to a piece of your family’s history, being there year after year, building memories that would last beyond your own lifetime. That was what she wanted for Bailey, as much as for herself. A place to belong, where they’d always feel at home.
Hopefully, putting aside her old dreams and coming to Oaks Crossing would prove to be the first step to a better life for both of them.
* * *
Heather Fitzgerald wasn’t at all what Josh had been expecting.
With a cloud of curly blond hair and a killer pair of baby blues, the petite vet looked more like a shoe-in for prom queen than someone capable of managing sick and injured animals. Then again, he spent his days wrestling with cranky field hands, tractors and harvesters, working sunup to sundown to wring every ounce of profit out of his end of their struggling horse farm. It didn’t leave him much spare time for pondering what made folks tick.
As so many Kinleys before him had done, when it rained too much, he stared at the sky and prayed for the sun to come out again. And when the soil got too dry, he prayed for rain, season by season, methodically rotating the crops in each field to keep the fertile acreage as productive as it could possibly be. It wasn’t an easy life, but the land was like a member of the family to him, and he loved it with everything he had.
Many of his childhood friends had moved away after graduation, but at twenty-seven, Josh couldn’t envision being truly happy anywhere else. If only his high school sweetheart, Cindy O’Donnell, had felt the same way, he’d be married and a father by now. Sadly, she’d left him behind to strike out on her own, and he’d finally come to realize that, much as he’d loved her, they simply weren’t meant for each other.
Ever since he could remember, he’d known that this was where he belonged. While so many people fretted over where to go and what to do, he sat back and listened to them, grateful that he’d been planted in the right place. All he needed to make his life complete was a family of his own. More than anything, he wanted the kind of strong marriage his parents had built together, something that would last through the good times and the bad. But since losing Cindy to the big, bad world, he’d gone through enough failed relationships to know that wanting something wasn’t enough. You had to make it happen.
His two older brothers were happily married now, and they’d both told him the secret was to find a woman capable of loving him for who he was. Unfortunately for him, their advice had ended there, leaving him as clueless as ever.
Josh checked his rearview mirror to make sure Heather was still with him before taking the fork that snaked through the woods on its way to the clinic. She matched the maneuver, and before long they pulled into the gravel lot in front of the Oaks Crossing Rescue Center. Located on a few acres at the edge of the main farm, it was surrounded by trees and unspoiled meadow, the perfect spot for a place devoted to caring for animals.
He pulled in and parked off to the side to leave a closer space for Heather’s car. She was the doc, he reasoned, so she deserved the VIP treatment. Now that he thought about it, they should designate a spot for her so visitors and volunteers didn’t block her entrance if she had to come in quickly and take care of an emergency.
Josh got out of his truck and strolled toward the main building, assessing the best place for her to park in the future. When she arrived and stepped out of her car, he heard her call out his name. “Did you lose something?”
“Just thinkin’,” he replied, and he pointed to the pavement in front of the clinic while he explained.
He’d expected her to be on board with the perk, maybe even a little flattered that he’d thought of it. But she surprised him by shaking her head. “That’s really not necessary. Anywhere is fine.”
She’d initially struck him as a bit of a princess, accustomed to having people help her at the drop of a hat. That she actually seemed to have an independent streak was a pleasant surprise to him. “Okay. Let me know if you change your mind.”
“I won’t, but I appreciate the offer.”
There was that prim, overly polite tone again. Easygoing by nature, Josh normally accepted people as they were, figuring it was their right to choose their own attitudes. But he had to admit that her rapid shifts from sweet to stern were beginning to bug him. Add that to the fact that she’d all but ordered him to back off earlier, and he counted two strikes.
And everyone knew you got only three.
Unwilling to blow them all at once, he put aside his curiosity about the pretty veterinarian and motioned her toward the glass front door etched with the clinic’s logo. “Ladies first.”
She gave him a long, uncomfortable look that made him feel like a new species of bug. Finally, the cynical glint in her eyes mellowed, and she offered him a tentative smile. “Thank you.”
“Anytime.”
That got him another clinical stare. “You said that before, when we were in town. You really mean it, don’t you?”
“Wouldn’t say it if I didn’t.”
“In my experience, most guys aren’t that honest.”
“Well, ma’am,” he responded in his best down-home accent, “I think you’ll find we do things a little differently around here.”
“I’ve never lived anywhere other than Michigan,” she confided. “I guess I have some things to learn about how things work in Kentucky.”
Josh had no doubt that before long she’d have men lined up to give her a few lessons on the subject. Not him, of course, he thought with a muted grin. She’d made it plain that she wasn’t interested in him. While he didn’t understand her chilly behavior toward him, he’d been raised to have a healthy respect for women. Especially the feisty ones.
When he realized she still hadn’t made a move to go inside, he turned to her with a sympathetic smile. “Nervous?”
“A bit.” Peering into the vacant lobby, she frowned in concern. “This is my first time being in charge of a veterinary practice, and I’m not sure what to expect.”
In her confession, Josh heard that she wasn’t worried about the actual doctoring, but about handling the people involved. Inspiration struck, and he said, “Around here, we get some of every critter around. How ’bout a tour of the animals before you meet the staff?”
“Are you sure? I mean, don’t you have other things to do?”
Josh had never had to contend with a nerve-racking first day on the job, or moving with a child hundreds of miles from the only home he’d ever known. But he could imagine it was pretty intimidating, even for this intelligent woman making a career in such a challenging field. His late father had taught them all that a little patience went a long way with most creatures, whether they were the four-legged or the two-legged kind. “Yeah, but they can wait a while longer.”
He skirted the kennel building and took her out to where temporary corrals held an interesting collection of wild animals healing before being released back into the forest. Today, the group included a mother duck with a broken wing and her fuzzy yellow brood of ten, an injured armadillo and a llama that had escaped from somewhere and taken up residence in a local farmer’s herd of dairy cows.
As they strolled along the enclosure, Josh filled her in on how each animal had come to be here and what he
