A Bride For Liam Brand. Joanna Sims

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      “What’s wrong?” Kate put her hands on her daughter’s shoulders, giving her face and body a cursory check with her concerned eyes.

      Callie’s round face was flushed bright red and drenched with tears and sweat. Her daughter was eighteen-years-old, an adult by any standard, but Callie had been born with Down syndrome. Negative emotions, in particular, were difficult for Callie to process.

      “Take a minute.” Her daughter was gasping for air, struggling to speak. “Catch your breath.”

      Callie leaned forward a bit, closed her eyes, coughed several times and followed her mother’s instructions.

      “Visa...” Callie finally got the words out. “He’s hurt, Mommy!”

      Kate was, at first, relieved that her daughter wasn’t the one injured, but the last thing a horse owner wanted to hear was that one of the herd was injured. So, the relief she had originally felt was fleeting.

      “It’s okay, Callie.” Kate gave her daughter a steady look. “Let’s go see what’s going on with him.”

      It was just a fact of life that her daughter didn’t have many friends in their community; Bozeman, Montana, was a small town surrounded by ranches and uninhabited swaths of land. There simply weren’t any other young adults with a similar disability living close by—so every animal on their ranch was Callie’s friend. And she took it hard if any of her friends were injured or sick.

      Visa, whose registered name was Expense Account, was a rare member of their horse-breeding ranch. The majority of the horses on the Triple K Ranch were Quarter horses with excellent pedigrees. Visa, on the other hand, was a Dutch Warmblood and Hanoverian mix, and he was Callie’s favorite.

      Together, they walked quickly out to the pasture closest to the barn; each horse had its designated pasture and turnout time. Visa, who wasn’t the most assertive horse in the herd, was always turned out with the older, more experienced geldings.

      Kate spotted typically social and “in everyone’s business” Visa, standing alone and away from the herd. The owner of the Triple K, her brow furrowed with concern, unlatched the gate to the pasture.

      “Wait for me here, please, Callie.”

      “I—I want to help.” Her daughter said.

      “Callie.” Her tone brooked no argument. “This I need you to wait here, please.”

      Callie, in her own right, was a talented horsewoman; she had been raised working with these elegant creatures and had been riding before she could walk. But, in this moment, Kate didn’t want the distraction of watching out for Callie while she tried to figure out what was going on with Visa.

      “Hi, good-looking boy,” Kate said as she approached Visa. She spoke in a calm soothing voice that she used with all of the horses.

      Visa was a beautiful russet-red with black legs and a black mane and tail. The horse, which typically greeted her with a friendly head bump, pinned back its ears at her, gnashed his teeth, and tossed his head aggressively. Visa loved to scratch his face by rubbing his head on her shoulder and arm; his unusual behavior served to underscore the fact that something was wrong.

      “Okay. Okay,” Kate said in a low, gentle voice, ignoring the pinned ears and his attempts to bite her while she began to take inventory of his physical state. The biggest red flag for her was the fact that he wasn’t putting weight on his right hind leg.

      “Why are you standing way out here all by yourself?” Kate ran her hand along the young horse’s muscular body. “That’s not like you.”

      Careful not to move in a way that would spook Visa, Kate kept her right hand on his haunch while she bent forward to get a closer look at the hind leg. There was a distinctive gash above Visa’s hoof it looked like a crescent, and she immediately suspected that the young gelding had got too nosey with one of the older horses and been kicked for his trouble.

      “Easy, Visa. Let me just take a quick look. Did you get kicked?” She ran her hand down the leg; the moment she got near the gash with her fingers, Visa lifted his leg to pull it away from her.

      Kate straightened her body, acid beginning to roil in her stomach. A leg injury in a horse was never good news.

      “Okay,” she said softly to Visa. “Let’s see you walk.”

      The horse trainer hooked her finger into the horse’s halter and clucked her tongue to get Visa to walk a step forward. The horse jerked his head, resisting at first, before he agreed to take a couple of steps forward. The second he tried to put weight on that right hind leg, Kate’s suspicions were confirmed: Visa was lame. She couldn’t know, without an X-ray, how bad the injury was. But there was an undisputable truth of horse ownership—no legs, no horse.

      Kate called out to her daughter to fetch her a lead rope. Red-faced and sweaty, Callie handed her the rope.

      “I-is he hurt b-bad?”

      “I’m not sure, kiddo. Let’s get him back to the barn and we’ll call Dr. McGee. Do me a favor. Go check Visa’s stall and make sure it’s been cleaned.”

      While her daughter rushed back into the barn, lead rope in hand, Kate headed back to Visa.

      “This is going to be hard, Visa. But we’ll do it together.” She clipped the lead rope to the horse’s halter and began the painstaking walk back to the barn.

      Along the way, the rest of the herd, curious creatures, tried to join them in their journey, but Kate shooed them away. One of Visa’s pasture mates had seriously injured him, that much she knew, but she couldn’t pinpoint which horse had done the damage.

      Callie hurriedly opened the gate so Visa could limp through.

      “I-is he going to b-be okay? He looks like he’s hurt b-bad.” Tears had returned to Callie’s brown eyes.

      “It might be a broken leg, Callie. I’m not sure.” Kate had always told her daughter the truth. “But I do know that we have to be strong for Visa. We have to be calm so he can stay calm. You have to try, okay?”

      “Okay,” Callie said as she shut the gate behind them. “I—I’ll try.”

      It took a long time to get the lame horse back to his stall; once he was settled, Kate asked Callie to get Visa a pad of hay to keep him occupied while she called her regular vet.

      “Oh, Kate,” Dr. McGee’s receptionist, Dawn, said, “I’m so sorry, but Dr. McGee is out with the flu—sick as a dog, poor man.”

      Kate shook her head in frustration. Dr. McGee had been her vet for years, and she simply didn’t trust anyone else with her horses.

      “It sounds like you need someone right away.” The receptionist filled in the silence. “I can refer you to Dr. Brand. I have his number right here if you’d like to have it.”

      Kate had gone to school with Liam Brand, starting in kindergarten. Yes, she grew up with him, and yes, she ran into him every now and again in town. But she had no idea what kind of veterinarian skills Liam Brand had. Unfortunately, she wasn’t in a position to question her own vet’s referral. Kate took the number, thanked the receptionist for her time and then immediately called Dr. Brand.

      * * *

      “He-llo.” Liam Brand tapped the green telephone symbol to answer the phone quickly so he could still keep his eyes on the road.

      “May I speak with Dr. Brand, please?”

      “You got ’im.”

      “Hi, Dr. Brand. This is Kate King.” The woman on the other end of the line paused for a second. “Triple K Ranch?”

      Large-animal veterinarian Liam Brand didn’t want to let on, but he didn’t need any additional qualifiers beyond Kate’s name to identify who she was. He was a little old to have a crush, he supposed, but she certainly had caught his interest