Castaway Cove by Joann Ross

look a lot like her,” he said.
    “I’ll take that as a compliment.” She wasn’t nearly as dramatically beautiful as Annie Buchanan had been, but she wasn’t about to argue.
    “It’s in your eyes,” he said. “They’re that same color. I always told her they remind me of the sun shining through the rain. . . . I should introduce you to my grandson. He’s a doctor.”
    The stress caused by his struggle to remember the field trip, and the unwelcome memory of his wife’s death, seemed to drift off his handsome face, weathered by years of being outdoors on the sea. His eyes, clouded by the disease, brightened. “You could do a lot worse.”
    Annie knew that his son was the doctor, while his grandson was actually deployed in the Air Force, but rather than correcting him, she merely smiled and patted his arm. “If he’s even half the man you are, Charlie, I’d definitely have to agree.”
    They worked for a few more minutes. Annie felt a burst of optimism when, with a bit of coaxing, he was able to remember eating the ice cream in the photo taken of him at the seawall in town on the way back from the aquarium. She always sent an update to his son, Dr. Boyd Buchanan, after each of their sessions, and it was nice to be able to report positive news.
    She was on her way out of the building when she dodged a scooter—whose rider had swerved to avoid hitting Daisy, a calico who’d jumped down from a chair—and plowed into a man who’d been entering the building. Distracted by a display on his phone, he hadn’t seen her coming.
    “I’m sorry,” she said as she was brought to a sudden stop by the rock-hard wall of his chest. The wheeled bag carrying her craft supplies tipped over onto the floor.
    “It was my fault.” Sounding anything but apologetic, he shoved the phone into the pocket of his jeans. “I wasn’t watching where I was going.”
    Although she couldn’t see his eyes because of the wraparound Ray-Bans, she could feel the laser glare he aimed at the cat. Who was calmly licking her paw, either unaware or uncaring of the potential disasters she’d caused. “Especially in this place with all the animals underfoot.”
    His sexily beard-stubbled jaw was firm, his chin ruggedly square and marked with a deep, delicious cleft.
    Although the local joke went that Oregonians rusted instead of tanned, his tan suggested he spent a lot of time outdoors. Maybe he was a fisherman, like so many men in town? Or in construction? After a real estate dip due to the recession, in the past few months you couldn’t go anywhere in town without seeing signs of a construction boom, mainly beach houses and condos for wealthy weekenders
    He was tall, lean, and hard enough that she’d felt as if she’d run into a wall of unyielding steel when her chest slammed into his.
    Annie took a step back and lifted her purse strap, which had slid down her arm, more securely onto her shoulder. “I take it you don’t like cats?”
    “I don’t exactly dislike them.” He shrugged shoulders clad in a black T-shirt that showed off that muscled male body in a way that supported the idea that he did some sort of physical work.
    And heaven help her, when he combed his fingers through his shaggy, sun-streaked chestnut hair, she had a moment of what the nuns who’d taught in her high school would’ve referred to as an “impure thought.” A picture of his broad, dark, workingman’s hands on her body flashed wickedly through Annie’s mind.
    “I just don’t
get
them.” His baritone voice roughened with exasperation. “They’re not like dogs, who let you know exactly what they’re thinking.”
    Damn. He might be testosterone on a stick, but with that disparaging comment, his sex appeal plummeted several degrees. Not only did Annie love cats, but she was currently owned by a twenty-pounder she’d adopted at Charity Tiernan’s Christmas pet fair.
    “That’s part of their appeal. They’re mysterious.” She started to bend down