“You sure now? Don’t cover up for her. She can be pretty sassy with that mouth o’ hers, always disruptin’ folk, buckin’ authority like she knows how to run this place.”
Cat’s mouth fell open. She never bucked anything. In fact, she’d probably been the quietest she’d been in her entire life during her employment with Arlo.
Could she be accused of being overly passionate about the unfairness of overcharging seniors for weak, watered-down coffee? Or defending a new mother just trying to catch her breath without the jeers and eye-rolling of an insensitive, rude caveman?
Yes. But that was hardly bucking the system. Mostly she’d been nonbucking.
Still, what happened next was due only to the fact that she’d always had trouble heeding her mother’s infamous words.
She had no honey left in her pot to catch a fly with.
It was all just vinegar.
There went unlucky job number thirteen hot on the heels of an incoming call from the Oakdale administrator, Casper Reynolds.
* * *
Shit.
The last thing he’d meant to do when he’d wandered into the coffee shop was get the only person at the nursing home who’d been able to coax his mother into responding to anything in three solid months fired.
Nothing he’d said could change that tyrant Arlo’s mind, either. He’d bargained, offered to pay her salary for six months and threatened to report him to the labor board, but all with no luck.
Arlo was a caged tiger, and he’d latched onto firing Cat like she was his only source of protein.
Flynn McGrady watched from his rental car as Cat’s long legs ate up the parking lot of the coffee shop connected to the nursing home. Her chestnut-brown hair billowed behind her in thick streams streaked with gold, her cheeks were fiery red and her chest heaved beneath the snugly fitting blue T-shirt she wore.
In that moment, he realized how beautiful she was, with her creamy skin, full, peachy lips and bright, almond-shaped eyes. He’d never taken the time to really look at her. She was always excusing herself and rushing off somewhere when he came to visit Della.
Cat Butler was like Mother Teresa at Oakdale. Everyone loved her. There wasn’t a patient in the connecting health-care facilities or senior in the nursing home who didn’t. She baked cupcakes when someone graduated from a wheelchair to a walker and turned it into a ceremony where she presented the lucky graduate with a certificate they could frame, and she encouraged everyone to join the party.
She played board games and cards with all the seniors, and made sure everyone was always included. She’d brought costumes in for an impromptu costume party and organized a senior parade along the halls.
In review, Cat was loveable, and he was an asshole. He’d overreacted to what his mother said.
He wanted to go and apologize to her. Smooth this over; get her job back for her somehow.
She dropped down on a bench under a tree, resting her face in her hands. It looked like her shoulders quivered while the sunlight slipped between the trees, casting shadows along her spine.
Perfect, and you made her cry, jerk.
He’d been a surly asshole with her from the moment he’d sat down at that table and realized she was the saintly angel from Oakdale. Since his mother’s stroke, if he listened to his sister, Adeline, he’d been an asshole period.
It was the endless commute back and forth from his home in New York to Atlanta to see his mother each weekend and find she’d made little progress, as he tried to manage his internet-based company from two places at once, and also juggle her health care, that left him so cranky. At least he kept telling himself that.
Not a good enough excuse, Flynn.
He’d only egged on Cat because she’d managed to get his mother interested in something—finally. He was almost resentful. Nothing he’d bribed Della with, bartered with her for, had garnered the effect on her like Cat’s idea about those romance novels had.
And in fairness, he’d been a little embarrassed, too. It was, after all, his mother garbling out the words, “Spank me harder!” in front of a roomful of people.
Now he had to find a way to make this right. Cat was his mother’s favorite visitor. They’d forged this bond, this secret sort of means of communication that made Della’s face light up, even if her lips still couldn’t unite a smile with her emotional state.
For the past three months, he’d made weekend trips to Atlanta to see his mother since she’d been admitted to Oakdale. He’d watched Cat and Della interact from afar when they were engrossed in a jigsaw puzzle, or watching a television show. He’d actually admired the ease with which Cat soothed Della when she was frustrated, by simply touching her hand, leaning in close and whispering something in her ear that settled her right down.
Pretty Cat had all the qualifications to help heal Della that he apparently lacked.
How was he supposed to know his mother read that kind of fiction? In fact, he’d never seen her with anything but a knitting book in her lap in all of his thirty-seven years.
Damn, he wished Adeline were here. She’d know how to help, but she was on active duty in Afghanistan with only the occasional Skype session or phone call to ease his uncertainties.
The last thing he wanted was for his mother to slip back into her deafening silence. If she found out he was part of the reason Cat had been fired, leaving all her Oakdale time eaten up to pound the pavement looking for work, Della would slay him with that sour look she’d perfected since her stroke.
Flynn gripped the steering wheel while he stared at Cat’s back. Now what?
Anything. He’d do anything to help get back his mother’s will to live. The doctors all said she was perfectly capable of becoming fully functional again. They said she had to want to fully function. Somewhere between Adeline leaving for Afghanistan and his father’s passing, Della had just lost interest in the business of living.
When it had happened, he couldn’t pinpoint, but it was clearer each time he visited her, which made the decision to leave New York, at least temporarily, an easy one.
The stroke had brought new focus; shed light on some underlying issues causing his mother to suffer. He’d been too blind to see them—too busy with work and his own life.
But he was here now. He’d leased an apartment, he had wheels and he was going to make it right.
With his mother and with Cat.
Chapter Two
“Cat?”
Swiping the tears from her eyes with her thumb, Cat looked up to find one of her all-time favorite former patients at Oakdale’s Cancer Center, Landon Wells, staring down at her, his handsome face so elegant and understated, his eyes sharper than they’d been in a while.
Landon was in his early-to-mid-thirties, she guessed. He wasn’t construction-worker hot with ripped abs, and miles of hard, tanned flesh.
