The Valentine Two-Step

She learned early she would never be able to please the endless parade of busybody social workers and foster parents who marched through her life. She couldn’t please them, and she couldn’t depend on them. Too often, the moment she began to care for a family, she was capriciously yanked out and sent to another one. Eventually, she learned not to care, to carefully construct a hard shell around her heart. The only one she could truly count on was herself.

This was her chance. Hers and Dylan’s. The opportunity to build the life she had dreamed of since those early days cleaning cages.

She wasn’t ready to give up that dream, patients or none.

Besides that, she had SueAnn to consider. With the animosity between the two, she and Steve would never be able to work together, and she didn’t want to lose her as a friend or as an assistant.

“I’m not going to change my mind, Steve,” she finally said. “It’s a good offer and I appreciate it, really I do, but I’m just not interested right now.”

If Dylan had given her that same look, Ellie would have called it a pout. After only a moment of sulking, Steve’s expression became amiable again. “I’ll keep working on you. Eventually I’ll wear you down, just watch.”

He picked up the case of vaccine and headed for the door. “Thanks again for the loan. I’ll drop my shipment off tomorrow, if that’s all right with you.”

“That would be fine,” she said.

At the door he paused and looked at her with a grin. “And have fun working with Matt Harte. The man can be tough as a sow’s snout, but he’s a damn hard worker. He’s single-handedly built the Diamond Harte into a force to be reckoned with around here. I’m not sure that will help when it comes to planning a school carnival, but it ought to make things interesting.”

Interesting. She had a feeling the word would be a vast understatement.

He was hiding out, no denying it.

Like a desperado trying frantically to stay two steps ahead of a hangin’ party and a noose with his name on it.

A week after visiting Ellie at her clinic, Matt sat trapped in his office at the ranch house, trying to concentrate on the whir and click of the computer in front of him instead of the soft murmur of women’s voices coming from the kitchen at the end of the hall.

As usual, he had a hundred and one better things to occupy his time than sit here gazing at a blasted screen, but he didn’t dare leave the sanctuary of his office.

She was out there.

Ellie Webster. The city vet who had sneaked her way into his dreams for a week, with that fiery hair and her silvery-green eyes and that determined little chin.

He thought she was only driving out to the Diamond Harte to drop her kid off for a sleepover with Lucy. She was supposed to be here ten minutes, tops, and wouldn’t even have to know he was in here.

Things didn’t go according to plan. He had a feeling they rarely would, where Ellie Webster was concerned. Instead of driving away like she should have done, she had apparently plopped down on one of the straight-backed kitchen chairs, and now he could hear her and Cassie talking and laughing like they’d been best friends for life.

They’d been at it for the last half hour, and he’d just about had enough.

He wasn’t getting a damn thing done. Every time he tried to focus on getting the hang of the new livestock-tracking software, her voice would creep under the door like a sultry, devious wisp of smoke, and his concentration would be shot all to hell and back.

Why did it bug him so much to have her invading his space with that low laugh of hers? He felt itchy and bothered having her here, like a mustang with a tail full of cockleburs.

It wasn’t right. He would have to get a handle on this awareness if he was going to be able to work on the school thing with her for the next few months. As to how, he didn’t have the first idea. It had been a long time since he’d been so tangled up over a woman.

Maybe he should ask her out.

The idea scared him worse than kicking a mountain lion. He wasn’t much of a lady’s man. Maybe he used to be when he was younger—he’d enjoyed his share of buckle bunnies when he rodeoed in college, he wouldn’t deny it—but things had changed after Melanie.

He had tried to date a few times after he was finally granted a divorce in absentia after her desertion, but every attempt left him feeling restless and awkward.

After a while he just quit trying, figuring it was better to wake up lonely in his own bed than in a stranger’s.

He wasn’t lonely, he corrected the thought quickly. He had Lucy and Jess and Cassidy and the ranch hands. He sure as hell didn’t need another woman messing things up.

He cleared his throat. The action made him realize how thirsty he was. Parched, like he’d been riding through a desert for days.

The kitchen had water. Plenty of it, cold, pure mountain spring water right out of the tap. He could walk right in there and pour himself a big glass and nobody could do a damn thing about it.

Except then he’d have to face her.

He heaved a sigh and turned to the computer until the next wisp of laughter curled under the door.

That was it. He was going in. He shoved back from the desk and headed toward the door. He lived here, dammit. A man ought to be able to walk into his own kitchen for a drink if it suited him. She had no right to come into his house and tangle him up like this.

No right whatsoever.

Chapter 5

As soon as he walked into the big, warm kitchen, he regretted it.

He felt like the big, bad wolf walking in on a coop full of chickens. All four of them—Ellie, Cass and both of the girls—looked up, their cutoff laughter hanging in the air along with the sweet, intoxicating smell of chocolate chip cookies baking in the oven.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt,” he muttered. “I, uh, just needed a drink of water and then I’ll get out of your way.”

“You didn’t interrupt,” Cassie said. “Sit down. The cookies will be done in a minute, and I know how much you love eating them right out of the oven.”

Information his baby sister didn’t need to be sharing with the whole damn world, thank-you very much. Made him sound like a seven-year-old boy snitching goodies after school. “I’ve got things to do,” he muttered.

“They can wait five minutes, can’t they?”

His jaw worked as he tried to come up with a decent-sounding excuse to escape without seeming rude. How was a man supposed to think straight when he had four females watching him so expectantly?

Finally, he muttered a curse under his breath and pulled out a chair. “Just five minutes, though.”

Like a tractor with a couple bad cylinders, the conversation limped along for a moment, and he squirmed on the hard chair, wishing he were absolutely anywhere but here. He was just about to jump up and rush back to the relative safety of his office—excuse or none—when Lucy ambushed him.

She touched his arm with green-painted fingernails—now where did she get those? he wondered—and gazed at him out of those big gray eyes. “Daddy, Dylan and her mom aren’t going anywhere for Thanksgiving dinner since they don’t have any family around here. Isn’t that sad?”

Keeping his gaze firmly averted from Ellie’s, he made a noncommittal sound.

“Do you think they might be able to come here and share our family’s dinner?”

Despite his best efforts, his gaze slid toward Ellie just in time to catch her mouth drop and her eyes go wide—with what, he couldn’t say for sure, but it sure looked like she was as horrified as he was by the very idea.

“I don’t know, honey—” he began.

“That’s a great idea,” Cassie said at the same time. “There’s always room at the table for a few more, and plenty of food.”

“Oh, no. That’s okay,” Ellie said quickly. “We’ll be fine, won’t we, Dylan?”

Dylan put on a pleading expression. “Come on, Mom. It would be so cool. Lucy’s aunt Cassie is a great cook. I bet she never burns the stuffing like you do.”

Ellie made a face at her daughter, and Matt had to fight a chuckle. And he thought Cass and Lucy were bad at spilling family secrets.

“Be that as it may,” Ellie said, her cheeks tinged slightly pink, “I’m sure the Hartes have a lovely family dinner planned. They don’t need to be saddled with two more.”

“It’s no problem,” Cassie said. “We’d love to have you come. Wouldn’t we, Matt?”

He cleared his throat. Again, he couldn’t seem to make his brain work fast enough to come up with an excuse. “Uh, sure.”

Ellie raised an eyebrow at his less-than-enthusiastic response. He obviously didn’t want to invite her for Thanksgiving any more than she wanted to accept.

“Good. It’s settled,” Cassie said, oblivious to their objections. “It’s usually really casual. Just family—Matt, Lucy, our brother Jess and whichever of the ranch hands stick around for the holidays. We eat around two but you’re welcome to come out any time before then, especially if you’re into watching football with the guys.”

What she knew about football would fit into a saltshaker. Ellie sighed heavily. And what she knew about big rowdy Thanksgiving family dinners wouldn’t even fit on a grain of salt.

It looked like she was going to be stuck with both things. So much for her good intentions about having as little as possible to do with the man who somehow managed to jumble up her insides every time she was around him.

What choice did she have, though? She didn’t want to hurt his daughter or sister’s feelings by refusing the invitation. Lucy was a dear, sweet and quiet and polite. Exactly Dylan’s opposite! It was a wonder they were friends, but somehow the two of them meshed perfectly. They brought out the best in each other.

To her surprise, she and Cassie had also immediately hit it off. Unlike Matt, his sister was bubbly and friendly and went out of her way to make her feel welcomed.

She would sound churlish and rude if she refused to share their holiday simply because the alpha male in the family made her as edgy as a hen on a hot griddle and sent her hormones whirling around like a Texas dust storm.

“Can I bring something?” she finally asked, trying to accept the invitation as gracefully as she could manage.

“Do you have a specialty?” Cassie asked.

Did macaroni and cheese count as a specialty? She doubted it. “No. I’m afraid not.”

“Sure you do, Mom.” Dylan spoke up. “What about that pie you make sometimes?”

She made pecan pie exactly twice, but Dylan had never forgotten it. Hope apparently springs eternal in a nine-year-old’s heart that someday she would bake it again. “I don’t know if I’d call that a specialty.”

“Why don’t you bring it anyway?” Cassie suggested. “Or if you’d rather make something else, that would be fine.”

I’d rather just stay home and have our usual quiet dinner for two, she thought. But one look at Dylan revealed her daughter was ecstatic about the invitation. Her eyes shone, and her funny little face had the same kind of expectancy it usually wore just before walking downstairs on Christmas morning.

She looked so excited that Ellie instantly was awash in guilt for all the years they had done just that—stayed home alone with their precooked turkey and instant mashed potatoes instead of accepting other invitations from friends and colleagues.

Why had she never realized her daughter had been missing a big, noisy celebration? Dylan was usually so vocal about what she wanted and thought she needed. Why had she never said anything about this?

“Whatever you want to bring is fine,” Cassie assured her. “Really, though, you don’t have to bring anything but yourselves. Like I said, there’s always plenty of food.”

“I’ll bring the pecan pie,” she said, hoping her reluctance didn’t filter into her voice.

“Great. I usually make a pumpkin and maybe an apple so we’ll have several to choose from. Knowing my brothers, I doubt any of them will last long.”

She looked at Matt out of the corner of her eyes and found him watching her. What was he thinking? That she was an interloper who had suddenly barged her way in to yet another facet of his life when he had plainly made it clear she wasn’t welcome? She couldn’t tell by the unreadable expression in those startling blue eyes.

The timer suddenly went off on the oven.

“That would be the cookies.” Cassie jumped up and opened the oven door, releasing even more of the heavenly aroma.

A smell so evocative of hearth and home that Ellie’s heart broke a little for all the homemade cookies she never had time to bake for her daughter. She had shed her last tear a long time ago for all the missing cookies in her own childhood.

Cassie quickly transferred at least half a dozen of the warm, gooey treats onto a plate for Matt, then poured him a glass of milk from the industrial-size refrigerator.

She set both in front of him, and he quickly grabbed them and stood up. Ellie smiled a little at the blatant relief evident in every line of his big, rangy body.

“Thanks,” he mumbled to his sister. “I’ll let you ladies get back to whatever you were talking about before I interrupted you.”

The girls’ giggles at being called ladies trailed after him as Matt made his escape from the kitchen.

“Wow, Mom. You look really great,” Dylan said for about the fifth time as they made their way up the walk to the sprawling Diamond Harte ranch house.

Ellie fought her self-consciousness. Matt’s sister said Thanksgiving dinner would be casual, but she didn’t think her usual winter attire of jeans and denim work shirts was quite appropriate.

Instead, she had worn her slim wool skirt over soft black leather boots and a matching dove-gray sweater—one of her few dressy outfits that only saw the light of day when she went to professional meetings. Was she hideously over-dressed? She hoped not. She was nervous enough about this as it was without adding unsuitable clothes to the mix.

She shouldn’t be this nervous. It was only dinner, nothing to twist her stomach into knots over or turn her mouth as dry as a riverbed in August.

She cleared her throat, angry with herself, at the knowledge that only part of her edginess had to do with sharing a meal with Matt Harte and his blue eyes and powerful shoulders.

That might be the main reason, but the rest had more to do with the holiday itself. She had too many less-than-pleasant memories of other years, other holidays. Always being the outsider, the one who didn’t belong. Of spending the day trying to fit in during someone else’s family celebration in foster home after foster home.

This wasn’t the same. She had a family now—Dylan. All she could ever want or need. Her funny, imaginative, spunky little daughter who filled her heart with constant joy. She was now a confident, self-assured woman, content with life and her place in it.

So why did she feel like an awkward, gawky child again, standing here on the doorstep, hoping this time the people inside would like her?

Dylan, heedless of her mother’s nerves, rushed up the remaining steps and buzzed hard on the doorbell, and Ellie forced herself to focus on something other than her own angst.

She looked around her, admiring the view. In the lightly falling snow, the ranch was beautiful. Matt kept a clean, well-ordered operation, she could say that for him. The outbuildings all wore fresh paint, the fences were all in good repair, the animals looked well-cared for.

Some outfits looked as cluttered as garbage dumps, with great hulking piles of rusty machinery set about like other people displayed decorative plates or thimble collections. Here on the Diamond Harte, though, she couldn’t see so much as a spare part lying around.

It looked like a home, deeply loved and nurtured.

What must it have been like to grow up in such a place? To feel warm dirt and sharp blades of grass under your bare feet in the summertime and jump into big piles of raked leaves in the fall and sled down that gently sloping hill behind the barn in winter?

To know without question that you belonged just here, with people who loved you?

She pushed the thoughts away, angry at herself for dredging up things she had resolved long ago. It was only the holiday that brought everything back. That made her once more feel small and unwanted.

To her relief, the door opened before she could feel any sorrier for herself, sending out a blast of warmth and a jumble of delectable smells, as well as a small figure who launched herself at Dylan with a shriek of excitement.

“You’re here! Finally!”

“We’re early, aren’t we?” Ellie asked anxiously. “Didn’t your aunt say you were eating at two? It’s only half past one.”

“I don’t know what time it is. I’ve just been dying for you to get here. Dylan, you have got to come up to my room. Uncle Jess bought me the new ’N Sync CD and it’s so totally awesome.”

Before Ellie could say anything else, both girls rushed up the stairs, leaving her standing in the two-story entry alone, holding her pecan pie and feeling extremely foolish.

Okay. Now what did she do? She’d been in the huge, rambling ranch house a few times before to pick up Lucy or drop off Dylan for some activity or other, but she had always entered through the back door leading straight into the kitchen. She had no idea how to get there from the front door, and it seemed extremely rude to go wandering through a strange house on her own.

She could always go back and ring the doorbell again, she supposed. But that would probably lead to awkward questions about why her daughter was already upstairs while she lingered by the door as if ready to bolt any moment.

She was still standing there, paralyzed by indecision, when she heard loud male groans at something from a room down the hall, then the game shifted to a commercial—somebody hawking razor blades.

“You want another beer?” she heard Matt’s deep voice ask someone else—his brother, she presumed, or perhaps one of the ranch hands. The deep timbre of it sent those knots in her stomach unraveling to quiver like plucked fiddle strings.

Seconds later—before she could come up with a decent place to hide—he walked out in the hall wearing tan jeans and a forest-green fisherman’s sweater. She was still ordering her heart to start beating again when he turned and caught sight of her standing there like an idiot.

“Doc!” he exclaimed.

“Hi,” she mumbled.

“Why are you just standing out here? Come in.”

She thought about explaining how the girls had abandoned her for their favorite boy band, then decided she would sound even more ridiculous if she tried. She held up the pie instead. “Where’s the best place for this?”

“Probably in the kitchen. I was just heading there myself, I can show you the way. Here. Let me take your coat first.”

She tensed as he came up behind her and pulled her coat from her shoulders while she transferred the pie from hand to hand. Despite her best efforts, she was intensely aware of him, his heat and strength and the leathery smell of his aftershave.

After he hung her coat in a small closet off the entry, he took off down the hall. She followed him, trying fiercely not to notice the snug fit of his jeans or those impossibly broad shoulders under the weave of his sweater. Something was different about him today. It took her a moment to figure out what. He wasn’t wearing the black Stetson that seemed so much a part of him, nor was his hair flattened from it.

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