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“Does it?”
“Sure. They’re your family. You know them, and they know you. No Bull would ever hurt you.”
Kelsey froze with a mouthful of garden salad and balsamic vinaigrette. She’d never thought about it like that. Had she become interested in Dex because he was a Bull?
She definitely considered it a plus, but no, the patch on his back wasn’t the prevailing reason she wanted to be with him. She’d really noticed him, become interested in him, wanted to be with him, outside of the clubhouse. Watching him with his dogs. The way he’d tried to save that dying puppy, and how he’d cried when he couldn’t. How he’d gone out of his way, and risked his own life, to try to save Maisie’s grandparents, though they were strangers to him.
The way he’d saved her. From Greg.
She’d wanted to be with Dex because he was a hero. A knight in shining armor.
She’d fallen in love with him when she’d discovered how tender he was, how much he hurt, inside that armor. Now she wanted to save him right back.
She finally swallowed and washed the bite down with her water. “I think I love him, Maze.”
Her lifelong best friend reached across the linen-covered table and clutched her hand. “I want this for you, Kel. You deserve every good thing. Including a great love like in the movies.”
Kelsey smiled. “I think I’d rather have a great love like in real life. Like my mom and dad.”
“Then it looks like you picked right this time.”
~oOo~
Kelsey tied off the last stitch on the last kitten in a litter from a feral mama, her twentieth surgery of the afternoon. Her feet were screaming, her back and shoulders throbbing. “Okay, little miss. All done.” She backed away from the table and let the techs take over. “How many left?” she asked as she pulled her gloves off.
“Three,” Anita answered. “Two spays and a neuter. All cats, all TNR.”
“And one of the spays is the pregnant kitten, right?” A woman who ran an excellent rescue and TNR organization from her semi-rural home, and had worked with Cedar Ridge for several years, had brought in a six-month-old kitten, malnourished and full of worms, who was already pregnant. Sonogram had shown ten fetuses, which would be an enormous litter for a fully mature cat to deal with. The odds were slim that such a teeny baby herself could safely deliver all those kittens and then be ready to mother them. In such cases, unless the pregnancy was far enough along that the kittens were already viable, they carried on with the spay and terminated the pregnancy therein. Some vets would terminate even past viability, considering it akin to humane euthanasia, but that was not Kelsey’s way.
Even in an early pregnancy, it broke her heart a little to see all those tiny almost-kittens, but she knew everybody was better off with the spay and termination.
“Right, let’s do her next,” she sighed, preparing herself. The sonogram had shown these kittens to be nearing viability. “I’m going to take a quick break. Five minutes.”
“We’ll flip the room and be ready.”
“Thanks.” She escaped the OR. She needed to pee—and to collect her phone and check her messages. Dex had been tense this morning as she’d prepared to leave, and he’d said he’d probably be late because of work. Kelsey thought that meant the dark job that had him so out of sorts was going on today.
She had crystal clarity about what ‘dark’ work meant for the Bulls. And now she had some insight into how that kind of work rode Dex.
Because she had only five minutes and also wanted to get a drink and maybe a protein bar or something, Kelsey checked her messages while she peed. Nothing from Dex yet. Their last text exchange was from several hours earlier, when she’d started her work day. She’d textedLet me know when you’re done today??, and he’d responded pretty quickly withI will.
He hadn’t left yet when she had, but he’d been getting ready. That was sliding toward ten hours ago. His last text had come in more than six hours ago. What kind of bloody work was he doing for an entire day? Or had something gone wrong?
Was he hurt? Or in trouble?
She could call her father—he preferred calls to texts—and ask if there was trouble, but the waters were still troubled around her father and her relationship with Dex, and she didn’t have time to play out scenarios and make sure asking him wouldn’t start some kind of thing.
Really, she didn’t have any time right now. So she texted Duncan.
Hey, you busy?
He replied within a few seconds.
Just finished a brake job
Sitting on my ass in the shop
Sup?
