Sun Kissed

  “And dumb.”

  She sat on a rock to tug off her boots and pour out the water. “He isn’t dumb. I remember reading somewhere that rottweilers, border collies, and Australian shepherds are the three smartest breeds.” She stuffed her feet back into her boots and looked up at him. “Don’t be mad. How did you end up with a rottweiler, anyway? Most vets I know have herd dogs.”

  “Max is a herd dog. He just herded us straight off that rock into the river, didn’t he?”

  Samantha burst out laughing again, the sensual tension that had sprung up between them moments before almost forgotten. Because they were already wet, they spent the remainder of their respite at the river romping with Max in the shallows, throwing sticks for him to fetch, and trying to help him catch minnows. They were no more successful at fishing than the canine had been.

  When they were finally back in the truck, Samantha said, “Thank you, Tucker. This has been fun.”

  He flashed her a dazzling grin. “It was my pleasure.”

  A few mornings later Tucker brought in a giant breakfast burrito for their first meal of the day, which he divided with a scalpel and served up on paper towels. Samantha had grown accustomed to joining him for takeout meals at his desk and sat across from him without invitation. As they chewed food and sipped steaming mugs of coffee, they each broke off pieces of burrito for Max, who clearly considered himself deserving of his share.

  When the meal was almost finished, Tucker looked Samantha dead in the eye, assumed a solemn expression, and said, “You can take Tabasco home today.”

  Samantha almost choked on a bit of ham. “What?”

  His firm mouth twitched at one corner. “His levels have dropped again. He’s not out of the woods yet. I won’t say that. But he’s come far enough to be off the fluids and monitors. You can take your baby home.”

  The news filled Samantha with gladness but also with a strange, inexplicable sense of loss. Her time with Tucker was almost over. Despite all her efforts not to, she’d come to enjoy being with him, maybe even to need being with him. Sharing simple meals like this one. Watching him as he pored over medical tomes. Working beside him as he treated Tabasco. Once she returned to the ranch, she’d see him only briefly when he came out to check on her horse. She wasn’t sure why that made her so sad, only that it did, and the realization made her feel all mixed-up inside.

  She carefully set down her cup of coffee, removed the paper napkin from her lap, and pushed to her feet. She couldn’t speak past the huge lump that had come into her throat. Before she embarrassed herself, she fled the office and ran to the bathroom, the only place in the clinic where she could hide behind a locked door.

  Once there, she sat on the commode, still struggling against tears, her emotions in such a tangle that she couldn’t make sense of them. She was delighted that Tabasco had improved enough to go home. She was absolutely overjoyed, in fact. For days on end she’d spent nearly every moment frantically praying he wouldn’t die. So why did she feel this overpowering urge to cry? It was silly. No, more than silly, it was stupid.

  Tucker tried to concentrate on his work. Tabasco wasn’t the only sick horse in his clinic, after all. He had a mare with colic and had to periodically put her on a stomach pump to infuse her belly with special fluids in an attempt to break up the blockage in her upper intestine. He also had two post-ops, one who’d needed a tendon repair and another who’d gotten tangled in barbed wire, cutting up its legs.

  As Tucker paced the hall, he told himself he couldn’t, absolutely couldn’t, linger outside the restroom, wondering if Samantha was all right. But she’d been in there for thirty minutes. He wondered if she was crying and could only shake his head at the thought. He’d delivered good news. He had expected her to jump up and down with joy. Instead she’d turned white as a sheet.

  Females. He would never understand them. His mother, his sister, and all his brothers’ wives occasionally baffled him to the point where he could only scratch his head. They didn’t see the world the way men did; that was for damned sure.

  As Tucker worked with the colicky mare, he wondered who’d come up with the phrase “the war between the sexes.” It wasn’t a battle to be waged, but a mystery to be solved, and he had a feeling few men succeeded at the task.

  Maybe that was a good thing. If the world were made up of only left-brain thinkers, there might be no poetry or great pieces of art or delicate china, and Tucker needed beautiful things in his life almost as much as he did the analytical and scientific.

  Riley, the senior tech, came into the stall where Tucker was working. He hemmed and hawed for a moment, and then he finally said, “Ms. Harrigan has been in the john for over half an hour. I need to take a leak.”

  Tucker looked up from where he was crouched near the mare. “You’ve got the same equipment I do, Riley. Step out behind the building.”

  “What if someone sees me?”

  “If you’re not smart enough to make sure no one sees you, what are you doing working as a tech in my clinic?”

  Riley rolled his eyes but nevertheless exited the building, leaving Tucker to regret almost snapping the man’s head off. Still, it was no big deal that the restroom had been occupied for thirty minutes. No female techs were working a shift, and Samantha surely deserved the same consideration that she’d so readily shown to others.

  Tucker couldn’t count the times he’d heard her ask everyone in the building if they needed to use the facility before she grabbed a quick shower. He’d also heard her offer to help the technicians with the more menial tasks. She’d cleaned stalls, forked hay, washed out water troughs, assisted with feedings, and all but taken over the coffee counter, making sure a fresh pot of java was always available and sometimes even making the rounds with cups filled to the brim, fixed just as each technician liked it.

  If she wanted to hog the restroom for a few minutes, she’d earned the privilege.

  Tucker finished what he was doing and descended on the john. But when he stood in front of the door, he couldn’t bring himself to knock. She would come out when she was ready. All she needed was a little time away from prying eyes, and he respected that.

  Some news flash that was. He’d come to respect almost everything about her.

  He remembered coming upon her in the middle of the night as she knelt in the straw by her cot, saying a rosary. He recalled walking in another time to find her sharing that same narrow cot with Max, her slender body curled around the dog’s massive shape to make room for two. He thought of the many times over the last few days that she’d shared her food with the silly dog as well, one bite for herself, one bite for Max, each offering followed by a light pat on the rottweiler’s broad head.

  She was a gentle creature, his Samantha, and as sweet as they came. She loved animals with a depth and constancy that made him almost jealous, because he’d developed a yearning to have her look at him that way.

  I’m in love with her. It hit him like a brick between the eyes. After all these years it had finally happened. For the life of him, he couldn’t say how, exactly. It sure as hell hadn’t gone according to his plan, which involved months of dating and lots of romantic evenings so he could try a woman on for size. He’d never even kissed Samantha, let alone been intimate with her. And they’d never had a long conversation, sharing their thoughts on life, either. He’d always considered that to be an absolute must. You had to know a person before you could love her, right?

  Only he’d fallen for her anyway. The soft curve of her lips right before she smiled. The pain in her lovely brown eyes when her heart was breaking. The way she counted off Hail Marys on her fingertips when she was too busy to sit in the corner with her beads. The light, gentle way she patted Max’s head and the soft murmur of her voice.

  He supposed he did know her, in a way, perhaps better than he might have come to know her in a dating situation. He’d seen her in good moments and in bad, and probably at her worst a few times as well. He knew she looked just as pretty
with straw in her hair as she did coming fresh from the clinic shower with her clothes stuck to her damp skin and long curls hanging in wet ribbons over her shoulders. He had also come to understand on a purely emotional level that had nothing to do with reason or logic that she was everything he’d ever wanted in a woman.

  Only where was the magic? Tucker had watched all his brothers fall in love, and to a man, they’d gone around in happy dazes with goofy grins on their faces, barely hearing when they were spoken to and replying in fits and starts, their minds clearly elsewhere. Tucker didn’t have an urge to grin. Instead he felt as if his stomach were a wet rag being wrung out by brutal fists.

  She didn’t love him back. That was the bottom line. Sometimes he wasn’t even sure if she saw him as a man. He was just Tucker Coulter, the vet. And whenever he dared to step over that invisible line, trying to take their relationship to a deeper level, she withdrew from him. That day by the river when he’d almost kissed her, she’d gone as tense as a coiled spring.

  When forty-five minutes had passed, Tucker returned to the restroom door and rapped his knuckles on the wood.

  “Samantha, are you all right?”

  To his surprise, the door swung open, and the next thing he knew his arms were full of delicious feminine softness that smelled faintly of dog because she’d shared her bed with Max again last night.

  “Thank you, Tucker,” she whispered fiercely against his collarbone. “Thank you so much for all that you’ve done.”

  At the back of Tucker’s mind, he knew and accepted that she clung to him only out of gratitude. But another part of him grabbed hold of the moment, and he gathered her close against him, acutely aware of how she felt in his arms. Right, absolutely right. He wanted the seconds to last forever. He wanted to believe that she felt some small measure of affection for him.

  Then she drew away, and the moment was gone. Rubbing beneath tear-swollen eyes with quivering fingertips, she smiled tremulously up at him. “I’m sorry. I feel like an idiot. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  There was nothing wrong with her, not as far as he could see, but that was a thought better left unspoken.

  “Tabasco isn’t completely out of the woods,” he reminded her. “I just think he’s strong enough to go home now.”

  She nodded that she understood, but Tucker wasn’t sure she heard him. He could only hope that she wasn’t setting herself up for a devastating disappointment.

  He hoped he wasn’t, either.

  Chapter Twelve

  By late afternoon Samantha and Tabasco were back at Sage Creek Ranch and settled in. The first thing she did after seeing to her sick stallion’s comfort was make her rounds of the stable, greeting every horse, and then staying for a bit to make each animal feel special.

  “When you run out of horses,” Kyle said to her over a gate, “I’ll take one of those hugs. I’ve missed you, too.”

  For once Kyle’s manner failed to make Samantha bristle. As was often the case, it wasn’t so much what the man said, but how he said it that bothered her. But she was far too distracted right then by mixed emotions to pay him any mind. She was delighted to have Tabasco home again, but also sad because her time with Tucker had ended.

  “And I just might give you one,” she popped back. “I’ve missed you, too. Thanks for helping Jerome hold down the fort while I was gone.”

  When Samantha reached Blue Blazes’s stall, her heart went still and quiet. She opened the gate and stepped in side, her gaze immediately shifting to the scabbed-over lacerations on his black legs. The stallion whickered and bobbed his noble head as he moved toward her. Samantha stepped in to hug the horse’s neck.

  “Oh, Blue,” was all she said. It was enough. Anything else that needed saying came from her heart, and Blue heard the message.

  “Close call, huh?”

  Samantha glanced over her shoulder. Carrie stood out side the gate. In addition to wearing her hair curled and loose, the stable hand had frosted the honey brown strands with blond since Samantha had last seen her. On the right woman it would have been becoming, but on Carrie it only looked brassy and pathetically feminine in contrast to her masculine visage.

  “Yes, it was a very close call.” Samantha left her stallion to join Carrie at the barrier. “And even though Tucker Coulter is a fabulous vet, Tabasco could still die. I’m praying not, but we’re taking it day by day.”

  “Do you have any idea how it happened? I heard—” Carrie broke off and shrugged. “Well, what I heard didn’t make a whole lot of sense. The police said Blue was given morphine and Tabasco arsenic.”

  “The police?” Samantha hadn’t been told that the police had been notified. But of course they would have been. Her father had probably called them. Thinking back, she could only wonder why she hadn’t thought to do it herself. Her only excuse was that she’d been so worried about Tabasco that she’d been able to think of little else.

  “Yeah, they came out the next morning,” Carrie told her. “It was kind of creepy, actually. They made all of us feel like criminals.”

  Samantha patted Carrie’s hand where it rested atop the gate. “I’m sorry. I’m sure they didn’t intend to make you feel that way.”

  “Feel what way?”

  Both women turned to look at Kyle, who was walking toward them. “Carrie was just saying that the cops made all of you feel like criminals when they came out to investigate the poisonings.”

  “I didn’t feel like a criminal,” Kyle said, drawing to a stop at Carrie’s side. “I think their hunch is absolutely right, that teenagers did it.”

  “Teenagers?” Samantha repeated. “What makes them think that?”

  “An adult would have done a better job of it,” Kyle replied. “Two different substances, neither in large enough quantity to be deadly. Sounds like kids to me. They took some herbicide from Dad’s gardening supplies and a few morphine tablets from Grandma’s medicine cabinet, being careful not to take so much that anyone would notice.” Kyle shrugged. “It smacks of teenagers out to do mischief.”

  Samantha hadn’t considered the possibility. The theory made sense, she supposed. Maybe she’d been totally off base to suspect Steve.

  “I’m sure the authorities will do their best to get to the bottom of it,” she finally said. “We just have to make sure it doesn’t happen again. During the day, keep a close eye out for anything suspicious.”

  Kyle held up a hand. “We’ve already been through the drill a dozen times with Jerome and your dad. Examine the feed as we measure it out. Check the hay for any kind of powder, and smell a handful to make sure it hasn’t been sprayed. And above all, yell to high heaven if we see a stranger skulking around the stables.”

  Samantha nodded her approval. “Exactly. We’re also locking up tight in the evening and arming the security system. If anyone tries to enter the building or a stall from outside, the siren will go off.”

  “It won’t happen again,” Kyle said confidently. He winked at Samantha. “School has started back up. The long, boring days of late August have come to an end, and most kids are busy now at night doing homework, not going out after dark to look for trouble.”

  “School has started?” Samantha hadn’t realized so many days had passed. “Labor Day already came and went?”

  “Yeah,” Kyle said with a laugh. “And with you gone, none of us got Monday off, let alone the weekend. Hello? Earth to Samantha. It’s Thursday, September seventh.”

  Samantha felt awful about depriving all her employees of the holiday off with their families. Even worse, she felt guilty about Tucker, who had worked both days and nights over Labor Day weekend.

  She tried to tell herself that it would be just as he had predicted, a debt she would handsomely repay when she wrote out the check to cover his bill. But deep in her heart she knew Tucker hadn’t done it for the money. He’d done it because he cared, not only about Tabasco but about her as well.

  “You okay?” Kyle asked.

  Samantha j
erked and refocused. “Yes. I’m fine. Just very sorry that this mess has been such a burden on all of you.”

  Kyle laughed again. “Not a problem. I, for one, kind of like having you in my debt.”

  Carrie gazed sadly at Blue, then straightened her shoulders. “I was glad to be here when you most needed me,” she said. Then, glancing at her watch, she added, “I’d better get cracking if I hope to finish up before quitting time.”

  Kyle stared after Carrie as she left to resume her work.

  “Isn’t she a sight?”

  Samantha turned to watch Carrie walk away. “I’m sorry?”

  He flapped a hand near his head. “All the goop on her face and now the blond hair. She looks like a linebacker in drag.”

  It was a fairly accurate description, and for that reason it galled Samantha all the more to hear it said aloud.

  At five o’clock that afternoon, Samantha’s father and eldest brother stopped in to say good-bye. They were headed out for tomorrow’s horse auction at the outskirts of Bend, an annual event on the second Friday of each September that Samantha had totally forgotten. Not only would they sell some of their horses, but they’d also be on the lookout for new mares, a constant necessity in their business.

  “I hate to leave you,” her father confessed as he hugged Samantha tight.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said, looping both arms around his neck. “It’s only forty miles away, and you have no choice but to go. A good share of your annual gross comes to you at that auction, and you need some new blood in your stables as well.” She leaned back within the circle of his embrace to grin up at him. “Keep your eyes open for me, too. I’d love to get my hands on a nice black mare.”

  “It’s just such a bad time.” Frank pressed his cheek to the top of her head. “With all that’s happened, I hate being gone overnight.”

  “I’ll have Jerome,” she reminded him. “And if, by chance, I need you, you’ll only be a half hour away. I’ve got your cell phone number memorized.”