Harlequin Superromance May 2018 Box Set

by Amber Leigh Williams

  Such as what?

  How could she be so totally over Trip so fast? Was she that shallow? Apparently so. Because she was a whole lot happier than she should have been with no job and no fiancé and no prospects.

  Her thoughts flashed to Seth. Bon appétit! She went to bed laughing.

  She remembered that the vet’s clinic opened for business at eight thirty, but when she called, the line was already busy. Maybe she should forget about talking to Barbara. As she waited for the babies to finish their gruel, she went down the list of chores she had to do before Saturday, when she had company coming. She could put the pedal to the metal tomorrow and concentrate on résumés and phone calls today.

  The third time she called Barbara, she got through.

  “Barbara,” Emma asked. “Are you on your way out or can you talk?”

  “Both. I’ve got a tup with an abscess on his jaw. I’ll pick you up in ten minutes. You can ride along. Shouldn’t take long, and I could use the extra hands.”

  Why not? Another morning of boring résumé writing down the tubes, but hey, what was money? She hadn’t put on a pair of panty hose or a skirt since she’d moved into The Hovel. That felt like winning a nasty battle.

  The first thing she said when she climbed into Barbara’s monster truck was, “What kind of animal is a tup?”

  “It’s what the Scots call a breeding ram. And the required action is called ‘tupping.’ So if some guy with a Scottish burr asks you if you’d like to tup…”

  “Say no.”

  “Not necessarily,” Barbara said with a grin. “Depends on the guy.”

  “What about you? Have you ever considered remarrying?”

  “At my age? With grown—well, semigrown—kids who keep me broke and on the verge of a heart attack? I have no intention of getting naked with a strange man. Even if I knew one strange enough to be interested.”

  “You look great.”

  “The corollary to that is ‘for my age.’ I don’t think after the years without my husband I could adjust to having a male living with me again. They want their laundry done and folded or—God forbid, ironed—and meals cooked for them and a reasonable schedule they can count on. Not happening with my job. If I was supposed to be doing corporate wifely things at some fancy function, and a cow got stuck in the middle of delivering a calf, I’d pick the cow every time.”

  “You’d never marry a man who didn’t support your decision.”

  “So far as I’ve found, there ain’t no such animal. Not after John. The turn-in we want is a couple of hundred yards along on your side of the road. It’s only a break in the privet hedge, so look sharp.”

  Barbara made the turn and found their way blocked by a five-bar steel farm gate. Without being asked, Emma jumped out, held the gate open, shut and fastened it after Barbara drove through, then jumped back in the car.

  They followed a narrow dirt and gravel driveway that had probably not been graded or had gravel added to its surface in years. Barbara’s truck didn’t have the finest shock absorbers either. Once, Emma bounced up and hit her head on the edge of the closed sunroof and saw stars. Eventually, however, they pulled up in front of a medium-size red barn that had not seen a lick of paint since the gravel driveway was new and smooth.

  The man who loomed up out of the darkness in the barn looked a lot like the mayor, except that his weight was stretched up to at least six and a half feet instead of being squashed down like the mayor’s. He wore muddy boots, muddy jeans, a muddy shirt and a sweat-darkened John Deere baseball cap. “Hey, Dr. Barbara,” he said, holding out a giant paw with patches of dark hair on the knuckles. “This here pretty lady must be Miss Martha’s niece.” He enveloped her hand after he shook Barbara’s.

  Emma nodded. Of course he would have heard about her. “Are you by any chance kin to the mayor?” she asked as she rubbed feeling back into her fingers.

  “First cousin on my momma’s side. How’d you guess?”

  “Just a hunch.”

  “Growin’ up, folks thought we was twins. Then he started growin’ sideways while I kept on straight up.”

  “Where’s your ram, Holloway?” Barbara asked as she pulled her travel case from the backseat. “I hope you’ve got him confined.”

  “Well, now, as to that…”

  “I refuse to chase your ram all over the pasture.”

  “Not as bad as that. We got him in a stall. Just that it’s the foaling stall.”

  “Holloway, it’s half the size of this barn!”

  He held up his hands in a placating gesture. “Gimme a little minute. We’ll get a couple ropes and hog-tie him.”

  “Until I can get some tranquilizer in him,” Barbara said.

  “He’s a real sweet ram generally, but his jaw hurts, so’s he can’t eat. He does like to eat almost as much as he likes his ladies.”

  From outside came three young men, also giants. “Sons?” Emma whispered.

  Barbara nodded. “Boys, y’all go help your daddy.”

  They didn’t meet the eyes of either woman, but marched off toward the far end of the barn and through a stall gate.

  “They’re kinda shy,” whispered Holloway.

  “Here we go,” Barbara said.

  The boys were huge compared with the ram. He, however, had large horns, four sharp hooves and apparently the temperament of the Tasmanian Devil in the Saturday cartoons.

  “Should we help?” Emma asked Barbara.

  “Are you completely insane? Just watch.” She brought out a syringe, filled it with some sort of liquid, then waited by the gate.

  Emma had watched children’s goat rodeo classes at the fair. This was the same sort of thing, except it was one goat versus four large men. At one point they cornered the ram against the fence, only to have him rise up on his hind feet and drive his horns into the belt buckle of the largest of Holloway’s sons, who flew back six feet and landed on his rear end.

  He clambered to his feet, brushed off the seat of his jeans and said, “That’s it.” He rushed the ram, grabbed one front and one rear leg, flipped the ram flat on his side, then sat on him.

  Barbara hurried into the stall and emptied her syringe into the ram’s rump.

  “You can get up as soon as he’s unconscious,” she said.

  Five minutes later, the ram snored peacefully. The lump on the side of his jaw was the size of a softball.

  Emma brought Barbara’s case to her.

  “Stand back,” Barbara said. “I’m going to drain this thing. It’ll be nasty.”

  It was. Smelly, too. After Barbara had lanced and emptied the wen, she cleaned it and felt around inside. “Hello,” she said. “Here’s his problem.” She took her forceps and carefully withdrew a five-inch-long twig from the wound. “He must’ve run into the hedge when he was chasing down his harem.”

  She finished cleaning, dosed with antibiotics and gave instructions for Holloway to keep up the treatment. “Needs to stay open so it can heal from the inside. You’ll have to irrigate twice daily. He ought to be good as new in a couple of days.”

  When the two women drove back down the driveway, the four large men watched them silently.

  “Well, that was fun,” Barbara said.

  “I didn’t do anything to help,” Emma said.

  “You stayed out of the way and handed me stuff. That’s plenty. I don’t mind blood, but I do hate pus. Bleh.”

  “Poor little ram,” Emma said.

  “If you can put up with that without turning a hair, you can probably handle anything. Come on, I’ll make you a double latte when I get back to the clinic. There’ll be folks waiting for me to open up and mad as snakes because I’m late. I really have to get somebody in full-time to answer the phone and schedule appointments.”

  Half a dozen trucks, two horse trailers and three SUVs waited in the parkin
g lot of the clinic. Not a single sedan. As Barbara parked, doors opened and prospective clients piled out and followed her to the door.

  “Sorry, y’all,” Barbara said. “Let me get the coffee on and clean myself up, and we’ll figure out what sort of order to see you in.”

  Without being asked, Emma slid into the vacant seat behind the receptionist’s desk, opened the appointment book to a new page, entered the date and began to check in the clients who were waiting. For twenty minutes she fielded clients’ questions, wrote notes and generally did the job as she guessed it should be done. She’d worked the reception desk during the summers she’d been an unpaid intern at a couple of temp agencies, so this wasn’t completely unfamiliar. But she discovered that the computer was password protected and she didn’t have a chance to check with Barbara. She didn’t know how to open it, much less bring up the data. She did the best she could by taking hand-written notes. The clients seemed to have evolved their own way of working out the order in which they were seen. Since there didn’t seem to be any genuine emergencies, that turned out quite well.

  An hour later, the chaos had resolved itself to semiorder, but semiorder punctuated by meows, barks, the screech of one red macaw and the squeal of a small potbellied pig. Emma met her neighbors, overheard more gossip than she had in a dozen years in Memphis, and actually enjoyed herself. As she saw the last client with her beagle puppy out, Barbara left the exam room. “Put the closed sign up,” she said. “I’m starved.”

  “Good grief,” Emma said. “So are my babies! I have to get home.”

  “Can’t thank you enough for helping out. You really jumped in there.”

  “I couldn’t even turn on the computer. You’ll have a lot of notes to transcribe.”

  Barbara collapsed into the nearest client seat. “How desperate are you for a job?”

  “Desperate for the right job.”

  “Meaning not one that pays just over minimum wage and works your tail off?”

  “I may be at some point. But if I keep not sending out résumés or networking, that may be sooner rather than later.”

  “So, stave off the wolf at the door a little while longer. If you could do what you did this morning, I would bow down and kiss your feet.”

  “I thought you had a high school girl.”

  “She does a couple of hours after school three days a week and a couple of hours Saturday morning. She cleans the cages and scrubs the floors, and if she has a few extra minutes, she does some computer work. But mornings are crunch time. Say, eight thirty to noon, or eight thirty to two? Not even every day.” Barbara was starting to look pitiful.

  Emma laughed. “I’d rather ride with you. Tell you what… I’ll work for you eight thirty to noon three days a week if you’ll teach me about fostering animals.”

  “Done. Which days?”

  “Which are the heaviest?”

  “Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays. Saturday is covered.”

  “Let’s give it a shot,” Emma said. “If it doesn’t work out, no pain, no foul.” She flipped the sign on the door to Closed. “Now, I have babies and me to feed.”

  “I could maybe scrounge up a can of soup or something…”

  “Nope,” Emma said. “Let’s start as we mean to go on. Anyway, so far it’s been fun. See you Monday.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “I NEVER SHOULD’VE told Emma about the barn and the pond,” Seth said to Earl. He finished his chef salad and corn bread. Velma took his drink glass to put in a to-go cup so he could take it with him on his afternoon rounds. He hadn’t asked. She always did it and fixed it up properly with lemon and sweetener. “Emma wants to hotfoot it down there and see if the barn can be saved.”

  Earl snorted. “Hope you got your snakebite kit up-to-date.”

  “What I told her. Come on, we got a poacher to track.”

  Thirty minutes later, Seth turned left onto the gravel road into a dense fir tree plantation. Some optimistic farmer twenty years earlier had planted the trees in serried rows in hopes of cutting them down to sell as Christmas trees. Unfortunately, Southern forests weren’t good places to grow the fancy Norway spruces that people seemed to prefer these days. Those were brought down by the truckload from Minnesota and Wisconsin the week before Thanksgiving. Trees that weren’t sold by December 15 were given away. Any scruffy leftovers were turned into mulch after New Year’s Day, and that was given away in the spring.

  Seth had no idea who currently owned this tree farm, but whoever held the title ignored it except for large “No Trespassing, No Hunting, Private Property” signs posted at irregular intervals.

  The deer didn’t ignore the property, however. Therefore, neither did the hunters. Or the motorcycle and ATV riders. Every ATV ride off the dirt roads, even on deer paths, set up ruts that eroded with every rain until the roads themselves were impassible. At least Southern wardens didn’t have to worry about snowmobiles. Except for one good snowstorm a year, more or less, snowmobiles weren’t usable.

  The laws of Tennessee said that a property owner could cull the deer on his own property if they were destroying his crops. He didn’t have to hold to restrictions as to permits, seasons for rifles or for bows and black powder antique weapons, or even does versus bucks.

  Seth hated that law. Most farmers were protective of their wildlife and didn’t abuse the law. Some big corporations, however, saw their large tree farms and soybean fields as an excuse to bring in rich clients to hunt in or out of season.

  Seth considered that pure poaching. So did all the other game wardens, although there wasn’t much they could do about it. Farmers did suffer predation from deer, especially after particularly cold winters—and more to the point, horribly hot summers. Human predation, however, meant orphaned fawns, and orphan fawns largely wound up being cared for by Barbara and her animal rescue group. They spent time and money, often their own, rescuing. They held fundraisers, but according to Barbara, they always worked on a narrow margin at the edge of penury.

  He could remember seeing The Yearling as a kid. When the father shot the deer, Seth walked out of the theater. He’d never willingly gone to another movie about animals. He’d never seen Turner and Hooch, or Benji, and definitely not Bambi. He took a lot of teasing from his buddies at Auburn and even now. Earl understood, but plenty of others thought he was a wimp and told him so. He really didn’t care.

  At this point, he was checking the trails through the Christmas tree farm in search of an ATV that had been reported as hoorahing full blast day and night, possibly jacklighting deer and firing what sounded like howitzers much too close to houses.

  There was always shooting in the country. Most everybody ignored it. Everybody owned at least one gun and probably several. In dove season, however, he’d been forced to comb bird shot out of his hair on more than one occasion, when some fool hunter had gotten off his beer-stocked cooler and let fly. Hunting drunk was right up there with—or above—driving drunk. He and Earl came down on excessive blood alcohol levels like a ton of bricks. He’d badgered the powers that be unmercifully until they’d purchased a Breathalyzer. Half the time, however, it was in the other car.

  But this wasn’t dove season. Or deer season either. Because there’d been no rain for several days—not since the night Emma moved in—any ATV tread marks had practically disappeared. Enough remained so the two men knew they were following a big ATV with balloon tires.

  “You gonna be ready for me to come over Saturday morning?” Earl asked. “Finish up that cage for you? Sounds like it’s gonna be big enough to use as a flight cage. Barbara’s is pretty puny when you’re trying to exercise a broken wing on a big hoot owl.”

  “Not that big, unless it’s a very small bird,” Seth said. “Damn!” he shouted as the SUV bottomed out in a hole as wide as his wheelbase.

  “What’s with you and Miss City Slicker?”

  “I�
��m being neighborly. Period.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “If she hadn’t moved into Miss Martha’s place, I never would’ve met her,” Seth said. “Our orbits do not mesh. My guess is she’ll get a new job in the city and be out of here in a couple of weeks. Back with her fiancé and setting the date. You know that dating site where they try to match country boys with country girls?”

  Earl nodded.

  “Well, I am and she isn’t. Barbara told me she was a debutante.”

  “And that means?”

  “Where all the rich daughters get displayed for all the rich eligible bachelors to get ’em married off to go live in somebody else’s McMansion instead of Daddy’s.”

  “You sound a tad bitter.”

  “After Clare, you can see why I’m not real high on city girls.”

  “Not every city girl is like Clare,” Earl said. “Anyway, seems like all the classifieds I read are about selling a hobby farm to city execs who want to move out of the rat race that they largely created.”

  “Farming, as we both know from experience, is not a hobby. That was Clare’s problem. She thought she could swan in to Memphis every whipstitch to get her nails done and have lunch at chic little restaurants with her rich girlfriends. And I’m not.”

  “A girlfriend? You got that right.”

  “No, idiot. Rich. Hello. See that little bit of red over there in the brush?” Seth pulled to the side of the road. Both men got out and slid through the trees.

  The rear end of a large ATV stuck out from under a dark green tarp obviously meant to conceal it. The way it was parked, it posed a threat to any vehicle that came up on it.

  Earl checked the plate. “A year out of date. That would seem to constitute a violation.” He got out his phone and dialed in a series of numbers. “The last license comes back to a Tyrell McKee.” He waited. “My, my, Mr. McKee is not one of our more saintly citizens.”