Page 3 of The Vet's Unconditional Love
She didn't pull away until she was sure he wasn't hot on her heels, determined to give her a piece of his mind.
She wouldn't blame him.
Perhaps she'd do better to give him a wide berth for a while.She was an expert in being simultaneously useful and invisible, after all;
Chapter One
Harper stared out the window of the plane, taking in the snow-capped mountains below.The vastness of the landscape and the never-ending clear blue sky made her feel as though she was already back in Montana.They couldn't be there yet — there was still an hour and a half to go — and once she arrived, she'd be under the big sky rather than zipping through it like this.She leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes.
Her trip back to New York had been brief but useful.Her friends had been glad to see her; she'd been glad to see them.When she'd left the city all those months ago, she'd thought she was only going to Montana for a few weeks — a month at most — to visit Shelley.But with the way things had worked out, she'd decided to stay.
She was grateful to her friends for keeping an eye on her apartment, and she was going to have to make some decisions about it at some point.She could keep it, if she wanted to, but it didn't make much sense if Montana was going to be home.
She sighed.She thought she wanted to make it home.But she didn't have to decide right now.
Her New York friends thought she was crazy to even consider it.Of course they were biased — they wanted her back.And there were parts of her life in the city that she did miss.She'd been to the symphony in Bozeman, and it was good.Good for a small city out west, as her friends had pointedly reminded her after their evening at Carnegie Hall last week.
They didn't understand.She wouldn't have understood herself if she hadn't spent the last few months in Montana — hadn't experienced life out there.Of course, it was a whole different world from what she was used to.A different culture, different values, a pace that was glacial compared to New York.But the people — the people were something else.Hardworking, honest, straight-shooting, decent.Not that there weren't plenty of those in New York, but it was almost like comparing two different planets.
She adored her city friends.But her very best friend in the world was now in Montana, and the two of them hadn't lived in the same place for far too many years.And she'd made other friends there too.Jim Sheridan, who'd rented her his cottage.The whole MacFarland clan.Shelley's new friends, mostly women like them, who’d moved out there for one reason or another.Shelley’s man, Trip, and his group of friends — most of them former Navy SEALs who'd grown up together in Paradise Valley, gone off to serve, and come home again.Good men.Not men she could imagine fitting into her life in the city.
She turned to stare out the window again.
And then there was Emmett.
Emmett was one of that group of former SEALs but he was so much more than that.He was a widower.He was a single dad to Tanya and Alana — thirteen and fifteen — who he’d raised by himself since their mom passed.
The rest of that group of men were good-looking, no question, and rugged with it.But Emmett was something else.Competent, capable, a good father who'd put his girls and their needs ahead of everything else since the day he lost Emily.
She made a face.He was damn good at it; he just shut the rest of the world out while he did it.
She hadn't known that when she first started helping out with the girls — driving them to rehearsals, picking them up from school, filling in wherever they needed her.She'd done what she always did: spotted a problem that needed solving and got on with it.And things had been going well.Until the night she'd opened her mouth and said too much.
As she so often did.
She probably would have gotten away with calling him out on his self-reliance — he knew it himself, owned it even.But she hadn't been able to stop there.She'd gone further and implied — or maybe come right out and said, she wasn't entirely sure which — that in shutting the world out, he was shutting the girls out, too.
She couldn't remember exactly what she'd said to him, but she'd never forget the look on his face when she left.He'd been furious at first, and that was fine.Well, maybe not fine, but — she could understand it, and she could deal with it.
But she'd done something worse than make him angry.She'd made it sound as though she was on the girls' side and he wasn't.And as far as she was concerned, that was unforgivable.
It was the way she'd said it — the way she'd turned to the girls, made it anus, made him the outsider in his own kitchen.In his own family.She hadn't meant to do that.She'd just been angry and the words had come out the way they always did, faster than her better judgment.But the result was the same whether she'd meant it or not.She'd stood in his home and implied that she and his daughters were a team — and that he wasn't on it.
The girls were his world.
She hadn't apologized since — not because she didn't want to, but because she knew that bringing it up would mean wading back through what she'd said and what she'd meant.And that would be like poking the bear.She let out a short laugh at that.She and the girls had taken to calling him Papa Bear — she'd christened him with it, and Tanya and Alana had gleefully adopted it.The irony wasn't lost on her.
She could handle him being angry at her.What she didn't want was to make him face what she'd implied.The last thing she wanted was to hurt the man.
So she'd managed to keep hanging out with the girls, taking care of logistics whenever she was needed.Shelley and Trip and the others were all taking turns picking Alana up from her theater rehearsals, too — it wasn't as though she was the only one showing up for them.But for all the time she spent with the girls, she'd still managed to avoid spending even a moment alone with Emmett since that night.
Which was unfortunate, really.Because in many respects, there was nothing she'd rather do.
She took her phone out of her purse.She’d deal with the Emmett situation when she had to – and not a moment before.In the meantime, the rest of her life in Paradise Valley was something she was looking forward to getting back to.
She opened her phone and smiled as she scrolled through her texts.She hadn't messaged with Shelley since yesterday morning, but her friend had promised she'd be there waiting when Harper landed.Harper was looking forward to seeing her.
The two of them had met and become close friends in college, and their friendship had stayed solid ever since.Harper had based herself in New York, working as an editor for one of the big publishing houses, while Shelley had gone on to law school and worked for a firm out of Pittsburgh.They'd seen each other through marriages, divorces, and worse, and the distance had never made any difference.
