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Chapter One
The last thing Tennessee Lisle needed—or wanted—to see on his doorstep in the middle of a snowy February night was the chaos demon otherwise known as Matilda Stark.
Especially since she was holding a bedraggled, woebegone creature before her like an offering.
“Whatever that is,” he said, by way of a greeting once he hauled the door open and scowled at her because she was not, in fact, a hallucination or a very bad dream, “I don’t want it.”
“It’s a puppy,” Matilda replied, frowning at him as if there was something wrong with him. When she was the one standing on his porch in the middle of the night.
Tennessee could see that the weather behind her had not gotten any better since he’d last paid any mind, which had been hours ago when he’d brought in more wood for his fire. There was a typical Montana winter storm howling down from the higher elevations, dumping snow and ice as it pleased, and he’d accepted that he’d likely be digging his way to work in the morning.
That was par for the course in the Rocky Mountains. Besides, Tennessee was no flatlander, seduced by a pretty day or two in August and not at all prepared for the realities of life here. Tennessee was the oldest son and current head of the Lisle family—and Lisles had been right here in Cowboy Point before it had a name.
None of that explained what the disheveled, walking commotion that was Matilda Stark was doing on his doorstep. At all, much less at this hour and in this kind of weather.
He could see ice encrusted on Matilda’s red braids that hung out from beneath her winter hat—itself a shade of livid yellow that would have hurt his eyes if he’d let it—making her hair into her very own icicles.
Knowing Matilda as he wished he didn’t, he assumed she would think this was delightful if asked.
Tennessee did not intend to ask.
“Matilda,” he began, though he didn’t understand why this was happening.
Like everybody else in Cowboy Point, he was perfectly aware that Matilda Stark spent the bulk of her time rescuing animals. No one could avoid knowing this. Rumor had it that she transformed the outbuilding behind the cottage she’d lived in with her sister Rosie—before Rosie had married a Carey, which, given the age-old feud between the Lisles and the Careys, Tennessee was required to view as a downgrade and yes, he felt that way about his sister’s questionable Carey marriage too—into some kind of private animal shelter. Maybe the cottage was a shelter now too. Maybe she had a zoo.
He wouldn’t put it past her.
Matilda could often be seen driving around Cowboy Point in her ancient red pickup truck that no one could believe still ran. Especially the way she kept it stuffed full of animals, presumably more rescues. Though he guessed it made sense, insofar as anything involving Matilda Stark made sense, because she was some kind of vet. A vet technician, he was pretty sure, whatever that entailed. Or something like that—he couldn’t keep track.
Because he did not need to keep track. Because Matilda Stark was not one of his endless and ever-increasing responsibilities. She did not work for him in the General Store that his family had rightly won from the sore loser Careys in a poker game in the 1800s, like his mother and his siblings. She had nothing to do with the old, fanciful lighthouse one of his ancestors had built at the top of Lisle Hill. She did not work in the family diner, because he could not tolerate anyone else in his kitchen, and also, even if he could, it would not be a strawberry-blonde menace who had once shut down traffic on the main—and only—road in town to allow a meandering bunch of raccoons to cross. Likely to raid Tennessee’s trash cans, not that Matilda had cared.
Matilda was not a Lisle. She was not his problem. She was her own family’s problem, though, so far, the entire extended Stark family had never seemed to view Matilda as the problem in need of solving she clearly was. Likely because she, unlike some of her cousins, wasn’t exactly likely to throw a punch in a bar or get a little too rowdy on a weekend night, so her offenses were viewed as cute.
But Matilda and her cuteness had nothing to do with him. That he had occasion to tell himself this more often than he should have was its own problem, but not one he could solve at 12:17 am on a nasty little February night.
Which brought him back to really not wanting to know what she thought she was doing on his front porch. Or why she was holding out a puppy before her like a gift.
“I don’t care what it is,” he told her shortly. “Puppy, kitten, wombat—why is it here? Why are you here?”
“I rescued him from beneath the General Store porch,” Matilda told him in that matter-of-fact way that he always found… unsettling. Because she was so otherwise ditzy, he assured himself. It was always a surprise that when she actually spoke to someone, there was nothing flighty about her at all. On the contrary. “There are at least two more. I need you to keep him warm while I dig them out. And, obviously, there are no wombats in Montana.”
She shoved the squirming, bedraggled bundle at him as if she fully expected him to accept it. He did not. He would not.
But his body betrayed him. It acted on reflex—that was the only explanation he could come up with.
And the next thing he knew he was holding said bundle of bedraggled wet fur and Matilda Stark was disappearing, clomping down off of his porch and tossing herself back into the snowy, wet, entirely too cold night.
Giving no indication that she intended to return and reclaim the creature she’d thrust at him.
Tennessee was outraged.
But he was also, despite how he liked to behave half the time—according to his family—not a monster. He looked down at the tiny, wet, shivering little thing with big brown eyes that stared up at him. He could feel the way it shivered in his arms. He could see how tragic and woeful it was.
So he muttered a series of curses as he went back inside and started pulling towels out, so that when Matilda inevitably returned—because he didn’t think she ever said things she didn’t mean and he was pretty sure she had indicated she would come back—he would be ready. He threw another log on his fire to get it roaring again. Then he wrapped the shivering little puppy in a fluffy towel, held him in the crook of his arm, and waited to see if the little guy would get warm.
He also watched the clock. He decided that he would give her ten minutes. If in ten minutes she wasn’t back, he was going to have to go out there and help her, because she shouldn’t be out in this weather in the first place. No one should be out in this weather. It was the kind of weather folks avoided until it passed, something even a committed maker of unnecessary problems like Matilda Stark should have known as well as he did. She had also been born here, to another family that had been right here in this tiny valley on the backside of Copper Mountain for generations.
Besides, it was after midnight on a Tuesday. He couldn’t imagine what the hell she thought she was doing out there, wandering around looking for beleaguered animals in a storm.
It was, of course, a very Matilda thing to be doing.
Everyone knew that, the same way everyone knew that if you had a secret in this town, you’d better steer clear of the Sheens who owned the feed store, the pastor and his wife, and Zeke Carey—who was so genial that even Tennessee sometimes forgot he was a Carey.
Against his will, with the puppy snoozing in his arms in a racket of tiny little snores, Tennessee found himself wondering what her life was like. Was this what she did to entertain herself? Did she wander where she liked, poking around the wilds of Montana with this same recklessness, looking for animals to save without a shred of concern for her safety?
The obvious recklessness of tonight aside, he doubted it.
Tennessee didn’t spend much time frequenting the Copper Mine, the only dedicated bar in Cowboy Point and a prime source of information on everyone who drew breath in the community, thanks to yet another purveyor of local “news,” Shane Johnson, its grumpy owner and bartender. Still, he was sure he would have heard about her misadventures through the grapevine if she really did go to such lengths.
Whether he wanted to know anything about her or not. That was how small towns that were actually more like remote neighborhoods of slightly bigger small towns worked.
He’d never heard of her going out that much at all, which he’d always thought was because she really did have a job. The last he’d heard—against his will, because everything he knew about everyone in this town was against his will—the vet she worked for was down in Marietta. So unlike many of the members of this little community, she probably spent most of her time driving the treacherous ten miles up and down Copper Mountain that was the only way in and out of Cowboy Point. And was no fun at all in bad weather.
Matilda didn’t have time to dip into whatever comprised the pool of singles around here.
Tennessee realized that he was thinking about singles, and dating, and without meaning to, Matilda Stark dating, and he really didn’t like that line of thought at all. It made his ribs feel funny.
But he was also watching the clock, and at exactly nine and a half minutes, he heard boots stamping on his front porch again.
And he couldn’t decide if he was pleased about that, or if some part of him had wanted to storm off into the snow so he could be even more pissed about this interruption to his typically quiet night of paperwork and not talking to anyone than he already was.
He went over to meet her at the door but she barged right in before he could get there, holding two more wet and squirming bundles in her arms. She didn’t wait for him to direct her. Instead, she looked at the pile of towels on his living room table, then she toed off her boots and padded over to help herself to them.
In socks that didn’t match. And if he wasn’t mistaken, had holes all over them. He was sure he saw a painted toenail in a sparkly lavender shade that made him… unreasonably irritated.
Matilda paid no attention to him at all.
She set down one pup, then the other, as she shrugged out of her puffy coat. And left it lying on the floor, he noticed. Something he wanted to use as more evidence that she was a walking disaster of epic proportions, especially here in his ruthlessly tidy little house. But, sadly, he suspected she left it on the floor so it wouldn’t leave a puddle on his couch.
Then she scooped up the puppies again and took them with her as she went and squatted down in front of his fire. She ended up cross-legged, holding them in her lap and cooing at them. Murmuring soft little words as she kissed them on their heads and used the towels to rub each pup in turn.
Only when she seemed satisfied with the state of the puppies did she look up at him again. And when she did, she frowned. “Your guy could stand to warm up a bit more too,” she said.
Feeling simultaneously chastened and outraged that she dared chastise him at all, Tennessee found himself doing her bidding anyway. He walked across his own goddamned living room and sat himself down in front of the fire next to her with three damp bundles of mournful little puppies between them.
What the hell was happening right here in his own house where there was never any chaos of any kind, he could not have said.
“They all look pretty good despite being out there for who knows how long,” Matilda murmured, but Tennessee got the distinct impression that she wasn’t talking to him.
She checked each of the puppies all over, then handed each towel-wrapped bundle to him as if he’d signed up for all of this. As if he was complicit in her… whole thing.
He didn’t know why he was letting this continue, but then again, was he really so far gone that he was thinking he might toss a woman with literal puppies out of his house in the middle of the night? In the driving, howling snow?
That he had to ask was probably answer enough.
Tennessee settled for glaring at her, but that wasn’t helpful. She was still wearing that impossibly yellow hat. It was still blinding. Her icicle braids were melting, dripping onto the scrub top she wore, leaving a spreading stain of water on each shoulder that she didn’t seem to notice.
He couldn’t look away.
Not even when he realized that the long-sleeved shirt she wore beneath the scrub top was patterned and the pattern was mushrooms and foxes and what looked like ferrets with spectacles.
Looking at Matilda made him feel like he was losing his sanity.
“I wish people wouldn’t have puppies if they were just going to discard them like this,” Matilda was muttering. This time she was talking to him, he understood, when she lifted her head and leveled that frown on him. Like he’d mounted an argument. “Look at them. They’re adorable.”
“All puppies are adorable,” Tennessee said gruffly. “All baby animals, specifically mammals, are adorable. It’s how they stay alive.”
Matilda lifted that disconcerting gaze of hers to his. Those gray eyes that almost every member of her family seemed to have. On her, they couldn’t seem to decide between gray and blue, but they were always grave.
She didn’t look away. Or blink. “Being cute isn’t going to help them survive a February snowstorm in the Rocky Mountains, Tennessee.”
Now she was talking to him as if she was a schoolteacher and he was an errant student, and he did not know how it was that she felt empowered to do that. In his house, which she had entered and commandeered against his will. He also did not know why he was reacting as if he wasn’t older than her, significantly more responsible than her, and more to the point, not some close friend of hers that should expect her to drop in on him at any time.
He wasn’t even sure Matilda Stark had friends. She never seemed to have any use for people. Only animals.
“Matilda.”
He tried to sound pleasant, but that was a stretch at the best of times, and this was an absurd situation that needed to end. And quickly, because he had his usual early morning coming in hot.
So Tennessee tried again. “What the hell is going on? You have your own house where, according to everything I have ever heard about you, you have any number of animals at any time. Why are you here in mine instead?”
End of Excerpt
