Home to Stay. Annie Jones

and slammed the door. “Looks like Emma Newberry has finally come home to Gall Rive. Let’s go welcome her, shall we?”

      Earnest T, a lanky, scruffy-looking Australian shepherd and Airedale mix, stuck his head between the seat and the passenger-side window and gave a gruff woof.

      Hank cranked the engine and shifted into Drive. “Don’t worry. I have no intention of getting involved with her.”

      A doctor of veterinary medicine for about a decade now, he didn’t hold much with the idea some folks had of carrying on conversations with the creatures in the animal kingdom. Particularly when those people took it upon themselves to hold up both sides of that exchange as if they knew the minds of the animals themselves. But as a man who had landed wounded and weary in this small town hoping to put his lonely and painful childhood and family life behind him, he also embraced the notion that sometimes a man needed to think things out loud, to unload a bit to a sympathetic ear. All the better if that ear didn’t have a direct connection to a pair of lips that might blab it all to the neighbors.

      “No, I’ve learned my lesson as far as Emma Newberry is concerned,” Hank said.

      Otis, Earnest T’s bulldog best buddy, snorted.

      “I mean it.” He pulled the old truck onto the well-rutted road and headed after the SUV. “I won’t give her the chance to get to me again. Not that she would be interested… She made that perfectly clear when she left me without even saying goodbye.”

      The truck hit a dip in the road. The dogs bounced into each other. Earnest T laid his ears back and gave Hank a look someone else might have described as scolding. Otis lapped his tongue out and slobbered.

      “Almost there, right through these trees, boys.” He wasn’t talking to the dogs, he justified inwardly. He was talking…to keep from thinking about what waited for him through those trees, what had his pulse racing and his mouth dry. He eased out a long, resigned breath then gripped the steering wheel to maintain control over the last bit of broken road.

      Up ahead sat the silver SUV framed by a yard scattered with live oaks. Hank thought the moss hanging from their branches looked like streamers, as if the very landscape had arranged itself to welcome home this too-long-absent member of the family.

      Movement in the driver’s seat drew his attention, but the SUV’s tinted windows kept him from seeing the driver clearly. He reached across the seat of his truck to the passenger-side door and yanked the handle. When she opened her door, he would call out to her. Better that than jumping out of a truck and striding up to her. He was only thinking of her feelings.

      Which meant he had completely forgotten to take into account his dogs’ eagerness to get out and get an eyeful and a snout full of Gall Rive’s newest arrival.

      As soon as the passenger door of his truck came open just a crack, Earnest T gave Hank’s elbow a hard nudge. The truck door swung outward. The already banged-up truck door went clanging into the cautiously opening door of the SUV just a few feet away. The wham of metal against metal rang in the quiet of the slowly spreading daylight.

      Earnest T leaped out.

      Otis came clumping along after.

      A flurry of waves of rich brown hair whipped forward and back from the SUV’s open door. The lower part of a tanned leg kicked outward. A high-heeled shoe went somersaulting into the shaggy, damp grass. A glimpse of black fabric, a flash of something shiny and a hand grasping nothing but air. That was all Hank saw of her.

      That was enough.

      His heart lodged in his throat, sending a hard, expectant pounding beat all the way to his temples.

      She let out a sound that, as a vet, Hank was prone to call a yelp followed by a series of unfinished thoughts that went something like, “My car! Dogs? Where did… This is my family’s property… Keep these vicious animals…”

      At that point she lunged from her seat to grab the door handle. That was her first mistake.

      She leaned out and down and right into the path Earnest T’s ice-cold nose, extended in the enthusiastic reverie of doggy greeting. Otis’s unfurled ribbon of a tongue was not far behind.

      “Yeah, they are pretty vicious.” Hank laughed. “That one licked the scowl right off your face. If you’re not careful one of them might actually get you to smile.”

      Earnest T and Otis went loping back and forth, sniffing at the tires and underside of the new vehicle.

      As soon as they moved away from her, Emma jerked her head up. Her hair bunched against her slender neck and over her bare upper arm but mostly it covered her eyes.

      Hank could hardly see her face, or anything but bits of her—a bare foot, an arm, the wink of gold and diamonds on her wrist. Still, just being this close to her made something in him feel suddenly…

      Lighter? Not exactly.

      Love struck? Hardly.

      As if he’d come home.

      He pushed the fleeting and foolish thought aside. Closed the lid on it. Locked it down. That’s how he had survived his childhood, how he dealt with the hard realities of his work, how he had coped all those years ago when this very woman had broken his heart.

      “This is private property. You should take your dogs and get off it before I call…” Emma pushed the tangle of hair back from her face with one hand, lifted her chin and her gaze met his. “You.”

      “No need to call me, Emma. I’m already here.” Had he thought she felt like home? Hank got out of the truck. He should have been suspicious at the tenderness and warmth he’d associated with the term. Those things had nothing to do with the home he’d grown up in. Maybe there was more warning than welcome in his first thoughts about the youngest Newberry.

      The dogs rounded the SUV and headed for Emma again.

      Hank strode to the back of his truck to better take command of the situation—at least the situation with his dogs. He had not quite gotten between the two vehicles when a squeal of pure delight caught his attention.

      Layers of pink-netting stuff flipped and flapped and fluttered above the tops of clunky green rubber boots that were clomping over the overgrown grass of the yard. A purple knit scarf bounced over the orange-and-yellow swirls of a tie-dyed T-shirt. A small girl with tufts of blond hair sticking up here and there on her head stumbled over Emma’s lost shoe. Arms flung wide she shrieked, “Dog-friends! Dog-friends! Here I am! I want to hug you, dog-friends.”

      “Ruthie, no!” Emma’s arm shot out, but between Earnest T and Otis and her own safety belt restraining her she couldn’t climb out of the driver’s seat fast enough. “You don’t know these dogs. They might bite you.”

      Hank clenched his jaw at her frantic tone, knowing it was doing nothing to calm the dogs or educate the child. He stepped in front of the girl rushing headlong toward the animals who had spotted her and turned to bound her way. He gave a quick, sharp whistle, held out his hand and said, “Cool it.”

      The child pulled up short in her tracks.

      “You have no right to yell at my daughter.” The click and clatter of the seat belt releasing underscored Emma’s indignation.

      “I wasn’t yelling.” Daughter? Emma Newberry had a daughter? Even without looking at the child’s bright hair and pale skin or guessing from her slight build and barely-out-of-first-grade behavior, Hank knew the child was not his. That meant Emma had…married? He’d told Emma’s aunt shortly after Emma left never to mention her to him again, and Sammie Jo had honored his wishes. Now he wished he’d have at least asked about the big stuff, marriage, children, that might have prepared him for this moment.

      “I never yell.” He adjusted his hat and tipped his head back, not quite making eye contact as he said, with as much quiet grace as he could muster, “And I wasn’t talking to…your daughter.”

      He had no problem believing that Emma had become