by Claire King
Daniel came to her little house a week after his cattle were cleared from quarantine. She answered the door, already sure it was him. She was a pariah now; the few people she knew, except for Lisa, wouldn’t have anything to do with her. And no one at all besides Daniel Cash would come to her house at eleven at night.
He looked amazing, and she felt the pain of that come all the way up from her chest to lodge in her throat. He looked as strong and handsome and tall as he had the first time she laid eyes on him, and she was overcome by how lonely she was, how much she missed him. Funny, she thought as she stood looking at him. She’d been alone all her life, and it had never particularly bothered her. In the weeks she’d known him, he’d somehow made that familiar sensation unbearable.
“Hello, Grace.”
“Daniel.”
“May I come in?”
She debated, he saw. Too bad. He couldn’t go another minute without seeing her. He stepped past her before she could answer.
“We need to talk.”
“Probably,” she agreed, and shut the door. She folded her hands in front of her, then met his eyes squarely. “I should have called you after the final tests came back, but Phil Brown told he sent someone out to notify you. It wasn’t very professional of me.”
He shrugged that off. “I know why you didn’t”
“I didn’t think you’d want me to. I imagine you were angry I’d put you through all that.”
He had been, of course. But he’d gotten over his anger. He just couldn’t seem to get over this strangling need to see her, be with her. He shrugged again. “You made a mistake. It happens.”
“No, Daniel. Not to me.”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Grace. Let’s just put it behind us.”
She moved into the room, folded her arms in front of her for protection. “My practice is in a shambles, which is to be expected. I’ll be leaving as soon as I can sell it.”
“Leaving?” His heart stuttered against his chest. He’d been almost faint, big old boy that he was, with it pounding as it had when he’d finally got up the nerve after ten minutes on her front porch to knock on the door. But now it threatened to stop in his chest. Sell her practice? Leave Nobel? Never see him again? These past two weeks without her had nearly driven him crazy. And now she wanted to make that madness a permanent thing? “Why?”
She stared at him, incredulous. “Why? I nearly ruined you, Daniel. A diagnosis of brucellosis in a herd is a deadly serious thing.” She frowned. There was always something there, at the back of her mind, when she thought of it. If only she could pull it up. She shook off the self-doubt, the anguishing recriminations she’d been plagued with for a week. “Do you think any of the dairymen around here are going to trust me after this? I’ve been here less than a month and I’ve already made a false diagnosis of one of the most serious diseases in the livestock industry.”
“They’ll get over it.”
She laughed shortly. “No, they won’t. You know that as well as I do.” She studied him. “Why are you trying to talk me out of this? You’ve made it very clear all along this was my mistake, my fault.”
He pushed a hand through his spiky, short hair. “I don’t think you should give up on a whole practice because of one stupid mistake.”
“It wasn’t a stupid mistake,” she insisted, though all evidence and even a good deal of her own self-confidence was against her. “Something happened to those serum samples, and someday I’ll figure out what it was. Meanwhile, I have to make a living, pay back my parents. I clearly can’t do that here, so I have no reason to stay.”
He stared her down. “I can’t believe you’d go.”
“I can’t believe you think I’d stay.”
“What about us?” he shouted at her, furious, and regretted the words the instant they came out of his mouth.
“What about us?” she asked flatly.
He didn’t have an answer for that, so he just kept yelling. Whatever came into his head. It seemed, at the time, the right thing to do. “You’re just going to pack it in and not give this relationship a second thought?” he accused.
She stared at him. “This relationship? Are you insane?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Figure it out.”
He balled up his fists in frustration. “Oh, my God!” he bellowed at her. “Why do women say that?”
“Get out, Daniel.”
“I’m not leaving until you talk to me.”
“I’m done talking to you,” she said calmly.
He glared at her, lost. “Fine,” he muttered, raking his fingers across his scalp. “Fine with me.” And he grabbed her by one slender wrist and yanked her against his chest. Right before his mouth slammed down onto hers, he glared at her a last time. “No more talking.”
Chapter 10
She pulled back, astonished both by the fact that he’d kissed her, and by how desperately she wanted to respond. Pull him to her and forget he didn’t love her, didn’t trust her. Forget the humiliation and pain she’d known since she met him, and give in.
“Don’t kiss me, Daniel,” she whispered, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “We did this last time. Let an argument get out of hand.”
“Is that what we did? I remember different.” He kissed her again, more persuasively this time. “I remember everything.”
“No.” She shook her head, pushed at his chest, but her eyes stayed tightly closed. “You can’t do this. Not the way you feel about me.”
“How do I feel about you, Grace?” He really wanted to know. He certainly couldn’t have answered that simple question himself.
“You hate me.”
“My God, I don’t hate you, Grace.”
She searched his face. “How could you not?”
“One thing has never had anything to do with the other. I realized that the first day I met you, standing in your clinic that was supposed to be mine.” He pressed against her. “I was furious you were there, but I wanted you, anyway.”
“I don’t understand that,” she whispered.
“Well, I don’t, either.” He bent, hooked his elbow under her knees and lifted her into his arms. “And right now I don’t care. I need you, Grace. Just let me love you.”
Not love me, she wanted to correct him. But she couldn’t say anything. He was kissing her, touching her, making her remember everything he’d awakened in her just a short time before.
He knew everything about her, and he used the knowledge mercilessly. He took her into her bedroom and came down on top of her on her bed. They began to work at each other’s clothes. When they were skin to skin, and he had fastened his greedy mouth at her breast, the exquisite flooding of her body, the perfect arousal of her heart, scared her to death. This was more than she could contain, this feeling, and if he was here, in her bed, in her heart, for any reason other than an honest need, she knew it would destroy her.
“Daniel,” she whispered desperately, a last chance to hang on to sanity, dignity. “Listen to me. Please.”
He raised his head. He was dazed with the lust coursing through him, didn’t want to listen to anything she might say that would make him stop.
“What, Grace? Tell me quick.”
She closed her eyes, ashamed, but compelled.
“Daniel, people have looked at me all my life, and seen one kind of person. But I’m not the person people see. Just because I’m a big girl, just because I’m tall and strong doesn’t mean I can’t be hurt.” She was speaking quietly, frantically, as though she had to get the words out but against her will, and he had to duck his ear to her mouth to hear her. “If you’re doing this to humiliate me, for revenge, you will hurt me.” Her voice hitched, her head moved back and forth on the pillow as she looked up at him. “So badly, Daniel. So badly.”
She destroyed him. Utterly unmanned him, and he felt unfamiliar tears burn at the back of his throat. “Grace,” he whispered. “No. No.” He buried his face at her ne
ck, breathing deeply the smell of her. “I don’t want to hurt you. I never wanted to. I wish I could tell you why I’m doing this,” he murmured, half to himself. “Mostly it’s because I think I’m going to die if I don’t.”
He kissed her then. He kissed her, Grace thought dazedly, very much as if he loved her.
Daniel wanted to reacquaint himself with her body, had spent two weeks’ worth of restless nights dreaming about that very thing. But something he didn’t understand drove him, and, almost before he knew it, he found himself inside her.
He clutched at her outstretched hands, stared down at her. She watched him, too, but when he began to move inside her, her chin lifted, her neck bowed, her mouth fell open and her eyes closed. The sight of her, the surrender implied by such simple movement, unhinged him, and he began to pound into her. Steadily, ruthlessly. She wouldn’t leave Nobel. She belonged here, belonged to him. Why couldn’t she see that?
He didn’t wait for her, couldn’t have if his life depended upon it, but she went with him, anyway. He spilled inside her in a long, almost painful flooding while she clenched around him like a vise. And only when he was sure everything he had, everything he was, was spent within her, did he allow his eyes to close.
He stayed until he was soft inside her, his face at her throat. He didn’t want to untangle himself from her limbs, her body, her life.
“Am I hurting you?” he whispered.
Yes, she wanted to cry out. You’re killing me.
“No.” Nevertheless, she scooted out from under him.
He flipped onto his back to stare at the ceiling with her.
“I didn’t use anything. Protection. I didn’t come here thinking this would happen.”
“I know.” She knew her body well. “It’s all right. It’s a safe time for me.”
He felt inexplicably sorry about that. “Good.”
They were quiet a minute.
“You have to go now,” she said at last.
He nodded, his jaw clenching. “I know I do. What I don’t know is why.”
“Because I love you. And you don’t love me.” She closed her eyes, pitilessly fought back useless tears. “And if we do this again, I will never, ever recover.”
He turned onto his side to stare down at her. “Grace—”
She met his eyes, told the truth with them. “I’m begging you, Daniel.”
He watched her for a moment longer, then got out of the bed. He dressed quickly and was gone. Grace heard the front door close, but it was only after she heard his truck start in the driveway and ease into the street, that she turned her face into her pillow.
The phone was ringing when she woke. Her head was pounding and her eyes were gritty and stinging. She didn’t even bother opening them as she grabbed blindly for the phone.
“Dr. McKenna,” she mumbled groggily into the receiver.
“Doc, it’s Frank Cash.”
“Frank.” She sat up in bed, wishing she’d put on a nightgown after Daniel had left, so she wouldn’t be naked, his scent still clinging to her warm skin. She glanced at the clock; it was nearly noon and she hadn’t even called the clinic. No matter. Her pager was on, and she didn’t have a single appointment to keep. “What’s the matter?”
“We got a big problem out at the ranch. Is Daniel there?”
“No.”
“You better get out here.”
“Why, Frank?”
“Because I have a dead cow out here. And from the way she died, I think it’s pretty damn serious.”
Grace closed her eyes. No, this couldn’t be happening. “I’ll be there in thirty minutes. Find Daniel.”
The news hit the sale yard harder and faster than the twister of 1969. In five minutes—no, less than that, everyone knew.
A Cash Cattle, Incorporated, cow had just tested positive over to Doc McKenna’s. And because of that whole Bangs mess, she’d had it confirmed by the Idaho Department of Agriculture Animal Industries Division.
She’d called the sale yard, spoken the word through the phone, and, faster even than bad gossip traveled or news of a lottery win hit the poor relations, everyone knew.
Anthrax. The very word was almost as deadly as the disease itself. It stopped the sale like a plug from a double-barrel shotgun. The cowboys wrangling the cattle froze, the cows bunched and clogged the slick alleyways. It stopped the auctioneer, who stood with his gavel stuck in the air and his rapid-fire voice stuck in his throat. It stopped the murmur of voices in the ring, the crack of the whip, seemed even to stop the swirl of wood shavings and dust coming from the selling floor. And it stopped Daniel Cash’s heart in his broad chest.
He’d left his house before dawn, too restless even to lie in his bed and brood, and he’d decided to take the bred heifers, which, predictably, his buyer in Montana had passed on, in to the Friday sale. It had taken him all morning to transport the forty fat heifers into town, taking four loads in his horse trailer to avoid trucking costs. He never saw his brother, never saw the dying cow in the pasture.
Anthrax. No disease more deadly, none more dreaded. It made headlines when it appeared. People died, stock was slaughtered. Whole industries fell. Entire countries were quarantined. And any man who found it in his herd was ruined.
Daniel Cash was ruined. He knew it instantly, instinctively, like he knew the sound of his father’s voice and the scent at the base of his lover’s throat. She’d ruined him. Not the first time, with her carelessness, but this time certainly.
He got up from the bench where he’d been sitting with the same men he’d sat with for years at these Friday sales; the same men his father had sat with. They didn’t say a word to him as he passed, just pulled in their knees and let him by. No one spoke at all, in fact. The cows bawled at being separated from their calves, the calves bawled from missing their mamas, and all the odd buck goats and dry sows and stud colts that ran through a Nobel County Friday stock sale made their own noises to signal their dissatisfaction with the whole mess, but there wasn’t a human voice to be heard. The fates had annihilated Daniel Cash yet again, and everyone knew it.
Several men reached up, stood, clapped him on the shoulder or slapped him on the back, lending silent support or commiseration, but no one offered assistance. No one offered solace. They were ruined, too, perhaps. Likely. Their cows were here, penned next to Cash Cattle. Or their cows were out there, running the desert just over a fenceline from Cash Cattle, cheek-to-jowl at salt licks and watering holes. They would suffer along with him.
Daniel didn’t notice the rough contact of wide male palms on his back and shoulders. Didn’t notice the dead quiet or the averted faces of his friends or the sick, hard, cold lump that his heart had become at this final, killing twist of fate. He wanted only to get to Grace, to find out why she’d done such a thing.
He took the steps leading from the ring one at a time, in no hurry. No answer she could give would start the cold thing in his chest beating again. As he pushed his way through the door that led to the holding pens, he heard the auctioneer’s voice behind him, speaking slowly so there’d be no mistaking it.
“Cash Cattle are in the pens, boys. Place is quarantined until the feds clear your stock. That’s all.” Daniel heard the bang of the gavel after the door shut behind him.
Grace knew he’d come to her before he did anything else. She cleared the office of everyone but Lisa, who was on the phone with the state boys, screaming and being screamed at. No one wanted an outbreak of anthrax in Idaho, Grace heard some bureaucrat shout through the phone lines as Lisa held the phone away from her ear. As if they all didn’t know that.
She saw him through the glass door. He stood outside for a minute, watching her. She remembered how he’d done that the night he’d first kissed her, the night they’d met. He’d stood on the other side of that door and looked at her as no man ever had.
Again, that was so. No one had ever looked at her as he was looking at her. No one had ever had the same measure of disgust and pain and
disbelief in their eyes. She pulled in her shoulders, a self-protective motion that came to her automatically, and waited until he had looked his fill.
She was afraid. It registered somewhere in his dead heart that she was afraid of him. He didn’t feel any joy in it, any thrill, though he probably could have killed her with his bare hands at that moment. He stood a minute longer, watching her watch him, until the urge passed. He’d thought from the start it was better to resist the urges this woman gave him.
He pushed open the door, ignoring Lisa and her phone call, and walked slowly toward Grace until the toes of his boots were nearly touching hers. His eyes did not narrow, nor his jaw clench. He was totally expressionless. Grace was terrified.
“Come into my office,” she said, her voice shaking. He followed her back, closed the door very softly behind them.
“Anthrax.” The word passed through his mouth to her ears, but she would have sworn his lips didn’t move.
“Yes.”
“Where? How?”
“Frank called me. A cow went down this morning with the symptoms. It was an old one, he said. You’d left her in the pasture when you moved back onto the range.” She took a breath. “I know what you’re thinking.”
“I don’t think you do.”
“You’re thinking I’ve made another mistake. But I haven’t. I tested blood smears, taken separately, transported separately. They were positive. I checked the brain tissue, to make sure. I found the spores. I don’t take this lightly, Daniel.”
“It’s impossible. It’s impossible for me to have something like anthrax in my herd.”
She had nothing to say to that. She’d argued the possibility before, when it was brucellosis she’d found, and she’d been wrong then.
“You checked for anaplasmosis, leptospirosis?”
“Yes. And anemia, bracken poisoning, lead poisoning. I know what I’m doing, Daniel.”
“You were wrong about the Bangs.”
She swallowed thickly. “I don’t think I was wrong about that. I think someone tampered with the blood. It came to me this morning, Daniel. This kind of thing doesn’t just happen. A Bangs scare, then anthrax, of all things, in the space of two weeks. It’s impossible.”