Czytaj książkę: «Her Cowboy Boss»

Chapter One

“Stop fussing, Meredith,” Wes Billings rasped. “You look as tired as I feel and need to rest now.”

Meri sighed and smoothed the covers over her father’s chest once more. The weeklong trip to Oklahoma City for his final scheduled chemotherapy treatment had been grueling, and, no doubt, he was as glad as she was to be back at Straight Arrow Ranch.

She prayed that the drugs, which had followed extensive surgery, had done their work and rid her father’s rangy six-foot-four-inch body of any remaining cancer. Only time and tests would tell, as Meri, a nurse, well knew. Still, time seemed to slip through her fingers with alarming speed. Her leave of absence from her job at the hospital in the city would soon end, and she would be forced to return there to work.

The irony struck deep as she bent and kissed her dad’s bald head through the paper mask that she wore. Meredith had never wanted to leave home. She’d settled on nursing after her mother’s unexpected death more than four years earlier, only to discover that her chosen career left her few employment options within driving distance of the tiny town of War Bonnet, some six miles from the ranch. Neither her older brother nor her sister had intended to return permanently to their hometown, yet they’d both recently married locally and settled in to live there, while Meri had come up empty—again—in her search for a job that would allow her to remain near her family.

She disliked living in a large city for many reasons. The summers were hotter and the winters dirtier. Everything was more expensive. Green spaces were few and far too formal. She’d never thought to miss a red-dirt road so much. As time had passed, the hundred miles between War Bonnet and Oklahoma City had started to seem like thousands to her. Moreover, the quality and quantity of medical care to be found there had robbed the smaller communities of hospitals and clinics even this far out, which meant that she couldn’t find a job closer to home.

How she hated to think of going back! The traffic and the noise grated on her, and the crime... She shuddered, touching the scar just above her left breast through her blouse.

If help had arrived even a minute later, she doubted she’d be here. In the city, when not working, she felt virtually trapped in her apartment with her cats.

Make that cat. She still grieved the loss of Tux, her black-and-white tom.

“Call out if you need me,” she said to her dad, stripping off the mask and gloves. She wore the protective gear to care for her father since his infusions had temporarily demolished his immune system. She dropped them into the receptacle beside the door and left the room, stepping into the back hallway of the sprawling old ranch house where she, her siblings and their father before them had grown to adulthood.

Her five-year-old nephew, Donovan, jumped down from his seat at the kitchen table and raced across the room, throwing himself at her, his fiery red head a blur. “Is Grandpa okay? Did you go shopping? Christmas is coming, ya know, and it’s my birthday.” It was only October, but Donovan was already counting the days to his next birthday.

“I might’ve done some shopping,” she answered cagily, sliding a narrowed gaze at the table, where she expected to find his parents. Her eyes snagged instead on the dark head of Stark Burns. Before she could catch them, the words that had popped into her mind slid right out of her mouth. “What’s he doing here?”

She didn’t like Stark Burns. She didn’t trust him. In her opinion, he’d let her cat Tux die after it had been injured the day of Rex’s wedding. Yes, the cat had been seriously wounded, but she believed that careful surgery and nursing care could have saved it. She’d heard that some veterinarians were too quick to put down animals with serious injuries and that large-animal vets were especially hasty in giving up on small animals. Both of those criticisms seemed to apply to Dr. Burns. Still, her brother, Rex, counted him a friend, and Wes paid him well to look after the livestock on the ranch.

And she’d just been rude. Again. Meri was never rude, except when it came to Dr. Stark Burns. She pulled in a deep breath.

“I—I mean, is there a problem with one of the animals?”

Rex frowned at her as Burns hitched around in his seat, hanging one long arm over the chair back and turning his head to cut his dark eyes at her. No one could say he wasn’t a good-looking man, with that thick, coal-black hair and brooding, hawkish features. Plus, he had to be at least as tall as her dad and looked every bit as comfortable in jeans and boots. He was more slender than either her brother or brother-in-law, and he looked just as fine in a hat, which he had the good manners not to wear at the table. She’d always thought sideburns a ridiculous affectation in a man—and given his last name she’d have advised him against them—but somehow they worked on him, which just made her dislike him all the more.

“Yes,” Rex said in reply to her question, shooting a look at their father’s closed bedroom door.

Obviously, Rex didn’t want to worry Dad. Meri couldn’t argue with that. She turned Donovan around and walked the boy to the table. The veterinarian’s silent gaze tracked her the whole way. Warily she pulled out a chair and sat, while her sister, Ann, sent Donovan into the living room to play with his little cousin, Bodie. Meredith didn’t know if that was because the other adults didn’t want Donovan to overhear their conversation or because Stark Burns didn’t like children. She’d noticed before that he went out of his way to avoid them.

That way of thinking was foreign to the Billings family. Bodie’s natural father had died in a flood before she was even born, and Donovan’s mother had abandoned him at birth, but the children were part of the Billings family now. Rex had considered himself Bo’s father from the moment he’d married her mom, Callie, and Ann had delighted in playing Donovan’s mom even before she’d married his dad, Dean, and become his mother in fact.

“What’s going on?” Meredith asked, glancing at the solemn faces around the table.

“It’s Soldier,” Rex said, referring to their father’s beloved stud horse.

They’d loaned the handsome sorrel stud to a friend, another rancher down in Texas, who had mares to breed. The horse had been scheduled to return to the ranch before Wes did. Had he not shown up, failed to perform or returned injured?

Callie, who had come to the ranch as the housekeeper, set a fork and a plate overflowing with apple pie in front of Meri. Smiling her thanks, Meredith picked up her fork. Stark Burns followed suit, his pie already half finished. Meri took a bite, humming in appreciation as she glanced at her sister, Ann. Dean, Ann’s husband of two months, snugged an arm around Ann’s waist, his chin nuzzling her long red hair. The expressions on their faces were serious enough to have Meri putting down her fork again.

“How bad is it?”

“Soldier didn’t look too steady when we got him back from Texas,” Ann explained. “Then we found him down this morning.”

“Oh, no.” A horse that couldn’t rise to its feet on its own strength could quickly die, because its organs wouldn’t function properly, especially its lungs. A horrible fear struck her. If that horse was dead... She abruptly sat forward again and faced Stark Burns. “What did you do?”

He set down his fork, swallowed and calmly wiped his mouth with a paper napkin before bracing his forearms on the tabletop. “I slung him,” he said.

Meri blinked. “Slung him?”

Sitting back, Stark crossed his long legs. “I brought in a hoist and a specially designed sling, got him to his feet, drew some blood for testing and set him up on IV fluids.” He crumpled the napkin in his hand and tossed it onto his plate. “It’s encephalitis, a particularly virulent strain I’ve been reading they have down in Texas.”

Meri’s heart thunked. Encephalitis was a deadly disease. She cast a desperate glance around the table. “Don’t we vaccinate for that?”

“Yes,” Rex said, “but it wouldn’t have covered this strain. This was recently brought up from Venezuela.”

Meri put her head in her hands. “This is the last thing Dad needs right now.”

“We know it, sis,” Ann agreed softly.

“And we’re all praying,” Dean said.

Burns pushed back his chair and rose. “Horse’ll need tending through the night for a while.”

Rex nodded. “We’ll take turns.”

Stark Burns shook his dark head. “Nope. The possibility of pneumonia is too great when a horse has been down. I’ll be staying nights.”

“Let us know if you need anything,” Callie said as Burns’s long legs carried him toward the hallway flanking the back staircase.

“I’m used to this,” he assured her. “I’ll just run back to my place for some gear. See y’all in the morning.”

Meri narrowed her eyes as he disappeared from view. She would be keeping a very close watch on him. Maybe he hadn’t put down Soldier. Yet. But neither would he—if she could help it—let her father’s horse die. The others trusted Dr. Burns implicitly, but they had no medical training. She knew enough to assess the quality of his treatment, and she would do so whether he liked it or not.

* * *

Shoving a package of clean paper coveralls into his kit, Stark glanced around the Spartan interior of the small room where he slept most nights, trying to think if he’d forgotten anything. Exhaustion tugged at him, but when did it not? Pushing it aside, he ticked off supplies in his head, listing medications and equipment bundles, his hands gliding over each as he recalled them. The air mattress and sleeping bag were kept in the truck. Deciding that he could use a clean pair of socks, he reached into a drawer. His hand struck the small framed photo that he could not bear to display or resist looking at once he’d touched it.

The smiles always shocked him, especially his own, but there he was, tossing his daughter over his shoulder like a sack of grain, while she squealed and her mother laughed. Belinda’s ninth birthday. Such a happy day. He could almost hear her giggles.

Don’t drop me, Daddy! Don’t drop me!

Hold still then, Belindaworm. Mommy, give her that birthday spanking, and be sure she gets one to grow on.

Except there had been no spanking, and she hadn’t grown. It had been a joke, and less than five months later, they’d both been dead.

Words he couldn’t forget rang through his mind.

I just want to watch this football game. Then we’ll go.

Whatever you think best, sweetheart. We’ll leave whenever you’re ready.

Ten minutes earlier. If they’d just left ten minutes earlier. The grief, nearly four years old now, swamped him, guilt digging its claws deep.

He swiped his thumb over his daughter’s face. He’d studied genetics in college. Dark eyes and hair were supposed to be dominant, but Bel had inherited his dark hair and her mother’s sky-blue eyes. His blonde, blue-eyed wife had been all things lovely, but his daughter’s combination of light and dark had fascinated him.

He shoved the picture back into the drawer and closed it, snagging his kit from the narrow bed as he whirled away and left the room.

Exhaustion pulled at him, so he took three cans of energy drink from the refrigerator in the dispensary. He wouldn’t get much sleep tonight, but he rarely slept well even when he worked himself to the point of exhaustion. On the other hand, only work and slumber let him escape the emptiness, grief and guilt.

He drove from his place on the edge of War Bonnet back to Straight Arrow Ranch. The Billings place was by far the biggest concern in the area. Two square miles in size and well run, the ranch apparently turned a good profit. Though the comfortable, sprawling old house couldn’t hold a candle to the home near Ponca City that Stark had walked away from after the deaths of his family, he couldn’t have gone back. He and his wife, Catherine, had built that place, pouring their hearts into every brick, board and stone. He never wanted to see it again.

Parking the truck to the side of the red-dirt road that separated the Straight Arrow home from the outbuildings, Stark shouldered his kit and automatically reached for his hat. Thinking better of that, he left the wide-brimmed black felt on the seat and got out.

Cool autumn air washed over him as he reached into the back for his bedroll. He hoisted it onto his shoulder, curling his arm around it, and trudged toward the stables, choosing the lit path on the backside of the building. Coming to the welded metal corral fence, he shoved his backpack and bedroll through the lower rungs and onto the ground, then climbed over and dropped down. He shouldered his gear again before going inside the darkened building. The light at the end of the long row outlined the shapely feminine form standing at Soldier’s drooping head.

Meredith Billings was the very last person Stark wanted to see tonight. In fact, she was the last person he wanted to see most days. Those accusatory blue eyes and her obvious disdain pierced him clear through every time. Sighing, he started forward, listening to half-a-dozen horses blow and shift as he walked down the long aisle. She waited, petting the butternut sorrel’s neck and casting glances into the dark as Stark drew closer.

He didn’t say a word, mostly because he knew it needled her, but partly because this was the first time she’d approached him in private. She obviously had something on her mind. He waited for her to come to the point as he carefully stowed his gear, placing the medical kit atop a nearby blue plastic barrel, then unrolling the bedding behind the open gate of the stall. Because the equipment to hoist a downed horse required a minimum of nine feet in clearance, they’d had to rig it from the stable’s central beam, which meant Soldier actually stood, supported by the sling, partially outside his stall. Stark placed the air mattress on the ground under the sleeping bag and attached the foot pump that would inflate the coils. Then he rose and turned to face Meredith, his arms folded.

She lifted her worried blue gaze, and asked, “What happens if he develops pneumonia?”

Stark shoved a hand through his hair. “I don’t want to give you false hope. Pneumonia can be fatal, especially in an older horse, even one that isn’t already seriously ill. Let’s just take it a day at a time.”

Her chin shot up, and she went on the attack. “False hope! Is that your way of saying you’re going to let him die?”

Stark rolled his eyes. “The cat again. And keep your voice down. Animals don’t like shouting.”

She glanced in the direction of the horses. “Admit it! Your solution for every seriously ill or injured animal is a swift death sentence,” she hissed.

He sighed and grated out, “How many times do I have to say it? Your cat was gravely injured. There was nothing I could do.”

“You forget,” she reminded him tartly, “that I’m a nurse, and I know something about medical matters.”

“For humans,” he retorted. “Animals are not people. I suggest that you not assign human attributes to them.”

She stepped back as if stung. “I do no such thing!”

“Of course you don’t. Which is why your family calls you the crazy cat lady.”

“They do not.”

“No?” he shot back. “Then why did Ann forbid me to tell you that Donovan’s cat had kittens?”

Meredith’s eyes lit. “Kittens?”

“And I just told you,” Stark moaned, pinching the bridge of his nose, suddenly aware of the horses grunting and knocking about in their stalls. “Look, Meredith, I’m sorry about your cat. I’d have saved it if it could have been saved. You can trust me to do all that can be done for every one of my patients.”

Meredith adopted a lofty tone, saying, “My concern here is my father’s well-being. He’s ill, and he loves his horse. I don’t want him to suffer any unnecessary losses, not with these tests coming up to determine the status of his cancer. I mean, if that doesn’t go well...” She shook her head. “He’s been through enough.”

Moving his hand to the horse’s flank, Stark stepped closer. It had been a long time since he’d noticed a woman, and he didn’t want to notice this one, but those soft blue eyes were tough to ignore. Package them in an oval face with broad, full lips and a petite nose, framed by long, strawberry blond hair, add a shapely figure meant for jeans and knit tops, and he’d dare any man to find a complaint with her looks. Okay, she could be taller. She had to be a foot shorter than him. And she had yet to smile in his presence.

Frowning at that thought, he said, “Meredith, everyone suffers unnecessary loss.”

She blinked at him, her head tilting just so, and he knew instantly that he’d given himself away.

Mumbling, “Excuse me,” he turned and strode down the aisle of the darkened stable toward the open door and the safety of solitude.

* * *

Meredith took a last look at her father’s drooping horse before turning and slowly following Stark down the aisle of the stable. As she stepped into the night, she pulled her cardigan closed against the crispness of the mid-October evening and headed toward the welcoming lights of the two-story ranch house across the red-dirt road. As she walked, she prayed for her father and his horse. Stepping up onto the porch, she wondered what “unnecessary loss” Stark Burns had suffered, for she had heard the unmistakable tone of experience in his voice.

That thought and others kept her awake late into the night. She didn’t know what came over her when Stark Burns was around. He never frightened her like some men did now, but something about him just pushed her buttons, every last one of them. Even with her cat, Tiger, curled next to her on the narrow bed, Meri couldn’t seem to sleep for more than moments at a time. Nevertheless, she woke early the next morning and instantly decided that she owed Stark some sort of apology.

Quickly dressed in jeans, boots and a sweater, she twisted her long, light red hair into a messy bun at the nape of her neck as she left her room. She headed for the stairs, where she met her sister-in-law. Callie held a fingertip to her lips, indicating that at least little Bodie still slept. Wondering if Burns would be awake, Meri slipped out of the house and crossed the road to the stable. He hadn’t closed the door, so she crept inside quietly, only to find the light on at the far end of the aisle and the doctor changing an IV bag.

“How is he?” she asked, walking onto the scene.

Burns didn’t even spare her a glance. “He’s still with us. The next few days will be critical, though.”

“What do we do?”

“We keep as close an eye on him as possible, administer fluids and medication, try to get him to eat... I’m monitoring his temperature. That’s the important thing right now.”

“I can stay with him so you can go to the house for breakfast,” she offered politely. “Callie should be cooking as we speak.” He shook his head.

“No, thanks. I prefer to take my meals alone.”

Meri’s mouth fell open. “Always?”

“Usually.”

She didn’t know what to say to that.

“I have another appointment in an hour so,” he went on absently. “I’ll get something to eat after that.”

We’ll see about that, Meredith thought. Wouldn’t the confounded man even let her be nice to him?

She turned around and marched straight back to the house, where she found Callie busy in the kitchen, as predicted. Explaining that the doctor had to leave soon for another appointment, Meri quickly loaded up a tray and returned to the stable with her peace offering.

She set the tray, a clean dishcloth draped over it, next to his kit on the blue barrel. Stark sat atop a wooden box and glanced at the tray.

“What’s this?”

“Your breakfast. Callie made pancakes and bacon. There’s coffee, too, and it’s getting cold. How do you take it?”

He frowned at her for a long moment before saying, “Black.”

She picked up the mug and held it out to him. “Here you go.”

He took the mug, sniffed, sipped, then slugged back a healthy gulp, sighing. “Why does coffee taste so good when you’re hungry?”

“I drink it, but I’ve never much learned to appreciate it,” she admitted.

“Why do you drink it, then?” he asked, after swallowing another mouthful.

“Two words,” she answered. “Shift work.”

“That’s right. Nurses work around the clock in shifts.”

“And caffeine and shift work go hand in hand.”

“I hear you.” He set the mug back on the tray, picked up the whole thing and brought it down to his lap. Balancing the tray on his knees, he slathered butter on the pancakes with the tines of his fork, then poured on the syrup, saying, “This is mighty nice. Of Callie.”

Meri rolled her eyes. “You don’t give an inch, do you?”

He squinted up at her. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Really?”

“You going to stand there and watch me eat?” he muttered, stuffing pancake into his mouth.

She turned away. Okay, if he didn’t want an apology, she wouldn’t give him one. Instead, she moved to the horse, reaching out a hand to signal her presence. Trailing her fingertips over the butternut hide, now dull with illness, she crooned to the animal.

“Hey, boy. How ya doin’?” The horse blew through his nostrils, as if acknowledging her concern, and Meri smiled. “You need to get well. The Straight Arrow wouldn’t be the same without you.”

“That horse doesn’t understand anything but your tone,” Stark pointed out laconically. “You know that, right?”

“Do you always have to be so surly?” she asked, turning just in time to spy a yellow-on-gold-striped cat slink around the bottom of the blue barrel. “Tiger!” she gasped, starting forward, “How did you get out?”

Following her horrified gaze, Stark set the tray aside and slid to the floor, easily capturing the cat as it attempted to streak past him. Crossing his legs at the ankles and bending them at the knees, he brought the cat into his lap, scratching it under the chin.

“Well, well. Haven’t seen this guy before. Tiger, is it?” He held up the cat in one hand, checking its eyes, nostrils and teeth with the other. “Healthy fellow.”

“I don’t know how he got out,” Meredith said, fighting the urge to snatch Tiger out of Stark’s grasp. “I keep him in my room.”

The doctor checked the animal’s paws and inclined his head. “Well, a declawed cat shouldn’t be out-of-doors, especially not in the country, but a bedroom seems like a small space to keep a cat in.”

“It’s not permanent,” she snapped. “He’s usually in my apartment in Oklahoma City. And he was a lot more content before Tux...”

Stark glared at her but otherwise ignored the truncated comment. “Why don’t you give him the run of the house? Just keep him out of your dad’s room. Contrary to myth, clean animals do not spread contagion.”

“I know that. It’s just that everybody forgets, and they let him out.”

“Poor kitty,” Stark cooed, bringing Tiger nose to nose with him. “Nobody looking out for you.”

“I look out for him!” Meredith protested hotly. “He’s all I have now.”

Stark sent her a glance of pure censure, a silent scold that spoke louder than words. She hadn’t meant it, of course. She had her whole family, a growing family, which she seemed doomed to leave. And what right did he, a loner by choice, have to judge her, anyway?

Thankfully, Ann called her name just then. Otherwise, she—the quietest, smallest, youngest, mildest, most timid of the Billings siblings—might have been tempted to do Stark Burns harm. Real physical harm.