Claire King - The Virgin Beauty

“Listen, McKenna—”

“You better not talk to me right now, Cash.”

“I can explain.”

“You don’t have to explain. I know exactly what was going on back there.”

“You do.” Well, of course, she would. Nobel was a small town, and she’d been here a week. Surely she’d heard from a dozen people already how he’d been drummed out of vet school just months shy of graduation, for cheating. For cheating! Something that never would have occurred to him.

“I do,” she said through gritted teeth.

He put a booted foot on the dash and glared out the window. “Well, I’m interested to hear what you have to say about it.” The old, helpless sense of anger nearly overwhelmed him. The injustice of it had almost killed him at the time, and now this woman was going to tell him all about how she’d managed to get through vet school without stealing any test results.

“I think you don’t trust me and you came with me today to make sure I didn’t kill any of your high school buddy’s precious cows!”

His foot hit the floorboard with a thump. “What?”

She yanked the wheel of the truck, screamed onto the shoulder, spitting gravel twenty feet behind her, and came to a sliding halt. She shoved the stick into neutral and turned on him. “I’ve seen you driving by, don’t think I haven’t.”

“You’re on Main Street, McKenna. I can’t come to town without passing your office.”

“And Mrs. Handleman told me you’d gone out into the clinic’s corral Monday to look at that mule Katie Reed brought in while I was on a call.”

Handleman! What a snitch. She’d been ratting him out since he was ten. “Katie asked me to,” Daniel argued stubbornly. And he’d been flattered, thrilled.

“I think you’ve been checking up on me since the very minute I got into this town because you don’t think I can do this job. Well, you’re wrong! I can, and I will. And for your information, pal—” She reached out a long finger and poked him in the chest as he turned to stare, dumbfounded, at her. “The day I need anyone’s help diagnosing parturient paresis is the day I sell my vet box and start a bakery!”

He couldn’t help it. He was angry and she was angry, and now wasn’t the time, but a bakery? He could just picture her wearing an apron. He laughed.

She was going to punch him. He may have had the most beautiful eyes and a glorious body and he may have been tall enough to kiss her without craning his neck toward the heavens, but she was going to punch him anyway. It was a matter of principle. She balled up her fist.

“Wait, wait,” he said. “Wait a minute. I’m not laughing at you.”

She glared at him.

“Okay, I am, but just at the thought of you in a bakery. Do you even know how to bake?”

“You think just because I look like this I can’t bake,” she shouted at him. Hideous tears burned at the back of her throat. Silly, girlish tears. She could have screamed in frustration. “I am still a woman.”

“What’s that got to do with it?” he yelled back at her. “My mother can’t bake worth a damn. And look like what?” He knew what she meant, couldn’t let it pass no matter how much he wanted to. No matter how angry he was, or how desperately he did not want to be attracted to this woman, he couldn’t let her think he meant she wasn’t desirable as hell. “Tall and willowy as a wheat stalk? Beautiful? Sexy? Mouthwatering? No, I think because you’re a young vet with a busy new practice you might not have had the time to learn to bake cookies.”

“Well, I haven’t!” she yelled.

“That’s all I was saying,” he bellowed.

“Look, I don’t need you or anyone else looking over my shoulder, Cash. I’m a hell of a vet. Born to it, I’ve had people say.”

People had said the same thing to him. “Fine. Fabulous. You’re the best vet around, McKenna.”

“Stop yelling at me!”

“You’re yelling at me.”

“Because you laughed about the baking thing.” She turned back in her seat, folded her arms across her chest and stared out the front window. “If you’re not checking up on me, Cash, then why hang around in some stinking barn with a sick cow?”

He pulled at his jaw, stalling. When he couldn’t think of anything better to tell her than the truth, he said, “Because it’s what I was trained to do.”

She turned her head. “I beg your pardon?”

Daniel dropped his head back, and when that gave him no comfort, scrubbed his face with his hands. “Never mind.”

“What do you mean, it’s what you were trained to do?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“You’re a vet?”

“No, dammit, I’m not a vet.”

“You’re shouting again.”

“You bring it out in me.”

She barked out a laugh. “I doubt it’s my fault. You’ve acted like a jackass since the instant I met you, and except for one rather bizarre moment last week which we won’t mention despite the fact that you didn’t even call me afterward, when that would have been the polite thing to do, and I should give you hell for that—” she took a deep breath, struggling to keep on the matter at hand “—you’ve been a jackass ever since. This just tops it.”

He scowled at her. She was right about the jackass part, damn her, and that just made her all the more insufferable. But call her? After that mind-slaughtering kiss? Did she think he was a masochist, too?

Okay. Good enough. He reached for the door handle and jerked open the truck door. He was over it now. Over whatever weird, obsessive sexual witchcraft she wielded that had made him kiss her in the first place, that had drawn him back to her office to see her this afternoon despite the fact that it was the last place he wanted to be. He was cleansed, free. Her witchy power was helpless against his stronger will. Ha!

“I’ll walk back to town.”

“Great!”

“I don’t need this kind of aggravation from a woman I hardly know,” he muttered.

“I imagine most women would have to get in their aggravation where they could with you,” she muttered back. “They wouldn’t want to have to wait until you did get to know them before they started aggravating you!”

“What?”

“You know what I mean.” She always got flustered when she was nervous. And this huge man breathing fire was making her very nervous. “You’re very hard to be around!”

“Fine.”

“Fine!”

“See you around.”

“What did you mean you were trained to hang around barns treating sick animals?”

He’d reared back in preparation for giving Grace McKenna’s passenger door a slam she’d not soon forget, but he froze halfway into it. He scowled at her, a bluff as much as anything. He didn’t particularly want this gorgeous woman with her snotty attitude and his vet practice to know what a failure he’d been.

“I’m not going to stand here on the side of the road and discuss this with you.”

“Are you really going to walk back to town?”

“You betcha.”

She’d been ready to soften, but he’d snapped at her. Again. She wasn’t such a wimp that she’d let Daniel Cash bully her around.

She raised her patrician eyebrows. “Have a nice walk, then.”

“I will.”

“Do,” she retorted primly.

“Thank you,” he yelled back incensed.

“You’re welcome!”

He did slam the door then, and was gratified when she sat there awhile longer, truck idling, as he started off down the long road to town.

When she finally roared past him, her truck tires sprayed a fine coating of sand and gravel over him, head to toe.

He glared at the retreating vehicle and shook dust out of his hair. He sucked a clod of dirt off his bottom lip.