The Valentine Two-Step

by RaeAnne Thayne

  A bonding thing? The last thing he needed to do was bond with Ellie Webster, under any circumstances.

  “What do you know about bonding? Don’t tell me that’s something they teach you in school.”

  Lucy shrugged. “Dylan says we’re in our formative preteen years and need positive parental influence now more than ever. She thought this would be a good opportunity for us to develop some leadership skills.”

  Great. Now Ellie Webster’s kid had his daughter spouting psychobabble. He blew out a breath. “What about you?”

  She blinked at him. “Me?”

  “You’re pretty knowledgeable about Dylan’s views, but what about your own? Why did you go along with it?”

  Lucy suddenly seemed extremely interested in a little spot on the cat’s fur. “I don’t know,” she mumbled.

  “Come on. You can do better than that.”

  She chewed her lip again, then looked at the cat. “We never do anything together.”

  He rocked back on his heels, baffled by her. “What are you talking about? We do plenty of things together. Just last Saturday you spent the whole day with me in Idaho Falls.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Shopping for a new truck. Big whoop. I thought it would be fun to do something completely different together. Something that doesn’t have to do with the ranch or with cattle or horses.” She paused, then added in a quiet voice, “Something just for me.”

  Ah, more guilt. Just what he needed. The kid wasn’t even ten years old and she was already an expert at it. He sighed. Did females come out of the box with some built-in guilt mechanism they could turn off and on at will?

  The hell of it was, she was absolutely right, and he knew it. He didn’t spend nearly enough time with her. He tried, he really did, but between the horses and the cattle, his time seemed to be in as short supply as sunshine in January.

  His baby girl was growing up. He could see it every day. Used to be a day spent with him would be enough for her no matter what they did together. Even if it was only shopping for a new truck. Now she wanted more, and he wasn’t sure he knew how to provide it.

  “Wouldn’t it have been easier to tell me all this before you signed me up? Then we could have at least talked it over without me getting such a shock like this.”

  She fidgeted with Sigmund, who finally must have grown tired of being messed with. He let out an offended mewl of protest and rolled away from her, then leaped from the bed gracefully and stalked out the door.

  Lucy watched until his tail disappeared down the end of the hall before she answered him in that same low, ashamed voice. “Dylan said you’d both say no if we asked. We thought it might be harder for you to back out if Ms. McKenzie thought you’d already agreed to it.”

  “That wasn’t very fair, to me or to Dr. Webster, was it?” He tried to come up with an analogy that might make sense to her. “How would you like it if I signed you up to show one of the horses in the 4-H competition without talking to you first?”

  She shuddered, as he knew she would. Her shyness made her uncomfortable being the center of attention, so she had always avoided the limelight, even when she was little. In that respect, Miz McKenzie was right—Dylan Webster had been good for her and had brought her out of her shell, at least a little.

  “I wouldn’t like it at all.”

  “And I don’t like what you did any better. I ought to just back out of this whole crazy thing right now.”

  “Oh, Dad, you can’t!” she wailed. “You’ll ruin everything.”

  He studied her distress for several seconds, then sighed. He loved his daughter fiercely. She was the biggest joy in his life, more important than a hundred ranches. If she felt like she came in second to the Diamond Harte, he obviously wasn’t trying hard enough.

  Lucy finally broke the silence. “Are you really, really, really mad at me?” she asked in a small voice.

  “Maybe just one really.” He gave her a lopsided smile. “But don’t worry. I’ll get you back. You’ll be sorry you ever heard of this carnival by the time I get through with you.”

  Her eyes went wide again, this time with excitement. “Does that mean you’ll do it?”

  “I guess. I think we’re both going to be sorry.”

  But he couldn’t have too many regrets, at least not right now. Not when his daughter jumped from her bed with a squeal and threw her arms tightly around his waist.

  “Oh, thank you, Daddy. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You’re the best.”

  For that moment, at least, he felt like it.

  “No way is Matthew Harte going to go through with it. Mark my words, if you agree to do this, you’re going to be stuck planning the whole carnival by yourself.”

  In the middle of sorting through the day’s allotment of depressing mail, Ellie grimaced at SueAnn Clayton, her assistant. She had really come to hate that phrase. Mark my words, you’re not cut out to be a large animal vet. Mark my words, you’re going to regret leaving California. Mark my words, you won’t last six months in Wyoming.

  Just once, she wished everybody would keep their words—and unsolicited advice—to themselves.

  In this case, though, she was very much afraid SueAnn was right. There was about as much likelihood of Matt Harte helping her plan the carnival as there was that he’d be the next one walking through the door with a couple of his prize cutting horses for her to treat.

  She sighed and set the stack of bills on SueAnn’s desk. “If he chickens out, I’ll find somebody else to help me.” She grinned at her friend. “You, for instance.”

  SueAnn made a rude noise. “Forget it. I chaired the Halloween Howl committee three years in a row and was PTA president twice. I’ve more than done my share for Salt River Elementary.”

  “Come on, SueAnn,” she teased. “Are you forgetting who pays your salary?”

  The other woman rolled her eyes. “You pay me to take your phone calls, to send out your bill reminders and to hold down the occasional unlucky animal while you give him a shot. Last I checked, planning a Valentine’s Day carnival is nowhere in my job description.”

  “We could always change your job description. How about while we’re at it, we’ll include mucking out the stalls?”

  “You’re not going to blackmail me. That’s what you pay Dylan the big bucks for. Speaking of the little rascal, how did you punish her, anyway? Ground her to her room for the rest of the month?”

  That’s what she should have done. It was no less than Dylan deserved for lying to her teacher. But she’d chosen a more fitting punishment. “She’s grounded from playing with Lucy after school for the rest of the week and she has to finish reading all of Little Women and I’m going to make sure she does a lot of the work of this carnival, since it was her great idea.”

  “The carnival she ought to be okay with, but which is she going to hate more, reading the book or not playing with her other half?”

  “Doesn’t matter. She has to face the music.”

  SueAnn laughed, and Ellie smiled back. What would she have done without the other woman to keep her grounded and sane these last few months? She shuddered just thinking about it.

  She winced whenever she remembered how tempted she’d been to fire her that first week. SueAnn was competent enough—eerily so, sometimes—but she also didn’t have the first clue how to mind her own business. Ellie had really struggled with it at first. Coming from California where avoiding eye contact when at all possible could sometimes be a matter of survival, dealing with a terminal busybody for an assistant had been wearing.

  She was thirty-two years old and wasn’t used to being mothered. Even when she’d had a mother, she hadn’t had much practice at it. And she had been completely baffled by how to handle SueAnn, who made it a point to have her favorite grind of coffee waiting very morning, who tried to set her up with every single guy in town between the ages of eighteen and sixty, and who brought in Tupperware containers several times a week brimming with homemade soups and casseroles and m
outhwatering desserts.

  Now that she’d had a little practice, she couldn’t believe she had been so fortunate to find not only the best assistant she could ask for but also a wonderful friend.

  “What’s on the agenda this morning?” Ellie asked.

  “You’re not going to believe this, but you actually have two patients waiting.”

  “What, are we going for some kind of record?”

  SueAnn snickered and held two charts out with a flourish. “In exam room one, we have Sasha, Mary Lou McGilvery’s husky.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Him. Sasha, oddly enough, is a him. He’s scratching like crazy, and Mary Lou is afraid he has fleas.”

  “Highly doubtful around here, especially this time of year. It’s too cold.”

  “That’s what I tried to tell her. She’s convinced that you need to take a look at him, though.”

  Dogs weren’t exactly her specialty, since she was a large animal veterinarian, but she knew enough about them to deal with a skin condition. She nodded to SueAnn. “And patient number two?”

  Her assistant cleared her throat ominously. “Cleo.”

  “Cleo?”

  “Jeb Thacker’s Nubian goat. She has a bit of a personality disorder.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, let’s put it this way. Ben used to say that if she’d been human, she’d have been sent to death row a long time ago.”

  Ellie grinned, picturing the old codger who had sold her the practice saying exactly that. Ben Nichols was a real character. They had formed an instant friendship the first time they met at a conference several years ago. It was that same bond that had prompted him to make all her dreams come true by offering her his practice at a bargain basement price when he decided to retire, to her shock and delight. He and his wife were now thoroughly enjoying retirement in Arizona.

  “What’s Cleo in for?”

  “Jeb didn’t know, precisely. The poor man ’bout had a panic attack right there when I tried to get him to specify on the paperwork. Blushed brighter than one of his tomatoes and said he thought it was some kind of female trouble.”

  A homicidal goat with female trouble. And here she thought she was in for another slow morning. “Where’s Jeb?”

  “He had to go into Afton to the hardware store. Said he’d be back later to pick her up.”

  “In that case, let’s take care of the dog first since Mary Lou’s waiting,” she decided. She could save the worst for last.

  It only took a few moments for her to diagnose that Sasha had a bad case of psoriasis. She gave Mary Lou a bottle of medicated shampoo she thought would do the trick, ordered her to wash his bedding frequently and scheduled a checkup in six months.

  That done, she put on her coat and braved the cold, walking to the pens behind the clinic to deal with the cantankerous goat. Cleo looked docile enough. The brown and white goat was standing in one of the smaller pens gnawing the top rail on the fence.

  Ellie stood near the fence and spoke softly to her for a moment, trying to earn the animal’s trust. Cleo turned and gave her what Ellie could swear was a look of sheer disdain out of big, long-fringed brown eyes, then turned back to the rail.

  Slowly, cautiously, she entered the pen and approached the goat, still crooning softly to her. When she was still several feet away, she stopped for a cursory look. Although she would need to do a physical exam to be certain, she thought she could see the problem—one of Cleo’s udders looked engorged and red. She probably had mastitis.

  Since Cleo wasn’t paying her any mind, Ellie inched closer. “You’re a sweet girl, aren’t you?” she murmured. “Everybody’s wrong about you.” She reached a hand to touch the animal, but before her hand could connect, Cleo whirled like a bronco with a burr under her saddle. Ellie didn’t have time to move away before the goat butted her in the stomach with enough force to knock her on her rear end, right into a puddle of what she fervently hoped was water.

  With a ma-aaa of amusement, the goat turned back to the fence rail.

  “Didn’t anybody warn you about Cleo?” a deep male voice asked.

  Just what she needed, a witness to her humiliation. From her ignominious position on the ground, she took a moment to force air into her lungs. When she could breathe again, she glanced toward the direction of the voice. Her gaze landed first on a pair of well-worn boots just outside the fence, then traveled up a mile-long length of blue jeans to a tooled silver buckle with the swirled insignia of the NCHA—National Cutting Horse Association.

  She knew that buckle.

  She’d seen it a day earlier on none other than the lean hips of her nemesis. Sure enough. Matt Harte stood there just on the other side of the pen—broad shoulders, blue eyes, wavy dark hair and all.

  She closed her eyes tightly, wishing the mud would open up underneath her and suck her down. Of all the people in the world who might have been here to watch her get knocked to her butt, why did it have to be him?

  Chapter 3

  Matt let himself into the pen, careful to keep a safe distance between his own rear end and Jeb Thacker’s notoriously lousy-tempered goat, who had retreated to the other side of the pen.

  “Here, let me help you.” He reached a hand down to the city vet, still sprawled in the mud.

  “I can do it,” she muttered. Instead of taking his hand, she climbed gingerly to her feet by herself, then surreptitiously rubbed a hand against her seat.

  Matt cleared his throat. “You okay?”

  “I’ve had better mornings, but I’ll live.”

  “You hit the ground pretty hard. You sure nothing’s busted?”

  “I don’t think so. Just bruised. Especially my pride,” she said wryly. She paused for a minute, then smiled reluctantly. “I imagine it looked pretty funny watching me get tackled by a goat.”

  She must not take herself too seriously if she could laugh about what had just happened. He found himself liking her for it. He gazed at her, at the way her red hair had slipped from its braid thingy and the little smudge of dirt on her cheek. Her eyes sparkled with laughter, and she was just about the prettiest thing he’d seen in a long time.

  When he said nothing, a blush spread over her cheeks and she reached a hand to tuck her stray hair back. “Did you need something, Mr. Harte?”

  He was staring at her, he realized, like some hayseed who’d never seen a pretty girl before. He flushed, astounded at himself, at this completely unexpected surge of attraction. “You might as well call me Matt, especially since it looks like we’ll be working on this stupid school thing together.”

  Her big green eyes that always made him think of new aspen leaves just uncurling in springtime widened even more. “You’re going to do it?”

  “I said so, didn’t I?” he muttered.

  She grinned. “And you sound so enthusiastic about it.”

  “You want enthusiasm, you’ll have to find somebody else to help you.”

  “What made you change your mind?”

  He didn’t know how to answer that, and besides, it wasn’t any of her business. He said he’d do it, didn’t he? What more did she need? But somehow the sharp retort he started to make changed into something else.

  “Miz McKenzie’s right,” he finally said. “Lucy’s done better in school this year than she ever has. She never would have wanted to organize something like this last year. I don’t want to ruin the improvement she’s made. Besides, she usually doesn’t ask for much. It’s a small price to pay if it’s going to make her happy.”

  Ellie Webster cocked her head and looked at him like she’d just encountered a kind of animal she’d never seen before.

  “What?” he asked, annoyed at himself for feeling so defensive.

  “Nothing. You’re just full of surprises, Mr. Harte.”

  “Matt,” he muttered. “I said you should call me Matt.”

  “Matt.” She smiled suddenly, the most genuine smile she’d ever given him. He stared at
it, at her, feeling like he’d just spent a few hours out in the hard sun without his hat.

  “Is that why you stopped?” she asked. “To tell me you decided to help with the carnival?”

  He shrugged and ordered his heartbeat to behave itself. “I had to drop by the post office next door anyway. I thought maybe if you had a second this morning, we could get a cup of coffee over at the diner and come up with a game plan. At least figure out where to start.”

  Again, she looked surprised, but she nodded. “That’s a good idea. But if you’re just looking for coffee, SueAnn makes the best cup this side of the Rockies. We can talk in my office.”

  “That would be fine. I’ve already had breakfast. You, ah, need to get cleaned up or anything?”

  She glanced down at her muddy jeans, then at the goat with a grimace. “Can you wait ten minutes? Since I’m already muddy, I might as well take a look at Cleo now.”

  He thought of the million-and-one things he had to do at the ranch after he ran to the parts store in Idaho Falls—the buyers he had coming in later in the afternoon, the three horses waiting for the farrier, the inevitable paperwork always confronting him.

  He should just take a rain check, but for some reason that completely baffled him, he nodded. “Sure, I can wait.” His next question surprised him even more. “Need me to give you a hand?”

  She smiled again, that sweet, friendly smile. “That would be great. I’m afraid Cleo isn’t too crazy about her visit to the vet.”

  The next fifteen minutes were a real education. With his help, Ellie miraculously finessed the ornery goat into holding still long enough for an exam. She murmured soft words—nonsense, really—while her hands moved gently and carefully over the now docile goat.

  “Okay, you can let go now,” she finally said. He obeyed, and the goat ambled away from them.

  “What’s the verdict?” he asked.

  She looked up from scribbling some notes on a chart. “Just as I suspected. Mastitis. She has a plugged milk duct. I’ll run a culture to be sure, but I think a round of antibiotics ought to take care of her.”