Sun Kissed

  “Mine, too, I hope.”

  “Of course, yours,” she said, giving Clint a hug. “Not that I’ll need to call either one of you. Tabasco is on the mend. Tucker will be out tomorrow morning, bright and early, to get another blood sample. Jerome and I will arm the security system before lights-out and be safe as two bugs in a rug.”

  “You’ll be stayin’ here with Jerome, then?” her father asked hopefully.

  For just an instant Samantha resented the question. She was perfectly capable of spending a night alone in her own house when her father was away on business. But she saw the genuine concern in his eyes, and she swallowed her pride.

  “Absolutely. My bedroll is already on his couch. I won’t even be going home to eat. A pot of his famous Blue Buzzard Ranch chili is simmering on the stove.”

  “Blue Buzzard chili?” Frank’s eyebrows rose. “Well, hell, that settles it then. I ain’t leavin’.”

  Samantha laughed. “Sucks to be you. I’m going to have two heaping bowlfuls and hot corn bread slathered with butter.”

  “You’d better have plenty of antacids on hand,” Clint cautioned.

  Samantha had not been cursed with a sensitive stomach. She’d loved Jerome’s Blue Buzzard chili since she was knee-high to a tall grasshopper. “I’ll devour it and sleep like a baby after I beat the pants off of him at canasta.”

  In truth Samantha planned to fall into an exhaustion-induced coma the moment she went upstairs, but she didn’t think it necessary to tell her father that.

  “Well, then,” Frank said, rubbing a hand over his mouth. A twinkle crept into his dark eyes. “After eatin’ two bowls of Blue Buzzard chili, you’ll have a built-in weapon if Steve comes around. You can just breathe on the bastard and knock him flat.”

  Samantha was still smiling when she stood outside the stable to wave her father and brother off. Quincy, Parker, and Zach would also be gone for the night. The horse auction was always a family affair. Samantha knew that employees would be on shift around the clock at each of the other ranches, but it was still a lonely feeling, knowing that all her family would be gone until sometime late tomorrow. She rubbed her arms, chilled despite the warmth of the late-summer evening.

  As always, Samantha thoroughly relished every bite of Jerome’s famous chili. He guarded the recipe as jealously as a leprechaun a treasure of gold, and she couldn’t rightly blame him. Big, tender chunks of beef, infused with homemade sauce, all but melted on her tongue. Jerome sat beside her at the counter, his elbow almost touching hers.

  “I love this stuff,” Samantha finally said to break a silence that didn’t really need to be broken. She turned to regard his face, which had grown a little more wrinkled and ever dearer with each passing year. “One of these days I’m going to hog-tie you and jab you with pins until you give me the recipe.”

  “Maybe I’ll leave it to you in my will,” he drawled between slurps.

  “Yeah, right. It isn’t written down anywhere.”

  “How do you know?”

  She sent him a sidelong glance. “Because I looked in your recipe box. You’ll get old and die, and all I’ll have to go on is memory.”

  “You went through my recipe box?”

  “Yes. Who’s Moony?”

  Samantha had come across the name in a letter Jerome had stuffed into the soup section. She’d skimmed only a few lines before she realized it was a love letter and stopped reading.

  “You little whippersnapper.” His eyebrows slowly arched. “You got no business snooping in my recipe box.”

  Samantha struggled not to smile. “I wasn’t snooping, Jerome. I was looking for your chili recipe.” She lost the battle and grinned broadly. “I never expected to find a love letter tucked behind a split-pea-soup recipe.”

  “I don’t have a recipe for split-pea soup. I hate the stuff.”

  “Oh. Well.” Samantha frowned. “Must have been a bean recipe then. The point remains. I never expected to come across anything personal.”

  “My point stands, too. You got no business poking through my recipe box.”

  “True,” she conceded. “I just couldn’t help myself, that’s all. It’s what you get for having such a good recipe and keeping the ingredients a secret.”

  “You start with prime chunks of beef,” he said, leading her to believe that he finally meant to give her the details. “Then you marinate it for several hours in two cups of nosiness.”

  Samantha almost fell off the bar stool from laughing. Jerome nearly helped her on her way with a jab of his elbow. “You stay out of my personal effects, young lady. You’re liable to get an education.”

  She pressed a palm to her forehead. “Lands, don’t shock me. I am, after all, still innocent as a babe and wet behind the ears.”

  Jerome’s weathered face went suddenly solemn. “That you are, darlin’, and just don’t know it.”

  Samantha’s mirth faded as quickly as his had. A quick flash went through her mind of Steve dragging her to the bedroom by the hair of her head. “Trust me, Jerome, I kissed innocence good-bye long ago.”

  As a general rule, everything in Samantha’s stables ran as punctually as a Swiss watch. At ten every night, the horses got their last bit of nourishment for the day, three cups of wet cob.

  In all the years Jerome had worked for her, he’d never once complained about the extra hour of work that this particular foible of Samantha’s caused him. She suspected it was because Jerome settled back with a bowl of ice cream before he went to bed every night, and he figured the horses deserved the same.

  At precisely ten o’clock they went downstairs and began to make the rounds, dividing the stalls equally between them. Samantha was pleased to note that her foreman took as long with each horse as she did.

  Samantha couldn’t help herself. She particularly loved Blue Blazes, so she began her half of the stable at the rear for once, giving him his measure of wet cob first. She checked every grain, the memory of her last night with him still fresh in her mind. The mixture of ground cob was dark and pure. She even ate some herself to be certain. Nothing but sweetness melted over her tongue.

  Blue, her sweet boy. She loved him in a special way that posed no slight to the others. There was just something precious between her and the stallion, something she couldn’t explain or define, and she didn’t try. She loved all the others just as much in their own way, but she adored the blue roan stallion particularly, and had ever since she’d held him, still wet from birth, in her arms.

  She spent a few extra minutes with him, which she felt was natural. She’d come so very close to losing him, and would have if it hadn’t been for Tucker. As she stroked the stallion and fed him, she tried to think of ways, beyond paying her bill, to tell the vet how greatly she appreciated all that he had done. Because of him, Blue gobbled his cob eagerly and looked at her for more.

  “Oh, no,” she said with a laugh. “Do you want to get fat? This is it, sweetheart.”

  The stallion nudged her with his nose, nearly knocking her off her feet. A love push, that was all. Samantha knew these huge, powerful, and undeniably wonderful creatures better than she knew the lines on her palm.

  It wasn’t easy to leave Blue’s stall, but others were waiting. She marked off each stall with offerings of food and affection. As she fell into the pace, which had long since become second nature to her, she could hear Jerome’s low voice across the way as he performed the same tasks.

  Samantha was tired, oh, so very tired, and looked forward to a night’s sound sleep. Even so, when she reached Tabasco’s stall, she stayed longer to check his respiration and pulse. All seemed fine. Even the yellowish color of his eyes was beginning to fade, a very good sign.

  When she was satisfied that Tabasco was okay, she moved to the next stall to say good-night to Cilantro and her colt. The smell hit her full in the face before she actually saw the horses. Blood, feces. The walls of the enclosure were covered. Disbelieving, Samantha threw the gate wide, ran inside, and stood over her
horses, who had already gone down. She looked at them, and then she screamed.

  Jerome came running. When he braked to a stop inside the stall, he cried, “Oh, sweet Jesus!”

  Everything after that was a blur. Samantha went to her knees, turning to first one horse and then the other. They were still alive, but just barely.

  “Call Tucker!” she cried. “Hurry, Jerome! Oh, my God, oh, my God.”

  Tucker arrived twenty minutes after he received Jerome’s call. No matter that he’d broken all the speed limits in excess of thirty miles an hour. When he stepped into Cilantro’s stall, the smell of imminent death surrounded him. He did his thing—all that he’d been trained to do, checking for and finding clinical evidence of damaged microvascular integrity, severe colic, hypovolemic shock, dehydration, and cardiovascular collapse. Working like a dervish, he started IV fluids, gave injections, ran stomach tubes down the horses’ throats to flood their stomachs with GI protectants, and prayed that something, anything, might work. But in the end, there were no miracles in his black satchel, only useless concoctions that were no defense against huge doses of poison.

  Emptying himself as most humans and animals did at the last, the colt died first. As death claimed him, Samantha started to wail as if she were demented. Cilantro raised her head to sniff her dead baby, and then, despite the injections Tucker frantically pumped into her bloodstream, the mare lay down her head and expelled her final breath.

  For Tucker, Cilantro’s passing marked the end of a battle barely fought. If only Samantha or Jerome had noticed the sick horses earlier. If only he’d had a little more time, he might have been able to save them. It was such a horrible thing to stand over them now, knowing his medicines had failed them.

  That was the way of it for a vet, he reminded himself. Sometimes he won the battle, and sometimes he didn’t. He couldn’t give up the fight simply because the failures were so devastating.

  “Noooo!” Samantha cried when she realized Cilantro was dead. “Noooooo!”

  Tucker had never heard such pain in a scream, and he prayed he never would again. It went on and on. She knelt over the dead horses with her head thrown back, her neck muscles distended, her hands knotted into fists. Tucker actually feared for her, the noise was so awful, bouncing off the interior walls of the huge arena like an echo in a canyon.

  When she stopped screaming, the expression on her small face went absolutely blank. She had lost all her color. Her eyes were as lifeless as the animals that lay in front of her. She pushed jerkily to her feet.

  “Jerome,” she whispered. “I have to go to the house. Arm the system the moment I’ve left the building. Don’t go upstairs. Don’t sleep. Watch the others until I come back. If one of them even starts to act sick, call Tucker.”

  It was then that Tucker realized she had gone completely over the edge. He was standing right in front of her.

  “Samantha?”

  She left the stall as if she didn’t hear him. He looked questioningly at Jerome. “Where’s she going?”

  In a choked voice, the old foreman said, “I don’t rightly know, son.” And then he went back to staring at the horses, his shoulders jerking with sobs he refused to release.

  The horses were indeed a terrible sight. Tucker didn’t need lab reports this time to tell him that the animals had been poisoned, but dimly he realized he would need blood and tissue samples nevertheless. The cops had laid the last poisonings off on kids, but there would be no shrugging these deaths off as a prank. A serious crime had been committed. Very valuable horses had perished. Insurance companies would be involved. Tucker would have to file a detailed report, and he would need clinical evidence to back it up.

  He bent to his task, thankful, at least, that Samantha wasn’t there to watch. As he worked, he heard Jerome outside the stall, gagging. Tucker had long since learned to distance himself, to see yet not see. He did what he had to do as quickly and neatly as possible, then put the samples into marked plastic bags, covered the mutilated horses with saddle blankets, and hurried into the arena restroom to wash his hands before he went after Samantha.

  As he left the stable, a killing rage welled within him. Now he understood Clint Harrigan’s furious outburst the night Blue Blazes had been doped with morphine. Tucker wanted to kill the son of a bitch who’d done this. Arsenic. The smell of death followed him out into the summer night, making him want to vomit.

  Samantha drew the shotgun from her kitchen broom closet. She kept the weapon loaded and near at hand for snakes, and tonight she planned to kill the biggest of them all. Her hands shook as she worked the lever action and heard the satisfying click of a cartridge being shoved home. She didn’t know where Steve Fisher was, but she meant to find him. And when she did, the walls of his hidey-hole would be as bright with blood as Cilantro’s stall.

  It wasn’t about the law, or right and wrong anymore. Not to her. It was about protecting her own. Yes, they were only horses. But damn it, they were so much more than that. Did he think they had no feelings, that they were incapable of suffering? He was going to pay for this—oh, yes, he was going to pay. She imagined how he might look when he realized he was facing death, and in her mind, she grinned and pulled the trigger.

  She was startled to meet Tucker on the porch. He loomed like a tree in her path, his chiseled face and broad shoulders limned in gold by the porch lights behind her. His stance was reminiscent of when he’d gone toe-to-toe with the drunk. She knew by the determined set of his jaw that he meant to block her path and relieve her of the gun.

  “Get out of my way,” she bit out. “I mean it, Tucker.”

  “Sammy, you’re not thinking straight right now.”

  She blinked at the nickname, something only her father and brothers ever called her. “Get out of my way, Tucker. I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to. Get out of my way.”

  “I know how you’re feeling,” he said.

  “No, you don’t know how I feel!” she cried. “Cilantro was Blue Blazes’s dam. I was going to name her colt Hickory Smoke. You don’t know how I’m feeling. You can’t possibly know. He killed them! With no thought for the pain they would suffer, without an instant’s remorse, he coldheartedly murdered them to get back at me.”

  In that instant Tucker accepted that maybe he couldn’t know how she felt. No one he’d loved had ever died a violent, agonizing death at the hands of a sadistic maniac. The closest he’d ever come to experiencing what Samantha felt now was when he stood over the crumpled form of his sister after her riding accident. In those endless minutes when he hadn’t known if Bethany would live or die, he’d turned his hatred on the horse she’d been riding when she fell. If it hadn’t been for his elder brother Jake’s intervention, Tucker would have helped their dad put a bullet in the mare’s brain.

  “Samantha, stop and think.”

  To her credit she didn’t point the gun at him. Instead she charged, one slender shoulder dropped to ram him in the belly and knock him off his feet. Problem. He outweighed her by over a hundred pounds, and even though she was well toned and in superb condition, she was no match for a man. Tucker held his ground and caught her hard in his arms. The gun clattered to the porch, the ring of cold steel striking the wood planks with a hollow finality.

  “Let go of me!” she cried. Doubling her fists, she swung futilely at his chest. “Let go of me. He has to pay. Don’t you see? If I don’t go after him, Clint will!”

  So that was it. Tucker caught her wrists to stop her wild swinging. “You can’t protect Clint by going after Steve. Clint’s a big boy and responsible for his own actions. Give him a little more credit.”

  “Steve Fisher was my mistake,” she insisted. “Mine, only mine. My family has suffered enough. If Clint goes after Steve, he’ll end up in prison.”

  Tucker curled his palms over her fists and pressed them firmly to his chest. Then he hunched his shoulders around her and buried his face in her hair.

  “Sweetheart, focus,” he whispere
d. “Clint hates Steve Fisher. I don’t argue the point. But your brother is also an intelligent, levelheaded man. He talks mean. We all do in situations like this. But he’s mostly just blowing off steam. He may want to go after Steve. Hell, I’d like a piece of the bastard myself. But if push comes to shove, Clint’s good sense will carry the day.”

  He felt some of the rigidity leave her slender body. “You think?”

  “I know,” Tucker assured her. “Clint is no dummy.”

  She started to sob. Tucker slipped his arms around her. He hadn’t cried since his sister’s accident, but tears filled his eyes now. Oh, how he wished that he’d been able to save her horses. It hardly seemed fair that the two worst failures of his career had occurred tonight and brought this particular woman so much pain. She was the last person on earth he would set out to hurt.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I am so sorry.”

  All reservations gone in her grief, she pressed fully against him, giving him a taste of how it might feel to hold her in his arms when no tears came between them. Sadly, that wasn’t possible tonight or anytime in the near future. Arsenic wasn’t the only poison Steve Fisher had doled out. Samantha wouldn’t trust easily a second time, if ever at all.

  Tucker bent at the knees and scooped her up into his arms. She fit easily against him. Shouldering his way through the partially open doorway, he entered a brightly lit kitchen with a slate floor, gorgeous granite countertops, and ash cabinetry. An archway led from the kitchen into a shadowy dining room and then to an even darker living room.

  Feeling his way through the dimness, Tucker finally bumped against a leather sofa with his shins. Turning, he sank onto the soft cushions, then shifted the sobbing woman in his arms to lie curled against his chest. Half choking on a relentless flood of tears, she spoke unintelligibly against his shirt, the only words he could clearly make out being an occasional “Steve,” or the names of her dead horses. Tucker wished with all his heart for a magic potion to ease her pain, but lacking that, all he could do was hold her tight and hope that his nearness might somehow help.