He Wanted Me Pregnant!
The Curvy Vet and the Billionaire Cowboy
by Victoria Wessex
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Also by Victoria Wessex on Kindle
He Wanted Me Pregnant…
The British Nanny and her Billionaire Employer
The Lawyer and the Outlaw Biker
The Stewardess and the Billionaire CEO
The Intern and the Senator
The Maid and the Billionaire Prince
The Cocktail Waitress and the Card Shark
The Lady and the Pirate (a double length special!)
The Nurse and the Soldier
The Curvy Waitress and the Billionaire French Count
Blurbs and free extract at the end of this book!
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Chapter 1
It was the lack of caffeine that did it.
Normally, I make the first coffee of the day on the way to the shower, while my eyes are still half shut. Then there’s the travel mug in the car as I drive to the lab and more when I arrive.
That morning, though, I’d been so paranoid that I’d miss the flight that I’d barely slept at all. Then I’d had to drag myself out of bed in the early hours to get on a flight to Denver, then stand in the terminal for an hour, asleep on my feet, to catch my connecting flight to Cheyenne, Wyoming. So I’d had no coffee at all.
As I stood sleepily in line at Cheyenne airport, a security officer asked me to aside for a random security check. I heaved my carry-on suitcase up onto the table and popped the lid. The officer looked down at the piles of clothes and then gave me a look.
I felt myself redden. What? So everything was folded into neat little piles. Okay, and sorted by garment type. And then color. So? “I like to be organized,” I said.
He nodded at the wheeled Pelican case beside me, the one I’d just retrieved from the luggage carousel. “And what’s in that?”
Factor in that I was half asleep.
“Drugs,” I said brightly.
A few minutes later, I was in a side room with three security guards, watching as they picked through all the tiny glass vials. I could feel the familiar cold tide of panic rising inside me, threatening to pull me under the surface. I was so scared I could barely speak. Then I caught a female guard looked meaningfully at a pack of latex gloves.
“I’m a vet,” I croaked. “I work for the CDC in Atlanta!”
“CDC’s for people,” said one guard.
I get this a lot. “It’s the Center for Disease Control,” I said. “Animals get diseases too.”
“What’s this?” said the female guard, holding up a long, phallic syringe. “A sex toy?”
“It’s for injecting semen,” I said tightly. “Into a cow.”
She put it down very quickly and they said I was free to go.
***
I stopped in the restroom to try to make myself look human. I was so tired, I was almost past caring, but it wasn’t like I got to meet a lot of billionaires in my line of work. I might as well make an effort, I thought. I looked in the mirror and winced.
My skin is normally very pale anyway—it comes with the auburn hair. But under the unforgiving fluorescents of the restroom I looked as if I hadn’t seen the sun in years. Which, worryingly, was not so far from the truth. I spent almost all my time in the lab—even weekends. I was the twenty-four year old with probably the worst social life in Atlanta.
I’d thrown on a charcoal-gray business suit, a green blouse and heels, figuring that would see me through whatever sort of consultation the guy had in mind. Hopefully there wouldn’t be too much trudging around his farmyard because the shoes weren’t cheap. I always spent money on my shoes because I knew spending it on the rest of my outfit, with my body, was a waste of time.
The skirt clung to my plus-sized ass and hips. The blouse was tight over my full breasts, the jacket doing nothing to hide my shape. The door opened and another woman strolled in, her own suit skimming her A-cup breasts and boyish hips. Me in reverse, right down to the tiny suitcase she wheeled past my own huge, security-stickered Pelican case.
I’ve always hated my body. I know we’re meant to be body-positive and love the body we’re in, but that never worked for me. How are you meant to love your body when all it gets you is stares, especially from men, until all you want to do is crawl into a corner and hide?
When I finally emerged into the arrivals area, my caffeine-starved brain almost made me walk right past the man to the nearest cafe, but he moved to block my way, holding up a sign that said Dr. Amanda Sansom. “Ma’am?”
I took a deep breath. “Yes. That’s me.” I put my hands together in prayer. “But please can I get some coffee before we leave?”
“Already waiting for you in the car, doctor. Mr. Tyler thought you might need it.”
I focused on him. He was an older guy with soft, silver hair in a chauffeur’s uniform. “Okay,” I said sleepily. “Fine. Thank you.” I would have let him throw me into the back of a van, duct-tape my wrists and sell me into white slavery at that point, as long as he gave me coffee.
We stepped outside into the warm breeze of a Wyoming summer. Wyoming. When I’d got the call the day before, I’d had to look it up because it was bang in the middle of the big, dark area of my mental map of America, lumped in with Montana and Idaho and Colorado, covered by a sign that simply said “Here Be Mountains and Cowboys.”
The chauffeur hauled my cases into the trunk and opened the door for me. The limo was some big, black SUV with leather seats, but all my attention was on the steaming takeout cup in the cup holder. As we pulled away from the airport in the early morning light, my lips finally made contact with the hot, brown nectar. Bliss.
“How far is it, anyway?” I asked, looking out of the window as we pulled onto the interstate.
“Oh, four or so mumble,” the chauffeur told me, sounding embarrassed.
“Four miles?”
He glanced apologetically in the rearview mirror. “Four hours.”
“What?! Where the hell is this place?”
“Most of the way across the state. Near the mountains. Mr. Tyler said not to tell you straight off. Hoped maybe you’d doze most of the way and not notice. Sorry.”
I settled back against the soft leather, crossed my arms and brooded. It wasn’t the chauffeur’s fault, but this was getting ridiculous. Who flies a vet all the way from Atlanta to Wyoming? There were about a million vets closer to him.
Answer: a billionaire. Tyler had made his money in oil, then bought himself a stud farm. No doubt the fee he was paying the CDC to borrow me for a few days was pretty hefty. But it still didn’t explain why he wanted me, when all I knew about was equine viruses. Had there been some sort of an outbreak on his farm?
***
Four hours in the car was enough to remind me how much I hated the country. The scenery was beautiful, sure, but there was just nothing to…do. Small town after small town. High schools and bowling alleys and diners. People growing up and getting married and having kids, all in the same fifty-mile bubble. I kept checking my phone, watching in horror as the signal strength bars disappeared one by one until none remained at all. I couldn’t remember even not having WiFi. I’d never had zero bars. What if I needed to call someone
—find a payphone? What if I needed to use the Starbucks app on my phone to find the nearest branch—
What if there wasn’t one, out here?!
Breathe, Amanda, breathe….
I looked at my watch. It was almost noon but if it was just a short consult, maybe I could catch a flight back late that evening and be back to civilization the same day. Back to the cool, clean sterility of my lab and people who wore shoes, not boots.
We drove up a long driveway towards a huge mansion. On either side, horses filled the fields, being trained by men in Stetsons, eating or just standing there, magnificent and proud. For the first time, I pressed up against the window to look out. I’ve always loved horses.
We stopped some distance from the house, beside yet another guy in a Stetson—a black hat, this time. Isn’t that meant to be what the bad guy wears?
I climbed out and the guy ambled over to me, the brim of his hat hiding most of his face. He was a tall guy and built like a quarterback, with wide shoulders and thick arms under his black and white checked shirt. Probably the guy who runs the ranch for Tyler, I thought. It hit me that I probably wouldn’t even get to meet the man himself. He was probably in an office somewhere, with his nose in a spreadsheet.
“Dr. Sansom,” the man said, extending a hand that was big enough to swallow mine whole. “I really appreciate you coming all the way out here.”
I thought of the journey from hell and gritted my teeth. Not at all, I was going to say. “Not—”
But then something went wrong.
He stepped closer and raised his chin, and for the first time I could see his face. His big, chocolate-brown eyes were what hit me first, their melting warmth and humor exactly what was needed in such a strong, rugged face. His jaw was dusted with dark stubble and I could see tousled black hair under the hat. Mid-thirties, I estimated, and utterly different to men I saw in Atlanta. There was something wild about him, as if he’d just travelled here from the Old West. He looked like a guy who’d ride into town, wrestle a grizzly, shoot the sheriff and ride off with the schoolmarm.
Ride off with the schoolmarm for some reason sent a thread of heat twisting straight down to my core.
He was grinning and his smile was so infectious I felt the corners of my own mouth twitching, despite my exhaustion. I felt sort of giddy and even giggly for a second—which is ridiculous because I never giggle. We locked eyes and, just for a second he gave me the look. The one I saw men give other women, right before they buy them a drink and sweet-talk them into a dance or a kiss. A you’re going to be mine look.
I blinked and looked away. Get real! No man—especially one as gorgeous as him—was going to give me that look. “…at all,” I finally remembered to say. Then, to cover my embarrassment, “Um. Why am I here?”
He didn’t answer immediately. He regarded me as he rubbed his cheek, the stubble there rasping. For a second, I wondered what it would be like to kiss him. He had the most beautiful mouth, a full lower lip set within a strong, masculine jaw. Soft and hard at the same time. And he’d have to bend down a little to kiss me, and I’d have to tilt my head up—
I caught myself and flushed.
“Triple E,” he said at last.
I blinked. Triple E is Eastern Equine Encephalitis. It’s spread by mosquitoes and caught by horses and—occasionally—by people. In horses, it causes a vicious fever, paralysis and death. It’s a horrible disease, killing maybe eighty percent of horses it infects, and the one saving grace is that there’s a vaccine.
Which is why this made no sense. No way would a billionaire not vaccinate his horses, especially when he was running a stud farm and each horse could be worth a fortune. “I don’t understand,” I said. “Why didn’t you—”
The cowboy held up his hand and then let out a sigh. “There’s a complication,” he said.
I watched him carefully.
He rubbed his cheek again. “Look,” he said. “You probably didn’t even eat breakfast. Why don’t I buy you something to eat while I explain?”
I shook my head. “Triple E is no joke,” I said. “We should start treatment immediately.”
He nodded. “I know, but…that’s the complication. We can’t treat immediately. Come on. Breakfast.”
I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on. Was this really about the horse, or was he trying somehow to…no, that was ridiculous. Of course he wasn’t interested in me. So why take me to breakfast? Why not just spit it out?
I looked again at the muscled forearms poking out from under his shirt. At the strong, curving chest. There was something about him I couldn’t put my finger on, something I’d never seen before, and it had me transfixed. And there was the fact that I hadn’t eaten since the previous night, a fact my stomach kept noisily reminding me of. I nodded slowly. “Okay,” I said cautiously. “Breakfast.” I looked in the direction of the huge mansion. “Shouldn’t we tell Mr. Tyler we’re going, though? I wouldn’t want him to come out and wonder where his vet is.”
The cowboy gave me another one of those smiles, teeth gleaming. “Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry, doctor. I’m Russ Tyler.”
Chapter 2
He drove us into the nearby town in his own car—not a Ferrari or a Lamborghini or even some big, expensive SUV, but in a beat-up pickup truck. I was almost silent the whole way. I was trying to reconcile this big, muscled, gorgeous man with the ex-oil tycoon I’d heard about. He didn’t look as if he did deals for a living. He looked as if he’d be more comfortable wrestling with a wellhead—or with a bull, for that matter. I mean, I got that sometimes rich people retired and went and bought a ranch or something, but he was still in his mid-thirties, and from the dust on his jeans he didn’t just saunter around his farm, treating it like a toy. He actually worked at it.
When he opened my door for me and helped me out onto the sidewalk, I finally realized what it was about him that was so different. He was real, in a way that the guys in Atlanta—and even the guys I could see around me on the street in Wyoming—weren’t. They were like faded photocopies or fuzzy holograms. He was somehow authentic and buzzing with life.
When he hauled open the door of the diner and showed me in, three different people greeted him by name. This wasn’t the sort of billionaire lifestyle I’d read about in books. Where were the bodyguards and the SUVs with the blacked out glass?
“I don’t get it,” I said as we sat down in a booth. “You eat at diners…you drive an old pick-up truck. Where do you spend your billions?”
“Where they’re needed,” he said. “Like getting you here.”
I shook my head. “I’m very flattered, Mr. Tyler—”
“Russ.”
“…Russ. But there are lots of other vets right here in Wyoming who could have dealt with a case of Triple E.”
“But they’re not the best. I wanted the best. You’re the best.”
He didn’t say it as if it was a compliment. He said it as if it was a fact, which made it a thousand times harder to take in.
“I read your paper on Triple E yesterday,” he told me before I could argue. “And then I called a friend at the CDC. He agreed you knew more about it than anyone.”
The waitress arrived, which saved me from further embarrassment. I was proud of the work I’d done on Triple E and other equine diseases, but I still couldn’t believe he’d fly me across the country just to take a look at a sick horse. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a warm glow alongside the shock, though. Someone appreciating—or even noticing—what I did was new to me.
He ordered a cowboy-sized breakfast of eggs, toast and beef hash, together with coffee. “The stuff here is legendary,” he told me proudly. “Brought a man back to life, once, after he’d been dead a week.”
I politely rolled my eyes, but super-strong coffee did sound like exactly what I needed. “I’ll have coffee then, please,” I said. “Maybe some oatmeal. Do they have muesli?”
Russ just stared at me and I remembered I was in the country. I looked
around. There was a distinct lack of people eating muesli. My stomach growled. “Some pancakes?” I asked, tentatively.
He nodded. “With bacon? And maple syrup and butter?”
I blanched at that, suddenly self-conscious. But he was smiling so enthusiastically…I nodded.
***
When the food arrived, I looked at the groaning plate and thought, I can’t eat all that! And promptly did. The pancakes weren’t the heavy, tasteless stodge you get in a city diner—they were freshly made, crispy at the edges and soft and fluffy in the middle. The butter’s satin-smooth richness melted into the syrup’s sweetness. The bacon was salty and crunchy and perfect, its sharp tang cutting through everything else. And the coffee…heaven in a cup, smoky and strong, coffee you could almost chew. It was like a depth-charge of adrenalin heading down to my stomach, waking me up from the inside out.
Russ had demolished his eggs, toast and beef hash in the meantime, which made my empty plate seem not quite so embarrassing. “Okay,” I said. “I had breakfast. What’s this complication?”
Russ hunkered forward over the table, close enough that I could smell the citrus note of his aftershave. A hot little rush went through me. “Technically, it’s not my horse,” he said. “And I’m not sure where it is.”
I stared at him.
“It’s feral,” he said. “I spotted it yesterday morning. Beautiful mustang mare, running wild out in the mountains. And I’m pretty sure she’s got Triple-E.”
Feral horses, of course, weren’t vaccinated, so Triple-E made sense. “So…you’re going to catch it and bring it back here, so I can treat it?” I asked.
“It’s too rocky out there for a truck. And she looks too shaky to walk back.”
I felt my mouth drop open. “You want me to treat her out there?”
He nodded, watching my reaction carefully. “I can give her a home, if we can save her.” He leaned even closer. “Doctor Sansom, she’s going to die out there if we don’t help her.”
The Curvy Vet and the Billionaire Cowboy (He Wanted Me Pregnant!) Page 1
