of her.
She couldn’t, wouldn’t, lose Stormy. Stormy had been her first purchase for the farm, even before she’d found the location for Llama Fiber Haven. She’d put the money down on Stormy based on a single phone call to a couple in Michigan. They’d had to sell off their livestock quickly due to his illness.
She recalled the conversation as though it was last night and not more than two years ago. She’d called them from location in Iraq via a satellite phone. Thirty-four days on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan covering the presidential visit had left her exhausted, grimy and on the edge of a mental breakdown. Her team was leaving the next morning, but she couldn’t wait that long to talk to the llama farmers.
Her dreams of leaving Washington, D.C., and having her own business were all that kept her going by that point. Ten years of constant pressure weighed on her spirit. She’d given up everything for her job, which in the early years seemed reasonable since she could say she was doing it as a service to her country.
But she’d had nothing left for herself. She’d let all her relationships decay. First to go were her girlfriends; she couldn’t possibly make time for a monthly dinner or cocktail social. Then any signs of a dating life disappeared. Her on-again, off-again relationship with a lobbyist had to be turned off permanently once she realized he wanted her to publicize his agenda.
Any new love interests never went past the second date—if they even made it that far. She’d had heads of state and diplomats, not to mention her own bosses, try to fix her up with some of their acquaintances, but it was for naught.
Claire was a dedicated career girl.
Until she had an epiphany. One that came to her, strangely enough, when she saw a group of women knitting. Claire had landed a plum interview with the First Lady during visits to local Washington charities. She’d been allowed to travel in the motorcade and should’ve been celebrating her journalistic coup. But then a bookstore window caught her eye. The presidential motorcade roared through D.C. unchallenged, but slowed to navigate a traffic circle.
Light glowed from the corner bookstore’s front window, forming a backdrop to a group of women who sat around a table. Holding needles—knitting.
The table between them was loaded with what looked like woolen items in different colors. Sweaters? Afghans? Scarves?
But it wasn’t the colors she noticed. It was the women, their oblivion to everything except what was happening around that table.
Laughing. Enjoying one another’s company. Happy, living in the moment.
Claire made a lightning-swift discovery then: She didn’t want to work so hard for the rest of her life, with no time for the sense of serenity the knitting women in the bookstore exuded. Even through the bulletproof glass of the limo she rode in and the windowpane of the bookstore, Claire felt the joy those women shared with one another.
She’d known in that instant that she had to go home. She’d been no more than two hours away, in Washington, D.C., for the past decade, but rural Maryland might as well have been the far side of the moon. Claire never took time off back then, not even to see her family or childhood friends.
“Ewwwwwww.”
Stormy’s mewl of pain brought her mind back to the present and elicited a shock of nausea. As a political reporter anxiety had been her constant companion and she’d actually believed she thrived on it.
She’d been insane.
“I’m here, Stormy.” The words struggled through her dry throat as Claire stroked Stormy’s long, graceful neck. Claire’s stomach twisted again as she recognized that Stormy wasn’t going to make it through this. Twins were too much stress on the llama’s body, especially since it was her first birth.
Claire fought back tears. This was the llama who’d got her through her first year back in Dovetail. Who’d helped her start to heal over her many too-raw emotions. It felt as though Stormy was part of Claire.
“Hold on, Stormy! You have to.”
DUTCH PULLED into the long drive that led to the farmhouse Claire had purchased from the Logan family on her return to town almost two years ago. The headlights of his pickup arced across the large painted Llama Fiber Haven sign she’d erected at the end of her property, but he didn’t pay attention to it. He’d already focused on the huge job that lay in front of him and the llama.
He’d managed to avoid Claire this entire time. There were at least three other vets she could go to, and had. Whenever her name or her farm came up in conversation with his colleagues, he’d been grateful he had no involvement. It was a relief that Charlie Flynn had taken her on as a full-time client.
The large-animal vets in town and surrounding environs all ran individual offices but worked together to help one another out. They had an agreement that any of them would fill in during an emergency.
Charlie was away, visiting his new grandbaby. That baby had come early, too, as the twin llama crias were arriving for Claire. The other two vets in their circle lived too far out of town to get to her place in time, so the night-duty call service had contacted Dutch.
He shook his head.
She wasn’t going to be pleased when he walked into her barn.
Over the past year they’d avoided each other with all the skill of secret agents. When he’d heard she’d returned, he thought she wouldn’t stay more than a few months. Claire had wanted to leave Dovetail since they were twelve and running through the sunflower fields on the south side of town. Thinking about it, he could still feel the heat of the sun on his head. Those impromptu hide-and-seek games, when they teamed up against Natalie and Tom, had been the freest time of his youth.
That was when his masculine strength was starting to surface, but before his hormones took over his motives.
He remembered how Claire used to look at him with wide-open sea-green eyes, before her curiosity and intelligence had been warped by at first an academic and then later professional drive that obliterated everything in its path. Collateral damage included Claire’s best friend since toddlerhood and Dutch’s deceased wife. Sasha’s mother.
Natalie.
He sighed, and recalled what he’d learned in the grief support group.
“Remember to breathe.”
He took in three deep breaths, exhaling completely after each one. The constant ache of loss had eased over the past three years. He still had his moments of sharp grief, but not the knee-buckling waves of it that nearly did him in during those initial months.
His resentment toward Claire, however, hadn’t abated. Her lack of compassion for Natalie during Natalie’s life-stealing illness was simply…unforgivable.
Especially at the end. Claire had said she’d come to see Natalie, and then didn’t. She wasn’t even in the country for the funeral.
“Damn it!” He pounded the leather bench seat next to him as he made the last arc up the long drive.
He had to let go of all of this, at least for the moment. He had animals to save.
CLAIRE LOOKED at her watch.
“C’mon,
