The Vet from Snowy River by Stella Quinn

CHAPTER

10

Oh! Poppy’s dad was the big handsome vet?

She hauled in a breath. Wait, so Poppy’s story about the gossip in town was about Josh Cody? And—she flicked through the kid’s story in her head—if he was in business with Poppy’s aunt … then that meant the Cody and Cody Vet Clinic wasn’t a husband-wife team, but a brother-sister team.

Not that who he was in business with was any concern of hers.

He met her eyes over the top of his daughter’s head, thanks and questions written across his face.

‘Er, hi again,’ she said. ‘Vera. From The Billy Button Café.’

He smiled, a grin so brimful of charm she was able to understand how Poppy’s mum, whoever she was, had fallen under its spell.

‘You don’t have to keep introducing yourself. I know who you are.’

Oh boy. And now she knew who he was: single; too good-looking for her peace of mind; and with daughter-shaped emotional baggage which she had just sort-of employed.

Poppy was peeling herself out of her dad’s chokehold. ‘Guess what, Dad?’

‘What?’

‘I’m going to be a waitress.’

‘You are?’

‘Yep. Vera’s offered me a job for the holidays.’

‘I see.’ He raised his eyebrows in Vera’s direction. ‘Honey, can you call your mum? Let her know I found you.’

‘My phone’s dead.’

Josh rolled his eyes. ‘Of course it is. When you charge it again, maybe you’ll see the three thousand messages I’ve left for you.’

‘Oops. Sorry, Dad.’

‘No, it’s fine. I’m the one who’s sorry. We’ll talk, okay? Here, use mine. Your mum and Ron are worried about you.’

He handed his phone over to Poppy then looked up at Vera. She figured some sort of explanation was in order, so stopped running the ears of the dog through her fingers and stood up straight.

‘About the job,’ she began.

He nodded. ‘About that. Listen, you got time for a coffee or something? My place is just down the road. I’d like to get Poppy inside out of this cold.’

Vera hesitated. It was late, and she’d been planning a long bath and a deep-bottomed beverage. She shot a glance at her watch and dithered.

Saying yes would be a mistake. Get involved with no-one and avoid all drama … that had been her mantra as she packed up her life in Queanbeyan.

But … she had just employed this guy’s daughter. Maybe it was her civic duty to prove she wasn’t going to be an ogre of a boss.

Besides, she just had a cold, lonely apartment to go back to, with only her worries about guilty pleas for company, and this reckless spark the vet had lit in her brain felt good. When had she last felt good?

‘Sure,’ she said, recklessness winning out over caution, for now. She turned with Josh and started back down Paterson Street in the direction of the lake. Poppy’s chatter to her mother filled the air behind them.

‘You live above the vet clinic?’

‘Yeah. We, as in my sister Hannah and me, own the building together. It’s been in the Cody family for generations. Our grandparents ran a haberdashery from the ground floor, back when haberdasheries were a thing. There’s apartments on the upper storeys. Hannah’s on the top floor, I’m the middle floor.’

‘That’s handy for work.’

He smiled. ‘Sometimes too handy. And since I’m the junior partner, Hannah thinks it’s my job to deal with the middle-of-the-night pet dramas.’

‘So you bought into your sister’s practice?’

‘Well, “buy” probably isn’t the right word. Me and Hannah made a deal.’

‘Oh? What sort of deal?’

He shrugged. ‘She’d have let me into the business for nothing. But she’d used her savings to fund the fit-out—the treatment rooms, the x-ray machine, the dog run out back—and worked hard the last few years to build the practice up into a profitable business, so I found a way to pay her in kind.’

In kind? What an idea. If only she could pay the rent on the café in cakes and chicken ribbon sandwiches.

‘I worked construction when I left school. Ten years. I can knock out walls, lay tiles, plumb a shower. Hannah gave me the idea. The apartments on the upper storeys hadn’t seen a paintbrush since about 1920 when we moved in, so I strapped on my toolbelt and worked out my half of the practice fixing up her apartment. My place will be next and then, when time and money permit, we’re going to restore the street frontage to its original condition.’

A vision of Josh wearing a toolbelt and a patina of sawdust and man-sweat drifted across her mind’s eye, and she tripped on a crack in the footpath. She stiffened as his arm came up under hers and set her back on her feet.

‘You okay?’

Vera could feel herself blushing and unglued her fingers from Josh’s muscled forearm. What had they been talking about? Her mind had gone blank all of a sudden. Oh, right. Buildings. In kind. Kindness.

How messed up was her world that kindness felt like a word from a foreign language?

‘Construction to vet school. That seems like a big jump.’

‘Journalist to café owner and cake expert. Seems like you don’t mind a leap yourself.’

Vera stood stock-still on the footpath. How the hell did some random guy, who she’d barely met, know she used to be a journalist? And if he knew that, what else did he know? Her voice, when it came, was low. ‘It’s a long story. One I have no intention of sharing. I don’t know how you heard that, but—’

Josh touched her arm. ‘Hey. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry. I’ve got a few long stories myself, one of which crawled out and bit me on the bum today. Bit Poppy, too.’

She sighed. ‘Don’t tell me. Small-town gossip. Poppy did give me a mangled version that made virtually no sense. It seems like I was prying, now, but at the time I had no idea who she was or how to get her home without a bit more information.’

He reached his arm around her and gave her shoulders a little squeeze. It felt good. Too good, for a woman who’d sworn off men forever.

‘Whatever you did, it worked. This is the nicest Poppy’s been to me since I told her I was moving to Hanrahan.’

Vera eased herself away and looked back over her shoulder, to where Poppy was nattering away on the phone about puppies and bus travel and how to store meringues like a professional. Josh was right, at least Poppy looked a whole lot happier than when she’d first seen her, weeping in the shadows of the skip bin.

‘I should have guessed when she mentioned a guinea pig,’ she said, as she followed Josh across the park over to Salt Creek Flats Road.

‘Excuse me?’ He was looking at her like she’d lost her marbles. Which, truth be told, she may very well have done. She’d barely been in town a month, and already she was halfway to forgetting her personal vow to never get involved with any guy, ever again—no way, no how. Problem was, when she made that vow, she didn’t know she was about to meet a warm-hearted vet with a flirty grin and a kooky daughter.

‘Poppy was going on about boys keeping their trousers on, and older women, and unexpected babies, which didn’t make a lot of sense, and the guinea pig threw me for a total loop. I should have realised the guinea pig was my biggest clue. Who else has guinea pigs for clients other than vets?’

‘Former client.’

She grinned. ‘Yeah, Poppy mentioned everyone left the room in a hurry when you went … what was her word? … apeshit.’

Josh chuckled. ‘Yeah. There’s a bill that’ll never get paid.’

The light over the doorway of the Cody and Cody Vet Clinic shone a golden circle over the quiet street corner.

‘Come in,’ said Josh. ‘You can fill me in on Poppy’s job, and I can thank you for keeping her safe for me. I should probably also mention she doesn’t actually live here in Hanrahan full time. I’m not quite sure how a job is going to work.’

She shook her head. ‘She told me. School holidays only. About coming inside … I don’t know, it is kind of late.’

The vet shrugged. ‘I’ve got wine, frozen pizza, peanut butter and half a loaf of maybe stale bread?’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Wow. That’s a dizzying list of food enticements.’

‘Please, Vera,’ said Poppy, who had bounded up to them after finishing her call. ‘If you come in, Dad won’t tell me off for running away this afternoon.’

Oh, what the hell. It wasn’t as though this was a date. She was just reassuring a worried father that she was going to be a nice employer for his daughter on the odd occasions she was in town.

She nodded. ‘You Codys have a unique way of persuasion. But just for a bit. I really do have to be up at dawn.’

‘Great.’ Josh shoved a key into the heavy wooden door, and let her and Poppy precede him into the foyer. ‘Popstar, can you take Jane Doe back to her pups? Make sure she has some water.’

‘Okay.’

The dim foyer was quiet after Poppy led the dog away, the clicking of claws on the tiled entry fading as they disappeared somewhere in the house. Quiet and oddly charged, like static had built up in the space between her and the man who stood watching her.

‘So,’ she said, clearing her throat. Ridiculous to feel this nervous, he was just a guy. Just a concerned father, with a whole life she knew nothing about. Hell, he could be gay, celibate, completely uninterested.

He moved a step closer.

Oh boy. The static charge jumped up by about a thousand volts. Her clothes prickled, her hair felt heavy, her breath juddered in her chest.

‘So,’ he said, the low echo of her word rumbling in the space between them. He leaned a shoulder up on the wall in a gesture that would have seemed casual if it hadn’t, for some crazy reason, also sent her heart rate into a spin. ‘This is a little unexpected.’

She pretended to have no clue what he was talking about. ‘Not at all. Graeme and I were just talking the other day about having some casual workers on our books. Hiring Poppy for a few hours this week will help us work out when we need staff the most.’

She wondered if she sounded as dizzy as she felt. Hot vet alert. Graeme’s words rang in her head; her feckless hormones had been on high alert ever since she’d felt the blaze of Josh Cody’s eyes on her.

‘You want to take off that jacket? It’s plenty warm upstairs.’

How had he managed to make an innocuous sentence sound like an indecent proposal? Not gay, then. Or celibate. Or uninterested, if the look in his eyes was anything to go by.

‘Ah …’ she said. ‘Um …’

‘You know, I was wondering if I should get to know you a little better.’

She swallowed. ‘You were?’

‘Yeah. But, you know, I’ve got a vet practice to build up, a daughter to wrangle, a derelict apartment to renovate in an historically sensitive way. I’d take some persuasion.’ His teeth gleamed in the shadowed light. Oh yeah, this guy had charm all right. And it was damn near irresistible. She hugged her jacket about her; perhaps the padded fleece of her old winter coat could deflect some of it.

‘Uh-huh,’ she said, putting some steel in her voice so it wouldn’t sound like she was flirting. ‘Well, that’s just as well. I’ve got a café business to build. My aunt to care for. Some, er … stuff left over in the city that can’t be ignored. I most definitely could not be persuaded.’

His voice was lower still. ‘And yet, I’ve got this big hungry urge to try.’

Oh, she was in trouble. Sexually charged banter was not the road to a calm and peaceful life alone in Hanrahan while she pulled herself together. Sexually charged banter was the road to ruin.

Josh was—crap—was he leaning towards her? Was he going to kiss her? She had about sixty thoughts all at once, none of them connected, none of them making any sense. A few were along the lines of this is sudden, and woah there, Vera, you hate guys right now, but the big clamouring all-caps one was saying DO IT, DO IT, DO IT!

At the last second, common sense prevailed. At least, that’s what she told herself as she turned her head to the side and his hot, stubble-rough mouth pressed a kiss into her cheek. Chickened out was what she’d really done.

She dragged in a long breath. ‘About that wine,’ she said, ‘not a good idea.’

He held his hands in the air then gestured towards the old-fashioned timber staircase to the next floor. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I thought … well, it doesn’t matter what I thought. What matters is that we’re being neighbourly, and to be honest when I said wine, I may have been exaggerating. There’s beer, that I can promise. And I wasn’t joking about the stale loaf of bread.’

Poppy’s footsteps clattered up the corridor behind them. ‘Relax, Vera. I can make us a green tea. It’ll be like a practice run for when I start making tea for customers.’

The girl looked so pleased, she didn’t have the heart to turn her down.

‘Sure. Just a quick one, though, I have work tomorrow.’

‘Cool! Me too? I mean, you do want me to start tomorrow, right? I’ve only got a few days, I need to learn everything.’

Vera smiled. Crazily enough, this almost felt like fun. ‘Sure, tomorrow sounds fine. Six am.’

‘Six am?’ The girl’s shriek nearly splintered her eardrums.

She heard Josh give a snicker of laughter beside her. ‘Oh, I am so persuaded, Vera De Rossi.’