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.”
