Mr. Right Next Door (10 page)

Like kiss her again.

Or blow the case by telling her too much.

Or both.

Before he hurt her and became just one more man that she learned she could not trust.

Because he wasn’t the man she thought he was and he knew women like her. He wasn’t the kind of man a woman like her wanted. A staying kind of guy. A guy who didn’t know how to lie the way Nick did. A guy who’d had things in his life that had lasted, relationships that had lasted. A guy who knew how to care about people.

She deserved all that and Nick wasn’t the man to give it to her.

It was very, very late before he climbed into bed that night, later still when he finally fell asleep.

He should have known he’d dream of her. Of sinking into sleep, the two of them a tangle of arms and legs, soft, creamy skin, long, blond hair, perfect lips, all of that. Couldn’t she even leave him alone while he slept?

He dreamed of finding her in his bed in the middle of the night, her warm, soft body pressed up against his back.

Nick grinned just thinking about it. He snuggled a bit closer, thought about turning over and wrapping his arms around her, but if he was asleep that might be enough to wake him up and he didn’t want to wake up.

He wanted to imagine—or maybe he didn’t have to imagine—that she was there, sleeping in his bed. That she would wrap her arms around him, warm and willing in sleep. That when he woke up all he’d have to do was turn over and there she’d be. He’d kiss her soft, soft lips, take her into his arms and…

Okay, he really couldn’t wait for that to happen.

If he woke up, he woke up and ruined a perfectly good dream.

But if he wasn’t asleep and it wasn’t a dream, he could be enjoying it a lot more.

He rolled over, an arm coming out to wrap around her, found hair and a little, warm body.

A really little, warm body….

Nick opened his eyes, thinking he still might see her there, that he’d be practically nose to nose with her and could kiss her awake. When he opened his eyes it was still dark, the room nothing but shadows and…

“Aaaarrrrrrruuuhhhh!”

He saw what looked like a mouth and lots of teeth, clearly not the woman of his dreams.

“Aaahhhhh!” he roared right back.

Who the hell was in his room?

There was a scramble of movement. He blinked once, then again, hoping to clear his vision.

Was he still asleep?

Was this a nightmare?

Because it was awfully loud for a nightmare.

Instinctively, he grabbed for his gun, which he slept with tucked between the mattress and the box spring, and took aim at the source of the noise.

He heard a crash of some sort, heard what he was sure was Kim scream from down the hall and then something came at him, and he didn’t have time to think, just react.

He’d been trained to think first, shoot later, but when someone was coming at you in the dark in a split second, you either put a stop to it or let it get you. That was it. No choice. And if they stopped him, there’d be no one to protect Kim.

He squeezed the trigger, heart pounding, breath ragged, still not completely sure he was awake.

There was an ungodly howl of protest.

Honestly, it didn’t even sound human.

What the hell had he hit?

He had hit it, hadn’t he?

No way he was lowering his gun until he knew.

“Don’t move!” he ordered.

Kim woke in an unfamiliar bed, an unfamiliar room, to the weirdest sounds. She didn’t know what they were.

Then she heard a crash coming from Nick’s room, and then—oh, God, it sounded like a gunshot. Kim took off running toward him with a baseball bat she’d found tucked away in a closet and stashed by her bed three nights ago, just in case, before she went to sleep. Not that a baseball bat would be that helpful against a gun, but it was the best she could do.

Had that really been a gunshot?

Who would have a gun in Mrs. Baker’s B&B?

“Kim?” Mrs. Baker called out. “Are you okay? What was that?”

“I’m not sure,” Kim yelled back. “Call 911! Now!”

And then, bat in hand, she charged into Nick’s room, ready to do battle, because she couldn’t leave him alone, defenseless in his room, against a guy with a gun. She just couldn’t.

She pushed the door open, raised the bat, ready to swing and found…

Nick with a gun?

Why would Nick have a gun?

“Don’t move!” he ordered.

The gun swung toward her and she screamed, skidded to a halt in her bare feet, still holding the bat.

And then the gun swung back to whatever he’d been aiming at before she came in, which was making an awful, howling noise.

What was it?

“Get the light, Kim,” he yelled.

She found the switch and flipped it.

Light flooded the room, blinding her for a moment.

She winced, then blinked twice against the improbable scene before her.

Nick was sitting on the side of his bed, shirtless, a huge, menacing-looking gun firmly in hand and pointed down at the floor where…

The cat, Cleo, was standing, back arched, hair raised, hissing and scowling at Nick, making a horrible howling noise like nothing Kim had ever heard from the cat before.

And…bleeding?

The cat was bleeding, its front right paw held off the ground.

There was a little pool of blood under its right paw.

“You shot the cat?” Kim yelled.

“No, I didn’t shoot the cat!” Nick claimed.

“But you shot your gun? That was you?”

“Yeah.”

“You have a gun?”

“Yeah, I have a gun.”

“And you shot it?”

“Yes, I fired the gun—”

“And the cat’s bleeding, but you expect me to believe you didn’t shoot it?”

“I wouldn’t shoot a cat,” he claimed, all evidence to the contrary. “I shot at someone who was in my room, who attacked me.”

Kim looked around, not sure what to believe.

She was still half asleep and Nick might be, too. She wasn’t absolutely certain she was awake, although why she’d dream of Nick shooting Mrs. Baker’s cat, she couldn’t imagine.

Cleo was still protesting loudly, and she was standing in the middle of some broken glass, Kim realized.

The cat seemed to realize sympathy was available, if she wanted it, and she decided to plead her case to Kim. Cleo held up her right paw, dripping with blood, to Kim and started meowing pitifully.

“Oh, you poor baby.”

Kim dropped the bat and picked up the cat gingerly, fussing over its poor, injured paw. There was a long, angry-looking scrape from halfway down its front leg to its paw, raw and welling with blood. It was definitely no little run-in with a bit of broken glass on the floor.

“You shot the cat!” she yelled at Nick.

“I’m telling you, it’s the glass—”

“No, it’s not. You don’t skid on broken glass and get a gash three inches long. You shot her!”

“There is no way I’d shoot a cat,” Nick claimed.

Cleo hissed at him and held up her wounded paw, as if to say,
What do you have to say about this, you jerk?

“Oh, baby,” Kim said, hugging the poor cat closer to her.

She grabbed the closest thing she could find to stop the bleeding, which happened to be Nick’s white shirt, and wrapped it around the poor kitty’s paw.

“I am so sorry, you sweet thing,” Kim crooned. “I can’t believe that awful man did this to you.”

If it were possible, Kim would have sworn the cat stuck out its bottom lip and started pouting prettily.

“I know,” Kim said, then turned to Nick. “Silly, old man—”

“And I am not old!” Nick roared.

Kim shielded the cat as best she could from his outburst, hugging it more tightly and covering one of Cleo’s ears with her hand, pressing the other against her shoulder and giving Cleo a kiss on the top of her head. “Don’t you worry. I’ll take care of you and him.”

“What are you going to do?” Nick asked. “Shoot me back?”

“Maybe.”

He looked completely baffled. “Where the hell is the guy who was in my room?”

“Did you actually see someone in your room?” she demanded.

“Yes. I think so—”

“And how’s your eyesight, Nick?”

“My eyesight is just fine, dammit—”

She was mad enough to add, “Night vision? How about that? I hear it gets worse with age.”

“Oh, that was low,” he complained.

“Not as low as shooting a cat!”

“Okay, I might have grazed the damned cat,” he admitted. “Maybe. I don’t see how, but…maybe.”

“Maybe you should look before you start shooting. And why do you have a gun, anyway?”

“I always have a gun,” he told her, then looked like he wished he hadn’t.

From downstairs, Mrs. Baker yelled, “I’ve got 911 on the phone. They want to know what our emergency is. I wasn’t sure what to tell them.”

“911?” Nick looked at her accusingly. “You told her to call 911?”

“Yes, I told her to call 911. It’s the middle of the night, I hear a gunshot down the hall from where I’m sleeping and I want someone to call 911. I’m funny that way.”

“Dammit,” he swore softly, then yelled, “We’re fine, Mrs. Baker. Just a little misunderstanding.”

“Misunderstanding?” Kim couldn’t believe him.

“Yes, a misunderstanding,” he whispered urgently. “The cat knocked a glass off the nightstand and broke it,” he yelled.

“That was a glass breaking? I thought I heard a gunshot?”

“Two glasses,” Nick claimed, lying through his teeth.

Lying rather well, Kim noticed.

“Back me up,” he insisted, still holding the gun, she realized.

Not pointed at her or the cat or anything in particular, but still holding it.

She looked from him, to the gun, then back to him again.

He glanced down at his hand, at the gun, then back at her. “You’ve got to be kidding me. You think I’m going to hurt you?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “You have a gun and you shot the cat.”

K
im’s brother would have told her to hang on to the cat and run or scream or throw something, anything but just stand there and talk to a man she didn’t really know that well who had a gun in his hand in the middle of the night, a gun he’d already fired.

Nick swore long and none too quietly, then put the gun down on the nightstand and held up his empty hands for her to see.

“No more gun. Now, will you please tell Mrs. Baker to tell the nice 911 dispatcher that we don’t need any help here, that it was all a misunderstanding, and then tell her to go back to bed, that we’re all fine.”

“Why should I?” Kim asked.

“Because I don’t want to have to explain to anyone why I’m here, why I have a gun and why I shot a cat, thinking it was someone in my room, coming to get me, so they could get to you.”

“Get to me? Why would anyone with a gun want to come and get me?”

“Kim—” he began.

“Kim?” Mrs. Baker yelled. “Should I come up there and—”

“No, don’t come up here,” Kim said.

That was the last thing they needed.

“Tell her everything’s okay. You and I will take care of the cat and I’ll explain everything to you,” Nick claimed.

“Everything?”

“Yes, everything.”

She didn’t quite see how he could, how it could possibly make sense. He’d shot the cat!

What kind of man shot a cat!

“Kim?” Mrs. Baker called out again.

“We’re fine, Mrs. Baker. Everything’s under control. Tell them it was a misunderstanding.”

“Thank you,” Nick said.

Cleo hissed at him once more and Kim felt like doing the same thing.

“I don’t trust you,” she said instead. “Not really.”

“Fine. Don’t trust me. Just don’t rat me out yet. This isn’t what you think.”

“I don’t know how it could not be what I think, when I have no earthly idea what I think right now,” she protested.

“Okay. Fine. But I can explain everything. Really, I can.”

Cleo didn’t seem to be in the mood for any explanations Nick might make. She hissed at him again, then leaped out of Kim’s arms, lost the shirt that had been wrapped around her grazed leg and landed on the pretty, tangled white sheets and the old-fashioned quilt on Nick’s bed.

She tiptoed daintily across them, leaving little bloody paw prints as she went.

“Cleo, no,” Kim said.

The quilt was likely an antique. How would they explain bloody paw prints all over Mrs. Baker’s quilt?

Nick went to grab the cat and Cleo bit him on the arm with a roar that said,
Take that, you cat shooter, you!

“Dammit,” Nick said again, grabbing his now-bleeding forearm. “That cat is vicious!”

“Only to people who shoot her first,” Kim said.

“It was a scratch,” Nick protested. “A little scratch.”

Cleo leaped from the bed to Nick’s suitcase, which was standing open on a luggage stand in the corner, and before Nick could get to her, the cat—looking extremely pleased with herself—started marching around, bloody paw and all, on Nick’s crisp, white shirts, on his socks, his tightie-whities and anything else the cat could find, a look of pure, absolute, vindictive glee on her face as she did it.

Nick, holding his bleeding forearm, said, “Would you get it off my clothes while I might still have something to wear without blood stains on it.”

Kim went to do just that, but only because she wanted him to have a shirt to put on. The sight of him in nothing but a thin pair of pajama bottoms was something she really didn’t need right now. It was making it hard for her to think and she needed to think.

Cleo, unfortunately, didn’t want Nick to have anything to wear. She growled at him, dodged Kim when she tried to get her off Nick’s clothes, then launched herself at Nick, landing somewhere in the vicinity of his lap, claws extended and digging in.

Nick sucked in a breath, his abdomen going concave as he tried to get away from the cat’s claws. He gasped, then made a pitiful, howling sound, not that unlike the one Cleo had been making.

Cleo was gone before he had a chance to swat her away, gone into the shelter of Kim’s arms, snuggling close and looking indignant and wounded once again.

Blood welled up from angry-looking scratches low on Nick’s tanned, taut abdomen and maybe from a few other places, a little lower down, that Kim did not want to think about.

Served him right, shooting a poor, sweet thing like Cleo.

Kim kissed the cat’s head and said, “Poor baby. You showed him, didn’t you?”

“I’ve run into some problems when I’ve been traveling,” Nick said for maybe the third time in the last twenty minutes.

“You? A parks planner?” Kim wasn’t buying it.

“Yes. You think parks planners are magically immune to the craziness in the world these days? You think anyone is? I mean, you just got shot at by pirates, after all.”

“Yeah, but I’m not living with a loaded gun under my pillow.”

“Well, maybe you should,” Nick said. “And I don’t keep it under my pillow. I keep it between the mattress and the box spring.”

“I don’t care where you keep it. I care that you have it and that you shot the cat,” Kim said.

They were in Nick’s little red midlife-crisis car, zooming toward the outskirts of Atlanta and the emergency vet’s, because Kim had insisted and because there was no way she was going to try to clean the cat’s scrapes by herself. Not after seeing what Cleo’s claws had done to Nick. And maybe because it was one thing Kim knew that had to get done—taking care of the cat. It was simple and fairly easy and none of the other things that needed to happen would be simple or easy.

She had to figure out what was going on here, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Although before they’d snuck out of Mrs. Baker’s house in the predawn hours, she’d grabbed a tiny can of mace from her bedroom, just in case. She’d brought it with her the first night she’d spent at Mrs. Baker’s, never thinking she might need to use it against Nick. And she’d gotten a friend out of bed and told her if she didn’t hear from her within the hour to call Kim’s brother and tell him she might have been kidnapped by a supposedly mild-mannered parks planner in a little red sports car, then gave her friend the license plate number, just in case.

A woman couldn’t be too careful these days.

She didn’t have to get in a car with guys who slept with guns and shot cats, but…dammit. Kim didn’t know what to think as she sat in the car beside Nick, zooming along toward the emergency vet. She figured if he was really going to kidnap her, they wouldn’t have brought the cat along, because Nick was still complaining about how much cat scratches hurt and maybe because it was all the reassurance she could offer herself.

Maybe she really was a first-class idiot where men were concerned, Nick and the supposed love of her life included.

Nick looked like he’d been on the losing end of a fight with a woman who had fingernails from hell. He’d pulled on his pants with a frightening degree of difficulty. Kim didn’t want to think about where Cleo’s claws might have landed other than his forearm and abdomen. But he had streaks of blood that had stained his shirtsleeve and the front right lower section of his shirt.

His room looked like someone had committed a massacre in it and it had been a miracle they’d managed to talk Mrs. Baker out of having the 911 dispatcher send the cops over and going into Nick’s room, then managed to sneak out of the house with her cat for a trip to the emergency vet.

Cleo was curled up in Kim’s lap, protesting here and there as they drove, still glaring at Nick every now and then.

Kim thought Nick was actually scared of the cat, too, which she felt he fully deserved.

And she wasn’t buying his story for one minute.

“Well, sorry, but if someone had broken in, you’d have been glad I had a gun,” he claimed.

“Oh, yeah. You could have taken out a bird or the neighbor’s dog, you’re such a good shot and all. Do you even know how to use that thing? I mean, it’s not a toy—”

“Yes, I know how to use it—”

“People with a gun in their home are much more likely to injure themselves or have one of their family members injured by the gun than to actually shoot an intruder. If you’d read the statistics, you’d know—”

“I know the damned statistics. I know how to use the gun,” he claimed.

Cleo growled at him. She was proving to be a wonderfully vindictive cat, with good reason, Kim thought. Nick had better watch his back. And just about every other part of himself.

“Look, I heard a crash, breaking glass and then something hurled itself at me in the dark when I wasn’t quite awake and, granted, it wasn’t the smartest thing to do—to shoot at anything unless I was absolutely sure what I was shooting at—”

“Gun Safety 101. Don’t shoot unless you know—”

“But sometimes, you don’t have time to ask questions, you know? It’s you or whoever’s coming at you—”

“Or an innocent cat—”

“It is not innocent!” he yelled. “What the hell was it doing in my room anyway? I was sound asleep in my room, minding my own business, when that thing attacked me for no reason—”

“She attacked you?”

“Yes, she did—”

“She probably just wanted to get in bed with you. She’s a very affectionate cat. And the room you’re sleeping in used to belong to Mrs. Baker’s daughter, Dana. I think Cleo used to sleep with her. So technically, you’re in the cat’s bed, not the other way around.”

“How did she even get in?”

“She’s very good with doors. She can open anything.”

“Great,” Nick said. “I’ll have to barricade my door against an attack cat.”

“If Mrs. Baker even lets you stay, once she finds out what you did.”

Nick glared at her and the cat, who hissed at him once more and bared her teeth to him.

Kim stroked the cat and wondered what kind of damage Cleo could do if she really sank her teeth into someone, not unsure Nick shouldn’t find out. She didn’t believe him for a minute about why he had the gun and what kind of man, when he wakes up in the middle of the night because of a noise, grabs a gun, shoots first and asks questions later.

Not any men she knew.

Her brother wouldn’t think of doing something like that. In all his years on the job, he’d only fired his weapon once. People who knew guns fired at the practice range and hardly anywhere else at any point in their lives.

So what was Nick Cavanaugh doing with a gun? And why would he shoot first and ask questions later?

She didn’t like guns. She’d been shot at on the cruise ship by pirates and now she’d had someone fire a gun at a cat in the B&B in the middle of the night, right down the hall from her room. This after going her whole life without being shot at.

It was too strange a coincidence to ignore.

And yet, what could Nick possibly have to do with the pirates who attacked her cruise ship? How could one possibly be connected to the other?

She wanted her brother, the cop. Kind of.

Actually, she wanted her mother, but her brother would do. He was every bit as protective as a mother and he carried a gun and, unlike Nick, knew how to use it.

Her brother was good at figuring things out, too. He’d never met a fellow law-enforcement officer he didn’t remember and couldn’t call on when he needed help.

Kind of like Nick’s friend at the phone company, she decided.

If the guy really worked at the phone company….

She was just starting to get a very bad feeling about that…the phone company guy of Nick’s and how he seemed to be able to get information on just about anything, when they pulled into the emergency vet’s around five o’clock in the morning.

She got out of the car, gently cradling the cat, and glanced over at Nick and his bloodstained shirt.

“You’d better let me go in first,” Kim said. “You’re likely to scare them.”

“You’ve got blood on your shirt, too,” he pointed out.

Indeed, she did, but not as much as him, and the blood on her shirt was mostly covered up by the cat she was carrying.

They marched in together to an insanely brightly lit room bustling with activity. Cleo went on alert immediately, thanks to the two tiny barking dogs in the waiting room. Kim felt claws sinking into her arms and felt a tad of sympathy for Nick. Just a tad.

She tried to reassure Cleo that everything was going to be okay, while Nick gave some outlandish explanation about Cleo’s injuries—broken glass, he claimed—to the skeptical receptionist, who was eyeing Nick’s bloody shirt with some degree of cynicism, but at least not with alarm. Maybe lots of people showed up bloody at the emergency vet’s.

“It’s a hundred and fifty dollars for an office visit,” the receptionist said.

“A hundred and fifty dollars?” Nick said incredulously.

The receptionist nodded.

“For a cat?”

“At five in the morning, yes,” the receptionist said. “Part of the cost of having emergency care available round the clock—nights, weekends and holidays.”

“That’s fine,” Kim said. “He’ll pay.”

“In more ways than one,” Nick muttered, reaching for his wallet.

The receptionist showed them to a private room a few moments later and gave them a ton of paperwork to fill out, none of which Nick could do. He knew nothing about the cat. He passed the clipboard and the forms over to Kim.

The vet technician arrived moments later, frowning at both the explanation she received and what she could see of the cat’s injuries.

“The cat’s pretty riled up. We may have to sedate her to even get a good look at the wound,” the vet tech said.

“That’s fine. Do it,” Nick said.

“It makes it more expensive—”

“We don’t care. Just do it,” Nick said.

“I mean, we usually have to see the wound before we can even give you an estimate and you have to approve the treatment and the costs before we actually treat the cat, so—”

“Money is no object,” Nick said, pulling out his wallet again and looking at Kim. “Right, honey?”

“That’s right, dear,” she said, giving him a fake smile.

“I have a feeling I’m going to be paying for this for a long time and not just with money,” he told the vet tech, then whispered into Kim’s ear. “I’m not sure, but I may never be able to father children, thanks to that cat.”