his audience.
“Jack, it’s Ruby Cade.”
“Hey, Ru—”
“I need you, Jack. Right now.”
For the first time in nearly two months those words coming from a woman didn’t illicit dread from him. Not only was Ruby married, she was a fellow lottery winner. Though Jack couldn’t recall the last time he’d seen Ruby’s husband Sam around town. Since Sam was a military man of some sort, his absence shouldn’t be cause for note. But Ruby owned The Mercantile just down Main Street from the clinic with Honor Lassiter and lived in the apartment above the store.
And she didn’t have a pet.
He cleared his throat. “Ah, what can I do for—”
She cut him off. “It’s that damn goat, Jack. The one that’s been hanging around town.” Her upset was clear in the quaver of her voice. “It must have wandered into my back storeroom when we were unloading a delivery earlier. Now it’s got its head stuck inside a damn bucket and is crashing all over the place. It kicks when we try to get a hold of it. Please, can you come right over and help us before it destroys my stock?”
Ruby never swore, and it was strange to hear her so rattled. But she had been unusually emotional ever since the lottery win.
“I’ll be right there, Ruby.” Jack hung up, thankful he had an excuse to leave. He grabbed his bag from the floor next to his desk, checking quickly to make sure it contained his heavy-duty clippers. If he recalled, the little billy goat that made occasional forays into town from who-knew-where had horns long enough to keep its head stuck in a bucket.
He stood and went to the coatrack near his office door and pulled his heavy, dark brown canvas barn jacket off the rack. Slipping into it, he met the eyes of the eager reporter. The cameraman’s face was already buried behind his camera. “I’m sorry, but I have to go.”
“Can you just answer a couple of quick—”
He held up a hand again. “It’s an emergency. Sorry.”
Marina’s face glowed, clearly having picked up the scent of opportunity. “We’ll come along.”
Irritated and knowing that telling them no didn’t work—they simply followed along at a distance—Jack nodded. “Okay, just give me a sec.”
He turned and headed for the examination room, but realized he didn’t want to leave them inside with access to his office. He whirled and headed back toward them. “Why don’t you go ahead and wait for me in your van. Give you time to warm it up.”
Marina nodded in agreement. “Sure. Good idea.”
Her cameraman opened the door for her, and then Jack held it for him as he maneuvered the expensive video camera unit through the doorway. Jack closed the door, turning the lock as quietly as he could. He then headed straight for the examination room and out the other door that led out back, effectively ditching the news crew. His gut told him the last thing Ruby needed was to have her upset featured on the evening news. And it would be, because she was a fellow winner.
Besides, since he only had to pass Faulkner’s Hardware and The Brimming Cup, then cross the side street Mayor Bobby Larson had had the ballocks to rename Big Draw Drive to reach the back of The Mercantile, he’d be shortening the time it took him to get there.
As he made his way along the backside of the Main Street businesses, which looked much smaller than they did from the front with their old-west style facades, all Jack could think about was how nice it would be to move some place where he could do his job without having to slip out the back door of his own clinic.
A place where no one knew who he was, or could remind him of his pain.
Chapter Three
Melinda dragged her feet up the side porch steps to the little house she rented on Mega-Bucks Boulevard late that afternoon, weary to the bone. She should have been exhilarated after having her work praised as much as it had been by Wyla.
But when the thin, sour-faced woman wasn’t complimenting Melinda on her veterinary skills, she was griping. From afar, of course. With plenty of hired hands to do the work, Wyla no longer went anywhere near the animals that her last husband had been forced to “give” her after a nasty divorce. But she still stood in the pig barn door and griped and griped. About everything.
Though she’d been smart enough to keep her complaints about Jack, and the insinuations she’d been making around town that he stole her money by opting into the lottery after she’d opted out, to the minimum. She must have known Melinda wouldn’t stand for it. It was no secret he had her loyalty. Blessedly, the fact that he also had her heart remained a secret.
Wyla’s negativity had simply beaten Melinda down in a way wrestling several dozen pigs never could. She definitely couldn’t wait to seek comfort with her critters over this day, and had come straight home after finishing up at Wyla’s rather than stopping in at the office like normal. The paperwork, and Jack’s talk, could wait.
How was she going to talk him out of leaving without revealing too much? She shook her head at the seeming impossibility and let herself into the house. She’d been told when she first moved here that she needn’t worry about locking her doors. After the lottery win, however, the town sheriff, Luke McNeil, had advised everyone, even nonwinners, to take precautions. There were a lot more strangers in town now, thanks to its new notoriety.
The side door of her house opened right into a tiny laundry room. After she greeted her fat, notched-ear, half-blind, gray-and-black tabby cat and his timid, snow-white counterpart, per her routine, she stripped off her filthy and smelly work clothes—today the scent being eau de hog—and tossed them straight into the clothes washer. Down to her French-cut, cotton underwear and bra, she trudged through the little kitchen, the harvest-gold linoleum cold under her feet and the eager cats dangerous around her ankles.
She bought herself some safe-walking time by stopping to refill their food bowls, then went through the cozy living room to the short hall that the bathroom and her bedroom opened off from. Heading straight for the shower, she did her best to wash away the day behind a white with blue dog-paw print shower curtain.
The mud and manure were easy, requiring only a little soup and a nail brush. Wyla’s negativity succumbed under the force of the massage setting on the shower head. Bud Webster’s chauvinism required a few choice words that echoed nicely off the bathroom’s white and blue-flecked tile. But no matter how hot or hard she ran the water, Jack’s words, his pain, appeared to be with her to stay.
Turning pruney and needing to see to her other animals, Melinda gave up, turned off the shower and stepped out of the tub. She towel-dried her long curly hair as best she could, combed it out, then donned the pink satin pajamas and terry cloth, powder-blue robe with white clouds that she kept hanging from a ceramic cat’s paw on the back of the bathroom door. Out of the pockets of the robe she pulled thick woolen socks the cats assumed were some other weird creatures she’d taken in. She put them on, then went to tend to the rest of her menagerie.
The cats had already been seen to, but her parakeet with the broken beak needed water and her barbecue-singed guinea pig needed more pellets in the cages in a corner of the living room. In the laundry room she slipped her stocking feet into oversize rubber boots and went out into the fenced backyard.
She saw to her three rabbits in their hutch next to the house, added fresh straw to her two pigmy goats’ little shed to keep them warm through the very cold night, and coaxed her beloved, three-legged dog into the house. A mutt of some kind, mostly Australian shepherd she figured, he had been the first animal she’d rescued after moving out on her own, and his tenacity and good nature inspired her to keep at whatever she was doing no matter how tempted she was to give up. The silly thing loved to be outside in his doghouse, no matter how frigid the weather, but Melinda insisted he come in with her at night, as much for her and her need for company as for his health.
Kicking