The Virgin Beauty

“Barely.” He took the keys and unlocked her door, then stepped back before the urge to put his hands on her again got to be too much to resist. He kept reminding himself how much he resented her, how much he couldn’t get involved with another woman who would betray him the minute she heard about his past.

“Why didn’t you tell me this morning you had a thousand head of beef cattle?” she asked, a little accusingly.

He shrugged. “I figured Niebaur would have told you.”

“He didn’t. I thought you were a real estate agent or something.”

He laughed despite his uncertain mood. “A real estate agent. Is that what I look like?”

She brought her shoulders to her ears, shy again. She didn’t want to say out loud what he looked like to her. It would have sounded silly, telling him he looked big and strong, man enough to make her feel small and feminine. For once. “I don’t know. You own this building, and you said you had others in town.”

“Oh.” He scratched his nose, knitted his brows in annoyance and embarrassment. “That was kind of a stretch of the truth. I own this building and a little house on Temple. Well, I own part and the bank owns part. I bought them both three years ago when I thought I’d— When I thought about moving to town.”

“Good thing you changed your mind about moving. I imagine it’d be hard on the neighbors to have a thousand head of cattle in town. It’s a big herd. Are you looking for a new vet?”

“I thought you were the new vet.”

“You know what I mean. Are you going to someone else now that Niebaur’s retired?”

He looked at her for a minute. Glared at her, she might have said if she could think of a single reason he might do so.

“We’ll try it out,” he finally said. “I’ve got some heifers need checking week after next.”

“Okay.” While she didn’t appreciate his antagonistic attitude, her practical heart wanted to sigh in relief. “Okay. Good. I could use the business.”

They stood on the sidewalk, staring at each other, unsure of what to say or do. They were having a moment, it occurred to both of them; what that meant, they hadn’t the slightest idea.

“So,” Daniel began slowly, “Niebaur still have all his files on paper?”

Grace smiled, relieved. She’d been scrambling for something to say, anything to break the peculiar, tingly tension between them. “Yes. I have to find an assistant right away so I can get started on getting them on computer. I don’t know how he ever managed to keep his billing straight.”

“I don’t know, either, but he must have. Frank and I have paid out enough to him over the years to prove it.”

“Is Frank your dad?”

“My brother and business partner. Are you cold?”

Grace wondered at the way his face closed at the mention of his brother. “A little. I’d better get home. I still have my suitcases in the back of the truck.”

“Come on, then,” He slapped the side of her truck, shuffled off grim thoughts of his brother. “I’ll follow you.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Do you argue this much with everyone?” he asked testily. He wanted to feel testy; he wanted the low-level anger and bitterness he’d lived with for three years to shoot back into his system. Because if it didn’t he was very much afraid he was going to grab the woman and kiss her. Damn the male sexual response, anyway. He needed to think with his brain right now, but his other, more aggressive organs were pushing for equal time, it seemed.

He closed the door, jogged back to his own truck, tossed in Cat and hoisted himself inside.

Grace didn’t get lost, that would have taken a 14-carat idiot in a town the size of Nobel, but she drove five miles an hour down her street until she spotted the little house. It was as dark as a tomb.

They got out of their respective vehicles and stood looking at it.

“You should have gone in when it was still light out,” he whispered in deference to the late hour, the quiet neighborhood, the breath he could barely catch, just standing next to her, with her shoulder against his.

“I should have,” she conceded in the same quiet tone. His breath had moved her hair aside, brushed against her temple. She blinked. “It looks pretty dark in there.”

He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. He gritted his teeth, rolled his eyes, sighed. It didn’t help. He still wanted to take that anxious look out of her eyes. But that would be it, he told himself. She was no little girl, no damsel in distress. She was the personification of every single thing that had pissed him off for three long years. He’d look around her dark little house and then he and Cat would head home for a long, comforting brood.

“I’ll come in with you,” he offered reluctantly.

Oh, she should say no. She should tell him she could handle herself just fine, thanks. But she wanted him to come in with her, chase out all the spooks and spiders. It was a rare thing, a man offering to do such a thing. Not since her father, not since her brothers, had a man looked beyond the size of her to the tender, sometimes fragile woman beneath.

“What about Tiger?”

“Who?”

She looked at him. “Your cat?”

“He’s okay in the truck. He’s sleeping in my rain slicker.”

“Oh.” She chewed on her lower lip a moment. “Okay. Thanks. Sorry.”

He walked in front of her. “For what?”

“For asking you to do this.”

“You didn’t ask me,” he rumbled crossly.

“Oh. Well, just thanks, then.”

He nodded shortly.

He walked up the steps, unlocked the door with her key, and flicked on the lights. The place was furnished sufficiently, if a shade shabbily, and was well-lighted and thickly draped. She’d be safe enough in here. He walked through the rooms, leaving her in the living room, snapping on the lights as we went. It didn’t take long. The house was tiny.

“Everything looks okay.”

“Good. Thanks again.”

“No problem.”

They stood across the room from each other. He pretended to look at the structure of the room, scanning the ceiling for signs of a leaky roof, bouncing lightly on his toes to listen for a creaky floor. She studied the furniture, the worn carpet, to keep from looking at him. Finally she took in a deep breath, then let it out.

He heeded the signal. “Well, I better be going.”

“Yes. It’s late. Thanks again.”

“You said that already,” he noted brusquely. “A couple times.”

“Oh. Well.”

He walked toward the door, toward her. She wanted to move out of his way, desperately, but found herself rooted to the spot. It was as if her mind was certain she should do one thing, the safe and sensible thing, but her body, her unruly, nothing-but-trouble body, was making the decisions.

He came to her slowly, brushed against her shoulder as he reached for the doorknob. And stood so still she could hear him swallow. Just stood there, his right shoulder against hers, for the space of ten heartbeats. He stared at the door, his throat working. She stared unseeing into the room, her heart pounding.

Then he turned his head slightly, and nuzzled her neck. Her breath caught and held while her face went a dozen shades of scalding red. She was paralyzed with arousal and shock. No one had ever nuzzled her neck. Not ever! Never anything so simple, so erotic. He took his time, let her flush redder, kissing his way up her neck to her ear, taking her earlobe between his teeth.

She’d heard people say, countless times, that their knees went weak, but she’d never believed it actually happened. No empirical scientific evidence to support such a claim. She had some now. She reached out a hand to steady herself, found nothing there, and let the hand hang in midair.

He made his way to her jaw, nipped it gently when she didn’t turn her head, drop it back. She hadn’t known she was meant to until then, and when she did, he kissed her.

The most amazing kiss. Wet and deep and slow. Her head turned fully to his, his turned to hers, both necks arched back in greed and surrender, the kiss made sweeter, more erotic because they touched in not a single other spot. When his tongue flicked forward, licked at her mouth, she managed to choke back only half the moan that slid up from her chest.

That little sound shot all the way down to his toes and he had to dig his short nails into his palms to keep from grabbing those wide shoulders of hers, turning her to face him. He wanted to, possibly more than he’d ever wanted anything. More even than he’d wanted her job, he wanted her. And that scared the hell out of him. He reared back suddenly, his mouth wet, his brain scrambled, his blood roaring. He met her wide-open eyes for the briefest moment, then fumbled for the doorknob. Without so much as a second glance in her direction, Daniel walked out into the cold night.

Grace’s knees did buckle then, and as she slumped to the floor, she laughed. A gasping, dumbfounded, girlish little giggle of complete surprise and joy.

Chapter 3

Grace’s office had been a zoo all week, populated by a large assortment of domesticated animals, some of which, like Daniel’s cat, did not have a thing wrong with them. Which was more than Grace could have honestly said about some of their owners.

The kid with the bike was back today, with a perfectly healthy white rat who rode happily in a plastic milk crate he’d strapped to the handlebars with a bungee cord. She’d looked over the rat while the kid looked over her. The rat was quiet and polite, the boy was not, giving her a little headache with questions about how tall she was, and had she ever played basketball for the Utah Jazz, and could she change a lightbulb without getting on a chair?

Why Mrs. Handleman had sent the child and a perfectly healthy animal back into the examining room was a question Grace posed the first chance she got.

“Because his mother has an account with this clinic,” Mrs. Handleman explained, gravely affronted at having her authority questioned, Grace gathered from her tone. “And I didn’t want that filthy vermin in the front office. You’re the vet. You deal with the filthy vermin.”

Grace was the vet, and everyone in town seemed to know it. The company she’d had moving in was nothing compared to the rush during her first official week. Several times she sent up a quick prayer to thank Dr. Niebaur for lending her Mrs. Handleman until she found an assistant. A prayer that was almost always followed by a curse. Under her breath, of course.

She’d had just one applicant for Mrs. Handleman’s job. A woman who’d shown up at the clinic before Grace’s ad had even appeared in the newspaper. Lisa Cash, a relative of the hunk, she presumed. Grace secretly decided “Lisa” was a rather plain name for a rather flashy young woman. She’d come into the office in tight jeans and a pearl-buttoned cowboy shirt pressed to within an inch of its life. Her hair was bleached until it was more dead straw than live follicle, with what looked like intentionally dark roots. She wore a good quarter pound of eye makeup, as well, which only added to the barmaid aspect of her. Grace was thrilled with her, and envious. As much as it would have galled her to look in the mirror and have a yellow head and Bride of Frankenstein eyes staring back at her, she’d always secretly wished she could work up the courage to look like a hooker every once in a while. For novelty. As a change from looking like someone an eleven-year-old rat owner might mistake for a member of the starting lineup of the Utah Jazz.

Lisa didn’t have any experience in a vet’s office, but she was good on a computer, she said, and could file and take appointments. Grace hired her on the spot. Anyone who looked like Lisa Cash would be unlikely to sniff at something so inconsequential as a rat, and besides, Grace couldn’t wait to get rid of Mrs. Handleman.

The woman was bossy, tyrannical and territorial. And if she mentioned how Dr. Niebaur did things one more time, Grace was going to put her fingers in her ears and start screaming. But she knew everyone who came through the door, whatever their species, and filed them back to the examining room in a reasonably orderly manner, so Grace fought off the urge to fire her before Lisa was trained.

“You have the dairy call at two,” Mrs. Handleman reminded Grace again, at a quarter to the hour. “It’s a good ten miles out of town. Dr. Niebaur would have left by now.”

“Uh-huh. Right. Thanks.”

Grace was tempted to make a face at the old woman’s wide, retreating back. She only just managed to pull in her imaginary tongue when the woman looked back, suspicious.

“Anything else?” Grace asked innocently, peeling off her lab coat and reaching for the hook behind her door for her coveralls.

Mrs. Handleman gave her a cross, distrustful look, then stomped officiously down the hall. Grace almost giggled.

Even Mrs. Handleman couldn’t puncture Grace’s good mood, apparently. Her first dairy call, and she could hardly contain her excitement. Nobel County had several large dairies, mostly transplants from California, where dairymen had been all but zoned out of the crowded suburban landscape. Grace was happy they had been. She loved working with the big, gentle dairy cattle, but wanted, too, the kind of rural lifestyle only a sparsely populated place such as Idaho could offer. The best of both worlds, she thought, smiling.

“You look pretty when you do that.”

Him. She stopped short, halfway wiggled into her insulated coveralls. Oh, the gorgeous, giant Daniel Cash. The man who had kissed her until she was a wide, giggling ooze of pudding on her living-room floor, then hadn’t called her for a week. Weren’t men who kissed you that way supposed to call you right after? Or at least the next day? Or the day after that? She didn’t know, but she thought so. She turned down the corners of her mouth. Wouldn’t do to have him think the smile was for him.

“Mr. Cash.”

“Dr. McKenna.” He gestured to the coveralls. “Don’t let me keep you.”

She finished worming her way into the coveralls with as much dignity as ten pounds of stiff canvas and padding would allow.

Daniel watched her worming, and fought back the little thrill it gave him. She toed off her sneakers and stepped into her boots. He hid an unexpected smile at the picture she made. The bulky coveralls, with the right sleeve cut off as befits a large animal vet, fit her fine in the torso, but the legs were a good five inches short, and her heeled boots gave her another inch, making her look a little like a stork wearing a winter coat. He doubted she’d have appreciated the analogy.

Grace knew exactly how she looked, and she would have given a lot at that moment to have been dressed in anything else. She furrowed her brows, shook off the wave of self-consciousness. She was a vet, she had a call to make. The last thing she needed was to be worrying about the fashion opinion of some man.

“How’s Tiger?”

“Who?”

“Tiger,” she offered blandly. “Your cat?”

“Oh.” He looked a little sheepish. “Tiger’s good. Where are you headed?”

“I have a dairy call. Spandell’s.”

“Dairy call?” Daniel’s brain kicked automatically into a familiar, low-level hum of excitement. It had been the same for him since he was a kid, when he’d splinted the broken leg of a pup his dad had run over. Doc Niebaur had told he’d make a hell of a vet someday. Had used the word “hell” even, which at ten was forbidden to Daniel, and had made him feel like a man. He’d hoped, after all this time, the buzz would fade. No damn luck, evidently. “What’ve you got?”

“Mild fever, probably.”

He nearly rubbed his hands together. Milk fever. He could have cured that in his sleep. Then again, so, probably, could have most dairymen. “Spandell call you in?”

She nodded. “About twenty minutes ago. He sounded pretty worried about it. He seems to have a very close attachment to his cows. Plus, I think he wants a look at me.”

Daniel narrowed his eyes fractionally. “I bet.”

Grace didn’t know whether to be flattered or annoyed by the glower that had come over his face. “I’ve got to go. I’m going to be late as it is.”

“I’ll ride along with you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s my first call on this place. I want to make a good impression.”

“Then you should have gotten some longer coveralls.”

Grace’s face dropped, then flamed.

Daniel watched the transformation of her face and felt an uncomfortable little bite of regret gnaw through him. He’d been teasing, of course, didn’t realize she’d be so sensitive. She seemed so confident. A woman the likes of Grace McKenna, embarrassed by a silly thing like her coveralls?

“I was just kidding you,” he said roughly. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt like such a heel.

She smiled gamely. “I know. They are funny, aren’t they?”

“Look, Doc—”

“I got them as long as I could, but the only ones they had in my length were so big in the torso I couldn’t swing my arms when I walked. I looked like Frankenstein.”

“I’m sorry I said anything.”

“It’s okay. Seriously. I’m used to teasing.” But not from him. Since he’d kissed her, she’d been working up to wondering if maybe this man saw her as someone desirable, feminine maybe, and possibly even, when she was sitting down and her big feet were tucked under, a little bit delicate. She’d always wanted one man, someday, to consider her a little bit delicate. “I really do have to go.”

He’d hurt her feelings, Daniel knew. Being…well, a man, he wasn’t quite sure why, but he felt like a jackass.

“Let me ride along. I went to high school with Larry Spandell. He won’t mind.”

She considered him a minute, looked down at his boots. “Well, since you already have manure on your boots, I guess you can come. But don’t get in my way.”

Get in her way? She was in his way, and had been ever since she’d stepped down from her truck with his vet box in the back. Get in her way. He jammed his cowboy hat onto his head, vexed with both of them. “I won’t.”

Larry Spandell had a small operation, milked just seventy-eight Holsteins on a place his mother had inherited from her mother. Every cow was his baby, and the one with milk fever was his favorite. When Grace and Daniel walked into his milk barn, Larry was worrying over the sick cow like a nanny over a fevered child.

“Mr. Spandell? I’m Grace McKenna.”

He shook her hand, didn’t give her more than a glance. Daniel saw how she’d braced herself for the introduction, how relieved she was when Larry didn’t gape up at her from his five feet, eight inches. Daniel filed that observation away. He’d kick it around later, when the nearness of the woman and the excitement of the job wasn’t clouding his judgment.

“Doc. This is her.”

Grace could see that. She could tell it was milk fever from the position of the cow; lying on her sternum with her head displaced to the right, turned into the flank.

She sterilized her hands and knelt to the cow, already reaching for her bag. Daniel placed it in her hands.

“Parturient paresis,” he murmured absently, using the diagnostic name for the affliction. Grace glanced at him in surprise. He was taking the cow’s pulse at the carotid artery. “Muzzle’s dry, extremities cool, temperature below normal.”

Grace decided she’d be curious about Daniel Cash later. She turned to the dairyman. “When’d she calve?”

“Yesterday.”

“Pulse is seventy-five, pupils dilated,” Daniel mumbled, talking to himself.

“Thank you,” Grace said tightly. She took a brown bottle from her vet bag. “When’d she go down?”

“’Bout an hour ago. I called your office as soon as I saw.”

“Good.” She filled a syringe, injected it smoothly into the thick vein on the cow’s neck. “She’s an old cow, Mr. Spandell. I’m giving her some calcium borogluconate. She should be up soon, but next calf I want you to give her a single dose of ten million units of crystalline Vitamin D eight days before calving. That should prevent this happening again.”

Daniel rose. “Your older cows should be on high-phosphorus, low-calcium feed, Larry. I told you that last time you had a cow go down with milk fever.”

“I know, Dan, but I’m on a budget here, you know.”

“Be harder on your budget to lose a cow.”

Grace shot Daniel a glare, then turned to the dairyman. “Call my office in a couple hours. If she’s not up by then, I’ll come back on my way home and treat her again.”

“You may have to inflate the udder,” Daniel said.

Grace whipped around, said in a low voice, “I know my job, thanks.”

Daniel nodded, sucked in his cheeks. Geez, he’d made her mad, and no wonder. But he didn’t care. It had felt so right, so incredibly good, kneeling beside this old cow in this milk-smelling barn. He’d wanted it to go on all day, treat every one of Larry Spandell’s seventy-eight Holsteins for problems they didn’t even have.

“Okay, Mr. Spandell?” she was worried he hadn’t heard her, mooning over his downed cow the way he was. “You’ll call me?” She pressed one of her new business cards against his shoulder. He reached up and absently pushed it into his shirt pocket. “That card has my home number and my pager number on it.”

“I will. Thanks a million, Doc. Doc Niebaur said you was a good vet.”

“Thanks. I think she’ll be fine. You take care now.”

Daniel, had anyone asked, would have had to say Dr. Grace McKenna practically stomped out of that milking barn. And a woman like her made a powerful physical statement, stomping around in a full-on snit, he decided.

“Doc!”

But she had already tossed her bag back into her vet box and was gunning the truck. He loped over and scooted inside just as she roared off.

“Listen, McKenna—”

“You better not talk to me right now, Cash.”

“I can explain.”

“You don’t have to explain. I know exactly what was going on back there.”

“You do.” Well, of course, she would. Nobel was a small town, and she’d been here a week. Surely she’d heard from a dozen people already how he’d been drummed out of vet school just months shy of graduation, for cheating. For cheating! Something that never would have occurred to him.

“I do,” she said through gritted teeth.

He put a booted foot on the dash and glared out the window. “Well, I’m interested to hear what you have to say about it.” The old, helpless sense of anger nearly overwhelmed him. The injustice of it had almost killed him at the time, and now this woman was going to tell him all about how she’d managed to get through vet school without stealing any test results.

“I think you don’t trust me and you came with me today to make sure I didn’t kill any of your high school buddy’s precious cows!”

His foot hit the floorboard with a thump. “What?”

She yanked the wheel of the truck, screamed onto the shoulder, spitting gravel twenty feet behind her, and came to a sliding halt. She shoved the stick into neutral and turned on him. “I’ve seen you driving by, don’t think I haven’t.”

“You’re on Main Street, McKenna. I can’t come to town without passing your office.”

“And Mrs. Handleman told me you’d gone out into the clinic’s corral Monday to look at that mule Katie Reed brought in while I was on a call.”

Handleman! What a snitch. She’d been ratting him out since he was ten. “Katie asked me to,” Daniel argued stubbornly. And he’d been flattered, thrilled.

“I think you’ve been checking up on me since the very minute I got into this town because you don’t think I can do this job. Well, you’re wrong! I can, and I will. And for your information, pal—” She reached out a long finger and poked him in the chest as he turned to stare, dumbfounded, at her. “The day I need anyone’s help diagnosing parturient paresis is the day I sell my vet box and start a bakery!”

He couldn’t help it. He was angry and she was angry, and now wasn’t the time, but a bakery? He could just picture her wearing an apron. He laughed.

She was going to punch him. He may have had the most beautiful eyes and a glorious body and he may have been tall enough to kiss her without craning his neck toward the heavens, but she was going to punch him anyway. It was a matter of principle. She balled up her fist.