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foot to the other. “And I remember your hands, too. Long, thin fingers. You had pretty hands. Still do.”
    “Thank you.” She pushed them deep into her coat pockets and wrapped them around her gloves. “Thanks for…warming them.”
    “Yeah, well…I guess I’d better go get that lasso thing.” As though suddenly remembering he had to be somewhere, Rob turned and barreled back into the house.
    Claire let out a breath. This was weird. Rob West was way out of her league. She could tease him. Scold him. Educate him. But she could not—absolutely not —desire him. And she knew the way her heart was beating at this moment had nothing to do with the exercise of chasing stray cats or battling Missouri’s winter wind. Definitely not.
     
    “That’s far enough!” Rob gritted his teeth in concern and frustration as Claire inched her way across a tree limb toward a shivering cat. Did the woman ever listen?
    “Hey, Claire, don’t go any farther!” He tried again. She had insisted on being the one to go after this cat. At six foot four and a hundred pounds heavier, Rob had reluctantly agreed. “That branch is too thin, Claire. It’s not safe.”
    “Shh!” She scowled down at him, her eyes flashing in the setting sun. They were not hazel. “Stop yelling at me, you nincompoop.”
    “Just try the lasso.”
    “All right, all right.” Spread full-length along the branch, she gripped it with one hand and both knees as she extended the metal pole toward the cat.
    Except for this wily black-and-white tomcat, the group gathered at the mansion had finally captured all the felines. Earlier in the day Rob made the welcome discovery that Florence Ross had locked all the doors to the basement and upstairs rooms, confining her living area mainly to the front parlor, the foyer and a single bathroom. After combing the house for weapons, he located the pistol and several caches of ammunition, which he confiscated. Though concerned about her reaction to the cat roundup, he removed Flossie’s handcuffs.
    Despite the old woman’s every effort to deter them, Jane Henderson—along with Bill Gaines and the two firemen—eventually trapped all the indoor cats. About midafternoon, Jane and her crew stacked the humane shelter’s van with ten cages. After promising to make regular checks on Flossie until they could return a couple of her cats, Jane drove away. The men begged off, saying they needed to go take showers.
    That left Claire and Rob to continue the nearly impossible job of cornering the strays that lurked around the perimeter of the mansion. Climbing trees, falling through the rotting porch floor, negotiating the roof, and racing back and forth, they’d managed to nab six cats. The two indoor ones that Jane’s shelter couldn’t take made eight. This final tom in the old oak tree would complete their mission.
    “The pole isn’t long enough,” Claire called down from the tree limb. “I can’t reach him.”
    “Just come on down, then. We can leave him.”
    “Leave him? After all this, you want to leave him here?”
    “Claire, it’s one cat. Please come down. You’re making me nervous.”
    “Rob, I’m fine—just good ol’ Clarence up a tree. What do you care anyway?”
    “I care, okay?”
    Her face appeared over the limb a second time. Green eyes pinned him, and he felt again an unexpected jolt that zinged down his spine and settled in the pit of his stomach. What was that all about? She was right—it was just dorky Claire Ross up in the tree. Skinny ol’ Clarence…whose curls cascaded downward like a flow of red-hot lava. Whose lips transfixed him every time she spoke. Whose peach-soft skin just about begged him to caress it.
    He couldn’t be looking at her this way, Rob cautioned himself. After his wife’s death, he had made a conscious decision not to date again, and certainly never to remarry. The painful experience had taught him that he wasn’t cut out for the job. Like the Apostle Paul, he had a