Suddenly Family. Christine Flynn

feelings were mercilessly easy to identify. She felt regret because she had clearly stepped into Sam’s personal space and stepped over a line he didn’t want crossed. And stung because she’d reached out only to have him pull back like a snapped spring and slam an invisible door. The embarrassment was there because, thanks to Lauren, she now realized he probably thought she’d been coming on to him.

      The embarrassment she could live with.

      It was the rejection she hadn’t been prepared for.

      She’d left herself wide open for it, too, which wasn’t like her at all. Over the years, she’d honed her reserve with men, developed a finely tuned sense of caution with any human possessing a Y chromosome. She trusted only children, animals and books and neither expected nor wanted anything from any male other than her son.

      That reserve had failed her, however, with Sam Edwards. Until the moment he’d walked away from her in the hangar, her usual reticence simply hadn’t existed.

      The front wheel of the wheelbarrow squeaked as she moved her supplies toward the next enclosure and the hole of twilight at the beginning of the path. It had taken her only minutes of the drive home last night to figure out why that caution hadn’t been there.

      The sympathy she’d felt for him having lost his wife and being left to raise his children on his own had prevented it. Even the way he kept to himself, his work and his little family had served to sabotage her usual defenses. It was almost as if she’d sensed a kindred sprit in him, as if they’d had so much in common that there had been no need for protection. Only, there hadn’t been a connection at all. She just hadn’t been able to avoid responding to him any more than she could avoid responding to any wounded animal.

      Water trickled from the end of the long garden hose as she hauled it back up the path. She was almost finished with her chores, but she wasn’t finished lecturing herself just yet. After all, no one knew better than she did that wounded animals needed to be approached with caution. She’d learned that lesson when she was eleven years old and tried to play nurse to a cougar. The beautiful sleek animal had been hit by a car and left for dead by the side of the road. The big cat had turned on her when it had come out of its stupor and missed slicing her face with its claws by scant millimeters before bolting into the woods to heal or die on its own.

      A person would be a fool to forget a lesson like that.

      Two adolescent raccoons chittered as she left a plate of cat food in their enclosure and added more water to the plastic bowl they’d dumped. In the larger enclosure at the edge of the trees by her lawn, a lame doe made her way to the sweet oats T.J. had left her a while ago. Mindful of the doe’s daughter following her as she fed the last of her charges, she smiled at her little shadow.

      “This isn’t for you,” she murmured to the tiny fawn and dipped into the sack of oats once more. “It’s another serving for your mama. You need to talk to her about your meal.”

      The fawn’s back barely reached T.J.’s knees. With the metal scoop in one hand, she bent to smooth her other hand over the white spots scattered over the animal’s lovely rust-colored coat.

      She’d barely touched the soft hide when she suddenly went still.

      So did the fawn. Her little head jerked toward the narrow gravel road beyond the house as the sound of crunching rock and a vehicle engine grew louder. Seconds later, the animal’s whole body on alert, they both stood frozen in the headlights of a large dark truck.