Chapter 2
The foal was dying.
Dillon knelt in the straw beside the little sorrel filly, his hands moving with a steadiness that belied the urgency hammering in his chest. She’d been born two hours ago in a tangle of long legs and slick membrane, and for the first twenty minutes, everything had looked fine. Then she’d stopped trying to stand.
“Is she gonna make it?” Tom Beecham hovered in the stall doorway, his weathered face creased with worry.
At seventy-three, Tom had been ranching since before Dillon was born, and he’d seen his share of foals come and go.
But this mare was his granddaughter’s horse, and the foal was supposed to be a Christmas present, and the granddaughter was five, and Christmas was already past.
No pressure.
“She’s got a partially collapsed lung,” Dillon said, not looking up. “I need to get her stabilized.”
He worked quickly, adjusting the foal’s position, clearing her airway, then inserting a needle between her ribs to allow air trapped around the lung to escape.
He held his finger just above the end of the hollow needle, monitoring the flow of air.
The barn was cold—Montana cold, the kind that crept through your jacket and settled in your bones—but Dillon barely registered it.
When he was working, the world narrowed to the animal in front of him and nothing else existed.
Lexi hated that about me—
He pushed the thought away and focused on the foal.
After several tense minutes, air finally stopped coming out of the needle, and the filly’s breathing deepened and steadied.
She blinked up at him with huge, dark eyes and made a sound halfway between a sigh and a whimper. He removed the needle gently.
“There you go,” he murmured. “That’s better.”
He stayed on his knees beside her for another fifteen minutes, monitoring her vitals, watching the rise and fall of her ribs, making sure the lung was holding. When he was finally satisfied, he sat back on his heels and let out a long breath.
“She’s going to be fine,” he told Tom. “Keep her warm, make sure she nurses within the next hour, and call me if anything changes. I’ll come back tomorrow to check on her.”
Tom’s face split into a grin that knocked ten years off him. “What do I owe you?”
“We’ll worry about that later.” Dillon knew Tom was having a thin year. The hay crop had been poor, and feed prices were way up. A vet bill right now likely meant making a choice between electricity and running water. “Just call me if anything seems off.”
“Doc, you gotta let me pay you something—”
“Later, Tom.” He clapped the old man on the shoulder. “Get some sleep.”
He packed his kit in his truck and sat behind the wheel for a moment, letting the heater blast against his cold hands. Three-forty-seven in the morning. He’d been out here since midnight when Tom’s call had pulled him out of a dead sleep.
This was his life. Phone calls in the dark. Frozen barns. Animals that needed him at the worst possible hours. The quiet drive home afterward, when the adrenaline drained away and the silence around him felt lonely and exhausting.
His headlights cut through the blackness of the night. A light snow was falling, dusting the road with fine white powder that sparkled in his high beams.
Usually his mind sifted through his current patients, cataloguing next steps in their care as he drove home to his cold bed and overdue sleep. Tonight, though, his mind went somewhere it had no business going.
You must be Tessa.
He’d known who she was the moment he saw her.
Fern had described her daughter-in-law often enough, always with a mixture of exasperation and grudging respect.
“She’s got style, I’ll give her that. Could freeze a man at fifty paces with one of those looks of hers.
And the girl dresses like she’s going to a magazine shoot. ”
Fern hadn’t been wrong. Tessa had stood there in that fellowship hall looking like she’d stepped out of a catalog for expensive, tasteful things regular people couldn’t afford. Pearls. Heels. Hair that probably cost more per month than he spent on diesel.
And those eyes. Sharp. Guarded. The color of good whiskey and twice as likely to burn.
She’s not your type. She’s nobody’s type around here. She’s—
Lexi.
The name landed in his chest like a stone dropped down a deep well.
He’d been down this road before. Fallen for a beautiful woman with money and polish and expectations he could never meet. He’d married her. Watched her grow restless with his irregular hours, job-first priorities, and stubborn refusal to be anything other than what he was.
He’d listened to that woman tell him, on her way out the door with her suitcases and her lawyer’s card, that he was so obsessed with taking care of animals he had nothing left inside him for taking care of a woman.
He’d believed her then. Still did, most days.
Which was why the fact that he was thinking about Tessa at all annoyed him considerably.
He’d been rude to her. He knew that. He’d seen her standing there with her perfect manicure and polished smile and every alarm bell in his body had gone off.
He’d done what he always did when he felt cornered—he’d gotten blunt. Borderline rude.
Could’ve fooled me.
Smooth, Dillon. Real smooth.
But she’d given as good as she got. Better, actually. That line about learning animal medicine herself before she’d call him? He’d had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing out loud.
She was sharp. He’d give her that. Fern had always said Tessa was scary smart, and Fern wasn’t easily impressed.
None of which matters, because she’s exactly the kind of woman you have no business thinking about.
Too bad she was everything he’d always been attracted to in women. Everything that was a terrible, impossible fit for him and his life.
He pulled into his driveway and killed the engine.
His house sat at the end of a gravel road outside of town—a crumbling ranch house he’d bought dirt cheap.
Renovating it gave him something to do between vet calls.
Kept his hands and mind occupied in the long, lonely hours of the night when he couldn’t sleep.
Inside, he dropped his kit by the garage door, hung his hat on its hook, and opened the fridge.
He dug out a plastic container of leftover chili and ate it cold, standing at the counter, because warming it up felt like more effort than the meal deserved.
He had three new messages on his phone: Tom, confirming the foal was nursing.
His brother Reno, sending a photo of himself in full rodeo clown makeup with the caption “Happy Wednesday from Tucson.” And Bonnie Watson, asking if he could look at her new puppy’s ear tomorrow.
He texted Tom a thumbs up, sent Reno an emoji of a clown face, and told Bonnie to bring the dog by the office at ten.
He rinsed his bowl, turned off the lights, and stood in the dark kitchen for a moment. The house was silent. The kind of silence that settled into a place when only one person lived in it—not peaceful, just empty.
Lexi had hated quiet. She liked excitement and bright city lights. Sirens and cars and voices outside all night long. She would’ve hated this house. This small, slow-paced town. This whole bucolic valley.
You have nothing left inside you for taking care of a woman.
Her voice in his head was as clear as the day she’d said it.
He’d stood in their modern white and chrome kitchen and watched her leave and hadn’t said a word. What was there to say? She was right.
He’d proved it every time he left a dinner date with her early for a calving, every time he’d missed one of her precious social events for an emergency, every time he’d chosen the phone call over conversation with her.
He was good at taking care of things. Animals. Ranchers. Farmers who couldn’t pay. He just wasn’t good at taking care of the person across the table from him.
Too bad he wasn’t fond of living alone. He’d always pictured himself with a family of his own one day, but then he’d chosen to become a veterinarian.
Oh, he’d tried to have both. But it just wasn’t in his nature to let animals that he could help suffer for the sake of his own happiness.
He could be a vet or a family man. But not both.
He went to bed and stared bleakly at the ceiling until I became clear he wasn’t sleeping any more tonight. He got up and went to work spackling and sanding the drywall he’d finished installing in the guest bedroom last weekend. He worked until the alarm went off in his bedroom two hours later.
By seven o’clock, Dillon was at the small clinic he’d leased for six months on the edge of town.
It used to be a dog grooming parlor and had several good-sized kennels, a nice bathing set-up, and a tall stainless steel table that made for a good examining table for him.
His portable x-ray machine was in the back along with a makeshift operating set-up he’d cobbled together.
It wasn’t fancy, but it got the job done.
He caught up on paperwork between coffee refills and trying not to think about how little sleep he’d gotten. The foal was doing well—Tom had sent a photo of her standing on long, knobby-kneed legs, nursing like a champ. One win for the day, at least.
The office door swung open, and his older brother, Hank, ambled in, bringing with him the smell of cold air and horse.
“Heard you had a night,” Hank said, dropping into the chair across from Dillon’s desk like he owned it.
“Beecham’s foal. Partially collapsed lung. She’s fine.”
“Also heard you had a moment at the Lawrence funeral yesterday.” Hank’s grin was wide enough to require its own zip code.
Dillon took a long pull on his coffee. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Word is you went toe-to-toe with Mick Lawrence’s widow and she cleaned your clock. Something about how she’d rather perform surgery on her own animals than call you?”
“That’s not exactly what she said.”
“What did she say? Exactly?”
Dillon set his mug down. “Does it matter?”
“It matters a great deal to me and the dozen other people who heard about it before Ruth Sanger even sat down at Rose’s diner for breakfast this morning.
” Hank leaned back, grinning insufferably.
“According to Ruth, and she is the official town gossip, half the reception was pretending not to listen, and the other half darn near choked laughing.”
Fantastic. Just what I need. The whole town gossiping about me.
“I might have been a little . . . direct.”
“Direct.” Hank savored the word. “Is that what we’re calling it? Because the version I heard involves you telling a widow at her mother-in-law’s funeral that she couldn’t tell a steer from a stump.”
Dillon pinched the bridge of his nose. “I told Tessa that Fern said that. I wasn’t—it was a quote. From Fern. The dead woman. Whose funeral we were attending.”
“Oh, well, that’s much better.” Hank’s voice dripped sarcasm. “You insulted her using her dead mother-in-law’s words. Very classy.”
“Get out of my office.”
“Is she pretty?”
“Out.”
“Folks at the diner said she looked like money. Which is interesting, because that’s how people used to describe—”
“Don’t.” Dillon’s voice went flat.
Hank held up both hands. “Fair enough. But for the record, the fact that she looks like money doesn’t mean she’s Lexi.”
“I’m well aware of that.”
“Are you? Because from where I’m sitting, it sounds like you met an attractive woman and immediately picked a fight so she’d dislike you before you had a chance to like her.”
Dillon opened his mouth, closed it, and took another gulp of coffee instead. The annoying thing about Hank was that he was usually, inconveniently right.
“She’s a widow,” Dillon said finally. “She’s got a kid. She’s probably going to inherit Fern’s place and hire someone to sell off the animals. I’ll never even talk to her again.”
“Uh huh.” Hank didn’t look convinced. “And if she does need a vet? You’re the only game in town, buddy. She’s going to have to call you eventually.”
“She made it very clear she’d rather not.”
“Yeah, I heard.” Hank stood up and headed for the door. “But in my experience, the women who swear they don’t need you are usually the ones who need you most.”
He left before Dillon could come up with a response, which was probably for the best because he didn’t have one.
He turned back to his paperwork. The Beecham file needed updating.
There were lab results to review for the dairy herd.
And he needed to schedule a visit to Fern’s property.
Regardless of who ended up in charge of it, those animals couldn’t go much longer without proper veterinary oversight.
Arlo had stepped in to feed them, bless the old codger, but he wasn’t up to managing complex medical care for a dozen different animals.
He thought about Tessa standing in that fellowship hall, polished and composed and smelling lightly of expensive perfume, telling him with perfect poise that she’d rather learn veterinary medicine than call him.
He almost smiled again.
Almost.
Then he thought about the little girl—Makayla—who’d stood outside watching the farrier work with a look on her face he recognized. It was the look of a kid who’d just discovered horses and was never going to be the same. He’d worn that look himself, about thirty years ago.
She’d been dressed like she was going to a fancy tea party, her shoes shiny as mirrors. Not a speck of dirt on her. She’d stood at a careful distance from the horse, clearly wanting desperately to touch it but not quite daring.
What kind of kid didn’t dare touch a horse?
The answer settled in his gut with an uncomfortable weight. The kind of kid who’d been taught that getting dirty wasn’t allowed. Which was no surprise given who her mother was.
It wasn’t his business. None of it was his business. Not the mother, not the daughter, not a farm full of critters that needed someone who knew what they were doing.
His phone rang. Bonnie Watson. Probably about the dog’s ear. He picked up, grateful for the distraction. “Morning, Bonnie. How’s Jasper doing?”
And just like that, the day moved on. Another call, another animal, another person who needed him. This was his life. He was good at it, and it was enough.
It had to be.