A Cowboy's Angel

“You’re going to help me rehab him?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”

She couldn’t take it anymore. She hopped up, scooping her plate up with her. “I’ll do your dishes for you.”

“Hell, no, you won’t.” He jumped up, too, grabbing her arm and turning her around midstep. “Let me take that.”

Instinctively, she pulled her arm back. He closed the distance and reached for her plate. Their midsections brushed. Her cheeks heated like a nuclear reactor. She tried to step away, but the counter kept her from moving.

“Thanks,” he said softly, taking the plate from her and setting it on the counter behind her.

Should she dart past him? Push him out of the way? What?

The man clearly read the dilemma in her eyes.

“Now what are you going to do?” he teased softly.

Chapter Four

If she’d still been holding the plate, she would have smashed it over his head, Zach thought, trying not to laugh.

“Let me go.”

Her whole body had tensed. Her eyes briefly darted to his lips. She couldn’t look at them for long.

Maybe it was all the times she’d caused him grief at the track. Maybe it was because she tried so hard to pretend there was nothing between them when it was clear as day that there was. Whatever the reason, he liked messing with her. Something about her gorgeous red hair and flashing brown eyes. Something that challenged him. No. Something that defied him. Her eyes seemed to silently accuse him of pushing her buttons on purpose...and he did.

“I thought you had a proposition for me,” he whispered.

He saw her gulp, as if she suspected he meant a different type of proposition but didn’t dare call him on it. “I do.”

Her hands had stopped pushing. They lay flat against him in a spot somewhere between his breastbone and his abdomen, and it was all he could do not to bring their lower sections together again. Then he felt it, the gentle flexing of her fingers, the tips of them pressing against his chest, sliding downward.

Agh.

He let go. But when he looked in her eyes, he knew. She’d known exactly the type of proposition he’d had in mind—and it’d infuriated her.

“My proposition was to treat all of your injured horses, not just Dasher.” She was shorter than him but somehow she managed to look down her nose. “I recognize they’re under the care of Dr. Miller, but I can help them in a way he can’t, free of charge.”

He’d gone from being amused to feeling like a putz in two seconds flat. “How do you know I have more than one injured horse?”

“Track gossip says you have three, and that one of them is still undiagnosed despite spending a small fortune in vet fees.”

Holy—he’d have to talk to his staff about blabbing to perfect strangers.

“One of them had a fractured sesamoid. There’s not much you can do about that.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Why don’t you let me decide that?”

“When?”

“The sooner we start, the better.”

He should tell her no. He didn’t need her poking around in even more of his business. Lord, for all he knew, this might be a ploy. A way for her to get into his business. To find something she and her friends at CEASE could use against him and maybe other horse breeders.

“Look, I appreciate the offer, but I can’t exactly afford to pay you for experimental vet care. With Dasher out of commission it’s going to make it hard for ends to meet as it is.”

“I told you, there’s no need to pay me.” She crossed her arms in front of her. “I’ll do it all for free.”

Wow. She must really want to get the dirt on him.

Yet as he stared into her eyes, he didn’t think that was true. She didn’t look at him with malice in her eyes. Sure, she might still be irked over his whole “proposition” comment, but that wasn’t what this was about. She stared up at him earnestly, and he could tell she waited with bated breath for him to answer.

Free vet care.

He’d spent a small fortune on Summer, the bay filly he’d been hoping to race and then breed. They’d found nothing wrong. Doc Miller had suggested he haul the horse up to UC Davis for a full-body scan, something he had neither the time nor the money to do, and it’d been heart-wrenching to admit they couldn’t do anything else for her. He’d still breed her when she was old enough, but if he could discover what was wrong...

“Be here tomorrow around ten. I’ll pop in after morning workouts and show you what we’ve got.”

She hadn’t expected him to agree. He saw her golden-brown eyes widen for a moment.

But then she relaxed. “Okay, then,” she said with a glance toward the food she’d brought. “I’ll just pick that up tomorrow.”

“You’re leaving?”

“Dinner was great.”

She sidled toward the door.

He leaned back against the counter and asked a question that had been on his mind all afternoon. “Why?”

She paused. “Why, what?”

“Why are you doing this?”

She stood in his kitchen, her red hair so wild and untamed his fingers itched to grab a curl and tug it. The tips of it sparkled like the depths of a fire opal, the gold flecks matching the sparkle in her eyes.

“I want what’s best for your horses. All horses. So many ex-racehorses are tossed away, but if we could get yours better, send them on to second careers, it might help your bottom line and help me to prove there’s no need to kill a horse simply because it can’t race again. Plus, if something I do helps them, then it might help others, and maybe there’ll be one less horse sent to slaughter.”

Something in her eyes changed while she said the words. She no longer seemed nervous. She wasn’t peeking glances at his lips anymore, either. She faced him square on and he knew she’d remembered who he was then and, more important, what he did for a living. He doubted she’d ever let him get close to her again.

Too bad.

* * *

SHE HAD HERSELF firmly under control the next morning, or so she told herself. Still, her pulse raced as she pulled into the same parking spot as yesterday. It’d dawned another cool and crisp day, the kind of day that made horses frisky and the scent of fresh-cut grass hang in the air. The sun against the side of the white barn nearly blinded her. She took a deep breath as she emerged from her car, wondering where he was.

“In here,” she heard him call.

She headed toward the barn, and the moment she spotted him standing in the middle of the aisle, a friendly smile on his too-handsome face, she knew she’d been kidding herself.

Control. Bah.

“Welcome back,” he called.

His black brows lifted when he smiled, and the edges of his eyes crinkled, and it was such a damn friendly smile it made her teeth click and then jam together. Handsome, hunky, hazardous-to-her-health son of a gun.

“Bet your racehorse friends would keel over if they saw me here today.”

It was the only thing she could think to say, but it was true. She knew she wasn’t liked at the racetrack, and that was okay. As long as she saved horses’ lives, that was all that mattered.

“You’re probably right, but what they don’t know won’t hurt them.”

In other words, he didn’t want it known that she was helping him. The words shouldn’t surprise her or bother her, but they did. She tried to hide her disappointment by saying, “Wow. This is nice.”

Like the house on the hill, the stable was a showpiece. She’d been so distracted yesterday she hadn’t paid much attention, but today she’d noticed that while the outside might be nondescript—a simple whitewashed building with an A-frame roof—the inside was a different story. Old-fashioned open-box stalls stretched down both sides, the kind with three-quarter walls and swooping Regency-style grills atop them. The bars were made out of black iron, higher in the back than in the front, but the change in altitude was accomplished with an almost roller coaster–like curve—very swanky. The face of each stall had the same type of bars, one on the left side and one on the right, gently swooping toward each other and meeting in the middle at the stall door. It was as if she’d been transported back two hundred years—well, except for the rubber mats covering the barn aisle. They even had tack trunks—large wooden boxes that held bits and bridles and maybe even a saddle or two—in between the stalls, although they were covered in red vinyl, the crimson color matching the blankets and halters hanging from the stall fronts.

“Actually, more like amazing,” she amended.

“Yeah, my mom had pretty good taste.”

He’d just come from the track, and so he wore a red polo shirt with JJJ stitched across the left breast. She could smell the sweat and horses on him and it should have served as a reminder of what it was she was here to do. Instead she found herself simply inhaling the scent of him and then fighting the urge not to close her eyes.

Way to rein in those hormones!

Clearly fifteen hours away from him had done little to cool her jets.

“I like the old-fashioned look of the place,” she admitted.

He lifted his cowboy hat, then ran a hand through his ample hair, leaving indented rows where his fingers had touched. “Yeah, although my dad complained the entire time that everything was just fine the way it was.” Like a cloud covering the sun, a shadow formed in his eyes. “He never understood the need to show off.”

Unlike my mother.

The words were unspoken, but she gleaned what he wanted to say from the tone of his voice.

“You should open up the place for horse boarding.” She hoped he picked up on the change of subject, because she didn’t like the way staring into his troubled eyes made her heart soften. “I know some hunter/jumper trainers that would kill for a place like this.”

“I don’t have an arena.”

“You could build one. I saw a small track out behind the barn. Build one in the middle.”

He tucked his hands in the pockets of his jeans. Alas, that drew her eye to his midsection and what she knew would be a ridge of muscle just beneath his belly button. Did he have hair there, too? Dark hair that formed a V above his...

Stop it!

She couldn’t help herself. The man was pure good-looking. He could be the spokesperson for a cologne commercial. Sell whiskey to the Amish. Rocks to a coal miner.

“Unfortunately, that’s not in the cards right now.”

Because of his finances, she immediately realized. “Maybe if I help you sell one of your horses, you could do it then.”

What are you doing?

You shouldn’t be helping him to stay in business. Frankly, helping him go out of business should be her goal.

His hands slipped from his pockets. He crossed them in front of him. “So you’re a veterinarian and a horse broker now?”

She shrugged even as inside she mentally sucker punched herself for offering to help him out. Again.

“I’ve come into contact with a lot of different people through vet school, and a lot of really good racehorses are off the track.”

He grinned, but it was a small one, the man seeming almost bemused. “You know, I thought for sure you’d be a real pain in my rear, but you’re surprisingly nice.”

Aww, how sweet....

She had to swallow back her irritation at herself. “Give it time. I promise to offend you soon.”

The smile on his face grew. “You sound like you don’t really want to be friends.”

“I want to do what’s best for the animals.”

“It’s better than being enemies, though, isn’t it?”

No.

She needed him to be an adversary. He was easier to resist that way.

Who was she kidding?

Ever since she’d first spotted him at the racetrack, she’d been smitten. He’d caught her gaze and everything inside her had gone, “Oooh.” She’d contained her reaction only by telling herself the man was a jerk—a racehorse owner—so he was ugly inside. Only he wasn’t ugly inside. At least, she didn’t think so.

She moved toward one of the stalls, berating herself the whole way, but when she caught a glimpse of the animal inside, she said, “Wow.”

The dark bay animal took her breath away—huge shoulders, massive hindquarters, long legs, and all topped off with the prettiest head and large brown eyes she’d ever seen. The horse hardly spared her a glance, though; he was napping, back leg resting, ears cocked back casually.

“What a gorgeous animal.”

“Yup. He’s a dandy, all right,” he said with pride. “Dandy of a Dasher, that’s his registered name. Dandy for short.”

“Is Dandy one of your injured horses?”

He came up next to her and whatever aftershave he wore wafted toward her on a breeze. Sage again. And pine. And then something different, yes, there it was...leather and horses. Her two favorite smells in the world, and they emanated from her enemy.

“He’s the one coming off the sesamoid injury.”

“How bad of a break was it?”

“Doc called it an apical fracture. No tendon damage. I could probably race him, but...”

If he did, the odds of the horse breaking down again were huge, and the next time might be catastrophic. She clutched the front of the stall, her stomach doing that odd little flip thing again, the same thing it’d done when she’d first spotted him at the track. Most owners would send a horse back to work—damn the long-term consequences. That he didn’t, well, it was one more reason to get her lust under control. She could never get involved with a man who raced horses for a living, even if he was one of the nicer ones.

“Did the bone chip?” she asked.

“No. Just a hairline fracture. Enough to make him lame. He’s been off since November.”

That translated to six months. “He should be nice and healed by now.”

“Doc said he is. He gets daily turnout and I haven’t seen him take a lame step in months. Just not sure what to do with him.”

Okay, brace yourself.

She turned and faced him. “This is exactly the type of horse I think I can help you with.” She cleared her throat. “As long as there’s no bone chip or full fracture, there isn’t any reason why he couldn’t go on to perform in a dressage arena or maybe even a jumping pen. I’d want to see his X-rays before I make a judgment call, but if they look good, and you don’t mind, I’d like to put some miles on him under saddle, maybe take some new film in a few weeks to see how he’s holding up and, if it looks good, call a few friends of mine.”

“You want to ride him?”

She took a deep breath before facing him again. Why was he looking at her like that? “Yeah. You know. Leg him up, get a feel for what’s going on up here.” She tapped her head. “Maybe take some video so I can assess how he moves. See if he has any potential.”

He’d done it again, moved closer. She hadn’t even noticed. “You’re really determined to help me, aren’t you?”

It felt as if she’d swallowed an air bubble all of a sudden. “Not you,” she choked out, “your horses.”

“I see. I’m still the enemy?”

She steeled herself. “As long as you race horses, you will always be the enemy.”

When she snuck a glance at him, he seemed disappointed and almost hurt.

Ignore it, she told herself.

“Good to know where I stand.”

“I just want to make sure we’re on the same page.”

“Oh, we are.”

She nodded. “I’ll partner with you, but only for the horses’ sake.”

“Got it.”

She took another deep breath, telling herself she should be grateful he understood.

Why do you feel like such a jerk, then?

“So my first bit of advice is to list your horses on this website I know about. It’s for off-the-track racehorses. A lot of trainers keep an eye on what’s being posted there.”

“Just give me the URL.”

“But before we do that, I’ll need to ride him first.”

“And are you any good at riding?”

She imagined the double entendre to his word. No way was he flirting with her again after what she’d just made clear.

“I grew up on horseback.”

“Oh, yeah? Were you one of those spoiled horse-show kids?”

He wasn’t being mean, just curious. And, yes, she had definitely imagined the double entendre.

She gave her attention back to the horse. “No. My family couldn’t afford riding lessons, so I hung out at the local riding stable. The resident horse expert took pity on me.” She tipped her chin up proudly. “It took a lot of hard work, but I learned to ride well enough that I qualified for a national scholarship. Rode for my college team until entering grad school. So, yes, I ride.”

“I’m impressed.”

Don’t fall for his soothing charm.

“If I hadn’t learned how to ride, I doubt I would have ever gotten into vet school. We couldn’t have afforded it.”

When she dared to look into his dark blue eyes again, she saw interest there, maybe even admiration.

“Lucky for all the abused racehorses in the world that you did.”

Except his horses didn’t look abused. Far from it. Dandy was the picture of good health.

“It’s been a while, though,” she admitted. “Haven’t been on a horse in a few months.” She was at the mercy of whoever had a horse that needed exercising since she couldn’t afford one of her own, not that she needed one. She had her hands full.

“Why not get back on right now?”

She straightened in surprise. “Oh, I don’t know. Dandy’s injury...”

“Doc cleared him for work weeks ago.”

“Yeah, but I’d still like to look at his chart.”

“You don’t have to work him. Just walk him around. He’ll be fine.”

He was challenging her—she could see it in his eyes. Maybe all her talk of being wary adversaries had gotten under his skin. Or maybe he just wanted to see what she was capable of and what he was getting into, not that she blamed him.

“What if he gets away from me in his excitement at being ridden again?” She shook her head. “I’d rather come back tomorrow.”

Regroup. Get her head screwed on straight, because right now she had a hard time remembering what he did for a living and that as much as she’d like to succumb to his friendly blue eyes, he could never be her friend.

“Okay, tomorrow it is, but did you want to see the last horse with an injury? It’s a filly. No one can figure out what’s wrong with her.”

“Why don’t you get her chart, too?” Because she really just wanted to escape.

He rocked back on his heels, examined her, a hand lifting toward his chin and stroking the razor stubble. “Okay, but she’s right over there.”

He wasn’t going to stop, and it did seem silly to not at least have a look, especially since that was the whole point of her visit this morning. She followed his gaze, spotting a bay filly out in the pasture, an animal as beautiful as Dasher and Dandy.

“What seems to be the problem?”

“Intermittent lameness,” he said as they walked to the wooden gate. The thing opened with barely a sound, at least not to her ears, but the filly heard them. She lifted her head.

“I thought at first it was a growth issue, but her joints all look fine. Had her scanned up one side and down the other. A shame, too, because she showed real promise.”

Promise as a racehorse. And what better a reminder than the young horse they approached. Beautiful. Sleek. A racehorse. One potentially ruined by him.

“And if I can make her sound again? What then?”

Clearly, he knew the direction of her thoughts. Just as clearly, he didn’t want to answer her. “She’ll return to work.”

“As a racehorse?”

He shrugged.

Well, of course. What did she expect? That he would have a sudden change of heart where racing horses was concerned? Hardly.

The filly turned toward them, nostrils flaring as they approached. Something about their scent must have titillated her senses, because her tail suddenly lifted. Her neck arched. She bolted toward them. If Mariah hadn’t known better, the filly would have looked sound, but years of training had taught her to spot the telltale signs of lameness, and she saw it in the horse’s gait, especially when she broke into a trot, the filly coming to a halt a few feet away, ears pricked forward, eyes bright.

“Hey there, pretty girl,” she heard Zach croon. “How you feelin’ today?”

Voice so soft, eyes so kind, hand outstretched as he sought to soothe the fractious filly.

The evil racehorse owner. The horrible horseman. The man responsible for so many lost lives—equine lives, but just as important to her as human lives.

He cared.

The man took a step closer, whispered soothing words, placed a palm against the horse’s neck.

“It’s the right front,” he said softly.

“I saw that.” She approached cautiously. “Has she gotten any better since you put her out to pasture?”

He shook his head as he stroked the animal’s mane. “It comes and goes. Sometimes she seems almost sound. Other days—”

Bad. Like today. “And they found nothing on X-rays or scans.” Not a question, more of a statement.

“Nothing.”

His disappointment had nothing to do with the loss of a valuable racehorse and everything to do with the health of his animal. She knew that, though how she knew it, she couldn’t say.

“I’ll need to see her chart, too.”

He nodded, still petting the horse.

“And perform my own diagnostics.”

He faced her again. “Anything you want.”

Dear Lord, she didn’t want to like the man, but it was hard not to when he stared at her so hopefully.

“I’ll do what I can.”

“I would appreciate that.”

She found herself backing away before she could stop herself, as if he were a dangerous tiger about ready to pounce.

“Call me if you can’t get those records. Some clinics can be weird about releasing information.”

“I’ll let you know.”

He moved away from the horse, falling into step next to her as she hurried toward the exit. The horse followed along, Mariah glancing back in time to spy the limp. Poor thing.

“Thanks for coming out today.”

She didn’t say anything. She couldn’t forget the way he’d studied the filly like a man worried about his best friend. It disturbed her, though not in a bad way.

“Can I take you to lunch? As a way of thanking you?”

“No, no. I, ah, I have another appointment to go to after this.”

He didn’t say anything, not for the longest time. She saw him scan her face, spotted the way his gaze lingered on her lips, and then his eyes sprouted the faintest hint of a challenge. “Yeah?”

“Yes,” she lied.

He knew she didn’t have anything more important to do than watch YouTube videos for the rest of the afternoon. Just as he knew she didn’t want to spend any more time with him than necessary, and not because of what he did for a living. Oh, no. She didn’t want to spend more time with him, because despite what she told herself, she really did like him.

Fool.

There was no denying that she was.

Chapter Five

She hated horse racing.

Zach reminded himself the next morning, and it was all the reason in the world to give Mariah a wide berth. Yet oddly, he kept glancing at his cell phone’s clock as he oversaw his morning workouts and then later, on the way back to his ranch.

That cell phone chimed as he turned off the main road. A quick glance revealed what he suspected: email alert. Doc Miller’s office. They’d pdf’d the information Mariah needed. When he arrived at his ranch, he headed toward the barn and figured Mariah must already be there, judging by the car parked out front. She had to be in the stall with Dandy because he didn’t see her when he glanced down the barn aisle as he headed toward his office. It took him just a moment to print out a black-and-white copy of Dandy’s radiographs and the accompanying chart.

Mariah the vet, he thought as he did so. Mariah the champion equestrienne. Mariah the enigma.

She was right where he’d figured she’d be, inside the stall with Dandy tied to an iron bar, an English saddle on his back. She glanced up at him, but it was a quick look, as if she didn’t trust herself to make eye contact.