Kitabı oku: «Don't Mess With Texans»

CHAPTER ONE

SIX HOURS AFTER SURGERY, the tomcat was looking like a keeper. “Gums couldn’t be pinker,” Tag assured him. So he wasn’t bleeding internally. He let the cat’s upper lip drop and the torn slashed at his leather glove, then retreated to the back of the cage. Reflexes coming back nicely after anesthesia. His pupils were equally dilated and no wider than they should be. “So what day of the week is it?” Tag murmured, and got a sing song growl in reply.

“Wednesday, right. First week in January, last year of the century.” The car that hit him last night must have just grazed him, breaking his jaw as it tossed him aside. But his brains didn’t seem to be scrambled. “And who’s the president?”

The tom’s ragged ears stayed flattened to his furry skull. Another subsonic moan issued through wired jaws.

“Who cares? You wouldn’t give three fleas and a dead rat for every politician in the country,” Tag translated. “Can’t say I blame you.” Neither would he. Politics was a pastime for comfortable people with time on their hands and steady paychecks coming in. For his and the cat’s kind, survival was the name of the game. And living well was its best revenge.

Still, to live well this stray would have to learn to tolerate humans. Because as soon as he mended, Tag meant to find him a home. He hadn’t spent half the night patching him up just to boot him back out on the street when he was healed. He shut the cage door, then lingered, talking soothing nonsense till the cat stopped growling.

“Got time for a paying customer, Doc?” Carol Anne Kopesky, Tag’s medical technician/receptionist, frowned at him from the doorway leading to the front of the clinic. Hired some twenty years ago by Tag’s senior partner, Dr. Higgins, and trained by that grimly practical gentleman, she took his same dim view of charity cases. And now that Higgins had suffered a mild heart attack and taken a leave of absence, Carol Anne was watching their bottom line with even more than her usual zeal. Tag was earning for two now, till Higgins returned to the Green Mountain Veterinary Clinic next Monday. And even then he would only be practicing part-time.

“Mrs. Allen’s in room one,” she briefed him as Tag stretched his tired bones to his full six feet, one inch. “With her Irish setter, Jebbie, for his yearly checkup and vacs.” She lowered her voice. “A month late. I was afraid we’d lost them to you-know-who.”

A new practice had opened in Bennington, twenty miles to the west, last summer. Their competition was a small-animal man with glitzy new facilities and all the toothy charm of a TV game-show host. Higgins had brought Tag in as his junior associate to counter that threat.

A bell rang as the clinic’s front door opened.

“That’ll be Mrs. Rafferty with Gigi,” Carol Anne added as a yap-yap! like two strokes of an ice pick to the skull rang out from the reception room. “Here to have her toenails trimmed, and don’t even think of suggesting we knock her out to scale her teeth. Gigi has a delicate constitution.” She rolled her eyes and departed.

“Right.” Let the day begin. Tag rotated his shoulders under his white coat and headed for exam room one. Four hours’ sleep last night, and five the night before, with that false alarm out at the Great Dane kennel on the edge of town. A firsttime mother’s delivery, except that she hadn’t. No doubt she’d drop tonight—about the time he dropped off.

Three dogs, two cats and a molting parrot later, he heard a truck rumble down the driveway. Tag injected the last c.c. of distemper vaccine into a squirming Lab puppy and glanced up in time to see a dusty two-horse trailer, hitched to a pickup, glide past his window and on to the barn. Damn. Somebody who hadn’t heard that Doc Higgins was out of commission.

Higgins ran a mixed practice, serving small animals and large, for what had been a rural farming community. But dairy farms were giving way to computer analysts’ country retreats, where the largest animal in residence was more likely an English sheepdog than a sheep. Tag, in keeping with changing times, was a small-animal specialist. Unless the occupant of that trailer had a very simple problem, he wouldn’t be much help.

“You’d better go see,” he advised Carol Anne as he set the syringe aside and took hold of the puppy before it could leap off the table. “Paws like pie plates, he’s going to be a bruiser,” he added to the proud owner. “Have you thought about obedience school?” The bell chimed at the front door. Driver of the truck and trailer, he supposed.

While Tag gave his views on various trainers around the state, he listened with half his attention to the voices down the hall. Carol Anne’s was rising and taking on a hard edge. Some sort of disagreement going on out there? Her opponent’s responses were barely audible, a low liquid murmur and pause, insistent for all its softness. A woman, he thought. Any man would have recognized Carol Anne’s no as no and stomped off by now.

“So Carol Anne can give you Mrs. Dearing’s number.” He eased patient and owner out the door and down the hall toward the debate. “I believe she has a class starting next month.” He gave the puppy a farewell ear scratch. “Meantime he’s looking terrific. You’re doing a great job with him.”

As they reached the reception room, a girl—woman—spun away from the desk to face him. Hair the color of marigolds, flying out from her head as she swung. Cheeks pink with emotion, big eyes meeting his own like a slap. “Are you the doctor?”

High-heeled boots rap-tapping on the linoleum, she came at him. For a moment Tag thought she’d march right into the puppy’s owner, but at the last instant the women do-si-doed and she was toe-to-toe with him, looking up. Despite threeinch heels, she stood no higher than his heart. Pointy chin, lush lips. “You’re Dr. Taggart?” She caught his sleeve.

An emergency, that was clear. Half his mind was already listing the instruments and meds he might need—tourniquets, splints, horse-size syringes, painkiller? The other half was taking her in the way a punch-drunk boxer takes it on the chin, one hit after another, with no time between blows to recover. Drawl like hot honey in spite of her urgency. Her hair wasn’t standing on end; it just seemed that way. Eyes blue as a summer thunderstorm, pink-rimmed with recent tears or maybe lack of sleep, long-lashed in gold. A faint scent of flowers overlaid with a whiff of...bourbon? Maybe it was just some component of her perfume.

She tugged him toward the door. “Would you please, please, please help me?”

He would, in a heartbeat.

“I tried to tell her,” Carol Anne said angrily from behind the counter, “that Dr. Higgins is out. That if she’d just drive to Bennington, I’m sure she could find somebody who’d—”

“I haven’t got time!” his captor snapped without turning. She transferred her grip from his sleeve to his forearm. Slender fingers, and strong. “If you’d just come see...”

“Of course. Show me.”

“Doctor! Honestly, I never—”

The door slammed on Carol Anne’s reproach and they burst out into cold, crisp air—a warm day for January in Vermont, low forties with sunshine. Her breath smoked. “He’s around back.” She couldn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds, but she was all leg in her tight blue jeans and short denim jacket. Matching him stride for stride, she tugged him down the drive, and he went willingly, wanting to laugh, in spite of her urgency, because of her fierceness.

“What an old dragon! I thought she’d chew me up and spit me out before you showed up. Though she’s right, this is terrible, me landing on you out of nowhere like this, ’thout an appointment, but I...” She shrugged and smiled up at him for the first time in apology. Beautiful teeth, something Nordic in her blood with that high coloring. She pronounced her long Is as ah. Ah thought...Ra-aht, instead of right...

Georgia, he guessed. What was she doing up here in the cold north? “How did he hurt himself?” And if she could smile like that, how terrible could it be? Half of him hoped for a false alarm, an easy fix. The other half wanted something serious that he could heroically cure. Dr. Taggart at your service, m’lady.

She shook her head. “He’s not hurt. Not yet.” Her smile faded and she darted ahead. “Here he is.” She threw a bolt on the trailer and swung open the rear door. “My baby.” She pronounced it mah. “Hey, Pookie, sweetheart!” She tipped her head in from the side, to peer past a dark brown flank and black tail. “It’s gonna be okay now. Ollie, ollie oxen free. Dr. Taggart’s gonna fix you up jus’ fine.”

Pookie was enormous, or maybe it was the confines of the trailer that made him seem so. Horses always looked enormous to Tag. Had ever since he was a boy back in Boston and saw the mounted cops’ animals, unpredictable and dangerous as their riders, with steel-shod hooves that could mash a mouthy slum kid’s feet to jelly. Though he’d handled horses at veterinary college, first impressions were hard to lose. Why couldn’t she have had a cow in need? Cows weren’t half so intimidating.

She bent over, denim stretched tight around trim curves, and Tag’s attention swerved sharply and stuck fast. Clearly he hadn’t been dating enough these past five months. Too busy, with Higgins dropping like a stone not six weeks after Tag bought into the practice. And even if he’d had the time, he hadn’t seen a woman up here he wanted to chase. Till now.

Metal rumbled as she slid a gridded ramp down to the ground. Tag found his voice. “Wait a minute. If he’s not hurt, what’s the problem?”

“Not a problem, exactly. I mean it is, but—” She vanished into the empty stall to the right of the horse. Hooves thudded on padded metal, then the horse, a stallion, backed ponderously down the ramp. Tag retreated several hasty steps. Miss Blue Eyes reappeared, holding the animal’s lead, then clattered down to ground level, caught his halter beneath his chin and turned him around. “Ta-da!”

The stallion tossed his dark head and she staggered, then laughed and flattened a hand high on his glossy neck. “Pookie, meet Dr. Taggart.”

The stud’s head towered high over her red-gold ripply curls. Horse-mountain. Dark eyes focused on Tag with an almost human curiosity. The stallion snorted, and the gruff “Huh!” sounded like an opinion.

“What precisely do you want me to do for...Pookie?” All half-ton-plus of him?

She gave him a dazzling smile. “I want you to Bobbitt this ol’ boy for me.” She slapped the stud’s shoulder for emphasis.

Oh, boy. “You mean...”

She nodded vigorously. “I mean fix him. Geld him. I bought him for riding and he...” Her eyes slid away to follow a crow winging over the barn, then back to Tag’s face and she shrugged. “His octane’s a bit high.” Her chin tipped up a notch. “I mean I can handle him, but...”

Tag didn’t know much about horses, but he knew this one was no lady’s ride. One toss of his head and the beast could have flipped her over the barn. “Um...if he’s Pookie, then you’re...?”

“Susannah,” she said, and held out a fine-boned hand. “Susannah...Mack.”

He liked her strength as they shook, liked even better that his hand dwarfed hers. She had calluses, just enough that her touch was interesting. “Susannah, if you just bought him... He’s a looker, but isn’t he a bit more horse than you need? Maybe you should consider taking him—”

Her eyes went steely. “There isn’t anything on four legs I can’t ride. That’s not the problem.”

“Then the problem is...?” And why the rush?

She stared at him unblinking as the tomcat he’d saved last night, then looked down at her toes. “Problem is we’re new in town. Just up from...the South.”

Tag glanced automatically at the trailer’s license, but it was too muddy to read the state. Looked like they’d forded a river on their way.

“We drove all night, and now we get here—” She scuffed at the frozen dirt “—I find the stable where I’d made arrangements won’t take him. I forgot t’mention he was a stud. They have only one turn-out pen, lots of mares, and they’re afraid he’ll...” She laughed.

“He will.” Tag rubbed the back of his neck and sighed. The last time he’d gelded a stallion, it had been a Shetland pony who’d almost returned the favor. He’d sported a tiny, blue-black hoofprint on his upper thigh for a month. He’d gone along to watch Higgins on a Saturday and that canny veteran had taken one look at the pony, then pressed Tag into service. The time before that had been in vet school. “What about some other stable?”

She looked up from her boots. “I want that one. And it’s just going to be the same ol’ story, wherever we go.” She drifted closer and put a hand on his arm. “Please do it? I don’t know where I’ll go or what I’ll do if you don’t help us.”

When she put it like that... And she was determined, that was clear, and he was damned if he’d have her turn to any other man—any other vet—for help. “All right, then.” Let’s get it over with. “When did he eat last?”

“Not since ’bout ten, last night.” She let Tag go and backed off a step, still holding him with her storm-cloud eyes.

“Good. Then his stomach’s clear.” The clinic barn was clean, with a freshly bedded stall waiting for the patients Higgins might never see again. And the older man’s instruments were stored in the surgery. “If you could walk him around the grounds for fifteen minutes or so, settle him down, I’ll turn on the heat in the barn and set everything up.” And snatch a quick look at his text on equine procedures.

And face down Carol Anne’s outrage when he told her to postpone his first two afternoon appointments. Luckily Susannah had descended on him at the start of his lunch break. An experienced vet could geld a horse in half an hour or less. But he’d want to take his time, measure twice and cut once, as the saying went. Oh, boy. Tag turned and headed for the clinic.