Strays and Lovers Read online

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  More from John Inman

  About the Author

  By John Inman

  Visit Dreamspinner Press

  Copyright

  Strays and Lovers

  By John Inman

  Forty-six-year-old Eddie Hightower has a problem. He’s all alone. The only thing that saves him from facing that stark reality is the fact that he isn’t really alone at all. He has a house full of pets and a refuge full of stray unwanted animals he spends every waking hour trying to place in homes. While he loves what he does with all the joy in his heart, that same poor aging heart is still missing something. And Eddie knows exactly what it is. Romance.

  But wait. Cue the music. Suddenly, beyond all hope, it happens. In the small desert town of Spangle, California, where Eddie lives, comes a sad young stranger with piercing gray eyes. They are the palest, most stunningly beautiful eyes Eddie has ever seen. Poor Eddie Hightower is swallowed up in their silver depths and disappears without a gurgle. The stranger’s name is Gray Grissom. Gray, like his eyes. Without hesitation Eddie opens his doors—and his heart—to the lost young man. After all, that’s what Eddie does. He finds homes for strays. But this is one stray Eddie intends to keep for himself.

  For John B, as always.

  Chapter One

  EDDIE HIGHTOWER stared into the bathroom mirror. He placed his fingertips at his temples, just below two arrowheads of receding hairline, and pulled everything backward and up. Gratifyingly, his crow’s-feet disappeared, and his cheekbones popped into view.

  “Cool,” he said.

  Of course now he looked Chinese, which was no bad thing in and of itself. But with a name like Hightower, it would seem genetically improbable.

  While keeping the crow’s-feet ironed out, he applied pressure to both sides of his neck below the ears with his thumbs, dragging the flesh on his neck back toward his spinal column, smoothing out the wrinkles on his throat and tightening his jowls.

  “Ooh,” he said admiringly. “Twenty years younger.” He blithely ignored the lump of extraneous flesh now pooched up on the nape of his neck like a tumor and the fact that his eyeballs were flattened out to a point of being all but useless.

  He studied his image from three different angles before emitting a less than ecstatic snarl.

  Releasing the grip on his face and neck, he watched with disdain as everything dribbled back to its normal state of laxity. And there he was. Forty-six-year old Eddie Hightower again. Not bad looking, he supposed, but certainly not in his prime.

  “Hmm,” he said, continuing to eye himself with resigned acceptance. His brown hair was definitely thinning. Nothing to do about that. Damned if he was going to sport a comb-over. His eyes were still blue, and he didn’t need glasses yet, so that was a plus. His back was still straight and his teeth were still good. He still had a hairy chest and his belly was reasonably flat. No complaints there. His sex drive was still in high gear, although it ran mostly on idle these days—something he was none too happy about. And last but not least, he had kept the same thirty-two-inch waistline he had in his twenties, thanks to all the running around he did at the refuge, tending his flock of lost souls, which is how he sometimes thought of the unfortunate animals in his care.

  Lately he had begun to think of himself that way too. Another lost soul. One more unwanted pussycat.

  That thought caused Eddie to cough up a reluctant laugh as he studied his reflection one last time. Yep, old Eddie Hightower was a little like a pound of bologna, creeping up on its expiration date as it sat unspoken for on the deli shelf, all semblance of freshness dwindling, the edges beginning to curl, the reek of corruption starting to leak through the dusty packaging.

  Eddie sniffed his furry armpit to test his theory. Yep. Corruption indeed.

  He stared down at the gray-and-white tabby sitting in the sink in front of him, watching every move he made. The cat’s name was Leonardo DeCatrio, or Leo for short. Was it Eddie’s imagination, or did Leo look vaguely appalled?

  “What do you think, Leo? Do I stink? Be honest.”

  “Meow,” said Leo.

  “Don’t hold back. Tell me how you feel.”

  “Meow,” Leo said again, with a little more fervency this time, as in “I said it once. How many times do I have to repeat myself?”

  That sounded like an emphatic yes to Eddie, so he dropped the towel from around his waist, stepped naked into the shower stall, and drew the curtain. After dancing around and bellowing at the top of his voice for a minute while the shower spray went from arctic to subtropical, Eddie began energetically sudsing himself down from top to bottom with a washcloth and a bar of Ivory soap. He dutifully tended to all the jiggly parts in the middle with extra care.

  The jiggly unused parts in the middle, he sadly mused.

  Standing there dripping and frothing and squinting into the spray, Eddie sighed. When he realized he couldn’t remember in what month, or even what season, he had last lured a man into his bed, he sighed again. This last sigh came all the way up from the soles of his feet. In truth, it sounded more like a groan than a sigh.

  He looked down at a fluffy little head poking around the edge of the shower curtain and ogling his naked frame. The fluffy little head belonged to Oxley, a champagne-colored Persian with soulful blue eyes. Oxley came into the Hightower household after someone dropped him off as a kitten on Eddie’s front doorstep sealed inside a UPS box. Being a cat that positively oozed personality from day one, Oxley had immediately wormed his way into Eddie’s heart, as well as Eddie’s inner circle, which to Eddie was the same as family.

  Many of the strays Eddie gathered around him never saw the inside of the sanctum sanctorum, as it were. The sanctum sanctorum being a century-old, two-story clapboard farmhouse tucked between two boulder-strewn hills on a lonely desert highway outside San Diego, California. Eddie had called the farmhouse home since a maiden aunt had willed the property, along with a fair chunk of money, to Eddie upon her death ten years before.

  While the money was dwindling fast, the house was still standing, and Eddie had long since thought of it as his world, his castle, his home. He loved its seclusion, sitting as it did out in the middle of the Southern California high desert. There wasn’t a neighbor within eyesight, and Eddie liked that too. Sometimes in the evening, when Eddie sat in his backyard watching the night creep into the sky, the silence that fell over his little stretch of desert was so deafening he could hear the blood sluicing through his veins.

  Still, loneliness had not found him there in the high desert. Not true loneliness. He had his animals to keep him company. And he had his gratitude to his aunt ever present in the back of his mind to remind himself how lucky he was.

  That one act of incredible generosity from a woman Eddie barely knew had changed his life. It changed the lives of a lot of unwanted animals too. And while most of the lost or abandoned creatures in Eddie Hightower’s care found their way to Eddie’s doorstep either under their own power or, like Oxley, were purposely deposited there for the sake of convenience (generally a human’s convenience, not the animal’s), few of them had truly found their way into Eddie’s heart. No, the rest of Eddie’s four-legged guests were relegated to the fenced-in lawns and kennels and dog runs and wire-enclosed cat condos scattered around the three acres of property out back. In inclement weather the animals were sheltered in a row of small Quonset huts; cats with cats, dogs with dogs, and a few o
ther singular specimens ranging from iguanas to rabbits to hamsters. A couple of boa constrictors were housed separately and in individual cages for the safety of the other guests, many of which a boa constrictor might quite reasonably misconstrue as dinner, thus the solitary confinement.

  Eddie cared for these other beasts, of course. He worried and fussed over them and did his level best to find each and every one of them a decent home. He even loved them in his own way. But not the way he loved his true pets.

  Eddie had renovated the two-car garage at the side of the house into the refuge’s reception room and ICU, as he called it. There, the animals in need of special care were kept in tiered cages in the back while they became healthy enough to be integrated into the refuge’s general population.

  On an average day, Eddie Hightower’s refuge sheltered more than sixty creatures. Happily, none at the moment were in the ICU. Only six of the sixty or so animals in attendance had the run of the house. That was because only six had become true family. Of those six, on the feline side were Leo, the gray-and-white tabby, Oxley, the champagne Persian, and coal-black Madame Ovary, so named because she had managed to entice every tomcat on the place with her wiles, thus becoming pregnant three times in quick succession before Eddie could get her to the vet for spaying. Oddly, after spaying, she was still a slut, which rather surprised Eddie until the vet, red-faced with embarrassment, admitted he must have missed part of her reproductive wiring—no more kittens, but plenty of sex drive. It could happen to anyone, he said, which Eddie didn’t entirely believe. So Madame Ovary was sent to a different veterinarian to complete the procedure. Before she made it to the OR the second time around, that veterinary clinic burned to the ground. By chance, the only animal on the premises when the inferno broke out that night was Madame Ovary. She escaped. With so much divine intervention already expended on her behalf, Eddie decided to leave Madame Ovary’s remaining sex bits right where they were, come hell or high water. Needless to say, every feline Lothario within a ten mile radius was thankful he did.

  The fourth and final feline to grace Eddie’s home was Chester, an old yellow tom who had been with Eddie since before he inherited the property, which made Chester the alpha male of the enterprise, what with him being the first in Eddie’s heart and all. He was also one of the few male pussycats on the premises whom Madame Ovary had not bedded, primarily because he was simply too old and too lazy to care about wooing the ladies any longer. Sort of like Eddie. (Not that Eddie had ever wooed a lady in his life, being more drawn to the masculine branch of the species.)

  Chester spent his days now sleeping on a windowsill in Eddie’s upstairs bedroom, climbing up and down the stairs on his arthritic joints only at mealtimes. Between naps, he would gaze superciliously down onto the grounds below, waiting patiently for each day to end and for Eddie to climb the stairs and tumble exhausted into bed so Chester could curl up at his master’s nice warm feet and snore like a Mack Truck while he dreamed of breakfast.

  On the doggie side of the inner circle, Eddie hosted Lucretia, a German shepherd left with only three operative legs after an abusive puppyhood. When Lucretia arrived at the refuge, the fourth leg, a hind one, had been atrophied and more hindrance than help, flopping uselessly when she tried to walk, forever getting in her way. Since having surgery to amputate the useless appendage (which had cost Eddie a small fortune and taken a considerable chunk out of his aunt’s inheritance), Lucretia now hopped along quite gamely on her three remaining legs, wagging her tail happily. Usually at her side came Fred. Fred was a tall, lanky, brindle-colored mutt with a squirt or two of greyhound in his lineage and an endless capacity for unimpeachable loyalty. He had been discovered on Eddie’s doorstep one day, leashed to the doorknob with a length of dirty clothesline, half-starved and cowering in fear. After a few good meals and patient, friendly tending, Fred attached himself to Eddie, and Eddie, feeling the love the creature bore him, welcomed him into his home.

  Even now, Eddie knew as he stood dripping in the shower, Fred would be lying outside the bathroom door waiting. When Eddie came out, Fred would greet him with a butt wag that shook everything from his tail all the way up to his long, skinny ears. Laughing together, the two would head off for breakfast, with all the other household creatures trailing along behind. As they did every single morning.

  So five minutes later, toweled off and dressed for the day in his customary T-shirt and jeans, that was exactly what happened. Eddie, still shaking the dampness out of his hair and with entourage in tow, skirted his toxic dump of a living room (he really had to clean house one of these days) and headed straight for the kitchen.

  He laid out individual bowls of cat food for the four cats, kibbles and Milk-Bones for the two dogs, and a bowl of Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries for himself, which he gobbled down in less time than it takes to tell about it. Eddie had a sweet tooth.

  After rinsing his cereal bowl in the sink, he guzzled three cups of coffee as hot and strong as he could stand it. Then he snagged a chocolate donut from a box on top the refrigerator (out of reach of the dogs) and wolfed it down. On his way out the door, he snagged a second donut, this one with sprinkles all over it. He liked sprinkles. That donut was gone before he hit the back porch.

  He squinted into the caramel light of a California desert morning with a smile on his face and a song in his heart. So to speak. Positioning his sunglasses on the end of his nose, he gazed around to see what the animals were up to. Chester was probably already back upstairs, sawing logs on the windowsill. The other three cats were sniffing around the back porch, ever alert for alligator lizards, which they pestered and consumed every chance they got. Only yesterday Eddie had found the gnawed carcass of one, sans tail, deposited among the cushions in his favorite chair. Apparently a gift.

  The two dogs, also with smiles on their faces and songs in their hearts, or so Eddie presumed, took off running around the compound—Lucretia with her galumphing three-legged gait, and Fred as fast and sleek as a bullet train. They bumped friendly noses with a few of the other guests through the mesh cages, then chased each other around and through a tangled stand of cholla cactus at the edge of the property. Eddie cast a silent prayer skyward for their safety, since they had unearthed more than one rattlesnake on that cactus-covered hillside. So far both Fred and Lucretia had shown enough common sense to give the rattlers a wide berth, and for that Eddie was grateful. The last thing he needed was more vet bills, or worse.

  Each new animal at the refuge was vaccinated and spayed or neutered upon its arrival. The spaying costs were astronomical in and of themselves. Then there were the medical costs of those creatures that came to him with specific problems of their own. Malnutrition or injuries from abuse, like Lucretia had suffered, or broken limbs and skin lesions from their time in the wild, usually after confrontations with coyotes. Also to be considered were general illnesses and dental problems, which could also ratchet up medical costs in a hurry.

  Eddie Hightower insisted each of his creatures be in tip-top shape before allowing them to be adopted out. Pet adoption, after all, was what it was all about, and Eddie insisted on giving each and every animal in his care their best shot at a happy, stable, well-loved life.

  The Desert Sky Pet Refuge was Eddie Hightower’s pride and joy. As he began doling out breakfast to all his guests—thirty-some dogs, twenty-some cats, and a handful of assorted other species—he thought about how far the enterprise had come since the early days. It had begun by accident, of course. A stray dog here. A litter of unwanted kittens there. Word spread quickly that the man who lived all by himself out in the high desert—and who wasn’t really as crazy as one might think, living alone like he did—could be counted on to rescue unwanted pets, and in a pinch even work hard to find them a new home.

  Many of the animals that came to Eddie were simply in the way. People were moving and couldn’t take their pets with them. Some were sick, and their owners couldn’t afford to have them treated. And still others were just born
unwanted. Those were the ones that broke Eddie’s heart the most.

  Regardless of why and how they came to him, Eddie did his best to find each of them a home. The creatures that proved to be impossible to place were allowed to simply stay on with him at the refuge. Only the truly ill were ever euthanized, and even then only as a last resort.

  Eventually Eddie’s reputation became such that he had little time for anything other than caring for the animals on his tiny ranch. Three years back, he’d quit his day job as a clerk at the Spangle Hardware Store and devoted all his energies to making his pet refuge a go. He eventually eked enough of a livelihood from it to provide himself a fairly decent living. The day he nailed the Desert Sky Pet Refuge sign to the fencepost out front was the day he committed himself to the enterprise wholeheartedly. And so far he had not backed down one tiny iota. Nor had he regretted his decision. The refuge gave him purpose, and finding loving humans to adopt his animals made him happy.

  Eddie was proud of his refuge, and that was something new for Eddie. He hadn’t done that many things in his life to be proud of. But here, surrounded by the creatures in his care, Eddie had found the perfect niche. He belonged here. He knew it the first time he stepped onto the property. The fact that he had turned the vacant farmhouse and rocky, sunbaked three acres into a place that actually accomplished something good pleased him even more.

  Yet it hadn’t been easy.

  Eddie had three veterinarians who worked at reduced rates to help the refuge care for its creatures, but still the monthly medical costs were high. Only by charging for his adoption services could Eddie keep his head above water financially. But so far, he had managed.

  Two years back he had filed to incorporate the business as a charity, and that had helped, lowering the cost of licenses and taxes and limiting his liabilities. As a charity, he qualified for cheaper prices from pet food companies, who used their charity work as a write-off, just as Eddie did.