The Virgin Beauty

by Claire King

  She swallowed tears. “My ankle hurts.”

  “You need to get to a doctor. As soon as they plow this morning, we’ll get you into town.”

  “It’s my left foot. I can drive myself.”

  He didn’t even bother disputing that ridiculous suggestion. “Are you thirsty?”

  She was, terribly, and she nodded. He levered himself up with a groan and left the bed. He padded into the kitchen without a thought to his nudity, and Grace was astonished to see he was almost fully aroused. She knew men often awakened…in that condition. She simply thought Daniel would be too tired for anything close to a sexual thought. Not only was he apparently not too tired, he was also not shy about her knowing it.

  Grace was not so sanguine. Somehow, the scratchy shirt that had kept her warm last night had been discarded on the floor next to the bed. She wore nothing now. She had no idea where even her underwear was, and she needed to be dressed for what was to come.

  “Do you want coffee?” Daniel asked as he came back into the room and handed her a glass of water.

  “No.” She drank deeply. “Thanks. Uh, where’s my underwear?”

  He regarded her steadily. “On the floor of your truck. You were wet through. I took them off you.”

  “Well. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” He’d been expecting a bit of trouble over that. Women were unpredictable when it came to underwear, and its removal, he’d found. “Do you want some clothes?”

  “Yes, please.”

  He went to his dresser, not bothering to so much as wrap a towel around himself, and gave Grace an excellent view of his excellent butt as a reward for such a difficult week. She took in every muscle and shadow with greedy, lonely eyes.

  “Here.” He turned, tossed her an old W.A.S.U. sweatshirt and a pair of sweats. He decided to pull on a pair himself, if for no other reason than to get her to stop looking at him. Those round brown orbs boring into him were doing nothing to calm the restless feeling he’d had since he’d awakened to find her touching him. “I’d like to get that boot off you and have a look at your ankle, if you think you can stand it.”

  Grace nodded and slipped the oversize sweatshirt over her head and tucked it around her hips. Only then did she allow the sheet and blanket she’d been clutching virginally to her chest to drop to her lap. She whipped back the covers to her knee, exposing her booted foot.

  Daniel took a multi-use tool from a drawer, flipped open a pair of leather shears. “This is going to hurt, honey,” he said, using the endearment absently. Grace stared at the top of his head. If he called her that one more time, she was going to drop to her knees and beg him. For what, she couldn’t quite decide.

  Daniel’s breath hissed out as he peeled back the leather, easing the boot from her heel. The ankle was the black and blue and sickly yellow of damaged flesh, and swollen, but not as badly as it might have been had she taken the boot off earlier. He ran a hand under her heel, another over the ankle. It was her turn to hiss.

  “That hurt?”

  She bit down on her lower lip. “Pretty much.”

  “It’s broken.”

  “Of course it is,” she sighed. “First a little case of anthrax, then hypothermia and now a broken ankle. I’ve had a terrific week.”

  Daniel leaned over and snagged a couple pillows from his side of the bed. He gently elevated her ankle. “We’ll get you to a doctor as soon as it’s okay to drive the roads.”

  Grace nodded. “Okay.” She was humiliated, angry with herself for making this all so difficult for him. She hated being helpless, hated being nearly naked in his bed, hated what she had to tell him, what he probably wouldn’t believe. “Daniel, I need to tell you something before we go anywhere.”

  He sat on the bed with her, his heavy body making a dent in the mattress, and she almost pitched into him. She held herself upright, unwilling to have even that much contact, he noted grimly.

  “Good.” With unconscious gentleness, he tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear. “I’ve been wondering what could be so important, Grace, that you’d risk your life.”

  “Someone’s been poisoning your cattle, Daniel. And I think I know who.”

  Chapter 13

  Daniel braced himself. If she said it had been Frank—his own brother, the destruction of the family—he needed to be ready. Not to accept, but to dispute. He’d never, ever believe it. Even if it was Grace telling him it was so.

  “Who?”

  “Lisa.”

  He laughed; couldn’t help but laugh. “Come on.”

  Grace stiffened. How many times was she going to allow this man to doubt her word? A dozen more? A hundred? She narrowed her eyes, reminded herself yet again that despite the fact that she was practically naked in his bed, this was not a personal issue between them; she was the Cash Cattle, Incorporated, vet, and for the safety of this herd and the rest of the cattle in Nobel County, Idaho, she was obliged to tell him what she suspected. He could believe her or not, no use feeling hurt over it. He’d made it very clear she was the only one who thought he ought to believe what she said because she loved him. Would never lie to him.

  “You don’t believe me.”

  He got up, paced the room. “Lisa isn’t capable of pulling off something like this.”

  Grace shook her head in disgust. “Think, Daniel. For once, stop acting like you have control over everything that goes on in your life, refusing to allow there might be a couple things you can’t bully your way through. Think.”

  “About Lisa? I’ve known her all my life. We grew up together. She’d never do this.” He shook his head. “She wouldn’t even know how.”

  “I think she does know how. And I think she did it.”

  “You thought Frank did it.”

  Grace met his gaze without flinching. “I went to the university. Found out Frank had been there with you the week you were suspended for cheating.”

  “So?”

  “What I didn’t know was that Lisa was there, too. Don’t you think that’s a suspicious coincidence?”

  “No. I think it’s just a coincidence.”

  “Well, it isn’t.” Grace ran her hands over her face, was shocked by how tired she felt. When this was over, when it was all out and Daniel had decided one way or another how to handle it, she would sleep for a week. Then she’d go home, to Washington, and start her crazy life all over again. “I know you think I’m grasping at straws, Daniel. I know you think this has all been some huge mistake I’ve made. I know you think I’m not a good vet, certainly not as good as you would have been.”

  He said nothing, knew she was waiting for him to deny it. He wanted to, if for no other reason than to take the hurt from her eyes, the hurt she was trying so valiantly to hide. It buckled his knees, that betrayed, wounded look. He would have done almost anything to not have put it there.

  But if he did deny it, then he would be as good as admitting this situation was out of his control, and he would never be in that position again.

  Grace sighed and gathered her considerable professional confidence around her. Her personal confidence was shot, but she still had resources. She’d use them to convince him.

  “I don’t know what happened at W.A.S.U. I don’t have any evidence, only suspicions. Take them or leave them. I think Lisa framed you for cheating. And I’d bet my license that Frank thinks so, too.”

  “You talked to Frank about this?”

  “He was the one who told me Lisa was there with you.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said it was possible. She had opportunity. He doesn’t know, for certain, either. But I talked to some of your classmates, Daniel. They’ve sworn there wasn’t a reasonable way for anyone else to have done it. You were well-liked, a model student, nearly finished with the program. You didn’t live on campus, so someone had to have had access to your apartment. There was an investigation after you left, and they came up with nothing on any of the students. It almost had to have been
done by someone outside the school. You’ve ruled out your wife, and I don’t believe anymore that it was Frank.”

  “You talked to my classmates?”

  “The ones that were still in the general area, practicing locally. Just a few. But everyone gave the same answers, Daniel.”

  “Why would she have done it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And now, three years later, she’s out to get me again?”

  “You don’t have to believe me, Daniel. I’m only presenting you with a theory.”

  “And no empirical evidence.”

  “No.”

  “Grace, look—”

  She put out a palm, stopping his words. “I’m not doing this with you again. I know—” Her voice broke in spite of herself, and she cursed herself for it. “—I know you don’t trust me, and I don’t care.” It was a lie, and they both knew it. “But you have to listen to me. It’s my duty as your vet to tell you.”

  Daniel nodded, barely kept himself from going to her, reaching out. The hitch in her voice was an agony.

  “Lisa has been working closely with Mrs. Handleman. She’s been ordering not only drug and office and kennel supplies, but laboratory supplies, as well. You’ve seen the slides I took from that dead cow. You saw the anthrax bacilli. And the state lab confirmed my initial diagnosis of brucella bacterium in the heifer samples. Daniel, think. How else could those samples have been contaminated? How else could you have a false outbreak of Bangs one week, and a cow dead from anthrax the next? It’s statistically and medically implausible, if not impossible. Unless I made a mistake, I know.” She held his gaze. “But I didn’t. I don’t make mistakes like that. Personal mistakes I seem to make in abundance, but not mistakes in my lab.”

  “Grace—”

  “No. Shut up and listen. Lisa has keys to the clinic. She has had every opportunity to order both anthrax bacilli and the brucella bacterium as lab testing supplies. You know as well as I do, all it takes is a signature from a licensed vet. You’ve watched the news, Daniel. It’s how terrorists get the stuff. The night we found the door to the clinic open, she could have gone in and contaminated those samples, and she could have injected your cow anytime after you brought it in from the range.”

  He made no commitment. “Have you gone to the police?”

  “No.” Grace sat back against the pillows. “It’s all conjecture. I haven’t been back to the clinic to check the order records, I haven’t called my suppliers. I only just put it all together after I talked to Frank.”

  Daniel shook his head. “What does Frank have to do with this? Why would he think this could be true? He and Lisa have worked together half their lives.”

  “I can’t tell you that, Daniel. You’ll have to ask him.”

  He said nothing for a while, just jammed his hands into the pockets of his sweats and studied the worn carpet.

  “Daniel,” Grace said softly, earnestly. “You can trust me on this or not. It doesn’t…it doesn’t matter anymore.” His eyes whipped back up to hers, but she had them cast down now, unable to bear the doubt she knew she would see on his face. “I may have done it all. I may have made horrible mistakes, or I may have done it for spite. I may have, but I didn’t, and I can’t do anything to convince you of that until I get those supply records. Until then, you have to consider, for the sake of the rest of the cattlemen in this state, that I’m right.

  “Mrs. Handleman had access to the laboratory supply forms and my signature and the clinic. But she has not had access to your cattle, nor was she at W.A.S.U. Frank was at W.A.S.U. and he’s had access to your cattle, but he could not have ordered those supplies without my vet stamp, nor could he have got into the clinic easily. If they didn’t do it, and I didn’t do it, that only leaves Lisa.”

  “I know.” He raked his hands across the crown of his head, spiking his hair. “I know it.”

  “But you still can’t trust me.”

  He came again to sit beside her on the bed. She wished he hadn’t. She could smell him, count the fine hairs on his wrist, see the tortured aspect in his sharp, beloved face. In the distance she heard the rough sounds of a snowplow clearing the gravel roads.

  “I want to believe you.”

  “But you won’t. Not really.”

  He looked away for a minute, watching the gray sky outside his bedroom window. “You have no evidence, Grace. This is all just speculation, based on what you want to be true.”

  “No, Daniel,” she said softly. “Even if I laid a stack of evidence two feet high on this bed right now, you’d never trust me, never believe me. Because it isn’t in you to trust anyone. What happened to you at W.A.S.U., and with Julie, was horrible. A looting of your life and your dreams. But I didn’t do it, Daniel. And you can’t keep blaming me for doing with my life what you were kept from doing with yours.” She’d been tired before, but now she was drained of everything but the desire to leave him with his doubts and his pride. She no longer had the strength to battle against them. “I hear the plow. I need to go home now.”

  “No.”

  “Take me home.”

  “I’ll take you to the hospital, and then we’ll talk about all this.”

  “I’m finished talking to you.”

  He ran a frustrated hand through his hair. “It isn’t that easy, Grace. There’s something between us.”

  She looked up at him. “There’s nothing between us,” she said, her voice low and steady. “You don’t love me, Daniel,” she said. “And I don’t love you anymore. I just want to go home.”

  While Daniel took a shower, Grace called Frank. Within minutes she was in the front seat of his truck dressed in Daniel’s soft sweats, and heading for the hospital. Neither of them spoke on the way to town; the creak of newly plowed spring snow under Frank’s tires was the only sound.

  The emergency room doctor put a pretty, purple cast on her ankle, to cheer her up, he said. Frank drove her home and helped her into her house. They stood awkwardly for a few minutes in her living room.

  “Do you want me to help you into bed?” Frank asked finally.

  “No. I need to do some work.”

  “You look pretty beat, Grace.”

  “I’ll feel better when I have something in my hands to take to the state boys. If I’m going to salvage anything of my professional reputation and you guys are going to save anything of your ranch, I need to get to work.”

  Frank nodded. “Do you want me to take you to the clinic?”

  “Not right now. I need to do some research here first. Besides, last night took a lot out of me. Out of you, too, I’ll bet.” She smiled.

  “Nah. By the time I got Dad up and Mom had made coffee and gathered some stuff together to take back up with us, you two were back.”

  “I wondered where you were. I didn’t think Daniel would have gone to sleep without knowing you were home.”

  “No. He wouldn’t have. He would have done anything to make sure I was safe. Just as he did you.”

  “I know.”

  “He’ll come around, Grace.”

  She took a deep breath. “It doesn’t matter. I only have to prove it to the Idaho Department of Agriculture so they don’t shut down the county.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “I’m going to go through the computer files on my laptop first, try to get hold of my lab supply company from here.”

  “What will happen to Cash Cattle?”

  “If Lisa put the anthrax into the water supply, or on the ground or into the feed, every cow will have to be treated with antibiotics whether they’re infected or not. The sick ones will have to be shot and burned or buried.” Grace shuddered at the thought. “If she injected the single cow, which is what I think she did, and the rest test out clean, they’ll keep the herd off the range for a time, and you won’t be able to sell stock for a while, but you won’t have to destroy them.”

  “How will you know?”

  “The state’s taken water, soil
and manure samples. They’ll be able to tell how far the contamination went. And we’ll need to talk to Lisa. See what information we can get out of her.”

  “Did you tell Daniel everything? About me, about Lisa?”

  Grace shook her head. “No. It wasn’t relevant enough to compromise your confidence. He wasn’t going to believe me anyway.”

  “He’s an idiot.”

  Grace smiled sadly. “I know.”

  “But you love him.”

  “No,” she said. “No.”

  But the lie, though necessary, was so agonizing she could stand against it for only a minute or two. Her face crumpled finally and she burst into tears. She leaned against her crutches to keep from falling as sudden, wrenching sobs shuddered through her body. In a moment, maybe less, she was enfolded in the arms of her lover’s brother, and she took what small comfort she could from him.

  “Shh,” he said quietly, stroking her hair. “Shh. Don’t cry, Grace.”

  She clung to him, wetting his shirtfront, weeping out exhaustion and grief. He held her for a long time, just running his hand down the short cap of her curly hair, over her back and along her shoulder blades. When she calmed a little, he took a clean, worn bandanna from his back pocket and handed it to her. He smiled when she blew into it heartily and then debated handing it back to him.

  “I’ll wash it,” she said hoarsely.

  “Okay.”

  “Thank you, Frank. For coming to get me last night. For everything.”

  “It’s been painful for me, Grace,” he admitted slowly.

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “But it’s the first time in three years I’ve felt anything much at all. I guess feeling bad is better than feeling dead.”

  Grace nodded, sniffed. She hoped so. Because she felt awfully bad right now.

  Frank smiled again, his mouth working around the unaccustomed expression. “You may have to have all the faith for a while, Grace. Daniel doesn’t have much left. Neither of us do.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she whispered again, her voice cracking.

  “You’re a terrible liar.”