LOVE OF A RODEO MAN (MODERN DAY COWBOYS)

by Hutchinson, Bobby

  In an instant, she was back beside Mitch, sitting as she had the evening before in the Forgies’ kitchen, drinking coffee and mostly listening as Mitch talked with Bill about hopes and dreams that Sara mentally filed away. She must have a file going, because every detail was there in her head the instant she relaxed her guard.

  Like now. She sighed, stroking Agnes, the witch-black cat that had landed in her lap the instant she sat down. She gave up the effort of shoving Mitch Carter into the corners of her mind. Instead, she let him take over, sorting through impressions as the coffee in her cup dwindled and the street outside the clinic slowly came alive with early Saturday business.

  Mitch had lost a brother he loved, his only brother. He’d reluctantly left a lifestyle that suited him to come back here and work with a father he obviously didn’t get along with. He hated pigs, loved horses and kept a remarkably cool head in emergencies...probably a trait he’d acquired on the rodeo circuit. Certainly every working day contained an emergency of some sort when you were a rodeo cowboy. He’d been a hero in his field, yet despite the recognition he’d earned, Mitch was anything but egotistical. In fact, he was endearingly bashful at times...a wry grin twisted her mouth. And boldly confident at others.

  At strategic moments, Mitch Carter wasn’t backward at all, she remembered with a shy smile that faded abruptly. He must have had an awful lot of practice over the years, to learn to kiss like that. She gave herself a mental shake and shoved Agnes off her lap. Here she was, like any spinny teenager, mooning over a kiss in a barnyard.

  The phone rang.

  “Stone’s Veterinary, can I help you?”

  “My dog has a terrible case of worms, can I stop by and get something for him? You’re that new lady vet, aren’t you? Well, Doc Stone always used to give me...”

  Back to work, Wingate.

  By ten forty-five, she’d answered a dozen phone calls, seen to a puppy’s sore paw and given him his shots, and was in the process of advising an eccentric old woman in a black bowler hat that her cat had a diaphragmatic hernia and needed an operation as soon as possible.

  The cat’s owner, Miss Emily Crenshaw, didn’t take the diagnosis well at all. She promptly burst into tears. “But I haven’t any money, Doctor, only my pension, and that barely covers essentials. I can’t afford an operation. How much will it cost, Doctor?”

  Hurriedly reducing her own fee for the surgery, Sara named the lowest figure she could possibly quote. Emily still looked profoundly shocked and shook her head sadly, chin quivering and tears dripping down her faded cheeks as she lifted her nondescript-looking black cat off the examining table and into her arms, shuffling toward the door.

  “An operation’s out of the question. She’ll just have to live with the pain, won’t you pet? That’s far too expensive for us, isn’t it, Queenie? We’ll just have to get along without it. Poor old Queenie.”

  “But the trouble Queenie’s having with her breathing will get steadily worse, Miss Crenshaw. You see, she has a tear in her diaphragm, and each time she runs or jumps at all, it enlarges. It could easily prove fatal.”

  But Miss Crenshaw simply shook her head hopelessly. Feeling like a money-grubbing, unfeeling monster, Sara watched the pathetic figure clutch her precious cat to her concave bosom and heard herself saying the instant before the door closed behind the cat and its owner, “Look, I’ll have a talk with my boss, maybe we can work something out.”

  Sara knew what they’d work out. She’d do the surgery free and meticulously deduct the cost of the medications she’d used out of her own check.

  Emily’s tears dried up as if by magic. “Oh, you are a dear girl. When shall I bring Queenie in?” Resignedly Sara checked her schedule. “How about Thursday morning at eight? No food or water after six the night before.”

  When the old woman and the cat were gone, Sara slumped into a chair, one of her professor’s words ringing in her ears. “Some pet owners will try about anything to trick you into treating their animals free of charge. Be very careful about people who insist they can’t pay for treatment. Some may be telling the truth, but an awful lot are shysters.”

  Surely Emily Crenshaw wouldn’t try anything like that. The woman looked penniless. Still, Sara’s only major problem with her job had nothing to do with the animals she treated; it was this matter of dealing with their human owners that daunted her. And the poor, pathetic old ones like Miss Crenshaw usually ended up costing her money instead of earning it for her.

  Floyd still hadn’t turned up by eleven thirty, and neither had Doc Stone.

  Sara couldn’t put off the surgery on Daisy any longer. The dog’s owner was planning to take her pet home later that afternoon, and Sara knew there’d be an ugly scene if the operation hadn’t been done when the woman arrived.

  There’d been a lull in patients for the past half hour, and Sara took advantage of it to prepare the surgery and then sedate the little dog, hoping each moment that Floyd would finally make an appearance. She’d already begun the operation when her assistant stuck his head in the door of the surgery, eyes as red as the blood she was mopping from the neat incision in Daisy’s abdomen.

  Floyd had an air of importance about him that Sara knew from past experience was simply an act designed to deflect her anger away from its rightful object.

  “Mornin’, Dr. Sara. Sorry I’m late in, but...”

  Sara didn’t wait for the implausible and imaginative excuse she knew Floyd would come up with.

  “I’ve put the answering machine on the phone, take it off, will you, Floyd?” she interrupted. “And I also have a note on the front door that says back in half an hour, take that down as well. I can’t very well do this and monitor the waiting room by myself,” she said pointedly.

  “Do you have any idea what time Doc Stone might be coming in today?” Sara couldn’t control the trace of annoyance in her tone. The senior vet was supposed to have an agreement with her about Saturdays. Sara had offered in the beginning to work from eight until one, and then the older man would take over, leaving her with a precious free afternoon. Except that in the six weeks she’d been working for him, Doc Stone had appeared to relieve her exactly once.

  “Ahhh, me head’s not on straight just yet.” Floyd was the very essence of abject apology. “Doc said yesterday to tell you he was going out to the horse auction in the valley so he wouldn’t be able to come in until late today. It slipped me mind entirely.”

  Floyd shut the door hastily behind him when she glared at him, and Sara returned her attention to the inert body of the animal on the table, deftly stitching up the incision she’d made and forcing herself not to think about Doc Stone or Floyd at the moment.

  Daisy would be just fine in a day or so. Sara felt pride at a job well done as she tenderly carried the small, limp form back to its cage in the infirmary. She made the dog comfortable before she allowed herself to dwell on Floyd, Doc Stone and the difficult situation she’d landed in by taking this job.

  It was a subject she’d studiously avoided facing for several weeks. Stripping off her gloves and the protective green operating smock, she washed in the antiquated bathroom and wandered back into her tiny office, mulling it all over.

  The thing was, she’d desperately wanted the job only months before and had been humbly grateful when the acerbic little vet hired her. She loved the work and the surroundings. It was the people she worked with that she found unreliable at best, irresponsible at worst. It hadn’t taken her a week to figure out that being Doc Stone’s assistant actually meant assuming almost full responsibility for his busy rural veterinary practice.

  As soon as he’d realized she was fully competent—two days after he’d begrudgingly hired her, it seemed to Sara—the wily old vet had all but disappeared, leaving her to run the entire business nearly alone, while paying her the meager salary of an assistant. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Over the past weeks, she’d begun to suspect that it was a blessing her boss didn’t do more of the actual vet work.<
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  Doc Stone was making mistakes, serious errors in judgment that troubled Sara.

  The first indication had been a puzzling emergency call Sara made to a ranch that raised feedlot cattle. Doc had visited the ranch the day before and used a relatively new drug while medicating the animals’ feed. Sara was called because several of the animals were unsteady on their feet and had stopped eating. Meticulous checking on Sara’s part revealed that the cattle were suffering from a drug overdose.

  Doc had gotten the new drug dosage wrong—fortunately not enough to kill the animals or leave residue in the meat. But for several horrible days, Sara wasn’t entirely certain of that. Because she was able to correct the dosage almost immediately, there was no lasting harm done.

  The farmer didn’t ask exactly what the problem had been; he seemed relieved that she was able to correct it and of course Sara didn’t volunteer the fact that Doc had caused it. He was a respected practitioner in the area. She didn’t want to publicly embarrass him.

  But then she’d realized that Doc was using old syringes and needles routinely, a practice guaranteed sooner or later to result in contamination of one animal by another. She’d tried to talk with him about both problems. He’d been angry and defensive.

  “I’ve been a vet in this area longer than you’ve lived, young lady,” he’d snapped, and his totally bald head had seemed to glow with rage. “No female fresh out of college can tell me how to do my job.”

  “But what if...”

  He was much shorter than Sara, but he’d seemed to tower over her as his raspy voice put her in her place. “So I make mistakes. Do you think you never will? Does all this fancy new training they give you insure you’ll never do anything wrong? " He was adept at avoiding issues, at making her feel he’d done her a huge favor by hiring her at all, which was probably an honest reflection of how he felt.

  He’d made it plain from the beginning he’d prefer a male vet, that he was hiring her only because he felt grateful for things Dave Hoffman, her stepfather, had done for him in the past. Well, she consoled herself, if worse came to worst, she could always leave Plains and find another job somewhere, regardless of how much she was beginning to love this isolated comer of northwestern Montana, or how much she enjoyed being able to be with Mom and Gram...and Dave.

  Her new stepfather was fast becoming one of her favorite people. And now, to add to the complications, had Mitch Carter become a factor as well in her desire to stay here? There was no denying the powerful attraction she sensed growing between them. In a burst of honesty, she admitted that the last thing she wanted at the moment was to pull up stakes and leave Plains.

  Which left her right back at the beginning, meekly allowing herself to be bullied by her employer.

  It was almost a relief to be interrupted by Floyd, who was sticking his head around the door and screwing his florid features into a sympathetic grimace. “George Dolinger’s on the phone, roarin’ like a bull.” Floyd snickered at his own wit before adding, “George is always roarin’. He says his prize mare’s just been bred by somebody’s runaway stallion. He wants her aborted immediately.”

  Dolinger owned one of the largest ranches in the area. Sara had met him only once and thought him a cantankerous little man. She sighed and picked up the phone, determined to be both cheerful and businesslike.

  “Good morning, Mr. Dolinger...”

  A stream of curses made her hold the phone away from her ear. “... and you can tell Stone I’ve no intention of allowing some young female still wet behind the ears to mess around with that mare. Now get him out here on the double, you hear me?”

  Sara drew a deep breath and tried to curb her rising temper. “Unfortunately Dr. Stone is not here at the moment, and I’m not certain when he’ll be in,” she said as calmly as she could.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” The man sounded on the verge of a coronary. “I want this animal aborted immediately, and I want Doc Stone to do the job. Is that perfectly clear? So I suggest you send Floyd to find him and give him the message, you hear me?”

  “But I’ve just told you...”

  Bang. Dial tone.

  Sara glanced at the receiver, and she was trembling with rage when she finally put it down. It didn’t take much imagination to figure out which particular veterinary procedure she’d delight in performing on Mr. George Dolinger. The man was utterly impossible and rude to boot.

  The office door swung open, and Sara snapped, “Floyd, if that horrible man calls back, you can tell him...”

  Sara stopped in midsentence. Mitch stood in the doorway, grinning at her, brown Stetson tilted firmly down over his forehead, powerful body clad as usual in fresh denims and cotton shirt. His boots showed signs of careful polishing.

  “Afternoon, Doc.” He ambled casually into the room and turned an old wooden chair around so he could straddle it. He rested his arms on its back and studied her calmly until she felt uncomfortably self-conscious.

  “Trusty old Floyd told me to just come straight in and to pass on the message that he’s on his way out for lunch.” Mitch’s voice held a note of sarcasm, and Sara suspected he knew he Floyd was a slippery, smooth-talking, lazy rascal.

  “The guy wouldn’t be much help if an ax murderer walked in here straight off the street, would he?” He raised a questioning eyebrow at her, adding, “I figured maybe that’s what you and I could do.”

  “Murder someone with an ax? Boy, have I got just the person in mind.”

  Suddenly the whole day seemed much brighter, and Sara shoved her hair back from her forehead and returned his smile with a dazzling one of her own. To blazes with George Dolinger.

  “I was thinking more of lunch, but if you’d like me to murder the man you were swearing about when I came in, maybe we ought to tend to him first.”

  Sara thought of all the calls needing to be answered, the farm visits that meant driving from one emergency call to another around the countryside if Doc didn’t show up. The least she was entitled to was a lunch break. It wasn’t hard to make up her mind.

  She got hurriedly to her feet, and before the phone could start ringing again, she switched on the machine.

  “Quick,” she instructed, going over to the door and peering out to make sure the coast was clear and no one had come into the waiting room during the past few moments. “First, we lock the front door and put the Out to Lunch sign up. Then we sneak out the back way, preferably in disguise.”

  “Gotcha.” Mitch had the sign on the front door before Sara had finished running a quick brush through her hair and hastily adding some pink lipstick. She was absurdly glad she’d worn a pair of quite decent blue cotton pants that morning with a gaily striped knit shirt instead of her usual uniform of T-shirt and blue jeans. There was only one little stain on her knee and hardly any animal hair at all on her shirt. She looked really presentable, considering the mess she could end up in around here.

  “How did you happen to...I mean...what are you doing in town?” she began, but he’d settled his hat firmly on his head and grabbed her hand.

  “Silence, woman, till we make our getaway.” He tugged her out the back door, making a great pretense of checking in both directions before he hustled her through the back gate and down the grassy path, and then up the sidewalk to the main street before he answered her question.

  “How did I escape from Carter’s work detail before sundown, you mean? Well, the tractor had a flat. I’m getting it fixed.” It wasn’t the entire truth, and the old man would have a fit when he found out Mitch had chosen a sunny day in June to fix a slow leak they’d lived with for heaven knows how long.

  Mitch couldn’t have cared less. For the first time in months, he was exactly where he wanted to be. He was walking down a sleepy street in his hometown with a beautiful woman by his side, and he was content.

  Hustling along beside him, her fingers still firmly captured in his callused hand, Sara nodded and teased, “A flat tire, huh? Of course, Mr. Carter, we repair trac
tor flats all the time at the clinic. How silly of me. Where is the poor injured thing, anyway?”

  He shot her a narrow-eyed glance and said, “Truth is, I wanted to see you, Sara. Somewhere outside of a barn or a pigpen and without an audience.”

  His forthright declaration shut her up for the entire time it took them to reach the cafe. Floyd was cozily jammed into a booth with three of his drinking cronies. He looked comically surprised when Sara paused beside his booth and said in a friendly but firm tone, “I hate to rush you, Floyd, but you’re due back at work in ten minutes.”

  Before he could answer, Sara sailed past and Mitch took a table on the other side of the small cafe, as far from Floyd as they could get.

  “You like steak?” he demanded, removing his hat and ruffling his hair so it stood enchantingly on end above his forehead.

  Sara had the urge to reach over and smooth it down for him.

  “Yes, umm, sure, but I was thinking more of an egg salad sandwich, it’s only noon.”

  The redheaded waitress, who’d been sitting drinking coffee with two friends, got up and wandered nonchalantly toward them.

  “We’ll have sirloin steak with baked potatoes and all the trimmings, and ice cream on apple pie for dessert. Coffee now,” Mitch.

  The waitress smiled at Mitch, her eyes assessing his body and face in minute detail. “Sure thing, honey,” she cooed at him, setting out place mats and glasses of water, cutlery, catsup and steak sauce.

  “Mitch, I’m not sure I want all that food,” Sara protested weakly. “Besides, I ought to get back to the clinic before too long.”

  “Surely Doc Stone gives you a lunch hour?” Mitch queried.

  “Doc Stone doesn’t come around enough to give me my paycheck, never mind time off for lunch,” Sara blurted.

  Mitch’s eyes narrowed. “I wondered if something like that was going on. The other night, Dave Hoffman said he figured the old man was taking advantage of you.”