LITMIR.BIZ

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me?”

      “It’s autumn,” she repeated.

      The older woman was staring blankly at her.

      Keely shrugged. “Every autumn, Dr. Rydel gets even more short-tempered than usual and he goes missing for a week. He doesn’t leave a telephone number in case of emergencies, he doesn’t call here and nobody knows where he is. When he comes back, he never says where he’s been.”

      “He’s been like this since I was hired,” Cappie pointed out. “And I’m the fifth new vet tech this year, Dr. King said so. Dr. Rydel ran the others off.”

      “You have to yell back, or just smile when he gets wound up,” Keely said in a kindly tone.

      Cappie grimaced. “I never yell at anybody.”

      “This is a good time to learn. In fact…”

      “Where the hell is my damned raincoat?!”

      Cappie’s face was a study in horror. “You said he went to lunch!”

      “Obviously he came back,” Keely replied, wincing, as the boss stormed into the waiting room where two shocked old ladies were sitting beside cat carriers.

      Dr. Bentley Rydel was tall, over six feet, with pale blue eyes that took on the gleam of steel when he was angry. He had jet-black hair, thick and usually untidy because he ran his fingers through it in times of frustration. His feet were large, like his hands. His nose had been broken at some point, which only gave his angular face more character. He wasn’t conventionally handsome, but women found him very attractive. He didn’t find them attractive. If there was a more notorious woman hater than Bentley Rydel in all of Jacobs County, Texas, it would be hard to find him.

      “My raincoat?” he repeated, glaring at Cappie as if it were her fault that he’d left without it.

      Cappie drew herself up to her full height—the top of her head barely came to Bentley’s shoulder—and took a deep breath. “Sir,” she said smartly, “your raincoat is in the closet where you left it.”

      His dark eyebrows rose half a foot.

      Cappie cleared her throat and shook her head as if to clear it. The motion dislodged her precariously placed barrette. Her long, thick blond hair shook free of it, swirling around her shoulders like a curtain of silk.

      While she was debating her next, and possibly job-ending, comment, Bentley was staring at her hair. She always wore it on top of her head in that stupid ponytail. He hadn’t realized it was so long. His pale eyes narrowed as he studied it.

      Keely, fascinated, managed not to stare. She turned to the old ladies watching, spellbound. “Mrs. Ross, if you’ll bring—” she looked at her clipboard “—Luvvy the cat on back, we’ll see about her shots.”

      Mrs. Ross, a tiny little woman, smiled and pulled her rolling cat carrier along with her, casting a wistful eye back at the tableau she was reluctantly foregoing.

      “Dr. Rydel?” Cappie prompted, because he was really staring.

      He scowled suddenly and blinked. “It’s raining,” he said shortly.

      “Sir, that is not my fault,” she returned. “I do not control the weather.”

      “A likely story,” he huffed. He turned on his heel, went to the closet, jerked his coat out, displacing everybody else’s, and stormed out the door into the pouring rain.

      “And I hope you melt!” Cappie muttered under her breath.

      “I heard that!” Bentley Rydel called without looking back.

      Cappie flushed and moved back behind the counter, trying not to meet Gladys Hawkins’s eyes, because the old lady was almost crying, she was laughing so hard.

      “There, there,” Dr. King, the long-married senior veterinarian, said with a gentle smile. She patted Cappie on the shoulder. “You’ve done well. By the time she’d been here a month, Antonia was crying in the bathroom at least twice a day, and she never talked back to Dr. Rydel.”

      “I’ve never worked in such a place,” Cappie said blankly. “I mean, most veterinarians are like you—they’re nice and professional, and they don’t yell at the staff. And, of course, the staff doesn’t yell…”

      “Yes, they do,” Keely piped in, chuckling. “My husband made the remark that I was a glorified groomer, and the next time he came in here, our groomer gave him an earful about just what a groomer does.” She grinned. “Opened his eyes.”

      “They do a lot more than clip fur,” Dr. King agreed. “They’re our eyes and ears in between exams. Many times, our groomers have saved lives by noticing some small problem that could have turned fatal.”

      “Your husband is a dish,” Cappie told Keely shyly.

      Keely laughed. “Yes, he is, but he’s opinionated, hardheaded and temperamental with it.”

      “He was a tough one to tame, I’ll bet,” Dr. King mused.

      Keely leaned forward. “Not half as tough as Dr. Rydel is going to be.”

      “Amen. I pity the poor woman who takes him on.”

      “Trust me, she hasn’t been born yet,” Keely replied.

      “He likes you,” Cappie sighed.

      “I don’t challenge him,” Keely said simply. “And I’m younger than most of the staff. He thinks of me as a child.”

      Cappie’s eyes bulged.

      Keely patted her on the shoulder. “Some people do.” The smile faded. Keely was remembering her mother, who’d been killed by a friend of Keely’s father. The whole town had been talking about it. Keely had landed well, though, in Boone Sinclair’s strong arms.

      “I’m sorry about your mother,” Cappie said gently. “We all were.”

      “Thanks,” Keely replied. “We were just getting to know one another when she was…killed. My father plea-bargained himself down to a short jail term, but I don’t think he’ll be back this way. He’s too afraid of Sheriff Hayes.”

      “Now there’s a real dish,” Cappie said. “Handsome, brave…”

      “…suicidal,” Keely interjected.

      “Excuse me?”

      “He’s been shot twice, walking into gun battles,” Dr. King explained.

      “No guts, no glory,” Cappie said.

      Her companions chuckled. The phone rang, another customer walked in and the conversation turned to business.

      Cappie went home late. It was Friday and the place was packed with clients. Nobody escaped before six-thirty, not even the poor groomer who’d spent half a day on a Siberian husky. The animals had thick undercoats and it was a job to wash and brush them out. Dr. Rydel had been snippier than usual, too, glaring at Cappie as if she were responsible for the overflow of patients.

      “Cappie, is that you?” her brother called from the bedroom.

      “It’s me, Kell,” she called back. She put down her raincoat and purse and walked into the small, sparse bedroom where her older brother lay surrounded by magazines and books and a small laptop computer. He managed a smile for her.

      “Bad day?” she asked gently, sitting down beside him on the bed, softly so that she didn’t worsen the pain.

      He only nodded. His face was taut, the only sign of the pain that ate him alive every hour of the day. A journalist, he’d been on overseas assignment for a magazine when he was caught in a firefight and wounded by shrapnel. It had lodged in his spine where it was too dangerous for even the most advanced surgery. The doctors said someday, the shrapnel might shift into a location where it would be operable. But until then, Kell was basically paralyzed from the

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