Ever After (Love to the Rescue Book 3) (5 page)

“Nope. Maybe those college kids who achieved Internet fame last week with that picture of themselves mooning the camera.”

A smile quirked his lips. “Could be. Do you know them?”

“No, I don’t know them.” She huffed in annoyance.

“Then how would they know who you are or what car you drive?”

“I don’t know. It’s a small town. Lots of people know me from the café. Anyway, thank you for bringing me the kitten.” She reached for the cage.

He motioned that he would carry it inside. “I don’t think it’s tame.”

In answer, the kitten hissed.

“Oh.” She pursed her lips. What was she going to do with it? She couldn’t very well turn a feral cat loose in the house. “I’ll put it in the bathroom for now.”

He nodded. “Probably best.”

He followed as she walked to the half bath at the end of the hall. It was barely large enough to hold the trap and the small litter box she’d bought. But once the kitten came out of the trap, she’d have more room to set up supplies for it.

Pete’s arm bumped hers as he set it on the floor. His skin was hot. It sent a jolt of awareness through her. And damn if he didn’t still smell like he’d just stepped right out of a bakery. He made her hungry, in several different ways.

“So I’ll be on my way then. Good luck with that.” He gestured toward the kitten, still crouched and watching them.

“Thanks again. You really didn’t have to do this.”

He shrugged. “No problem. Make sure you stop by the sheriff’s office later and report that vandalism on your car.”

He strolled out her front door, leaving her with a healthy dose of unrequited longing and a decent amount of trepidation about the kitten in the bathroom. At least one of those could be easily fixed.

She went down the hall and set up litter, food, and water for her visitor, then unlocked the cage and closed the bathroom door. She’d leave it alone in there for a while to calm down, then check on it later.

In the meantime, she sat in front of her laptop to find out how to tame a feral kitten. Her search results suggested that, with a kitten as young as this one, the process shouldn’t be too difficult. Nothing she couldn’t handle. She also needed to get it to a vet. She suspected it had a leg injury, and it probably had a whole host of other issues, but she’d give it some time to settle in first.

In the meantime…

“Ugh.” She closed her laptop and leaned back in the chair. The last thing she wanted to do was visit the Dogwood County Sheriff’s Office, and that’s exactly what she was about to do.

O
livia walked out the front door of the Dogwood County Sheriff’s Office, her pulse thumping an angry tap dance between her ears. The deputy who’d taken her statement had all but laughed at her.

“Do you own white spray paint?” he’d asked, as if she would spray-paint her own car and report it so that they could enjoy a laugh at her expense. They didn’t take her seriously. And if the sheriff’s office thought she was a joke, how was she ever supposed to get them to take action against Halverson Foods?

She hadn’t thought anything could be more humiliating than her arrest last week, but this might be, because this time she hadn’t done anything wrong. Now she had to go home and find out how to get spray paint off her car, then deal with the stray kitten in her bathroom.

That all sounded a bit lonely and depressing, which was not her idea of a good time in the least, so she picked up her phone to try to rustle up some company for later. No boyfriend at the moment, and she was trying to distance herself from Kristi and Terence. Her college roommate, Cara, had moved to Massachusetts. That left Merry. They’d been friends through Cara, but now that Cara had moved, she and Merry had been spending more time together.

Merry’s phone rang through to voicemail, and Olivia remembered belatedly that her friend worked a twelve-hour shift at Dogwood Hospital on Mondays.

“Hey, it’s Liv. If you feel like going out for a drink or something after work, let me know.” She hung up and pushed the phone into her purse.

Ugh. This was so lame.

Olivia drove home in a huff. Phone in hand, she walked around the Prius taking photos of the graffiti. The sheriff’s office might not take her seriously, but this was no laughing matter as far as she was concerned. It couldn’t hurt to have her own documentation of the damage.

Once she was satisfied she’d taken enough photos, it was time to clean it off. A quick Google search suggested nail polish remover might be the answer. Unfortunately she’d used most of what she had scrubbing paint off herself after last week’s debacle. She took what remained of the bottle outside with a dish towel and started rubbing at the chicken closest to her front bumper.

It smeared and began to come off. The rag quickly turned pink, but it looked like most of the car’s red paint had stayed intact. She managed to remove the first chicken, leaving only a dull patch in the Prius’s paint, before she ran out of nail polish remover.

Determined not to drive to work tomorrow in a chicken-covered car, she hopped in and drove down the street to CVS. She bought a half dozen bottles of nail polish remover, then drove back home and spent the next two hours scrubbing every last bit of graffiti from her car.

Her hands stung, and her head ached from the fumes. She turned on the hose and sprayed the rest of the residue from the Prius, then headed inside for a shower. When she got out, her phone was ringing.

She glanced at the screen, then answered. “Hey, Merry.”

“Can I take a rain check?” Merry asked. “I work again tomorrow, and I usually go to bed super early on work nights. What if we go to The Watering Hole on Friday?”

“Oh, sure. That sounds great.”

“Everything okay?”

Olivia swallowed a sigh. “Yeah. I just need a night out is all.”

Merry made a sound of agreement. “That makes two of us. I’ve been a bit of a homebody since Jayden came to stay with us, but T.J. can handle bedtime when he needs to.”

“Okay, I’ll text you later this week.”

“Perfect.”

Olivia hung up the phone feeling as if the spring had returned to her step. Her car was clean, and she had fun plans to look forward to.

Now she just had to deal with the feral cat doing God-knew-what in her downstairs bathroom. She left the dogs gated in the kitchen, grabbed an armful of old towels, and cautiously cracked the door to the bathroom.

The trap was empty. She grabbed its handle and slid it into the hall, then stepped into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. A slight disturbance in the litter box indicated it had been used—
Hallelujah
—but where was the kitten?

Then she spotted a bit of white fur behind the toilet. The kitten was crouched against the linoleum, eyeing her. Olivia set about fashioning the towels into a makeshift kitten bed on the floor beside her. Then she sat and scooped the terrified creature into her lap.

The kitten hissed like a wild thing, struggling against her grip. Olivia pressed it against her chest and began stroking it behind its head. “Shhh. Sorry about this, but the Internet says I have to hold you and rub you several times a day to make you tame.”

It didn’t fight her but instead crouched, eyes wide and terrified.

Olivia kept rubbing it while she told the kitten all about her day, keeping her tone light and soothing. After she’d talked herself blue in the face, she set the kitten in the bed of towels she’d made. It ran behind the toilet again, hissing all the way. She made a show of freshening the food and water bowls, then said good-bye and slipped out of the room.

She’d keep at it until she won him or her over. It couldn’t be that hard. Taming this kitten was the least of her worries.

Pete stepped inside the rec center and took a deep breath. It was quieter today. Maybe the boys had given up on him and gone home early. He could hardly blame them. It was four thirty, a half hour after Steve Barnes, the rec center’s director, had asked him to be here to coach their soccer practice. Pete had gotten tied up with a traffic stop and subsequent paperwork. The story of his life.

He dropped his gym bag on the end of the bleachers and eyed the boys huddled at the other end of the gym. He cleared his throat loudly, and they scattered like drunks in a bar fight. One boy slunk off to put away the cell phone they’d all been ogling God-knew-what on.

They came to the rec center to stay out of trouble, and thanks to Pete’s tardiness, that’s exactly what they’d been up to.

“You boys ready to play soccer?” he asked.

“You’re our coach for the day?” a tall boy with wavy blond hair asked.

Pete nodded.

“You’re late. We already played. We’re just about to clear out of this joint.”

“According to Mr. Barnes, I still have almost an hour.” Pete swallowed his guilt and grabbed a bag of soccer balls off the bleachers.

A couple of the boys groaned, while a few looked excited at the prospect. Zach Hill hung at the back of the group, head down and notably silent.

Pete started rolling balls toward them. “Take a minute to warm up while I get set up and see what you can do.”

There was more groaning. One boy kicked his ball under the bleachers. Zach dribbled his ball to the goal and kicked. It sailed over the top of the goal. He scowled.

Pete set up some cones, then called the boys over. “You and you,” he pointed at two boys. “You’re a team. You’ll stand here, and here. You two, there.” He positioned the boys on four corners, partners diagonally from each other. “You two are in the middle.” He brought two more boys in. “The object is to pass the ball to your teammate without letting the guys in the middle steal it. If they get your ball, they get to move out to the corners. Got it?”

He set them up, then arranged the remaining boys to run the same drill at the other end of the gym. Soon the room filled with the sounds of sneakers squeaking against the floor and boys yelling as they worked together to pass the ball.

It didn’t take long for the center teams to steal a ball and claim their turn on the corners. After everyone had a turn and the boys were focused and warmed up, he put them on teams and let them play a quick game.

“Sorry I was late today, guys. I got held up at work,” he said as they were cleaning up.

“It’s okay, Coach. We’ll give you another chance,” a lanky kid named Lonnie said.

“Well, actually—”

Steve Barnes came into the gym then, a big smile on his face. “Pete! Glad you made it. How’d it go?”

“I barely got here before it was time for them to go.”

Steve shrugged. “Happens. Want to try again next week?”

“Oh, I don’t think—” Pete turned away from the boys. “Probably you should find someone with a more reliable schedule.”

“In a perfect world. But I have a feeling you could show these boys a thing or two about reliability, regardless of what time you got here today.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jason, the tall blond, asked.

“He’s a cop,” Lonnie told him, with a shrug. “I’ve seen him around town before.”

“A sheriff’s deputy, actually,” Steve said. “Deputy Sampson was good enough to help us out today after he finished a full day’s work serving our town.”

“That’s cool,” one of the boys said, before they all headed to the locker room to change.

“Appreciate you helping us out today,” Steve said. “I’m still in a bind on Tuesdays. I can’t get over here early enough to do it myself, not to mention I don’t know squat about soccer.”

Pete wracked his brain and came up empty on a reason not to do this. “All right then. Pencil me in on Tuesdays for now.”

And then he headed home to look up soccer drills. Because if he was going to do this, he was going to do it right.

Olivia sat on the bathroom floor and rested her chin on her knees. This had become her newest unofficial hobby: sitting in the bathroom talking to herself. “It’s all your fault,” she told the little white ball of fur in the corner.

The kitten lifted its head and stared at her.

She was making progress though. Yesterday they’d visited the vet, where Olivia had learned the kitten was a female and in overall good health. Naturally she had parasites and was underweight. The good news was that her lameness was caused by an infected cut in her footpad. A round of antibiotics ought to make her good as new.

In the two days since Pete dropped her off, Olivia had spent hours in here talking to the kitten and holding her despite much hissing and spitting. This morning, she had come close enough to sniff Olivia’s hand. Surely she’d be tame soon, but Olivia wasn’t the patient sort.

“Come here, furball.” She held her hand out, and the kitten craned her neck to sniff her. “I blogged about you today.”

She kept a blog on the Citizens Against Halverson Foods website, detailing the group’s efforts to get the chicken-processing plant shut down. The kitten didn’t technically have anything to do with Halverson, but she’d found it on their property and witnessed an employee throw a rock at it, so she’d put up a personal interest piece about how she’d captured it and managed to raise some money for future vet bills while she was at it.

She got a lot of visitors to her website and a lot of interaction through her blog and on Facebook. There were so many people supporting her cause. So why couldn’t she seem to get any sanction passed against them?

Yesterday, she’d started a campaign to get her followers to write to all of their congressmen and other local representatives requesting a change in legislation to better protect factory-farmed animals and chickens in particular.

She’d included form letters and a handy little app that would generate an email to the appropriate representative if the person would just enter their name and address. If enough people wrote in…

Her top priority, though, remained finding an existing law they had broken and proving it. That would get them shut down a hell of a lot faster.

Her arrest had definitely shone a spotlight on the issue. She’d decided to milk it for all it was worth, owning up to her misdeed and detailing her struggles afterward. Traffic to the website had increased almost fifty percent, and she had over five hundred new “likes” on Facebook. So maybe her arrest hadn’t been totally in vain.

If she could just keep the momentum going, she might finally be getting somewhere on her crusade against Halverson Foods. Feeling empowered, she reached out to rub the kitten beneath her chin. She jumped back, then came closer, sniffing Olivia’s hand.

“That’s right. I don’t bite.” She gave her a quick rub, rewarded by a thin purr. “I gotta get you tame so we can quit hanging out in the bathroom like this.”

The kitten ventured closer, sniffing her bare toes and up her calf. Definite progress. They bonded for a few more minutes, then the kitten retreated behind the toilet, and Olivia left the bathroom. She took the dogs for a walk, then meditated for a few minutes in her bedroom to get her energy centered before work.

She hurried out to her car, then stopped dead in her tracks. The air whooshed from her lungs as she stared at the fresh graffiti on the side of her car. Again chickens had been crudely painted on the Prius, this time with the message
“Butt out.”

This time, someone had come onto her property. During the night.

And that was scary as shit.

Heart pounding, she stood there for several long minutes, unsure what to do. The sheriff’s office had all but laughed at her last time, but this was more serious. Wasn’t it? And what did “butt out” mean? Had someone from Halverson Foods done this?

Whatever and whoever, it would have to wait until after she got off shift tonight because she was going to be late if she didn’t hurry. She was already one step away from losing her job. Tom wouldn’t be happy if she brought more trouble his way.

Still rattled, she slid into the driver’s seat and drove to the Main Street Café. She parked at the end of the lot with the driver’s side facing the dumpster so that the graffiti wasn’t visible from the street. No one needed to know about this but her and the Dogwood County Sheriff’s Office.

She smiled her way through her shift. Eight hours later, she was smiling her way through another police report. The deputy behind the desk, Deputy Hartzler, was not the same guy who’d taken her initial report on Sunday, and if possible, he was even worse.

He flat out suggested she had brought this on herself when she spray-painted the Halverson Foods plant, and his promise that they would “look into it” left her fairly sure her report would never leave the corner of his desk.