LOVE OF A RODEO MAN (MODERN DAY COWBOYS) (19 page)

It hadn’t seemed real
before now. The lawyer’s handshake brought home to Sara the enormity of what she’d just done. And she still hadn’t said a word about it to Mitch.

With the sale finalized, Doc immediately disappeared.

Floyd was surprisingly reliable for a change, calling Sara “Dr. Wingate” in an ann
oyingly formal way when he congratulated her on the purchase. “I’ll do me best for you, just as I’ve always done for Doc,” Floyd assured her, and Sara shuddered. It was more a threat than a promise.

During the two weeks before the party, Sara came to the office early and stayed late, answering several midnight calls that brought her back home in time to go to work again.

Fortunately it was haying season, so Mitch was just as busy as she. They were able
to spend a couple of passionate hours together one evening, but it wasn’t nearly enough. And what with one thing and another, like finding her underclothes, she still didn’t find the right moment to tell him she was the new owner of Stone’s Vet Service.

Mitch rang Sara first thing on Friday morning.

“Hiya, Doc.” There was a note of exuberance in his greeting, and Sara smiled into the receiver. “Hiya Doc yourself.”

“How about playing hooky with me and driving down to a ranch south of Missoula this weekend? Misty’s come into season and the guy down there has some of the best rodeo stock in the country. We could leave tonight, come back Sunday afternoon and go out for dinner and dancing in some fancy hotel in the city.”

Sara knotted a fist with frustration. “Mitch, I’d like nothing better, but I simply c
an’t get away,” she said.

“Surely that place will run without you for two lousy days,” he said.

Floyd bustled into the room before Sara could answer. “There’s a rancher from up the valley in the waiting room. He wants to talk to you, Doctor,” Floyd informed her in a stage whisper, hovering.

Sara waved a hand at
him. “I’m coming,” she said impatiently.

“Good, I’ll pick you up...” Mitch’s tone was jubilant.

“Oh, Mitch, not you, I was talking to Floyd.” She glared pointedly until Floyd finally inched his way out and shut the door. “Mitch, darling, I’m sorry, I just can’t get away right now.”

There was silence, and then he said he understood, but Sara could hear the disappointment in his voice.

That weekend passed in a flurry of hard work, two night calls that kept her out till nearly dawn, and a constant, nagging sense of utter misery because she hadn’t been able to go with Mitch.

He called her late Sunday night; she was having a cup of coffee with her mother and Dave by the pool.

“Hiya, Doc.” His voice was weary. “I’m home, I’m beat. It was one hell of a lonely weekend without you.”

“Same here,” she said f
ervently. “I missed you desperately, Mitch. I hated every moment you were gone.”

“Good, then next time you’ll come along.”

There was a pause, and she finally said, “If it’s possible, of course I will.”

The Sunday of the engagement party, Bitterroot was hopping with frenzied activity by 8:00 a.m.

Ruth had already arrived with a dour-faced Wilson in tow, and he’d been immediately ordered to work by Gram. The amazing t
hing was, Sara noted, Wilson went meekly ahead and did what he was told, which included, of all things, washing a huge bowlful of salad greens.

Buffet tables were set up on the cedar decking all around the pool, and flowers were arranged on each. Chairs were grouped in friendly circles here and there across the grass, and by twelve, everything was ready for the arrival of the guests at one.

The women were putting the finishing touches on the salads and arranging the rolls in napkin lined baskets, growing more nervous by the minute.

“Go and get ready, Sara.
We’ll finish here,” Jennie ordered, and Sara gratefully headed for her cabin. She actually had a new dress for the occasion, a silky black and-white print mini

chemise with string-thin shoul
der straps, about the sexiest dress she’d ever owned.

Sara had seen it in the window of the smart new boutique in Plains and bought it without giving hers
elf time to think about the leg baring hemline or the astronomical price tag.

Mitch deserved this dress, she told herself now, sliding it down her freshly showered, perfumed body and wishing she had a full-length mirror to see how it looked. He’d rarely seen her in anything but stained working coveralls, and the time had come to remind him she was female through and through.
With legs.

She was just putting th
e finishing touches to an ambitious chignon high on the back of her head when she heard a tap on the door and Mitch came in. He took two steps into the room and stopped, and the expression on his face was worth twice what the dress had cost.

His green eyes were sultry as he allowed his gaze to trace every inch of her, from the
ridiculously high strappy sandals to the artfully casual curls escaping from the high knot at the back of her head.

“Are you the lady doc who’s gonna marr
y a cowboy?” he said, and she closed the space between them and wrapped her arms around his neck. “You look like a movie star.”

“I feel like Cinderella,” she said, and neither of them cared one bit that he kissed off
all her carefully applied lipstick.

The guests started arriving long before one, and Mitch kept Sara’s hand clasped proudly in his the whole time they greeted friends and neighbors. Carol and Bill Forgie were among the first to arrive, Carol hugely pregnant by now.

“Not much longer,” she groaned, lowering herself carefully into a straight-backed chair. “But I wanted to come and congratulate both of you even if my water breaks right here with all of Plains looking on. I feel as if our foal had a lot to do with you and Mitch falling in love. I’ll never forget the way you looked at each other that day. Look, Bill, they’re doing it again now,” she teased. “Isn’t that cute?”

Sara stuck out her to
ngue and Carol giggled.

The smell of beef roasting in the huge outdoor barbecue pit mingled with the pine scent from the surrounding trees and the faint mineral odor from the pool. Laughter and voices filled the air, and Sara and Mitch shook hands and smiled and thanked more people than they would have thought even lived in the area.

But before the last guests had even arrived, Dave came hurrying over and tapped Sara on the arm. “There’s a phone call for you,” he said quietly. “They said they tried your cell.”

She’d deliberately left it in her cabin.
She turned to Mitch, and the look he gave her sent a shudder of foreboding down her spine.

“Sara, not today. Please
, not today. Tell whoever it is that you can’t come.”

“I’ll be right back,” she said weakly, and hurried into the lodge.

The man on the phone was furious and upset. “One of my cows calved out in the pasture last night, and she pushed out her uterus in the process. The neighbor’s dog was running loose, and he’s ripped her to ribbons. Not only that, he attacked the calf as well. I called the vet I usually use from Lynch Creek, and he’s out for the day. I phoned his partner, and he’s got the flu. He told me to call Doc Stone, and finally I got referred to you. Now, I’m goddamned sick and tired of trying to get a vet out here. Are you gonna come and do something about this or not?”

Sara could see Mitch standi
ng apart from the group outside, waiting for her. In her mind’s eye she saw the bloody cow and the poor newborn calf.

“Tell me where you’re l
ocated,” she heard herself saying. “I’ll be there as quickly as I can.”

Mitch saw the expression on her face when she hung up the phone and started toward him, and he knew, even though he could hardly believe she’d do this to him. Sara was about to walk out on her own engagement party, walk out and leave him to apologize and explain and act as if he didn’t mind at all being deserted on such an occasion.

“Mitch, I have to go.”

Impotent anger flared in him, and he wondered, not for the first time, just how much of their life together would be interrupted by those very words. He saw her stricken look, and he tried his best to swallow his rage.

“How long d’you think you’ll be?”

She shook her head hopelessly. “From the sound of it, quite a while.”

He saw his father watching them, and he forced himself not to show his frustration with her in front of Wilson. He planted a hasty kiss on Sara’s cheek as she hurried off and pinned as good a grin as he could manage on his stiff features. He wasn’t about to give the old man the satisfaction of thinking he’d been right about what he’d said when Mitch had told him he was marrying Sara. “Better learn quick how to cook and clean house, boy.
Change diapers, too. These career women put their jobs ahead of everythin’ else.”

The afternoon stretched ahead of Mitch like an eternity.

It turned out the ranch was twenty miles away, and the tiny calf was nearly dead when Sara finally arrived in the pasture where the rancher and his men were waiting with the injured animals.

She’d
taken a wrong turn and had to backtrack, wasting valuable time, and the rancher, Adam Mayberry, was quick to ask scathingly what the hell had taken her so long.

She took one look at the horribly mutilated calf and with nausea ris
ing in her stomach, she told Mayberry that it was hopeless. “The calf will have to be put down.”

Mayberry cursed viciously. “I hope you know what the hell you’re talking about, lady, because I don’t think much of letting some green vet make decisions like that about my animals.”

Under different circumstances, Sara thought that the big, rawboned man might have been easygoing and friendly. Today he was as obnoxious as he could possibly be.

She met his gaze with a cold, level stare. “You called me out here. Now decide right now whether or not you want me to treat these animals, because if you have doubts about my ability, I’ll leave immediately.”

He gave her a furious look. “I don’t have much choice, do I, miss? You’d better go ahead.”

She thought of the party she’d left to come here, Mitch’s anger when she’d left him to deal with their celebration alone, and she longed to walk away. Fast. But the cow was lowing pitifully over her calf and was bloodied herself.

What’s more, at the end of the month, there was Sara’s payment to be met to Doc Stone, and all the other payments for all the other months ahead. And the rent increase. Neither her conscience nor her bank account could afford an excess of pride at the moment.

“Do you want to salvage the meat from the calf?”

Mayberry shook his head. “There’s not enough intact to bother about,” he said despondently, and Sara had to agree with him. She administered a lethal injection to the calf and prepared a second hypodermic full of anesthetic. She injected it in the cow’s tail, grimly hoping it would do what it was designed for.

“Get me buckets of hot water from the back o
f my truck,” she ordered. “I have to clean this animal before I can do anything for her.” Time disappeared as it always did when she was doing the work she’d been trained for, and afternoon waned and became evening and then night as she struggled and failed and tried again, and then again, and still again.

“She’s not here? Hey, Mitch, don’t tell me she saw through you already and ran, buddy?” “Where’s your lady, Mitch? We drove all the way in to meet her. Can’t believe you’re really gettin’ hitched, you old son of a gun. Introduce us...”

During the interminab
le afternoon Mitch parried comments, apologized for Sara’s absence and endured the taunts and teasing from friends he hadn’t seen for years and had rashly invited to the engagement party. When everyone finally got in their vehicles and drove away, he stalked out to Sara’s cabin, threw himself into the old rocker on the porch, and waited.

It was nearly ten before he saw the lights of her truck turn in. He heard the vehicle’s door slam, saw her tall shape coming across the yard. She avoided the lodge, making her way around the side of the building quietly and skirting the pool as she found the path to her cabin.

Smart move, Doc,
Mitch thought admiringly, despite the outraged fury rising in him. Jennie and Adeline had been anything but pleased at her absence, and Adeline wasn’t one for keeping silent.

His own mother was
the only one who staunchly defended Sara’s absence that day.

“She’s a doctor, and doctor’s go when they’re needed,” she’d said firmly when they were all
cleaning up that evening and Adeline had made a caustic comment about Sara being absent from her own danged party.

Sara
stopped just short of the steps when she realized he was there.

“Oh, hi, Mitch. I thought everyone had gone home.” Her voice was infinitely weary. She still wore the blue coverall she’d worked in, and it was a spectacular mess. Her face was dirty, her hair sweaty and lying in ropes on her shoulders.

He tried to stop the angry retort that rose in his throat, but he failed. “I’m not everyone, Sara. I’m the guy you’re supposed to be marrying in a month, remember? This wingding here today was to celebrate that. But it’s kinda hard for me to have a good time when my bride-to-be walks out on the party.”

A long, weary sigh escaped her. All the long way home, she’d hoped she wouldn’t have to deal with this tonight. “I’m sorry, Mitch, really I am. There was a cow and calf that’d been savaged by dogs...”

He cut her off. “Every single call is something urgent, Sara. What the hell is wrong with Doc Stone answering a few of his own emergencies? It’s his practice. You’re just playing the sucker, letting him throw all the work on you.”

“Mitch, it’s not Doc Stone’s practice anymore.” She drew in a
deep breath. “It’s mine now, I’ve made arrangements to buy it.”

He was speechless. Long, pregnant moments drifted by and neither of them moved.

“You bought it?  You bought a business, and never said a word to me about it?” His eyes narrowed, and there wasn’t a trace of warmth in the cold, hard lines of his face.

A
nnoyance crept into her tone. “I didn’t think being engaged meant I had to ask permission. It came up all of a sudden a week or so ago, and I had to make the decision. It’s what I’ve always dreamed of, having my own practice. Besides...” She was probably trying to figure out how to tell him all the details, but Mitch wasn’t listening.

“This affects my life as much as it does yours, and yet you didn’t even bother talking it over with me,” he was saying in icy tones. “Your job obviously comes first with you, Sara, and that’s not going to change just because we get married. So where does that
leave me? Sitting around waiting for a few scraps of your time when nobody has an emergency? Being embarrassed, like I was today, when you ought to be beside me and instead you’re off taking care of somebody’s cow?”

Sara’s fatigue was rapidly being replaced with defensive anger. “You knew from the beginning that
my job was demanding. Can’t you understand what it means to me to have a practice of my own? I spent years in school, hard years, dreaming of the day I’d be able to have something like this. Can’t you understand that and be happy for me?”

“Lots of us have dreams, lady,” Mitch sneered, “I had dreams, and look where it got me, back here slopping pigs and rounding up sheep. Some of us don’t just take what the hell we want without first considering the people we love.”

Sara’s tenuous control was gone. She was trembling, and her voice rose. “So that’s what this is about, that I have a career I love, a job I look forward to doing, while you go on wishing you were still the hero of the rodeo circuit. Don’t you think your being a reluctant rancher will affect our life just as much as my being called out on a Sunday? What happens to me if one day you decide you just can’t handle pigs and sheep anymore, and you grab your rope and take off back to the rodeo?”

He took two quick strides down the steps and detoured sharply around her, careful not to touch her.
He was furious.

“Mitch, please,
come back, let me explain…”

She held
out a hand to him, and he heard her, but he didn’t turn around. In a few moments, the truck roared and gravel spun wildly as he accelerated out of the parking lot.

Mitch clutched the wheel as if it were someone’s neck. Her words smashed through his skull, making it ache, and as he hurtled down the deserted highway at a speed far beyond the posted limit, his mouth twisted into a grimace with the bitter admission that what Sara had accused him of was only the truth.

H
e wasn’t thrilled with his role as prodigal returned, he didn’t look forward to days spent working beside his father. Maybe some of the rage that had built up today against the woman he loved was actually just what she’d said—envy because she had a career she loved, and he didn’t. So what the hell was he going to do about it? Cut and run, back to a way of life he was already getting too old for? Climb on Misty and head on down the road, odd jobbing here and there until something took his fancy?

His shoulders slumped, his grip relaxed on the wheel, his foot slackened on the gas.
None of the reasons for his coming back here had changed. Home was where he belonged. He was the one who needed to change. He was no quitter, either.

As a rodeo rider, he didn’t give up just because a bronco threw him once or twice, or ten times. There was a way to make this work, and by God, he’d find it.

The problem was, would he ever be happy at it? Damn that stubborn woman of his anyhow, buying a vet practice and never saying a word to him. Hurt pride mingled with Mitch’s other confused emotions.

His mind’s eye pictured Sara as he’d left her back there, hopping mad at him, covered in the muck her job so often produced,
begging him to listen, and a stab of uncertainty shot through him. Was there hope that the two of them could take the love they had and turn it into a marriage that worked?

Was love enough? Or would they be smarter to pack the whole thing in right now?

The answer to that question
continued to plague him during the days that followed, and because there were no simple answers to it, Mitch stayed at the ranch, busy from daylight to dusk with haying but aware also that he was deliberately avoiding Sara.

She sent a message back with Ruth, late in the week, that she’d like to talk with him, but still he delayed. He worked from dawn until dark in a kind of maniac frenzy, collapsing into bed in utter exhaustion and getting up before daybreak to do it all over again.

There’d been an uneasy truce between Mitch and his father since the day of the engagement party. They worked together when a job required two men, but neither sought out the other’s company voluntarily.

Wilson had main
tained a stubborn silence about the trip Mitch had taken to have Misty bred. Mitch no longer offered any comments or suggestions about the management of the ranch. He did his stubborn best to act exactly like a hired hand, taking orders meekly. He knew it drove Wilson nuts, and that was satisfying in some perverse fashion.

Friday morning, Mitch was already half done with the chores when he saw his father coming across the yard. Dawn was just streaking the eastern sky, and the roosters were crowing persistently from the chicken c
oop.

Wilson strode
over to Mitch. “You tryin’ to show me up, boy, gettin’ out here every mornin’ this week an hour ahead a’ me?”

“Nope,
” Mitch said shortly. “Just can’t sleep, that’s all.”

To Mitch’s absolute amazement, his father heaved a huge sigh and said grumpily, “Well, that makes two of us. Never dreamed that at my time of life I’d be havin’ problems with your mother like this.” He spat disgustedly, and with an embarrassed sidelong glance at his son, added, “Leave th
e rest of this, I’ll do it. Come on up to the kitchen and have some coffee.”

It took a long moment for Mitch to realize that the old man might actually want to talk to him.

Wilson made heavy business of pouring mugs full of the truly awful coffee he’d brewed. Ruth was still asleep upstairs, and Wilson carefully drew the door shut at the bottom of the stairwell before he sat down.

“It’s this danged fool
job your mother’s taken, Mitchell,” he whined before Mitch had even lifted his cup. “She never worked before, in all the years we bin married. Why in tarnation would she have to go and get a job now being a cook at some fool restaurant? It’s blamed disgustin’, if you ask me.” Wilson shook his head dejectedly. “We don’t need the money, I provide for her. And she’s never here anymore, place is fallin’ apart. Half the time, supper’s late, nothin’ baked.”

Usually the old man’s complaining tone sparked anger in Mitch, but this morning, he
found himself feeling sorry for Wilson, even though the urge to defend his mother ran hot. This job at Bitterroot was changing Ruth...changing her for the better.

She’d started smiling again, she chattered about the people she met, she’d stopped crying all the time.

Mitch told his father that, trying his best to make Wilson see that Ruth had good reasons for taking the job.

But Wilson couldn’t and wouldn’t understand. He just began another tirade about the chickens, of all things. Ruth had always taken care of the chickens, and now Wilson was having to clean out the coop.
He hated bloody chickens. It seemed that was the final straw.

He was deliberately ignoring the fact that having a job was making his wife happy again. Why was that? Mitch sat back, his coffee untouched, not listening to the litany of petty complaints about unwashed socks and dishes in the sink. Instinctively Mitch knew these weren’t the things really bothering his father. Was it the realization that Ruth had suddenly found something that interested her, Mitch mused, something that Wilson had no part of?

Was Wilson jealous that Ruth could be involved in a life quite apart from the one she’d always lived?