The Others 15 - Born to Be Wild by Christine Warren

Author:Christine Warren [Warren, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780312357191
Published: 2010-03-02T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Wednesday, Josie decided, was a gift from God. Not only had the day started with an amazing bout of lazy, sleepy sex, but by ten o’clock the sun beamed down, the sky and attained the color of a Tiffany’s box, and a late-season surge of warmth brought the temperature up to a glorious sixty-five.

If it hadn’t been for the two wild Lupines locked in her storage room, Josie might have assumed her epidemic of bad luck had run its course. Still, she had definitely had worse days.

To top it all off, on Wednesdays the clinic opened late as a trade-off for their Saturday-morning hours, and on this particular morning, her last appointment before lunch called to cancel, giving her an unheard-of extra twenty minutes all to herself.

Well, all to herself and the stack of paperwork she needed to catch up on.

And the large, hairy, drooling mass at her feet.

She nibbled a sandwich while she worked, so she had her mouth full when Leah, her receptionist, paged her from the front of the clinic.

“Dr. Barrett?”

Josie grabbed the receiver. She hated talking into a speaker. “What’s up, Leah?”

“There’s someone here to see you. She doesn’t have an appointment, but she says you’re expecting her? Her name is Mary Applewhite.”

For a minute Josie stared blankly into space. She didn’t know anyone by that name, did she?

Through the intercom, she heard a rustling and some muffled voices, then Leah spoke again. “She said to remind you that Sheriff Pace asked her to come to the clinic to consult with you on some patients.”

Another vet? Josie thought briefly, then the lightbulb clicked on and she almost smacked herself in the head. Not a vet, a witch.

“Right,” she said, dropping her sandwich and dusting her hands off on her lab coat. “I’m sorry, Leah, I should have told you she was coming. I’ll be right there.”

Mary Applewhite, Josie decided as they shook hands in the clinic’s bright and sparsely furnished waiting room, looked a little like a witch and a little like a coffee house barista. Her face had that sort of ageless look that said she could have been anywhere between twenty-seven and forty-seven. She wore her strawberry-blond hair very short, in a spiky modern pixie cut, and a series of six earrings decorated her left ear. In the right, she wore only two—one dangling from the lobe, the other a ring around the cartilage at the very top of the auricle. Those things made her look like a barista. The warm smile, silver pentacle necklace, and glint of ageless wisdom in her slate-blue eyes made her look like a witch.

Josie liked her immediately.

Especially since she wore her pentacle and earrings with a pair of faded blue jeans, a snug T-shirt the color of rhododendron leaves, and purple high-top sneakers.

“Come on back,” Josie invited, turning to lead the way. “I’m so glad you were willing to drive all the way out here from Portland.”

“It’s a pretty drive,” Mary said. Her voice sounded more barista than witch, rough and quick, as if she might be a smoker, or had grown up with them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.