by Leah Vale
“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 compe
te 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.
Relief flooded her, providing just enough hope to bolster her. “So you’re not leaving town soon.”
“I am.”
His simple statement, said with such conviction, slapped her hope down for good.
“I’ve only stayed this long because I couldn’t leave the town without a vet. But then you came. Now I just need to get you established before I leave.”
His mention of her being established brought back her anger in a rush, only now it was coupled with the bitter taste of yet another fantasy that would never become reality. “I don’t see how that’s ever going to happen when some people in town won’t let me treat their animals.”
“Given no choice, they’ll come around.”
While she had never disagreed with him in the entire six months she’d known him—never had cause to—Melinda shook her head adamantly. Even if she wasn’t crazy about him, she wanted—needed—the farmers to respect her because of her abilities as a vet, not because she’d be the only vet available to them. She needed more time to prove herself. To prove she was as good a vet as any man.
She had to convince Jack to stay longer.
Just as important, she needed to squelch her feelings for him completely so she could concentrate on earning the respect she craved more than anything else. Even more than love.
Chapter Two
“You can’t go, Jack.”
Melinda’s blurted declaration startled Jack from his musing about where he might move to, where he could go to outrun the past. He’d never seen this sort of assertiveness from her before. Melinda was normally very quiet yet affable.
He’d grown so comfortable with her gentle presence, her reliability, that he occasionally forgot whether she was in the office or out on a call when he was treating a small animal in the examination room.
She was also a damn good vet. She had a way of handling the most difficult of animals, large or small, seemingly reassuring them that she would make whatever pain they might have go away. He had no reason to worry about leaving the animals of Jester in her capable hands.
He’d never seen this side of her, though. He raised his brows at her.
Melinda’s cheeks reddened, but her determined stare didn’t waver.
Why didn’t she want him to go?
His mind drew a blank. He knew she could handle the practice. He tilted his head at her and asked, “Why not?”
Her jaw worked, but her full lips remained sealed and she looked away before he could figure out what emotion her big brown eyes held. Finally, she said, “Because…well, because…” she trailed off and started to fidget.
Alarm swelled in his gut. What if she’d decided she didn’t want to stay either?
He opened his mouth to coax her reasons out so he could convince her otherwise but the crash of blinds against the door to the clinic stopped him.
Jack looked over the top of Mel’s head in time to see Mary Kay Thompson complete her entrance into the clinic—twice as loudly as Mel had—with a flip of her shoulder-length, permed blond hair, no less, and clutching her obese orange tabby cat, Pumpkin, to her chest.
He would have gaped at Mary Kay’s outfit if he hadn’t grown so used to her outrageous—and downright foolish, considering the weather—getups. Today she’d put on open-toe, yellow shoes with low but spiky heels, bright orange-and-yellow flowered tight pants that only reached her sculpted calves—Mary Kay was the only person he knew of around Jester to have her very own stair-climbing machine. Instead of wearing a parka or heavy coat like a sane person, she’d pulled on a vinyl-looking, unlined, bright yellow slicker. He’d lay money on the guess that she had on a matching tank top beneath the slicker.
The woman routinely risked hypothermia in the name of fashion. Or more likely, in blatant attempts to attract a man. Since his lottery win, Jack had the unfortunate distinction of being that man.
She swiveled toward the office door. “Jack! Thank goodness you’re in.”
He suppressed a groan. It wasn’t that Mary Kay wasn’t a nice gal, it was just that she was so…ragingly single. Most eligible men—whom she should have realized by now he wasn’t one of—in these parts steered clear of her. Thanks to Pumpkin, a run-of-the-mill barn cat Mary Kay insisted was a rare type of Persian purebred that only he could treat, Jack had no choice but to weather Mary Kay’s determination head on.
He cleared his throat. “Actually, Mary Kay, I was just on my way out. But Dr. Woods, here, can take a look at Pumpkin—”
“Now Jack,” Mary Kay interrupted. “You know how delicate Pumpkin is.”
Jack looked skeptically at the rotund, very robu
st appearing cat hanging over Mary Kay’s arms. The only delicate thing about Pumpkin was the silly pink, rhinestone-studded collar and matching leash Mary Kay put on him. Didn’t the woman realize she was living in a very rustic part of Montana?
“I really don’t think he can bear the upset of being handled by a stranger. No offense, Melinda.” Mary Kay’s apology to Mel sounded genuine, despite her absurd reasoning.
It hit him that Mary Kay was yet another Jester resident to snub his partner for a ridiculous reason. He glanced at Mel. She had crossed her arms over her chest, and though she was smiling reassuringly at Mary Kay, her smile looked tight around the edges. Great.
“Please, Jack.” Mary Kay reclaimed his attention. “There must be something wrong with Pumpkee. He’s been coughing that awful cough again.”
The cough the cat had yet to cough in anyone’s presence other than Mary Kay’s.
And because she lugged the huge thing everywhere with her—probably for warmth—Jack had a hard time believing Pumpkin was anything but fat and spoiled. Still, he was duty-bound to check the cat out.
“All right, Mary Kay. I’ll take a quick look at him.” Jack gestured toward the clinic’s lone examining room.
Mary Kay smiled triumphantly and headed in.
Jack leveled a look at Mel. “I want to finish our discussion. This’ll only take a second. Okay?” If needed, he’d go blue in the face convincing her that she could handle the practice on her own.
She shrugged and looked away. He couldn’t tell if the fight had gone out of her, or if Mary Kay’s additional refusal to let Mel treat her animal had been the straw that broke Mel’s spirit. Lord, he hoped not.
The pestering he was getting from Mary Kay and some of the other ladies in the area, not all of them single, with supposedly sick animals and a shared fantasy of landing themselves a millionaire, was becoming too much to take. He needed Mel happy so he could leave. Soon. The constant reminder of his availability had made the memories of the reasons behind it that much harder to bear.