Once and for All. Jeannie Watt

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      “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, man.”

      Mrs. Newland was a sweet lady devoted to her two wild terriers. Sam didn’t do a lot of small animal work, but when one of the dogs had been attacked by a coyote, he’d stitched it up after hours.

      “I know. What do you want to do?”

      “Call the bank before you redeposit. If there aren’t enough funds to cover it, then bill her again.”

      Sam couldn’t afford to do work gratis, much as he’d like to.

      The bell on the back door rang, and Beau and Tyler, who were supposed to be on their way to school by now, came through the mudroom into the clinic office with a blast of cold air.

      “We can’t get the Beast started,” Tyler said, rubbing his gloved hands together.

      “For real?” The last time the boys had trouble starting the Beast was when Ty had a date and thought Sam’s Ford crew cab would be more impressive than a tiny ‘94 Mazda pickup with a dented tailgate. Ty loved to impress. Beau was happy to just be himself.

      “Yeah. I think it’s the battery. We’ll need a jump.”

      Sam plopped the Elmer Fudd hat back on his head and grabbed his gloves. Five minutes later the Beast was running and he was coiling his jumper cables.

      “Good luck with that test,” Sam said to Beau as the kid climbed behind the wheel. “You, too, Ty.”

      “You don’t need luck when you’re good,” Tyler said with a confident smirk.

      “You have a C.”

      “Whatever.”

      Sam opened his wallet and pulled out four twenties, which he passed to Ty through the open window. “Buy a battery for the Beast on the way home.”

      “Are you sure?” The boys were supposed to handle maintenance on the small truck.

      “Yeah. I don’t want you getting stranded somewhere.” The teens could change the oil themselves. A battery СКАЧАТЬ