Page 1 of Her Christmas Wish
Chapter One
The smile left Sage’s face. Wiped away by the serious, and slightly worried, expression her twin brother was wearing.
He’d been smiling, too. Laughing out loud, even, as he’d walked over to her porch from the beach just a couple of feet away. The concerned look in his eyes was clearly for her.
Which would have been understandable if she had anything troubling on her plate. Scott could read her better than most.
As she could him.
Filling with terror, she sat up, her gaze swinging out at the beach to make sure that Leigh, her whole life, was still there. Laughing infectiously. Throwing her entire pudgy four-year-old body into the game of catch she was playing with Scott’s corgi, Morgan.
It was a game doctors had never thought the little girl would be able to play after her premature birth. Leigh’s chances hadn’t been good.
“Iris is good with her,” Scott said, sitting on the edge of the second high-backed rocker on Sage’s newly built wooden porch. His gaze followed hers out to the foursome just yards away.
Tall where Sage was short, her brother leaned forward, his elbows on his knees as he watched the longtime Ocean Breeze resident—a well-known professional photographer—playing with Leigh and Morgan, and her own canine companion and sole housemate, Angel. A miniature collie.
He was stalling...
“What’s wrong?”
Glancing over at her, his blue eyes identical to her own, Scott almost as quickly glanced away.
Sage set down the applications she’d been going over. As the newest partner in Bryon and Bryon, the corporate law firm with which she’d been employed since passing the California State Bar ten years before, one of her duties was hiring new associates.
It was a task she was taking as seriously as she took everything in life.
Watching her twin, another shard of fear shot through her. “Tell me, Scott. Is it your health? Something go horribly wrong on a case?” As lead prosecutor for the county, there were any number of things that could have popped up in that arena.
All of them manageable.
Her brother was straight up. No way he’d be involved in anything illegal.
Scott looked at her again. “It’s not me,” he said. “Well, not directly. I kind of made an offer, but I need your okay first.”
The hard grip on her stomach softened a little. “You’ve got it, whatever it is,” she told him. “What are you buying?”
A surfboard was her immediate, albeit silent, answer to herself. A wannabe star surfer from the time he could walk, her brother bought boards. The best. Determined to master the sport. But never did.
He was too tall. Too lanky. And just not a good enough surfer to make the boards wise investments. Which wasn’t why he’d be coming to her. He knew she worried about the damned thing flying up and conking him on the back of the head.
“I’m not buying anything,” he said. “I offered my spare bedroom to an old friend in grave need...”
Sage threw up a hand, shaking her head. “Then offer it,” she said, cutting him off. “You don’t need me to tell you that. Or need my permission...”
Her own soliloquy broke off midstream as an early October breeze off the ocean rustled Scott’s thick blond hair, and he didn’t immediately reach up to run his fingers through it. Something he’d been doing as long as she could remember. As though being out of place drew attention to the unconventionally longish strands.
Unconventionally long for a county prosecutor—and for their father’s son, when they’d been younger. Not at all long compared to California standards.
“Who is it?” she asked, after studying him silently. But she knew.
Understanding floated over her first. Then started down, slowly flowing around her, but not touching anywhere she could feel.
As though she was being prepared from afar.
“He has to stay local, sis. He’s innocent and is fighting to get his life back. To open a new clinic. Affordable vet care is too hard to come by these days and animals are suffering because of it. Owners are either opting not to get regular care for their pets, or just plain can’t afford to do so. He’s changed hotels numerous times. The press, and clients who’d trusted and felt betrayed, continue to hound him. He has nowhere else to go.”
He wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t already know. She was a corporate attorney. The news of the local chain of veterinary clinics being shuttered after an employee veterinarian was caught writing hundreds of fraudulent prescriptions for people over a period of years was fodder for gossip all over the firm. Not because Grayson Bartholomew and GB Animal Clinics were clients. They very purposefully, she was sure, were not. But because attorneys all had to ask what they’d do if a client was found in a similar situation.
