Page 67 of The Cajun Doctor

Jeesh! When did I start thinking of Daniel as a bad boy? And why Alaskan since he seems to have settled on the bayou?

When he began to star in my dreams, that’s when. Alaskan or otherwise.

But he’s a nerd.

A sexy nerd.

She made a quick trip to the bathroom . . . no time for a shower . . . and grabbed a pair of cropped sleep pants to go with her sleep shirt, and a pair of thongs for her bare feet. Then she rushed down the wide stairway toward the second parlor where the only sound she heard was “Holy shit!” Opening the pocket door, she discovered all the animals, except for Clarence, were missing. The cover had been taken off his cage, and she noticed that there was clean water and birdseed. For once, the bird was quiet and seemed to be staring out the window near his cage, almost with a yearning expression on its face. If birds even had expressions! Maybe it wanted to be free, to fly outside. Yeah, right. She should be so lucky!

A quick peek showed that Angus and Lily Beth were still asleep in the front parlor, curled up on their respective air mattresses. Daniel had suggested that the pregnant girl would be more comfortable in Aaron’s bed upstairs, but Lily Beth said she was too tired to trek up all those steps, and Angus was sticking to Lily Beth like glue.

Angus was wearing only a pair of Star Wars boxer shorts, and Lily Beth wore boxers, too, hers imprinted with pink stars on a white background. Both of them were loaners from Daniel, even the pink ones. Samantha had been too tired last night to ask where he’d gotten them. On top, Lily Beth had a white sports bra that left her big belly free of restriction.

Samantha’s heart went out to the two of them. Yes, they’d brought a lot of trouble into her life, but at this moment, they seemed so darned innocent, even Angus with all his silly piercings and tattoos. They’d been sucked in by Nick’s on-again/off-again charm, just as she had at the same age and level of naiveté.

For a brief blip of a second, she entertained an outlandish idea. Maybe I could adopt Lily Beth’s baby.

Immediately, she discarded that notion. She should be thinking of ways to help the girl keep her baby, not ways to take it away.

She closed the door quietly and made her way down the hallway to the back staircase that led to the first floor kitchen. Looking down, she saw the imprint of her flip-flops in the dust-covered floors and steps. In fact, the entire house was covered with a film of dirt, which was to be expected in a structure under renovation, but some of this dirt and grime was decades old. Good thing they didn’t have any furniture yet. The whole place would need a thorough cleaning first. It was the kind of thing a bachelor, or bachelors, like Aaron and Daniel, would hardly notice. And she certainly hoped they would furnish the rest of the house from someplace other than IKEA, hardly historically appropriate for this old house.

There was an upscale coffeemaker sitting on the counter, the only thing less than fifty years old in the empty kitchen, as far as she could tell. The fridge, for example, was a putrid avocado color that had been retired back in the 1970s. A matching green Kelvinator electric range was missing two burners, and its oven door was hanging on one hinge.

The kitchen was huge with a gray flagstone floor, cracked in some places. A massive, walk-in, brick fireplace, now inoperable, had been used for cooking in the mansion’s early days, although there was also a separate building, known as a summer kitchen, for cooking to avoid the intense heat.

Samantha poured herself a mug of surprisingly good coffee, and stepped out the back door to a wide, roofed verandah, where slaves would at one time have done house chores. There would have been benches here, and perhaps a rocking chair or two. Even a table for folding air-dried laundry, or preparing vegetables for dinner, like snap beans or peas. There might even have been dried herbs hanging from the rafters.

Old houses like this held a genetic memory, in Samantha’s opinion. If you sat and listened, with eyes closed, you could almost see and hear and feel the people who’d passed through this place.

She stepped off the porch onto the hard-packed dirt yard, and relished the sun which was already up but pleasant this early in the day. That’s when she noticed two unusual things:

— The rare, white tupelo tree standing back about twenty yards from the house. It had to be at least fifty feet tall with a gray, furrowed bark on its old trunk-like alligator hide, and green fruit hanging from its branches, sometimes known as swamp limes. In fact, the tupelo was also called river lime, Ogeechee lime, sour gum, or swamp gum. But it wasn’t its size or distinctive features that made this tree rare. It was because tupelos usually grew only in swampy areas, or along riverbanks. This specimen, which had to be hundreds of years old, was a testament to the fact that this property had once been under water.

— The other thing she noticed was what sat under the tree. Daniel. And all her animals. Like a harem, they were. Daniel could be the pasha, sitting in the shade, on a large, circular, wrought iron bench with chipped white paint that surrounded the base of the tupelo, leaning back, his long legs extended and crossed at the ankles. Sitting next to Daniel on one side was an empty mug. On the other was Emily, whose snout was propped on Daniel’s thigh. One of Daniel’s hands rested lightly on Emily’s head, as if he’d been patting her.

Axel was snoozing on the ground, or just plain exhausted from traveling from the parlor through the house, down the stairs to the kitchen, and then outdoors. His old German Shepherd bones tired easily these days. Then there was Madeline, who was frozen mid-crouch, about to attack some bees. The other two cats, Garfield and Felix, were nowhere to be seen, probably off munching on field mice. The puppies were gamboling in a patch of grass.

Samantha’s chest tightened with sudden emotion. A man who was this comfortable with animals had to be amazing with children, or at least he would have been during his pediatric oncology career. A true doctor, unlike Nick and his pals.

Further adding to Daniel’s allure were his heavily lashed lids that were half mast as he dozed, a testament to his having stayed up all night. He sported morning whiskers, and wore black running shorts, a pristine white T-shirt, and a pair of old, once-white athletic shoes without socks that highlighted the light brown furring of hair on his arms and long legs. In other words, sexy, sexy, sexy.

Her traitorous thoughts (traitorous to the shield she usually had up around Daniel) were broken by the too-sexy-to-live man who hadn’t been asleep after all. “I liked your other sleep outfit better.”

“What?” she said, looking down. “What’s wrong with this?” She wore mid-calf, green-and-white polka dot cotton pants, and the long white sleep shirt with its I-Heart-Dogs logo, an animal rescue fundraising purchase from last year.

“Nothing. It’s just not the same as your screw-me-silly, red silk harem pants and the touch-me-you-idiot, see-through top.”

She gasped, feeling both outraged and pleased at the same time. Despite her best efforts, she blushed and claimed, “They were not harem pants.” And recalled her likening him to a pasha out here with his harem.

He shrugged, as if it were mere semantics.

“And how would you know harem pants anyhow?”

“I dated a belly dancer at one time.”

Now, that surprised her. “And you could not see through the top.”

“You could if you had a good imagination, and mine is really good.” His eyes danced with mischief as he spoke. In the meantime, their voices had awakened the animals. He picked Emily up and placed her on the ground.