Cara/Cassidy Colter/Caron - Love's Nine Lives

“Conaaaan, nooooo!”

Too late.

He’d bounced back off that window as if he was a tennis ball spiked from a racket and lay on the floor dazed, blood—important blood, his—splattering the carpet around him.

Hence the unfortunate meeting with Dr. Veggie, a white-haired antiquity with more wrinkles and creases than that Shar-Pei monstrosity Conan had been forced to share the waiting room with. Conan had hated the little winter balaclava Miss Daisy had made for him, but he hated this more—his whole head wound with white tape, his ears poking through two holes in the top, his face completely surrounded in white as if he were a nun wearing a wimple.

It was horrible. And was there a little sautéed shrimp to help him through his most humiliating moment? No, there was not.

Because the evil dog lover had pronounced him overweight. Nothing so scientific as a scale either. Just prodding with those poochie-smelling fingers that had been God knew where else that morning!

Miss Daisy could be counted on to be thorough, though. She had taken him home and put him on her bathroom scale. He should have known her gasp of dismay did not bode well for his culinary endeavors. She had actually thought the scale wasn’t working.

“Twenty-six pounds! Conan, I don’t think that’s possible.”

Of course it wasn’t possible. He was a little portly, not fat. It was not at all his fault. His mother had also been big-boned.

But then Miss Daisy had weighed herself, and it seemed the scale had been correct after all.

So now he lay curled on the couch, looking like a cat extra for The Mummy and feeling slightly crazed from food deprivation. It was a low point in his life, he decided. He’d had a sniff of the diet food she’d put out and decided it was worth sulking for a few more days to see if he could make her come around.

He heard her pick up the phone and perked up slightly.

Maybe she was giving in. Would the pizza joint be open at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning? He got the pepperoni nicely gobbed with melted cheese, and she got the inedible portions—tomato paste and crust. There was simply no figuring humans.

“Dr. Thornfield?”

Conan groaned and put his head back down.

“It’s Bridget Daisy. I’m sorry to bother you at home. I’m calling about Conan.” There was a long pause. “No, no, his head seems fine. No, no blood seeping through the bandages. Of course it doesn’t stink!”

The man was gross. Couldn’t he word things more delicately than that?

Her voice went very low, as if she didn’t want Conan to hear, but he was a cat, which meant superior hearing. Superior everything, come to that.

“I think he’s depressed,” she whispered into the phone.

Yes! Depressed. Treat immediately with vanilla ice cream, with just a little shrimpy-poo on top.

Miss Daisy was quiet for a moment and then when she spoke, her voice had an unfamiliar icy note in it.

“I can’t believe you said that! You think I need to occupy myself? A husband? A child?”

Conan winced and barely staved off a painful flashback from his former life. Oh, no, he did not care for husbands or for children, and look how quickly she had taken the dieting advice!

But he needn’t have worried. Her voice was now quite loud, shrill even.

“What a totally unprofessional thing to say! I thought you were a man of education and refinement. I can see now I was wrong. You are—”

Conan held his breath, waiting, delighted. You give it to him, Miss Daisy, he thought. He was streetwise enough to have various phrases at hand that he would have loved to hear her use on the evil dog-loving, diet-prescribing Dr. Veggie.

“You are—” her voice quivered with righteous anger “—hopelessly old-fashioned!”

Disappointment washed over Conan. Sheesh. Hopelessly old-fashioned? What about You are a dog-breathed poop eater? What about You are a birdbrained worm slurper? Sometimes Conan wondered if there was any hope at all for Miss Daisy.

She marched into the living room. “Why,” she said, her voice still quivering with indignation, “he’s just another barbarian. Just like all the rest of them in this town.”

Ah, yes, Conan had heard quite a lot about the town’s barbarians. That was how Miss Daisy referred to the male population. Beer-swilling barbarians whose idea of culture was growing in the bottom of their lunch pails. According to Miss Daisy, every single man in Hunter’s Corner, Ohio, loved duck hunting and fishing and playing pool. The name of the place should have given her a clue. Redneck heaven.

Duck hunting usually involved dogs of some sort, so Conan was against that, but he thought she might have been too quick to write off fishing. A nice freshly caught trout, braised in butter and garlic, was nothing to turn up one’s nose at!

He had no opinion on pool, but if it was one of the reasons Miss Daisy had ended up at the animal shelter seeking companionship, he could hardly condemn it.

She never really said she was lonely, but Conan could tell. She’d told him most of her life story his first night in residence, curled up together on the sofa, her popping little soft-centered nondiet cat treats into his mouth as she talked.

She was from Boston and had a master’s degree in library science. When she’d been offered the position of librarian here, in this northeastern corner of Ohio, right after completing university, she had jumped at the opportunity.

“Of course,” she had told Conan that night, “I always thought I’d move on. To a bigger place, a city bursting with art and live theater and music. To a place with corner cafés that serve lattes, quaint little bookstores filled with old treasures and outdoor flower markets.”

She sighed heavily and pulled him more tightly into her bosom. “But, Conan, I have come to love my little brick library across from the town square. I’ve done so much with it in the two years I’ve been here! We have story time and a poetry club. The chess club meets there once a week. Why, the collection is marvelous for a small-town library! How could I leave it?”

Still, he could see her dilemma. How was a woman like her ever going to find companionship in a town where men drove pickup trucks with wheels nearly the size of her house?

At the animal shelter, of course!

Barring the sweater, hat and leash, it had not been an unhappy arrangement, really, until the last three days. Now Conan wasn’t so sure if it was going to work.

“I’ve got it,” she said suddenly, squatting down by the couch and running her hands tenderly through his fur. “I know how to make you happy.”

He sighed with relief. Their first fight over, then. Of course she knew how to make him happy.

She was reaching for the phone book. Oh, goody. That meant takeout. Perhaps she had just realized the calamari was calorie-reduced. With a nice little side of salt-and-pepper squid…He began to purr happily.

She was frowning at the phone book. “How do I find a contractor?” she muttered. “Every single one of them will take one look at me and realize I’m a woman alone. I’ll be overcharged for shoddy workmanship.”

What the heck was she talking about? What did any of that have to do with honey-glazed salmon?

“I’ll ask Fred, the maintenance man at the library,” she decided, closing the telephone book.

Conan willed her to reopen it to the Yellow Pages, Restaurants, but she did not.

Instead she picked him up as if he didn’t weigh anything near twenty-six pounds and waltzed around the room with him tucked next to her heart.

“Conan,” she announced, “you are getting a cat door!”

His disappointment was sharp. A cat door was a long, long way from the little tuna sushi rolls that he favored.

“I’ll have it installed in the back door and I’ll have the fence replaced around the yard and then you can go outside and play while I’m at work. I won’t have to worry about you going over the fence either.”

My God, she thought he was too chubby to drag himself over a fence?

He glared at her, but she was oblivious to his mood, dancing around, blabbering about drawing up specifications.

Her mood was hard to resist, however, and suddenly it struck him what he was being offered.

Freedom. The great outdoors in springtime.

She had bird feeders everywhere in that backyard! It would be like having his very own drive-through window.

I’ll have the McFinch, please.

Conan chuckled to himself. It came out as a deep, rich purr, and his mistress hugged him tighter.

“I knew I could make you happy,” she said blissfully.

Justin West hopped out of his truck and eyed the house. It was in the older part of Hunter’s Corner, a neighborhood called Honeysuckle, where small, postage-stamp-size houses sat on huge lots surrounded by the neighborhood’s namesake. At this time of year the air smelled sweet with the scent of the blossoms that hung heavy in the shrubbery.

This house was extremely well kept, the shingle siding painted sunshine-yellow, the trim, stairs and window boxes white. Cheerful red geraniums were already planted in those boxes. A front window was open and a lace curtain danced on the light spring breeze.

“Thanks, Fred,” Justin muttered.

Justin owned West’s Construction, a construction company specializing in framing new houses. The north side of town was building up phenomenally as more and more people left the cities looking for exactly what Hunter’s Corner, population fifteen thousand, had to offer—a small-town feel and flavor.

There was no Wal-Mart, no Starbucks, no multiplex theaters. The town was tidy, safe and neighborly. For amenities, it boasted a town square with a park that children still played in. There was a library, a swimming pool that was open in the summer, two grocery stores, one ice cream parlor and close proximity to the great outdoors and all its attractions. People here sat on their front porches, grew gardens, threw out a fishing pole in their spare time. Kids rode their bikes down the tree-lined streets and walked unescorted to school.

Justin West had more work than he knew what to do with.

He didn’t need the kind of job a tidy house in Honeysuckle implied—a little old lady who wanted a new washstand for the backyard. He’d be plied with cookies and tea—and get phone calls long after the job was done about imaginary popped nails or squeaks. When he arrived to investigate, there would be more cookies and tea and pictures of the new grandchild.

On the other hand, Fred had asked him to come and at least look at the job. And how could he say no to Fred?

In his seventies, Fred was still the town maintenance man, refusing to reveal his actual age or to consider retirement. He had also been Justin’s father’s best friend since the days when Hunter’s Corner had been little more than an autumn retreat for city boys who wanted to bag a deer or two. Fred had been there through all those lonely, hard years when the Alzheimer’s took hold, wrapped its tentacles around Justin’s father’s mind, changing him from a powerful man into a baffled, helpless child. Fred had never once said, “I’m too busy,” when Justin called in panic because he had to be at work and his dad was having one of “those” days.

His dad had gone finally, a bittersweet blessing. And now Fred was asking a favor of him, of Justin, for a lady friend.

Justin wasn’t going to return the friendship and loyalty that Fred had shown his father with I’m too busy, even though he was.

Justin took the front steps two at a time, knocked on the door—loudly, in case Fred’s lady friend was deaf. He thought it was nice that Fred had a lady friend. Fred’s wife had been gone for nearly fifteen years. And his best friend for just over a year. It was about time—