Outlaw Hartes: The Valentine Two-Step / Cassidy Harte And The Comeback Kid. RaeAnne Thayne

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      A delicate pink tinged the doc’s cheeks. “Thanks for sharing that, sweetheart.”

      “What?” Dylan asked, all innocence. “That’s what you said, isn’t it?”

      She laughed ruefully. “You’re right. I did. The truth is, I’ve always wanted to live and work in the Rockies. I met Ben Nichols when I was giving a lecture a few years ago. Afterward, when he told me about Star Valley and his practice here, I told him how much I envied him and casually mentioned I had always dreamed of living out here. I never imagined he would offer to sell his practice to me when he retired.”

      So that explained what brought her to Wyoming. What interested him was why a tiny little thing like her would choose such a physically demanding job as a large-animal vet in the first place. If she wanted to be a vet, she would have been better off with little things like dogs and cats instead of having to muscle a half-ton of steer into a chute.

      He didn’t think she’d appreciate the question, so he asked another one. “Where were you working before?”

      She shifted her gaze across the table to him as if she’d forgotten he was sitting there. “I worked at a clinic in the Monterey area. That’s on the central coast of California—so I guess you were right, Jesse. Technically I suppose you could call me a beach girl, although I rarely had a chance to see it.”

      “I’ve heard that’s a beautiful area,” Cassie said.

      “It is. Pebble Beach is just south of it, and Carmel-by-the-Sea.”

      “How many cattle operations did you find in the middle of all those golf courses and tourist traps?” he asked abruptly, earning a curious look from Cassie.

      “Not many, although there are a few farther inland. My clients were mostly horses—thoroughbreds and jumpers and pleasure horses.”

      The conversation turned then to the physical differences between working horses and riding horses and then, with much prompting by Dylan, onto the best choice for a pleasure horse for a nine-year-old girl. Matt contented himself listening to the conversation and watching Ellie interact with his family.

      Even after three years of marriage, Melanie had never fit in half as well. He felt vaguely guilty for the thought, but it was nothing less than the truth. She and Cassie had fought like cats and dogs from the beginning, and Jess had despised her.

      So much for his grand plan to give his younger siblings more of a stable home environment by bringing home a wife.

      He should have known from the first night he brought her home after their whirlwind courtship and marriage at the national stock show in Denver that he had made a disastrous mistake. She spent the entire evening bickering with Cassie and completely ignoring Jess.

      But by then it was too late, they were already married. It took him three more years of the situation going from bad to worse for him to admit to himself how very stupid he had been.

      He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

      He hated thinking about it, about what a fool he had been, so he yanked his mind off the topic. “Everything tastes great, as usual,” he said instead to Cassie.

      She grinned suddenly. “Remember that first year after Mom and Daddy died when you tried to cook Thanksgiving dinner?”

      Jess turned his attention long enough from Ellie to shudder and add his own jab. “I remember it. My stomach still hasn’t forgiven me. The turkey was tougher than roasted armadillo.”

      “And the yams could have been used to tar the barn roof.”

      He rolled his eyes as the girls giggled. Jess and Cassie teased him mercilessly about that dinner. Usually it didn’t bother him—but then again, usually he didn’t have Ellie Webster sitting across from him listening to the conversation with that intrigued look in her green eyes.

      “Give me a break,” he muttered. “I did my best. You’re lucky you got anything but cold cereal and frozen pizza.”

      He’d been twenty-two when their parents died in a rollover on a slippery mountain road. That first year had been the toughest time of his life. Grieving for his parents and their sudden death, trying to comfort Cassie, who had been a lost and frightened thirteen-year-old, doing his damnedest to keep Jess out of juvenile detention.

      Trying to keep the ranch and the family together when he didn’t know what the hell he was doing.

      It had been a rough few years, but they had survived and were closer for it.

      “At least we had to only go through Matt’s attempts to poison us for a while.” Jess grinned. “Then Cassie decided to save us all and learned to cook.”

      “I had no choice,” she retorted. “It was a matter of survival. I figured one of us had to learn unless we wanted to die of food poisoning or starve to death. Matt was too busy with the ranch and you were too busy raising hell. That left me.”

      Jesse immediately bristled, gearing up for a sharp retort, and Matt gave a resigned sigh. Cassie always knew how to punch his buttons. Jesse’s wild, hard-drinking days after their parents died were still a sore point with him, but that never stopped Cass from rubbing his nose in it.

      Before he could step in to head trouble off, Ellie did it for him. “Well, you learned to cook very well,” she assured Cassie, with an anxious look toward Jess’s glare. “You’ll have to give me the recipe for your stuffing. I tend to over-cook it. Is that sausage I taste in there?”

      She prattled on in a way that seemed completely unlike her, and it was only after she had successfully turned the conversation completely away from any trouble spots that he realized she had stepped in to play peacemaker as smoothly as if she’d been doing it all her life.

      Had she done it on purpose? He wondered again about her background. She hadn’t mentioned brothers or sisters, but that didn’t mean she had none. What had happened when she was seven, the year after which she said she’d moved around so much?

      He wanted badly to know, just as he was discovering he wanted to know everything about her.

      * * *

      “Come on, Ellie. It’s our turn to watch football.”

      She looked at the dishes scattered across the table. “I can help clean up….”

      “No way. The men get to do it—it’s tradition. That’s why I try to make the kitchen extra messy for them.” She smiled sweetly at her brothers. “I think I used just about every single dish in the house.”

      Matt and Jesse groaned in unison. Unmoved, Cassie stood up. “Have fun, boys.”

      With guilt tweaking her, Ellie let Matt’s sister drag her from the dining room, Dylan and Lucy following behind.

      Cassie led her into a huge great room dominated by a towering river-rock fireplace. A big-screen TV and a pair of couches took up one corner, and a pool table and a couple of video games jostled for space in the other. As large as the room was, though, it was comfortable. Lived in, with warm-toned furniture and shelves full of books.

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