Kaih’s borrowed jeans that were too short, and too loose around the waist, chopped wood. She went immediately to the bin of dog food they kept in the open pantry and filled the dogs’ bowls. “You hire him to do odd jobs around the place?”

Katie’s eyes fell back to her coffee as she set Li’l Anthony down, clamping the mug with her one good hand, and resting the other between her jean-clad thighs with a wince. She’d spent the better part of a restless night trying to figure out a cover story for her aunt and anyone else who might ask about Spanky and the women who were still sleeping soundly upstairs.

Of all the stories she’d come up with, declaring him the help, the simplest of all fabrications, had never occurred to her. “Um, yup. I hired him to take care of some things around the house and the clinic. Winter’s coming. We need wood chopped and . . . and stuff done.” Lots of stuff. Li’l Anthony gave her a strange glare of disapproval. “Well, we do need stuff done,” she whispered to him.