Czytaj książkę: «Big-Bucks Bachelor»

Chapter One

Two months later as Jack sat at his desk, the slight rattle of aluminum blinds against the clinic door brought his gaze down from a pet pharmaceutical company’s wall map of where rabies most often occurred in the United States. He’d been fantasizing again about where he’d set up shop next. Through the open door of the clinic’s lone office he saw that his partner in the Jester Veterinary Clinic, Melinda Woods, had just burst into the lobby as only a petite, shy woman could, barely rattling the blinds to announce her arrival.

Since she normally didn’t make any noise at all when she came in, Jack knew something was wrong. His gut tightened and he frowned. The last thing he wanted was Mel upset. She was the key to his being able to leave Jester.

As she strode toward him, he met her glowering gaze, surprised to find her big brown eyes sparking in a way he’d never seen before. His gut tightened still more. “What’s up, Mel?”

“Pigs! That’s what. Pigs.”

Jack’s eyebrows went up. “Pigs?”

She stopped beside the coatrack next to the office door. “Like I don’t know from pigs. Me! Of all people!” Yanking her big, tan corduroy jacket off her shoulders, she muttered darkly when the sleeves of her red flannel shirt clung to the jacket’s quilted lining. The resulting static electricity had the fine strands of long, blond ringlets that had escaped her ponytail rising in a crazy dance around her head.

She looked more than a little wild around the edges, a far cry from the quiet, efficient woman Jack had grown used to in the six months they’d worked together. It had taken him a long time to find someone willing to work in such a small town so far from anything, and the fact that that someone was as easy to get along with as Melinda was nothing short of a miracle.

Hopefully nothing had happened to change his surprisingly good luck of late.

His confusion and concern mounting, he repeated, “Pigs?”

“The Websters’ pigs—oh, excuse me,” she jerked a hand from her coat sleeve to hold it up in clarification, “prize-winning hogs.” Her tone dripped a sarcasm he’d never heard from her before. “Mr. Webster won’t let me near his prize-winning hogs.”

She flung her coat down on the desk that butted against his, fluttering the paperwork he should have been attending to instead of daydreaming about moving. While they were rarely in the office at the same time, there was plenty of space for them both to handle the paperwork the clinic generated, which historically wasn’t enough to warrant hiring any office staff.

Though business had certainly picked up since he’d won part of the lottery. Funny how being rich suddenly made a guy popular. Annoyingly popular.

Settling his elbows on the armrests, he sat back in his wooden chair, the swivel mechanism creaking. “Bud Webster wouldn’t let you near his hogs? You’re kidding.”

“Trust me, you have no idea how much I wish I were.” She plopped down in her matching chair, which made nary a peep. She, however, let out an exasperated sounding huff and dropped her delicate chin to her chest.

Jack’s concern trumped his puzzlement. He’d never seen Melinda like this. From what he could tell, she loved being a vet, and had never once complained about her work, the town or the population of Jester. Just the opposite.

She often spoke highly of the people she was getting to know, even though her shyness made the process slow, and Jack suspected incomplete. He doubted many in town knew just how smart Melinda was. She’d come highly recommended by one of his former professors. What if she changed her mind? What if she decided Jester wasn’t the place she wanted to be after all?

A spurt of panic had him leaning toward her. “What exactly happened?”

“Just what I said. Mr. Webster wouldn’t let me near his hogs.” She lurched to her feet and started pacing the small office, her square-toed work boots clomping heavily on the dark blue vinyl floor. “He said he doesn’t want ‘no slip of a woman doctoring his hogs.’ Slip of a woman,” she grumbled, “I’ll show him a slip.”

Jack pulled back his chin. He’d yet to see a critter cross Melinda’s path that she couldn’t keep a strong, tight hold on, despite being no more than five-four, and she always handled everything with quiet capability. He’d never seen her express herself with so much…passion before.

And despite how threatening her upset was to his intentions to leave, he had to admit the fire in her eyes suited her. But it was a fire that, for Jack’s long-term plans, needed to be doused.

“Of all the pigheaded males, that pig farmer has got to be the pigheadedest of them all…” The rest of what she said was lost behind her hands when she reached up and rubbed at her makeupless face as if she were trying to scrub away her frustration.

She dropped her hands and planted them on her jean-clad hips. “He wants you to do the vaccinations.”

“Because you’re…you’re…” he waved a hand at her, struggling to describe her in a way other than the fact that she was outweighed by most large dogs “…not very big?”

She rolled her eyes and threw out a hip. “No. Not because I’m petite. Because I’m a woman, Jack. Nothing more than that. Mr. Webster doesn’t want a woman vet to work on his ranch. And he doesn’t care that I grew up on a farm surrounded by pigs, along with just about every other kind of animal.” The fiery spark in her eyes turned to a watery shimmer and her defiant expression started to crumble slightly. “I know from pigs, Jack.” Her voice sounded a little strangled.

His own throat closed up in response. He hated to see a woman cry. It was one of the reasons he’d become a veterinarian instead of a physician. You didn’t have to come up with something good to say to make a suffering animal feel better.

Worried by the degree of her aggravation, he rose from his chair and went to her, placing what he hoped would be calming hands on her shoulders. He felt her rigid stance instantly soften and melt. “I know you do, Mel. But the old guard—farmers like Bud Webster—they’re still living in a different century. And I don’t mean the most recent one. They’ll see soon enough that you know what you’re doing.”

“How? When they won’t let me through the gates?”

Her heat seeping into his palms, Jack realized with a jolt that this was the most contact he’d had with a woman in five years and dropped his hands from her slender shoulders. He turned to look at the map on the wall again. At all the places he could go.

The need to leave Jester and the pain that ate away at his insides like a slow-growing cancer flared white-hot. He could have left the day he’d received his lottery check, but he’d wanted to see Melinda securely established in the practice he planned to simply sign over to her so he could leave with no strings attached.

If some of the townspeople refused to accept her, though…

He pulled in a heavy sigh and ran a hand through his hair. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t stay. Jester held too many memories, too many dreams that would never be realized. Even the dingy statue on the Town Hall lawn of Caroline Peterson, atop her horse, Jester, the town’s namesake, brought echoes of laughter and the true story about how the wild horse was really tamed—not with grit and bluster, but patience and sugar.

He turned back to Melinda, absently noticing how her high temper had added an attractive flush to her already sun-kissed cheeks and a golden glow to eyes he had previously only thought of as brown. “Pretty soon they won’t have a choice if they want to keep their prize-winning hogs healthy.”

Her finely arched blond brows came together, then she stilled. “How so?”

“They can’t very well refuse to let you treat their livestock if you’re the only vet within miles.”

JACK’S WORDS hit Melinda like an unexpected blast of frigid, Montana winter air, freezing the breath in her lungs as quickly as fog to glass. While he’d been talking about leaving since the day he’d given her a spot in his practice, she didn’t want him to go.

Granted, the prospect of virtually being handed an established veterinary clinic had been the sweetest part of the deal when she’d first signed on, but even without that offer she probably would have agreed to partner with Jack because Jester was exactly the sort of place she wanted to spend her life. She could continue to live in her beloved home state of Montana, be close enough for her mother to afford to call and check up on her like she insisted on doing every Sunday, but still be far enough away from the father Melinda had never been able to please. The one thing she couldn’t change about herself was the fact she’d been born a girl.

Then there was Jack, himself.

She’d never forget walking into this office for the first time and nearly being floored by how handsome he was. He’d been sitting with the heels of his brown work boots propped on the corner of the desk, his long, muscular legs stretched out in jeans. The light chambray shirt he’d had on clung to his broad shoulders, and where he’d left it unbuttoned at his neck showed off a sprinkle of chest hair that matched the thick, slightly wavy light brown hair hanging to his collar. His position, along with the set of his square jaw and wide, sensuous mouth, exuded such confidence and animal magnetism it was a wonder she could speak at all.

But unlike her father, and even the guy she’d thought she had a future with in college, Eric Nelson, Jack had wanted to hear what she had to say, so he’d coaxed her past her nervousness and awareness of him enough that she’d landed the partnership despite her relative inexperience. She’d still had to prove herself, though, which was something she had plenty of experience with.

Even on that first day he’d mentioned leaving Jester, that because he’d lost his wife—a loss that had instantly made her ache for him—he should move on, away from Caroline’s hometown. But he’d talked so often since then of leaving without ever taking steps to do it that she’d ceased to believe he actually intended to leave. He seemed so ingrained in the town, so a part of its pulse.

She forced herself to pull in a chest-warming breath. “You say that like you mean it.”

A muscle in his jaw flexed. “This time I do.”

Melinda felt gut punched. She struggled not only to breathe, but to keep the air moving in and out steadily. Today just wasn’t her day. She should have stayed in bed with her cats asleep on her feet.

But she’d never been the type to hide from life. To temper her father’s disappointment over her being a girl, she’d pulled more than her weight around their farm while growing up, whether he noticed or not. It wasn’t her fault she was not only female, but short and quiet. Being the only kid on a farm a long way from most everything, with no one but animals to talk to, didn’t make for a sparkling conversationalist.

She couldn’t retreat and complain to her critters over this one, though. Simply venting wouldn’t make her feel better, wouldn’t allow her to accept the outcome, because, bottom line, the outcome was unacceptable to her.

Jack couldn’t leave.

She met his gorgeous green gaze, for once blocking from her mind how they exactly matched the sweetest grass in springtime, and dared to ask, “Why now? I sort of figured that when you didn’t leave two months ago after picking up your share of the lottery that you’d decided to stay.” He was such a part of Jester, she couldn’t imagine the town without him.

Just as she couldn’t imagine her life without him. She was such a fool, but she couldn’t help it. From their very first meeting she’d wanted Jack Hartman. He’d been so kind, dropping his feet from the desk and leaning his elbows on his knees to make his powerful body smaller. He’d coaxed her to talk about herself, about the kind of veterinary practice she wanted to make her life’s work.

All he’d wanted was a partner he could leave his practice to.

He shifted his gaze to the wall. “I didn’t leave after I got the money because the timing wasn’t right then.” He went back to the file cabinet and reached up to straighten the framed photo on it, his fingers lingering. It was something he usually did only when he thought no one was looking.

She usually was. He drew her gaze to him like a skittish creature is drawn to a soothing voice. She knew she shouldn’t be attracted to him, had heard all about his painful past. Jester was such a small town. Everyone knew everyone else’s business. Or at least thought they did.

Thank goodness no one knew how she felt about Jack. She’d already once had to publicly suffer for loving a man who hadn’t loved her back, ditching her ugly in front of a crowd of their friends at college when someone better came along. She could never face that sort of humiliation again. Though it was sheer torture, she was much safer loving Jack in secret.

Her romantic sufferings aside, she wouldn’t trade for anything the happiness she felt working with him, often going days without actually seeing him if one or the other of them was out on calls. But walking into the office after he’d been there, the faint smell of his no-nonsense aftershave lingering in the air and the wonderful scrawl of his handwriting on notes he’d leave her about where she was needed next never failed to make her smile. The notes were always about work, but their informality always warmed her heart, despite that he almost exclusively used his nickname for her, Mel.

That casual shortening of her name, while undoubtedly unconscious, drove home the fact that he didn’t see her as a woman. It was so stupid that the one man to have given her the thing she craved most—respect for what she did—pretty much from the start, was the one man she wanted to notice what she had to offer as a woman. She rubbed a hand over her face again. She really needed to pick a side and stick to it.

Dropping her hand to her lap, she asked, “But the timing is right now?”

Jack cleared his throat in a telling way then said, “I can’t stay.”

Melinda’s heart twisted and ached in her chest. For the millionth time she wished she could pull him to her and heal him. But all she would probably end up doing would be making a bigger fool of herself. Even if Jack were to notice what she could offer him as a woman, there was a very real chance that what they said about him around town was true—that he’d never get over the death of his wife and their unborn child. How could she compete with the memory of the kind of love she could only dream about?

She couldn’t.

Instead of risking embarrassment by trying to comfort him, she asked, “Why now, Jack? Hasn’t it been five years since…” she trailed off, unable to put to words what caused him such pain. He’d never spoken to her directly about the car accident. Though she knew from people like Dean Kenning, who thought the world of Jack, that he hadn’t been with his wife, five months pregnant, when the accident had happened. A fact that only deepened the wound to Jack’s psyche.

Jack finally nodded, running a finger down a clearly familiar course on the dark-wood frame. “It’s been five and a half years, actually.” He gave a half shrug. “But time isn’t going to make any difference. This town holds a lot of painful memories for me, and I don’t think one hundred years could make them go away.”

Melinda closed her eyes, Jack’s pain reverberating inside of her even with the desk separating them. She never could have withstood such a loss. The fact that Jack had weathered such an awful thing without becoming bitter and useless made Melinda love him all the more. Too bad that when it came to love, she simply didn’t measure up.

He surprised her by continuing. “Jester was Caroline’s town, you see. She was the one who’d grown up here. I’m from Yakima, over in Washington, but my parents have since moved to Florida to be near my older brother and his wife. Caroline and I met at Washington State University.” He waved a distracted hand at his framed diplomas on the back wall.

“Even though her family had moved to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, right before she started high school and are still there, she wanted to come back to Jester. A couple generations back, her family had settled the town.” He glanced up at Melinda, the color of his eyes deepened to moss by the memories. “You know that statue on the Town Hall lawn?”

“Of course.” She walked or drove past the moldering looking bronze statue of a woman on a bucking horse everyday. She rented a little house just down from it on the other side of the street. One of the first things she’d learned about the town was the legend of how Caroline Peterson—a mere slip of a woman, no less—had broken the seemingly unbreakable stallion, Jester. It was telling that the old geezers back then had named the town after the horse instead of the woman on him.

“Well, that woman is my Caroline’s ancestor and namesake. My wife felt she belonged in Jester. She loved the idea of being connected to a place. So after the wedding, we moved here.”

“But you don’t feel connected to Jester? Even after eight years?”

“It’s Caroline’s town.” He looked back at the framed photo of the pretty brunette with the glowing smile that Melinda hadn’t been able to keep from studying when alone in the office. How could a woman not smile that way with a man like Jack in her life? Then to have that life cut so short…the unfairness of it all had made Melinda weep inside.

She crossed her arms over her aching heart and faked a nonchalance she didn’t feel. “Where will you go?”

Jack cleared his throat again and visibly pulled himself from his thoughts—probably memories of his beautiful wife and the future they’d planned together—by straightening his strong back and squaring his broad shoulders. “I don’t know yet.”

“You don’t know?”

“No. I haven’t decided…exactly…where…” He moved toward the map on the wall.