If you haven’t read the PROLOGUE check it out first.

Chapter One

Little Mishap 

Fifteen Years Later

Laine cranked up the music in the studio at her home.

She’d closed her business at eight tonight. She’d had a wine and paint party and the group of ten ladies was having a ball on this August Saturday night.

No one was producing much more than good times at those parties and that was what she wanted.

But at eleven thirty she was in the little studio in her craftsman home on Amore Island up on a cliff looking down at the waves crashing below. There was a storm brewing and she loved that the best.

She stood back to look at the canvas in front of her she’d been working on for hours.

Stormy Night. That was what she was going to call this. 

The moon was peeking through the clouds and she’d tried to capture this before the night ended and she lost her mojo.

Angling her head side to side, she was almost done. At least to the point where she could stop and finish up the next day. She’d snapped a few pictures with her camera when the storm was at the peak she was trying to replicate to look back on.

After the last finishing touch, Beyoncé’s “Put a Ring On It” piped through the ceiling speaker.

“Now you’re talking my language, Beyoncé. Best way to end the night.”

Laine broke out in a dance. She had the imaginary microphone in front of her, singing along, her horrible off-key voice echoing off the walls.

She was voguing, switched off into the running man, found herself halfway across the room, then broke off into a head whip, her hair swirling around her, the sweat dribbling down her back.

When the chorus ended, she switched it to the floss. Big mistake!

In the process of “flossing” her arms front and back, she slammed her left hand into the wall.

“Holy mother of sweet potatoes.” She swung her wrist around, trying to shake off the pain tingling into her pinky. 

“Fart snookers! Stomp on some monkeys!”

She was hopping around the room doing her own version of a “What the heck did I do to myself?” dance.

Not one to swear because it wasn’t polite, she was running out of funny sayings to pop in her head with the way her knuckle was beating a conga drum in her brain.

She took a few deep breaths and stopped moving. She closed her eyes and held her hand out in front of her, then popped one eye open, saw the swelling on her knuckle and realized she couldn’t bend her pinky. 

“Fork me!”

Her bottom lip started to wobble. The pain was really hitting home.

She went to the freezer and got a bag of frozen veggies and slapped it on her hand. 

The first person she thought to call was Avery. Her new best friend lived on Amore Island. She’d brought Avery here a year ago when the island decided it needed a full-time vet.

In that year her old college friend and she had gotten extremely close and now Avery was even engaged. A few days ago Carter Bond popped the question in Laine’s studio.

She picked her phone up and then put it down when she saw it was close to midnight. Nope, not waking her friend for this.

Besides, it’s not like Laine had paws or claws that Avery could tend to.

After thirty minutes of ice, the swelling was only getting worse and not better.

Time to put her big girl panties on and drive herself to the ER. “Deviled eggs!” she yelled.

Maybe she’d get lucky and it’d be slow there at this time of the night. 

She was only half lucky when she arrived ten minutes later. 

She was brought into an exam room quickly, saw a nurse within thirty minutes. Thirty minutes more, a doctor pulled the curtain back.

“I’m Dr. Mills,” he said. “I see you jammed your knuckle…dancing? Were you at a club?”

She looked down at her tan cotton shorts that were barely mid-thigh, her black T-shirt that had paint splatters on it from when she was flinging the paint in her excitement, down to the droplets on the top of her feet that were seen from the flip-flops she’d slid on.

More than once she wished she’d changed her clothes before she drove away from home.

“Yeah,” she said, putting a big smile on her face. “It’s called the Idiot Club. One where you turn the music up loud and break out in kids’ moves to look like a fool, then jam your digits on the wall.”

He laughed when she said that. “It’s always good to have a sense of humor.”

She snorted. “I’ve got that in abundance. Or I did before this little mishap.”

“Let’s take a look at your hand.”

She held her hand out to him. The nurse had been nice enough to swap out her frozen peas for an ice pack and towel.

Dr. Mills removed the towel from her hand. “Well. A betting man would guess this is broken.”

“You feeling lucky enough to go to the casino?” she asked. “I bet you’d hit it big.”

“That’d be great, but I’m stuck here chatting with the members of the Idiot Club.”

She burst out laughing. “You’re funny,” she said.

“Thank you. My wife thinks so too.”

“Delaney,” she said.

“Oh,” Dr. Mills said. “Do you know my wife?”

“I’m on the town board,” she said. “I know a lot of the Bond family. But my best friend just happened to get engaged to a Bond this week.”

He frowned. “Give me a second. I know everyone and what is going on. The only person I know that isn’t engaged but dating someone is Carter. Did Carter get engaged?”

“A few days ago,” she said. “At my studio.”

“Damn,” Dr. Mills said. “Good for him. Let’s get you down to X-rays. You’ll get your fill of the Bond family tonight. The other Dr. Mills is working. He might not be as good-natured as me tonight. He’s short staffed and doing the X-rays himself so it’s slowing down the results being read.”

Her heart started to race more than when she’d been dancing.

She was going to be talking to Carson Mills.

Yeah, she knew who Hudson and Carson were. The twins. Carson was the single hot one she’d seen around the island that got her blood pumping.

They’d never talked. Never had a reason to.

Tonight they would.

Too bad she was drunk on stupidity served up at the Idiot Club.

“Guess we are all in for a fun-filled night,” she said, putting a smile on her face.

“I’ll have a nurse bring you down when she gets a minute. It could be a bit. As I said, short staffed but thankfully not that busy. It could be worse.”

“Isn’t that a fact of life? It could always be worse.”

It was what she’d told herself since she was little.

She popped her earbuds in that she’d taken off when Hudson came in and turned the music back on.

No dance music. Nope. Instead she was chilling to Zac Bryan. A nontraditional combination of punk and folk music. Some made her bop in her seat. Others mellow out. None made her want to break into a dance and that was what she needed.

She lay back on the bed and closed her eyes.

She didn’t know how much time had passed, maybe twenty minutes, since she’d just gone through about five songs, when a nurse tapped her on the arm and she all but fell out of the bed. Yeah, that would have put a cap on the night, but at close to two in the morning, she was ready to pass right out. Good thing her studio was closed on Sundays because she’d be sleeping most of the day away.

“I’m so sorry,” the nurse said. “I know it’s late. We can go get your X-rays now.”

“My pinky doesn’t need a wheelchair,” she said in almost a panic. No one knew her fear of hospitals and she was proud of herself for having gotten herself here and staying as calm as she was.

No way she was getting in the chair though. Nope, not doing it. 

“It’s just procedure,” the nurse said.

She put a big smile on her face. “I know, but I’m trying to stay awake and a walk will help. Can I walk? Please. There might be someone else that needs that. Like if they jammed their pinky toe, not finger?”

The nurse giggled and Hudson popped his head in the room. “She can walk down if she wants.”

“Thanks,” Laine said, letting out a breath. Maybe he’d heard the anxiety in her voice or just decided to be nice. 

She swung her legs off the bed and found her flip-flops on the floor that she’d slipped off before she lay back to get comfortable. She feared she was still in for a few more hours here. Talk about a sucky way to spend a Saturday night.

Might be the most excitement she’d had in a long time though. 

When they reached the X-ray waiting room, the nurse said, “Just have a seat here. Dr. Mills will be out to get you when he can.”

“Thanks,” she said. She slid her earbuds back in. No reason to bring the Bluetooth ones and risk losing or dropping one. The ones that plugged in let everyone know what she was doing anyway with her phone in her pocket. 

She barely got through one song when the sexy Carson Mills…the other Dr. Mills…came into the room where she was waiting.

“Laine Connors?” he asked.

“That’s me,” she said. “I’d raise my hand for clarification, but since I’m the only one here and you’re a doctor and all, I’m assuming you could deduce that yourself.”

He laughed like his brother had. “Hudson filled me in. He said you were funny.”

Guess the twins chatted back and forth while they were working. “Does this mean I get pushed to the top of the list to get out of here faster?”

She hated asking that. Her father would be throwing money around and she would have been out of here an hour ago.

Though she had more than enough of her own money for a comfortable life, she didn’t have her dad’s wealth. Not yet at least. But she didn’t want to think of that or how she’d end up with it.

“It’s not too busy back here,” he said. “I’ll read them right after I take them if you want to wait and keep me company. I could use some entertainment.”

“I could show how to bust a move if you want,” she said. 

“Let’s just stay away from the walls,” he said. Which told her that Hudson had filled him in. Or more likely, he just read her chart like any other doctor could do.

“Trust me, I’ll be more aware of that next time. I was just going right at it. I shouldn’t have closed my eyes during the running man, and then I had to shut them when I was doing the head whip thing or I would have gotten dizzy. What I should have done was recalibrate myself before I went into the floss.”

“I’m getting a visual with everything but the floss,” he said.

She giggled. “You might look good doing it.” She stood up when he walked in. Before they moved to the X-ray room, she pulled her phone out, found a quick video and showed him.

“Oh,” he said. “Yeah. I can see how that might damage a finger.”

“There you go,” she said. “My impulsiveness celebration brought me to the ER. I should know better, but when excitement takes over, I just can’t control it.”

“I bet,” he said. His eyes were laughing at her, but there was a touch of something more going on too. She’d heard a bit about this particular Bond family member when it came to women.

She’d let it pass for now. 

A little flirting never hurt anyone. Or at least she figured not much could hurt her tonight, including her pride.