The Vixen and the Vet Read Free Page B

dressed in an adorable cotton candy–pink sundress, modestly covered with a mint-green cardigan.
    “Hey, Scar let,” Savannah said, still staring at the massive brown house in the distance. “What do we know about Asher Lee?”
    “Asher Lee?” Scarlet fanned herself as she followed her sister’s gaze into the distant hills like her sister. “Some folks call him “Hermit” Lee. Poor thing. Used to be a big-time football star over at Danvers High. But he got his face and hand blown off in some war, and no one’s seen him for a million years. He got real strange when he came home, refusin’ to go into town, hirin’ Miss Potts to be his maid. No one’s seen him in almost a decade. Nobody knows what he does up there, but there’s the normal fiddle-faddle about the bogeyman and such. Really, it’s easier just to forget he’s up there. It’s just so awkward and sad.”
    “Have you ever seen him?”
    Scarlet shook her head pursing her lips and looking away from the old brown mansion. “Why are you so interested?”
    Savannah turned to her sister, cocking her head to the side. “I think it’s about time someone showed a little Southern hospitality to our very own wounded veteran.”
    “What’re you up to, Vanna?”
    “ Nothing bad, little sister, don’t trouble yourself. I just wonder if he’d like to tell his side of the story.”
    “Leave him be. All he wants is his privacy.”
    “Not if he’s got a story to tell, Miss Scarlet. Not if he has a story he’d like the world to know.”

     
     

CHAPTER 2
     
    Asher Lee did not anticipate or appreciate visitors. While Danvers had not been especially welcoming upon his return home, at least the locals had seen fit to respect his privacy.
    Which is why, when his ancient doorbell rang on Sunday afternoon, he started, jumping a foot in the comfortable reading chair that sat by the window on the west side of his vast office. Once upon a time the room had been called the library, and it still maintained an impressive collection of books that rivaled that of the Danvers Public Library. And in the years since Asher had returned home, he’d added to the collection, occasionally hiring out-of-state woodworkers to expand the cherry bookcases to house more and more books. Books were his refuge, his only real pleasure.
    At present, he was deep into the romances of Jennifer Crusie, an author who wrote with excellent pacing and laugh-out-loud wit. He’d already read six of her books and had three more to read before he’d move on to a different author. But not romance this time—there was only so much romance he could read before his heart bled from living vicariously, knowing that life loomed long and his own chances at happily-ever-after were nonexistent. Sometimes he argued with himself—why torture yourself reading about what you can’t ever, ever have?—but a few weeks would go by, and after the thrill of mysteries, the voyeurism of biographies, and the swashbuckling satisfaction of adventure, he’d find himself gravitating toward romance. Again.
    He reasoned that he had no one to impress. Aside from Miss Potts, who did his cooking, cleaning, laundering , and shopping, and the occasional craftsman who worked on his monstrosity of a mansion, he saw no one. Despite the injuries he’d sustained, at thirty-four years old he was physically fit enough to live until a hundred. In short, he had a long, lonely road ahead. He could read what he wanted.
    When the bell ran g a second time, he stood up from his chair, his muscular body moving with surprising grace, made his way around the attractive cherry desk that served no real purpose—he wrote no letters, and his bill payments were automated on the laptop that sat lonely in its center—and headed to the library door. He cracked it just enough to hear Miss Potts’s light step on the front hall marble, then hurried out into the upper gallery, moving as quietly as he could to a spot that had been rigged with