She found him in the kitchen, having done what she’d told him to do—he’d removed the sling from his left arm and taken off his shirt.
As a nurse she’d seen more male torsos than she could remember and never once had there been one that did to her what that first sight of Sutter did. Suddenly she was hot and cold and felt as if everything inside of her had gone a little spongy.
Because despite the bandage wrapping his left arm and shoulder, her view was of bulging biceps, shoulders a mile wide, a superbly broad chest, super flat abs with more than a six-pack—she counted eight rows of sinew that went down to his waistband—and all of it astonishingly sexy. Fortunately, he was draping his shirt over the back of a chair so he didn’t notice her reaction.
She took a very deep breath, thinking that she could have used some of the colonel’s oxygen at that moment, and exhaled, all the while telling herself to snap out of whatever this strange reaction to him was.
Then she went the rest of the way into the kitchen, set her kit on the table and said, “Let me wash my hands.”
Breathe... Breathe... Stop being stupid...she told herself.
Then, shoulders back and reminding herself that she was a professional, she dried her hands on a clean paper towel and turned to Sutter once again.
He was no less fabulous. And now she was going to get up close and personal...
“Okay, sit down and let’s see what we have here,” she said too merrily.
She removed the bandaging to expose a large incision and the remnants of his original wound.
Concentrating on sounding normal as she went to work on the stitches, she said, “So what happened to you?”
“Sniper fire. I was on a mission in Afghanistan.”
An answer with a bare minimum of information. Kinsey had had more than her fair share of responses like that from her brothers. She knew nothing she asked would garner additional details and before she could even try, Sutter changed the subject.
“Are you originally from Denver?”
“No. I was born and raised in a small town in Montana—Northbridge.”
“I know Northbridge. My cousin Beau and I have always been close. I went to the Camden ranch in Northbridge with him many times during the summers.”
So Sutter wasn’t opposed to opening up, just not about his mission in Afghanistan.
“Is this your first time living away from Montana?” he asked.
“No, I left to go to college at the University of Colorado, then stayed here for nursing school,” she said, wanting his attention somewhere other than his wound. He’d been right that the stitches were past ready to come out. The skin had healed around them and they weren’t easy to remove—something that she knew was painful.
Not that he so much as flinched. But still she wanted to offer him a distraction. And keep her own mind on the straight and narrow in the meantime.
“After nursing school,” she continued, “I got a position at Denver General Hospital. I worked there full-time until two and a half years ago—I went to half-time when my stepfather got lung cancer so I could go back and forth between here and Northbridge to help my mom take care of him.”
“Did he make it?”
“For about eight months. Then six months after the funeral, I realized that my mom wasn’t doing well. At first I thought it was grief but she just got worse and worse. I finally persuaded her to see a doctor and she was diagnosed with kidney disease and dementia. I had to quit my job here to take care of her full-time.”
“Because there wasn’t anyone else. What about your brothers? You said they’re marines?” he asked then.
“Two out of three. My oldest brother is a doctor—”
“Navy, I’ll bet, because there’s no doctors in the marines, it’s navy docs who patch us up. Are you about finished?” he asked as she yanked a particularly deep stitch. Apparently she’d come close to reaching his pain threshold.
“Sorry,” she apologized. “You were right that this should have been done days ago. I think that one was the worst, though. They shouldn’t be as bad from here.”
“So after your mom passed, that was when you went into private nursing?” he asked, apparently wanting the diversion of her history to go on.
“Not intentionally. I was closing down my mom’s house until my brothers and I can decide what to do with it when one of the Northbridge doctors called. He asked if I could do some home health care for neighbors of his—the Tellers. They needed help but they were also in the process of moving to Denver. The Northbridge doc knew I wanted to get back here so he thought I could start with the Tellers in Northbridge then transition along with them to Denver.”
“And the Tellers are somehow hooked up with the guy Livi Camden is engaged to, right?”
“Callan Tierney, right. He was kind of a foster son of theirs. He was best friends with their son, and lived with the Tellers after his own parents died. When their son was killed in a car accident, Callan stepped in to see that they were taken care of, along with their granddaughter who is his godchild.”
“And that’s how you met Livi—nursing the Tellers. Livi, who you think is your half sister.”
“And Livi recommended me to you, so I’m here on what’s only my second home–health care job,” Kinsey concluded.
“Do you like it?”
“I do,” she said with some surprise. “I guess it lets me be sort of like family for a little while—and it’s nice working in a home environment. Oh!” she said, startled when Jack suddenly attacked her foot. Then she laughed and added, “And I would never have had a terrier puppy trying to chew on me while I worked at the hospital, so what fun is that?”
“Jack! Stop it!” Sutter commanded the dog, who elected to go on doing what he was doing.
Kinsey stopped her work on Sutter’s shoulder to kick the ball Jack had dropped nearby into the other room to distract him, too.
Jack took the bait and chased the ball so Kinsey could return to the stitches.
“You told my mother you were going to take care of the puppy problem, too—does that mean you have a plan? Because today she told me to take him back to the breeder,” Sutter said ominously.
“Ohhh, poor Jack!” Kinsey said sympathetically.
“We’ve always had this breed, but it was my dad who trained and took care of them. I’ve managed to housebreak this terror, but that’s it. I don’t know how to fix the rest—training a whole platoon of men is easier than getting Jack to behave. And if I don’t find a way to get him into shape before I leave, the colonel won’t keep him.”
A big tough marine daunted by a puppy—the idea of that amused Kinsey to no end.
“Actually,” she said then, “there’s an organization called Pets for Vets that pairs shelter animals and former military dogs with veterans. That way either the dogs already have military manners or the shelter dogs have been trained with them so they kind of fit a little more comfortably with a vet’s lifestyle and expectations. An animal like that might have been a little more to your mom’s liking at this point.”
“I didn’t even know that existed.”
“But now that you have Jack, we can’t give up on him—he’s just a puppy being a puppy. I know someone who works for Pets for Vets and I called him. I thought he could teach us—and the colonel, too, if we can get her onboard—what to do with Jack.”
Jack brought the ball back, dropped it and jumped against Kinsey’s leg, jarring her into yanking too hard on the stitch she was removing and causing Sutter