Page 3 of Love Bound

I better go make some welcome muffins.

From inside, through the kitchen window, I can see the gelding. The muffins are baking, and the mixing bowl is clean and rinsed and back on its shelf. Evening is beginning to fall, but the rusted-out truck still sits between the buildings.

Wandering out, I shush the gelding into a stall, being careful to stay away from his teeth and hooves. Now that he's settling in, shock may wear off and his personality may not be so reticent. I open the clinic's back window, drag a metal milking crate to stand on, attach a hose to the spigot above the clinic sink, and flood a rubber tub with thirty gallons of water.

The sun is just setting behind Camden hills, the rolling shoulders of the mountains backlit with crimson running behind them. A breeze kicks up and as I stand there, hose in hand, the gelding watches me with wide, frightened eyes.

A light flicks on in the second story floor of The Inn in a room facing the road.

Not the sea.

It's hard to find a room without a view.

The families who would stay in that room stayed for cheap and were always really nice. Most people who came and stayed were nice. The Inn was built to house quarrymen at the turn of the century and was remodeled in the nineteen-sixties as an inn. It went from twenty-one rooms to fourteen, with walls torn down and rooms enlarged. Our parents bought it with a business loan leveraged off the death of a grandmother in Oregon and then my dad turned the servants' house into the clinic—Russo Veterinary Clinic. The offices are downstairs, living quarters up. The sign still hangs at the end of the gravel road.

Three stories high with a walkup attic, The Inn is huge, needs scraping, and a new coat or two of white paint. Twenty pairs of dark green shutters would definitely complicate that chore. My favorites, though, are the old twelve-over-twelve windows that face the ocean and Rock Island and stretch the length of the dining area. Growing up, my one chore was to clean those little squares of glass, so old they warped the view of the sea, land, and trees, reflecting the twelve-foot tides and the occasional clam digger.

Stepping up, I turn the water off. The wind flips a strand of hair in both eyes and they sting and tear while I closed the stall door. The horse has plenty of room to turn around and make eye contact, but he won't. Head down, he stands in a corner and shakes himself. Soot flies. I hope he has enough trust to lie down in the fresh straw.

A movement makes me glance up. All I can see is the construction guy from the waist up. And it is a guy.

My eye still tears and I wipe it quickly, trying not to stare. I can't see the man’s face which makes this all the more voyeuristic, but I don’t care.

His body is hard. Hard. Everything about him is sinew and flesh, ripped, but lean. His stomach is flat and despite the old gauzy curtains blowing in the breeze, I can see the deadly, serrated pattern of a six-pack. The hose starts slipping to the ground then he turns around, steps into full view. No curtains separate my view of him and I take a step back as if to hide.

His chest is ripped, his pecs rising into perfect swaths of muscle with just enough hair to tease, to feel good, skin against skin. A faint tickle. A shiver in expectation and after.

He leans down for a moment to close the window and I hold my breath, afraid of being seen. Though he's not looking at me or even out the window. But it won't slide, and he wrestles with a wooden window prop—probably one my dad made. His arms in the fading pink light are muscular, strong; the arc of his lats moves as he struggles to wrest the prop from the sill. Shadows define the rest of him, cast where muscle tucks neatly to bone and suddenly the window slams shut. He never looked down. I never saw his face.

The curtains stop blowing. The construction guy disappears.

I start breathing again.

This is going to be my neighbor for God knows how long.

Really?

But he's in a financial bed with the enemy. So I definitely can't crawl into bed with him. With a body that hot he probably has a third eye or a hunchback. I never did see his back.

Besides. I don’t sleep around. I don’t even date.

Not anymore.

Unscrewing the hose from the sink spigot and coiling it over a post on the corral, I stomp my rubber work boots and slide them off before going in the side door. Just as the door closes, the timer dings.

Muffins are done.

This is my life. My sisters—Devon and Laurel—still make fun of me and how orchestrated my day-to-day existence is. But it has to be. It's the only way I could get through the day, the week, the month, the year, vet school, run a practice, and take care of all of them. Travis—our baby brother—is the only one who gets it, the only one who really sees how much work it is for me to keep it all together, all the time.

Setting the little metal pan on the cooling rack, I glance at the window across the driveway still lit with yellow light. Now that I’m upstairs, my kitchen window is directly across from where that man is sleeping tonight.

I'd better keep it together.

Two days ago, I received a certified letter from a Willis Bertrand, an "attorney at law" in Massachusetts. The letter was four pages long with a ten-page addendum and a survey of the entire property. My hand shook holding the papers and I had to set them down on the kitchen table. I spread them out, tried to read them, but the words were all caps and screamed at me. I ended up calling our family attorney, Aiden McCardell.

Aiden had also received a copy of the letter. It wasn't good news. The new owner—Finn Colton—wanted to break the land trust my parents set up when we were little. And, if he couldn't break it, then he'd petition to have himself named landlord over the clinic and give me three months' notice. I hung up the phone, and sat down hard, refusing to panic. But it was hard not to.

I'm still trying to tamp the terror down. I don’t have money for a court battle. I don’t have endless resources and it sounds like this guy might have a case. All I know about this Finn Colton is from George, who said Finn was a businessman who paid or The Inn with cash. Some rich guy who could just start throwing money around to get his way.