LITMIR.BIZ

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toward him, he met her glowering gaze, surprised to find her big brown eyes sparking in a way he’d never seen before. His gut tightened still more. “What’s up, Mel?”

      “Pigs! That’s what. Pigs.”

      Jack’s eyebrows went up. “Pigs?”

      She stopped beside the coatrack next to the office door. “Like I don’t know from pigs. Me! Of all people!” Yanking her big, tan corduroy jacket off her shoulders, she muttered darkly when the sleeves of her red flannel shirt clung to the jacket’s quilted lining. The resulting static electricity had the fine strands of long, blond ringlets that had escaped her ponytail rising in a crazy dance around her head.

      She looked more than a little wild around the edges, a far cry from the quiet, efficient woman Jack had grown used to in the six months they’d worked together. It had taken him a long time to find someone willing to work in such a small town so far from anything, and the fact that that someone was as easy to get along with as Melinda was nothing short of a miracle.

      Hopefully nothing had happened to change his surprisingly good luck of late.

      His confusion and concern mounting, he repeated, “Pigs?”

      “The Websters’ pigs—oh, excuse me,” she jerked a hand from her coat sleeve to hold it up in clarification, “prize-winning hogs.” Her tone dripped a sarcasm he’d never heard from her before. “Mr. Webster won’t let me near his prize-winning hogs.”

      She flung her coat down on the desk that butted against his, fluttering the paperwork he should have been attending to instead of daydreaming about moving. While they were rarely in the office at the same time, there was plenty of space for them both to handle the paperwork the clinic generated, which historically wasn’t enough to warrant hiring any office staff.

      Though business had certainly picked up since he’d won part of the lottery. Funny how being rich suddenly made a guy popular. Annoyingly popular.

      Settling his elbows on the armrests, he sat back in his wooden chair, the swivel mechanism creaking. “Bud Webster wouldn’t let you near his hogs? You’re kidding.”

      “Trust me, you have no idea how much I wish I were.” She plopped down in her matching chair, which made nary a peep. She, however, let out an exasperated sounding huff and dropped her delicate chin to her chest.

      Jack’s concern trumped his puzzlement. He’d never seen Melinda like this. From what he could tell, she loved being a vet, and had never once complained about her work, the town or the population of Jester. Just the opposite.

      She often spoke highly of the people she was getting to know, even though her shyness made the process slow, and Jack suspected incomplete. He doubted many in town knew just how smart Melinda was. She’d come highly recommended by one of his former professors. What if she changed her mind? What if she decided Jester wasn’t the place she wanted to be after all?

      A spurt of panic had him leaning toward her. “What exactly happened?”

      “Just what I said. Mr. Webster wouldn’t let me near his hogs.” She lurched to her feet and started pacing the small office, her square-toed work boots clomping heavily on the dark blue vinyl floor. “He said he doesn’t want ‘no slip of a woman doctoring his hogs.’ Slip of a woman,” she grumbled, “I’ll show him a slip.”

      Jack pulled back his chin. He’d yet to see a critter cross Melinda’s path that she couldn’t keep a strong, tight hold on, despite being no more than five-four, and she always handled everything with quiet capability. He’d never seen her express herself with so much…passion before.

      And despite how threatening her upset was to his intentions to leave, he had to admit the fire in her eyes suited her. But it was a fire that, for Jack’s long-term plans, needed to be doused.

      “Of all the pigheaded males, that pig farmer has got to be the pigheadedest of them all…” The rest of what she said was lost behind her hands when she reached up and rubbed at her makeupless face as if she were trying to scrub away her frustration.

      She dropped her hands and planted them on her jean-clad hips. “He wants you to do the vaccinations.”

      “Because you’re…you’re…” he waved a hand at her, struggling to describe her in a way other than the fact that she was outweighed by most large dogs “…not very big?”

      She rolled her eyes and threw out a hip. “No. Not because I’m petite. Because I’m a woman, Jack. Nothing more than that. Mr. Webster doesn’t want a woman vet to work on his ranch. And he doesn’t care that I grew up on a farm surrounded by pigs, along with just about every other kind of animal.” The fiery spark in her eyes turned to a watery shimmer and her defiant expression started to crumble slightly. “I know from pigs, Jack.” Her voice sounded a little strangled.

      His own throat closed up in response. He hated to see a woman cry. It was one of the reasons he’d become a veterinarian instead of a physician. You didn’t have to come up with something good to say to make a suffering animal feel better.

      Worried by the degree of her aggravation, he rose from his chair and went to her, placing what he hoped would be calming hands on her shoulders. He felt her rigid stance instantly soften and melt. “I know you do, Mel. But the old guard—farmers like Bud Webster—they’re still living in a different century. And I don’t mean the most recent one. They’ll see soon enough that you know what you’re doing.”

      “How? When they won’t let me through the gates?”

      Her heat seeping into his palms, Jack realized with a jolt that this was the most contact he’d had with a woman in five years and dropped his hands from her slender shoulders. He turned to look at the map on the wall again. At all the places he could go.

      The need to leave Jester and the pain that ate away at his insides like a slow-growing cancer flared white-hot. He could have left the day he’d received his lottery check, but he’d wanted to see Melinda securely established in the practice he planned to simply sign over to her so he could leave with no strings attached.

      If some of the townspeople refused to accept her, though…

      He pulled in a heavy sigh and ran a hand through his hair. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t stay. Jester held too many memories, too many dreams that would never be realized. Even the dingy statue on the Town Hall lawn of Caroline Peterson, atop her horse, Jester, the town’s namesake, brought echoes of laughter and the true story about how the wild horse was really tamed—not with grit and bluster, but patience and sugar.

      He turned back to Melinda, absently noticing how her high temper had added an attractive flush to her already sun-kissed cheeks and a golden glow to eyes he had previously only thought of as brown. “Pretty soon they won’t have a choice if they want to keep their prize-winning hogs healthy.”

      Her finely arched blond brows came together, then she stilled. “How so?”

      “They can’t very well refuse to let you treat their livestock if you’re the only vet within miles.”

      JACK’S WORDS hit Melinda like an unexpected blast of frigid, Montana winter air, freezing the breath in her lungs as quickly as fog to glass. While he’d been talking about leaving since the day he’d given her a spot in his practice, she didn’t want him to go.

      Granted, the prospect of virtually being handed an established veterinary clinic had been the sweetest part of the deal when she’d first signed on, but even without that offer she probably would have agreed to partner with Jack because Jester was exactly the sort of place she wanted to spend her life. She could continue to live in her beloved home state of Montana, be close enough for her mother to afford to call and check up on her like she insisted on doing every Sunday, but still be far enough away from the father Melinda had never been able to please. The one thing she couldn’t change about herself was the fact she’d been born a girl.

      Then there was Jack, himself.

      She’d never forget walking

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