Don't Mess With Texans
Peggy Nicholson
By the Year 2000: SATISFACTION!What have you resolved to do by the year 2000?Susannah Mack: The tabloids call her the most spiteful woman in America! Not only that–she's inadvertently destroyed R. D. Taggart's life in what appears to be nothing but a vendetta against her ex.R. D. Taggart: He's a veterinarian who's finally put his past behind him. But then he gets caught in the cross fire between a blue-eyed Texas hellcat and her vindictive ex-husband.Tag plans on doing whatever it takes to collect on his damages and somehow resurrect his reputation. But first he has to find Susannah–the beautiful woman who's stolen his life, his heart and his peace of mind.Don't Mess with Texans is a madcap caper about love, marriage and…getting satisfaction!
“She pay with cash or check?” (#u36592cd4-87d2-53a7-87c2-a67b0a4ac535)Letter to Reader (#uc6f0d399-561b-521c-b56a-c3f24e67bceb)Title Page (#u6b03c2b6-3ced-5873-8770-4f3d0613dfd3)Dedication (#uc8f325a7-7e70-544b-b4d0-c0ca61ee6ea3)CHAPTER ONE (#ud336f803-e3f2-576a-861d-663275c33515)CHAPTER TWO (#u257564b4-6008-5d4c-b496-413412c5d150)CHAPTER THREE (#u38b789ba-f664-5618-8eab-c5da3cf01da9)CHAPTER FOUR (#ucd941778-8643-56f9-bd95-be37dcc89cb5)CHAPTER FIVE (#u37d7404f-8ac4-5c70-8a2d-d1428b9a7af9)CHAPTER SIX (#ue1bc2eb5-660d-5bb0-beeb-0e61a8cd0fbe)CHAPTER SEVEN (#uc845d903-af93-505e-b82b-83a1ba641ae3)CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY SIX (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
“She pay with cash or check?”
“Something better, Doc. She said she was fresh out of cash.” Carol Anne plucked something shiny from a drawer and dropped the tiny object into his palm. “Here’s how she paid. She said to send her the change care of this address—” she waved a piece of paper at him “—once we’ve hocked it.”
Tag lifted the ring to the light “A diamond!”
“If you believe that, Doc.... It’ll be a zircon, I guarantee, worth fifty if we’re lucky.”
They both looked up as headlights swept the room, followed by a second pair, then a third. Brakes yelped in the parking lot Doors slammed.
As Tag threw open the door to the clinic, another car wheeled in off the road.... No, this was a van. With the logo of the local TV station emblazoned along its side. It was a media frenzy. With its prey in sight.
“Dr. Taggart! Why did you perform unauthorized surgery on the finest racing sire ever bred in America?” Voices receded into the yammering din of white noise. Somewhere, Susannah Mack was laughing at him. laughing at him while his life ended up in ruins.
“No comment” He’d save his comments and his own questions for the one woman who could answer them. He gazed into the cameras, because he knew she’d be watching. Read it in my eyes, Susannah. You can run. You can bide. But I’m gonna get you, if it’s the last thing I do!
Dear Reader,
“She’s from Texas,” my oldest friends roll their eyes and say whenever I stick out my chin, take the law into my own hands and charge off to seek Justice—and usually find Trouble instead. Like the time I dognapped one hundred and twenty pounds of bellowing mutt that was terrorizing our neighborhood at 3:00 a.m. and tied him to the police station back door, with a doggy confession looped round his shaggy neck. (I’ve been barking again.) Or the time this five-foot-two-inch woman got indignant and tried to stop a large and irate shoplifter all by herseff—not one of my better ideas.
And maybe my friends’ explanation is the best one—call it a mental holdover from the Wild West days, when Texas Rangers were few and far between. So if a lady wanted justice—or revenge (which we all fondly imagine to be the same thing)—well, she just had to find it herself.
Whatever, this Texan found it easy to imagine a woman like Susannah Mack, who needed revenge—shoot, she earned it!—and who was spunky enough, indignant enough and reckless enough to fight for it against overwhelming odds. And then to imagine her ideal partner in adversity—Dr. R. D. Taggart, a man practical, tough and tender enough to see his Texas Pistol safely through her wildest schemes to the happy-ever-after ending she so richly deserved.
So here’s Susannah’s story. I had a lark writing it, and I hope you will reading it. All the best!
Peggy Nicholson
Don’t Mess with Texans
Peggy Nicholson
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
This book is for my mother, Marguerite Grimes, the first
horsewoman I ever knew. Her endearing spunk and
stubborn gallantry inspired my heroine,
Susannah Mack. It’s also for Ron duPrey,
only my sun and moon and a northwest breeze
at dawn.
With special thanks to John Civic, D.V.M., for his
kind advice on veterinary procedures. Any technical
mistakes this author may have made were despite
his bemused help—You want to what?—rather than
because of it.
CHAPTER ONE
SIX HOURS AFTER SURGERY, the tomcat was looking like a keeper. “Gums couldn’t be pinker,” Tag assured him. So he wasn’t bleeding internally. He let the cat’s upper lip drop and the torn slashed at his leather glove, then retreated to the back of the cage. Reflexes coming back nicely after anesthesia. His pupils were equally dilated and no wider than they should be. “So what day of the week is it?” Tag murmured, and got a sing song growl in reply.
“Wednesday, right. First week in January, last year of the century.” The car that hit him last night must have just grazed him, breaking his jaw as it tossed him aside. But his brains didn’t seem to be scrambled. “And who’s the president?”
The tom’s ragged ears stayed flattened to his furry skull. Another subsonic moan issued through wired jaws.
“Who cares? You wouldn’t give three fleas and a dead rat for every politician in the country,” Tag translated. “Can’t say I blame you.” Neither would he. Politics was a pastime for comfortable people with time on their hands and steady paychecks coming in. For his and the cat’s kind, survival was the name of the game. And living well was its best revenge.
Still, to live well this stray would have to learn to tolerate humans. Because as soon as he mended, Tag meant to find him a home. He hadn’t spent half the night patching him up just to boot him back out on the street when he was healed. He shut the cage door, then lingered, talking soothing nonsense till the cat stopped growling.
“Got time for a paying customer, Doc?” Carol Anne Kopesky, Tag’s medical technician/receptionist, frowned at him from the doorway leading to the front of the clinic. Hired some twenty years ago by Tag’s senior partner, Dr. Higgins, and trained by that grimly practical gentleman, she took his same dim view of charity cases. And now that Higgins had suffered a mild heart attack and taken a leave of absence, Carol Anne was watching their bottom line with even more than her usual zeal. Tag was earning for two now, till Higgins returned to the Green Mountain Veterinary Clinic next Monday. And even then he would only be practicing part-time.
“Mrs. Allen’s in room one,” she briefed him as Tag stretched his tired bones to his full six feet, one inch. “With her Irish setter, Jebbie, for his yearly checkup and vacs.” She lowered her voice. “A month late. I was afraid we’d lost them to you-know-who.”
A new practice had opened in Bennington, twenty miles to the west, last summer. Their competition was a small-animal man with glitzy new facilities and all the toothy charm of a TV game-show host. Higgins had brought Tag in as his junior associate to counter that threat.
A bell rang as the clinic’s front door opened.
“That’ll be Mrs. Rafferty with Gigi,” Carol Anne added as a yap-yap! like two strokes of an ice pick to the skull rang out from the reception room. “Here to have her toenails trimmed, and don’t even think of suggesting we knock her out to scale her teeth. Gigi has a delicate constitution.” She rolled her eyes and departed.
“Right.” Let the day begin. Tag rotated his shoulders under his white coat and headed for exam room one. Four hours’ sleep last night, and five the night before, with that false alarm out at the Great Dane kennel on the edge of town. A firsttime mother’s delivery, except that she hadn’t. No doubt she’d drop tonight—about the time he dropped off.
Three dogs, two cats and a molting parrot later, he heard a truck rumble down the driveway. Tag injected the last c.c. of distemper vaccine into a squirming Lab puppy and glanced up in time to see a dusty two-horse trailer, hitched to a pickup, glide past his window and on to the barn. Damn. Somebody who hadn’t heard that Doc Higgins was out of commission.
Higgins ran a mixed practice, serving small animals and large, for what had been a rural farming community. But dairy farms were giving way to computer analysts’ country retreats, where the largest animal in residence was more likely an English sheepdog than a sheep. Tag, in keeping with changing times, was a small-animal specialist. Unless the occupant of that trailer had a very simple problem, he wouldn’t be much help.
“You’d better go see,” he advised Carol Anne as he set the syringe aside and took hold of the puppy before it could leap off the table. “Paws like pie plates, he’s going to be a bruiser,” he added to the proud owner. “Have you thought about obedience school?” The bell chimed at the front door. Driver of the truck and trailer, he supposed.
While Tag gave his views on various trainers around the state, he listened with half his attention to the voices down the hall. Carol Anne’s was rising and taking on a hard edge. Some sort of disagreement going on out there? Her opponent’s responses were barely audible, a low liquid murmur and pause, insistent for all its softness. A woman, he thought. Any man would have recognized Carol Anne’s no as no and stomped off by now.
“So Carol Anne can give you Mrs. Dearing’s number.” He eased patient and owner out the door and down the hall toward the debate. “I believe she has a class starting next month.” He gave the puppy a farewell ear scratch. “Meantime he’s looking terrific. You’re doing a great job with him.”
As they reached the reception room, a girl—woman—spun away from the desk to face him. Hair the color of marigolds, flying out from her head as she swung. Cheeks pink with emotion, big eyes meeting his own like a slap. “Are you the doctor?”
High-heeled boots rap-tapping on the linoleum, she came at him. For a moment Tag thought she’d march right into the puppy’s owner, but at the last instant the women do-si-doed and she was toe-to-toe with him, looking up. Despite threeinch heels, she stood no higher than his heart. Pointy chin, lush lips. “You’re Dr. Taggart?” She caught his sleeve.
An emergency, that was clear. Half his mind was already listing the instruments and meds he might need—tourniquets, splints, horse-size syringes, painkiller? The other half was taking her in the way a punch-drunk boxer takes it on the chin, one hit after another, with no time between blows to recover. Drawl like hot honey in spite of her urgency. Her hair wasn’t standing on end; it just seemed that way. Eyes blue as a summer thunderstorm, pink-rimmed with recent tears or maybe lack of sleep, long-lashed in gold. A faint scent of flowers overlaid with a whiff of...bourbon? Maybe it was just some component of her perfume.
She tugged him toward the door. “Would you please, please, please help me?”
He would, in a heartbeat.
“I tried to tell her,” Carol Anne said angrily from behind the counter, “that Dr. Higgins is out. That if she’d just drive to Bennington, I’m sure she could find somebody who’d—”
“I haven’t got time!” his captor snapped without turning. She transferred her grip from his sleeve to his forearm. Slender fingers, and strong. “If you’d just come see...”
“Of course. Show me.”
“Doctor! Honestly, I never—”
The door slammed on Carol Anne’s reproach and they burst out into cold, crisp air—a warm day for January in Vermont, low forties with sunshine. Her breath smoked. “He’s around back.” She couldn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds, but she was all leg in her tight blue jeans and short denim jacket. Matching him stride for stride, she tugged him down the drive, and he went willingly, wanting to laugh, in spite of her urgency, because of her fierceness.
“What an old dragon! I thought she’d chew me up and spit me out before you showed up. Though she’s right, this is terrible, me landing on you out of nowhere like this, ’thout an appointment, but I...” She shrugged and smiled up at him for the first time in apology. Beautiful teeth, something Nordic in her blood with that high coloring. She pronounced her long Is as ah. Ah thought...Ra-aht, instead of right...
Georgia, he guessed. What was she doing up here in the cold north? “How did he hurt himself?” And if she could smile like that, how terrible could it be? Half of him hoped for a false alarm, an easy fix. The other half wanted something serious that he could heroically cure. Dr. Taggart at your service, m’lady.
She shook her head. “He’s not hurt. Not yet.” Her smile faded and she darted ahead. “Here he is.” She threw a bolt on the trailer and swung open the rear door. “My baby.” She pronounced it mah. “Hey, Pookie, sweetheart!” She tipped her head in from the side, to peer past a dark brown flank and black tail. “It’s gonna be okay now. Ollie, ollie oxen free. Dr. Taggart’s gonna fix you up jus’ fine.”
Pookie was enormous, or maybe it was the confines of the trailer that made him seem so. Horses always looked enormous to Tag. Had ever since he was a boy back in Boston and saw the mounted cops’ animals, unpredictable and dangerous as their riders, with steel-shod hooves that could mash a mouthy slum kid’s feet to jelly. Though he’d handled horses at veterinary college, first impressions were hard to lose. Why couldn’t she have had a cow in need? Cows weren’t half so intimidating.
She bent over, denim stretched tight around trim curves, and Tag’s attention swerved sharply and stuck fast. Clearly he hadn’t been dating enough these past five months. Too busy, with Higgins dropping like a stone not six weeks after Tag bought into the practice. And even if he’d had the time, he hadn’t seen a woman up here he wanted to chase. Till now.
Metal rumbled as she slid a gridded ramp down to the ground. Tag found his voice. “Wait a minute. If he’s not hurt, what’s the problem?”
“Not a problem, exactly. I mean it is, but—” She vanished into the empty stall to the right of the horse. Hooves thudded on padded metal, then the horse, a stallion, backed ponderously down the ramp. Tag retreated several hasty steps. Miss Blue Eyes reappeared, holding the animal’s lead, then clattered down to ground level, caught his halter beneath his chin and turned him around. “Ta-da!”
The stallion tossed his dark head and she staggered, then laughed and flattened a hand high on his glossy neck. “Pookie, meet Dr. Taggart.”
The stud’s head towered high over her red-gold ripply curls. Horse-mountain. Dark eyes focused on Tag with an almost human curiosity. The stallion snorted, and the gruff “Huh!” sounded like an opinion.
“What precisely do you want me to do for...Pookie?” All half-ton-plus of him?
She gave him a dazzling smile. “I want you to Bobbitt this ol’ boy for me.” She slapped the stud’s shoulder for emphasis.
Oh, boy. “You mean...”
She nodded vigorously. “I mean fix him. Geld him. I bought him for riding and he...” Her eyes slid away to follow a crow winging over the barn, then back to Tag’s face and she shrugged. “His octane’s a bit high.” Her chin tipped up a notch. “I mean I can handle him, but...”
Tag didn’t know much about horses, but he knew this one was no lady’s ride. One toss of his head and the beast could have flipped her over the barn. “Um...if he’s Pookie, then you’re...?”
“Susannah,” she said, and held out a fine-boned hand. “Susannah...Mack.”
He liked her strength as they shook, liked even better that his hand dwarfed hers. She had calluses, just enough that her touch was interesting. “Susannah, if you just bought him... He’s a looker, but isn’t he a bit more horse than you need? Maybe you should consider taking him—”
Her eyes went steely. “There isn’t anything on four legs I can’t ride. That’s not the problem.”
“Then the problem is...?” And why the rush?
She stared at him unblinking as the tomcat he’d saved last night, then looked down at her toes. “Problem is we’re new in town. Just up from...the South.”
Tag glanced automatically at the trailer’s license, but it was too muddy to read the state. Looked like they’d forded a river on their way.
“We drove all night, and now we get here—” She scuffed at the frozen dirt “—I find the stable where I’d made arrangements won’t take him. I forgot t’mention he was a stud. They have only one turn-out pen, lots of mares, and they’re afraid he’ll...” She laughed.
“He will.” Tag rubbed the back of his neck and sighed. The last time he’d gelded a stallion, it had been a Shetland pony who’d almost returned the favor. He’d sported a tiny, blue-black hoofprint on his upper thigh for a month. He’d gone along to watch Higgins on a Saturday and that canny veteran had taken one look at the pony, then pressed Tag into service. The time before that had been in vet school. “What about some other stable?”
She looked up from her boots. “I want that one. And it’s just going to be the same ol’ story, wherever we go.” She drifted closer and put a hand on his arm. “Please do it? I don’t know where I’ll go or what I’ll do if you don’t help us.”
When she put it like that... And she was determined, that was clear, and he was damned if he’d have her turn to any other man—any other vet—for help. “All right, then.” Let’s get it over with. “When did he eat last?”
“Not since ’bout ten, last night.” She let Tag go and backed off a step, still holding him with her storm-cloud eyes.
“Good. Then his stomach’s clear.” The clinic barn was clean, with a freshly bedded stall waiting for the patients Higgins might never see again. And the older man’s instruments were stored in the surgery. “If you could walk him around the grounds for fifteen minutes or so, settle him down, I’ll turn on the heat in the barn and set everything up.” And snatch a quick look at his text on equine procedures.
And face down Carol Anne’s outrage when he told her to postpone his first two afternoon appointments. Luckily Susannah had descended on him at the start of his lunch break. An experienced vet could geld a horse in half an hour or less. But he’d want to take his time, measure twice and cut once, as the saying went. Oh, boy. Tag turned and headed for the clinic.
CHAPTER TWO
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, hands freshly scrubbed and jaw clenched tight on all the words he’d not said back to his assistant, such as Who’s the vet and who’s the med tech here? Tag stomped out the back door of the hospital, his home-visit bag swinging at his side.
“You don’t know her from Adam, that’s not your specialty, and she didn’t even make an appointment!” Carol Anne had protested, the last apparently being Susannah’s greatest sin. “Just waltzes in here, flaps those big eyes, says pretty please and you jump. Men!”
There was nothing like a little opposition to make him cast his own doubts aside. Tag stopped to scan the fields beyond the barn and his cottage, which he rented from Higgins. No long-legged lovely with King Kong horse. His gaze swung to her trailer and he frowned. Something about it... He spun on his heel as Carol Anne leaned out the back door of the clinic.
“I phoned Doc Higgins, but he’s not answering. But I left a message that if he came in anytime soon, he should call you on the barn line and—”
“Cancel that.” Tag didn’t need him or want him for this. And Carol Anne should know by now that he sometimes took advice, but he never took orders. They glared at each other for an ice-cold, unbending minute, then she banged the door shut.
He needed to calm down. Animals could sense your tension before you felt it yourself. Tag took a slow breath. Bedside manner of quiet, sunny confidence, that’s what was wanted here. Piece of cake, really, this procedure. The premise remained roughly the same whether you did tomcat or elephant. Laying him down would be the scariest moment. Horses were more fragile than they looked. And the danger cut both ways. A horse like that, toppling, could smash a man flat. His eyes lit on the barn door, an inch or so, ajar when he’d left it tightly closed. Ah.
They were waiting for him in the corridor outside the stall. The stud lifted his head and pricked his ears as Tag entered the barn. Susannah didn’t stir. She stood at his shoulder, face pressed to his chocolate-brown hide, one arm hooked over his withers. Asleep on her feet like a horse? “Susannah?”
She swung her head lazily Tag’s way, mouth, nose and forehead sliding across the stallion’s sleek coat. A sleepy, sensual move as if dragging her face across a warm pillow. To face a bedmate. The hair lifted along his arms. She was something! Cheek resting against the horse, she smiled at him. Her eyes glistened.
Had she been crying? “Susannah?” He reached for her, but Pookie thrust his nose out between them. Tag switched his attention to the stud, who had teeth the size of dominoes, offering the back of his hand for inspection, fingers curled away, ready to dodge. But the horse was satisfied with a lusty whiff of him, not a chunk. “Good Pook, nice Pookie.” Tag got a hand on his halter, rubbed his neck, turned to study her. “You all right there?”
“Um.” She nodded and pushed off from the horse. The hand that had been hidden from view held a small silver hip flask. “Just fine.” She cleared her throat and her voice gained conviction. “Finer than fine.” She thrust the flask at him. “Like a sip?”
“Not while I’m working.” He took the container and sniffed-bourbon—closed it with the cap that dangled from a silver chain. This was beautiful workmanship, with the name “Brady” engraved elaborately across its face. Who’s Brady? He tucked the flask into her jacket pocket. She was shivering, all the feverish vivaciousness of their first meeting faded to a braced stillness. And her eyes were much too bright. “You know,” he said, “we don’t have to do this right now. We could board him here for a day or so, if no stable will take him.” Of course, that meant Higgins would insist on doing the job once Carol Anne reached him.
Her lips slowly parted—and Tag’s brain went blank for half a dozen heartbeats. Then thought returned as his blood flowed north again and she shook her head.
“Nope. I’ve made up my mind. Let’s do it.”
Then he’d better get on with it. He had a full slate of patients this afternoon, beyond the two appointments he’d made Carol Anne reschedule.
He decided to give the stallion his first shot right there in the corridor. A tranquilizer, intramuscular injection. Susannah gripped the stud’s sculpted nose with one hand, held the halter tight with her other. If he reared, she’d go flying. Tag slapped Pookie’s neck smartly, the impact supposedly disguising the following prick, then inserted the needle. Pookie let out a grunt of surprise. But no fireworks. Tag had treated poodles that struggled more. “Good boy.”
Then a quick exam while he waited for the preanesthetic to kick in. Pulse, taken at the submaxillary artery along his lower jaw, was thirty-six. “Good...” Tag placed his stethoscope on the left side of the stallion’s chest just behind the elbow to check the heartbeat, then over the lungs for the respiratory rate. Ten breaths a minute, average for a horse at ease. He glanced at Susannah. “Any idea if he’s had a tetanus booster lately?”
“It’s up-to-date.”
She looked dead certain of that, so he left her stroking the stud and crooning endearments while he went in to check the stall. He spread more hay from the new bale in the corner, though the bedding was clean and deep enough already. Nerves. “Okay, you can bring him in now.”
Filled with a seventeen-hand stallion, the stall seemed the size of a shoebox. “Can you put him up against the wall there, head toward the door?”
She could, handling him as deftly as a trucker backed an eighteen-wheeler alongside fuel pumps, one small sure hand flattened to the monster’s ribs as she shoved him over. Pookie allowed himself to be parked, his left side nearly touching the wall, then turned his head to look at her with a snort of surprise while Tag swung the gate around. This was a hinged device Higgins had built years ago, a wide padded rail that hemmed the horse in against the wall. “Duck under, Susannah.” She ducked and he swung the rail all the way parallel to the horse, then dropped the front fitting into its reinforced slot. Let out a breath of relief. Not that the stud couldn’t still kick his way free if he took the notion.
She grabbed a lapel of the leather jacket Tag had thrown on over his lab coat. “You’re gonna put him to sleep, aren’t you? I don’t want—”
“It’s okay, Susannah.” He caught her wrist. Unlike her stallion pal, her pulse skittered wildly and her skin was clammy-cold. “He’ll be sleeping like a baby in a minute. Won’t feel a thing.” You could do a stud with a local, but he’d just as soon this brute was safely in dreamland when he stole the family jewels.
“The gate lets him drop straight down, nice and easy. We don’t want him falling sideways.” He rubbed a thumb across her silky skin, then had to consciously pull away to stop. “Why don’t you sit on that bale while I get organized?
“You wouldn’t know what he weighs, would you?” he added over his shoulder as he spread out a sterile sheet, then laid out his surgical pack, the various antiseptic scrubs, several pairs of gloves.
“‘Bout twelve hundred an’ fifty-five,” she drawled.
Tag blinked at the precision. How many owners knew to the pound? He glanced back and saw she’d pushed up her sleeve to consult a man’s wristwatch, one of those ugly black, multifunction sportsman’s timepieces that dwarfed her slender wrist. Her long legs were crossed and one lizardskin boot jiggled nonstop. “Won’t be long now,” he assured her, deciding to leave the special gelding tool out of sight till he’d banished her from the stall. “He’s a thoroughbred?” He didn’t know much about horses, but big and rangily graceful as this one was...
“Yeah.”
“How old?” He drew the bottle of short-acting barbiturate from his bag and shook it. “Twelve?” Pookie’s teeth weren’t those of a young horse.
“Fourteen.”
Based on the weight she’d given, Tag calculated the dose and filled the syringe. He detached the 18-gauge needle and held it between gloved fingers. “Has he ever been raced?” A lot of clapped-out racers ended up as hunters or riding hacks, the lucky ones that didn’t go to the dogs.
“Um...few times.” She sprang to her feet and went to the horse’s head. “We gonna do this or not?”
“Right now.” Joining her at the stud’s forequarters, he swabbed the jugular furrow with alcohol, then pressed down on that vein, nearer the heart. The vessel swelled with impeded blood. He smacked it with the back of his hand, then inserted the needle. No objections from Pookie, who was looking mellower by the minute. “He’s going to go down almost at once when this hits his bloodstream. Keep your hands and feet out of his way.” He attached the syringe, checked that the needle was still in place, then slowly depressed the plunger. “We’ll lay him down, then I want you to wait outside. Won’t take long at all.”
“Nope, I stay here.”
“But—”
“I want to watch.”
Great. He’d be happier fumbling his way through this without an audience, but one look at the angle of her chin, and he knew better than to argue. “Okay. Here we go.” He withdrew the needle. Pookie’s ears pricked, then wobbled. He let out a whuffling breath and swayed on his feet. The gate creaked ominously. “Hands out of the way, Susannah.”
While the stud folded slowly, majestically, front legs first, she crooned wordless sympathy and cupped his muzzle, supporting his massive head as it drooped. Tag bent to watch his back legs, folding nicely, all in order, good...good... That high, whimpering sound scared him for a second, then he realized it was the woman, not the horse. Pookie grunted and settled into the straw with a sleepy grunt.
“Oh, Jeez Louise!” She collapsed bonelessly beside his head.
“He’s fine, Susannah. Don’t worry.” Tag glanced at his watch, then swung the gate out of the way. “Now we’ve got to roll him onto his side.”
They had to brace their feet against the side wall, straighten their legs and put their backs into it. Once Pookie lay limp as a beached whale, Susannah returned to the stallion’s front end. While Tag changed his gloves, she stripped off her jacket. She levered the horse’s head onto her knees—“Lord. he’s heavy! ”—slid the jacket beneath, then settled him again. “Oh, Pookums...”
It wasn’t that warm in here, but Tag couldn’t stop now to give her his own coat to wear. And the stud’s lower eye was protected from the straw, something he should have thought of himself. “Watch his eyes and ears for me, Susannah. If you see any signs he’s waking...” There wasn’t a chance of that, but it would keep her occupied and out of his way.
Still, after a minute’s wordless crooning, she demanded, “What are you doin’ now?”
“Scrubbing him down.” Betadine, alcohol wipe, then Betadine spray. While that dried he checked the stud’s pulse at the back fetlock—slowing, but still well within acceptable range. Then his breathing—shallow, steady and slow. No worries there. Time to rock and roll. Tag reached for his scalpel, then glanced up—to see her small, greenish-white face staring at him from the far end of his patient.
With her pupils dilated, her eyes looked black, not blue. The irises were ringed entirely in white—and locked on the razor-sharp blade in his hand. He’d been an idiot to let her stay. “So here we go,” he murmured in the same soothing voice he saved for scared animals.
“Yeah...” She swallowed audibly. “Y’know, I think... maybe this is—” She vanished from view beyond the stallion’s bulk. Straw rustled.
“Is what?” But she didn’t continue and Tag’s focus narrowed to the task at hand. Steady, steady, easy there, gently... Time was of the essence now. Half his attention was focused on the dark skin under his gloved fingers, half envisioned the vital structures he knew lay beneath it. Nice and easy now...
He didn’t think of the woman again till he reached for the emasculator. If she hadn’t liked the scalpel, she’d like the look of this tool even less. “Won’t be long at all,” he murmured comfortingly, sparing her a glance.
Beyond the dark rise of the stallion’s shoulder, then the descending curve of his neck, he saw an upturned hand, like a starfish flung down in the straw. A swath of red-gold crinkled silk spilled over a mound of dried grass, then vanished from sight. “Susannah?” He couldn’t see more from this angle without standing. Her fingers curled limp and unmoving. “Susannah?”
There came a faint sigh and a murmur. Her hand flexed slightly, then relaxed. Out as cold as her four-legged friend.
And speaking of which, the clock was ticking. Tag had seen enough people faint in vet school not to worry about her. She hadn’t fallen far, and she’d fallen on straw. And if she was this squeamish she’d be happier out of it. Teach me to let amateurs in the op room! He grabbed the special stainless-steel pliers and went back to work.
Eight minutes later when he set the instrument aside, she still hadn’t stirred. Tag did his final cleanup, a last inch-byinch inspection, a quick stick of long-acting antibiotic to the rump, then nodded. A good job, if he said so himself. Even fussbudget Higgins would have had to agree.
“Susannah?” He hid his tools from view, then stood, stretched and had to smile. Oh, Susannah! She was as irresistible as a basket of golden retriever pups. She’d toppled straight back into the straw, one arm flung overhead, the other resting below her small breasts. She breathed deeply, easily, soft lips barely parted. Faint had flowed straight into sleep, it looked like. Drove all night, he remembered. He knelt beside her and clamped his fingers on his knees to keep from smoothing her hair.
It was like a run of rough water on a mountain stream, riffling and rumpling and cascading down sunstruck rocks, an eddy of smooth gold here, a swirl of copper and sunshine there. It almost begged a man to thread it through his fingers, use it to tip back her head for a—
“Bad idea,” she muttered without opening her eyes. “Oh, real bad!” She scowled, wrenched her head to one side, her lashes shivering.
Damn, was she psychic on top of all else? Tag hadn’t blushed since seventh grade, the time that little redheaded substitute teacher caught him peeking down her—“What is?” he said guiltily.
“Don’t!” She opened her eyes, stared blankly at a world of straw for a second, then swung her gaze up to his. “Don’t do it. I changed my mind!” She latched onto his jacket lapels, hauling him down and herself to a half-sit, their faces mere inches apart.
“You mean...?” His stomach did a slow, nasty somersault, and it wasn’t just her breasts nearly grazing his chest or the tip of her tongue glossing delectable lips. “Susannah, you mean don’t do your stud?”
She nodded violently. He slipped an arm under her shoulders before she choked him. “Uh, Susannah...it’s a bit late for that now.” All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, babe... “The Pook’ll be neighing tenor from now on.”
“Ohhh...” She squeezed her eyes tight and simply lay there, letting him support her weight for a long moment. “Oh.” She drew a shuddering breath and opened her eyes. “Right.”
He blinked, then realized. She meant “right,” not “rot.” She gave him a wavering smile and shrugged as he lifted her upright. “Oh, well, it was just a thought...”
Tag was having second thoughts, too. Malpractice suits against vets weren’t as rare as they once had been. Trusting idiot, he hadn’t even made her fill out the forms beforehand as he should have. If she wanted to claim otherwise, he had no legal proof that she’d requested this procedure and not a tonsillectomy. Higgins would have called him twelve kinds of lust-struck idiot for this oversight, thinking with his—
“Never mind.” She braced her arms behind her and he let her go. She glanced around. “How is he?”
“Couldn’t be better.” One dark ear twitched at their voices, then flopped again. He’d finished in the nick of time. Tag brought his gaze warily back to her face. Her color was returning to normal, well, maybe a bit pinker than normal, but whatever she was thinking he was pretty sure it wasn’t lawsuits. He pulled a wisp of straw from her hair and she gave him a shaky smile. It would be all right, thank God. She might be a waffler, but she wasn’t a blamer. “You’re from Georgia?”
Her foxy brows drew together. “Texas.” A two-and-a-half syllable word, the way she said it. “Te-exas,” pronounced with pride and mild reproof, as if he’d asked an angel for her address. Left hand of God, of course, silly. Where did you think?
Was it an ethical blooper to kiss your patient’s owner? And did he care? Tag wasn’t the outlaw he’d been in his youth, but he still followed his own counsel more often than not when it came to rules.
On the other hand, one of his personal principles was that you didn’t kiss a cornered woman. Not the first time, anyway, before you knew how she felt about it. He helped her to her feet, stood looking down at her. Her eyes weren’t blue in this light, but violet. “If you’re from Texas, then what’s a blue norther?” He remembered puzzling over the phrase in a paperback western he’d read that summer he’d spent locked up in reform school.
She laughed. “Big winter storm, comes whoopin’ down out of the Panhandle. The whole sky goes purply blue and the horse trough freezes over. Why?”
“Dunnow. Just crossed my mind.” Pookie lifted his head and blew, and the moment passed. They helped him roll awkwardly to an upright position. After he’d considered that woozily for a minute, he snorted and struggled to his feet. Stood wide-legged and swaying.
Out in the corridor, the phone rang. “Be right back.” If that was Higgins, he was too late.
It was Carol Anne. “Doctor Taggart. Mrs. Hazard and her Rotweiler have been waiting to see you for ten minutes.”
“Tell her five more.” Tag returned to Pookie’s owner. “He needs to be quiet for the next hour or two, Susannah. So why don’t you come up to the clinic? Carol Anne can find you a cup of coffee and—”
She shook her head. “I’d rather keep an eye on him.”
“Suit yourself.” She was a stubborn little cuss, but that was part of her charm, the variety—softness and toughness, flashes of fire and hints of tenderness. He shrugged out of his leather jacket as she turned back to her horse. He probably shouldn’t do this, but... He settled his coat around her, smiling down at her as she glanced back over her shoulder, surprised. “Meantime, this’ll keep you warm.”
Her lips parted as if to protest—then closed again and curved softly. She put up her arms like a trusting child and he helped her into its sleeves. Then she rotated under his hands to face him. “I want to thank you, Dr. Taggart.”
“It was my pleasure.” He shouldn’t push it. She had to be beat if she’d driven all night, but he didn’t want to let her get away. She was new in town and he meant to stake his claim before another man spotted her. “Once you’ve settled Pook into his new home, how about coming out to supper with me? Something simple. I know it’s been a long day and you...” He paused as her face closed down. Stupid, you should have waited!
Her shoulders stiffened under his fingers, subtly shrugging him off. “That’s most kind, Doctor.” Her drawl was more pronounced, as if she drifted southward away from him. “But truth is...I’m married.” She dropped her chin and fumbled with the zipper of his coat “B‘sides, I don’t much like men, now’days. Not that way.” She scuffed a boot in the straw. “But I appreciate the offer.” She looked up suddenly, jaw set, eyes direct and purply blue, the color of a freezing Texas wind.
“Right” He felt as if she’d slapped his face. No, he’d run head-on into her hand—she hadn’t raised it against him. He’d been the one who’d come on like a half-grown, bumptious puppy, sniffing after his first bitch in heat. She’d simply needed a doctor. Married, standing there straight and small in his jacket. “Right, well...” Crap. Stick your neck out this far, there was no way to retreat without looking a fool. He headed out the door. “Come up to the office if you need anything. I’ll check back in an hour, see how he’s doing.”
Or you could always come up and pay. If it wasn’t love at first sight, then he supposed it was business. Carol Anne would certainly see it that way. For all he cared, Susannah Mack could have a freebie.
CHAPTER THREE
HE TURNED UP THE HEAT on his way out, stalked past her trailer. Something odd about that... He looked back and saw what his subconscious must have noted an hour before, then skated blithely past in favor of a honey-mouth drawl and a pair of big, anxious blue eyes. There was more mud on the license plate than there was on the trailer.
Fortuitous splash when she drove through a puddle? Or... He’d used that trick himself a few times, back in his carcollecting days that summer he’d turned thirteen. Not that every cop didn’t know it, too.
Tag walked back to the trailer and brushed his fingers across frigid metal. Dried mud sifted down. A Kentucky plate. But Susannah had said “Texas” like she meant it, the way a U.S. Marine said “America.”
She hadn’t mentioned where from down south she’d departed yesterday, he reminded himself. Just because she was a Texan didn’t mean she still lived in sight of the Alamo. Maybe he was imagining things—there was nearly as much mud splashed on the truck as the plate. Nothing but hurt pride talking, he mocked himself. There’s no crime in turning down a date, is there?
He put her deliberately out of mind for the next half hour. Then she was driven out in a rush, as Champion Ophelia’s Flowers of Elsinore decided to drop her first litter of bluebloods. Though the brindle Great Dane was in superb condition and gave no indications of needing a vet’s assistance, Elsinore Kennel was Green Mountain Clinic’s most valued account. Tag had promised months ago that he’d attend the blessed event.
Stopping only to scribble a prescription for Pookie’s painkiller, he left Carol Anne to cancel the rest of his appointments, then roared off to the kennel. The afternoon blurred into a succession of squirming, squeaking, blind furry bundles, each needing its nostrils wiped clear and its ribs gently massaged with a soft cloth before it was presented to the anxious mother and her exuberant breeder.
Normally Tag loved whelpings, but this time, tired as he was and still smarting from rejection, he simply gritted his teeth and endured. Sometime between the eighth and ninth puppy he began to watch the clock. By now it would be safe to move Pookie. Carol Anne could give Susannah her postop instructions, but had she gotten the name of the stable where Susannah would be keeping her stud? Gelding, he reminded himself.
Because even if the woman was now off-limits, Pookie was still his patient. If Susannah didn’t bring the horse back for Tag’s inspection tomorrow, he’d have to hunt her down. There were only five stables he could think of in the neighborhood.
The sun had set and the cold clamped down like a vise of black iron when he escaped the kennel. Numb with fatigue, he paused by his truck, wondering where he’d left his jacket, then remembered. Susannah. She’d have left it with Carol Anne, he supposed, and felt a moment’s quickening. Would it now smell of her—flowers, horse and bourbon?
Get a grip, Taggart! Jaw clenched to keep his teeth from chattering, he drove toward the clinic and his cottage behind. Past suppertime and he’d skipped lunch, he realized. There were store-bought pizzas in his freezer. Flip one of those in the oven, down a beer or two tonight—he deserved it—then to bed. Tomorrow was anoth—He took his foot off the accelerator.
Light glowed in the clinic windows, though it was past six. And Carol Anne’s ancient Ford was still parked out front. As he came through the door she looked up from the other side of the reception counter. “Emergency?” He supposed he was good for one more.
“Not...exactly.”
“She left her horse here?” he guessed, and felt a sudden, ridiculous surge of hope and pleasure.
“Huh! They drove off not half an hour after you left.”
He frowned. “You didn’t tell her it would be better to—”
“I did and she wouldn’t. Said she had to hit the road and that was that.”
He’d met plenty of self-centered owners these past few months. He’d not have put Susannah among them. He supposed her horse would be all right as long as she took the curves carefully. Still, he didn’t like it.
“She asked me the best road to take for Boston,” Carol Anne added.
“Boston!” Two hours to the southeast? What the hell had she been doing up here, if—“She didn’t say anything about a stable here in town?”
Carol Anne shook her head with grim satisfaction.
Well...that was that, then. He might as well have dreamed her. No, she’d left him—or actually taken—one thing to remember her by. Tag stared at the coatrack standing in the corner beyond the file cabinets. “Where’s my coat?” He liked that coat, an old leather bomber jacket, Second World War, which he’d found in a Boston army-navy store his last year in high school. He’d shed blood for that coat once in a bar, the time a drunken biker took a fancy to it. And now Susannah had it off him for nothing but a smile? Left it in the barn, he assured himself, swinging toward the door. She wouldn’t have—
“That was your jacket she was wearing?” Carol Anne gave a cackling laugh. “Well, that’s the topper on a day to remember! You sure can pick ’em, Doc.” She turned toward the rack to pull down her own quilted overcoat.
“She pay with cash or a check?” If she’d paid by check, he could track her down through her bank. He wanted that jacket back, by God, and more than that, he wanted one last look at her face. Clearly he’d missed something the first time.
“Oh, no, something better.” Carol Anne shrugged into her coat. “She was fresh out of cash, is how she put it. And I told her we don’t take out-of-town checks.”
“You could have made an exception.”
“Ha! I said she could put it on a card, and she gave me a butter-wouldn’t-melt look and said something seemed to be wrong with her cards.”
“And so?” He wasn’t going to like the punch line if Carol Anne had stayed past closing to deliver it.
“So I said, let me try, anyway.”
“And she didn’t have any,” Tag muttered to himself. She drove around the country, ripping off gelding services from sucker vets? What kind of a con was that?
“She had an American Express and two Visa gold cards.”
But? Tag crossed his arms on the counter and waited for it.
“Every one of which had been canceled.”
“Right. Canceled.” He rubbed the back of his aching neck.. “So you told her goodbye and God bless?” She could have had his services for the asking. Could have had much more than that, if she’d wanted. There’d been no need to rip him off.
“You must be kidding. I asked Ms. Colton just how she intended to pay in that case—”
“Colton.” He was missing something here. Had missed a whole truckload of somethings. Must have left his brains in bed this morning, when he rolled out at 3 a.m. to take that call about the cat. “Colton? Her name was Mack.”
“Susannah M. Colton, according to her cards. I wrote it down here, along with her address.”
Tag stifled an impulse to lean across the counter and strangle his assistant. Nothing was wrong, nothing really. Susannah had left him a way to reach her. Had no doubt been too flustered by Carol Anne’s evil eye to remember his jacket She’d drop it in the mail when she’d reached her destination. “May I have it?” He tried for exaggerated patience, but it came out closer to a snarl.
“You surely may.” The med tech plucked a sheet of paper from an under-counter drawer, then something shiny. “And here’s how she paid.” A cold, tiny object was dropped into his outstretched palm. “She said to send her the change care of this address—” Carol Anne waved her paper and smirked “—once we’ve hocked it.”
Tag lifted the ring to the light. Fire glimmered, then flashed. “A diamond!” he said blankly. Big enough to choke a goose. Engagement ring, he supposed. Married, but she didn’t like men, she’d said, not that way.
“And if you believe that, Doc, you shouldn’t be let outdoors alone. It’ll be zirconium, I guarantee, worth fifty if we’re lucky.”
Had she been wearing this ring when he met her? No. He’d have noticed. Tag snatched the paper from Carol Anne’s fingers and read:
Susannah M. Colton
Fleetfoot Farm
RR 1
Versailles, KY 36502
Fleetfoot Farm. It rang a distant, somehow ominous, bell.
“Five cancellations,” Carol Anne muttered. “Doc Higgins will have kittens when I...”
They both looked up as headlights swept the room, followed by a second pair, then a third. Brakes yelped in the parking lot. Doors slammed. Footsteps approached at a run.
Tag groaned. As Carol Anne had said, this was a day to remember. And clearly it wasn’t done yet. He dropped Susannah’s ring into his pocket and clenched his fingers around it. Three cars at once, so this wouldn’t be a run-of-the mill vet’s emergency—an injured cat or a puppy with fits. Another car roared into the lot. He drew a breath and headed for the door. You heard of such crises in vet school. They were every beginner vet’s worst nightmare, a what-if scenario that if you were lucky, would never happen to you: A car wrecks on a nearby road—something messy and terrible, a head-on involving a school bus or a motorcycle.
And the way the nightmare always plays out, the local M.D.’s away or falling-down drunk. So they turn to the next best thing, a veterinarian. So here we go. People were just big furless animals, at heart, and if there was one thing he did well in life, this was it. He could help.
As Tag threw open the door a fifth car wheeled in off the road... No, this was a van. With the logo of the local TV station emblazoned along its side. Lights flashed in his face—he blinked and took a step backward. Not a wreck—a media feeding frenzy.
With its prey in sight. “Dr. Taggart?”
“Dr. Taggart!”
“Sir! How does it feel to have gelded Payback, the finest racing sire ever bred in America?”
No. No way. Not possible.
“Doctor, were you aware that Payback was insured for some sixty million dollars with Lloyd’s of...”
Pookie. Pookums. Payback. He’d never been to a horse race, but even he had heard that name.
A brunette in a tailored suit stormed the steps, fluffed her hair and spun toward the onlookers. Red lights gleamed like weasel eyes as cameras rolled. “We’re talking tonight with Dr. Richard Taggart, small-town veterinarian in southern Vermont,” she declared, and thrust a microphone under his nose. “Dr. Taggart, when America thinks horse racing in the twentieth century, only three names come to mind. Secretariat. Ruffian. And greatest of them all, the stallion Payback, Triple Crown winner, five-time Eclipse Horse of the Year, sire of some nineteen millionaire offspring, crown jewel of worldfamous Fleetfoot Farm in Kentucky, who up until today commanded a stud fee of four hundred thousand dollars per mare! So would you care to explain to racing fans everywhere why you gelded...”
Voices receded into a yammering din of white noise. Tag stared blindly into the blaze of lights. As if she stood just beyond them, meeting his gaze—and laughing. Laughing at him with her honeyed, lying, beautiful mouth and her eyes like a Texas blue norther. Well, she’d sure blown his life away! Seventeen years of it, since the day he’d decided to become a vet, instead of a car thief
“Sir, Stephen Colton, owner of Payback, states that you were never authorized to perform this procedure, which renders his stallion utterly worthless. Would you care to explain why you—”
“No comment.” Not for you, bitch. He stared out past the lights. Not for any of you vultures! He’d save his comments and his own questions for the one woman who could answer them, once he got his hands around her lovely neck. He winced as another flash went off, then gazed steadily into the cameras. Because somewhere out there, she’d be watching. Read it in my eyes, Tex, wherever you are. You can run, you can hide, but I’m coming to get you. Gonna get you, babe, if it’s the last thing I do!
CHAPTER FOUR
PAYBACK WAS THE LEAD story on the eleven o’clock news that night, and the network anchor reported it with a stern, semisorrowful expression that failed to hide his glee in relating such a juicy scandal.
Phone off the hook and with emergency bottle of scotch near at hand, Tag shoved a tape into his VCR, gazed owlishly at all its buttons, then nodded to himself and hit Record. Facts could be weapons and he didn’t mean to miss a single one.
“In a bizarre and still-breaking story,” intoned the anchorman, “NBC News has learned that sometime late last night, Susannah Mack Colton, wife of bluegrass millionaire Stephen Colton, secretly removed the world famous thoroughbred stud Payback from his stable at Fleetfoot Farm in Kentucky. The former exercise girl drove the Triple Crown winner and five-time Eclipse Horse of the Year to a small town in Vermont, where she paid veterinarian Richard D. Taggart to... geld the famous stallion.” Brief pause to let the magnitude of this outrageous act sink in around the nation.
“Seen here in his unforgettable Kentucky Derby victory, headed home eighteen incredible lengths ahead of the competition—” the camera shifted to a clip of a chocolate-brown stallion covering the ground in gigantic, effortless strides, a jockey crouched high on his withers with whip hand unmoving, while in the background a grandstand seethed with silently screaming racegoers “—Payback has long since retired to stand at stud at Fleetfoot Farm, renowned racing stable in the Kentucky bluegrass.” The view shifted to an overhead shot, showing the rest of the Derby field laboring farther and farther behind, then Payback sweeping smoothly under the wire at the finish line, while the anchorman continued off camera, “As top racing sire in America for the last eight years, Payback commanded a stud fee of four hundred thousand dollars... per mare.”
The camera returned to the studio and the anchorman. “And in an average breeding season, the stallion serviced one hundred of the finest thoroughbred broodmares in the world.” The newsman lifted his craggy brows to fix his audience with a significant gaze. “Meaning, folks, that this equine Romeo’s earnings averaged out to some forty million dollars per year!”
The anchorman touched the tiny receiver in his ear and his smile broadened to a blissful grin, immediately stifled. “In fact, NBC has just learned that one of the holders of a lifetime breeding right in Payback is Qeen Elizabeth II of England, herself an ardent racing fan.
“According to owner Stephen Colton, Payback was insured by Lloyd’s of London for sixty million dollars. But with his gelding today, this stud of the century’s value has been effectively reduced to... zero.
“The question that racing fans everywhere are demanding be answered tonight is why? Why did Susannah Mack Colton, er...pluck this fow-legged golden goose?”
The camera shifted from the newsman’s wounded perplexity to a shot of Susannah, standing somewhere in a parking lot, gripping Payback’s halter. The camera lights made her eyes seem enormous, bruised by shadows, but her chin was tipped to a familiar angle of defiance. “When Mrs. Colton, Payback at her side, was asked that question during a press conference she called in Boston earlier this evening, she had only this to say...” The sound switched to a taped recording, and Tag winced at the hunting-pack yammer of four reporters shouting questions at once.
An insistent tenor rose above the others as a microphone was thrust into the picture. “But why, Mrs. Colton? Why did you have Payback gelded?”
The gelding’s ears flattened back and he lunged teeth-first at the encroaching mike. Susannah staggered, then dug in her heels and hauled his nose around. “Why don’t you go ask my husband?” she cried over her shoulder. Payback shook his head again, shaking her like a rag doll.
The view swung wildly, showing reporters scattering like a flock of panicked pigeons, then steadied on Susannah, who stood poised and alert, facing Payback as he reared. When his flailing forefeet touched earth, she closed in and caught his halter, backing him away from her inquisitors.
“Damn, Susannah!” Tag muttered. If the horse yanked her under his hooves...
But she had him under control again and she glanced back at the cameras. “Now that’s enough! He’s tired and ya’ll got what you came for.”
“Just one more question, Mrs. Colton!” called the tenor, a short, hatchet-faced man. “Who did the actual gelding?”
“I told ya’ll, that doesn’t matter. What matters is—”
“You phoned the Boston Globe this afternoon from the Green Mountain Clinic in Vermont.”
“H-h-how—” She stood, blinking in the harsh lights, mouth ajar.
“Caller ID, you nitwit!” Tag groaned and gripped a handful of his own hair. She’d set up her news conference from the barn phone—and obviously never stopped to think that any half-competent investigative reporter would surely have—
“So if you know-it-alls know it already,” she cried, then staggered as Payback sidestepped, “what are you asking me for? Oh, what’s the—” She wheeled her horse in a circle. The picture wobbled as the cameraman retreated from Payback’s wicked back heels, then the scene ended—to be replaced by Tag himself, scowling from the top step of the clinic.
“Good God!” Tag thought. He looked like that? Ax murderer at bay?
“We asked the same question of Dr. Richard Taggart. Why would a reputable veterinarian agree to geld the finest racing sire ever bred in America—and without consent of his owner?”
“No comment!” Tag’s image snarled at the camera.
Tag moaned and dropped his head in his hands. With a few final words promising to keep viewers informed of latebreaking developments, the anchor wrapped up—to be replaced by a cheery jingle assuring Tag that if he used a certain breath mint, all his troubles would be over.
Tag grabbed the remote, slapped the mute, groped blindly for his Scotch. Reputable vet! Funny how they could say one thing and mean precisely the other. And once they’d put their spin on the situation... Maybe he should have talked when they were hollering their idiot questions.
His stomach revolted at the thought of himself, pleading his innocence to those carrion pickers, while half the country gleefully watched. Don’t whine, and never explain to strangers was more his style.
“Tomorrow,” he consoled himself. He’d talk with Glassman, the lawyer he’d consulted when he’d bought into Higgins’s practice. And he’d talk to Higgins—if the old man hadn’t suffered another coronary tonight watching the news.
He looked up at the TV in time to see a hulking policeman palm the top of Susannah’s crinkled-silk head, then tuck her neatly into the back of a patrol car. “Crap!” He snatched up the remote, jabbed buttons.
“—on charges of horse theft,” concluded the announcer, while behind glass, Susannah lunged for a nonexistent door handle, then rapped furiously on the window. “Just one more twist in this bizarre tale about a legendary racehorse, a jockey’s beautiful daughter from Texas and a bluegrass millionaire,” observed a voice-over as the police car set off.
The camera closed in greedily on Susannah’s face. Her lips were moving—she was calling someone? Cursing someone? Her husband, her lawyer, God...all three at once? Her expression was angry and urgent and somehow forlorn. The car turned a corner, and the camera cut away to a hotel fire in Chicago.
“Serves you right, babe. Lock you up and throw away the key, for all I care.” Not that they would. Some five-hundred-dollar an hour lawyer would be getting her out on bail in no time. Millionaires’ wives didn’t spend the night in jail.
“More’s the pity.” Tag lifted his glass to take another swallow—then deliberately set it aside. What he needed tomorrow was a clear head.
Today he’d taken it on the chin, but tomorrow was his turn. Time to start punching back. Susannah Mack Colton might be a career wrecker—a walking one-woman demolition derby!—but he’d worked too hard these last seventeen years to go down without a fight. A street fight, South Boston style. He might have cleaned up his act since his teen years, but he hadn’t forgotten a move. “Messed with the wrong vet, Blue Eyes, I’m telling you.”
So to bed, then tomorrow.
TOMORROW WAS EVEN WORSE.
It started with The Today Show and an exclusive interview with Stephen Colton, Susannah’s husband. Hearing the intro, Tag dashed in from the kitchen where he was scrambling eggs. A wide-eyed woman, he couldn’t recall her name, leaned toward a man sitting at ease in the network’s New York City studio. She rested a commiserating hand on the sleeve of his perfectly tailored suit. “I understand that your marriage was an unquestionable love match, Mr. Colton. Oh, may I call you Stephen? Yes, well, I believe Susannah was an exercise girl in your stables, Stephen, when you first met?”
Colton shook his head. Razor-cut dark blond hair, shining and flawlessly parted, didn’t stir. The guy looked to be a few years older than his own age of thirty and Tag supposed women would think him handsome, in spite of those wirerim glasses. Pretty boy, would be the male opinion. Certainly it was his.
Colton’s smile was gently nostalgic. “In the stables of a business associate of mine in Texas. I flew down to buy a promising filly.” His eyes crinkled. “Came home with two, instead.”
“Self-satisfied ass!” Tag sat and turned up the sound while the interviewer chuckled appreciatively, then switched back to Deeply Concerned. “It sounds like Cinderella and her prince! A girl who loved horses and a man who bred and raced some of the nation’s finest. So what went wrong with this perfect fairy tale?”
Colton shrugged his pinstriped shoulders. “Why do people fall out of love? Who’s to say? We came from entirely different circumstances...”
“Different worlds,” crooned the woman.
He smiled sadly. “Mint juleps in silver goblets versus Lone Star beer in longneck bottles. I suppose I was a fool to think she could ever...” He shrugged again. “Anyway, we gave it our best shot for two years, but it was time to move on. At least...I thought so.”
The woman leaned forward, hanging on his every word, her expression avid. “You mean...?”
His good humor faded. “I mean, I asked Susannah for a divorce two nights ago.”
The interviewer quivered like a springer spaniel with a rabbit in sight. “The night that she...took Payback and drove away?”
“She stole Payback later that night. Yes.”
Tag swore softly, savagely. You used me for that, Susannah?
“So it was your asking for a divorce that triggered her...”
“That and the news—which I suppose I didn’t deliver as tactfully as I might have done. Perhaps that bit could have waited till later. I also told her that I planned to remarry. That I’d fallen in love with another woman.”
“Ohhh...” The interviewer sounded halfway to orgasm. “I see. Yes. So this was an act of...spite!”
“Spite, malice and revenge,” Colton agreed in his Kentucky gentleman’s drawl. It was quicker and more mannered than Susannah’s breezy twang.
“Payback, Texas style!”
“I’m afraid they do believe in getting their own back down there. Don’t mess with Texans, or however it goes. I certainly knew Susannah had a temper and I suppose I expected... some sort of tantrum. Maybe a few dishes smashed or possibly the whole table service, but...”
“But to...smash the finest racehorse you ever bred! That anyone in America ever bred! Payback was a national treasure. I think you could say he belonged to...all of us.” The interviewer held that thought for three beats of nationwide mourning, then cocked her head and wrinkled her charming nose. “You know, Freud’s somewhat out of fashion nowadays, but might one argue that there’s almost something... symbolic in a scorned wife’s gelding—” she giggled “—her husband’s most treasured stud.”
Colton’s eyebrows shot up, but apparently he decided not to take offense. His smirk was confiding. Merrily roguish. “Ah, but I have others!”
“And a spare set of gold-plated balls for dress occasions, rich boy?” Tag snarled.
The interviewer giggled. “Other stallions, you mean!”
What had Susannah seen in this...this... Tag’s head jerked around at the smell of—“Damn!” The eggs! He bolted for his smoky kitchen.
THE DAY SLID STRAIGHT downhill from there. Reporters were camped out at the back door of the clinic when Tag went in to work. He had to wade through the baying pack, hands jammed in his pockets to keep from punching the eager faces thrust into his own.
“Dr. Taggart!”
“Dr. Taggart, would you care to comment on—”
“Dr. Taggart, were you aware that—”
“Move it or lose it, pal.” He gained the back door and unlocked it, opened it wide enough to slide in sideways—
“Taggart, how much did Mrs. Colton have to pay you to get you to geld Payback?”
An ice cube slithered down his spine. They couldn’t think he’d—He halted, half in, half out the door. “We charged her our standard fee for—” His heart dropped a beat as he remembered. At least they’d tried to charge her the usual fee for that procedure. God, Susannah’s ring! Let it be zirconium, oh, please God!
He had a feeling God had gone south on vacation this week.
He slammed the door on his own aborted statement and locked it. Fists pounded, voices rose indignantly. Did they think they owned him? If Payback was a national treasure, then what was he? National whipping boy? He half ran toward the office. “Carol Anne!”
She sat behind her counter with a stunned and mutinous look on her face, her hair escaping its pins. Beyond the locked front door, he could hear more of the same mob. “Carol Anne, did you tell anyone about the ring? Her ring?”
“And good morning to you, too, doctor.”
“I’m sorry, good morning. The ring—did you tell anyone?”
Her glower turned to a blinking stillness. She sniffed, opened the appointment book and buried her nose in it.
Control, control. If he shook her she’d quit. “Who, Carol?” She flipped to the next page, as if today could simply be skipped over. He leaned above her, a silent growl vibrating deep in his throat. She hunched her shoulders. “Doc Higgins, okay?”
Higgins wasn’t so bad. Higgins was as stingy with his words as he was with his gauze pads. He wouldn’t—
“—and my sister,” she added in a mutter, not looking up.
Wonderful. “All right, I want you to toddle straight out that door and tell her—”
“She’s already gone in to work. Her shift starts at six.”
Carol Anne’s sister was a waitress at the best place—the only place—in town to get an early breakfast At six this morning the diner’s counter would have been lined elbow to elbow with newsmen, sucking down coffee and local gossip. “Cripes. Then I want you to call her and—”
“Call—ha! I unplugged the phone. Somebody’s got an automatic dialler locked in on us. You can’t call in or out.” She rubbed her nose and looked up. Her eyes were red-rimmed. “And you know what’s on our answering machine from last night? Loonytunes calling in from all over, threatening to burn us down, or blow us up, or do to you what you did to that stupid nag!” She snatched a tissue from her pocket. “If you’d only listened to me...”
All right, forget the ring. By now that horse was out of the barn. “What did Higgins say?” He’d not been able to face the old man last night. Nor call, not with his own line jammed with incoming viciousness.
“He said you should’ve listened to me.”
Tag counted backward from ten, then slowly up again. “What else?”
“He said you’d better get yourself a good lawyer and it better not be on his dime.”
“I was going to phone Glassman at nine. Guess I’ll have to go see him, first break in the schedule I get.”
That break came earlier than expected. The first appointment of the day was a no-show. Simply forgot, or something more ominous? The second, Mrs. Wiggly and her cat, Sherman, arrived on time, but after they’d run the gauntlet of newshounds, Mrs. W was near tears and Sherman was doing a Persian variation of the Saber Dance.
When the third and fourth appointments were no-shows, it began to look like a trend. The fifth was an overweight dachshund, who bit a newsman on his way in the door. The reporter threatened to sue. Tag came out and offered to punch his nose for him, which seemed to cheer the reporter and his photographer no end, after which Tag completed Bismarck’s exam, then declared the clinic closed for the morning. He hung a sign in the window and left Carol Anne trying to phone out to cancel the rest of their appointments.
Because even more than loyal patients Tag needed a good lawyer.
He took the long way into town, which was down a logging road, then up over a rocky hillside pasture, thankful that his new truck had four-wheel drive. By the time he reached Main Street he’d lost his pursuers. Shutting the outer door to Glassman’s office behind him, Tag breathed a sigh of relief-Ollie, Ollie oxen free—then grimaced as he remembered who’d said that last.
Glassman’s receptionist looked up with a smile. It froze on her face.
“Hi, Barbara. I know I don’t have an appointment, but...” He gave her his best grin. They’d had a flirtation going while Glassman had been drawing up his contracts to buy into Higgins’s practice. He’d considered asking her out, but somehow couldn’t see himself ever telling Barbara about the car collection he’d started at age thirteen. Barb believed in The Law, not the unbearable beauty of Porsches.
“I’m afraid—”
“Barb, if he could see me for even a minute. I’m in the soup. I guess you know, if you saw—”
“I did.” She shot a glance over her shoulder toward the inner office. “But I’m afraid we—he—can’t help you.” She lowered her voice. “He took a retainer this morning. The other side.”
Tag stared at her blankly.
“Colton. Stephen Colton,” she hissed. “He’s retained us.”
Colton? Here? “To do what?”
“I’ve no idea, Tag, and if I had, I couldn’t tell you. Colton’s man showed up waving a check for five thousand half an hour ago. They’re in there now, so if you don’t mind...”
“Yeah. Sure.” Just like that, wave a check and he was the enemy? Well, hell, there were other lawyers.
THERE WERE THREE OTHERS in town—and Colton had retained all three. For a pretty boy, he played dirty. Outside the office of the third and last, Tag stopped to rub his aching neck. Okay, so now what? Drive to Bennington?
But would a small-town lawyer do the job, if Colton intended to go for blood? Maybe he should hire a Boston heavy?
But a big-time legal shark would do his own bloodletting, and Tag had zip to spare. He’d used every dollar he’d saved since graduation to buy his first slice of Higgins’s practice.
And surely it was too soon to be talking lawsuits? First he should talk to the guy. Colton might be a snob, but he hadn’t looked stupid or unreasonable. And his real quarrel was with his crazy wife, not an innocent bystander. Find a phone then, that was next. Once Colton had heard Tag’s side of the story...
It took him eighteen tries to get past a busy signal. When someone picked up the phone at last, Tag drew a thankful breath.
“May I speak to Mr. Colton, please?”
“I’m afraid he’s not available just now.” Another pattering Kentucky drawl—a woman’s, sweetly professional. “But may I take a message?”
He wasn’t leaving his apologies and regrets with a secretary. “Yes, um, would you tell him Dr. Richard Taggart called and that I urgently need to talk with him? I’ll keep calling on the hour, every hour, till we connect.” No use giving his own number, since the line was jammed with crank callers.
That done, and maybe a call was all it would take to straighten this nightmare out, Tag headed back to his clinic.
Where Carol Anne’s car was no longer parked in front of the building. Gone home to lunch, he supposed. But like piranhas gathering, the number of reporters had increased. They turned as one when he parked, beamed as they recognized him, but rather than rushing to meet him, they held their ground by his front door.
As Tag reached the steps, he saw why. A burly stranger was screwing something into the clinic’s doorjamb—a steel hasp. “You! What d’you think you’re doing?” He jabbed an elbow in someone’s ribs, shoved another aside, gained the top step—just as a second man snapped a padlock in place.
Locking him out of his own clinic! For a roaring moment, the world went bloodred. Tag grabbed the lock man’s collar with both hands. “You bastard!” He hauled him up on tiptoe.
“I wouldn’t!” squeaked the man. His helper loomed at Tag’s shoulder. Laying a hand on Tag’s biceps, he dug in stubby fingers and breathed meaningfully in his ear, “I really wouldn’t, Dr. Taggart. You’ve got trouble enough already.”
So what’s a little more? Still, Tag let go of .Squeaky. “What the hell d’you think you’re doing, locking my—”
The other man—a lawyer, who else would wear a threepiece suit in this town?—shook his head. “Not anymore, it isn’t. Dr. Higgins sold out.”
Sold out? Tag stood, sucking for a breath that wouldn’t come. Sold, just like that? That fast? “To...to whom?” But that was obvious. How many millionaires had he pissed off this week?
“The FYA Corporation of Delaware.”
Colton’s cover. Had to be. “Higgins didn’t own it all to sell! I own—”
“One-fifth of the goodwill—and none of the property. Yes, we know that. And you’re welcome to take your share of the patients and practice anywhere else in this town, or any town you please.”
Right, practice small-animal medicine without a clinic? Without supplies, instruments, exam rooms, a phone? Using what for money in the meantime?
Higgins’s accountant had divided the business that way for some arcane tax reason that Tag had never bothered to follow. The deal had required that Tag first buy the clinic’s patients, its goodwill, while he rented use of the facilities from Higgins. Once he owned a hundred percent of the goodwill, they’d agreed that then he’d start buying the property, using his share of monthly earnings to do so, while the old man phased out of the business. In five years he’d have owned it all.
The lawyer turned to his heavy. “Leo, if I may have that box?” The thug scooped up a box that had been sitting on the stoop by his size fourteen feet and passed it over. The lawyer presented it with a tiny smile. “We cleaned out your desk for you. And your diplomas. When you wish to pick up your share of the patient files, and one-fifth of the Rolodex, then please call my office.” He placed a business card on top of the box Tag had automatically accepted. “We’ll be keeping the books for a few weeks while they’re audited. But once that’s done, then—”
“Sure.” Oblivious to the flashes going off as cameras recorded the awful moment, Tag watched the pair go. Just like that, they could chop him off at the knees?
He could feel a howl rising in his throat. Could see himself tossing the box aside—all that remained of his hopes in one pathetic box?—and hurling himself on the departing shyster’s back. Dragging him down. Ripping and tearing and gouging as he’d learned long ago on the street....
What d’you think this is for, Taggart my man? Knuckles gently rapping his forehead. Tag blinked, the words drifting back over the years one more time when he needed them. Jake talking, the big young counselor at the reform school, been-there smile, words that could cut through Tag’s rage when no one else could reach him. You use that to think with, kid. It’s not decoration. Fists are for fools and losers, and that’s not you, Taggart.
So Tag drew a breath and nodded to someone not there. Fists jammed in his pockets, he stood by his padlocked door while the cameras probed his face. While his bright future drove away in a shiny blue BMW. Blinking hard, he looked up at the lowering sky. Once upon a time, he wouldn’t have been able to resist a car like that. But he was somebody else now.
At least, as long as they’d let him be, he was.
A flake of snow drifted down...then another. Winter.
CHAPTER FIVE
A PHONE CALL to Carol Anne, Tag told himself, as he strode up the walk to his cottage. Remind her to feed the stray tomcat while he was away. Presumably Higgins could get her past that padlock. Then throw together a couple of days’ change of clothes. It might take that long in Boston to find the right lawyer.
Once he’d hired his big-city shark, he’d worry about shark feed. Somewhere in Boston he’d find a jeweler to buy Susannah’s ring. Because if Colton had given her that rock, it wasn’t zirconium. With any luck—if there was any luck left anywhere in the world—he’d get enough to pay his lawyer. And no, Susannah, I won’t be sending you back your change, care of Fleetfoot Farm. Her bill was higher than she’d dreamed and mounting by the minute.
And if he couldn’t salvage his career, then her ring would be just the first installment on all she owed him.
A letter was taped to his front door. Tag took it inside with him, ripped it open, then wadded it as he cursed aloud. A notice from the FYA Corporation, terminating his tenancy in their cottage, effective a month from today. Teeth clenched till they ached, he stalked to his TV. He’d set the VCR to record the noon news before he left the house that morning.
The twelve o’clock lead came as no surprise. The cameras showed Susannah Colton, sometime earlier that morning, coming down the Boston courthouse steps with a grimlooking suit—her lawyer, according to the voice-over. Besieged on all sides by reporters, she looked tiny and dog tired. More teenager than woman in her jeans and a man’s leather bomber jacket that hung down to her slim thighs.
Tag growled as he recognized it, but still, something twisted inside. She was wearing the same clothes she’d worn yesterday when he met her. She’d spent the night in jail, after all?
The newscaster confirmed it as reporters blocked the couple’s way. With one arm draped protectively around her shoulders, seeming almost to hold her up, Susannah’s lawyer was doing the talking. As for his client, a night in a cell seemed to have knocked the stuffing, all that Texas grit and sass, out of her. She looked fragile, stunned. Less like a desperado horse thief or a vindictive wife than a scared little owl, staring out from shelter with those wide, haunted eyes and her feathers all ruffled.
A woman having second thoughts was what she looked like, and unpleasant ones. A little revenge seemed like a good idea at the time, huh, Tex? But now she was realizing. Bit off more than you could chew, did you, darlin’?
Or maybe she only needed a good night’s sleep to regain her spunk—and her spite. Looking at Susannah, Tax had missed most of the lawyer’s statement. He rewound the tape and this time focused on her designated knight.
“Mrs. Colton has no statement at this time,” that gentleman said grandly if predictably.
The surrounding pack resumed their yelping. Susannah put her head down and allowed her companion to steer her to a waiting car. The anchorman switched back to the studio.
He interviewed an expert on equine insurance, who hemmed and hawed and finally hazarded a guess that Lloyd’s of London would decline to pay out on Payback’s policy because, one, the horse had not been killed but only altered, and two, that horrendous act had been instigated not by some crazed outsider but by Stephen Colton’s own lawful wedded wife.
Tag attempted a whistle, but his lips were too dry. Sixty million dollars irretrievably washed down the drain? Even a millionaire might miss a sum like that! If Colton wasn’t the forgiving sort, and it looked less and less as if he was...
The question was, once he’d had time to cool down, who would Colton blame?
BY THE TIME Tag checked into a Boston hotel the tabloids had the story.
Revenge of the Century! shrieked the one in his hotel lobby, in two-inch type above a picture of Payback and one of the Coltons, kissing at the altar.
Payback, Texas Style! blared one of the rags he saw in a drugstore, walking back from supper at a cheap fishhouse down near the docks.
Don’t Mess with Texans! warned another.
By morning the Boston Globe had dug deeper. $30,000 Payoff to Geld Payback! yelled its banner headline. Ice in his guts, Tag told himself that at least now he knew what to ask for Susannah’s diamond. Assuming the jerks hadn’t made up that sum along with the rest of their facts.
By the time he’d hired his lawyer, the evening papers were out and somehow they’d dug up his juvenile records—which his lawyer had spent the past two hours assuring him were sealed. Buried forever. Not to worry.
Ex-Car Thief Took $30,000 Bribe to Ruin Payback! was how one headline put it.
Why bother with lawyers and the courts? He’d been tried and convicted already, and he could guess the sentence.
SHE SHOULD HAVE BROUGHT an umbrella. The collapsible one she’d bought in Paris was up at the big house along with the rest of her stuff. Her lawyer was still working on retrieving all that.
She should have bought, at least, a raincoat, one of those cheap plastic things. But she’d be counting her pennies from here on out. So the bomber would have to do. Leaning back against Brady’s pickup, Susannah Mack Colton tipped her Stetson to let the rain run off, folded her arms and snuggled her nose below the collar of Doc Taggart’s old jacket. She sucked in a breath of cold, damp Kentucky air, savoring with it the scent of man and leather, oddly comforting on this comfortless day.
Beyond the white board fence, a hundred yards up a low hill, the crowd was still gathering. A good-sized group, Brady would have been pleased. Black umbrellas, dark clothes, like a bunch of mushrooms sprouted in the rain.
She wondered suddenly what they were burying Brady in. Should have been his old jockey silks, the ones he wore winning the Derby on Payback. But they’d never fit. He’d put on the pounds since he’d quit the track and stepped down to stallion groom.
“Never mind. They’ll give you fresh ones upstairs,” she drawled softly, and dug in her pocket for his flask.
One swallow left since the night he’d given it to her. “That’s for warmth, not for whoopee,” he’d warned as they parted. “You save me a drop.”
He’d never come for it. She hadn’t had a sip since she’d found out why, that awful night in a Boston jail.
The crowd was bigger now. A wall of darkness ringed the grave. She tipped her brim to hide all that and looked down at his name on the flask. Brady, engraved in curly letters on old silver. A fine, fancy gift from a grateful British bettor, that time Brady won the Epsom on a five-to-one shot.
She had to struggle with the cap. Last closed by Dr. Taggart’s big, capable hands, she remembered with a rueful grimace. She held up the flask to the dripping sky. “Here’s to you, Brady.” Something warmer than a raindrop ran down her cheek and she brushed it away. “If they have horse races in heaven, then you and Daddy must be runnin’ neck and neck ’bout now. God bless...and Godspeed.” She held the last taste on her tongue, fire and sweetness, then welcome warmth around the heart. G’bye, ol’ friend. She buried her nose in the jacket again and breathed deep.
When she heard the sound of a car stopping behind the truck, Susannah didn’t look up. God give me strength! If it was more reporters... One more stupid question, just one more, and it’s Katy, bar the door!
“Miss? I’m afraid you can’t stop here, Miss.”
Oh, one of them. Eyes narrowed, shoulders squaring for a fight, she turned her head slowly. This was a public road even if Stephen would never admit it and had convinced the county he had the right to patrol outside his own fences, bully anybody who dared look at his farm.
Her muscles eased as she recognized the approaching guard. “Hey, Randy.” Randall was one of the few decent ones who didn’t give her the creeps. Most of the security guards her husband hired seemed to be angry, disappointed men. As if life didn’t give them enough opportunities to use those guns that dragged down their belts.
“Miz—!” The guard yanked off his hat from long habit, then stood there twisting it. “Mrs. Colton, ma’am! I didn’t recognize—”
“Hardly surprisin’.” Stephen had always insisted she dress her part around the farm. If she must wear pants, then it had to be jodhpurs with a silk shirt or a tweed jacket. Hair up in a snooty French twist. Only when she rode out with the exercise boys at dawn was she allowed to wear jeans and let her hair fly free. Funny that Stephen fell for her, looking like that, then had to change that first thing once he got her.
The guard glanced from her to the distant ceremony. “Oh. I guess he wouldn’t let you...?”
“Nope.” She’d had her lawyer ask, since Stephen wasn’t taking her calls. Word had come back promptly from on high. Translated from Houlihan’s tactful legalese, the word was, “Not in this lifetime, sugarbabe!”
Funny how little you could know a man in two years. She’d known Stephen was tough. Kentucky hardboot, they called a shrewd horseman hereabouts. But just how hard his boots were, she’d only begun to learn these past few days. She had a feeling the lesson wasn’t done yet, either.
“Sure was a shame,” Randall observed, putting his hat on and coming to stand beside her, facing uphill. “Surprised the heck out of me when I heard. That old man was so tough I’d have said Brady’d bury us all.”
“Yeah.” She’d thought so, too. But then, her own father had gone in seconds—one horse stumbling in front of his own, then the pileup from behind. Winged hero to smashed cripple in less time than it took her to scream and rush to press her hands to the TV screen, as if she could lift those tiny, flailing bodies off him. For horse folks, life usually happened fast, and it happened hard.
“But that plate in his skull, a fall on that...” Randall heaved a hound-dog sigh. “And they say he must have knocked it more than once, tumblin’ down a whole flight.”
“Yeah.” And Brady wouldn’t have been hurrying so, ’cept for me. She swallowed hard and blinked at the distant funeral.
Movement up there, looked like they were almost done. Dropping red Kentucky clay on his coffin, one by one, then trudging off over the crest of the hill.
A tall man dressed in black stepped apart from the dwindling crowd and stood staring down at them, something ominous in his stillness.
“Oh, Jeez, is that the boss?” Randall took two long steps away from her, spun toward his truck, then back again. “If he saw I was talking to you...!”
“You’re just tellin’ me t’beat it, that’s all. He can’t blame you for that.”
“Oh, can’t he?” Good jobs were hard to find out in the country. A job at Fleetfoot Farm was golden. “But you’re not going.”
“Not till it’s over, I’m not.”
“Look, Mrs. Colton, I’m real sorry, but—” the guard grabbed her arm and hustled her toward the pickup’s door “—get out of here, will you? Please, ma’am? It’s my job if you don’t.”
“Ouch, dammit, lemme go!” Even a week before, if Randall had dared lay a finger on her, he’d never have worked again in the bluegrass. Now she was fair game for anyone. The door scraped her shins as he yanked it open. He grabbed her waist and tossed her up on the seat. “You son of a bitch!” She slapped his hands aside.
He shut the door carefully on her, then held it shut, onehanded, while he stooped for her fallen hat. She gave up pushing and rolled down the window. “Bastard!” The tears that had been threatening all day brimmed and overflowed. Her face burned with the shame of it. She didn’t cry easily or often. Never before strangers.
“Ma‘am, I’m real sorry, but y’know, you started it all.”
“Ha!” She rubbed her nose and glared past his shoulder. Stephen hadn’t missed the show. Thank God she was too far away to see him grinning! He who laughs last... It was a phrase he’d always been fond of, trailing it off with a little smirk and a shrug.
“I don’t blame you for wanting your own back,” Randall was saying, brushing off her hat. “Lot of us had a good laugh when we heard what you’d done.”
Maybe the guards and the house staff had. But not her people, the grooms and the trainers and the exercise boys down in the stables. They weren’t amused. She’d met a groom on the streets of Lexington yesterday and he’d spat at her feet.
“Serves him right, I say. But he’s a hard one and they say he never forgets if you cross him. I was you, I wouldn’t hang around here. I’d want some miles between.” He offered her the hat with a pleading smile.
It was good advice. Advice she’d already given herself. She’d only stopped to say goodbye, and now there was no one left by the grave but her husband.
A word that wouldn’t apply much longer.
She took the Stetson, saw the muddy bootmark on its brim—well, damn—and sat blinking frantically. Don’t be such a stupid crybaby! She dropped it on the seat and started the truck.
“Where’re you headed for, ma‘am, if y’don’t mind my asking?”
“Texas, where else?” This kid’s had enough of the high life. Her sister would be waiting for her in Houston, with that big old terry-cloth robe she always loaned Susannah when she came calling, and endless cups of hot chocolate. They’d stay up talking all night, and Saskia wouldn’t judge.
She couldn’t get back to Texas soon enough. Careful not to look toward the distant watcher, Susannah set her eyes on the open road and drove.
CHAPTER SIX
JUNE IN KENTUCKY. Beyond those towering, wrought-iron gates, Fleetfoot Farm looked like a slice of paradise. More than a square mile of prime bluegrass, according to Tag’s guidebook. Hill upon hill of lush emerald green—bluegrass wasn’t really blue, so go figure—stitched with white board fences. Flashes of chestnut and bay as thoroughbred yearlings chased each other around a distant pasture. A shady avenue lined in century-old sycamores, rising toward a glimpse of far-off roofs, which would be Colton’s antebellum manor.
So it was her upcoming expulsion from this Eden that Susannah had been avenging when she brought him Payback to ruin. To have risen this high, then to lose it. Tag could almost feel pity for the lying little bitch.
Almost. Has he ever been raced? Gullible fool, had he really asked that?
Few times, she’d drawled, and looked him straight in the eye. God, she must have been laughing fit to burst!
A heavyset guard paused in the open door of the gatehouse. Piggy eyes moved over Tag’s rusting and battered vehicle, an ex state police car he’d recently bought at auction. Its big V-8 engine burned oil and sucked gas at an awesome rate, but as long as you fed the monster, at least it still had some speed. The guard swaggered over to its window, his smile dismissing both man and car. “You here for the tour?” A driver of a heap like this might be allowed to press his nose to the glass, catch a peek of heaven, was the unspoken assumption, but he’d have no real business with the high and mighty.
“Yep.” Tag dragged his own eyes away from the gun on the man’s hip—more firepower than he’d have expected out here in the country—as he mustered a smile. Smiling was his best disguise these days. Since January, not a single gossip rag or network newscast had caught the infamous Dr. Taggart with a smile on his face. “The tour.”
Like many of the big racing stables and stud farms of the bluegrass, Fleetfoot Farm opened its barns and grounds to its admiring public in the summer months. And the only way he could hope to gain admittance to Susannah’s ex’s estate was if he was disguised as a lowly tourist.
Because in six months of trying, Tag hadn’t managed a meeting with Stephen Colton face-to-face. Nor had he even talked to the elusive bastard over the phone. But for the few glimpses he’d had of the man on TV, his signature on the blizzard of lawsuits that drifted down on Tag’s head, his endless army of legal minions, Colton might have been a figment of Tag’s worst nightmare. An invisible hand dealing cards of misfortune.
And it was you dragged me into the game, Susannah. But for you, I’d still be—He blinked as the guard thumped his fender.
“...the bus, mister,” he growled, apparently repeating his words. “See it?” He jerked a thumb at the gates. Beyond them, halfway along the tunnel of trees, a tour bus chugged uphill. Trailed by three cars and a van, it rounded a bend and disappeared. “Follow that bus. Stay right at the first and second forks in the drive, then you’ll see the parking lot Just stay with the tour, y’hear?”
Was it branded on his forehead that he was different? Dangerous? Did he look what he felt, lean and angry, like a coyote who’d missed his rabbit three days running? Tag showed his teeth in what he hoped passed for a smile, nodded and steered his beater through the massive green gates, swinging open in electrified silence.
Halfway through, the car died. Twisting the key, he swore and pumped hard on the gas—blue smoke blatted out the back. Time for another quart of oil. He bucketed on through the gap without looking toward the guard, who’d be grinning. Blast this wreck! Blast the woman who’d brought him to this!
He’d lost his beloved pickup, the first and only new wheels he’d ever owned in his life, in the second month of the disaster. He’d sold it to pay his mounting legal fees, since his lawyer had known better than to work for him on credit. But not to worry, Atkins had assured him each time he handed Tag another bill. Come his day in court, it would be obvious to even the densest jury that Tag was innocent of any wrongdoing. He’d operated in good faith, believing Susannah’s assertion that she was the owner. Colton could sue, but he’d never win.
Yeah, and the meek shall inherit the earth.
Whatever advice Tag had been buying, Colton obviously had bought better. Or maybe he’d simply known how the game was played. Because each time Tag’s lawyer prepared a painstaking defense encompassing hours of depositions, reams of paperwork, phone calls, assistants, charges, countercharges and consultations, the suit would be dropped at the last possible instant. Leaving Tag with more bills to pay.
He’d scramble to meet those debts—then a new lawsuit would loom over the horizon, winnable in the end, ruinous in the desperate meantime. And even knowing the score, Tag had to respond to charges, no matter how ridiculous. You couldn’t ignore a lawsuit. Death by law. A slow, nibbling death.
So I don’t play that game anymore. No more depending on lawyers. On anyone but himself. It was the way he’d grown up, after all, on the streets of South Boston. In the years since, he’d tried his best to play by society’s rules—and he’d gotten both hands smashed in a drawer for his efforts. From now on it was back to his own rules.
Round the bend he came to a fork in the road. The righthand choice followed the shoulder of the hill, curving gently around the unseen manor. The track and stables would be at its back, he supposed.
Tag chose the left fork, which burrowed into a glossy dark wall of rhododendrons, then burst out the other side into sunlight. Across a lawn smooth and wide as a golf course, beyond a spouting fountain encircled by red roses, the white columns and tall chimneys of Fleetfoot Farm reached for the sky. Tara north. My old Kentucky home, be it ever so humble.
He parked on the raked gravel sweep before the portico, feeling as if a hundred eyes watched him from the French windows to either side of the door. After all his months of trying to make contact, surely it couldn’t be this easy? Where was Colton’s wall of lawyers, his bodyguards, his secretaries?
The door knocker was a polished bronze horseshoe, mounted curve-down to hold the luck. What must it be like to be born lucky, a fourth-generation millionaire? To never once in your life have gone to bed hungry, wondering how you’d pay the rent? Did Colton have a clue how the other half lived? Two savage knocks and the door swung silently open.
“Yes, sir?” Except for the drawl, the speaker might have been snatched from Central Casting. The perfect English butler. Silvery hair, crisp white sleeves, a black waistcoat and trousers. No doubt he’d been polishing the sterling when interrupted. Eyes fixed respectfully on Tag’s face, though Tag was sure his best suit had been noted and found wanting.
Go ahead, tell me to apply at the back door, pal. But this one was too old to punch. “I’d like to see Mr. Colton, please.” Please let him be home.
There was no guarantee. In the first weeks of the scandal Tag, along with everyone else in America—had learned more than he’d ever wanted to know about the reclusive millionaire, thanks to the tabloids. Colton had his own jet, another house on a private island off Miami, inherited rights to the finest salmon fishing in Scotland. If his horses were racing in Europe this week he’d be there to collect the trophies. If not, he might be off shopping for broodmares in Japan or gambling in the Bahamas.
“Whom may I say is calling?”
By God, was it possible? “The name’s Taggart. R. D. Taggart.”
“Ah.” The butler didn’t pull an Uzi out of the porcelain urn to the left of the door, but his eyelids quivered. Trained in the very best butlering schools. “Yes, sir.”
Tag kept his face relaxed, his hands in view. Don’t call the cops, old man. I just want to talk.
The butler pulled a chain and a gold pocket watch slid into his palm. He consulted it with pursed lips. “Mr. Colton will have finished his barn rounds, I b’lieve. You might try down at the office.”
An elegant dodge while he called for reinforcements? Or the truth? Tag was tempted to shove past him and find out. But once he’d crossed the line into open belligetience, there’d be no going back. So he thanked the man, then followed his directions to the office, which turned out to be an entire building, painted white, trimmed in forest green to match the gigantic barns that dotted the hills beyond the manor.
A receptionist, blond and beautiful, was just cradling her phone when he found her on the second floor. “Yes, Dr. Taggart?”
So much for surprises. “To see Mr. Colton, please.”
“Of course, but I’m afraid he’s in a meeting. If you’d care to sit over there? And could I bring you a cup of coffee?”
So easy, so civilized, this reception, he thought, taking a seat. It felt all wrong. All these bitter months, though he’d boxed only shadows, he’d still sensed the presence of an enemy casting that shadow. Someone derisive...intelligent... merciless. Could that all have been his own paranoia? Colton’s ignorance of what was really happening to Tag’s life? An unfortunate misunderstanding blown up into a legal vendetta, like the classic case of two spouses who wanted a friendly divorce, but ended in a bankrupting brawl, thanks to their lawyers? As he sipped Colton’s excellent coffee, for the first time in months Tag allowed himself the barest of hopes. Perhaps a truce might yet be reached.
An hour passed and the hope cooled with the coffee. “How much longer do you think he’ll be?”
The blonde gave him a sunny smile. “Shouldn’t be much longer.”
Half an hour later he asked, “Where’s this meeting taking place?”
Her blue-shadowed eyes flicked to the mahogany doors on her left. She smiled. “I’m sure they’re almost done. More coffee?”
He’d give it another fifteen minutes, not a minute longer. Tag prowled from a Palladian window overlooking a broodmare paddock—spring foals butting their dams in the udder or loping alongside them on comically spindly legs—back to blond-and-beautiful’s desk. She looked more anxious each time he made the circuit. He turned from the window at fourteen minutes to find her whispering into her phone.
So give it five more.
The double doors opened at minute nineteen and another blonde stepped through, this one at least ten years older than the receptionist. Polished to a metallic gleam. Soft lips, hard green eyes. She approached with hand extended. “Dr. Taggart? Claire De Soto, Mr. Colton’s assistant. If you’d come through to my office?”
She led him to a corner room. DeSoto had pull, apparently. She put some effort into the hospitality, insisting he take the most comfortable armchair, offering him a mint julep, which he refused. “Now how may we help you, Dr. Taggart?”
“By getting me Colton.” He was out of patience. Smelling rats.
She lifted a plucked eyebrow. “He’ll need to know in regards to what before seeing you, Dr. Taggart. So...?”
So talk or get out, huh? All right. I want my life back. “I’d...like to know what he wants. These lawsuits...they aren’t going to bring back Payback’s—” million dollar balls “—his potency. There’s no way I can give that back to him. And it doesn’t look like Colton needs my money.” Tag glanced wryly to one side. Through the window on the right, he could see a half-mile exercise track in the distance. In the foreground, a groom led a prancing colt across a courtyard. “So what does your boss want from me?”
Tag had apologized last winter, in a letter passed from his lawyer to Colton’s. There’d been no acknowledgment. Still, he’d be happy to apologize for a second time. Because if Payback was the best horse Colton had ever bred, then Tag could sympathize with the man’s outrage. His disappointment. The stud had been much more than an oat-burning money machine. He would have been the foundation of all Colton’s hopes for future generations of wonder horses.
Tag sincerely regretted the part he’d been tricked into playing in blasting those hopes. But surely Colton could see that Susannah had screwed them both. “If it’s an apology he wants...”
“I’m sure he’ll tell you.”
That was all that Tag wanted or needed. To meet Colton face-to-face, without lawyers or tape recorders. Without witnesses. So that he could hear the man out, try one last time to apologize.
And then explain to him calmly and clearly where they were headed if they couldn’t reach a truce. If Colton couldn’t back off, wouldn’t back off, then Tag would have to kill him. It was as simple as that. I want my life back. And I don’t mean to live it looking over my shoulder.
But you didn’t make that kind of threat to lawyers or assistants, then ask them to please pass it on to the boss. Statements like that might be a basic man-to-man truth, but in the eyes of the law, they constituted assault. Seventeen years ago Tag had spent a summer behind bars, and that was enough for one lifetime.
“Is there anything else you need from Mr. Colton?”
One thing. “Susannah Mack’s address.” Her divorce had become final two months ago, he’d learned from the gossip rags, shortly after the charge of horse theft had been dropped. That was the last mention of her he’d been able to find anywhere. The bitch had dropped off the face of the earth. Gone to ground in Texas, maybe? Or some place much fancier? Wherever, she’d be enjoying her pay-off in the unbreachable seclusion that only big money could buy, he supposed. Because the tabloids also noted that, though the terms of her divorce had been settled privately, they were said to be exceedingly generous. Ten million was the figure whispered most often.
Whatever amount Colton had paid her to go away, Tag figured at least half of it was his.
“Oh...” DeSoto hadn’t expected that one. “I see.” She rose. “Well. If you’ll wait one minute, Dr. Taggart...” She shut the door behind her.
One minute turned into ten. Twenty. Enough. Tag stood, and standing, glanced up at the far corner above the chair that DeSoto had chosen.
The lens of a camera gazed blankly back at him. Hair prickled at the nape of his neck. A security camera within an office? Aimed at the window, surely? He turned. No, aimed at his chair. “You son of a bitch!” Had he been watching all this time?
“Dr. Taggart?” DeSoto stood in the doorway, an odd little smile curving her lips. “Mr. Colton won’t be able to see you today, after all.”
Two hours on ice. Suckered into hoping again. And all for what? For the same reason children pulled wings off flies—because they could?
And, clever boy, Colton had used women to do his petty work. Much as Tag needed to punch somebody, he didn’t punch women. “Where is he?”
“Why, there he is now!” DeSoto nodded at the window. “He must have stepped out the back.”
Out in the courtyard between the office and the nearest barn, a man stood by the door of a red Ferrari convertible, looking up. Gold wire rims, impeccable seersucker suit. As their eyes locked, Colton grinned, waved jauntily, got in the car.
Tag started for the door, the roar of a big engine reaching him faintly through the glass. He swept DeSoto out the exit before him, then swung to look back. As he’d thought, she couldn’t have seen Colton from where she’d been standing. A setup from start to finish. “Where’s he going?” And by God, she’d tell him!
Out in the corridor, DeSoto smiled demurely from beyond a wall of muscle—two guards built like linebackers, each with a hand resting on a bolstered gun. “Would you show Dr. Taggart to his car, please, Peterson?”
Tag wanted a fight so badly, he could taste its blood in his mouth.
The smile on the larger guard widened. He rocked on his heels. Come on then, his eyes invited. You and me.
With pleasure! Tag took a step forward—and saw beyond his mark another camera, tucked up in a far corner of the hallway. If he fought these two, he’d be fighting for Colton’ s entertainment. And if he lost, Colton would see him beaten. Tag pulled in a shaking breath. I play by my rules, you bastard, not yours.
“Thank you,” he said, and no two words had ever come harder.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THEY ESCORTED HIM in smirking silence to his car, then tailgated him all the way to the front gates, the grill of their outsized pickup filling his rearview mirror with glinting chrome. Swearing helplessly, Tag gunned his engine as he shot through the gates, but the truck was faster. “Crap!” His head snapped backward as they bumped him. “That’s it.” He swerved to the shoulder and stopped. “You want a fight, you got it.”
As Tag stepped out, the driver popped the truck into reverse. With the shotgun rider waving cheerily through the windshield, it roared backward down the road, past the gates, then shot forward and through. The gates closed behind it. The truck tootled farewell as it vanished up the avenue of trees.
Bastards, bullies, thugs! Somebody’s going to pay for this! Someday, somehow... But not today. He glared at the white board fences extending either side of the entry. Electrified, naturally. So-o-o... “Later.”
Fingers clenched on the steering wheel, he headed back toward Lexington. What now, what now? And using what for money? He had four hundred left in cash, the remains of his final paycheck from the dog pound in Buffalo. That job had ended three days ago, when the pound had run out of funding for his position. Third job that had fallen out from under him in the past six months.
When that final, dreary attempt to get on with his career aborted, something had snapped. Never mind the lawyers, he’d thought. He’d deal with Colton himself. Reach a truce somehow, then ask for Susannah’s address. No reason her ex should protect her, he’d figured.
He’d figured wrong every which way, regarding Colton. Petty bastard.
A horn sounded behind him and his teeth snapped together. Didn’t they know when to back off? The truck behind, Fleetfoot green like the guards’ truck but smaller, beeped again. “All right then, dammit!” He pulled over, climbed out and stalked back to where the truck had stopped on the shoulder behind him.
The driver didn’t step out to meet him. A small, stocky man. Sandy hair, pug nose, Irish face. Shrewd gray eyes studied Tag through his rolled-up window.
“What d’you want?” The guy looked too short to make a satisfying opponent, though Tag knew well enough from his Boston years how fierce the Irish could be.
The window rolled down an inch. “I heard you might be looking for Susannah.”
Yes! “Who’s asking?”
“I’m a trainer back at Fleetfoot. Friend of her and Brady.”
Brady? An image of a silver flask skated across his mind—that Brady? “Who told you I was looking?” He was in no mood to trust, but still, to get his hands on Susannah...
The window rolled the rest of the way down and the trainer grinned. “Ah, they sneeze up at the big house, we’re wiping our noses in minutes down in the barns.” He glanced over his shoulder. “I can’t stop long. If anybody sees me—”
“So you know where she is?” Don’t look too eager. If this guy was her friend, he wouldn’t want to send her trouble.
“Yeah, d’you mean to go see her?”
He must believe, as the rest of the world did, that Tag and Susannah had been conspirators. The sleaziest tabloids had even speculated they were lovers, supposing this was how she’d recruited him for the dirty deed. “Thought I might look her up,” he said casually. “But I haven’t heard from her in a few weeks and I was afraid she might have moved on.”
“She has that.” The trainer checked the road behind them again. “Look, I have this message from Brady, but I don’t trust the mail. It’s got to be delivered personal, put straight into her hand. And I can’t get away myself.”
“Be happy to take it.” Finally, finally, something was going his way. “Where’d you say she was?”
“Southwestern Colorado. Little town outside of Cortez. Dawson, it’s called.” The Irishman drew a crumpled envelope from a back pocket. “Here’s the message.” His fingers tightened on one corner as Tag took hold. “I have your word you’ll deliver it to her? To Susannah and no one else?”
“You got it, pal.” He might stick it in her sexy little ear, but she’d get it, all right.
The trainer nodded and let go. “Makes no sense to me, but I guess she’ll know what to do with it. Tell her I found it tucked inside his hatband, the one he wore that night. I was thinking I’d see her at the funeral, but—”
“Brady’s dead?”
The gray eyes narrowed. “Deader than doomails. Fell down some stairs last January. Didn’t you know?”
“No, I...” Think fast. This guy could still contact her, warn her that her hideout was blown. “That was a crazy time for me,” Tag improvised. To put it mildly. “Guess she didn’t want to bother me with it.” Thoughtful Susannah. “I’m very sorry to hear it.”
“Yeah, just about broke my heart, it did.” The trainer started his engine. “Well, I can’t be stopping. Give Susannah my best, will you?”
“Will do.” For the first time in six months, Tag’s smile was genuine as he waved farewell. Nothing but the very, very best for little Susannah!
MESSAGE FROM A DEAD MAN. Lurking in a booth in the far corner of Moe’s Truckstop outside Dawson, Colorado, waiting for a grilled cheese sandwich he didn’t want, Tag drew Brady’s message from its envelope. Unfolding the smudged strip of paper, he studied the penciled scrawl for the fiftieth time in the past three days.
For the fiftieth time, it read as pure gibberish. Was it possible that Brady, owner of a whiskey flask, could have been a raving drunk? That might account for this nonsense and might also, come to think of it, explain his fatal fall. The words were scribbled with blithe abandon or possibly haste, t’s uncrossed, spacing ragged.
Susie, what we were talking about. Decided it might come in handy for leverage. Got it, but couldn’t make it to your car. If you get this, the honey’s where...
Several words were crossed out here. The writer had borne down so hard on his pencil, he’d ripped a hole.
Remember that time I called you a begonia raper? Take care, kid.
Brady.
“Begonia raper”—what kind of nonsense was that? Tag frowned as he folded the paper and put it away. And “honey”—every time he read that word, he tried to make it come out money. His four hundred had dwindled to two and most of that spent for gas, not food or shelter. Till he tapped into Susannah’s bank account, he was counting pennies.
But if she’s loaded, what’s she doing working in a dive like this? When he’d reached Dawson late this afternoon, he’d stopped at the tiny post office, casually asked its ancient postmistress if she knew where his dear friend Susannah Mack might be staying hereabouts?
Stomach growling all the way west, sleeping in his musty heap every night to conserve cash, he’d cheered himself on by picturing the coming reunion. He’d imagined finding his quarry smug and cozy in some new lover’s hideaway, a rustic timber-and-glass ski lodge à la Aspen, which wasn’t so far to the northeast. Or maybe luxuriating in a retreat for the rich and too-famous, an upscale dude ranch or an exclusive health spa, secluded somewhere up in the mountains north of Dawson.
To keep himself awake on the road late last night, he’d fantasized catching Susannah at such a spa, facedown on the massage table and half-asleep, her slender body draped in nothing but a sheet. He’d pictured himself booting the masseuse out of the room, locking the door, then taking her place. He’d rubbed Susannah’s velvety back till she purred and stretched like a cat—then he’d given her shapely rump a resounding whack.
She’d whipped around, losing most of her sheet as she rolled—to reveal big blue eyes blazing up at him from the midst of a gooey, inch-thick, coffee-colored mud pack. Baring his teeth as he leaned over her, he’d pressed a forefinger to the tip of her muddy nose. Had waited while righteous indignation faded to doubt. Then just as her eyes widened in horror, he’d snarled, “Hey, babe! Remember me?”
“Here y’go!” Tag jumped half a foot as his waitress smacked a plate down on the table. “Can I get you anything else?”
“This’ll do. Thanks.” He’d drunk three cups of coffee already in the hour he’d been waiting. His waitress had told him when he asked that Suzie Zack worked the night shift, nine to dawn. He glanced at the clock over the distant counter. Eight-forty. Twenty minutes till he learned if the postmistress had been correct in claiming that the only newcomer to the county with a name remotely resembling Susannah Mack was Suzie Zack, that new little waitress down at Moe’s Truckstop.
But what the blue blazes would Susannah be doing working in a truckstop? Checking it out from the inside with a notion to buying it?
He was reaching. The tabloids had reported that, according to unnamed sources, Colton had given her a cool ten million and dropped the charge of horse theft—in exchange for Susannah’s granting him a swift, uncontested divorce. Ten million! With bucks like that, she’d be investing in stocks and bonds and diamonds, not truckstops.
The logical explanation was that Suzie Zack the waitress was not, and never had been, Susannah Mack, rich and vengeful hellcat. Still, he sat here sipping coffee and hoping. Because if Susannah wasn’t here in Dawson, then where on earth was she?
Quarter to nine and all that coffee was making itself felt. Leaving his sandwich to cool on the table, Tag tugged the bill of the baseball cap he’d bought for disguise lower over his nose. He headed down a narrow hall that he guessed led to the rest rooms. It did—and also to the phone.
His waitress stood with its receiver jammed to her ear. She smacked the side of the pay phone and swung half-around. “Well, then, where could I—” Her mouth rounded to an O.
Tag gave her an innocent grin and resumed walking. She spun away, stood silent with shoulders hunched till he’d shoved through the door to the men’s room.
Where could I what? he wondered while he took care of business. Where could I score some dope? But a big, motherly rawboned woman in her forties, she didn’t look the sort. Or... His smile faded. Where could I reach Susannah? He slammed out the men’s room door. She’d been giving him looks ever since he’d asked when that new waitress, the little one from Texas who’d served him last week—what was her name, Suzie? —came on duty? He’d figured that was a safe way to pose the question. Because if Zack proved to be Mack, then no doubt all the men were asking for her.
But now he thought about it, his waitress had vanished down this hall only minutes after his first inquiry.
No one stood at the phone now, but the door beside it was just closing. Hell, to lose Susannah now when he was so close! He’d been too impatient. Should have simply watched and waited even if it took her a week to show. Tag opened the door and leaned out to scan a potholed patch of pavement.
A cool, sage-scented mountain wind was blowing. Rolling before it, a beer can tinkled eerily, then came up short against a rock. Somewhere out in the dark a coyote yipped. Nothing else stirred. Whoever had come this way had moved on. Either gone back to the kitchen or to the parking lot out front.
Swearing under his breath, Tag turned back to the eating area. He could leave, then lie in ambush outside the kitchen door, but if for some reason she entered by the front or side door, instead... As he reached the end of the hall he skidded to a stop.
A short, slender woman stood at a table across the room, facing away from him. Taking the order of three trucker types who grinned up at her.
Thank you, God! His heart drumming a hunter’s beat, Tag ambled over to his booth and slipped into it. He pulled the bill of his cap down to his nose and slouched till his eyes barely cleared the back of the opposite banquette. Susannah Mack, as I live and breathe!
Waiting tables. She wore a white butcher’s apron tied over a blue work shirt and jeans. She seemed thinner than he remembered—she turned to take the third man’s order and the overhead lights threw an elegant cheekbone into stark relief. But he’d have known her anywhere, even without those lizardskin boots. She’d pulled her marigold mane back into a prim braid, though wisps of it escaped already to feather her cheeks. She swiped a forearm up across her brow as if she could feel the heat of his eyes, nodded coolly at something one of the customers said, then swung back toward the kitchen.
As she moved away, the biggest trucker grabbed an apron string. The perky bow at her hips unraveled and she stopped.
You—Tag found himself halfway to his feet. He dropped abruptly back into place. He couldn’t walk over there and heave that jerk across the counter without Susannah noticing. And he’d promised himself their first encounter would be private. On his terms. So easy. Cool it.
Besides, his Texas hellion needed no man’s help. She turned with graceful deliberation, said something that didn’t carry to Tag’s ears. Her admirer sat back and clasped his hands on the table, schoolboy with knuckles rapped. Chin high, boot heels clacking, she marched off to the kitchen. When the door swung shut behind her, the trucker’s friends tipped back their heads and roared.
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