Don't Mess With Texans

Beyond the dark rise of the stallion’s shoulder, then the descending curve of his neck, he saw an upturned hand, like a starfish flung down in the straw. A swath of red-gold crinkled silk spilled over a mound of dried grass, then vanished from sight. “Susannah?” He couldn’t see more from this angle without standing. Her fingers curled limp and unmoving. “Susannah?”

There came a faint sigh and a murmur. Her hand flexed slightly, then relaxed. Out as cold as her four-legged friend.

And speaking of which, the clock was ticking. Tag had seen enough people faint in vet school not to worry about her. She hadn’t fallen far, and she’d fallen on straw. And if she was this squeamish she’d be happier out of it. Teach me to let amateurs in the op room! He grabbed the special stainless-steel pliers and went back to work.

Eight minutes later when he set the instrument aside, she still hadn’t stirred. Tag did his final cleanup, a last inch-byinch inspection, a quick stick of long-acting antibiotic to the rump, then nodded. A good job, if he said so himself. Even fussbudget Higgins would have had to agree.

“Susannah?” He hid his tools from view, then stood, stretched and had to smile. Oh, Susannah! She was as irresistible as a basket of golden retriever pups. She’d toppled straight back into the straw, one arm flung overhead, the other resting below her small breasts. She breathed deeply, easily, soft lips barely parted. Faint had flowed straight into sleep, it looked like. Drove all night, he remembered. He knelt beside her and clamped his fingers on his knees to keep from smoothing her hair.

It was like a run of rough water on a mountain stream, riffling and rumpling and cascading down sunstruck rocks, an eddy of smooth gold here, a swirl of copper and sunshine there. It almost begged a man to thread it through his fingers, use it to tip back her head for a—

“Bad idea,” she muttered without opening her eyes. “Oh, real bad!” She scowled, wrenched her head to one side, her lashes shivering.

Damn, was she psychic on top of all else? Tag hadn’t blushed since seventh grade, the time that little redheaded substitute teacher caught him peeking down her—“What is?” he said guiltily.

“Don’t!” She opened her eyes, stared blankly at a world of straw for a second, then swung her gaze up to his. “Don’t do it. I changed my mind!” She latched onto his jacket lapels, hauling him down and herself to a half-sit, their faces mere inches apart.

“You mean...?” His stomach did a slow, nasty somersault, and it wasn’t just her breasts nearly grazing his chest or the tip of her tongue glossing delectable lips. “Susannah, you mean don’t do your stud?”

She nodded violently. He slipped an arm under her shoulders before she choked him. “Uh, Susannah...it’s a bit late for that now.” All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, babe... “The Pook’ll be neighing tenor from now on.”

“Ohhh...” She squeezed her eyes tight and simply lay there, letting him support her weight for a long moment. “Oh.” She drew a shuddering breath and opened her eyes. “Right.”

He blinked, then realized. She meant “right,” not “rot.” She gave him a wavering smile and shrugged as he lifted her upright. “Oh, well, it was just a thought...”

Tag was having second thoughts, too. Malpractice suits against vets weren’t as rare as they once had been. Trusting idiot, he hadn’t even made her fill out the forms beforehand as he should have. If she wanted to claim otherwise, he had no legal proof that she’d requested this procedure and not a tonsillectomy. Higgins would have called him twelve kinds of lust-struck idiot for this oversight, thinking with his—

“Never mind.” She braced her arms behind her and he let her go. She glanced around. “How is he?”

“Couldn’t be better.” One dark ear twitched at their voices, then flopped again. He’d finished in the nick of time. Tag brought his gaze warily back to her face. Her color was returning to normal, well, maybe a bit pinker than normal, but whatever she was thinking he was pretty sure it wasn’t lawsuits. He pulled a wisp of straw from her hair and she gave him a shaky smile. It would be all right, thank God. She might be a waffler, but she wasn’t a blamer. “You’re from Georgia?”

Her foxy brows drew together. “Texas.” A two-and-a-half syllable word, the way she said it. “Te-exas,” pronounced with pride and mild reproof, as if he’d asked an angel for her address. Left hand of God, of course, silly. Where did you think?

Was it an ethical blooper to kiss your patient’s owner? And did he care? Tag wasn’t the outlaw he’d been in his youth, but he still followed his own counsel more often than not when it came to rules.

On the other hand, one of his personal principles was that you didn’t kiss a cornered woman. Not the first time, anyway, before you knew how she felt about it. He helped her to her feet, stood looking down at her. Her eyes weren’t blue in this light, but violet. “If you’re from Texas, then what’s a blue norther?” He remembered puzzling over the phrase in a paperback western he’d read that summer he’d spent locked up in reform school.

She laughed. “Big winter storm, comes whoopin’ down out of the Panhandle. The whole sky goes purply blue and the horse trough freezes over. Why?”

“Dunnow. Just crossed my mind.” Pookie lifted his head and blew, and the moment passed. They helped him roll awkwardly to an upright position. After he’d considered that woozily for a minute, he snorted and struggled to his feet. Stood wide-legged and swaying.

Out in the corridor, the phone rang. “Be right back.” If that was Higgins, he was too late.

It was Carol Anne. “Doctor Taggart. Mrs. Hazard and her Rotweiler have been waiting to see you for ten minutes.”

“Tell her five more.” Tag returned to Pookie’s owner. “He needs to be quiet for the next hour or two, Susannah. So why don’t you come up to the clinic? Carol Anne can find you a cup of coffee and—”

She shook her head. “I’d rather keep an eye on him.”

“Suit yourself.” She was a stubborn little cuss, but that was part of her charm, the variety—softness and toughness, flashes of fire and hints of tenderness. He shrugged out of his leather jacket as she turned back to her horse. He probably shouldn’t do this, but... He settled his coat around her, smiling down at her as she glanced back over her shoulder, surprised. “Meantime, this’ll keep you warm.”

Her lips parted as if to protest—then closed again and curved softly. She put up her arms like a trusting child and he helped her into its sleeves. Then she rotated under his hands to face him. “I want to thank you, Dr. Taggart.”

“It was my pleasure.” He shouldn’t push it. She had to be beat if she’d driven all night, but he didn’t want to let her get away. She was new in town and he meant to stake his claim before another man spotted her. “Once you’ve settled Pook into his new home, how about coming out to supper with me? Something simple. I know it’s been a long day and you...” He paused as her face closed down. Stupid, you should have waited!

Her shoulders stiffened under his fingers, subtly shrugging him off. “That’s most kind, Doctor.” Her drawl was more pronounced, as if she drifted southward away from him. “But truth is...I’m married.” She dropped her chin and fumbled with the zipper of his coat “B‘sides, I don’t much like men, now’days. Not that way.” She scuffed a boot in the straw. “But I appreciate the offer.” She looked up suddenly, jaw set, eyes direct and purply blue, the color of a freezing Texas wind.

“Right” He felt as if she’d slapped his face. No, he’d run head-on into her hand—she hadn’t raised it against him. He’d been the one who’d come on like a half-grown, bumptious puppy, sniffing after his first bitch in heat. She’d simply needed a doctor. Married, standing there straight and small in his jacket. “Right, well...” Crap. Stick your neck out this far, there was no way to retreat without looking a fool. He headed out the door. “Come up to the office if you need anything. I’ll check back in an hour, see how he’s doing.”

Or you could always come up and pay. If it wasn’t love at first sight, then he supposed it was business. Carol Anne would certainly see it that way. For all he cared, Susannah Mack could have a freebie.

CHAPTER THREE

HE TURNED UP THE HEAT on his way out, stalked past her trailer. Something odd about that... He looked back and saw what his subconscious must have noted an hour before, then skated blithely past in favor of a honey-mouth drawl and a pair of big, anxious blue eyes. There was more mud on the license plate than there was on the trailer.

Fortuitous splash when she drove through a puddle? Or... He’d used that trick himself a few times, back in his carcollecting days that summer he’d turned thirteen. Not that every cop didn’t know it, too.

Tag walked back to the trailer and brushed his fingers across frigid metal. Dried mud sifted down. A Kentucky plate. But Susannah had said “Texas” like she meant it, the way a U.S. Marine said “America.”

She hadn’t mentioned where from down south she’d departed yesterday, he reminded himself. Just because she was a Texan didn’t mean she still lived in sight of the Alamo. Maybe he was imagining things—there was nearly as much mud splashed on the truck as the plate. Nothing but hurt pride talking, he mocked himself. There’s no crime in turning down a date, is there?

He put her deliberately out of mind for the next half hour. Then she was driven out in a rush, as Champion Ophelia’s Flowers of Elsinore decided to drop her first litter of bluebloods. Though the brindle Great Dane was in superb condition and gave no indications of needing a vet’s assistance, Elsinore Kennel was Green Mountain Clinic’s most valued account. Tag had promised months ago that he’d attend the blessed event.

Stopping only to scribble a prescription for Pookie’s painkiller, he left Carol Anne to cancel the rest of his appointments, then roared off to the kennel. The afternoon blurred into a succession of squirming, squeaking, blind furry bundles, each needing its nostrils wiped clear and its ribs gently massaged with a soft cloth before it was presented to the anxious mother and her exuberant breeder.

Normally Tag loved whelpings, but this time, tired as he was and still smarting from rejection, he simply gritted his teeth and endured. Sometime between the eighth and ninth puppy he began to watch the clock. By now it would be safe to move Pookie. Carol Anne could give Susannah her postop instructions, but had she gotten the name of the stable where Susannah would be keeping her stud? Gelding, he reminded himself.

Because even if the woman was now off-limits, Pookie was still his patient. If Susannah didn’t bring the horse back for Tag’s inspection tomorrow, he’d have to hunt her down. There were only five stables he could think of in the neighborhood.

The sun had set and the cold clamped down like a vise of black iron when he escaped the kennel. Numb with fatigue, he paused by his truck, wondering where he’d left his jacket, then remembered. Susannah. She’d have left it with Carol Anne, he supposed, and felt a moment’s quickening. Would it now smell of her—flowers, horse and bourbon?

Get a grip, Taggart! Jaw clenched to keep his teeth from chattering, he drove toward the clinic and his cottage behind. Past suppertime and he’d skipped lunch, he realized. There were store-bought pizzas in his freezer. Flip one of those in the oven, down a beer or two tonight—he deserved it—then to bed. Tomorrow was anoth—He took his foot off the accelerator.

Light glowed in the clinic windows, though it was past six. And Carol Anne’s ancient Ford was still parked out front. As he came through the door she looked up from the other side of the reception counter. “Emergency?” He supposed he was good for one more.

“Not...exactly.”

“She left her horse here?” he guessed, and felt a sudden, ridiculous surge of hope and pleasure.

“Huh! They drove off not half an hour after you left.”

He frowned. “You didn’t tell her it would be better to—”

“I did and she wouldn’t. Said she had to hit the road and that was that.”

He’d met plenty of self-centered owners these past few months. He’d not have put Susannah among them. He supposed her horse would be all right as long as she took the curves carefully. Still, he didn’t like it.

“She asked me the best road to take for Boston,” Carol Anne added.

“Boston!” Two hours to the southeast? What the hell had she been doing up here, if—“She didn’t say anything about a stable here in town?”

Carol Anne shook her head with grim satisfaction.

Well...that was that, then. He might as well have dreamed her. No, she’d left him—or actually taken—one thing to remember her by. Tag stared at the coatrack standing in the corner beyond the file cabinets. “Where’s my coat?” He liked that coat, an old leather bomber jacket, Second World War, which he’d found in a Boston army-navy store his last year in high school. He’d shed blood for that coat once in a bar, the time a drunken biker took a fancy to it. And now Susannah had it off him for nothing but a smile? Left it in the barn, he assured himself, swinging toward the door. She wouldn’t have—

“That was your jacket she was wearing?” Carol Anne gave a cackling laugh. “Well, that’s the topper on a day to remember! You sure can pick ’em, Doc.” She turned toward the rack to pull down her own quilted overcoat.

“She pay with cash or a check?” If she’d paid by check, he could track her down through her bank. He wanted that jacket back, by God, and more than that, he wanted one last look at her face. Clearly he’d missed something the first time.

“Oh, no, something better.” Carol Anne shrugged into her coat. “She was fresh out of cash, is how she put it. And I told her we don’t take out-of-town checks.”

“You could have made an exception.”

“Ha! I said she could put it on a card, and she gave me a butter-wouldn’t-melt look and said something seemed to be wrong with her cards.”

“And so?” He wasn’t going to like the punch line if Carol Anne had stayed past closing to deliver it.

“So I said, let me try, anyway.”

“And she didn’t have any,” Tag muttered to himself. She drove around the country, ripping off gelding services from sucker vets? What kind of a con was that?

“She had an American Express and two Visa gold cards.”

But? Tag crossed his arms on the counter and waited for it.

“Every one of which had been canceled.”

“Right. Canceled.” He rubbed the back of his aching neck.. “So you told her goodbye and God bless?” She could have had his services for the asking. Could have had much more than that, if she’d wanted. There’d been no need to rip him off.

“You must be kidding. I asked Ms. Colton just how she intended to pay in that case—”

“Colton.” He was missing something here. Had missed a whole truckload of somethings. Must have left his brains in bed this morning, when he rolled out at 3 a.m. to take that call about the cat. “Colton? Her name was Mack.”

“Susannah M. Colton, according to her cards. I wrote it down here, along with her address.”

Tag stifled an impulse to lean across the counter and strangle his assistant. Nothing was wrong, nothing really. Susannah had left him a way to reach her. Had no doubt been too flustered by Carol Anne’s evil eye to remember his jacket She’d drop it in the mail when she’d reached her destination. “May I have it?” He tried for exaggerated patience, but it came out closer to a snarl.

“You surely may.” The med tech plucked a sheet of paper from an under-counter drawer, then something shiny. “And here’s how she paid.” A cold, tiny object was dropped into his outstretched palm. “She said to send her the change care of this address—” Carol Anne waved her paper and smirked “—once we’ve hocked it.”

Tag lifted the ring to the light. Fire glimmered, then flashed. “A diamond!” he said blankly. Big enough to choke a goose. Engagement ring, he supposed. Married, but she didn’t like men, she’d said, not that way.

“And if you believe that, Doc, you shouldn’t be let outdoors alone. It’ll be zirconium, I guarantee, worth fifty if we’re lucky.”

Had she been wearing this ring when he met her? No. He’d have noticed. Tag snatched the paper from Carol Anne’s fingers and read:

Susannah M. Colton

Fleetfoot Farm

RR 1

Versailles, KY 36502

Fleetfoot Farm. It rang a distant, somehow ominous, bell.

“Five cancellations,” Carol Anne muttered. “Doc Higgins will have kittens when I...”

They both looked up as headlights swept the room, followed by a second pair, then a third. Brakes yelped in the parking lot. Doors slammed. Footsteps approached at a run.

Tag groaned. As Carol Anne had said, this was a day to remember. And clearly it wasn’t done yet. He dropped Susannah’s ring into his pocket and clenched his fingers around it. Three cars at once, so this wouldn’t be a run-of-the mill vet’s emergency—an injured cat or a puppy with fits. Another car roared into the lot. He drew a breath and headed for the door. You heard of such crises in vet school. They were every beginner vet’s worst nightmare, a what-if scenario that if you were lucky, would never happen to you: A car wrecks on a nearby road—something messy and terrible, a head-on involving a school bus or a motorcycle.

And the way the nightmare always plays out, the local M.D.’s away or falling-down drunk. So they turn to the next best thing, a veterinarian. So here we go. People were just big furless animals, at heart, and if there was one thing he did well in life, this was it. He could help.

As Tag threw open the door a fifth car wheeled in off the road... No, this was a van. With the logo of the local TV station emblazoned along its side. Lights flashed in his face—he blinked and took a step backward. Not a wreck—a media feeding frenzy.

With its prey in sight. “Dr. Taggart?”

“Dr. Taggart!”

“Sir! How does it feel to have gelded Payback, the finest racing sire ever bred in America?”

No. No way. Not possible.

“Doctor, were you aware that Payback was insured for some sixty million dollars with Lloyd’s of...”

Pookie. Pookums. Payback. He’d never been to a horse race, but even he had heard that name.

A brunette in a tailored suit stormed the steps, fluffed her hair and spun toward the onlookers. Red lights gleamed like weasel eyes as cameras rolled. “We’re talking tonight with Dr. Richard Taggart, small-town veterinarian in southern Vermont,” she declared, and thrust a microphone under his nose. “Dr. Taggart, when America thinks horse racing in the twentieth century, only three names come to mind. Secretariat. Ruffian. And greatest of them all, the stallion Payback, Triple Crown winner, five-time Eclipse Horse of the Year, sire of some nineteen millionaire offspring, crown jewel of worldfamous Fleetfoot Farm in Kentucky, who up until today commanded a stud fee of four hundred thousand dollars per mare! So would you care to explain to racing fans everywhere why you gelded...”

Voices receded into a yammering din of white noise. Tag stared blindly into the blaze of lights. As if she stood just beyond them, meeting his gaze—and laughing. Laughing at him with her honeyed, lying, beautiful mouth and her eyes like a Texas blue norther. Well, she’d sure blown his life away! Seventeen years of it, since the day he’d decided to become a vet, instead of a car thief

“Sir, Stephen Colton, owner of Payback, states that you were never authorized to perform this procedure, which renders his stallion utterly worthless. Would you care to explain why you—”

“No comment.” Not for you, bitch. He stared out past the lights. Not for any of you vultures! He’d save his comments and his own questions for the one woman who could answer them, once he got his hands around her lovely neck. He winced as another flash went off, then gazed steadily into the cameras. Because somewhere out there, she’d be watching. Read it in my eyes, Tex, wherever you are. You can run, you can hide, but I’m coming to get you. Gonna get you, babe, if it’s the last thing I do!