Groomed for Love
Is she too perfect?Dog groomer Rylie Quinn lights up the local animal clinic with her charming laugh, but there’s a dark secret lingering behind the radiant redhead’s bright smile. One man seems determined to dig up Rylie’s past…and gets under her skin in a way that no one ever has before…As Assistant DA Noah Prescott’s investigation reveals secrets she’d rather stay under wraps, the heat they generate flares out of control. But when Noah finally learns Rylie’s story, he’ll have to decide whether his desire for the truth is more important than winning the heart of the woman he’s come to love…
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“What difference does it make to you, anyway?” she replied, feeling a little desperate now.
Her resistance was crumbling under the power of this somber, intense Noah.
As soon as she uttered those words, she wished she could take them back, because he started to walk toward her. The expression in his gorgeous but compelling brown eyes had Rylie backing away, completely forgetting the truck behind her, until she bumped into sunset-warmed metal. From bra line to hips, she felt the heat; however, that was tepid compared to what his look stirred inside her.
When Noah was toe-to-toe with her, he framed her face with his hands. “Only this,” he whispered against her mouth.
* * *
Sweet Springs, Texas: Where love springs eternal!
HELEN R. MYERS is a collector of two- and four-legged strays, and lives deep in the Piney Woods of East Texas. She cites cello music and bonsai gardening as favorite relaxation pastimes, and still edits in her sleep—an accident, learned while writing her first book. A bestselling author of diverse themes and focus, she is a three-time RITA>® Award nominee, winning for Navarrone in 1993.
Contents
Chapter One
“Rylie, sweetheart, you are the best thing to happen to Sweet Springs since they started putting in drive-through windows at pharmacies.”
Rylie Quinn, the new groomer at Sweet Springs Animal Clinic, grinned at Pete Ogilvie, the eldest of the four war veterans who conducted a daily coffee klatch in the corner of the building’s reception area. It was she who’d dubbed them the four musketeers after characters in the famous Alexandre Dumas novel, and Pete himself Athos, after the eldest of the adventurers, because the former marine was the boldest yet most complicated of the group. He also had somehow taken Jerry Platt under his wing. At sixty-six, Jerry, whom she called D’Artagnan, was the youngest and had become the fourth member of the veteran group, as D’Artagnan had become the fourth musketeer in the story.
“Why, thank you, kind sir.” Holding out the hem of her maroon smock, as though it was a skirt, she offered a quick curtsy, bemused, even though the comparison was confusing. She suspected he hadn’t meant to imply that she was appreciated because she was a convenience. “All because I asked Mr. Stan if he wanted sweetener in his coffee?”
“That’s right! None of us can tell him that he’s being an old grouch the way you can and still bring a smile to his face.”
Stanley Walsh—aka Porthos, as far as Rylie was concerned—was sixty-nine, the second youngest, and an ex-navy man, as well as a retired master sheet-metal fabricator. Sometimes—like today—his hangovers caused him to grouse a little more than usual, which was saying quite a bit, since Stanley had a dry sense of humor to begin with.
“That, along with being as bright and as pretty as a black-eyed Susan, which is about the only damned flower that can survive the summer like we had with any grace. Whew, can you believe it officially became autumn yesterday?” Pete asked around the room. “If you hold that front door open for too long, I swear those bags of dog food stacked on the shelves over there are gonna pop like popcorn in a microwave.”
As others grunted their agreement, Rylie said, “I’m sorry for the strain it is on animals, but I sure don’t mind it being warm. I was born and raised in the desert country of California. That said, I’m getting seriously partial to your trees here, especially the pines.” She had arrived in this Central East Texas community early in July, in time to attend Dr. Gage Sullivan’s marriage to Brooke Bellamy last month, the niece of the lady who used to be Gage’s neighbor. That neighborhood, as well as several parts of town, was enhanced by pockets of the pines and hardwood trees that had once earned the region its other name—The Piney Woods. She told the men, who had also attended the wedding, “If I had Doc and Brooke’s yard, I’d sleep with the windows open every night to listen to the breeze whispering through the trees.”
“Well, don’t try it here, even if your fancy RV’s windows are high off the ground,” Roy Quinn said from inside the reception station in the center of the room.
As usual, her uncle pretended to have as gruff a personality as any of the old-timers, but Rylie knew the middle-aged bachelor saw her as the daughter he’d never had. “I wouldn’t do that. Besides,” she reminded her only relative in the area, “as far back as those trees are beyond the pasture, it’s easier to hear the highway traffic out front.” The clinic was on the service road of a state highway that ran north to south on the east side of town. The overpass that led to downtown was only a few dozen yards beyond the clinic’s parking lot.
“Good. Keep those miniblinds shut at night, too. What we lack in woods, we probably make up for in Peeping Toms and lechers, and word’s getting around about you and that RV being parked in back.”
