The Vixen and the Vet (3 page)

“Like you, she didn’t feel like Danvers was enough. She wanted to see more of the world. Six years after you went into the service, she went to New York University. You ended up getting your hand blown off; she ended up getting fired from the most prestigious newspaper in the country. You both came home to lick your wounds.”

Asher winced when Miss Potts, with her usual no-holds-barred directness, compared their lives so nakedly. He clenched his jaw, his eyes flicking to the plate before looking back up at her. For the
past eight years, since he returned home after sustaining “calamitous” injuries, Miss Potts had been his most important friend, the only person he trusted.

“Except her life was just starting when mine ended,” he said in a level voice, peppered with a good bit of anger. He’d been injured in the service of his country, but he hadn’t exactly been welcomed home
, and for the first five years after his return, he’d wallowed in it, drinking too much, raging at all hours of the day and night. Miss Potts had stayed quietly by his side, as loyal and kind during the dark years as she’d been when the Lee family library started to, literally, save his life.

“Only because that’s how you want it.”

He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table and thrusting his left index finger up toward his face. “I
wanted
this?”

She remained expressionless. “No. I didn’t say you wanted your injuries. But
you’ve
decided to live your life like a hermit. That was
your
choice.”

He didn’t need to get up and look in the ornate, gilt-edged mirror over the massive fireplace to know that
calamitous
was the accurate word for his face. His right eye drooped, and the right half of his face was a gnarled mess of scar tissue. He was missing a small chunk of his nose on the right side, and he wore his hair shaggy to conceal the scar where his right ear used to be. But no amount of hairstyling could conceal the fact that his right arm was missing below the elbow. And his right leg, also injured in the blast, would always cause him to walk with a slight limp. Once a handsome young man, he was now a monster. A beast.

“You don’t remember what happened when I first got back.”

“Maybe not,” she said, lifting the foil and leaning down to press her nose close to the dark chocolate frosted treats. “Mmm.”

“You didn’t see the faces of my fellow townsfolk,” he spat out. “My friends. People I’d known all my life. Who’d known my parents and grandparents. Who’d looked out for me after my parents
’ accident. They couldn’t
look
at me. They gasped and cringed and looked away.”

All chances of rejoining society had crumbled after those first few spirit-killing weeks
, and Asher had decided to turn his back on the people who had turned their backs on him.

“Mm-hm. That’s what I heard.” She lifted a brownie and bit into it, sighing with appreciation. “Oh
myyyy …”

“They didn’t come
’round to see the old football star. They were more comfortable pretending I was dead up here in my quiet prison, so I gave them their wish. I pretended I was dead too. And that’s all I ever wanted: to be left alone.”

Miss Potts took another bite
, then looked up at Asher. “What, dear? Did you say something?”

He pounded his hand on the table so hard the plate in front of her jumped, then clattered back down. “Don’t mock me!”

Without lifting so much as an eyebrow, Miss Potts said, “Oh, I’m not. I’m enjoying one of Savannah Carmichael’s excellent brownies.”

He pointed his finger at her. “You’re trying to provoke me.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” she said, taking another bite.

“You want me to call her? Let her come on up here to see the freak? Under the guise of an interview? Maybe I should tell her to bring her camera too.”

“If you like.”

Asher’s nostrils
flared, and he curled his good hand into a fist.

“But best let’s brush out that mane of hair first? Make you presentable,
hm?”

“I’m not doing it
,” he said. “I barely look human. I’m not fit to rejoin the human race.”
Not that they’d have me anyway.

Miss Potts had had enough. She calmly put the last bite of brownie back on the plate and cut her sky
-blue eyes to Asher’s furious brown.

“
Asher Sherman Lee! You’re more human than the lot of them. And so is Savannah. She’s in a bind, and you’d be saving her hide. When’s the last time you got a chance to play the hero?”

He clenched his jaw at her indelicacy, but she surprised him by sliding the plate across the table to him with one good push.

“You want your life to look different, Asher? Then change it.”

He scowled at her. “Oh, it’s that simple, huh?”

“Just don’t wait too long. She’s a survivor, that one. If you won’t help her? My money’s on her finding someone else who will.”

S
he stood up, dabbed at the corners of her mouth with the pad of her thumb, and left the room.

Asher seeth
ed for the better part of an hour, the chocolaty goodness of Miss Failed Reporter’s brownies nearly as distracting as the memory of her beautiful brown eyes. They’d widened in surprise as they caught his, and he couldn’t help but wonder how they’d look widening in pleasure, in—

No. No, you do not get to think about women in that way. You will not torment yourself with the impossible.

Without agreeing to do her interview, he felt like a cad eating one of her brownies, but he was weak for home-baked brownies like his mother used to make, and one turned into two, turned into three. Still feeling miserable, he’d ended up on the treadmill for an hour after that. Though his limp inhibited his speed and pace, the exercise usually helped release some of the tension from the helplessness and anger.

It didn’t help tonight. Tonight he wanted to break into a sprint, and it killed him that he couldn’t. He wished he had a chance with a girl like Savannah Carmichael. He longed for friends and family around him, but he
had neither. With every fiber of his broken being, he wanted to be whole again, but he wasn’t. And he never would be. Ever again.

He lived in a house on a hill,
almost totally devoid of human contact, not because that’s what he
wanted
, but because that’s how his life had turned out. Right? Right. And no amount of prodding from Miss Potts was going to change that.

His leg ached when he got off the treadmill and limped to his desk. He sat in the stiff chair, beads of sweat trailing down his face, his tangled hair soaked from the workout. He stared at his phone, then back at Savannah’s card, his phone, her card.

Of everything Miss Potts had said tonight, what needled him most was this:
You want your life to look different, Asher? Then change it.
Did he wish his life looked different? Hell, yes. But he wasn’t sure how giving an interview to Savannah Carmichael was going to change things. A woman as beautiful as Savannah would never see him as anything but a story. Still, he could help her, right? He hadn’t been useful to anyone in a long, long time, yet he could help her by giving her a story, just as Miss Potts had suggested. And maybe in return she could remind him what it felt like to be among decent people again.

“Damn it
.” He picked up the phone and dialed the number on the card. “I hope you’re happy,” he muttered toward the ceiling, where Miss Potts was likely watching reruns of her favorite program,
Bewitched
, as she folded laundry and ironed.

“Hello? This is Savannah Car
—”

“It’s Asher Lee.” He grimaced at the abrupt way he’d interrupted her, but holy hell, it’d been
over a decade since he’d called a girl.

“Mr. Lee!” The warmth in her voice made his heart speed up, made him squirm, made him want to go back to church. “What a surprise!”

“You make a good brownie.” Cradling the phone between his cheek and his shoulder, he slapped his forehead with his hand.
You make a good brownie?
Real smooth, Asher!

“Well, now. That’s so nice. It’s my sister’s recipe. I’ll be sure to let her know.”

An awkward silence settled between them, and he realized she was waiting for him to explain the reason for his call. He cleared his throat and swallowed.

“You wanted an interview?”

“Yes! Yes, I’ve been commissioned to do a human interest story in time for the Fourth of July. I thought, well, a hometown hero couldn’t be a better—”

She stopped speaking when h
e snorted, and he winced again. But “hometown hero?” That conjured images of flags and parades, not bitter, disfigured recluses.

“I have some conditions.”

“Go ahead,” she said, her voice professional and level. He wondered if it hid nerves.

“No photos.”

“Done.”

“We meet at my house.”

“Done.”

He took a deep breath. He didn’t know what she’d say to his last condition, but if meeting with Savannah Carmichael was the first step in rejoining the human race, he’d need to see her more than once.

“We’ll split the interview into multiple sessions.”

“Um
, of course,” she said.

“Mondays, Wednesdays
, and Fridays. Four o’clock. For the next four weeks.”

She hesitated, and he wondered if she was considering backing out of so many afternoons with
“Hermit” Lee, the mythic beast of Danvers.

“Will there be enough to talk about to fill that amount of time?
” she asked. “By my calculations, that’s about twelve hours.”

He panicked,
snapping, “Do you want the whole story of how I became the town freak, or not?”

“Mr. Lee
, I—I’ve insulted you. It wasn’t my … I mean, I’m so sorry that—”

“You didn’t insult me. Do we have a deal?”

“Yes,” she said, low and certain.

His eyes fluttered closed as his shoulders relaxed
, and his heart, already racing, pounded against his ribs with increased fervor.
Tomorrow.

“Good
,” he said.

“Good.”

“Miss Carmichael?”

“Yes, Mr. Lee?”
“I’m, um … I’ve been alone for years. I’m unpolished.”

“Well, then,” she said, and he pictured those pretty pink lips lifting when he heard the humor in her warm voice, “
you’ll be in good company.”

His lips twitched in an unfamiliar motion
, and he realized that his mouth was attempting to smile. It had been weeks, if not months, since he had smiled from human contact, and it was so bewildering to him that the smile quickly disappeared.

“See you tomorrow,” he said.

“Four o’clock,” she said, before the line went dead.

Asher put the phone back into its cradle on his desk and stared at it, dumbstruck, for a full minute before slumping back in his desk chair.

Holy hell.

The first time you sit in comfortable silence

Savannah looked at the note
cards spread out on the porch coffee table, swapping two, then glanced at her watch again. Twenty past three. She didn’t want to be late, and she still needed to change into something less edgy than her usual black. Yesterday she’d borrowed Scarlet’s too-tight V-neck sundress to complete the country-girl-with-brownies picture, and she guessed it would be smart to do the same today. Anything for the story, right? This piece was her chance, and she wasn’t going to blow it. If Asher Lee liked country girls and brownies, then a fresh-faced country girl is what she’d deliver.

She turned her attention back to the cards spread out before her. Her
sojourn to the library yesterday hadn’t been in vain. She’d learned an impressive amount about her subject, as attested by the note cards, which created a solid time line of Asher Lee’s life.

The only son of impressively wealthy Pamela and Tucker Lee, Asher Lee had been poised for greatness from birth. He attended local schools,
where he aced his studies, participated in several clubs and was the star quarterback in his junior and senior years. His parents had been killed in a chartered plane crash during his junior year of high school, and Miss Matilda J. Potts, a dear friend of his late grandmother, was named as his guardian. Even with the heavy burden of grief, his grades did not falter, and he was accepted at the University of Virginia, where he enrolled in pre-med studies. But this is where it got cloudy. Savannah noted his acceptance at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, but he either rejected the admission or deferred it to serve as an enlisted Army medic. Why? Why hadn’t he completed med school first? Did he want frontline medical experience? Did he have a deep yearning to serve his country? Did he have a death wish? Savannah placed a gold star on that note card, indicating an area of his life that required more explanation.

T
he next time Asher Lee surfaced in the media was in
The Danvers Gazette
: a notice of grievous injuries sustained in Afghanistan, almost four years after enlistment. One month shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, a land-mine style IED exploded near him as he tried to drag a fellow soldier to safety. According to the report, it severely injured the right side of his face, severed his right hand, and led to injuries in his right leg. He underwent extensive surgery in Kandahar and again in San Antonio before returning home to Danvers almost a year later.

There was a notice of his homecoming in the local paper, but then
… nothing. Not a peep. Not a word. Not a mention. For eight years. Nothing. He disappeared entirely from public view.

Why? What happened once he got home? Why hadn’t he been able to
acclimate to civilian life? Savannah didn’t remember ever hearing much about the Lee family growing up, though she was sure her parents were at least familiar with them. And she was leaving for college right around the time that Asher Lee returned home. But she couldn’t help but wonder how the captain of the football team, a U.Va. graduate, a veritable golden boy, had become a hermit? And what in the world had he been doing with himself for all these years?

She checked her watch again. Three-forty. She pushed the cards into a neat pile, put a rubber band around them, then slipped into the house.

“Scarlet?” her mother called.

“
It’s Savannah, Mama.”

Her mother, Judy, stepped out of the kitchen, her thick middle wrapped in a floral apron and a smudge of flour on the t
ip of her nose. “I’m baking muffins. Want a plateful? You can’t go empty-handed to visit that poor man.”

Judy Carmichael’s heart was solid gold, and she refused to see meanness or badness in anyone. When Savannah informed her mother she’d be interviewing Asher Lee over the next few weeks, her mother had smiled and patted Savannah’s hand like she was an angel from heaven on a mission of mercy.

“Banana nut, Mama?”

“My specialty!”

In truth, every baked good known to man was her mother’s “specialty,” as evidenced by the framed blue ribbons covering half her kitchen wall—one for just about every year she entered baked goods in the State Fair.

“I’ll take three?”

“Take four,” said her mother, bustling into the kitchen. “You’re skin and bones.”

Savannah grinned,
because that was not true, then took the stairs two at time, ready to pilfer something sweet and pastel from Scarlet’s closet before her four o’clock meeting.

***

Asher paced his study, stopping again to glance at his reflection in the full-length bathroom mirror. He started from the ground up.

Black driving moccasins looked comfortable but rich. His eye traveled up his Levi’s-clad leg
s and he had to admit, so far so good. His legs were long, the scarring hidden behind the light denim, and his waist was still as trim as it was during his football days. A pressed, light-blue oxford shirt was tucked into the jeans, which was belted with supple black leather. His uncomfortable, seldom-used prosthetic hand dangled from the right sleeve. It was an old, outdated model that was covered with a flesh-colored latex and had no real mobility. He knew that newer models acted like bionic skeletons, but Asher had gotten so used to one hand, he hadn’t bothered with the trip to Walter Reed to have a new hand fitted. Maybe someday. For now, as long as he kept his “hand” in his lap, the disfigurement was less obvious.

He
held his gaze on the body that looked surprisingly normal, forcing himself not to look above the neck. Finally he nodded once, ready to face the inevitable. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe time had worked its magic, and he wouldn’t look handsome, but he wouldn’t look so, so … He raised his eyes and gasped, then winced.

Time had not been kind to him, but it didn’t matter.
The doorbell rang. Savannah Carmichael was here, and it was too late to turn back now.

***

This time, Miss Potts didn’t make Savannah stand in the doorway like a vacuum cleaner salesman. She swept open the door, smiling in welcome.

“Why, Savannah! What a pleasure to see you again so soon! And you’ve brought treats
too.”

“My mother sends her regards, Miss Potts.
She made her award-winning banana nut muffins today and insisted I bring a plate to share with you … and Mr. Lee.”

“Ah! How kind. And speaking of Mr. Lee
…” Miss Potts flicked her glance to the stairs.

Flanking the mirror in the center of the landing, two windows cast late-afternoon light into the front hallway like spotlights, obscuring the features of the figure standing at the top of the stairs. She stared at him,
her breathing relaxing as her eyes adjusted. Why, he wasn’t a monster at all. Even in the strong glare, she could make out his long legs in jeans and the wide chest behind his crisp blue shirt. His face, catching the full force of the glare, was all but silhouetted from where she stood, but it didn’t matter. He was tall and stood straight and strong, nothing like the hunchbacked ogre she’d been led to expect from the few snippets of gossip she’d collected from her sister.

She stepped forward, feeling her smile broaden as she said
, “Mr. Lee.”

Slow
ly, with what she perceived as a slight, but well-controlled, limp, he came down the stairs, his face and form coming into sharper focus. As her eyes adjusted, she braced herself and said a thousand prayers of thanks to the reporter who’d given a detailed report of his injuries so she could prepare herself.

Oh my God. Oh my God.

She licked her lips nervously, but as soon as she found his eyes, she made sure to hold them. Like a child told to pick a spot from a spinning carousel pony and not to let it out of sight, lest she become sick, she stared at those rich brown eyes like her life depended on it. Her gaze didn’t flick to the mottled scar tissue that covered his right cheek, the drooping eye, or the burned skin on his lower cheek extending into his neck. She had read he lost his ear, and she could see his long, shaggy hair in her peripheral vision, covering the place where his ear would be. She held his eyes like a challenge, and without letting her smile weaken, she purposely lifted her left hand to him so they could shake hands skin to skin.

“Miss Carmichael,” he said in that low, deep, blue-blooded voice that had so discomfited her on the phone,
and reached out to take her hand.

His hand was soft and warm, and she could feel the coiled muscles under his skin as he pumped her hand gently. Of course this hand would be strong. It’s the only one he had
. Still, the strength and tone surprised her, and she felt her cheeks flush as his eyes searched hers.

“Thank you so much for agreeing to meet with me,” she
said. She’d never maintained such intense initial eye contact with a subject in her life, and though she knew it was entirely necessary, it felt too intimate for a first meeting.

“It’s my pleasure. Thank you for agreeing to my terms.”

His voice was smooth, but stilted, like it knew what to do but hadn’t been allowed to do it for way too long.

“Of course.”

“And thanks for the brownies. Though they forced me to log an extra half hour on the treadmill last night.”

He still held her hand
, and between the heat of his skin and the heat of his eyes, she was about to turn into mush. She dropped his glance and pulled her hand away. When she looked back up, he lifted his chin, as if bracing himself for her inspection.

She refused to inspect his face
, but from what she could gather from her peripheral vision, it was as disfigured as the reports had indicated. Looking down again, she pretended to rifle through her bag, relieved to find a little notebook and pencil at the bottom, and held them up for him to see.

“Shall we begin?” she asked, capturing his eyes with precision.

His good hand swept up toward the left side of the stairs. “After you.”

***

Well, well. Savannah Carmichael was a lot tougher than he expected. And more professional. And, he thought, ruefully wondering where she’d gotten her information, she was prepared: she’d offered him her left hand to shake and she’d always looked him directly in the eyes, not allowing her gaze to wander across his injuries. He followed behind her up the stairs, his entire body responding to the light sweetness of her perfume, the way her hips swayed gently in the lavender-flowered sundress she wore with a cream-colored sweater that just hit her trim waist.

“To the left or right, Mr. Lee?”

“Asher,” he responded. “Left. My office is the first door on the left.”

She stopped in front of his office
door, as though she expected it to open magically for her. He reached over her shoulder, pushing the door open, breathing in the scent of her shampoo or perfume—whatever it was, it smelled like a goddamned miracle. His blood rushed south and he cursed softly. He didn’t even know her. She could be dating someone, or engaged. He had no business thinking about her like that. Thinking about her, period.

“Are you married, Miss Carmichael?”

“Savannah,” she said, taking a seat in the guest chair in front of his desk. “No. I’m not with anyone.”

He ignored the leaping in his stomach from that simple admission.

“I thought we’d sit by the windows,” he said, walking over to a pair of wingback chairs facing an antique stained glass window that made a rainbow of light on the hardwood floor.

He quickly
moved behind the chair on the left, pulling it out for her. If he had to be interviewed, he’d at least be sure that when she looked at him, she saw his good side.

After she was settled, he took the seat beside her, letting his long legs drape languorously in front of him, crossing them at the ankles. Savannah dropp
ed her purse to the floor and crossed her legs toward him.

“I don’t want to tire you,” she said gently, turning her neck to look at him.

“You won’t.”

“I must admit, you don’t look like you’d tire easily.”

And damn it, he didn’t mean to take her comment sexually, but there it was: the image of her beneath him as he continued not-to-be-tired all night long. He must have blushed, because her eyes widened with surprise, and she looked away.

“I
just meant that you seem fit,” she said, a hint of teasing in her tone.

“I
am
fit.”

It was her turn to blush
and he cleared his throat, unaccustomed to company, to having a beautiful woman within reach.

“I told you I’m unpolished. I haven’t spent time with anyone but Miss Potts in years. I don’t want to scare you off with some stupid comment or other.
”

“I don’t scare easily,” she
said, grinning.

“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions before we get started?” he asked, turning slightly to look at her,
but making sure that she could see only his good side.

“Fire away
.” She shifted in her seat so that her adorable backside was shoved into the corner of the chair farthest from him, and her little pink ballet flat almost grazed the side of his thigh.