Once and for All. Jeannie Watt

bright and early tomorrow morning,” she grumbled as they made their way along the snowy path to the house.

      “He may even arrive tonight,” Jodie said, but she was getting a bad feeling about this. Mike should have called by now.

      She tried to reach him two more times that evening from the ranch phone, and then, wondering if he recognized the ranch number and wasn’t answering on purpose, she dialed the number from her cell. A masculine voice said hello on the second ring.

      “Is this Mike Bower?”

      “Yes.”

      “This is Jodie De Vanti. When are you coming back to the ranch?”

      There was a healthy silence before Mike said, “I’m not coming back.”

      Jodie’s temples started to throb. What the hell? “Why not?”

      “I found another job up here, closer to my family.”

      The throbbing intensified. “You do know that it’s common courtesy to give notice of resignation?” She spoke the last words through her teeth.

      “I was going to call tomorrow after everything was firmed up here,” he confessed.

      “And in the meantime, we’re left hanging, you coward.”

      “Maybe if your dad wasn’t such a jerk, I’d still be there,” Mike said, and he had the gall to sound justified. “But he is and I ain’t.” He hung up the phone, and it was all Jodie could do not to throw hers across the room.

      What an asshole, blaming her father, and not being man enough to quit properly.

      Jodie weighed her phone in her hand for a moment, then carefully set it on the desk.

      Okay. She could handle this. She was used to thinking on her feet. The only problem was she did it in a courtroom or while working with a difficult client. This was different.

      “He’s not coming back,” Jodie told Margarite when she came in with a cup of tea.

      The housekeeper stopped in her tracks and the cup clattered on the saucer.

      “Hey,” Jodie said, trying to be as positive as possible, “is there any reason we can’t handle the ranch on our own until Dad returns? It’s only six and a half more weeks and so far so good … barring the horse incident.” She wasn’t wild about feeding in the subzero morning temps, but she’d do whatever she had to.

      “Early calving.”

      “What?” Jodie asked, her eyes getting round.

      “The early calves. Sometimes the cows have trouble. And if there’s a blizzard, you can bet there’s a cow out there having a calf in it. Mike was out at all hours last year.”

      Jodie went to the sideboard and poured two glasses of Malbec without bothering to ask Margarite if she wanted one. At this point they both needed a drink, and tea wasn’t going to cut it.

      “I am so pissed at Mike,” Jodie muttered as she recorked the bottle with the crystal stopper. “At least he could have given some warning, the sniveling coward.”

      “I’m surprised he didn’t leave sooner,” Margarite said matter-of-factly, accepting the glass after setting the porcelain teacup on the end table next to the leather sofa.

      “Why?” Jodie asked. She had her own opinion—Mike was spineless—but was curious to hear the housekeeper’s take on the matter.

      “Frankly, when things go wrong, your dad tends to fire from the hip. Mike and Chandler took a lot of heat over the past year.”

      “Were they responsible for what went wrong?” Jodie asked reasonably, knowing that while her father was a tough man to work for, he set the same standards for himself that he set for others. She had spent her life living up to those standards and it had made her a stronger, more capable person.

      “Not always,” Margarite said. “Sometimes Mother Nature was responsible. Your father came down on Mike pretty hard a time or two for things that were out of his control.” She shrugged her thin shoulders. “And Mike doesn’t take criticism well. I think the only reason he stayed as long as he did was because there were no other job opportunities.”

      “Well, apparently one just arose,” Jodie said darkly, taking a healthy swallow of wine, “and now I have to try to hire a cowboy before this early calving starts.”

      She stared into her glass, slowly swirling the contents. Where did one start? The employment office? Hi. Do you have any cowboys?

      “Yeah, you need to do that.” Margarite hesitated in a way that made Jodie glance up. “But without Mike … you’re also going to have to find a vet that’ll come out here. Sometimes they have to C-section the cows.”

      Jodie stopped swirling. “You’re kidding.” A vet. Willing to come out here. She’d practically had to promise her firstborn to get Sam to the ranch, and despite the decent job he had done on the stitches, she still didn’t have a lot of faith in his vet skills. Maybe sutures were his forte. Since her father had buried a thirty-thousand-dollar horse, internal medicine obviously was not.

      “I’m not kidding one bit. Your dad bred the heifers to a big bull to get black calves.”

      Jodie blinked at the housekeeper. “Why did he need black calves?”

      “Black cattle sell for a few cents more a pound.”

      Jodie couldn’t even begin to find the logic in that. It wasn’t as if the person consuming the cow knew what color it had been. She slumped back against the sofa cushions, reminding herself that this, too, would pass.

      “Lucas is back in town.”

      Jodie stared at Margarite over her glass.

      “Wasn’t he in rehab?”

      “Yes.”

      “Didn’t my dad fire him for drinking on the job?”

      “Yes.”

      Jodie closed her eyes. Debated. What the heck? “Do you know how to get hold of him?”

      “I can find him. I know his sister.”

      “Think he’d work temporarily?”

      “We can ask.”

      “Let’s do that.”

      Margarite made a few calls, tracked Lucas down, and then Jodie phoned him. The cowboy was more than happy to put in a few weeks at the ranch while Joe was gone—with the understanding that if something permanent came up, he’d have to take it. He was in the middle of a job search.

      Jodie agreed and hung up. Lucas might not be a vet, but he was a warm body and knew how to feed cattle and birth calves. Joe probably wouldn’t approve of Lucas any more than Sam, but Joe wasn’t going to know about any of this until he came back.

      CHAPTER THREE

      “YOU’RE NOT GOING TO believe this,” Katie said as Sam came in from an early morning emergency call—a bull with a broken leg—that had segued into routine equine dental work in which the horse had not been all that eager to participate. He was tired and ready to believe anything. And he groaned when he saw what she was holding between her thumb and forefinger, as if it were a dead mouse.

      “Whose check bounced?” He shrugged out of his canvas coat and hung it on a wooden peg. It was the third returned check that week. At this rate, he wasn’t going to be able to pay his own bills. Given the choice, Sam would rather wrestle a prolapsed uterus back into a struggling cow than deal with billing and accounts receivable—although, since it was just after the holidays, his mailbox wasn’t exactly spilling over with envelopes containing checks. And obviously, those that did arrive were not a guarantee of money in the bank.

      “Mrs. Newland.”

      “Oh,