But Sweetie walked out of the crate and into Wyatt’s lap. He cuddled the cat in close and eyed Emily over its head. “All females react to that.”
“Not all,” Emily said. “I wouldn’t.”
He just smiled at her.
“I don’t,” she repeated. Liar, liar . . . “I’m . . . seeing someone.” Holy crap. Where had that come from?
Wyatt raised a brow at her.
“It’s true,” she said.
He totally didn’t believe her, she could tell. “We met in college. John,” she said, clarifying. Good Lord, stop talking! But her brain receptors refused to carry the message to her mouth. “He’s concentrating on his career right now, but . . . yeah.” She bit her tongue, hard, to keep from saying anything else. She’d bite it off if she had to.
Wyatt had gone back to checking out the cat in his lap, feeling her lymph nodes, looking in her ears and eyes. Somehow he got Sweetie to open her mouth for him. Emily would’ve sworn Sweetie was actually purring.
“So . . .” Wyatt said, continuing the conversation from hell. “You and your boyfriend are on a break. So he can concentrate on his career.”
“Um . . .” Emily wasn’t sure how John Number Two had gone from boyfriend fantasy to fake boyfriend but she wanted off this subject. “Yeah.” The. End.
“In the meantime, who’s concentrating on you?” Wyatt asked.
Not the end. “Me?” she asked, trying to sound bored.
Wyatt looked up from his exam of Sweetie. “Yes. You.”
“I . . . don’t know what you mean.”
“Say you need something,” he said. “A spider removal, someone to hold you after a bad dream, help with your car. Or maybe just some company, seeing as you’re new to town.”
She stared at him. “I handle my own spiders. And I don’t have very many bad dreams, but when I do, I turn on all the lights and watch Say Yes to the Dress on Netflix. My car’s in okay shape but if I need help, I’ll call a mechanic. And I don’t get lonely.”
Again with the liar, liar thing. Because the truth was, sometimes, she did get lonely.
But hell if she was going to admit to it.
Wyatt’s gaze said he knew she was full of shit, but he didn’t call her on it. Instead, he shocked the hell out of her by responding seriously.
“If you were mine,” he said. “I’d want to do those things for you. Just for future reference.”
“Well . . .” Gulp. “Good to know.” Something in the way he’d said mine had her taking a second look at him. He had that whole laid-back look going, but he had a good amount of protective alpha in him. “Are you with someone?” Oh, please don’t let her have slept with someone else’s man.
A small smile twitched at the corners of his mouth as he read her expression through those hot smart-guy glasses. “Worried?” he asked, stroking Sweetie into a puddle of goo in his lap.
“It’s a legitimate question,” she said.
His smile faded. “I wouldn’t sleep around if I was with someone.”
She nodded and then squirmed a little at the implication. “Listen, regarding my . . . boyfriend.” Oh boy. She squirmed some more. “The truth is, the relationship is sort of . . .” Nonexistent. “Silent.”
“Silent.”
“Yeah. Like the K on knight. Actually, to be honest, it’s more of an implied thing.”
Wyatt was looking amused again. “As in made-up?”
She sighed.
And he laughed. “You’re a nut.”
Yes. Yes, she was. A complete nut. “Let’s go back to ignoring each other,” she said a little desperately. “Can we?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “I’m good at ignoring nuts.”
She sighed again.
Six
Emily worked hard over the next few days to maintain some sort of professional distance with Wyatt, to varying degrees of success.
Or failure, depending on how she looked at it.
On Monday of week two—three hundred and fifty-eight days left—Emily and Wyatt went over their schedule and got right into it. Their first patient was a female boxer, approximately one-year-old, with a runny nose.
“’Morning, Martha,” Wyatt said to the dog’s owner. “This is Dr. Stevens, our new intern. What’s up with Gracie today?”
“She’s sick,” Martha said, wringing her hands. “So sick. She whistles when she breathes.”
Emily took a look at Gracie, who weighed around fifty pounds. Solid girl. Currently she was rolling in ecstasy in Wyatt’s lap, loving up all over him.
And she did indeed whistle when she breathed.
“Gracie’s new to Martha’s family,” Wyatt told Emily. “Which includes four kids and two other dogs. She’s very playful and obsessed with all the toys she can get her mouth around, as we learned last month when she swallowed Martha’s son’s coin collection,” he said, stroking Gracie. “She came from a shelter, so I think she’s just trying to make up for lost time, aren’t you, girl?”
Gracie licked his jaw, whistling with each inhale.
“Why don’t you do the assessment for us, Dr. Stevens,” Wyatt said, voice calm. She knew that was to keep both patient and owner calm. He always spoke calmly, even through the tough ones, like Friday’s tricky feline birth, or the extremely pissed-off pit bull who hadn’t wanted his shots, or extracting a nickel from the back of a yellow Lab’s throat.
But Emily knew that his casual ’tude had nothing on his sharp intelligence. No doubt he already knew exactly what was wrong with Gracie. But happy to learn and gain new experiences, she moved closer. Gracie sniffed her hand before turning back to Wyatt.
Wyatt smiled and held Gracie for her, taking on the role that she’d taken for him her first week. First thing she did was look at the dog’s extreme runny nose. Interestingly enough, it was only dripping down one side. This was a blatant clue that either something was anatomically incorrect, or there was a physical blockage. She turned to Wyatt and found him watching her.
Yeah. He was way ahead of her.
Her first thought was maybe the dog had broken a tooth, and she looked into Gracie’s mouth. Nope, not a broken tooth. But it was something she’d never seen before and again met Wyatt’s gaze.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s a new one for me, too.”
“What? What is it?” Martha asked, crowding in.
“Well,” Emily said after Wyatt nodded at her. “It appears Gracie swallowed a Kong toy whole.” She turned Gracie’s head to face her worried human mama so that she could see down the dog’s throat. The length of the Kong lined up along Gracie’s throat, the larger end nearest her nose.
“Oh my goodness,” Mrs. Coleburn said. “I suppose that’s why she whistles.”
Emily slid a look at Wyatt.
His eyes were flashing good humor. “Yep, that’s why she whistles.”
“But why the runny nose?”
“Because she can’t swallow,” he said.
“Oh my—Is she going to die?”
Had the Kong gone down sideways, Gracie most certainly could have, but Wyatt gently patted Martha’s hand. “No, we can get the Kong out. Emily here will take real good care of her, I promise.”
“But . . .” Martha glanced at Emily, gave her a nervous smile, then turned back to Wyatt. “She’s new,” she whispered, like Emily didn’t have ears.
“She’s also good,” Wyatt whispered back, and patted her again.
Martha melted for him the way Gracie had.
Dr. Wyatt Stone, animal whisperer, woman whisperer.
An hour later, Gracie had been sedated and the toy removed from her throat. Emily was washing up when both Dell and Wyatt walked into the staff room.