Chapter 5
Chapter Five
TIMOTHY
I marched out to the far pasture after getting a suspiciously vague text from my dairy manager.
Cody: Carol injured. Vet here.
No details. No explanation. Just enough information to make a man rush from the unfinished early morning evaluation of a build site’s progress and storm across a hill like he was marching into battle.
Apparently, someone from the clinic was already on-site. I knew it wasn’t Erika or Josh. There sure as hell better not be a McClary on my land.
Unfortunately, a weak, morally bankrupt corner of my brain immediately suggested I might be interested in seeing the McClary veterinarian—the woman who’d marched into a thunderstorm yesterday and accidentally given me a front-row view of the finest pair of breasts I’d seen in years.
My conscience was disgusted. The rest of me remained committed to preserving that memory in high definition.
Against my will, my brain replayed the whole scene—her soaked shirt, her horrified expression when she looked down, and then, somehow worst of all, her stiff, painfully professional: Consider the nipple show your tip.
I scrubbed a hand down my face.
I wasn’t a sixteen-year-old boy sneaking a stolen magazine into a barn loft. Yet, my idiot brain had spent the last twenty-four hours revisiting that moment like it was a favorite movie scene.
I crested the hill and nearly had a stroke. Dr. Gia Stevens stood in the calf-high weeds in boots and short-sleeved, tan coveralls with a rifle braced against her shoulder, sighting straight down the barrel at my llama.
“What the hell are you doing?” I shouted. “Stop!”
There was no crack of gunfire when she pulled the trigger. Just a soft thwip.
She lowered the rifle, squinted toward the llama in the distance, and smiled with disturbing satisfaction. “Got her.”
I stopped dead. Then turned slowly toward Cody. “Why,” I said carefully, “is the veterinarian sniper-shooting my animal?”
Cody lifted both hands. “She said stand back.”
“That explains nothing.”
“I darted her,” Gia said, in the same tone someone might use to announce the weather. She pointed toward Carol, who sprinted twenty feet, stopped and slowly turned to glare at us like she was plotting three separate murders.
Gia nodded toward the llama. “We tried to catch her for twenty minutes. I’ve been kicked at twice, spit on, and I’m about ninety percent sure she called me a bitch.”
Cody snickered.
“All I can see are bloody dreadlocks because apparently she hasn’t been clipped since…” She squinted at the llama. “Honestly? Ever?”
The llama took one staggering step, blinked hard, then dramatically folded sideways into the grass.
Gia slung the dart gun over a shoulder, grabbed a discarded duffel bag of supplies, and walked toward the unconscious menace.
“You had no right to shoot my llama,” I snapped, following her. “Why are you even here? I didn’t ask for you. In fact, I specifically told my brother—”
“Enough,” she barked, spinning on me so fast I nearly walked into her. “For the next forty-five minutes, I need you to put a sock in…” she made a broad circle at me with her hand, “…all this.”
I opened my mouth.
She pointed sharply at me. “No. Not one more word. Your asshole llama is sedated, bleeding, and somehow still the second biggest problem I’m dealing with in this field.” She jabbed an index finger at my chest. “You’re my first. Don’t make me dart you too.”
I swallowed the urge to keep arguing. She was right, damn it.
My scowl slid to Cody, who looked about to burst into laughter. He immediately sobered at my scowl.
For the next half hour, I stood there in simmering silence while she clipped fur and flushed several ugly gashes along the llama’s side and one leg. Grudgingly, I admitted she was good. I might venture to give her a very good at her job.
She didn’t waste time with nervous chatter like some of the fill-in vets who talked too much when I glowered at them for taking too long.
Gia worked like she had somewhere better to be and resented that my homicidal livestock had delayed her.
She spoke once. “Looks like she tangled with something big. A coyote or mountain lion, perhaps. At least she’s good at violence when it counts. Do you think you can remove sutures from her without me sedating her again?”
I looked at Cody.
He looked at me.
We both looked at the llama, who was unconscious but somehow still looked mean.
“No,” I said.
Gia gave one curt nod. “I’ll bury what sutures I can under the skin and put in dissolvable suture for the rest. I’ll also draw blood since I bet that’s never been done. She’ll need antibiotics in her food for a while. Up to you if you think she needs pain meds.”
She finished fast—antibiotic and pain injections, blood draw, final check—and stepped back as the llama staggered upright like a drunk.
The beast blinked, swayed, then cast me a filthy look as if I’d been the one who darted her.
She strutted off like she hadn’t spent a half hour face-down in the grass.
The second the llama resumed her day, I turned on Gia.
“You can’t waltz back to Vision like nothing happened.
I mean, yesterday...” When she didn’t immediately reply but her lips trembled as if she was about to burst into laughter, my blood pressure spiked.
“Why are you back? Haven’t you wrecked enough of my life already?
” I hadn’t intended to say that out loud.
“Yesterday…I wrecked you?” She gave me a look I remembered. Her green eyes flared. I was about to lose this fight in a way I’d never recover from.
She slowly unzipped her coveralls. My brain immediately abandoned ship. Not helped by the fact that traitorous memory chose this exact moment to replay yesterday’s rainstorm in vivid detail.
Meanwhile, in real time, she peeled the coveralls down and somehow stepped out of them while keeping her socks from touching the ground—a feat of female sorcery I could neither explain nor stop watching.
Underneath was a tight white shirt that clung in ways that should probably require a warning label, a permit, and possibly a pastor on standby.
My eyes briefly closed. Opened. She was still there.
Beside me, Cody made a small choking noise.
I cut him a glare.
He didn’t even have the decency to look ashamed.
Then—because she enjoyed cruelty—she lifted both arms and twisted her hair into a messy bun. Which did things. Terrible, magnificent things to her chest.
Her mouth curved like she knew exactly what she’d done.
She pulled a scrub top out of the duffle and pulled it down over the tight shirt.
Without a word, she packed the supplies into her duffel, casually picked up the dart rifle from the ground, and started walking up the hill like she hadn’t just detonated every functioning brain cell in a fifty-yard radius.
Then she tossed over her shoulder—
“I’m back, Timothy Hurst. End of story.” A few steps later she said, “You’re welcome…for dealing with your dangerous llama.”
Cody stared after her. After a long silence, he said quietly, “I’d let her shoot me with a dart gun.”
I rubbed a hand over my face. “Get back to work, Cody.”