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“Think?”
“Come on. I don’t notice a woman’s hair.” His mouth dropped open as if he realized a potential husbandly error that could ruin the rest of his evening. “Except yours, of course. Yours is beautiful.”
“Uh-huh.” She untucked the covers from under the pillow and folded them down. “What color is my hair?”
“See, I knew there would be a test.” He shot her a smile that suggested he thought he’d won something. “And the right answer is chestnut brown.”
“Listen to you with the fancy color description.”
He took her mind off the darkness. She’d come through the worst months of her life—some people, like her former therapist, insisted she was still going through them—but his smile, his laugh, the way he would say the right thing and make her feel less tense, worked like being thrown into the light.
“Okay, being honest here,” he said as he held up his hand. “I saw the box in the bathroom the last time you colored it. Then I got sidetracked, trying to figure out if I’d ever really seen a chestnut.”
“You’re making me sorry I asked.” But she wasn’t. In those few seconds of messy thinking he’d made her forget that anything bad could ever happen to them.
“So, why did you?” he asked.
Right.The redhead. “I saw this woman today while getting coffee, then again in the parking lot at the clinic.”
“Maybe one of her pets is an ongoing patient at the clinic?” He stood up and opened the drawer to his dresser. Turned his back to her as he grabbed a clean T-shirt.
That made sense. “Possible.”
He glanced up in the mirror above the dresser and stared at her reflection. “Did something happen with this woman?”
“No.”
He turned around to face her again. His eyes narrowed with what looked like concern. “Really?”
She didn’t mean to give him another reason to worry, but she clearly had. “Do you think I fought a stranger over coffee?”
His features softened again. “I wrestled with a cat suffering from explosive diarrhea today, so even if you did, I still win.”
She refused to ask for any details. “Poor baby.”
“Me or the cat?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. The cat.” She moved back to lean against the wall of pillows stacked on the bed.
“No.” He shook his head. “It has a loving family. We’re not adopting it.”
He spent a lot of time insisting they not becomethatvet family. The kind with nineteen pets. She disagreed.
“Of course not. We already have two cats.” An unreasonably small number, in her view. They had some land. They could handle more. “Fuzz and Buzz would be appalled at the idea of having to share.”
“Those names.” He groaned. “Never let a four-year-old name the pets.”
“Lesson learned.”
“Right . . . ” He made the word last for five syllables, as if he knew what was coming next, because he probably did. It was a popular refrain in their house.
“And the next pet will be a dog. Named by me.” She’d long ago sided with Nathan on the need for a dog... or three.
Harris rolled his eyes. “So, this woman...”
She admired his deft change of subject. “It’s fine. I’m sureit was nothing.” She wasn’t even sure why she brought it up except that the woman had looked familiar.
“Was there a point when you thought it was something?” When she shook her head, he kept going. “The whole story about seeing her sounds oddly mysterious.”
