1
RYLIE
Iwas so freaking fired.
No matter how many times I tried to shove that thought into the dusty storage closet of my mind, it kept wiggling back out. Like a guilt-gremlin with opinions.
Focus, I told myself. Every problem had a solution. A teacher of mine used to say that. Probably the same one who cried during parent-teacher conferences, but still. Wisdom was wisdom.
A lost cat on my first solo day running the clinic?
Yeah. That qualified as a capital-P Problem.
“Here, kitty kitty,” I called as I emerged from the woods with twigs in my hair and probably at least one spider along for the ride. I scanned the land around our sad little trailer-clinic.
No sign of Snowball. No sign of anything except the new, obnoxiously gigantic fire hall that made our clinic look like a kid’s science-fair project. A losing one.
Fire hall. Firefighters.
Firefighters rescued cats, didn’t they?
Okay, usually from trees. With ladders. And muscles. But Snowballcouldtotally be in one of the many trees behind me. Orsitting in a bush laughing at me. Hard to say—cats were hard to read.
Still. Firefighters rescued cats. Cats climbed trees. The math checked out.
For the first time in a solid ten minutes, I unclenched every muscle in my body as I marched toward salvation—a.k.a. the fire hall. There was a back door, but knowing my luck, it was alarmed and I’d end up on the evening news asLocal Woman Accused of Breaking Into Fire Station in Apparent Cat-Related Panic.
So, front door it was.
I walked straight through the open garage bay…then stopped short. The garage was empty. My hopes deflated like a balloon someone let go of at a birthday party. Did that mean the firefighters were gone, truck and all?
I pushed deeper into the station anyway, because what else was I going to do? Give up? Tell Dr. Hanson I'd lost Mrs. Porter’s diabetic cat on Day One of flying solo?
"Hello?" I called out, my voice echoing off the polished concrete floors. "Is anyone here?"
Silence.
Then—wait. Was that…singing?
I froze, tilting my head like my roommate’s spaniel did when she heard the treat bag. Definitely singing. Coming from somewhere in the back.
Following the sound felt only slightly stalkery. But desperate times, desperate measures, and all that.
The voice got louder as I moved down the hallway. Deep. Confident. Enthusiastic in a way that suggested the singer thought he was alone.
I rounded the corner into what had to be the station kitchen and?—
Oh.
Oh.
A man stood at the stove, his back to me, wearing nothing but black boxer briefs and apparently zero self-consciousness. He was singing into a spatula like it was a microphone at Madison Square Garden, his hips doing a little shimmy that should've required a permit.
Something sizzled in the pan in front of him. Bacon, maybe? The smell was incredible, which felt wildly inappropriate given that I was currently ogling a half-naked stranger’s…everything.
Broad shoulders. Defined back. The kind of arms that suggested he could probably bench-press me without breaking a sweat. And those boxers left absolutely nothing about his?—
Focus, Rylie.
