Heat floods my face.Stephen reads the expression and raises an eyebrow.
"Clara Whitmore knows I stayed here."
"Clara Whitmore knows everything that happens in a fifty-mile radius because she's married to Dan Whitmore, who works with Logan Creed, who's Sawyer's oldest friend.Information in this town doesn't travel in a line.It travels in a web."He sips his coffee, completely unbothered."Are you embarrassed?"
"Not embarrassed.Surprised.I've been here three days."
"Welcome to Grizzly Ridge.Population eight hundred and fifty, and every single one of them is in your business before you know you have business."
I laugh.A real laugh, loose and full, and the sound surprises me.I haven't laughed like that in months.Maybe longer.Stephen watches me laugh with an expression so raw and exposed that I have to look away before my eyes start stinging.
"Go see Clara," he says."I'll work Ranger and Duke this morning and start reading your threshold mapping protocol for the afternoon session."
"You don't want me here?"
He stands.Rounds the table.Puts both hands on the arms of my chair and leans down until his face is level with mine, his mouth three inches from my mouth, his sea-green eyes filling my entire field of vision.
"I want you here every minute of every day, and that's exactly why you should go have coffee with Clara.Because if you stay, we're not going to get any work done, and I've got six dogs who need my attention."
His proximity is doing things to my pulse that shouldn't be legal before eight a.m."Is that right?"
"That's right."He leans in and kisses me.Slow.Thorough.His tongue traces my bottom lip and his hand slides into the hair at the nape of my neck, and when he pulls back, my fingers are gripping the front of the flannel I'm wearing and I've forgotten what coffee is.
"Go," he murmurs."Come back for dinner."
"And after dinner?"
"After dinner you're staying in my bed and I'm going to make up for every night of sleep I've lost in the last four years."
I drive into town with wet hair and a racing heart and Scout sitting in the passenger seat giving me side-eye that I absolutely deserve.
Grizzly Ridge Veterinary Clinic sits on a side street off Main, a converted ranch house with a professional sign and a parking lot that holds four trucks and a horse trailer.Clara meets me at the door in scrubs and muck boots, her auburn hair in a practical braid, her smile warm enough to heat the building.
"Come in, come in.Coffee's fresh.Fair warning, everything I'm about to say is going to sound like small-town nosiness, and that's because it is."
I follow her into a clean exam room that doubles as an office.She pours coffee from a French press on the counter and hands me a mug with a cow on it.
"So."Clara leans against the exam table and wraps both hands around her own mug.Deep green eyes sparkling."Stephen Nelson."
"We're collaborating on his K9 program."
"Uh-huh.Is that what they're calling it now?"She grins."Honey, Dan got a text from Logan at five-thirty this morning that said, and I quote, 'Nelson's smiling.Something's wrong.'That man hasn't smiled in the entire time he's lived in Grizzly Ridge.Whatever you're doing, keep doing it."
The warmth in my face spreads to my chest.To my stomach.To the place behind my ribs that's been locked tight for years and is currently trying to expand in a way that terrifies me.
"It's complicated," I say.
"It's always complicated.I showed up in this town looking for my brother after twenty years and ended up falling for a Green Beret who was assigned to protect me from a stalker.Complicated is the town motto."She sets her mug down."But you didn't come here to gossip.You came because the vet who handles large animals for every ranch in this valley might have something useful to say about trauma recovery."
And just like that, Clara Whitmore proves she's as sharp as her reputation suggests.
We talk for two hours.Real, substantive conversation about cortisol regulation in traumatized animals, about the intersection of physical and behavioral rehabilitation, about the challenges of working with creatures who can't tell you what happened to them so you have to read it in their bodies.
Clara's approach with horses and cattle mirrors my approach with dogs in ways that surprise and energize me.She's intuitive.Patient.She treats animals like partners in their own recovery rather than problems to be solved.And when I describe what I've been seeing with Stephen's dogs, she nods slowly.
"That's Stephen," she says."He does the same thing with people.Holds everything so tight that nothing can get in and nothing can get out.Dan says Stephen's the most self-contained man he's ever met, and Dan spent fourteen years in Army Special Forces, so that's a high bar."She pauses."He cares more than he shows.A lot more.He just doesn't know how to let it live on the surface."
"He's learning."
