Outlaw Hartes. RaeAnne Thayne

twice. I’ve more than done my share for Salt River Elementary.”

      “Come on, SueAnn,” she teased. “Are you forgetting who pays your salary?”

      The other woman rolled her eyes. “You pay me to take your phone calls, to send out your bill reminders and to hold down the occasional unlucky animal while you give him a shot. Last I checked, planning a Valentine’s Day carnival is nowhere in my job description.”

      “We could always change your job description. How about while we’re at it, we’ll include mucking out the stalls?”

      “You’re not going to blackmail me. That’s what you pay Dylan the big bucks for. Speaking of the little rascal, how did you punish her, anyway? Ground her to her room for the rest of the month?”

      That’s what she should have done. It was no less than Dylan deserved for lying to her teacher. But she’d chosen a more fitting punishment. “She’s grounded from playing with Lucy after school for the rest of the week and she has to finish reading all of Little Women and I’m going to make sure she does a lot of the work of this carnival, since it was her great idea.”

      “The carnival she ought to be okay with, but which is she going to hate more, reading the book or not playing with her other half?”

      “Doesn’t matter. She has to face the music.”

      SueAnn laughed, and Ellie smiled back. What would she have done without the other woman to keep her grounded and sane these last few months? She shuddered just thinking about it.

      She winced whenever she remembered how tempted she’d been to fire her that first week. SueAnn was competent enough—eerily so, sometimes—but she also didn’t have the first clue how to mind her own business. Ellie had really struggled with it at first. Coming from California where avoiding eye contact when at all possible could sometimes be a matter of survival, dealing with a terminal busybody for an assistant had been wearing.

      She was thirty-two years old and wasn’t used to being mothered. Even when she’d had a mother, she hadn’t had much practice at it. And she had been completely baffled by how to handle SueAnn, who made it a point to have her favorite grind of coffee waiting very morning, who tried to set her up with every single guy in town between the ages of eighteen and sixty, and who brought in Tupperware containers several times a week brimming with homemade soups and casseroles and mouthwatering desserts.

      Now that she’d had a little practice, she couldn’t believe she had been so fortunate to find not only the best assistant she could ask for but also a wonderful friend.

      “What’s on the agenda this morning?” Ellie asked.

      “You’re not going to believe this, but you actually have two patients waiting.”

      “What, are we going for some kind of record?”

      SueAnn snickered and held two charts out with a flourish. “In exam room one, we have Sasha, Mary Lou McGilvery’s husky.”

      “What’s wrong with her?”

      “Him. Sasha, oddly enough, is a him. He’s scratching like crazy, and Mary Lou is afraid he has fleas.”

      “Highly doubtful around here, especially this time of year. It’s too cold.”

      “That’s what I tried to tell her. She’s convinced that you need to take a look at him, though.”

      Dogs weren’t exactly her specialty, since she was a large animal veterinarian, but she knew enough about them to deal with a skin condition. She nodded to SueAnn. “And patient number two?”

      Her assistant cleared her throat ominously. “Cleo.”

      “Cleo?”

      “Jeb Thacker’s Nubian goat. She has a bit of a personality disorder.”

      “What does that mean?”

      “Well, let’s put it this way. Ben used to say that if she’d been human, she’d have been sent to death row a long time ago.”

      Ellie grinned, picturing the old codger who had sold her the practice saying exactly that. Ben Nichols was a real character. They had formed an instant friendship the first time they met at a conference several years ago. It was that same bond that had prompted him to make all her dreams come true by offering her his practice at a bargain basement price when he decided to retire, to her shock and delight. He and his wife were now thoroughly enjoying retirement in Arizona.

      “What’s Cleo in for?”

      “Jeb didn’t know, precisely. The poor man ’bout had a panic attack right there when I tried to get him to specify on the paperwork. Blushed brighter than one of his tomatoes and said he thought it was some kind of female trouble.”

      A homicidal goat with female trouble. And here she thought she was in for another slow morning. “Where’s Jeb?”

      “He had to go into Afton to the hardware store. Said he’d be back later to pick her up.”

      “In that case, let’s take care of the dog first since Mary Lou’s waiting,” she decided. She could save the worst for last.

      It only took a few moments for her to diagnose that Sasha had a bad case of psoriasis. She gave Mary Lou a bottle of medicated shampoo she thought would do the trick, ordered her to wash his bedding frequently and scheduled a checkup in six months.

      That done, she put on her coat and braved the cold, walking to the pens behind the clinic to deal with the cantankerous goat. Cleo looked docile enough. The brown-and-white goat was standing in one of the smaller pens gnawing the top rail on the fence.

      Ellie stood near the fence and spoke softly to her for a moment, trying to earn the animal’s trust. Cleo turned and gave her what Ellie could swear was a look of sheer disdain out of big, long-fringed brown eyes, then turned back to the rail.

      Slowly, cautiously, she entered the pen and approached the goat, still crooning softly to her. When she was still several feet away, she stopped for a cursory look. Although she would need to do a physical exam to be certain, she thought she could see the problem—one of Cleo’s udders looked engorged and red. She probably had mastitis.

      Since Cleo wasn’t paying her any mind, Ellie inched closer. “You’re a sweet girl, aren’t you?” she murmured. “Everybody’s wrong about you.” She reached a hand to touch the animal, but before her hand could connect, Cleo whirled like a bronco with a burr under her saddle. Ellie didn’t have time to move away before the goat butted her in the stomach with enough force to knock her on her rear end, right into a puddle of what she fervently hoped was water.

      With a ma-aaa of amusement, the goat turned back to the fence rail.

      “Didn’t anybody warn you about Cleo?” a deep male voice asked.

      Just what she needed, a witness to her humiliation. From her ignominious position on the ground, she took a moment to force air into her lungs. When she could breathe again, she glanced toward the direction of the voice. Her gaze landed first on a pair of well-worn boots just outside the fence, then traveled up a mile-long length of blue jeans to a tooled silver buckle with the swirled insignia of the NCHA—National Cutting Horse Association.

      She knew that buckle.

      She’d seen it a day earlier on none other than the lean hips of her nemesis. Sure enough. Matt Harte stood there just on the other side of the pen—broad shoulders, blue eyes, wavy dark hair and all.

      She closed her eyes tightly, wishing the mud would open up underneath her and suck her down. Of all the people in the world who might have been here to watch her get knocked to her butt, why did it have to be him?

       Chapter 3

      Matt let himself into the pen, careful to keep a safe distance between his own rear end and Jeb Thacker’s notoriously lousy-tempered