The Virgin Beauty

by Claire King

  He couldn’t help it. He was angry and she was angry, and now wasn’t the time, but a bakery? He could just picture her wearing an apron. He laughed.

  She was going to punch him. He may have had the most beautiful eyes and a glorious body and he may have been tall enough to kiss her without craning his neck toward the heavens, but she was going to punch him anyway. It was a matter of principle. She balled up her fist.

  “Wait, wait,” he said. “Wait a minute. I’m not laughing at you.”

  She glared at him.

  “Okay, I am, but just at the thought of you in a bakery. Do you even know how to bake?”

  “You think just because I look like this I can’t bake,” she shouted at him. Hideous tears burned at the back of her throat. Silly, girlish tears. She could have screamed in frustration. “I am still a woman.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” he yelled back at her. “My mother can’t bake worth a damn. And look like what?” He knew what she meant, couldn’t let it pass no matter how much he wanted to. No matter how angry he was, or how desperately he did not want to be attracted to this woman, he couldn’t let her think he meant she wasn’t desirable as hell. “Tall and willowy as a wheat stalk? Beautiful? Sexy? Mouthwatering? No, I think because you’re a young vet with a busy new practice you might not have had the time to learn to bake cookies.”

  “Well, I haven’t!” she yelled.

  “That’s all I was saying,” he bellowed.

  “Look, I don’t need you or anyone else looking over my shoulder, Cash. I’m a hell of a vet. Born to it, I’ve had people say.”

  People had said the same thing to him. “Fine. Fabulous. You’re the best vet around, McKenna.”

  “Stop yelling at me!”

  “You’re yelling at me.”

  “Because you laughed about the baking thing.” She turned back in her seat, folded her arms across her chest and stared out the front window. “If you’re not checking up on me, Cash, then why hang around in some stinking barn with a sick cow?”

  He pulled at his jaw, stalling. When he couldn’t think of anything better to tell her than the truth, he said, “Because it’s what I was trained to do.”

  She turned her head. “I beg your pardon?”

  Daniel dropped his head back, and when that gave him no comfort, scrubbed his face with his hands. “Never mind.”

  “What do you mean, it’s what you were trained to do?”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “You’re a vet?”

  “No, dammit, I’m not a vet.”

  “You’re shouting again.”

  “You bring it out in me.”

  She barked out a laugh. “I doubt it’s my fault. You’ve acted like a jackass since the instant I met you, and except for one rather bizarre moment last week which we won’t mention despite the fact that you didn’t even call me afterward, when that would have been the polite thing to do, and I should give you hell for that—” she took a deep breath, struggling to keep on the matter at hand “—you’ve been a jackass ever since. This just tops it.”

  He scowled at her. She was right about the jackass part, damn her, and that just made her all the more insufferable. But call her? After that mind-slaughtering kiss? Did she think he was a masochist, too?

  Okay. Good enough. He reached for the door handle and jerked open the truck door. He was over it now. Over whatever weird, obsessive sexual witchcraft she wielded that had made him kiss her in the first place, that had drawn him back to her office to see her this afternoon despite the fact that it was the last place he wanted to be. He was cleansed, free. Her witchy power was helpless against his stronger will. Ha!

  “I’ll walk back to town.”

  “Great!”

  “I don’t need this kind of aggravation from a woman I hardly know,” he muttered.

  “I imagine most women would have to get in their aggravation where they could with you,” she muttered back. “They wouldn’t want to have to wait until you did get to know them before they started aggravating you!”

  “What?”

  “You know what I mean.” She always got flustered when she was nervous. And this huge man breathing fire was making her very nervous. “You’re very hard to be around!”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine!”

  “See you around.”

  “What did you mean you were trained to hang around barns treating sick animals?”

  He’d reared back in preparation for giving Grace McKenna’s passenger door a slam she’d not soon forget, but he froze halfway into it. He scowled at her, a bluff as much as anything. He didn’t particularly want this gorgeous woman with her snotty attitude and his vet practice to know what a failure he’d been.

  “I’m not going to stand here on the side of the road and discuss this with you.”

  “Are you really going to walk back to town?”

  “You betcha.”

  She’d been ready to soften, but he’d snapped at her. Again. She wasn’t such a wimp that she’d let Daniel Cash bully her around.

  She raised her patrician eyebrows. “Have a nice walk, then.”

  “I will.”

  “Do,” she retorted primly.

  “Thank you,” he yelled back incensed.

  “You’re welcome!”

  He did slam the door then, and was gratified when she sat there awhile longer, truck idling, as he started off down the long road to town.

  When she finally roared past him, her truck tires sprayed a fine coating of sand and gravel over him, head to toe.

  He glared at the retreating vehicle and shook dust out of his hair. He sucked a clod of dirt off his bottom lip.

  Witch.

  He was glad he was no longer under her spell.

  He walked for almost an hour before he saw the truck coming toward him. Five miles, he figured he’d walked in his cowboy boots on this damn country road. If he ever saw Grace McKenna again, and he fervently hoped he wouldn’t, he was going to give her a pretty big, pretty loud, piece of his mind. And then he was going to tell her he could check his own damn heifers, and the law be damned. And then he might just tell her the reason he didn’t call her after he kissed her was because he kissed a lot of women. A lot. And that one kiss in her living room didn’t mean anything to him.

  That’s what he’d tell her. And at least most of it was true.

  The truck slowed as the driver caught sight of him. Daniel sighed as he recognized both the rig and its driver. Hell, he would rather have just kept on walking.

  “Hey, Danny,” his brother called as the truck stopped.

  Daniel walked across the road, leaned in the open window.

  “Frank.”

  Frank looked around idly. “You’re a ways from home.”

  “Very observant,” he snapped. “I need a lift back to town.”

  “Hop in.”

  Daniel rounded the hood and got in on the passenger side. Frank flipped a U-turn on the empty road and headed back the way he’d come.

  “Your rig broke down?”

  “No,” was the terse reply.

  There was a long silence. “Just out for some exercise?”

  “Shut up.”

  Frank scratched idly at his jaw. “I saw the new lady vet come tearing into her parking space ’bout forty-five minutes ago while I was having lunch at the café. She looked mad. And sorta scary. I’d hate for her to be mad at me.”

  Daniel stared out his window.

  “That have anything to do with you walking this road in the middle of the afternoon?”

  “Frank, I’m warning you—”

  “Okay, okay. I wanted to talk to you, anyway, Danny. That’s why I came into town.”

  Daniel sighed again, knowing what was coming. “What do you want, Frank?”

  “You know what I want. I want out.”

  “I know.”

  “But you’re not going to do it.”

  “No.”

  Another si
lence.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” Frank said.

  “If you spent half as much time thinking about getting on with your life as you do thinking about how to sell this ranch, you’d be better off.”

  “Thanks for the advice, Danny. You can shove it.”

  Daniel eyed his little brother. “Nice talk.”

  “Better yet, take a little of that advice yourself. I was with you when it all came down up at W.A.S.U., Danny, and I was right there when you put Julie on that plane back to her parents. You haven’t been the same since. Maybe you should get on with your own life.”

  Daniel pulled his bottom lip through his teeth, a habit when he was mad. “What do you want, Frank?” he asked, though he already knew.

  “Borrow on your shares of Cash Cattle. Buy me out.”

  “We’ve gone over this a million times. I owe more on the property in town than I own. I’m stretched. The bank will never loan me enough to buy your shares in the corporation. I don’t want them, anyway.”

  “You’d be majority shareholder.”

  “So what? I could boss Mom and Dad around then?”

  “What about Lisa?”

  “What about her?”

  “She could buy my shares.”

  Daniel stared at his brother. “She doesn’t have that kind of money.”

  Frank thrust out his chin. “I think she does.”

  Daniel’s cousin Lisa worked for them, putting up hay in the summer, helping with calving in the spring, feeding the cattle during the long winter. Daniel knew exactly what she made.

  Daniel shook his head. “It doesn’t matter if she has it or not. You’re not selling.” He looked at his brother. “What about all we’ve talked about? What about keeping the ranch between the two of us, for our children? It was what Grandad wanted, what Mom and Dad want. How many ways do you want to parcel it out? You want the rest of the cousins in? How about the neighbors?”

  “Children?” Frank’s handsome, weathered face drained of color. He’d taken hold of that single word like a man on a lifeline. “Our children?”

  “Oh, hell, Frank. I’m sorry.”

  “We’re not going to have children, Danny. I’m sure as hell not going to, and you’re not moving in that direction as far as I can tell, either. You’ve had—what?—a dozen dates since Julie left you. Two dozen? How many of those women you considered having kids with? What children are we going to give this place to?”

  Daniel turned his head, watched the farmland and dairies go by. Frank was right. He wouldn’t have children, would never marry again, would never fall in love. The first go-around had taught him more about loss and betrayal than he’d ever wanted to know. A second such lesson would probably kill him.

  And Frank was less likely to have children than even he was. Frank’s wife, the silly, laughing Sara he’d married two weeks after they’d graduated from high school, had died three years ago on an icy highway between Nobel and Boise. Daniel thought Frank could have gotten over that, eventually. Could have outgrown his grief, go on to be the man he was meant to be.

  But the accident had taken a baby, as well. Frank and Sara’s firstborn. Frank was only twenty-five years old. And already three years gone to his grave.

  “Do you really love the place so much?” Frank asked finally. “Is it really that important to you?”

  “It’s important to me.” Daniel moved his shoulders restlessly. He hated putting emotions into words. It was a sorry, unmanly habit to get into. “As much as anything, though, it’s the folks. They poured their lives into Cash Cattle so they could give it over to us.”

  Frank eyed him. “You liar,” he said flatly, and snorted when Daniel’s fists clenched. “That isn’t why you won’t sell out, Danny. You think because of the thing at W.A.S.U., you have to hold on to the ranch with both hands. You don’t want to fail again, and you don’t care who gets in the way in the meantime. This isn’t about the folks and their ‘dream’ for us. And even if it were, I don’t want that dream. And until you got booted out of vet school, you didn’t want it, either.”

  “You know I was always going to keep a hand in.”

  “While I was stuck running the place on my own.”

  “You wanted it, Frank. Remember? And you had Lisa there. She loves the ranch as much as we do. Did.” Daniel shook his head. “Why the hell are we discussing this now? It didn’t work out that way, it worked out this way. We both have to live with it.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. We don’t. We could sell the outfit, lock, stock and barrel. Get a fresh start somewhere else.”

  “And how would Mom and Dad live? We don’t have enough equity in the land to give them a big chunk of money all at once, and the capital gains taxes would take what we did make off it. Would we just leave here and let them fend for themselves after everything they’ve sacrificed for us?”

  Frank slumped over the wheel of the truck, studying the road ahead of him. “We could work around that.”

  “No, we couldn’t.” After a long silence Daniel said, “I need you there, Frank. I need you, and I’m not about to pay you to leave.” He ran his hands down his face, pulled reflexively at his bottom lip. “Look, I know you’re frustrated. I know you’re overworked. Maybe we can see our way clear to hire on a summer rider. That’d leave me free to help you and Lisa with the farming.”

  “She’s getting a job in town.”

  “Lisa? Where?”

  “With the new vet. Heard about it down at the Rowdy Cowboy, I guess. She doesn’t know much about vetting, but she took those secretary courses in high school, and those computer classes a couple years back.”

  “Huh. I didn’t know she wanted a job in town.”

  “Guess she does.”

  “We’re about to start farming.”

  Frank shrugged. “We’ll have to hire someone else.”

  “Is she moving to town?”

  “No. She said she’ll stay out in her house. Cost her too much to rent in town.”

  “Huh,” he said again, though the longer he considered, the more sense it made. Lisa had been complaining, albeit gently, subtly, for months about Frank’s erratic behavior. It was no wonder she wanted out. “I guess I’ll have to hire a rider, after all. You’ll need help with the farming until we find someone.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Frank—”

  Frank turned pleading eyes to his brother. “I can’t take much more, Danny. I swear to God.”

  “You’ll be okay, Frank. You’re just feeling blue right now.”

  “I’m not just feeling blue. It’s more than that.”

  “I can see that it is.” He could, quite clearly. “Have you thought about seeing someone about it?”

  “You were an animal doctor, Danny, not a human doctor.”

  “I wasn’t either. But it’s been three years, Frankie. You need some help.”

  “Yep.” His brother pulled up to the curb, behind Daniel’s pickup. “And I keep hoping you’ll give me some.”

  Chapter 4

  Daniel watched his brother drive away until he could no longer see the truck. He was opening the door to his own pickup when Dr. Grace McKenna herself stepped out onto the sidewalk.

  Instantly his eyes narrowed and he ruthlessly pushed his brother from his mind. He had a bone to pick with this lady vet, and now was as good a time as any.

  “Hey, McKenna!”

  Her head jerked around at the sound of his voice. Oh, she should have known. She’d just been about to go back out after him, and here he was. Probably used those hunky long legs of his to run all the way back to town, she thought resentfully. She’d wasted an entire hour feeling guilty about leaving him stranded.

  She walked slowly over to where he stood, hip-cocked and fuming.

  “You made good time.”

  He wasn’t about tell her he got a ride. Let her suffer. “I’m fast.”

  “That wasn’t a very good display of common sense, walking back.”

&
nbsp; “You never miss a chance at a shot, do you, McKenna?”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “I know what you’re saying.” She’d cleaned up since she got back, was in her office clothes. Damn if those prim pleated pants and the sensible blouse didn’t distract him. In her coveralls, he could think of her as just another vet, and his nemesis. In this getup she looked like a woman. She smelled like a woman. She certainly made every instinct and cell and nerve ending in his body sit up and take notice of her as a woman. Now, what had he been planning to say? Oh, to hell with it. “Have dinner with me tonight.”

  She blinked those big brown eyes at him. “Are you kidding me?”

  “No, I’m not kidding you,” he said, exasperated. “Why the hell is it every time I ask you to dinner you act as if I’ve just asked you to saw off my arm or something?”

  “That wasn’t asking me to dinner. That was telling me to have dinner with you. Besides, you don’t even like me.” It came out a little less snippy, a little less confident than she wanted it to.

  Daniel caught the edge of hurt in her voice. Wondered at it.

  He frowned. “I still have to eat. And so do you.”

  “Not together.”

  His lips thinned. “Okay, Doc. I’m not going to beg you.” He turned on his boot heel and went back to his truck. And just as quickly turned back. He went toe-to-toe, face-to-face. “Listen, why do you have to make this so hard? You look nice in that outfit. I thought maybe we could talk. I don’t dislike talking to you, except when you get all huffy. And dinner at the café with me is not going to kill you.”

  “‘Huffy,’” she said, cocking her head to peer up at him. “‘Huffy.’” She stood her ground, though he was close enough that their breaths mingled. When she couldn’t quite manage to hold his green gaze a moment longer, she looked up at the hazy spring sky. “And he asks me why I’m making it so hard.”

  Grace shook her head, conscious of the fact they were standing on the sidewalk, and every client she could hope to have could come by at any minute and see the county vet in a knock-down, drag-out with one of the biggest cattlemen in the state. She lowered her voice, leaned in. “Let’s do a rundown, shall we?”

  He couldn’t help it. He loved how her voice went from little-girl vulnerable to snotty in less than a moment. Yeah, she was huffy, and it made her darn near irresistible. He inched closer. Her breath tasted like coffee. And he could smell her hair.