Hard-Headed Texan
Hard-Headed Texan
Candace Camp
Okay, maybe Antonia Campbell hadn't exactly found heaven in Angel Eye, Texas. But even if she did get mysterious midnight phone calls and her only bed warmer was a cat named Mitzi, her life as a country vet was a lot better than what she'd left behind: a stifling Virginia upbringing and an abusive ex-husband.Then a call to Daniel Sutton's ranch changedeverything. Sparks flew the minute they met, and in his arms she felt petite, protected and every inch a woman. But Daniel's heart might not be as free as it first seemed, and her mysterious caller appeared to have ideas of his own for her future. Was everything about to fall apart just when heaven had seemed within reach?
Daniel smiled and took a beer out of the fridge.
His brother Quinn, then his father, had come by to talk about Antonia. All that was missing was a call from Cater or Cory. Or Beth.
That would come, he assured himself—as soon as one of them talked to Quinn. But Daniel knew he didn’t really mind. His family’s concern was warming. Besides, he rather liked everyone knowing he was seeing Antonia Campbell.
He smiled again, taking a swig of beer. Talk about feeling like a teenager again. He realized that he was grinning at the wall like an idiot, but the fact only made him grin harder. He hadn’t felt this good in years. And he intended to make damn sure he continued feeling that way.
Hard-Headed Texan
Candace Camp
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CANDACE CAMP,
a USA Today bestselling author and former attorney, is married to a Texan, and they have a daughter who has been bitten by the acting bug. Candace’s family and her writing keep her busy, but when she does have free time, she loves to read. In addition to her contemporary romances, she has written a number of historicals, which are currently being published by MIRA Books.
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 1
The phone rang, startling Antonia awake. She sat bolt upright, heart pounding. Beside her the cat stood up, looking at her balefully for disturbing her nap, then stalked off. Antonia blinked, her sleep-fogged mind adjusting to her surroundings. It was the clinic, she told herself. There was an emergency at the clinic. The telephone shrilled again, and she picked up the receiver.
“Dr. Campbell,” she answered, relieved that she had managed to make her voice come out calm and cool. She didn’t want anyone here to know that the least thing could make her panic.
There was no sound on the other end of the line, and she repeated her words, more loudly. Still there was no answer, even though the phone had the sound of a live connection.
“Hello?” she said, fighting down the upsurge of panic-nerves in her chest. “Who is this? Can I help you?”
Still there was no reply, and Antonia slammed down the receiver. Her hands were shaking, and there was a tight, cold knot in the center of her chest.
It wasn’t him, she reminded herself. It was probably just a wrong number or one of those strange connections that went awry—it happened with some regularity when the caller was using a cell phone. The silence on the end of the line did not mean that it was Alan. Alan did not know where she was; there was no reason to think that he did. This was just blind, unreasoning, atavistic fear, and she refused to give in to it.
Antonia took a deep, calming breath and went over all the reasons why she was safe now. Alan was in Virginia, and she was here; he did not know where she lived. It had been years since their divorce. He had not bothered her since she moved to Texas.
Still, she got out of bed and went to the front door, checking to make sure that it was locked and the chain was on. The little red light of the security monitor was blinking, showing that the security system was in effect. She went to the front room window of her small house and lifted the edge of the drapes to peer outside. It was dark outside, though beginning to lighten into a predawn grayness. She could make out the shapes of the trees in the front yard and her SUV parked in the narrow, old-fashioned driveway beside her house.
She would have preferred a house with an attached garage, but the charm of the 1920s-style bungalow had outweighed other considerations, and the passage of years had lessened her bunker mentality. A security system, an old neighborhood imbued with small-town friendliness and nosiness, her own hard-won vigilance—these were enough, she’d decided. She could not let her entire life be ruled by the fear that Alan might find her; if she did, she was letting him control her still.
Antonia walked around the small house, checking each of the windows and the back door to make sure that they were all locked. Reassured, she turned on the coffeemaker, already prepared the night before for ease in getting ready in the morning, and sat down at the kitchen table to wait.
It was pointless trying to go back to bed, she knew. Even though she had calmed down and was reassured that she was safe, it would take her a long time to go back to sleep, and her alarm was set to go off in thirty minutes. A veterinarian in a small ranching community kept early hours, just like the owners of the animals to which she tended. Antonia was usually in the office by seven and often on the road to one ranch or another soon after that.
That morning she arrived even earlier, before the receptionist or either of the technicians. Dr. Carmichael, the other veterinarian, never came in before ten o’clock. It was the reason he had brought in another vet, he had told her—the heavy workload and the early mornings were getting to be too much for him, and at seventy-two years old, he had decided to take life a little easier. Only the night watchman, Miguel, was there. A shy young man who loved to read, he was a perfect person to be on night duty with the animals. He was intelligent; only the fact that he came from a large, poor family had kept him from attending college. He knew as much as most of the techs, and he also had a rapport with the animals that was invaluable. A self-proclaimed insomniac, he had no trouble staying awake all night, and the long hours alone and doing nothing except making hourly rounds did not bore him as they would have most people. He was quite happy to read one of his books.
“Good morning, Dr. Campbell,” he said, coming out of the kennel door when she drove up.
“Hi, Miguel. How’s it going?” Antonia stepped out of her SUV, not bothering to lock it, another habit she had gotten into since moving to Angel Eye three months ago. Because their offices contained drugs, as well as for the safety of the animals, the clinic had a state-of-the-art security system, but there had never been a break-in—or even an attempted one. Everyone who parked in the clinic lot was more interested in finding a shady spot to protect their vehicle from the broiling Texas sun than in locking their doors.
“It’s okay.” Miguel knew that her question was more than rhetorical. “All the animals got through the night, even Dingo.” Dingo was a mixed-breed dog with liver problems, and it had been touch-and-go with him all day yesterday. Owned and much loved by a family with two little girls, Dingo had captured most of the clinic staff’s hearts, as well.
“Good. Well, let me get into my lab coat, and we’ll make the rounds.”
“Sure, Dr. Campbell.” Miguel grinned shyly, not quite meeting Antonia’s eyes.
Antonia was aware that she intimidated the young man. He was shy to begin with, but the fact that she was a towering six feet tall, with the cool, blond good looks of an East Coast society princess, had turned the poor kid nearly speechless when she first came to the clinic. Antonia often had that effect on people, so she was not surprised. She didn’t try to be distant or icy; in fact, her basic nature was warm. But she was by nature and experience somewhat reserved, and the years of training in the proper demeanor expected of a young lady that she had received from her mother—“a lady does not cry in public,” “a lady doesn’t show a vulgar display of excitement,” “a lady does not display unseemly curiosity”—had given her a vaguely aloof air that she did not know how to shake. Even in the casual shirt and jeans that she typically wore on and off the job, she still looked like someone who should be on her way to a Junior League meeting. Today, for instance, she wore jeans and a plain blue shirt, with her hair pulled back and arranged in a practical French braid and only the barest hint of makeup on her face, yet she was somehow elegant.
Antonia usually dealt with her looks by ignoring them. Once she was ready to go in the morning, she rarely glanced in a mirror the rest of the day. Her clothes were invariably practical. Her skin care regimen consisted of little beyond simple cleaning, moisturizing and frequent applications of sunscreen to keep her fair skin from burning. Her technician and friend Rita Delgado, whose devotion to skin care and makeup was profound, was frequently appalled by Antonia’s blasé attitude.
“What is sickening,” she would say, shaking her head, “is that you do almost nothing and still look the way you do!”
Antonia went to her office and pulled on a clean lab coat from the closet, then walked down the hall to the locked door that led to the back part of the clinic, where the sick animals were kept. Miguel was waiting for her there, and they started on their rounds, beginning with Dingo, who was miraculously hanging on.
She had checked over only three animals, approving one for dismissal that day, when the door from the main office burst open and Lilian, the receptionist, bustled in. Lilian, a middle-aged widow of very precise habits, was often the first person to reach the clinic. She liked to have the coffee made and her book work done before the clinic opened at seven-thirty. Lilian had a rather militaristic bent, Antonia thought, and she wanted to have her supplies lined up and her plans in order before she did battle with their clients.
“Dr. Campbell!” Lilian’s soft-featured face, so at odds with her crisp, no-nonsense personality, was creased with concern. “Daniel Sutton just called. He’s having trouble with one of his mares. He said to come right away. She’s been in labor for a while, and she’s losing ground.”
“Daniel Sutton?” Antonia asked, already unbuttoning her lab coat and starting back toward the front of the clinic. “The ranch I went to last week?”
“No, that’s Marshall. His father. Daniel’s on the same road, though, about ten minutes further west. Marshall Sutton’s a cattleman, but Daniel raises horses. He’s knowledgeable. If he says there’s something wrong, then there is.”
“Okay. I’ll take the mobile.” Antonia hung her lab coat on a hook beside the back door, listening as Lilian gave her detailed directions to Daniel Sutton’s horse farm. She took the key to the clinic’s mobile vet truck from another hook. It was the task of whoever drove the truck last to make sure that it was filled with gas and stocked with supplies so that it was always ready to go the next day.
She ran lightly down the steps and crunched across the gravel lot to where the mobile truck sat parked beneath a shade tree. Dr. Carmichael had told her many tales of his early days in the area, when he had driven around to the nearby ranches in his old International Harvester truck, a forerunner of the modern SUVs, with a stock of supplies in the back that he would need for his large animal practice. Today, of course, like most vets who practiced in rural areas, he had a modern mobile, a truck equipped with a shell, looking much like one of the smaller motor homes, in which there were sinks, refrigeration for some of the medicines and samples, and nearly every kind of instrument or medicine needed for working on animals in the field. It was generally far more practical for the vet to go to the horse or cow than for the animal to be loaded into a trailer and brought to the veterinarian.
Time, of course, was of the essence when a mare was having problems foaling, and the long distances between farms and ranches here ate up that precious time, so Antonia stepped on the gas when she left the outskirts of Angel Eye, bringing the truck up to eighty. She doubted that any sheriff’s deputy in this ranching community would interfere with a speeding vet on her way to save a horse.
Lilian’s directions were as precise as she was, and Antonia had no trouble finding the Sutton horse farm. She turned off the highway onto a graveled road, blocked by a mechanized steel gate. She pushed the button on the small raised platform, and almost immediately the gate began to swing open.
“I’m in the foaling pens, Doc,” a deep male voice, tight with worry, said over the intercom. “Better step on it. She’s in a bad way.”
Antonia stepped on the accelerator and started up the long drive. Automatically she noted the details of the farm as she drove toward the house and barn in the distance. It was obviously a working farm—there were none of the expensive decorative touches that marked the rich hobbyist horse farms. Everything was plain and serviceable, from the front gate to the black metal fences to the old farmhouse at the end of the drive. However, there was nothing shabby or ill-kempt about it, either. The fences, the road, the barn, the paddocks, even the two horse trailers sitting beside the barn—all were in good repair and of good quality. It was a neatly kept place, and the horses in the pasture beside the road looked equally well taken care of.
She pulled to a stop between the barn and the lower-roofed stables and hopped out of the truck. Grabbing her doctor’s bag, she hurried toward the stables, presuming that the foaling pens were there. As she did so, a tall man came out of the building, squinting in the sun. He raised a hand to shield his eyes, stared for a moment without moving, then came toward her at a lope.
He was long-legged, with a lean, muscled build that came from years of hard work rather than an intimate acquaintance with weight-training machines. Tall and broad-shouldered, he wore boots, worn blue jeans and a white short-sleeved T-shirt, and he looked so unutterably male that Antonia’s breath caught in her throat. She stopped where she was, a little taken aback by her own reaction. Tight jeans and a wide chest didn’t usually make her stomach flutter anymore, and she had seen plenty of cowboys since moving to Texas. None of them, however, had sent this jolt of pure, instinctive lust shooting straight down through her.
“Who the hell are you?” he demanded, his dark brows drawn together in a deep frown, as he stopped a few feet from her. “Where’s Doc?”
He glanced toward the veterinary truck, then back at her. He was a big man, taller by several inches than Antonia, who was accustomed to looming over most men. He wore no hat, and his hair was thick and black and a trifle shaggy. His skin was tanned from years of exposure to the sun, and there were deep sun lines at the corners of his dark eyes. He was handsome and just as intensely masculine up close as he had appeared at a distance.
Much to Antonia’s astonished dismay, she simply looked at him, unable to speak.
“Damn it!” the man went on. “I told her I needed Dr. Carmichael. Didn’t she understand? The foal’s in the wrong position. I gotta have a vet, not some tech fresh out of school!”
Antonia stiffened at his words, a quick rush of anger coming to her rescue. “I am the vet,” she told him crisply and extended her hand, pleased to see that it didn’t shake despite the bizarre inner turmoil that afflicted her.
The man stared at her, his jaw dropping comically. “What?”
“I’m the vet. Dr. Carmichael’s new associate. I am Dr. Campbell.” She dropped her hand, unsure whether shock or simple rudeness had kept him from shaking her hand. “Now, where’s your mare?”
“But you can’t be—” he said, a stunned look on his face. “You’re a girl.”
“I will take that as a compliment to my youthful appearance rather than a male chauvinist remark,” Antonia said coolly. “However, I am the vet. Dr. Carmichael needed someone younger to help with his practice. I take the early morning calls.”
The man let out a brief, vivid curse. “We’re talking about a horse here, not a cat or dog. You can’t—”
“In fact, horses are my specialty, so you’re in luck,” Antonia went on, struggling to keep a hold on her temper.
“Damn it, I’m not losing my best mare because Carmichael decided to go all politically correct and hire a woman vet!”
“You won’t lose that horse because of me!” Antonia shot back, fury shooting up in her. “I am fully qualified to—”
“A woman doesn’t have the strength to doctor a horse. I’ve seen big men who couldn’t—”
“In case you haven’t noticed,” Antonia bit out, “I am scarcely delicate. I am six feet tall and I work out. I can handle a horse. Usually I use my brains to overcome the difference in strength, and if brains won’t do it, I could turn it over to you. How’s that?”
A light flared in his eyes, and he came a long step closer, looming over her. Antonia was not about to be intimidated, and she, too, stepped forward, so that they were now so close she could see the thick dark lashes that ringed his eyes, making their dark brown color appear almost black.
She looked him straight in the eyes, putting her hands on her hips pugnaciously, and said, “Dr. Carmichael is not here. I am. Now, I can leave and you can wait until Dr. Carmichael comes into the clinic and can drive out here, by which time your stubbornness will probably have cost you a mare and a foal. Or you can show me your mare and let me try to save them. Which do you want to do?”
A vein pulsed at his temple, and for a moment Antonia thought that Sutton was going to explode, but then he stepped back. “This way,” he said shortly, and turned and walked back into the stables. Antonia followed him.
The mare was obviously in trouble. A splendid bay quarterhorse, with a white stripe down the center of her face, she stood with head lowered and feet spread apart. She was shivering, and her body was covered with sweat. Antonia took in the details of the stall automatically as she examined the mother, even as she had noticed the condition of the farm. Here, too, all was in order and prepared. The foaling stall was clean and floored with fresh straw, and several buckets stood at the ready, along with a supply of towels, and a shelf containing various bottles and tubes and a box of latex gloves. A large sink stood a few feet away, between this and another foaling stall, and at it were a nail brush and antiseptic soap. No matter how obnoxious the owner might be, he ran a good farm.
Talking soothingly to the mare, Antonia ran a calming hand down her neck and side, moving around to the back to examine her. “When did she go into labor?”
“During the night,” Sutton said, wiping the back of his arm across his forehead. Antonia saw, now that the anger had subsided from it, that weariness and worry stamped his face. “Five o’clock, maybe,” he told her in a deep, rumbling voice. “She started waxing up yesterday evening, and I knew it would be coming soon. I slept on a cot in the other stall. I checked her right after her water bag broke, and I couldn’t find the foal’s head, so I knew it was turned around. I called the clinic, and I’ve been walking her around.” He paused, then went on. “She’s my best mare, and the sire is Garson’s Evening Star at Mason Farms. It should be a good foal.” He sighed and looked at Antonia. “I don’t want to lose that mare.”
“I’ll do my best to save both of them,” Antonia said, softening a little at the undercurrent of emotion in his voice. This man wasn’t just talking about investments; he obviously loved his animals, and as far as Antonia was concerned, that fact made up for a multitude of sins. “Okay, let’s get to work.”
She went to the sink and began to scrub her hands. It was obvious that Sutton was right. The foal was turned around. It was trying to emerge; one tiny hoof protruded from the mare. But it was a rear hoof, instead of the two front hooves that should come out first in a normal delivery. The poor mare, in obvious pain, was struggling to deliver. The first thing Antonia did was examine the mare, reaching in to locate the foal’s head and forelegs. That in itself was difficult enough to do, but she finally determined that its head was twisted to the side, and the foal was more or less wedged sideways.
“You’re right. I’ll have to turn it,” she said, explaining the position of the foal as she once again scrubbed her hands and arm. “First I’m going to give her a tranquilizer to calm her down, as well as an epidural. This will take a while.”
Once she had administered the drugs, she went to work to turn the foal inside its mother. It was a long, tedious process, for she had to find the head and pull it back, as well as push and pull and twist until the foal was in the correct position, forelegs and head facing forward. Time after time, she tugged on the muzzle to no avail. She could not find one of the forelegs, and when she did, it slipped from her grasp.
Finally, however, she managed to get the leg secured with an obstetrical chain around it, then grasped the muzzle and wiggled and pulled until it slid around to the correct position. “I’ve got it!”
She began to pull, and slowly the foal slid forward until its forelegs and the tip of its muzzle emerged. Behind her Sutton let out a whoop. Antonia dropped her arm; it felt like a lead weight, numb from the strain. She shook it a little to get the feeling back, then began to pull again. The foal stuck at the chest and shoulders. It was large, and the mare was weak and tired, barely able to stand. Antonia was afraid that the mare would go down at any moment, and she was certainly no longer capable of expelling the foal.
Sutton moved up beside Antonia and grasped the muzzle and one foreleg. Antonia glanced up at him. He winked, surprising her, and said, “Looks like this is my specialty, as you pointed out earlier.”
Antonia had to grin, and she reached up to take the other foreleg. They began to pull again. It was a stubborn animal, big and slippery, and the two of them had to pull mightily, but then suddenly the shoulders popped through, and a moment later the foal was out, still wrapped in its amniotic membrane.
“Yes!” Antonia cried, triumph surging through her as Sutton gently laid the little animal down on the ground, close to its mother’s head.
She squatted down beside the man to strip the membrane from around the foal’s face and mouth. The mare would do the rest. Sutton turned to Antonia, a huge smile breaking across his face, and she grinned back at him.
“We did it!” he exclaimed, and as they stood up, he suddenly reached out and swung her up into his arms, whirling her around in a paroxysm of joy. They were both filthy, their shirts and arms covered with blood and amniotic fluid, but neither of them cared. The joy of bringing life into the world filled them. Antonia laughed, exhilarated, curling her arms around his shoulders as he spun her.
In the next moment she became aware of the reality of his body against hers. His hard chest pressed into her breasts; his arms were around her like a lover’s. She could feel the dampness of his sweat against her skin. A sudden, fierce desire slammed through her, almost frightening in its intensity. Antonia wanted to kiss him, to press herself against his muscular body. She wanted to taste the salt of his skin, to rub her face against his hair, to breathe in the healthy masculine smell of him.
Her breath caught in her throat. What in the world was she doing! She stiffened, embarrassment sweeping through her. This was a client! And her behavior was anything but professional.
Sutton seemed to become aware of the peculiarity of their situation in the same moment. Quickly he set her down and stepped back.
“I…ah…” He fixed his eyes on a point just over her shoulder. “Sorry. Got a little carried away, I guess.”
“Yes. This kind of thing doesn’t happen every day,” Antonia agreed, trying to smooth over the awkward moment. Her heart pounding against her ribs, she turned back to the mare, who was now engaged in licking her foal clean. The foal lay there, adjusting to its new world, its mother’s lifeblood still filling it through the umbilical cord. Antonia never cut the cord right away, as it would deprive the foal of much-needed nourishment.
“It looks as if everything’s proceeding normally,” she went on, aware that her voice sounded a trifle prissy, but she felt as though she had to say something, with the sudden, awkward silence settling around them.
“Yeah. I—usually Doc uses the shower out here in the barn to clean up. But—” He glanced doubtfully down the wide hallway. “Maybe you ought to use the one in the house. I’ll take this one. I mean…that is, if you have something to change into. I could loan you a shirt, of course, but…” His eyes fell to her slender legs, encased in denim. “Course you’re pretty tall. I reckon you could, you know, wear something of mine…if you wanted…you could roll them up—Oh, Lord, why don’t you just shoot me and shut me up before I make a complete fool of myself?”
Antonia had to smile. “A shower would be very nice, thank you. I appreciate it. I’m sure the one here in the barn is perfectly fine. And I carry a change of clothes in the truck. Unfortunately for the state of my clothes, I often wind up looking like this.”
They waited for the expulsion of the afterbirth, to make sure the mare was all right; then Antonia cut the umbilical cord, and they watched in fascination as the little foal staggered to its feet and wobbled to its mother and began to nurse. Antonia grinned, warmth flooding through her. No matter how many times she saw this sight, it never failed to fill her with happiness. She glanced over at Daniel Sutton and saw the same feeling reflected on his face.
Afterward, he directed her to the shower down the central hallway. It was small and spartan, but it was clean, and the water was hot and plentiful, which was enough for Antonia. She had many times made do with much less. Once again clean and dressed in a faded T-shirt and an old pair of jeans, she pushed her feet back into her boots, brushed through her long hair and neatly rebraided it, then made her way to the side door of the farmhouse.
She knocked on the door, then entered when a voice called to come in. Daniel Sutton stood at the kitchen counter in clean jeans and a fresh shirt, his hair slicked back wetly. He was pouring water into the coffeemaker, and he glanced over his shoulder at her as she came in.
“Cup of coffee?” he asked.
“That sounds nice,” Antonia replied, feeling a little shy. There was a certain intimacy to the scene—both of them obviously fresh from the shower and him making coffee—that was rather suggestive. She told herself that it was foolish to think that way, but she could not suppress the feeling.
She sat down at the table and glanced around. It was a large, old-fashioned kitchen, but, like the rest of the place, neat and well-kept. She wondered if there was a Mrs. Sutton and was a little surprised to realize that she hoped there was not.
“I was at another Sutton’s last week,” she said, deciding to probe a little. “Inoculating calves.”
“That’d be my dad, Marshall. Just up the road.” He nodded in the direction of his father’s ranch. “This was a piece of land I bought from my grandmother.”
“It’s nice. You run a good operation, I’d say.”
“Thanks.” He had finished with the coffee and now stood facing her, leaning back against the counter, arms crossed in front of him.
“Nice house, too. I like your kitchen.”
“Thank you.” He glanced around, then shrugged. “James isn’t messy. We manage to keep it up okay. It helps not to cook a lot.”
Antonia relaxed a little. That statement didn’t sound as if there was a woman living here. “James?”
“My son. He’s a teenager, but he’s a good kid.”
Antonia smiled. “You sound as if the two terms are contradictory.”
He grinned. “Well…”
“How old is James?” And where is his mother? She could think of no polite way to ask it.
“Eighteen. This is his senior year. He’ll be graduating in a few weeks. Next thing you know, he’ll be in college.” He made a face. “Whew, makes me feel old, saying that.”
“You must have married young.”
“Straight out of high school. Our parents thought we were stupid, and, of course, we were.” He shrugged. “But I guess we all have to make our own mistakes. We split up before James was three.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Long time ago,” he replied briefly, his face shuttered.
There was a long pause. Daniel looked down at the floor, then out the window. Finally he said, “Look. I’m sorry about earlier.”
Antonia gazed at him questioningly.
“You know, about wanting Doc Carmichael and all. I was wrong. You did a good job. I—I’m usually not, you know, all chauvinistic and thinking women can’t do things. I mean, I guess I am kinda old-fashioned in a lot of ways, but my sister’s put me straight any number of times. The thing was, I was worried about my mare.”
“I know.” Antonia was sure that was true, and she was inclined to give him a second chance. But it didn’t seem that she ought to let him off the hook quite yet.
“And I’m not used to women vets,” he went on. “I mean, well, actually, I never put much thought to the subject before. I just didn’t see how a woman could handle some of the things a horse doctor has to. It’s, well, you know, hard work.” He stopped, color rising in his cheeks. “Blast, that came out wrong, too. I meant, it takes a lot of physical strength and…”
He trailed off, looking uncomfortable.
Antonia relented. “Yes. It does. And women don’t usually go into a large animal practice because of that. But I’ve found that horses and cattle are pretty much stronger than men, too. It’s all a matter of degree. You just have to compensate for it. I haven’t yet had to turn an animal away because I wasn’t strong enough.” She grinned. “I have to admit, it might be different if I weren’t six feet tall. Long arms make a difference.”
He smiled. “I hope that means you accept my apology. I was wrong. And you did a great job. I hope you’ll work on my horses again.”
“I’d be happy to.”
After that, she couldn’t think of anything to say, and silence grew uncomfortably. Fortunately, the coffeemaker finished, and Daniel was able to turn his attention to pouring them cups of coffee. He set the cups down on the table and added a carton of milk from the refrigerator and a canister of sugar from the counter.
“Sorry.” He cast a rueful eye on the sugar and milk. “I’m afraid we don’t have those things…”
“Sugar and creamer?”
“Right.” He quirked an eyebrow. “We’re kind of plain here. Bachelor household.”
“That’s okay. I’m kind of plain myself.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
Antonia’s eyebrows sailed upward. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He glanced up at her, looking uncomfortable. “Sorry. Have I put my foot in my mouth again? You can see I don’t get out much. I didn’t mean anything bad. It’s just that you look—I don’t know, not plain, anyway. You look sort of like Grace Kelly, like some guy in a tux ought to step out onto the veranda and take you back inside to the Harvest Ball.”
Antonia chuckled. “Is that a compliment or a putdown?”
“I meant it as a compliment. You’re beautiful,” he replied simply.
Antonia felt herself blushing. “I…uh…”
“Don’t worry. I’m not coming on to you. Just a statement of fact,” he said quickly, then sighed. “I’m making a real mess of it, aren’t I? James would despair of me if he were here. He thinks I’m the lamest when it comes to women, and he’s probably right.”
“It’s okay,” Antonia said with a smile. “I don’t mind being told I’m beautiful. It’s a lot better than saying I look like a city girl or like I’ve never gotten my hands dirty in my life, which are also things people have told me.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I was cursed with a country club background. I can’t even tell people how wrong they are. I was, sorry to say, a debutante.”
“Really?” He looked surprised. “You’re kidding. I didn’t know they had those anymore.”
“Oh, yes, still going strong in Richmond, Virginia. It was part of my bargain with my parents—I’d have my coming out if they would let me go to the University of Virginia and get a science degree instead of going to Sweet Briar, like a proper young lady.” Antonia was a little surprised at her words. She didn’t usually reveal that much of herself to strangers.
Daniel’s grin lit up the rugged planes of his face, and Antonia noticed with some surprise that it caused the nerves of her stomach to go into a crazy little dance. It occurred to her that she was feeling about the same age as a debutante.
“Well, I’d say you’re about as far as you could get from Sweet Briar now.”
“You’re right.”
“So how you’d wind up in Angel Eye, Texas?”
“I went to veterinary school at Texas A&M,” she explained. No need to go into the reasons why she had wound up there. She had found that Texans rarely questioned why anyone would have chosen to come to Texas or to remain once they had lived there a while. They considered that obvious; they were usually curious only about how it had happened. “After that, I wanted to stay in Texas.”
Proving her point, Sutton nodded in agreement.
“So I got a job with a vet in Katy.” She named a suburb of Houston on the west side of the city. “His practice had a lot of show horse farms, tax write-off cattle places, that kind of thing. I didn’t want to live in the city, but I wanted to work with horses, and, well, most large animal vets weren’t interested in hiring a woman.”
“Chauvinistic pigs,” Daniel commented, his black eyes twinkling.
“I know. Terrible, isn’t it? Anyway, Dr. Carmichael knew Matt Ventura, the head of the clinic, and he asked him if any of his associates would be interested in moving to Angel Eye and eventually taking over a practice. I was the only one. I wanted to live in the country, and I prefer real working ranches and farms. You know? Where you actually talk to the owner, not some manager hired by a bank president or some cardiologist whose tax lawyer told him to buy a farm for a write-off. Real people who care more about their animals than about how picturesque all the white rail fences look.”
“You won’t find much of anything picturesque in Angel Eye.”
“There’s its name,” Antonia pointed out. “The Spanish calling it Los Ojos de Los Angeles for the stars.”
“And Anglos shortening and anglicizing it,” Daniel added. “Yeah, I guess that’s pretty unique.”
“Angel Eye is real. It has its own unique charm. I like it. Fortunately Dr. Carmichael was getting pretty desperate by that time, so he was willing to take a chance on a woman vet.”
“I’m glad.” His eyes were warm on her for a moment, reminding Antonia of that moment in the barn when his arms had enfolded her and she had thought about kissing him.
She glanced away from him quickly. “Me too. Well…” She took a last sip of her coffee and stood up. “I’d better be going. I’ll be way behind at the clinic.”
“I’m sorry.”
Antonia shrugged. “It happens all the time. We have emergencies. Dr. Carmichael will have taken up as much of the slack as he can.” She hesitated, then said, “It was nice meeting you—well, maybe not nice, but I’m glad we met.”
“Me too.” He had risen when she did and stood, hands hooked in his back pockets, looking undecided and faintly uncomfortable.
“Thanks for the coffee.”
“Any time. I…uh, I reckon the clinic’ll just bill me, like they usually do.”
Antonia nodded. In a moment, she thought, the two of them would start shuffling their feet and hemming and hawing around like first-graders. Reminding herself that she was a poised, confident adult on a business footing with Daniel Sutton, she stuck out her hand to shake his.
Daniel glanced from her face down to her hand. He reached out and enfolded her hand in his. His was warm and large, the palm roughened by years of calluses. Antonia was startled by the surge of electricity that shot through her at his touch. She raised her eyes to his a little wonderingly, and for a brief moment they looked at each other, unsure, pulses quickening in a way that was a little foreign to both of them.
Then, suddenly, he dropped her hand and stepped forward, his hands going to her shoulders. He pulled her to him, and his mouth swooped down to claim hers.
Chapter 2
Antonia stood stock still, stunned by the sensations that flooded her body. She had dated casually a few times in the four years since Alan, but she had never felt with any of those men the sudden, searing heat that rushed through her now. Her lips beneath Daniel’s tingled and burned; her skin was fiercely, instantaneously hot. Her hands came up and curled into the front of his shirt. She trembled; it was as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice, and she wasn’t even sure if she wanted to step back or forward.
Just as suddenly, Daniel’s mouth left hers. He pulled back and stared down into her eyes, his face mirroring her own confusion. Antonia could feel her blood racing through her veins; she could hear the rasp of her own breath, strained and too fast. Her hands fell away from his shirt. She turned, faintly surprised to find that her legs still worked, and hurried across the room and out the door. By the time she reached the small side stoop, she was running. She dashed across the yard and jumped into the mobile van, never looking back.
She turned the truck around and drove far too fast down the dirt road. As she neared the end of the drive, the electronic gate opened for her. She gunned the engine and rattled out onto the highway. She drove automatically, braking and turning on instinct alone, while her brain tumbled chaotically.
Whatever was she doing—kissing a man she scarcely knew! And a client, at that! And why had it felt so wonderful and scary? Why did she feel as if she might fly apart at any moment?
Her life was calm, even, uneventful. Antonia had worked hard to make it that way, to avoid the chaos that had marked her marriage. Today, in a matter of moments, Daniel Sutton had turned all that hard work upside down. Antonia could not decide whether that more excited, irritated or scared her.
By the time she reached the clinic in town, she had managed to calm her shaking nerves, but she did not have a handle yet on her confused feelings. As she had predicted, her clientele had built up in the waiting room while she was on her emergency call. Almost as soon as she stepped in the back door, Lilian came hurrying down the hall.
“Sorry. We’ve got a ton of people waiting. Dr. Carmichael tried to take up the slack, but he had a full load this morning. I managed to get a couple of them to just leave their animals, so we could work them in as we can, but you know how most people are. We had one emergency. Doc Carmichael took him.” She continued to talk as Antonia washed her hands and put on her white lab coat, checking in the small mirror above the sink to make sure that she looked more together than she felt.
Antonia sighed and smoothed down her coat. A lot of work, she thought, would take her mind off her inner turmoil. “All right,” she said. “Let’s get to them.”
There was far too great a rush for Antonia to take a lunch break, but finally, around two o’clock, one of the techs who had gone out to eat brought her back a burger, and she gratefully took the bag down to the employee lounge.
The only other person in the lounge was Rita Delgado, one of the technicians and also Antonia’s friend. Rita was short, with a voluptuous build, and she was constantly fighting a battle with calories. Today, as was often the case, she was eating a lunch brought from home, consisting of an apple and a carton of nonfat yogurt. Antonia knew that the odds were that Rita would be hitting the snack machines by four o’clock.
Rita glanced up when Antonia entered the room and smiled. “Hey, come sit down. I haven’t seen you all day. What a rush, huh?”
Antonia nodded, going over to the table and setting down her bag. Rita was exactly the person to see if one wanted information. She had a huge circle of family and friends and was always abreast of all the latest gossip. She was also, unfortunately, like a bloodhound once she scented news.
“So…” Antonia sat down in her chair and with studied casualness began to unwrap her burger.
“So?” Rita prodded, eyeing Antonia’s sandwich with envy. With a sigh, she dug her spoon into her own cup of fat-free yogurt.
Antonia shrugged. “I don’t know. Just a conversation opener.”
“What conversation?”
“An awkward one,” Antonia admitted, a smile touching her lips as she looked at her technician. “I want to ask you something, but I know you’ll go all big-eyed and pushy on me.”
“Me?” Rita brought her hand up to her chest dramatically, opening her expressive brown eyes wider, until they looked almost round. “Big-eyed? Pushy? How can you say that?”
Antonia quirked an eyebrow at her. Rita leaned forward.
“So what’s the conversation? You can’t just throw out a line like that and stop! What’s going on?”
“I wanted to ask you a question.” Antonia hesitated. “Now, don’t read too much into this. I’m only asking out of curiosity.”
“Sure. Sure. I know the spiel. Are we talking about a guy here?”
Antonia took a deep breath and plunged in. “Daniel Sutton.”
“Daniel Sutton!” Rita sucked in her breath. She stared at Antonia, apparently rendered speechless by Antonia’s words.
“Yes, Daniel Sutton,” Antonia retorted with some asperity. “Why are you looking at me like that? Is he the local ax murderer or something?”
Rita made a face at her. “Of course not. He’s gorgeous—well, not as gorgeous as Cater. Now, that one is the kind that could make a person forget she’s a happily married woman.”
“Cater? Who’s Cater? What are we talking about here?”
“The Suttons, silly.”
“How many are there? I met his father last week.”
“Oh, there are a bunch of them, all male. Well, except for one sister. Beth. Four boys. They’re all gorgeous, even Cory, who’s just a baby—he’s still in college. Daniel is the oldest, then Cater, then Quinn—he’s the sheriff. He’s a charmer, too, that one, and there’s something about a uniform…” Rita’s voice trailed off dreamily, then she shook herself and went on. “But he’s got that red hair, and I’ve never been much for redheaded men, myself. Now, my cousin Lena, she’s the evening dispatcher over at the sheriff’s office, and she says he’s sexy as hell. She has the hugest crush on him. But give me a black-haired guy any day, like Cater and Daniel. Cater doesn’t live here, though. He’s a big writer now, and he lives in Austin.”
“Cater Sutton!” Antonia straightened. “The mystery writer? He’s Daniel’s brother?”
“That’s what I just said. I don’t read much, but Roberto says he’s famous.”
“He is. Definitely. I’ve read all his books.”
“If you’d rather hold out for him, he comes back to Angel Eye pretty often. He owns a little house off of Highway 43. Sometimes he stays there for weeks at a time. Roberto says he’s recharging his batteries, either that or he comes here to work out the hard parts of his plot. Roberto’s got several theories.”
“I am not ‘holding out’ for Cater Sutton or anybody else,” Antonia said repressively. “I was curious about Daniel, that’s all. I went to his farm today.”
Rita nodded. “Lilian told me. How’d it go?”
“I managed to deliver the foal. It was tough, but—”
“I know that.” Rita grimaced. “I meant how did it go with Daniel? Is he interested in you? Are you interested in him?”
“I just…wondered what the story was on him. He, uh, well, he was quite obnoxious at first, but then later we talked and—”
“Daniel Sutton?” Rita asked. “Obnoxious? Are you serious? Daniel is one of the most laid-back men I’ve ever met.”
“He wasn’t this morning. He was ticked off because I was a woman and he didn’t think I could handle his horse.”
“Oh.” Rita gave a dismissive shake of her head. “Just worried about his mare, I’ll bet. He’s a nice man. I’ve never even heard him raise his voice. He’s very quiet, doesn’t say much. But I’m guessing what you want to know is whether there is a Mrs. Daniel Sutton.”
“Rita…” Antonia was irritated to feel heat rising in her face. She hated the way her fair blonde’s skin gave her away all the time.
Rita chuckled. “Nothing wrong with that. Who wouldn’t want to know that if they met a hunk like him? Well, there used to be. He married his high school sweetheart is the way the story goes. I’m younger than them, so all I know is hearsay. But what I’ve heard is that he was crazy as could be about her—Lurleen was her name. Anyway, they got married right after they graduated from high school, and pretty soon they had a kid, James. James is a nice boy. He’s friends with my sister Lupe’s boy, and I’ve met him a few times. But Lurleen, they say, couldn’t stand life in a little town. She had always wanted to get out, but then she fell for Daniel, so she stayed and married him. Only she still hated it here, and after a while she left town.”
“Oh, no. She left her little boy, too?”
Rita nodded emphatically. “James was only three years old. Well, you might guess that didn’t make her too popular around here. I mean, a husband is one thing, but leaving your own child?”
“So Daniel’s raised him alone all these years?”
“Yeah. Did a good job of it, too, from what I’ve seen. But they say that he still carries a torch for Lurleen.”
“Really? After so long?” Antonia felt her heart sink a little within her, and she told herself that was foolish.
Rita nodded. “Yeah. It sounds kinda weird, but that’s what folks say.” She shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s true, of course. But what they say is that he never filed for divorce. Finally, after several years, she did.”
“Goodness.”
“’Course, if any guy’d be like that, it’d be Daniel Sutton. He’s a solid kind of man…steadfast…loyal.”
Antonia thought back to that morning, to the clean, neat farm and house, the obvious care that he had lavished on them, the feeling he had for his horses. She suspected that he was not a very expressive man, but she also would not be surprised to learn that he felt things deeply. She pictured him, a young man alone on that farm with a little boy, doing the best he could for him, always hoping that the woman he loved would return. A pang pierced Antonia’s heart.
“That’s so sad.”
“Yeah.” Her assistant cast a sidelong glance at Antonia and added, “I bet the love of a good woman is exactly what he needs. You know, to bring him out of it. I mean, it’s been, what fourteen, fifteen years now? He hasn’t ever dated much, but you can only carry a torch for so long. You know what I mean? He’s bound to be ready to drop it…for the right lady.”
“And you’re saying that I’m it?” Antonia smiled. “I doubt it.”
“Why not? You’re a single woman. He’s a single man. In a town the size of Angel Eye, there aren’t that many opportunities. If it were me, I would jump at a chance like that. Besides, think about all the family reunions—getting to look at all that male pulchritude.”
Antonia rolled her eyes. “I don’t think so. Number one, I’m not really looking to date anyone. And number two, I don’t think a man who’s still in love with the wife who deserted him fourteen years ago is the best choice if I were going to date. Men are trouble enough without getting one who’s still in love with his ex.”
“Maybe. But a guy like Daniel Sutton—I don’t know, he might be worth the extra effort.” Rita wiggled her eyebrows exaggeratedly.
“How does Roberto put up with you?”
Rita laughed. “I make it worth his while. Who do you think I do all this suffering for?” She nodded toward her meager lunch.
“You,” Antonia retorted, grinning. “You can’t fool me. I heard Roberto last week worrying about how thin you were getting.”
“Oh, that!” Rita waved away the statement. “All the Delgado women get to be like bowling balls. He thinks it’s normal. But I can tell you he’ll notice it when I put on my negligee from Victoria’s Secret. But wait—you are not going to distract me from the subject of this conversation. Are you interested in Daniel Sutton?”
“I told you, I was curious. It isn’t as if he asked me out or anything.” Antonia wasn’t about to tell even a good friend like Rita what had happened that morning at Sutton’s ranch.
“Ah, but you’d like him to?”
“I didn’t say that.” Antonia sighed. “No. I don’t want to date him or anyone else. It’s too much trouble. I just want to do my work, get settled in Angel Eye….”
“Girl, you’ve been here two months. How much settling in can you do in a town this size?”
“I’m slow.” Antonia crumpled up the wrapper from her burger and tossed it in the trash. “Thanks for the info.” She paused. “But if I start hearing about Daniel Sutton from Lilian and the clerk at the Quik-Mart—”
“Antonia…you are so suspicious.” Rita smiled enigmatically.
“Yeah. Right.” Antonia gave her friend a knowing look and left the room.
Not surprisingly, Antonia’s work spilled over into the evening, and she did not get home until after seven-thirty. She was informed of her tardiness by Mitzi, the black-and-white, tailless street cat that had decided to favor Antonia with her presence last year. The white circle around one eye, in contrast to her mostly black head, gave Mitzi a look of faint surprise, and she carried herself with a feline hauteur that was rather comical, given her bobbed tail, a trait acquired in some accident, Antonia was sure, rather than a genetic anomaly. Mitzi, sublimely unaware of the humorous aspect of her looks, seemed to believe that she was a pampered registered Persian in a wealthy household. She greeted Antonia now with a long litany of complaints, plopping herself down in a seated position in front of the door.
“I hear you, Mitzi,” Antonia responded. “Too regal to bother with rubbing my leg, huh?”
She started toward the kitchen, and Mitzi jumped up, bounding forward to get in front of Antonia. Antonia smiled. She was more of a dog lover than a cat person, but Mitzi had been the perfect pet the last few months. Antonia’s dog of several years, a beautiful golden retriever named Bailey, had died about six months ago, and Antonia had been unable to bring herself to get another dog, although as a veterinarian she was provided with ample opportunities. Her heart was too bruised by Bailey’s death for another loving dog. However, her imperious, distant cat provided the perfect, amusing, faintly aloof companionship she needed.
She dumped out the dry food in Mitzi’s bowl, which, having lain there all day, was not fresh enough for Mitzi’s refined tastes, and refilled it with food straight from the bag.
“You know,” she reminded the cat as she set the bowl down on the floor beside her water, “when I found you, you were rummaging through trash cans for food. How soon we forget.”
Antonia knew that she ought to fix herself a nutritious dinner, given the burger that she had grabbed for lunch, but she was too tired, so she dug out one of her large supply of TV dinners from the fridge and put it in the microwave. She had barely sat down at the table with the dinner and a new paperback she had started the day before when the telephone rang. Antonia sighed and took another bite, contemplating not answering it. However, her instincts were too strong, and after two rings she jumped up and snatched the receiver from its cradle.
“Dr. Campbell.”
“Antonia, dear. It’s Mother.”
Antonia suppressed a sigh. “Hello, Mother.”
No doubt she was an undutiful daughter, she thought, but conversations with her mother invariably left her angry, depressed, guilty, or all three. It was not a prospect she enjoyed facing at the end of a long, tiring day. She wished sometimes for the warm, friendly relationship she had witnessed between other women and their mothers, but she had finally acknowledged that she would never have that with her own mother. They were simply too dissimilar. She had never been the daughter Elizabeth Campbell wanted, and, frankly, Elizabeth Campbell had never been the mother that Antonia would have chosen if she had been given the chance.
“How are you, dear?” her mother went on in her well-modulated, Tidewater-Virginia voice. “Is everything going well out there?”
“Yes, we’re fine out here in the back of beyond,” Antonia replied. Her mother had always acted as if her move to Texas had taken her to a foreign country.
“Now, Antonia, I didn’t say that.”
“Mmm. But that’s what you meant.”
“I will admit that that Angel place seems an excessively long way away from home. You could have had your practice in Virginia.”
“Being a long way from Virginia was the whole point, Mother. It’s better all around if I am nowhere near Alan.”
“But that was a long time ago, Antonia—almost four years. Don’t you think that now you—”
“Mother, we have gone over this before,” Antonia pointed out, shoving down her irritation. “I went to A&M because it was far away from Alan, but I like it here. It suits me. Angel Eye suits me.”
“Well, of course, dear, if you say so,” Elizabeth said doubtfully. “Although I cannot imagine why anyone would name a town such a preposterous name.”
“I like the name. It has character. The whole town has character. I feel…good here, relaxed.”
“But everyone’s foreign—”
“Foreign! Mother, what—”
“I can hardly understand that assistant of yours, that Delgado girl.”
“For heaven’s sake, Mother, Rita Delgado’s lived in Angel Eye all her life. She’s no more foreign than you or I. And she hardly even has an accent. I am sure you sound equally strange to her, with those Tidewater ‘ou’s and dropping all your ‘r’s.”
There was a pause, then Elizabeth went on. “Well, I didn’t call to argue.”
Antonia bit back the retort that rose to her lips and said mildly, “I don’t like to argue, either, Mother. Why don’t we just stay off the subject of my moving back to Virginia?”
“All right. I, uh, would you like to hear about the charity auction for the hospital?”
“Sure.” Antonia settled down to listen with one ear. She knew that her mother actually did a lot of good with all the energy that she expended on her various society charity projects. However, Antonia found the details of such projects deadly dull. Still, a dull topic was better than an acrimonious one, so she listened, murmuring enough “uh-huh’s” and “I see’s” to keep her mother going.
Finally Elizabeth paused, then cleared her throat. Now we’re getting to the real reason she called, Antonia thought.
“I ran into Alan yesterday. At the club.”
Antonia stiffened, her fingers clenching around the receiver. Her chest was suddenly so tight that she could not speak, could scarcely even breathe.
When Antonia said nothing, her mother went on. “Of course, it was a trifle awkward at first.”
“At first?” Antonia repeated incredulously. “Do you mean that then you settled down to a nice conversation with the man who put your daughter in the hospital on more than one occasion?”
“Now, Antonia…don’t twist my words. I could hardly cause a scene in the country club. I had to be polite.”
“Naturally.” Bitterness rose like bile in Antonia’s throat. Of course not causing a scene would be the most important thing to her mother.
“I listened to him, that’s all. But he, uh, he seemed sincere, Antonia. I think he has changed. He told me he had been to one of those twelve-step things.”
“I’m glad for him, then,” Antonia retorted coolly.
“He wants to see you, Antonia. He wants to talk to you.”
“Absolutely not!” Antonia cut across her mother’s words. She thought of the odd phone call she had gotten that morning, and a chill ran through her. The events of the day had put the silent caller out of her mind, but now her uneasiness came back in full force. “You didn’t give him my phone number, did you?”
“No, of course not. Really, Antonia…” Elizabeth hesitated, then said, “However, I did think that perhaps you ought to listen to him. Give him a chance. He wants to apologize, to set things right with you.”
“I have no need for that.”
“I think he does.”
“Mother, that really doesn’t matter to me.”
“He wants to try again.”
“Oh, please.”
“He means it, Antonia. I really think he does. Just think about it. You could have your old life back. You could come home.”
“I don’t want my old life back!” Antonia snapped. “Can’t you understand that? I’m doing what I want, living where I want now. Why do you persist in thinking that I am unhappy or wrong or whatever it is you think just because I don’t choose to live your lifestyle? This is what I want. This is what I love.”
“But Alan—”
“I don’t care about Alan! Frankly, I don’t understand why you do. Most mothers would despise any man who did to their daughter what he did to me.”
“Of course I detest what he did to you, Antonia. I was merely saying that he has changed.”
“Look, I sincerely doubt that Alan has reformed. I cannot tell you how many times he came to me, full of remorse and repentance, crying and begging me to forgive him, promising to make it up to me, promising to stop. They were words, that’s all. It never lasted—any more than it would this time if I went back to him.”
“But he actually has been working on it. He took a course….”
“One course does not change a lifetime, Mother. But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Say that he really has changed, that he wouldn’t beat me anymore. I still wouldn’t marry him again. After all that’s happened, after what he did to me, whatever love I felt for him is gone. I could never love him again. Just looking at him would fill me with pain and rage. For his sake, I hope he has changed, but his changing will not make me feel differently about him. I will never get back together with him, no matter what. If he was asking you to try to soften me, to persuade me to talk to him…”
“He didn’t ask me anything like that,” Elizabeth retorted stiffly. “He just asked about you—how you were and what you were doing, that sort of thing. Then he told me how much he regretted what had happened, how sorry he was. He didn’t try to persuade me to do anything. What I said to you just now—those were my thoughts. I just thought, if he’s different, you could…” Her voice trailed off, and she sighed. “You two were such a lovely couple.”
Antonia closed her eyes wearily. She reminded herself that her mother was as she was, and there was no changing her at this late date. Appearances mattered to her more than substance. The fact that Alan had been blessed with preppy good looks, excellent manners, and an old and distinguished family, meant far more to her than anything that had been inside him. She would always consider the two of them a lovely couple because they had looked like the country club couple personified: blond, refined, well-dressed. She had considered them perfect for each other because they knew the same people, went to the same parties, had the same backgrounds. She hadn’t seen—couldn’t see—the anger and pain that had lain beneath the surface.
“Mother…what exactly did he ask you about me? What did you tell him?”
“Oh, just things in general. I did not tell him where you lived, if that’s what you mean. He wanted to know if you had finished your studies at A&M and whether you had moved back to Virginia, and of course I said no, that you had decided to stay in Texas. Mostly he wanted to know if you were happy, that sort of thing.”
Antonia frowned. “How did he know I went to A&M?”
“Well, really, Antonia, how should I know that? It wasn’t top secret. I mean, several of our friends knew. Your friends. I’m sure somewhere along the line in the last four years, someone would have told him.”
Antonia worried her lower lip with her teeth. There had been no way to keep her whereabouts completely secret, of course, unless she had completely cut off all ties with her family and friends back home. And just because Alan knew she had been going to A&M didn’t mean that he knew anything else about her. Texas was a huge place; he couldn’t know that she lived in this small town…except, of course, that over time, her mother would probably mention the peculiar name of the town in talking to her friends, and those people might mention it to someone else, and after a while, just like the information that she was in vet school at A&M, the fact of where she lived would be floating around in the circles in which Alan moved. Circles, she added bitterly to herself, that had obviously not ostracized Alan for committing the small and pardonable sin of abusing his wife.
“Dear, I think you worry too much about whether he knows where you are. I mean, the fact that he knew where you were in school and never bothered you should reassure you, I would think.”
“That’s true,” Antonia admitted. It had been four years since their divorce, and once she had moved away from Virginia, Alan had not tried to see her again. After all this time, he would not go to the trouble of tracking her down, she told herself. There was no reason to think that the caller this morning had been Alan. “No doubt you are right, Mother. Still, it makes me feel more secure, knowing that he doesn’t know where I live.”
“Well, I won’t tell him, Antonia,” Elizabeth said in a patient tone that was guaranteed to set Antonia’s teeth on edge. “Let’s talk about something more pleasant. What’s going on in your life?”
“I saved a foal’s life today, maybe the mother’s, too.” And I met a very handsome man, and he kissed me, and I felt as tingly as a schoolgirl, and I’m not sure what to do about it—if, indeed, there is anything to do.
“That’s nice, dear. It sounds quite rewarding.”
“It was.” Antonia felt guilty. Her mother was trying, after all. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t understand her daughter. Perhaps she should confide in her mother about Daniel Sutton. Take the initiative to bring about a closer relationship.
At that moment there was a click, and Elizabeth said, with a note of relief in her voice, “Oh, there’s another call. I’m afraid I have to get off, Antonia. Faith Morton is supposed to be calling me with information about the June Gala.”
“Of course. I’m glad you called. Goodbye.”
Antonia hung up the phone and turned back to the table and her supper, no doubt cold by now. She found Mitzi crouched on the table, chowing down on the choicest bits of meat on the tray.
“Mitzi! Oh, well, I’m not hungry anymore anyway.” Antonia’s stomach was alive with nerves now. Talking about her ex-husband had a way of doing that to her.
She thought about the phone call that morning. It had the markings of one of Alan’s calls—jolting her from a sound sleep, the unnerving silence, the hang-up. But then, she reasoned, the same could be said of a dozen other kinds of calls, including a simple wrong number and embarrassed dialer. There wasn’t any reason to believe that it was Alan after all these years.
Still, she went to the kitchen door and checked its bolt, then continued around the house, checking each window and doorknob. She had forgotten to set the security system—one of her first acquisitions whenever she moved into a new place—and she punched in the keycode now, watching as the reassuring red light began to blink.
She went to the window of the living room, which looked out on the front yard. The blinds were closed, as they always were at night, but Antonia lifted the edge and looked out. The moon was full and cast a bright light across the scene, outlining trees and cars. Nothing moved.
For a long time she stood there, gazing into the darkness, thinking about the past, about how she had gotten here. About Alan.
Chapter 3
Marrying Alan Brent had been the first thing Antonia had done in her life that her mother had approved of wholeheartedly. Antonia had never fit into her parents’ country club world, no matter how much her mother had tried to mold her daughter in her own image. The only thing that Antonia enjoyed about her privileged upbringing was the riding. Horses and riding had long been a part of the “aristocratic” Virginia image. She started taking riding lessons when she was seven; riding was even part of the curriculum at the exclusive girls’ school she attended. From the moment Antonia was introduced to the huge creatures, she loved them and had no fear of them.
However, even her interest in this one aspect of her life was not enough to reassure her mother, for Antonia did not approach riding as a social activity at which one needed to be competent, but as a passion. Moreover, she was interested in everything about the animals, not just in learning the proper way to mount and ride. And the one thing concerning horses in which she had no interest was the local hunt club.
Before Antonia finished high school, she knew that she wanted to be a veterinarian and specialize in horses. For that reason she campaigned to go to a respected state university instead of the proper ladies’ college that her mother had attended. She had traded making her debut for attending the college she wanted, wading through the tedious balls, parties and teas for the requisite year. After that she had dived headlong into her schoolwork, concentrating on the science courses and academic standing that would get her into veterinary college. It had been her ambition to go to North Carolina State University for her professional training. Then she had met Alan Brent.
It had been during her junior year of college. He had been a senior, blond and blue-eyed, handsome, yet able to blend in with everyone else. She had met him at a fraternity party to which she had reluctantly gone with the son of one of her mother’s friends. Her date had gotten so thoroughly drunk that he had passed out under the table in the dining room of the fraternity house, and Alan had politely offered to drive her home. She had been amazed and delighted when he called her the next day and asked her out.
Though she had been told by more than one person that she had blossomed into a beauty, Antonia had never quite gotten rid of the inner feeling that she was the tall gawky wallflower she had been in middle school, when she had spent every tortuous cotillion seated against the wall, waiting for the night to end. Moreover, she was still accustomed to towering over many of the young men she met. Alan, however, was as tall as she, as long as she wore flats, and he was popular, poised and handsome. She was tongue-tied and terribly flattered by his attention, and by their fourth date, Antonia was hopelessly in love with him.
To her amazement, he seemed to be equally in love with her, and by the end of the year, they were engaged. Antonia’s mother was almost as delighted as Antonia. Alan Brent’s background was as blue-blooded as he appeared to be. The only fly in the ointment, as far as Antonia was concerned, was that Alan was planning to attend Washington and Lee law school. Faced with the prospect of spending the next three years apart from him, she agreed with Alan that the intelligent thing to do was for her to put off her postgraduate plans until he had finished law school. She would get a job while he attended law school, and once he had his degree, they would move to Raleigh so that she could attend vet school.
She sped up her college plans by going to summer school and taking a heavy load the next semester, enabling her to graduate in December. There had been a December wedding, and she had started to work.
Within two months, they had gotten into a fight, which had ended with Alan hitting her and walking out. Antonia, astounded and sick with unhappiness, had cried herself to sleep. The next day Alan had returned, full of remorse and promises. It was the stress of law school, he told her, and it would never happen again. Antonia, eager to believe him, agreed to stay.
That had begun the pattern of their married life. Confused, in love, and steeped in a lifelong habit of guilt for not being the child her parents thought she should be, Antonia had fallen into the classic syndrome of the abused wife. She blamed herself and made excuses for Alan; she hid her bruises and believed each promise that he would change. Living in a new town, she was cut off from her family and friends, and too embarrassed to reveal her problems to any of the people she met at work. They socialized primarily with Alan’s classmates, and even if she had felt close enough to any of his friends’ wives or girlfriends, she was far too loyal to Alan to reveal him in a bad light to those close to him.
She struggled on, growing more and more isolated, more and more unhappy. Concurrently, Alan’s violence escalated. Gradually, she grew to fear and hate him, but she felt trapped, even after they moved back to Richmond. Not surprisingly, when he graduated, Alan had decreed that it was counterproductive to move to Raleigh for Antonia to go to school. He had gotten a splendid offer from a Richmond firm, and, after all, Antonia did not need to get an advanced degree. He would be earning more than enough money for both of them; she wouldn’t even have to work anymore if she didn’t want to.
Finally, almost two years after they moved to Richmond, Alan had gotten drunk and beaten Antonia up and shoved her down the stairs, giving her a concussion, several cracked ribs and a broken arm. A sympathetic policewoman, unable to get a statement against Alan from Antonia, had given her the name of a psychologist specializing in domestic violence. Four months later, with the help of the psychologist, Antonia had left Alan and filed for divorce.
When she left him, Alan had started a program of harassment that included phone calls at all hours of the day and night, some silent, some filled with verbal abuse, and even more disturbing surprise visits in which he screamed and threatened and pounded on her door. It had culminated, finally, in his breaking into her apartment one night and beating her so badly that neighbors had called the police and Antonia had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance.
As she had lain in the hospital, she had made a vow never to let herself be in a position where such a thing could happen again. When she was released from the hospital, she had gone to her grandmother’s house in the Shenandoah Valley. Her grandmother, a faintly eccentric woman who always seemed a trifle surprised that she had produced a son as conservative as Antonia’s father, took Antonia in, informing her somewhat gleefully that she had exchanged free rent for her tenant in the cabin up the road from hers in exchange for his protecting her granddaughter. The tenant, a Vietnam vet, had agreed to patrol the road and house after dark; it was, her grandmother pointed out, a great deal for him, as he had trouble sleeping, anyway. The thought of a stranger with a gun roaming around outside in the dark unsettled Antonia at first, but once she had met the quiet, solid man, she had liked him as much as her grandmother did and had been able to get a good night’s sleep for the first time since she had gone to the hospital.
While she was recuperating in the mountains, she had applied to Texas A&M veterinary school. She was determined now to have the life she had always wanted, the life interrupted by Alan. North Carolina State, she decided, was too close, and it was somewhere Alan might guess she would go. Texas was far away and not a place where Alan would think of her going. He, like her parents, would assume that she would want to stay on the Eastern Seaboard.
Her grandmother had generously offered to pay for her schooling, and in the fall Antonia had moved to Texas. She had not even told her parents where she was moving, and it was some months before she contacted them in any way except through her grandmother. Finally the nightmares and fears had receded enough that she had told her parents of her whereabouts, but only after their promise to tell no one.
She had known there was the probability of one or the other of them letting slip a reference to her location in a conversation with friends. However, it wasn’t too likely that any of them would mention it to Alan, and she hoped that it would take long enough for the information to work its way back in a general way to him that she would already have gotten through with her training and left College Station. When she had moved to Houston and then to Angel Eye, she had tried to impress on her mother yet again how serious and important it was not to reveal where she lived. Her mother swore that she had not told Alan, but obviously, from what her mother had said, Alan had learned through the grapevine that she lived in Texas.
Hopefully that was all he would ever know. Orwould ever want to know. Surely by now, she thought, he would have given up his obsession with her. She had not seen or heard from him in four years. Even if he had not straightened himself out, as he had told her mother—and Antonia had grave doubts about the truth of that statement—she could not help but think that he would have moved on. It might rankle that she had gotten away from his control, but it seemed unlikely that he would have strong enough feelings about it that he would go to the trouble of tracking her down this far away.
Still, she could not help but think of that phone call this morning. It had been very much in his style. An involuntary shiver ran down her spine.
No! Antonia clenched her fists. She refused to let the least little thing turn her into a frightened creature again. She had worked long and hard at building a new life for herself. She had defeated Alan and broken his control over her. She had had the courage to leave her family and friends and start all over again in a new place. She was careful, of course—she tried to keep her whereabouts unknown to Alan; she had a security system; she checked her doors and windows; she kept pepper spray in her purse—but those things were part of what helped her not be frightened. She did not leave herself vulnerable to attack, and she was prepared for it if it should happen, so she did not have to be afraid.
She would not let a little thing like a phone call or her mother’s talking about Alan make her start cowering under her sheets. She refused to live her life in fear, to worry about Alan and where he was, what he was doing, whether he might show up at any time. To do so would be to give Alan control of her again. That, she promised herself, was the last thing she would ever do. Even if Alan were to find out where she lived and show up here, he would find her very different. He would discover that she could take care of herself, that she was no longer intimidated by him.
She was her own woman now. Antonia turned and walked away from the window.
Daniel Sutton drove by the café a second time, slowing down for a good look. Yes, sure enough, that was the vet’s mobile truck in the parking lot of the Moonstone Café.
On impulse, he turned into the next entrance to the parking lot, then stopped, thinking. He had been driving home from the seed store when he had spotted the mobile van, and he had driven two blocks farther before he circled around a few blocks and came back by. Thinking about it, it seemed a little silly and high-schoolish, just as whipping his truck into this lot had been.
First of all, he reminded himself, he didn’t even know if Antonia Campbell was in the café. It could have been Doc Carmichael who had been out in the van and had decided to stop in at the café for lunch on his way back. Second of all, he wasn’t sure what he would do if Antonia was in there. Most likely she had someone with her, one of the technicians or Doc Carmichael or maybe even a client. And if she was alone, what did he plan to do? Just walk up and plop down on the other side of the booth? She would, he felt sure, find him rude and forward. If he went in, he would probably wind up sitting down and eating at some other table and watching her—unless, of course, she finished eating and left as he came in. That would be just his luck.
Daniel knew that he had never been much good at dating. He and Lurleen had gone steady from the beginning of their junior year. Before that he had had a few dates with Suzette Carpenter, who had been visiting her grandmother in Angel Eye the summer after his sophomore year. Looking back on it, though, he realized that Suzette, a year older and way more sophisticated than he, had more or less maneuvered him into asking her out. And he had known Lurleen since they were kids. It wasn’t like dating a stranger.
He had gone out some since his divorce, had even had one or two fairly long relationships, but he knew that he was a novice in the field of dating, and he always found the process awkward, especially in the initial stages. This time, however, it was even worse. He felt like he was back in high school, he was so full of nerves and doubts.
He could hardly remember the last time he had had this sort of reaction to a woman. When he walked out of the barn the other morning and saw her, he had felt as if someone had slammed him in the gut. It had been a surprise, of course, expecting Doc Carmichael and instead seeing a gorgeous blonde. But it hadn’t been only surprise. It had been the immediate, unmistakable kick of sheer lust.
She had looked pristine and untouchable, a Society girl with ice in her veins but a face so lovely it made his heart clench, and mile-long legs that drove everything from his mind but the thought of having them wrapped around him.
It had been unnerving. He was still unnerved. That was, he thought, one reason why he had gotten so angry at her presence. He was a man who prided himself on his calm and control. He liked his life on an even keel, without all the emotional turmoil that had marked it with Lurleen—the bursts of passion, the long, dark nights of pain, the worry and doubt. All that was far in the past, and he had found that it was much easier to live this way. He dated women he liked, but he never fell head over heels in love with them. He didn’t lose control, didn’t get carried away.
So to feel such an electric shot of longing was not only unexpected but also faintly frightening, and he had reacted with a swift surge of anger.
It still bothered him. He didn’t like the fact that he had been unable to get Antonia Campbell out of his mind. He didn’t like the way his thoughts kept lingering over that kiss as she left. Most of all, he didn’t like the fact that when he saw her mobile truck parked in the café parking lot, his heart had skipped a beat and he had been compelled to return.
On the other hand, he couldn’t remember the last time he had felt this excited, eager and alive, either. It probably was foolish. He had decided long ago that most things connected with love were foolish. It was also, apparently, something he could not control with his usual ease. In fact, he found himself not wanting to control it.
It was kind of nice, in a way, to feel like a kid with raging hormones again.
Daniel opened the door of his truck and stepped out, reminding himself that it was even more foolish to sit out here in the parking lot, doing nothing. He walked across the asphalt and went in the front door.
Daniel paused inside the door and looked around the room. It was a typical lunchtime crowd; practically every table and most of the stools at the counter were full, and the air was vibrating with the noise of people talking. The Moonstone Café was a bit out of place in Angel Eye. It had been started three years ago by Jocelyn Kramer, a willowy woman with dark, wildly curling black hair, who had moved here from Dallas, seeking, according to the gossips, to get away from the big city. There were all sorts of rumors about why, ranging across everything from marital troubles to a nervous breakdown to some sort of New Age strangeness. But whatever had impelled her to come, she was a hell of a good cook, and her small restaurant had flourished.
For a moment it all seemed a blur of faces. Then Daniel spotted Antonia, sitting by herself in a booth in the back, a glass of iced tea and an open book in front of her. His stomach knotted. This was the moment of decision. He had to do it now. In another minute one of the waitresses would turn and see him and come lead him to a seat, and he knew that he would not have the nerve to tell her that he would rather sit with Antonia.
Swallowing hard, he started threading his way through the tables, nodding to people he knew. He stopped to talk to two of his father’s friends whom he knew would be offended if he didn’t. By the time he drew near Antonia’s table, she had looked up from her book and was watching him approach.
He had been rehearsing what he would say all the way across the room, but once he saw her eyes on him, all thoughts went straight out of his head. Daniel reached her table and stopped. His mouth went dry, and he couldn’t think of a thing to say.
“Hi,” Antonia said after a moment. “How are you?”
Daniel was too busy with his own problems to notice that her voice had a slight tremor to it. Antonia, however, heard it and felt like slapping herself. Why did she always seem to turn to quivering jelly around this man?
She had spent a great deal more time than was wise the past two days thinking about Daniel Sutton and had even considered calling to ask about his mare and foal just to have a chance to talk to him. In other circumstances, she probably would have called to make sure that everything was going all right, but because it was him, she knew that the call would be as much excuse as concern. What if he saw through it? What if he assumed that she was calling because of that kiss?
So she had not called, but still she had found her mind wandering all too often to the subject of whether and how she would see him again. When she had looked up just now and seen him walking through the dining room, pausing to chat to various friends, her heart had slammed into overdrive. He seemed to be coming straight toward her, and that fact made it even more difficult to breathe. She was surprised that she was able to squeeze out a hello.
“Hi,” Daniel returned, jamming his hands in the front pockets of his jeans. “Nice to see you.”
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Candace Camp
Okay, maybe Antonia Campbell hadn't exactly found heaven in Angel Eye, Texas. But even if she did get mysterious midnight phone calls and her only bed warmer was a cat named Mitzi, her life as a country vet was a lot better than what she'd left behind: a stifling Virginia upbringing and an abusive ex-husband.Then a call to Daniel Sutton's ranch changedeverything. Sparks flew the minute they met, and in his arms she felt petite, protected and every inch a woman. But Daniel's heart might not be as free as it first seemed, and her mysterious caller appeared to have ideas of his own for her future. Was everything about to fall apart just when heaven had seemed within reach?
Daniel smiled and took a beer out of the fridge.
His brother Quinn, then his father, had come by to talk about Antonia. All that was missing was a call from Cater or Cory. Or Beth.
That would come, he assured himself—as soon as one of them talked to Quinn. But Daniel knew he didn’t really mind. His family’s concern was warming. Besides, he rather liked everyone knowing he was seeing Antonia Campbell.
He smiled again, taking a swig of beer. Talk about feeling like a teenager again. He realized that he was grinning at the wall like an idiot, but the fact only made him grin harder. He hadn’t felt this good in years. And he intended to make damn sure he continued feeling that way.
Hard-Headed Texan
Candace Camp
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CANDACE CAMP,
a USA Today bestselling author and former attorney, is married to a Texan, and they have a daughter who has been bitten by the acting bug. Candace’s family and her writing keep her busy, but when she does have free time, she loves to read. In addition to her contemporary romances, she has written a number of historicals, which are currently being published by MIRA Books.
SILHOUETTE MAKES YOU A STAR!
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 1
The phone rang, startling Antonia awake. She sat bolt upright, heart pounding. Beside her the cat stood up, looking at her balefully for disturbing her nap, then stalked off. Antonia blinked, her sleep-fogged mind adjusting to her surroundings. It was the clinic, she told herself. There was an emergency at the clinic. The telephone shrilled again, and she picked up the receiver.
“Dr. Campbell,” she answered, relieved that she had managed to make her voice come out calm and cool. She didn’t want anyone here to know that the least thing could make her panic.
There was no sound on the other end of the line, and she repeated her words, more loudly. Still there was no answer, even though the phone had the sound of a live connection.
“Hello?” she said, fighting down the upsurge of panic-nerves in her chest. “Who is this? Can I help you?”
Still there was no reply, and Antonia slammed down the receiver. Her hands were shaking, and there was a tight, cold knot in the center of her chest.
It wasn’t him, she reminded herself. It was probably just a wrong number or one of those strange connections that went awry—it happened with some regularity when the caller was using a cell phone. The silence on the end of the line did not mean that it was Alan. Alan did not know where she was; there was no reason to think that he did. This was just blind, unreasoning, atavistic fear, and she refused to give in to it.
Antonia took a deep, calming breath and went over all the reasons why she was safe now. Alan was in Virginia, and she was here; he did not know where she lived. It had been years since their divorce. He had not bothered her since she moved to Texas.
Still, she got out of bed and went to the front door, checking to make sure that it was locked and the chain was on. The little red light of the security monitor was blinking, showing that the security system was in effect. She went to the front room window of her small house and lifted the edge of the drapes to peer outside. It was dark outside, though beginning to lighten into a predawn grayness. She could make out the shapes of the trees in the front yard and her SUV parked in the narrow, old-fashioned driveway beside her house.
She would have preferred a house with an attached garage, but the charm of the 1920s-style bungalow had outweighed other considerations, and the passage of years had lessened her bunker mentality. A security system, an old neighborhood imbued with small-town friendliness and nosiness, her own hard-won vigilance—these were enough, she’d decided. She could not let her entire life be ruled by the fear that Alan might find her; if she did, she was letting him control her still.
Antonia walked around the small house, checking each of the windows and the back door to make sure that they were all locked. Reassured, she turned on the coffeemaker, already prepared the night before for ease in getting ready in the morning, and sat down at the kitchen table to wait.
It was pointless trying to go back to bed, she knew. Even though she had calmed down and was reassured that she was safe, it would take her a long time to go back to sleep, and her alarm was set to go off in thirty minutes. A veterinarian in a small ranching community kept early hours, just like the owners of the animals to which she tended. Antonia was usually in the office by seven and often on the road to one ranch or another soon after that.
That morning she arrived even earlier, before the receptionist or either of the technicians. Dr. Carmichael, the other veterinarian, never came in before ten o’clock. It was the reason he had brought in another vet, he had told her—the heavy workload and the early mornings were getting to be too much for him, and at seventy-two years old, he had decided to take life a little easier. Only the night watchman, Miguel, was there. A shy young man who loved to read, he was a perfect person to be on night duty with the animals. He was intelligent; only the fact that he came from a large, poor family had kept him from attending college. He knew as much as most of the techs, and he also had a rapport with the animals that was invaluable. A self-proclaimed insomniac, he had no trouble staying awake all night, and the long hours alone and doing nothing except making hourly rounds did not bore him as they would have most people. He was quite happy to read one of his books.
“Good morning, Dr. Campbell,” he said, coming out of the kennel door when she drove up.
“Hi, Miguel. How’s it going?” Antonia stepped out of her SUV, not bothering to lock it, another habit she had gotten into since moving to Angel Eye three months ago. Because their offices contained drugs, as well as for the safety of the animals, the clinic had a state-of-the-art security system, but there had never been a break-in—or even an attempted one. Everyone who parked in the clinic lot was more interested in finding a shady spot to protect their vehicle from the broiling Texas sun than in locking their doors.
“It’s okay.” Miguel knew that her question was more than rhetorical. “All the animals got through the night, even Dingo.” Dingo was a mixed-breed dog with liver problems, and it had been touch-and-go with him all day yesterday. Owned and much loved by a family with two little girls, Dingo had captured most of the clinic staff’s hearts, as well.
“Good. Well, let me get into my lab coat, and we’ll make the rounds.”
“Sure, Dr. Campbell.” Miguel grinned shyly, not quite meeting Antonia’s eyes.
Antonia was aware that she intimidated the young man. He was shy to begin with, but the fact that she was a towering six feet tall, with the cool, blond good looks of an East Coast society princess, had turned the poor kid nearly speechless when she first came to the clinic. Antonia often had that effect on people, so she was not surprised. She didn’t try to be distant or icy; in fact, her basic nature was warm. But she was by nature and experience somewhat reserved, and the years of training in the proper demeanor expected of a young lady that she had received from her mother—“a lady does not cry in public,” “a lady doesn’t show a vulgar display of excitement,” “a lady does not display unseemly curiosity”—had given her a vaguely aloof air that she did not know how to shake. Even in the casual shirt and jeans that she typically wore on and off the job, she still looked like someone who should be on her way to a Junior League meeting. Today, for instance, she wore jeans and a plain blue shirt, with her hair pulled back and arranged in a practical French braid and only the barest hint of makeup on her face, yet she was somehow elegant.
Antonia usually dealt with her looks by ignoring them. Once she was ready to go in the morning, she rarely glanced in a mirror the rest of the day. Her clothes were invariably practical. Her skin care regimen consisted of little beyond simple cleaning, moisturizing and frequent applications of sunscreen to keep her fair skin from burning. Her technician and friend Rita Delgado, whose devotion to skin care and makeup was profound, was frequently appalled by Antonia’s blasé attitude.
“What is sickening,” she would say, shaking her head, “is that you do almost nothing and still look the way you do!”
Antonia went to her office and pulled on a clean lab coat from the closet, then walked down the hall to the locked door that led to the back part of the clinic, where the sick animals were kept. Miguel was waiting for her there, and they started on their rounds, beginning with Dingo, who was miraculously hanging on.
She had checked over only three animals, approving one for dismissal that day, when the door from the main office burst open and Lilian, the receptionist, bustled in. Lilian, a middle-aged widow of very precise habits, was often the first person to reach the clinic. She liked to have the coffee made and her book work done before the clinic opened at seven-thirty. Lilian had a rather militaristic bent, Antonia thought, and she wanted to have her supplies lined up and her plans in order before she did battle with their clients.
“Dr. Campbell!” Lilian’s soft-featured face, so at odds with her crisp, no-nonsense personality, was creased with concern. “Daniel Sutton just called. He’s having trouble with one of his mares. He said to come right away. She’s been in labor for a while, and she’s losing ground.”
“Daniel Sutton?” Antonia asked, already unbuttoning her lab coat and starting back toward the front of the clinic. “The ranch I went to last week?”
“No, that’s Marshall. His father. Daniel’s on the same road, though, about ten minutes further west. Marshall Sutton’s a cattleman, but Daniel raises horses. He’s knowledgeable. If he says there’s something wrong, then there is.”
“Okay. I’ll take the mobile.” Antonia hung her lab coat on a hook beside the back door, listening as Lilian gave her detailed directions to Daniel Sutton’s horse farm. She took the key to the clinic’s mobile vet truck from another hook. It was the task of whoever drove the truck last to make sure that it was filled with gas and stocked with supplies so that it was always ready to go the next day.
She ran lightly down the steps and crunched across the gravel lot to where the mobile truck sat parked beneath a shade tree. Dr. Carmichael had told her many tales of his early days in the area, when he had driven around to the nearby ranches in his old International Harvester truck, a forerunner of the modern SUVs, with a stock of supplies in the back that he would need for his large animal practice. Today, of course, like most vets who practiced in rural areas, he had a modern mobile, a truck equipped with a shell, looking much like one of the smaller motor homes, in which there were sinks, refrigeration for some of the medicines and samples, and nearly every kind of instrument or medicine needed for working on animals in the field. It was generally far more practical for the vet to go to the horse or cow than for the animal to be loaded into a trailer and brought to the veterinarian.
Time, of course, was of the essence when a mare was having problems foaling, and the long distances between farms and ranches here ate up that precious time, so Antonia stepped on the gas when she left the outskirts of Angel Eye, bringing the truck up to eighty. She doubted that any sheriff’s deputy in this ranching community would interfere with a speeding vet on her way to save a horse.
Lilian’s directions were as precise as she was, and Antonia had no trouble finding the Sutton horse farm. She turned off the highway onto a graveled road, blocked by a mechanized steel gate. She pushed the button on the small raised platform, and almost immediately the gate began to swing open.
“I’m in the foaling pens, Doc,” a deep male voice, tight with worry, said over the intercom. “Better step on it. She’s in a bad way.”
Antonia stepped on the accelerator and started up the long drive. Automatically she noted the details of the farm as she drove toward the house and barn in the distance. It was obviously a working farm—there were none of the expensive decorative touches that marked the rich hobbyist horse farms. Everything was plain and serviceable, from the front gate to the black metal fences to the old farmhouse at the end of the drive. However, there was nothing shabby or ill-kempt about it, either. The fences, the road, the barn, the paddocks, even the two horse trailers sitting beside the barn—all were in good repair and of good quality. It was a neatly kept place, and the horses in the pasture beside the road looked equally well taken care of.
She pulled to a stop between the barn and the lower-roofed stables and hopped out of the truck. Grabbing her doctor’s bag, she hurried toward the stables, presuming that the foaling pens were there. As she did so, a tall man came out of the building, squinting in the sun. He raised a hand to shield his eyes, stared for a moment without moving, then came toward her at a lope.
He was long-legged, with a lean, muscled build that came from years of hard work rather than an intimate acquaintance with weight-training machines. Tall and broad-shouldered, he wore boots, worn blue jeans and a white short-sleeved T-shirt, and he looked so unutterably male that Antonia’s breath caught in her throat. She stopped where she was, a little taken aback by her own reaction. Tight jeans and a wide chest didn’t usually make her stomach flutter anymore, and she had seen plenty of cowboys since moving to Texas. None of them, however, had sent this jolt of pure, instinctive lust shooting straight down through her.
“Who the hell are you?” he demanded, his dark brows drawn together in a deep frown, as he stopped a few feet from her. “Where’s Doc?”
He glanced toward the veterinary truck, then back at her. He was a big man, taller by several inches than Antonia, who was accustomed to looming over most men. He wore no hat, and his hair was thick and black and a trifle shaggy. His skin was tanned from years of exposure to the sun, and there were deep sun lines at the corners of his dark eyes. He was handsome and just as intensely masculine up close as he had appeared at a distance.
Much to Antonia’s astonished dismay, she simply looked at him, unable to speak.
“Damn it!” the man went on. “I told her I needed Dr. Carmichael. Didn’t she understand? The foal’s in the wrong position. I gotta have a vet, not some tech fresh out of school!”
Antonia stiffened at his words, a quick rush of anger coming to her rescue. “I am the vet,” she told him crisply and extended her hand, pleased to see that it didn’t shake despite the bizarre inner turmoil that afflicted her.
The man stared at her, his jaw dropping comically. “What?”
“I’m the vet. Dr. Carmichael’s new associate. I am Dr. Campbell.” She dropped her hand, unsure whether shock or simple rudeness had kept him from shaking her hand. “Now, where’s your mare?”
“But you can’t be—” he said, a stunned look on his face. “You’re a girl.”
“I will take that as a compliment to my youthful appearance rather than a male chauvinist remark,” Antonia said coolly. “However, I am the vet. Dr. Carmichael needed someone younger to help with his practice. I take the early morning calls.”
The man let out a brief, vivid curse. “We’re talking about a horse here, not a cat or dog. You can’t—”
“In fact, horses are my specialty, so you’re in luck,” Antonia went on, struggling to keep a hold on her temper.
“Damn it, I’m not losing my best mare because Carmichael decided to go all politically correct and hire a woman vet!”
“You won’t lose that horse because of me!” Antonia shot back, fury shooting up in her. “I am fully qualified to—”
“A woman doesn’t have the strength to doctor a horse. I’ve seen big men who couldn’t—”
“In case you haven’t noticed,” Antonia bit out, “I am scarcely delicate. I am six feet tall and I work out. I can handle a horse. Usually I use my brains to overcome the difference in strength, and if brains won’t do it, I could turn it over to you. How’s that?”
A light flared in his eyes, and he came a long step closer, looming over her. Antonia was not about to be intimidated, and she, too, stepped forward, so that they were now so close she could see the thick dark lashes that ringed his eyes, making their dark brown color appear almost black.
She looked him straight in the eyes, putting her hands on her hips pugnaciously, and said, “Dr. Carmichael is not here. I am. Now, I can leave and you can wait until Dr. Carmichael comes into the clinic and can drive out here, by which time your stubbornness will probably have cost you a mare and a foal. Or you can show me your mare and let me try to save them. Which do you want to do?”
A vein pulsed at his temple, and for a moment Antonia thought that Sutton was going to explode, but then he stepped back. “This way,” he said shortly, and turned and walked back into the stables. Antonia followed him.
The mare was obviously in trouble. A splendid bay quarterhorse, with a white stripe down the center of her face, she stood with head lowered and feet spread apart. She was shivering, and her body was covered with sweat. Antonia took in the details of the stall automatically as she examined the mother, even as she had noticed the condition of the farm. Here, too, all was in order and prepared. The foaling stall was clean and floored with fresh straw, and several buckets stood at the ready, along with a supply of towels, and a shelf containing various bottles and tubes and a box of latex gloves. A large sink stood a few feet away, between this and another foaling stall, and at it were a nail brush and antiseptic soap. No matter how obnoxious the owner might be, he ran a good farm.
Talking soothingly to the mare, Antonia ran a calming hand down her neck and side, moving around to the back to examine her. “When did she go into labor?”
“During the night,” Sutton said, wiping the back of his arm across his forehead. Antonia saw, now that the anger had subsided from it, that weariness and worry stamped his face. “Five o’clock, maybe,” he told her in a deep, rumbling voice. “She started waxing up yesterday evening, and I knew it would be coming soon. I slept on a cot in the other stall. I checked her right after her water bag broke, and I couldn’t find the foal’s head, so I knew it was turned around. I called the clinic, and I’ve been walking her around.” He paused, then went on. “She’s my best mare, and the sire is Garson’s Evening Star at Mason Farms. It should be a good foal.” He sighed and looked at Antonia. “I don’t want to lose that mare.”
“I’ll do my best to save both of them,” Antonia said, softening a little at the undercurrent of emotion in his voice. This man wasn’t just talking about investments; he obviously loved his animals, and as far as Antonia was concerned, that fact made up for a multitude of sins. “Okay, let’s get to work.”
She went to the sink and began to scrub her hands. It was obvious that Sutton was right. The foal was turned around. It was trying to emerge; one tiny hoof protruded from the mare. But it was a rear hoof, instead of the two front hooves that should come out first in a normal delivery. The poor mare, in obvious pain, was struggling to deliver. The first thing Antonia did was examine the mare, reaching in to locate the foal’s head and forelegs. That in itself was difficult enough to do, but she finally determined that its head was twisted to the side, and the foal was more or less wedged sideways.
“You’re right. I’ll have to turn it,” she said, explaining the position of the foal as she once again scrubbed her hands and arm. “First I’m going to give her a tranquilizer to calm her down, as well as an epidural. This will take a while.”
Once she had administered the drugs, she went to work to turn the foal inside its mother. It was a long, tedious process, for she had to find the head and pull it back, as well as push and pull and twist until the foal was in the correct position, forelegs and head facing forward. Time after time, she tugged on the muzzle to no avail. She could not find one of the forelegs, and when she did, it slipped from her grasp.
Finally, however, she managed to get the leg secured with an obstetrical chain around it, then grasped the muzzle and wiggled and pulled until it slid around to the correct position. “I’ve got it!”
She began to pull, and slowly the foal slid forward until its forelegs and the tip of its muzzle emerged. Behind her Sutton let out a whoop. Antonia dropped her arm; it felt like a lead weight, numb from the strain. She shook it a little to get the feeling back, then began to pull again. The foal stuck at the chest and shoulders. It was large, and the mare was weak and tired, barely able to stand. Antonia was afraid that the mare would go down at any moment, and she was certainly no longer capable of expelling the foal.
Sutton moved up beside Antonia and grasped the muzzle and one foreleg. Antonia glanced up at him. He winked, surprising her, and said, “Looks like this is my specialty, as you pointed out earlier.”
Antonia had to grin, and she reached up to take the other foreleg. They began to pull again. It was a stubborn animal, big and slippery, and the two of them had to pull mightily, but then suddenly the shoulders popped through, and a moment later the foal was out, still wrapped in its amniotic membrane.
“Yes!” Antonia cried, triumph surging through her as Sutton gently laid the little animal down on the ground, close to its mother’s head.
She squatted down beside the man to strip the membrane from around the foal’s face and mouth. The mare would do the rest. Sutton turned to Antonia, a huge smile breaking across his face, and she grinned back at him.
“We did it!” he exclaimed, and as they stood up, he suddenly reached out and swung her up into his arms, whirling her around in a paroxysm of joy. They were both filthy, their shirts and arms covered with blood and amniotic fluid, but neither of them cared. The joy of bringing life into the world filled them. Antonia laughed, exhilarated, curling her arms around his shoulders as he spun her.
In the next moment she became aware of the reality of his body against hers. His hard chest pressed into her breasts; his arms were around her like a lover’s. She could feel the dampness of his sweat against her skin. A sudden, fierce desire slammed through her, almost frightening in its intensity. Antonia wanted to kiss him, to press herself against his muscular body. She wanted to taste the salt of his skin, to rub her face against his hair, to breathe in the healthy masculine smell of him.
Her breath caught in her throat. What in the world was she doing! She stiffened, embarrassment sweeping through her. This was a client! And her behavior was anything but professional.
Sutton seemed to become aware of the peculiarity of their situation in the same moment. Quickly he set her down and stepped back.
“I…ah…” He fixed his eyes on a point just over her shoulder. “Sorry. Got a little carried away, I guess.”
“Yes. This kind of thing doesn’t happen every day,” Antonia agreed, trying to smooth over the awkward moment. Her heart pounding against her ribs, she turned back to the mare, who was now engaged in licking her foal clean. The foal lay there, adjusting to its new world, its mother’s lifeblood still filling it through the umbilical cord. Antonia never cut the cord right away, as it would deprive the foal of much-needed nourishment.
“It looks as if everything’s proceeding normally,” she went on, aware that her voice sounded a trifle prissy, but she felt as though she had to say something, with the sudden, awkward silence settling around them.
“Yeah. I—usually Doc uses the shower out here in the barn to clean up. But—” He glanced doubtfully down the wide hallway. “Maybe you ought to use the one in the house. I’ll take this one. I mean…that is, if you have something to change into. I could loan you a shirt, of course, but…” His eyes fell to her slender legs, encased in denim. “Course you’re pretty tall. I reckon you could, you know, wear something of mine…if you wanted…you could roll them up—Oh, Lord, why don’t you just shoot me and shut me up before I make a complete fool of myself?”
Antonia had to smile. “A shower would be very nice, thank you. I appreciate it. I’m sure the one here in the barn is perfectly fine. And I carry a change of clothes in the truck. Unfortunately for the state of my clothes, I often wind up looking like this.”
They waited for the expulsion of the afterbirth, to make sure the mare was all right; then Antonia cut the umbilical cord, and they watched in fascination as the little foal staggered to its feet and wobbled to its mother and began to nurse. Antonia grinned, warmth flooding through her. No matter how many times she saw this sight, it never failed to fill her with happiness. She glanced over at Daniel Sutton and saw the same feeling reflected on his face.
Afterward, he directed her to the shower down the central hallway. It was small and spartan, but it was clean, and the water was hot and plentiful, which was enough for Antonia. She had many times made do with much less. Once again clean and dressed in a faded T-shirt and an old pair of jeans, she pushed her feet back into her boots, brushed through her long hair and neatly rebraided it, then made her way to the side door of the farmhouse.
She knocked on the door, then entered when a voice called to come in. Daniel Sutton stood at the kitchen counter in clean jeans and a fresh shirt, his hair slicked back wetly. He was pouring water into the coffeemaker, and he glanced over his shoulder at her as she came in.
“Cup of coffee?” he asked.
“That sounds nice,” Antonia replied, feeling a little shy. There was a certain intimacy to the scene—both of them obviously fresh from the shower and him making coffee—that was rather suggestive. She told herself that it was foolish to think that way, but she could not suppress the feeling.
She sat down at the table and glanced around. It was a large, old-fashioned kitchen, but, like the rest of the place, neat and well-kept. She wondered if there was a Mrs. Sutton and was a little surprised to realize that she hoped there was not.
“I was at another Sutton’s last week,” she said, deciding to probe a little. “Inoculating calves.”
“That’d be my dad, Marshall. Just up the road.” He nodded in the direction of his father’s ranch. “This was a piece of land I bought from my grandmother.”
“It’s nice. You run a good operation, I’d say.”
“Thanks.” He had finished with the coffee and now stood facing her, leaning back against the counter, arms crossed in front of him.
“Nice house, too. I like your kitchen.”
“Thank you.” He glanced around, then shrugged. “James isn’t messy. We manage to keep it up okay. It helps not to cook a lot.”
Antonia relaxed a little. That statement didn’t sound as if there was a woman living here. “James?”
“My son. He’s a teenager, but he’s a good kid.”
Antonia smiled. “You sound as if the two terms are contradictory.”
He grinned. “Well…”
“How old is James?” And where is his mother? She could think of no polite way to ask it.
“Eighteen. This is his senior year. He’ll be graduating in a few weeks. Next thing you know, he’ll be in college.” He made a face. “Whew, makes me feel old, saying that.”
“You must have married young.”
“Straight out of high school. Our parents thought we were stupid, and, of course, we were.” He shrugged. “But I guess we all have to make our own mistakes. We split up before James was three.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Long time ago,” he replied briefly, his face shuttered.
There was a long pause. Daniel looked down at the floor, then out the window. Finally he said, “Look. I’m sorry about earlier.”
Antonia gazed at him questioningly.
“You know, about wanting Doc Carmichael and all. I was wrong. You did a good job. I—I’m usually not, you know, all chauvinistic and thinking women can’t do things. I mean, I guess I am kinda old-fashioned in a lot of ways, but my sister’s put me straight any number of times. The thing was, I was worried about my mare.”
“I know.” Antonia was sure that was true, and she was inclined to give him a second chance. But it didn’t seem that she ought to let him off the hook quite yet.
“And I’m not used to women vets,” he went on. “I mean, well, actually, I never put much thought to the subject before. I just didn’t see how a woman could handle some of the things a horse doctor has to. It’s, well, you know, hard work.” He stopped, color rising in his cheeks. “Blast, that came out wrong, too. I meant, it takes a lot of physical strength and…”
He trailed off, looking uncomfortable.
Antonia relented. “Yes. It does. And women don’t usually go into a large animal practice because of that. But I’ve found that horses and cattle are pretty much stronger than men, too. It’s all a matter of degree. You just have to compensate for it. I haven’t yet had to turn an animal away because I wasn’t strong enough.” She grinned. “I have to admit, it might be different if I weren’t six feet tall. Long arms make a difference.”
He smiled. “I hope that means you accept my apology. I was wrong. And you did a great job. I hope you’ll work on my horses again.”
“I’d be happy to.”
After that, she couldn’t think of anything to say, and silence grew uncomfortably. Fortunately, the coffeemaker finished, and Daniel was able to turn his attention to pouring them cups of coffee. He set the cups down on the table and added a carton of milk from the refrigerator and a canister of sugar from the counter.
“Sorry.” He cast a rueful eye on the sugar and milk. “I’m afraid we don’t have those things…”
“Sugar and creamer?”
“Right.” He quirked an eyebrow. “We’re kind of plain here. Bachelor household.”
“That’s okay. I’m kind of plain myself.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
Antonia’s eyebrows sailed upward. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He glanced up at her, looking uncomfortable. “Sorry. Have I put my foot in my mouth again? You can see I don’t get out much. I didn’t mean anything bad. It’s just that you look—I don’t know, not plain, anyway. You look sort of like Grace Kelly, like some guy in a tux ought to step out onto the veranda and take you back inside to the Harvest Ball.”
Antonia chuckled. “Is that a compliment or a putdown?”
“I meant it as a compliment. You’re beautiful,” he replied simply.
Antonia felt herself blushing. “I…uh…”
“Don’t worry. I’m not coming on to you. Just a statement of fact,” he said quickly, then sighed. “I’m making a real mess of it, aren’t I? James would despair of me if he were here. He thinks I’m the lamest when it comes to women, and he’s probably right.”
“It’s okay,” Antonia said with a smile. “I don’t mind being told I’m beautiful. It’s a lot better than saying I look like a city girl or like I’ve never gotten my hands dirty in my life, which are also things people have told me.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I was cursed with a country club background. I can’t even tell people how wrong they are. I was, sorry to say, a debutante.”
“Really?” He looked surprised. “You’re kidding. I didn’t know they had those anymore.”
“Oh, yes, still going strong in Richmond, Virginia. It was part of my bargain with my parents—I’d have my coming out if they would let me go to the University of Virginia and get a science degree instead of going to Sweet Briar, like a proper young lady.” Antonia was a little surprised at her words. She didn’t usually reveal that much of herself to strangers.
Daniel’s grin lit up the rugged planes of his face, and Antonia noticed with some surprise that it caused the nerves of her stomach to go into a crazy little dance. It occurred to her that she was feeling about the same age as a debutante.
“Well, I’d say you’re about as far as you could get from Sweet Briar now.”
“You’re right.”
“So how you’d wind up in Angel Eye, Texas?”
“I went to veterinary school at Texas A&M,” she explained. No need to go into the reasons why she had wound up there. She had found that Texans rarely questioned why anyone would have chosen to come to Texas or to remain once they had lived there a while. They considered that obvious; they were usually curious only about how it had happened. “After that, I wanted to stay in Texas.”
Proving her point, Sutton nodded in agreement.
“So I got a job with a vet in Katy.” She named a suburb of Houston on the west side of the city. “His practice had a lot of show horse farms, tax write-off cattle places, that kind of thing. I didn’t want to live in the city, but I wanted to work with horses, and, well, most large animal vets weren’t interested in hiring a woman.”
“Chauvinistic pigs,” Daniel commented, his black eyes twinkling.
“I know. Terrible, isn’t it? Anyway, Dr. Carmichael knew Matt Ventura, the head of the clinic, and he asked him if any of his associates would be interested in moving to Angel Eye and eventually taking over a practice. I was the only one. I wanted to live in the country, and I prefer real working ranches and farms. You know? Where you actually talk to the owner, not some manager hired by a bank president or some cardiologist whose tax lawyer told him to buy a farm for a write-off. Real people who care more about their animals than about how picturesque all the white rail fences look.”
“You won’t find much of anything picturesque in Angel Eye.”
“There’s its name,” Antonia pointed out. “The Spanish calling it Los Ojos de Los Angeles for the stars.”
“And Anglos shortening and anglicizing it,” Daniel added. “Yeah, I guess that’s pretty unique.”
“Angel Eye is real. It has its own unique charm. I like it. Fortunately Dr. Carmichael was getting pretty desperate by that time, so he was willing to take a chance on a woman vet.”
“I’m glad.” His eyes were warm on her for a moment, reminding Antonia of that moment in the barn when his arms had enfolded her and she had thought about kissing him.
She glanced away from him quickly. “Me too. Well…” She took a last sip of her coffee and stood up. “I’d better be going. I’ll be way behind at the clinic.”
“I’m sorry.”
Antonia shrugged. “It happens all the time. We have emergencies. Dr. Carmichael will have taken up as much of the slack as he can.” She hesitated, then said, “It was nice meeting you—well, maybe not nice, but I’m glad we met.”
“Me too.” He had risen when she did and stood, hands hooked in his back pockets, looking undecided and faintly uncomfortable.
“Thanks for the coffee.”
“Any time. I…uh, I reckon the clinic’ll just bill me, like they usually do.”
Antonia nodded. In a moment, she thought, the two of them would start shuffling their feet and hemming and hawing around like first-graders. Reminding herself that she was a poised, confident adult on a business footing with Daniel Sutton, she stuck out her hand to shake his.
Daniel glanced from her face down to her hand. He reached out and enfolded her hand in his. His was warm and large, the palm roughened by years of calluses. Antonia was startled by the surge of electricity that shot through her at his touch. She raised her eyes to his a little wonderingly, and for a brief moment they looked at each other, unsure, pulses quickening in a way that was a little foreign to both of them.
Then, suddenly, he dropped her hand and stepped forward, his hands going to her shoulders. He pulled her to him, and his mouth swooped down to claim hers.
Chapter 2
Antonia stood stock still, stunned by the sensations that flooded her body. She had dated casually a few times in the four years since Alan, but she had never felt with any of those men the sudden, searing heat that rushed through her now. Her lips beneath Daniel’s tingled and burned; her skin was fiercely, instantaneously hot. Her hands came up and curled into the front of his shirt. She trembled; it was as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice, and she wasn’t even sure if she wanted to step back or forward.
Just as suddenly, Daniel’s mouth left hers. He pulled back and stared down into her eyes, his face mirroring her own confusion. Antonia could feel her blood racing through her veins; she could hear the rasp of her own breath, strained and too fast. Her hands fell away from his shirt. She turned, faintly surprised to find that her legs still worked, and hurried across the room and out the door. By the time she reached the small side stoop, she was running. She dashed across the yard and jumped into the mobile van, never looking back.
She turned the truck around and drove far too fast down the dirt road. As she neared the end of the drive, the electronic gate opened for her. She gunned the engine and rattled out onto the highway. She drove automatically, braking and turning on instinct alone, while her brain tumbled chaotically.
Whatever was she doing—kissing a man she scarcely knew! And a client, at that! And why had it felt so wonderful and scary? Why did she feel as if she might fly apart at any moment?
Her life was calm, even, uneventful. Antonia had worked hard to make it that way, to avoid the chaos that had marked her marriage. Today, in a matter of moments, Daniel Sutton had turned all that hard work upside down. Antonia could not decide whether that more excited, irritated or scared her.
By the time she reached the clinic in town, she had managed to calm her shaking nerves, but she did not have a handle yet on her confused feelings. As she had predicted, her clientele had built up in the waiting room while she was on her emergency call. Almost as soon as she stepped in the back door, Lilian came hurrying down the hall.
“Sorry. We’ve got a ton of people waiting. Dr. Carmichael tried to take up the slack, but he had a full load this morning. I managed to get a couple of them to just leave their animals, so we could work them in as we can, but you know how most people are. We had one emergency. Doc Carmichael took him.” She continued to talk as Antonia washed her hands and put on her white lab coat, checking in the small mirror above the sink to make sure that she looked more together than she felt.
Antonia sighed and smoothed down her coat. A lot of work, she thought, would take her mind off her inner turmoil. “All right,” she said. “Let’s get to them.”
There was far too great a rush for Antonia to take a lunch break, but finally, around two o’clock, one of the techs who had gone out to eat brought her back a burger, and she gratefully took the bag down to the employee lounge.
The only other person in the lounge was Rita Delgado, one of the technicians and also Antonia’s friend. Rita was short, with a voluptuous build, and she was constantly fighting a battle with calories. Today, as was often the case, she was eating a lunch brought from home, consisting of an apple and a carton of nonfat yogurt. Antonia knew that the odds were that Rita would be hitting the snack machines by four o’clock.
Rita glanced up when Antonia entered the room and smiled. “Hey, come sit down. I haven’t seen you all day. What a rush, huh?”
Antonia nodded, going over to the table and setting down her bag. Rita was exactly the person to see if one wanted information. She had a huge circle of family and friends and was always abreast of all the latest gossip. She was also, unfortunately, like a bloodhound once she scented news.
“So…” Antonia sat down in her chair and with studied casualness began to unwrap her burger.
“So?” Rita prodded, eyeing Antonia’s sandwich with envy. With a sigh, she dug her spoon into her own cup of fat-free yogurt.
Antonia shrugged. “I don’t know. Just a conversation opener.”
“What conversation?”
“An awkward one,” Antonia admitted, a smile touching her lips as she looked at her technician. “I want to ask you something, but I know you’ll go all big-eyed and pushy on me.”
“Me?” Rita brought her hand up to her chest dramatically, opening her expressive brown eyes wider, until they looked almost round. “Big-eyed? Pushy? How can you say that?”
Antonia quirked an eyebrow at her. Rita leaned forward.
“So what’s the conversation? You can’t just throw out a line like that and stop! What’s going on?”
“I wanted to ask you a question.” Antonia hesitated. “Now, don’t read too much into this. I’m only asking out of curiosity.”
“Sure. Sure. I know the spiel. Are we talking about a guy here?”
Antonia took a deep breath and plunged in. “Daniel Sutton.”
“Daniel Sutton!” Rita sucked in her breath. She stared at Antonia, apparently rendered speechless by Antonia’s words.
“Yes, Daniel Sutton,” Antonia retorted with some asperity. “Why are you looking at me like that? Is he the local ax murderer or something?”
Rita made a face at her. “Of course not. He’s gorgeous—well, not as gorgeous as Cater. Now, that one is the kind that could make a person forget she’s a happily married woman.”
“Cater? Who’s Cater? What are we talking about here?”
“The Suttons, silly.”
“How many are there? I met his father last week.”
“Oh, there are a bunch of them, all male. Well, except for one sister. Beth. Four boys. They’re all gorgeous, even Cory, who’s just a baby—he’s still in college. Daniel is the oldest, then Cater, then Quinn—he’s the sheriff. He’s a charmer, too, that one, and there’s something about a uniform…” Rita’s voice trailed off dreamily, then she shook herself and went on. “But he’s got that red hair, and I’ve never been much for redheaded men, myself. Now, my cousin Lena, she’s the evening dispatcher over at the sheriff’s office, and she says he’s sexy as hell. She has the hugest crush on him. But give me a black-haired guy any day, like Cater and Daniel. Cater doesn’t live here, though. He’s a big writer now, and he lives in Austin.”
“Cater Sutton!” Antonia straightened. “The mystery writer? He’s Daniel’s brother?”
“That’s what I just said. I don’t read much, but Roberto says he’s famous.”
“He is. Definitely. I’ve read all his books.”
“If you’d rather hold out for him, he comes back to Angel Eye pretty often. He owns a little house off of Highway 43. Sometimes he stays there for weeks at a time. Roberto says he’s recharging his batteries, either that or he comes here to work out the hard parts of his plot. Roberto’s got several theories.”
“I am not ‘holding out’ for Cater Sutton or anybody else,” Antonia said repressively. “I was curious about Daniel, that’s all. I went to his farm today.”
Rita nodded. “Lilian told me. How’d it go?”
“I managed to deliver the foal. It was tough, but—”
“I know that.” Rita grimaced. “I meant how did it go with Daniel? Is he interested in you? Are you interested in him?”
“I just…wondered what the story was on him. He, uh, well, he was quite obnoxious at first, but then later we talked and—”
“Daniel Sutton?” Rita asked. “Obnoxious? Are you serious? Daniel is one of the most laid-back men I’ve ever met.”
“He wasn’t this morning. He was ticked off because I was a woman and he didn’t think I could handle his horse.”
“Oh.” Rita gave a dismissive shake of her head. “Just worried about his mare, I’ll bet. He’s a nice man. I’ve never even heard him raise his voice. He’s very quiet, doesn’t say much. But I’m guessing what you want to know is whether there is a Mrs. Daniel Sutton.”
“Rita…” Antonia was irritated to feel heat rising in her face. She hated the way her fair blonde’s skin gave her away all the time.
Rita chuckled. “Nothing wrong with that. Who wouldn’t want to know that if they met a hunk like him? Well, there used to be. He married his high school sweetheart is the way the story goes. I’m younger than them, so all I know is hearsay. But what I’ve heard is that he was crazy as could be about her—Lurleen was her name. Anyway, they got married right after they graduated from high school, and pretty soon they had a kid, James. James is a nice boy. He’s friends with my sister Lupe’s boy, and I’ve met him a few times. But Lurleen, they say, couldn’t stand life in a little town. She had always wanted to get out, but then she fell for Daniel, so she stayed and married him. Only she still hated it here, and after a while she left town.”
“Oh, no. She left her little boy, too?”
Rita nodded emphatically. “James was only three years old. Well, you might guess that didn’t make her too popular around here. I mean, a husband is one thing, but leaving your own child?”
“So Daniel’s raised him alone all these years?”
“Yeah. Did a good job of it, too, from what I’ve seen. But they say that he still carries a torch for Lurleen.”
“Really? After so long?” Antonia felt her heart sink a little within her, and she told herself that was foolish.
Rita nodded. “Yeah. It sounds kinda weird, but that’s what folks say.” She shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s true, of course. But what they say is that he never filed for divorce. Finally, after several years, she did.”
“Goodness.”
“’Course, if any guy’d be like that, it’d be Daniel Sutton. He’s a solid kind of man…steadfast…loyal.”
Antonia thought back to that morning, to the clean, neat farm and house, the obvious care that he had lavished on them, the feeling he had for his horses. She suspected that he was not a very expressive man, but she also would not be surprised to learn that he felt things deeply. She pictured him, a young man alone on that farm with a little boy, doing the best he could for him, always hoping that the woman he loved would return. A pang pierced Antonia’s heart.
“That’s so sad.”
“Yeah.” Her assistant cast a sidelong glance at Antonia and added, “I bet the love of a good woman is exactly what he needs. You know, to bring him out of it. I mean, it’s been, what fourteen, fifteen years now? He hasn’t ever dated much, but you can only carry a torch for so long. You know what I mean? He’s bound to be ready to drop it…for the right lady.”
“And you’re saying that I’m it?” Antonia smiled. “I doubt it.”
“Why not? You’re a single woman. He’s a single man. In a town the size of Angel Eye, there aren’t that many opportunities. If it were me, I would jump at a chance like that. Besides, think about all the family reunions—getting to look at all that male pulchritude.”
Antonia rolled her eyes. “I don’t think so. Number one, I’m not really looking to date anyone. And number two, I don’t think a man who’s still in love with the wife who deserted him fourteen years ago is the best choice if I were going to date. Men are trouble enough without getting one who’s still in love with his ex.”
“Maybe. But a guy like Daniel Sutton—I don’t know, he might be worth the extra effort.” Rita wiggled her eyebrows exaggeratedly.
“How does Roberto put up with you?”
Rita laughed. “I make it worth his while. Who do you think I do all this suffering for?” She nodded toward her meager lunch.
“You,” Antonia retorted, grinning. “You can’t fool me. I heard Roberto last week worrying about how thin you were getting.”
“Oh, that!” Rita waved away the statement. “All the Delgado women get to be like bowling balls. He thinks it’s normal. But I can tell you he’ll notice it when I put on my negligee from Victoria’s Secret. But wait—you are not going to distract me from the subject of this conversation. Are you interested in Daniel Sutton?”
“I told you, I was curious. It isn’t as if he asked me out or anything.” Antonia wasn’t about to tell even a good friend like Rita what had happened that morning at Sutton’s ranch.
“Ah, but you’d like him to?”
“I didn’t say that.” Antonia sighed. “No. I don’t want to date him or anyone else. It’s too much trouble. I just want to do my work, get settled in Angel Eye….”
“Girl, you’ve been here two months. How much settling in can you do in a town this size?”
“I’m slow.” Antonia crumpled up the wrapper from her burger and tossed it in the trash. “Thanks for the info.” She paused. “But if I start hearing about Daniel Sutton from Lilian and the clerk at the Quik-Mart—”
“Antonia…you are so suspicious.” Rita smiled enigmatically.
“Yeah. Right.” Antonia gave her friend a knowing look and left the room.
Not surprisingly, Antonia’s work spilled over into the evening, and she did not get home until after seven-thirty. She was informed of her tardiness by Mitzi, the black-and-white, tailless street cat that had decided to favor Antonia with her presence last year. The white circle around one eye, in contrast to her mostly black head, gave Mitzi a look of faint surprise, and she carried herself with a feline hauteur that was rather comical, given her bobbed tail, a trait acquired in some accident, Antonia was sure, rather than a genetic anomaly. Mitzi, sublimely unaware of the humorous aspect of her looks, seemed to believe that she was a pampered registered Persian in a wealthy household. She greeted Antonia now with a long litany of complaints, plopping herself down in a seated position in front of the door.
“I hear you, Mitzi,” Antonia responded. “Too regal to bother with rubbing my leg, huh?”
She started toward the kitchen, and Mitzi jumped up, bounding forward to get in front of Antonia. Antonia smiled. She was more of a dog lover than a cat person, but Mitzi had been the perfect pet the last few months. Antonia’s dog of several years, a beautiful golden retriever named Bailey, had died about six months ago, and Antonia had been unable to bring herself to get another dog, although as a veterinarian she was provided with ample opportunities. Her heart was too bruised by Bailey’s death for another loving dog. However, her imperious, distant cat provided the perfect, amusing, faintly aloof companionship she needed.
She dumped out the dry food in Mitzi’s bowl, which, having lain there all day, was not fresh enough for Mitzi’s refined tastes, and refilled it with food straight from the bag.
“You know,” she reminded the cat as she set the bowl down on the floor beside her water, “when I found you, you were rummaging through trash cans for food. How soon we forget.”
Antonia knew that she ought to fix herself a nutritious dinner, given the burger that she had grabbed for lunch, but she was too tired, so she dug out one of her large supply of TV dinners from the fridge and put it in the microwave. She had barely sat down at the table with the dinner and a new paperback she had started the day before when the telephone rang. Antonia sighed and took another bite, contemplating not answering it. However, her instincts were too strong, and after two rings she jumped up and snatched the receiver from its cradle.
“Dr. Campbell.”
“Antonia, dear. It’s Mother.”
Antonia suppressed a sigh. “Hello, Mother.”
No doubt she was an undutiful daughter, she thought, but conversations with her mother invariably left her angry, depressed, guilty, or all three. It was not a prospect she enjoyed facing at the end of a long, tiring day. She wished sometimes for the warm, friendly relationship she had witnessed between other women and their mothers, but she had finally acknowledged that she would never have that with her own mother. They were simply too dissimilar. She had never been the daughter Elizabeth Campbell wanted, and, frankly, Elizabeth Campbell had never been the mother that Antonia would have chosen if she had been given the chance.
“How are you, dear?” her mother went on in her well-modulated, Tidewater-Virginia voice. “Is everything going well out there?”
“Yes, we’re fine out here in the back of beyond,” Antonia replied. Her mother had always acted as if her move to Texas had taken her to a foreign country.
“Now, Antonia, I didn’t say that.”
“Mmm. But that’s what you meant.”
“I will admit that that Angel place seems an excessively long way away from home. You could have had your practice in Virginia.”
“Being a long way from Virginia was the whole point, Mother. It’s better all around if I am nowhere near Alan.”
“But that was a long time ago, Antonia—almost four years. Don’t you think that now you—”
“Mother, we have gone over this before,” Antonia pointed out, shoving down her irritation. “I went to A&M because it was far away from Alan, but I like it here. It suits me. Angel Eye suits me.”
“Well, of course, dear, if you say so,” Elizabeth said doubtfully. “Although I cannot imagine why anyone would name a town such a preposterous name.”
“I like the name. It has character. The whole town has character. I feel…good here, relaxed.”
“But everyone’s foreign—”
“Foreign! Mother, what—”
“I can hardly understand that assistant of yours, that Delgado girl.”
“For heaven’s sake, Mother, Rita Delgado’s lived in Angel Eye all her life. She’s no more foreign than you or I. And she hardly even has an accent. I am sure you sound equally strange to her, with those Tidewater ‘ou’s and dropping all your ‘r’s.”
There was a pause, then Elizabeth went on. “Well, I didn’t call to argue.”
Antonia bit back the retort that rose to her lips and said mildly, “I don’t like to argue, either, Mother. Why don’t we just stay off the subject of my moving back to Virginia?”
“All right. I, uh, would you like to hear about the charity auction for the hospital?”
“Sure.” Antonia settled down to listen with one ear. She knew that her mother actually did a lot of good with all the energy that she expended on her various society charity projects. However, Antonia found the details of such projects deadly dull. Still, a dull topic was better than an acrimonious one, so she listened, murmuring enough “uh-huh’s” and “I see’s” to keep her mother going.
Finally Elizabeth paused, then cleared her throat. Now we’re getting to the real reason she called, Antonia thought.
“I ran into Alan yesterday. At the club.”
Antonia stiffened, her fingers clenching around the receiver. Her chest was suddenly so tight that she could not speak, could scarcely even breathe.
When Antonia said nothing, her mother went on. “Of course, it was a trifle awkward at first.”
“At first?” Antonia repeated incredulously. “Do you mean that then you settled down to a nice conversation with the man who put your daughter in the hospital on more than one occasion?”
“Now, Antonia…don’t twist my words. I could hardly cause a scene in the country club. I had to be polite.”
“Naturally.” Bitterness rose like bile in Antonia’s throat. Of course not causing a scene would be the most important thing to her mother.
“I listened to him, that’s all. But he, uh, he seemed sincere, Antonia. I think he has changed. He told me he had been to one of those twelve-step things.”
“I’m glad for him, then,” Antonia retorted coolly.
“He wants to see you, Antonia. He wants to talk to you.”
“Absolutely not!” Antonia cut across her mother’s words. She thought of the odd phone call she had gotten that morning, and a chill ran through her. The events of the day had put the silent caller out of her mind, but now her uneasiness came back in full force. “You didn’t give him my phone number, did you?”
“No, of course not. Really, Antonia…” Elizabeth hesitated, then said, “However, I did think that perhaps you ought to listen to him. Give him a chance. He wants to apologize, to set things right with you.”
“I have no need for that.”
“I think he does.”
“Mother, that really doesn’t matter to me.”
“He wants to try again.”
“Oh, please.”
“He means it, Antonia. I really think he does. Just think about it. You could have your old life back. You could come home.”
“I don’t want my old life back!” Antonia snapped. “Can’t you understand that? I’m doing what I want, living where I want now. Why do you persist in thinking that I am unhappy or wrong or whatever it is you think just because I don’t choose to live your lifestyle? This is what I want. This is what I love.”
“But Alan—”
“I don’t care about Alan! Frankly, I don’t understand why you do. Most mothers would despise any man who did to their daughter what he did to me.”
“Of course I detest what he did to you, Antonia. I was merely saying that he has changed.”
“Look, I sincerely doubt that Alan has reformed. I cannot tell you how many times he came to me, full of remorse and repentance, crying and begging me to forgive him, promising to make it up to me, promising to stop. They were words, that’s all. It never lasted—any more than it would this time if I went back to him.”
“But he actually has been working on it. He took a course….”
“One course does not change a lifetime, Mother. But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Say that he really has changed, that he wouldn’t beat me anymore. I still wouldn’t marry him again. After all that’s happened, after what he did to me, whatever love I felt for him is gone. I could never love him again. Just looking at him would fill me with pain and rage. For his sake, I hope he has changed, but his changing will not make me feel differently about him. I will never get back together with him, no matter what. If he was asking you to try to soften me, to persuade me to talk to him…”
“He didn’t ask me anything like that,” Elizabeth retorted stiffly. “He just asked about you—how you were and what you were doing, that sort of thing. Then he told me how much he regretted what had happened, how sorry he was. He didn’t try to persuade me to do anything. What I said to you just now—those were my thoughts. I just thought, if he’s different, you could…” Her voice trailed off, and she sighed. “You two were such a lovely couple.”
Antonia closed her eyes wearily. She reminded herself that her mother was as she was, and there was no changing her at this late date. Appearances mattered to her more than substance. The fact that Alan had been blessed with preppy good looks, excellent manners, and an old and distinguished family, meant far more to her than anything that had been inside him. She would always consider the two of them a lovely couple because they had looked like the country club couple personified: blond, refined, well-dressed. She had considered them perfect for each other because they knew the same people, went to the same parties, had the same backgrounds. She hadn’t seen—couldn’t see—the anger and pain that had lain beneath the surface.
“Mother…what exactly did he ask you about me? What did you tell him?”
“Oh, just things in general. I did not tell him where you lived, if that’s what you mean. He wanted to know if you had finished your studies at A&M and whether you had moved back to Virginia, and of course I said no, that you had decided to stay in Texas. Mostly he wanted to know if you were happy, that sort of thing.”
Antonia frowned. “How did he know I went to A&M?”
“Well, really, Antonia, how should I know that? It wasn’t top secret. I mean, several of our friends knew. Your friends. I’m sure somewhere along the line in the last four years, someone would have told him.”
Antonia worried her lower lip with her teeth. There had been no way to keep her whereabouts completely secret, of course, unless she had completely cut off all ties with her family and friends back home. And just because Alan knew she had been going to A&M didn’t mean that he knew anything else about her. Texas was a huge place; he couldn’t know that she lived in this small town…except, of course, that over time, her mother would probably mention the peculiar name of the town in talking to her friends, and those people might mention it to someone else, and after a while, just like the information that she was in vet school at A&M, the fact of where she lived would be floating around in the circles in which Alan moved. Circles, she added bitterly to herself, that had obviously not ostracized Alan for committing the small and pardonable sin of abusing his wife.
“Dear, I think you worry too much about whether he knows where you are. I mean, the fact that he knew where you were in school and never bothered you should reassure you, I would think.”
“That’s true,” Antonia admitted. It had been four years since their divorce, and once she had moved away from Virginia, Alan had not tried to see her again. After all this time, he would not go to the trouble of tracking her down, she told herself. There was no reason to think that the caller this morning had been Alan. “No doubt you are right, Mother. Still, it makes me feel more secure, knowing that he doesn’t know where I live.”
“Well, I won’t tell him, Antonia,” Elizabeth said in a patient tone that was guaranteed to set Antonia’s teeth on edge. “Let’s talk about something more pleasant. What’s going on in your life?”
“I saved a foal’s life today, maybe the mother’s, too.” And I met a very handsome man, and he kissed me, and I felt as tingly as a schoolgirl, and I’m not sure what to do about it—if, indeed, there is anything to do.
“That’s nice, dear. It sounds quite rewarding.”
“It was.” Antonia felt guilty. Her mother was trying, after all. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t understand her daughter. Perhaps she should confide in her mother about Daniel Sutton. Take the initiative to bring about a closer relationship.
At that moment there was a click, and Elizabeth said, with a note of relief in her voice, “Oh, there’s another call. I’m afraid I have to get off, Antonia. Faith Morton is supposed to be calling me with information about the June Gala.”
“Of course. I’m glad you called. Goodbye.”
Antonia hung up the phone and turned back to the table and her supper, no doubt cold by now. She found Mitzi crouched on the table, chowing down on the choicest bits of meat on the tray.
“Mitzi! Oh, well, I’m not hungry anymore anyway.” Antonia’s stomach was alive with nerves now. Talking about her ex-husband had a way of doing that to her.
She thought about the phone call that morning. It had the markings of one of Alan’s calls—jolting her from a sound sleep, the unnerving silence, the hang-up. But then, she reasoned, the same could be said of a dozen other kinds of calls, including a simple wrong number and embarrassed dialer. There wasn’t any reason to believe that it was Alan after all these years.
Still, she went to the kitchen door and checked its bolt, then continued around the house, checking each window and doorknob. She had forgotten to set the security system—one of her first acquisitions whenever she moved into a new place—and she punched in the keycode now, watching as the reassuring red light began to blink.
She went to the window of the living room, which looked out on the front yard. The blinds were closed, as they always were at night, but Antonia lifted the edge and looked out. The moon was full and cast a bright light across the scene, outlining trees and cars. Nothing moved.
For a long time she stood there, gazing into the darkness, thinking about the past, about how she had gotten here. About Alan.
Chapter 3
Marrying Alan Brent had been the first thing Antonia had done in her life that her mother had approved of wholeheartedly. Antonia had never fit into her parents’ country club world, no matter how much her mother had tried to mold her daughter in her own image. The only thing that Antonia enjoyed about her privileged upbringing was the riding. Horses and riding had long been a part of the “aristocratic” Virginia image. She started taking riding lessons when she was seven; riding was even part of the curriculum at the exclusive girls’ school she attended. From the moment Antonia was introduced to the huge creatures, she loved them and had no fear of them.
However, even her interest in this one aspect of her life was not enough to reassure her mother, for Antonia did not approach riding as a social activity at which one needed to be competent, but as a passion. Moreover, she was interested in everything about the animals, not just in learning the proper way to mount and ride. And the one thing concerning horses in which she had no interest was the local hunt club.
Before Antonia finished high school, she knew that she wanted to be a veterinarian and specialize in horses. For that reason she campaigned to go to a respected state university instead of the proper ladies’ college that her mother had attended. She had traded making her debut for attending the college she wanted, wading through the tedious balls, parties and teas for the requisite year. After that she had dived headlong into her schoolwork, concentrating on the science courses and academic standing that would get her into veterinary college. It had been her ambition to go to North Carolina State University for her professional training. Then she had met Alan Brent.
It had been during her junior year of college. He had been a senior, blond and blue-eyed, handsome, yet able to blend in with everyone else. She had met him at a fraternity party to which she had reluctantly gone with the son of one of her mother’s friends. Her date had gotten so thoroughly drunk that he had passed out under the table in the dining room of the fraternity house, and Alan had politely offered to drive her home. She had been amazed and delighted when he called her the next day and asked her out.
Though she had been told by more than one person that she had blossomed into a beauty, Antonia had never quite gotten rid of the inner feeling that she was the tall gawky wallflower she had been in middle school, when she had spent every tortuous cotillion seated against the wall, waiting for the night to end. Moreover, she was still accustomed to towering over many of the young men she met. Alan, however, was as tall as she, as long as she wore flats, and he was popular, poised and handsome. She was tongue-tied and terribly flattered by his attention, and by their fourth date, Antonia was hopelessly in love with him.
To her amazement, he seemed to be equally in love with her, and by the end of the year, they were engaged. Antonia’s mother was almost as delighted as Antonia. Alan Brent’s background was as blue-blooded as he appeared to be. The only fly in the ointment, as far as Antonia was concerned, was that Alan was planning to attend Washington and Lee law school. Faced with the prospect of spending the next three years apart from him, she agreed with Alan that the intelligent thing to do was for her to put off her postgraduate plans until he had finished law school. She would get a job while he attended law school, and once he had his degree, they would move to Raleigh so that she could attend vet school.
She sped up her college plans by going to summer school and taking a heavy load the next semester, enabling her to graduate in December. There had been a December wedding, and she had started to work.
Within two months, they had gotten into a fight, which had ended with Alan hitting her and walking out. Antonia, astounded and sick with unhappiness, had cried herself to sleep. The next day Alan had returned, full of remorse and promises. It was the stress of law school, he told her, and it would never happen again. Antonia, eager to believe him, agreed to stay.
That had begun the pattern of their married life. Confused, in love, and steeped in a lifelong habit of guilt for not being the child her parents thought she should be, Antonia had fallen into the classic syndrome of the abused wife. She blamed herself and made excuses for Alan; she hid her bruises and believed each promise that he would change. Living in a new town, she was cut off from her family and friends, and too embarrassed to reveal her problems to any of the people she met at work. They socialized primarily with Alan’s classmates, and even if she had felt close enough to any of his friends’ wives or girlfriends, she was far too loyal to Alan to reveal him in a bad light to those close to him.
She struggled on, growing more and more isolated, more and more unhappy. Concurrently, Alan’s violence escalated. Gradually, she grew to fear and hate him, but she felt trapped, even after they moved back to Richmond. Not surprisingly, when he graduated, Alan had decreed that it was counterproductive to move to Raleigh for Antonia to go to school. He had gotten a splendid offer from a Richmond firm, and, after all, Antonia did not need to get an advanced degree. He would be earning more than enough money for both of them; she wouldn’t even have to work anymore if she didn’t want to.
Finally, almost two years after they moved to Richmond, Alan had gotten drunk and beaten Antonia up and shoved her down the stairs, giving her a concussion, several cracked ribs and a broken arm. A sympathetic policewoman, unable to get a statement against Alan from Antonia, had given her the name of a psychologist specializing in domestic violence. Four months later, with the help of the psychologist, Antonia had left Alan and filed for divorce.
When she left him, Alan had started a program of harassment that included phone calls at all hours of the day and night, some silent, some filled with verbal abuse, and even more disturbing surprise visits in which he screamed and threatened and pounded on her door. It had culminated, finally, in his breaking into her apartment one night and beating her so badly that neighbors had called the police and Antonia had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance.
As she had lain in the hospital, she had made a vow never to let herself be in a position where such a thing could happen again. When she was released from the hospital, she had gone to her grandmother’s house in the Shenandoah Valley. Her grandmother, a faintly eccentric woman who always seemed a trifle surprised that she had produced a son as conservative as Antonia’s father, took Antonia in, informing her somewhat gleefully that she had exchanged free rent for her tenant in the cabin up the road from hers in exchange for his protecting her granddaughter. The tenant, a Vietnam vet, had agreed to patrol the road and house after dark; it was, her grandmother pointed out, a great deal for him, as he had trouble sleeping, anyway. The thought of a stranger with a gun roaming around outside in the dark unsettled Antonia at first, but once she had met the quiet, solid man, she had liked him as much as her grandmother did and had been able to get a good night’s sleep for the first time since she had gone to the hospital.
While she was recuperating in the mountains, she had applied to Texas A&M veterinary school. She was determined now to have the life she had always wanted, the life interrupted by Alan. North Carolina State, she decided, was too close, and it was somewhere Alan might guess she would go. Texas was far away and not a place where Alan would think of her going. He, like her parents, would assume that she would want to stay on the Eastern Seaboard.
Her grandmother had generously offered to pay for her schooling, and in the fall Antonia had moved to Texas. She had not even told her parents where she was moving, and it was some months before she contacted them in any way except through her grandmother. Finally the nightmares and fears had receded enough that she had told her parents of her whereabouts, but only after their promise to tell no one.
She had known there was the probability of one or the other of them letting slip a reference to her location in a conversation with friends. However, it wasn’t too likely that any of them would mention it to Alan, and she hoped that it would take long enough for the information to work its way back in a general way to him that she would already have gotten through with her training and left College Station. When she had moved to Houston and then to Angel Eye, she had tried to impress on her mother yet again how serious and important it was not to reveal where she lived. Her mother swore that she had not told Alan, but obviously, from what her mother had said, Alan had learned through the grapevine that she lived in Texas.
Hopefully that was all he would ever know. Orwould ever want to know. Surely by now, she thought, he would have given up his obsession with her. She had not seen or heard from him in four years. Even if he had not straightened himself out, as he had told her mother—and Antonia had grave doubts about the truth of that statement—she could not help but think that he would have moved on. It might rankle that she had gotten away from his control, but it seemed unlikely that he would have strong enough feelings about it that he would go to the trouble of tracking her down this far away.
Still, she could not help but think of that phone call this morning. It had been very much in his style. An involuntary shiver ran down her spine.
No! Antonia clenched her fists. She refused to let the least little thing turn her into a frightened creature again. She had worked long and hard at building a new life for herself. She had defeated Alan and broken his control over her. She had had the courage to leave her family and friends and start all over again in a new place. She was careful, of course—she tried to keep her whereabouts unknown to Alan; she had a security system; she checked her doors and windows; she kept pepper spray in her purse—but those things were part of what helped her not be frightened. She did not leave herself vulnerable to attack, and she was prepared for it if it should happen, so she did not have to be afraid.
She would not let a little thing like a phone call or her mother’s talking about Alan make her start cowering under her sheets. She refused to live her life in fear, to worry about Alan and where he was, what he was doing, whether he might show up at any time. To do so would be to give Alan control of her again. That, she promised herself, was the last thing she would ever do. Even if Alan were to find out where she lived and show up here, he would find her very different. He would discover that she could take care of herself, that she was no longer intimidated by him.
She was her own woman now. Antonia turned and walked away from the window.
Daniel Sutton drove by the café a second time, slowing down for a good look. Yes, sure enough, that was the vet’s mobile truck in the parking lot of the Moonstone Café.
On impulse, he turned into the next entrance to the parking lot, then stopped, thinking. He had been driving home from the seed store when he had spotted the mobile van, and he had driven two blocks farther before he circled around a few blocks and came back by. Thinking about it, it seemed a little silly and high-schoolish, just as whipping his truck into this lot had been.
First of all, he reminded himself, he didn’t even know if Antonia Campbell was in the café. It could have been Doc Carmichael who had been out in the van and had decided to stop in at the café for lunch on his way back. Second of all, he wasn’t sure what he would do if Antonia was in there. Most likely she had someone with her, one of the technicians or Doc Carmichael or maybe even a client. And if she was alone, what did he plan to do? Just walk up and plop down on the other side of the booth? She would, he felt sure, find him rude and forward. If he went in, he would probably wind up sitting down and eating at some other table and watching her—unless, of course, she finished eating and left as he came in. That would be just his luck.
Daniel knew that he had never been much good at dating. He and Lurleen had gone steady from the beginning of their junior year. Before that he had had a few dates with Suzette Carpenter, who had been visiting her grandmother in Angel Eye the summer after his sophomore year. Looking back on it, though, he realized that Suzette, a year older and way more sophisticated than he, had more or less maneuvered him into asking her out. And he had known Lurleen since they were kids. It wasn’t like dating a stranger.
He had gone out some since his divorce, had even had one or two fairly long relationships, but he knew that he was a novice in the field of dating, and he always found the process awkward, especially in the initial stages. This time, however, it was even worse. He felt like he was back in high school, he was so full of nerves and doubts.
He could hardly remember the last time he had had this sort of reaction to a woman. When he walked out of the barn the other morning and saw her, he had felt as if someone had slammed him in the gut. It had been a surprise, of course, expecting Doc Carmichael and instead seeing a gorgeous blonde. But it hadn’t been only surprise. It had been the immediate, unmistakable kick of sheer lust.
She had looked pristine and untouchable, a Society girl with ice in her veins but a face so lovely it made his heart clench, and mile-long legs that drove everything from his mind but the thought of having them wrapped around him.
It had been unnerving. He was still unnerved. That was, he thought, one reason why he had gotten so angry at her presence. He was a man who prided himself on his calm and control. He liked his life on an even keel, without all the emotional turmoil that had marked it with Lurleen—the bursts of passion, the long, dark nights of pain, the worry and doubt. All that was far in the past, and he had found that it was much easier to live this way. He dated women he liked, but he never fell head over heels in love with them. He didn’t lose control, didn’t get carried away.
So to feel such an electric shot of longing was not only unexpected but also faintly frightening, and he had reacted with a swift surge of anger.
It still bothered him. He didn’t like the fact that he had been unable to get Antonia Campbell out of his mind. He didn’t like the way his thoughts kept lingering over that kiss as she left. Most of all, he didn’t like the fact that when he saw her mobile truck parked in the café parking lot, his heart had skipped a beat and he had been compelled to return.
On the other hand, he couldn’t remember the last time he had felt this excited, eager and alive, either. It probably was foolish. He had decided long ago that most things connected with love were foolish. It was also, apparently, something he could not control with his usual ease. In fact, he found himself not wanting to control it.
It was kind of nice, in a way, to feel like a kid with raging hormones again.
Daniel opened the door of his truck and stepped out, reminding himself that it was even more foolish to sit out here in the parking lot, doing nothing. He walked across the asphalt and went in the front door.
Daniel paused inside the door and looked around the room. It was a typical lunchtime crowd; practically every table and most of the stools at the counter were full, and the air was vibrating with the noise of people talking. The Moonstone Café was a bit out of place in Angel Eye. It had been started three years ago by Jocelyn Kramer, a willowy woman with dark, wildly curling black hair, who had moved here from Dallas, seeking, according to the gossips, to get away from the big city. There were all sorts of rumors about why, ranging across everything from marital troubles to a nervous breakdown to some sort of New Age strangeness. But whatever had impelled her to come, she was a hell of a good cook, and her small restaurant had flourished.
For a moment it all seemed a blur of faces. Then Daniel spotted Antonia, sitting by herself in a booth in the back, a glass of iced tea and an open book in front of her. His stomach knotted. This was the moment of decision. He had to do it now. In another minute one of the waitresses would turn and see him and come lead him to a seat, and he knew that he would not have the nerve to tell her that he would rather sit with Antonia.
Swallowing hard, he started threading his way through the tables, nodding to people he knew. He stopped to talk to two of his father’s friends whom he knew would be offended if he didn’t. By the time he drew near Antonia’s table, she had looked up from her book and was watching him approach.
He had been rehearsing what he would say all the way across the room, but once he saw her eyes on him, all thoughts went straight out of his head. Daniel reached her table and stopped. His mouth went dry, and he couldn’t think of a thing to say.
“Hi,” Antonia said after a moment. “How are you?”
Daniel was too busy with his own problems to notice that her voice had a slight tremor to it. Antonia, however, heard it and felt like slapping herself. Why did she always seem to turn to quivering jelly around this man?
She had spent a great deal more time than was wise the past two days thinking about Daniel Sutton and had even considered calling to ask about his mare and foal just to have a chance to talk to him. In other circumstances, she probably would have called to make sure that everything was going all right, but because it was him, she knew that the call would be as much excuse as concern. What if he saw through it? What if he assumed that she was calling because of that kiss?
So she had not called, but still she had found her mind wandering all too often to the subject of whether and how she would see him again. When she had looked up just now and seen him walking through the dining room, pausing to chat to various friends, her heart had slammed into overdrive. He seemed to be coming straight toward her, and that fact made it even more difficult to breathe. She was surprised that she was able to squeeze out a hello.
“Hi,” Daniel returned, jamming his hands in the front pockets of his jeans. “Nice to see you.”
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Candace Camp
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Okay, maybe Antonia Campbell hadn′t exactly found heaven in Angel Eye, Texas. But even if she did get mysterious midnight phone calls and her only bed warmer was a cat named Mitzi, her life as a country vet was a lot better than what she′d left behind: a stifling Virginia upbringing and an abusive ex-husband.Then a call to Daniel Sutton′s ranch changedeverything. Sparks flew the minute they met, and in his arms she felt petite, protected and every inch a woman. But Daniel′s heart might not be as free as it first seemed, and her mysterious caller appeared to have ideas of his own for her future. Was everything about to fall apart just when heaven had seemed within reach?