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“You’re welcome.” Catherine picked up her purse and walked through the door.
Suddenly Kit felt so exhausted she wasn’t certain she could drag herself up the stairs to her bedroom. The doctors had warned her about that. After any kind of stress and particularly after a long session of reading lips, her energy could suddenly bottom out. And sometimes she lost her balance. The doctors said that was the physical trauma of the blast and the psychological trauma of nearly winding up both deaf and blind.
She didn’t like to remember what a close call that had been. The scar that bisected her right eyebrow and touched the corner of her eye was barely noticeable thanks to a great plastic surgeon. And her vision in that eye was almost normal, thanks to an ophthalmologist in the trauma center who’d removed splinters from her eye without damaging it.
The doctors told her she’d never remember the blast itself, but she’d heard the story of her accident so many times she almost felt as though she could.
She’d come through plenty of hostage situations and drug takedowns without a scratch. It was embarrassing to lose her hearing and her job with the police department in what amounted to a comedy of errors.
Keystone Kops, Vince Calandruccio called it.
Start with one rookie who kicked in the back door of a crack house a second too early so that Kit had to cover him to keep him from getting his ass blown off. Add another cop at the front door with a flash-bang grenade who didn’t know Kit was already in the vestibule. Toss in a commander who waited a couple of seconds too long to rescind his order to lob in the flash-bang.
What do you have? Kit Lockhart standing practically on top of the damn grenade when it went off.
She still had to watch herself on the stairs. Her depth perception wasn’t perfect, but it was improving.
Unfortunately, Emma had eyes like a hawk, ready to spot the least sign of weakness in Kit.
Life was better with Kevlar. Emma seemed willing to hand over some of the responsibility she felt to him. Thank God he was going to be all right.
Kit leaned against the wall at the top of the stairs for a moment, panting.
“Oh, this is not a good thing,” she said as she bent to catch her breath. “It is high time we went back to working out, Kit, my girl. You’ve been lazy too long. You’re getting soft.” She walked into her bedroom, shucked off her sweater, then pulled off her boots and dropped them beside her.
Lord, she hoped the noise they made wouldn’t wake Emma! She slipped down the hall and peered into her daughter’s bedroom. Emma lay curled up asleep. From the crook of the little girl’s knees, Jo-Jo raised his flat head and looked at Kit for a moment before subsiding into sleep again. Kit crossed to the bed and bent to kiss Emma’s forehead, damp with nighttime perspiration.
On her way back to her own bathroom, she jabbed hard at the heavy punching bag in the corner of her bedroom. “Ow! Wimp. Next time wear gloves.” She kicked at it. “Wonder how Dr. John MacIntyre Thorn keeps up those muscles. He certainly wouldn’t risk injuring his hands on a punching bag.”
In the bathroom, she began to cream her makeup off. Then stopped and leaned both hands on the sink. Thank God for those hands of his. Please, let him really have saved Kevlar.
ACROSS THE HALL, Emma opened her eyes. It was much easier to feign sleep now when her mother couldn’t hear her breathing.
She heard the sound of her mother’s fist as she thwacked the heavy bag, then her exclamation. She couldn’t understand the rest of the words.
Her mother never used to talk to herself—not out loud. Emma wasn’t certain she even knew she was doing it since she couldn’t hear her own voice.
Weird.
Even weirder to think that she could play her stereo all night. Her mother wouldn’t know about it unless Emma woke the neighbors, and they called to complain.
At first she’d thought being able to get away with stuff behind her mother’s back was cool—her friend Jessica definitely thought so. But it wasn’t. She’d always relied on her mother to set boundaries. Before, when she played her music too loud, her mother told her to turn it down.
Before, her mother knew when she was playing a video game in her room when she was supposed to be doing homework just by the pinging sound the game made. All the way from the kitchen, too.
Emma hated feeling guilty when she took advantage of her mother’s deafness. She hated having to find her mother and look at her to tell her something instead of just yelling from upstairs or the back yard. It made every word they said to each other too important. Why couldn’t they just go back the way they were before the stupid accident?
CHAPTER TWO
MAC SLEPT LATE on Sunday morning. He deserved a little extra time after having worked on that corgi until nearly ten o’clock on Saturday night.
His first thoughts on waking were of Kit Lockhart. Mrs.? He hadn’t asked her last night, but he definitely wanted to know whether she had a husband.
Not that he was likely to see her again once Kevlar was fully recovered. His life was entirely too busy to complicate with women, and definitely not with women who unnerved him.
Even though it was a Sunday on which he was not officially on call, he dressed, grabbed a doughnut and an espresso from the drive-through and drove to the clinic to check on his patients.
He went straight to the small-animal ICU. Bigelow Little, the kennel man and general clinic help, was on his knees in front of the corgi’s cage.
“Hey, Dr. Mac,” Big said. “He come in last night?” Big stood up.
At six foot four Mac was used to being the tallest person in the room, but when Big was around, Mac knew how Chihuahuas must feel around Irish wolf-hounds. Big was immense—nearly seven feet tall, and half as broad. Not an ounce of fat on him. He looked capable of breaking Mac in two, but was in fact the gentlest soul on earth.
“Removed a kidney. We had any bodily functions this morning?”
Big grinned and ran his huge hand over his cropped white-blond hair. “Yes, sir. Downright apologetic about it, though. Acted like he’d done dirtied in the churn.”
“You had him out?”
“Cleaned up after him is all. Didn’t know what you wanted me to do.”
“If you have time, you might try walking him around in here. He’s pretty sore, but he needs to use those legs. Don’t want him throwing a blood clot.”
“I’ll do it.”
And he would. Big Little had been the greatest find the clinic had made since it opened. An inmate at the local penal farm, Big had been one of the members of the first team to work the new beef-cattle herd at the farm. Dr. Eleanor Grayson, now Eleanor Chadwick, had been the veterinarian in charge of that program, and had picked Big out immediately as having a special rapport with animals.
When Big was pardoned, Creature Comfort had hired him at once. Now he had a small apartment on the grounds behind Dr. Weinstock’s laboratory, and acted as night watchman as well as a jack-of-all-trades in the clinic. If anyone could coax Kevlar to walk, Big could.
Mac checked his other patients, then went to look over his schedule for Monday. He wondered when Kit Lockhart would come to visit Kevlar today, and realized he hadn’t told Big she was deaf. He started to go back, but Rick Hazard stuck his head out of his office door and called him.
“You keeping banker’s hours?” Rick said.
“It’s Sunday, dammit.” Mac bristled. “And I was here late last night removing a kidney.”
Rick raised his hands. “Whoa! I’m just kidding. How come you didn’t let Liz Carlyle handle it? She was on call for small animals last night.”
Liz Carlyle was an excellent vet. At the moment she was working on an advanced degree in veterinary ophthalmology and her surgical skills were top-notch.
“I trust her, but I trust me more.” Besides, Kevlar’s kidney problem was an interesting and delicate case and a welcome change from neutering dogs and spaying cats. “I didn’t have anything better to do.”
Rick nodded. “Like you don’t have anything better to do this morning. Hey, podner, you ought to get a life.”
Mac forced a smile. “I have a life. And I have patients in ICU. Where else would I be? You’re the one who’s usually on the golf course by now.”
“That’s where I would be if I weren’t on call here. Eighteen holes, then a late brunch with Margot at Brennan’s, a long post-brunch snooze in front of the television set and a late supper.”
“And you think I should get a life?”
“Actually, I think you should get a wife.”
“You sound like my mother. Don’t.” Mac pivoted on his heel and walked back to his office, then stopped and turned. “Look, since I’m here already, I’ll handle the calls, if any, until Liz gets in. Will that give you time for your golf game?”
“Heck, nine holes, at least. Forget what I said about getting a life. You just go right on being a lonely workaholic as long as you want.”
After Rick dashed for the parking lot and his golf clubs, Mac propped his feet on his desk and picked up the copy of the Sunday paper he’d brought with him. He might take in a matinee this afternoon, maybe try a new restaurant tonight. Or he could work out at the gym. He had plenty of friends at the gym.
Except they seldom showed up on Sunday.
More annoyed by Rick’s gibes than he was willing to admit, he pulled open his desk drawer and took out a dog-eared black leather address book. He’d take someone to dinner tonight, maybe wind up spending the night.
He wasn’t quite certain when he’d given up sex. It hadn’t been intentional. Recently he hadn’t been seriously involved with any woman. He never had been able to master the bed-hopping techniques of some of his bachelor colleagues. Sex should entail real emotional attachment.
Talk about getting old!
He ran his eye down the names in his address book. Cindy was married—pregnant, he thought. Marilyn had moved away to Seattle or someplace. Jennifer would probably be free, but her endless prattle about social functions would give him a migraine. Claire would hang up on him.
Sarah Scott and Eleanor Chadwick, the two large-animal vets, were both happily married, and Sarah had a baby. Mac couldn’t barge in on either of them on a Sunday. Bill Chumney, the exotics vet, was out in the Dakotas somewhere building a census of black-footed ferrets, and Sol Weinstock was at the international equine clinic in Lexington, Kentucky, working on his experiments with EIA vaccine.
Mac wandered back to the kennels. The cages were cleaned and all the animals had fresh water and food.
“You about done, Big?” Mac asked.
“Uh-huh. Got the little guy out and walked him around some. He’s a real happy fellow, isn’t he?”
Mac nodded. “You doing anything this afternoon?”
Big turned his seraphic smile on Mac. “Me’n Alva Jean are taking her kids to the zoo.” He looked hard at Mac. “Hey, why don’t you come along? They got that new baby gorilla out. Ain’t nothin’ cuter than a baby gorilla.”
Mac shook his head. “Thanks for the offer, but no. I’m here until two. Then I’ll probably take in a movie.”
“You ought to come with us. Alva Jean wouldn’t mind.”
Alva Jean had recently been through a nasty divorce. The last person Mac might have expected her to take up with was Big Little. Well, maybe not the last. She’d walked out on her husband because he had smacked her and the two children around. It took a great deal to rile Big Little, and he would as soon raise a hand to a woman or child or animal as he would take up brain surgery. At least with Big she’d be physically safe from her husband.
Unfortunately, if the husband tried to hurt either his ex-wife or his children again, he wouldn’t be safe from Big.
Mac had no intention of spending all afternoon with this unlikely pair, and definitely not with Alva Jean’s two small children in tow.
It wasn’t that he disliked children, exactly, but they always acted like—well—children.
He avoided them even in his practice. Nancy usually spoke to distraught parents about Bobby’s rottweiler or Betty’s kitten.
You could count on animals to act like animals, so he preferred to devote himself to them and not to the owners who caused so many of their problems.
He said goodbye to Big and walked back up the hall to his office. His footsteps echoed on the tile floor. All the treatment rooms were soundproofed, so once he had closed the door on the kennel, he could no longer hear the whines and barks of the patients. The clinic felt almost eerily quiet.
As he reached the door of his office, the front-door buzzer sounded.
Good. An emergency. Maybe something to get his teeth into, to keep him from feeling as though he was the last human being on earth.
He walked into the reception room and peered through the glass doors.
His heart bounced into his throat. It was that Lockhart woman. He’d know that hair anywhere.
He opened the door for her.
“I’m here to see Kev.”
“Yeah. Come in.” He stood back and held the door.
She turned away from him and called, “Hey, Em, it’s okay.”
The passenger-side door of an elderly but well cared for red Jeep opened and a slight figure jumped out and ran up the stairs.
A child! A tall, skinny girl in oversize jeans and sweatshirt. Obviously Kit Lockhart’s child. There couldn’t be half a dozen people in the city with hair that extraordinary dark red. As she bounced up the steps, he saw that she had missed out on her mother’s green eyes. Hers were hazel.
She might be a beauty someday. At the moment she was as uncoordinated as a day-old foal.
He took a step back.
“Is he okay? Can we see him?” the child asked. “We brought him some of his toys.” She held out a brown paper sack.
“Whoa, girl. This is my daughter, Emma. Emma, this is Dr. John MacIntyre Thorn. He’s the man who saved Kevlar’s life.”
“Uh-huh. Can we see him now?” She slipped past him.
“Um, yes. Please follow me. And be quiet.”
Fat chance, he thought. He’d learned about the habits of prepubescent girls from growing up in the same house with his younger sister, Joanna. They invariably squealed every chance they got. No doubt this one would do the same.
As they came to the door of the ICU, he pointed to the Quiet sign. He pushed open the door and stood aside. The child shoved past him, then stood stock-still a foot inside the door. He nearly tripped over her.
“Oh,” she whispered into the immediate stirring of whimpers and meows.
“Kevlar’s over there on the bottom tier.”
She went to the corgi and dropped to her knees in front of his cage. “He’s Mom’s dog, really,” she said, pressing her open palm against the wire. “He works for her. Can I get him out and pet him?”
“Carefully. Don’t let him run around. Just hold him and pet him. You can give him his toys before you leave.”
“Thanks,” said Kit as she joined her daughter on the floor. “Hey, Kev,” she crooned. He came into her lap, licked her chin and settled quietly while mother and daughter bent those extraordinary red heads over him.
Mac felt the need to talk, to tell them about the incision, the prognosis, how beautifully the dog was doing—anything to interrupt this tableau that pointedly excluded him. But he couldn’t speak to Kit—she couldn’t see his lips. He had no idea how to speak to the child.
Emma solved the problem for him. She stood up awkwardly, but with the fluidity of young joints, and began to wander around the room while her mother continued to pet Kev. He watched her long fingers caress the dog’s pelt, and felt a shiver down the back of his neck.
“What’s wrong with this little dog?” Emma asked.
