Linda Miller - A Stone Creek Christmas

“Why do you keep calling me ‘Doc’?”

She was nervous. Maybe she sensed that Tanner wanted to kiss her senseless and then take her upstairs to his bed.

“Because you’re a doctor?”

“I have a name.”

“A very beautiful name.”

Olivia grinned and some of the tension eased, which might or might not have been a good thing. “Get a shovel,” she said. “It’s getting deep in here.”

He laughed, pushed away his pie.

“I should go now,” she said, but she looked and sounded uncertain.

Hallelujah, Tanner thought. She was tempted, at least.

“Or you could stay,” he suggested casually.

She gnawed at her lower lip. “Is it just me,” she asked bluntly, “or are there sexual vibes bouncing off the walls?”

“There are definitely vibes,” he confirmed.

“We haven’t even kissed.”

“That would be easy to remedy.”

Linda Lael Millergrew up in rural Washington. The self-confessed barn goddess was inspired to pursue a career as an author after a teacher said the stories she was writing might be good enough to be published.

Linda broke into publishing in the early 1980s. She is now a New York Times bestselling author of more than sixty contemporary, romantic suspense and historical novels, including McKettrick’s Choice, The Man from Stone Creek and Deadly Gamble. When not writing, Linda enjoys riding her horses and playing with her cats and dogs. Through her Linda Lael Miller Scholarships for Women, she provides grants to women who seek to improve their lot in life through education.

For more information about Linda, her scholarships and her novels, visit www.lindalaelmiller.com.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For Sandi Howlett, dog foster mum, with love.

Thank you.

Sometimes, especially in the dark of night, when pure exhaustion sank Olivia O’Ballivan, DVM, into deep and stuporous sleep, she heard them calling—the finned, the feathered, the four-legged.

Horses, wild or tame, dogs beloved and dogs lost, far from home, cats abandoned alongside country roads because they’d become a problem for someone, or left behind when an elderly owner died.

The neglected, the abused, the unwanted, the lonely.

Invariably, the message was the same: Help me.

Even when Olivia tried to ignore the pleas, telling herself she was only dreaming, she invariably sprang to full wakefulness as though she’d been catapulted from the bottom of a canyon. It didn’t matter how many eighteen-hour days she’d worked, between making stops at farms and ranches all over the county, putting in her time at the veterinary clinic in Stone Creek, overseeing the plans for the new, state-of-the-art shelter her famous big brother, Brad, a country musician, was building with the proceeds from a movie he’d starred in.

Tonight it was a reindeer.

Olivia sat blinking in her tousled bed, trying to catch her breath. Shoved both hands through her short dark hair. Her current foster dog, Ginger, woke up, too, stretching, yawning.

A reindeer?

“O’Ballivan,” she told herself, flinging off the covers to sit up on the edge of the mattress, “you’ve really gone around the bend this time.”

But the silent cry persisted, plaintive and confused.

Olivia only sometimes heard actual words when the animals spoke, though Ginger was articulate—generally, it was more of an unformed concept made up of strong emotion and often images, somehow coalescing into an intuitive imperative. But she could see the reindeer clearly in her mind’s eye, standing on a frozen roadway, bewildered.

She recognized the adjoining driveway as her own. A long way down, next to the tilted mailbox on the main road. The poor creature wasn’t hurt—just lost. Hungry and thirsty, too—and terribly afraid. Easy prey for hungry wolves and coyotes.

“There are no reindeer in Arizona,” Olivia told Ginger, who looked skeptical as she hauled her arthritic yellow Lab/golden retriever self up off her comfy bed in the corner of Olivia’s cluttered bedroom. “Absolutely, positively, no doubt about it, there are no reindeer in Arizona. ”

“ Whatever, ” Ginger replied with another yawn, already heading for the door as Olivia pulled sweatpants on over her boxer pajama bottoms. She tugged a hoodie, left over from one of her brother’s preretirement concert tours, over her head and jammed her feet into the totally unglamorous work boots she wore to wade through pastures and barns.

Olivia lived in a small rental house in the country, though once the shelter was finished, she’d be moving into a spacious apartment upstairs, living in town. She drove an old gray Suburban that had belonged to her late grandfather, called Big John by everyone who knew him, and did not aspire to anything fancier. She had not exactly been feathering her nest since she’d graduated from veterinary school.

Her twin sisters, Ashley and Melissa, were constantly after her to ‘get her act together,’ find herself a man, have a family. Both of them were single, with no glimmer of honeymoon cottages and white picket fences on the horizon, so in Olivia’s opinion, they didn’t have a lot of room to talk. It was just that she was a few years older than they were, that was all.

Anyway, it wasn’t as if she didn’t want those things—she did—but between her practice and the “Dr. Dolittle routine,” as Brad referred to her admittedly weird animal-communication skills, there simply weren’t enough hours in the day to do it all.

Since the rental house was old, the garage was detached. Olivia and Ginger made their way through a deep, powdery field of snow. The Suburban was no spiffy rig—most of the time it was splattered with muddy slush and worse—but it always ran, in any kind of weather. And it would go practically anywhere.

“Try getting to a stranded reindeer in that sporty little red number Melissa drives,” Olivia told Ginger as she shoved up the garage door. “Or that silly hybrid of Ashley’s.”

“ I wouldn’t mind taking a spin in the sports car, ” Ginger replied, plodding gamely up the special wooden steps Olivia dragged over to the passenger side of the Suburban. Ginger was getting older, after all, and her joints gave her problems, especially since her “accident.” Certain concessions had to be made.

“Fat chance,” Olivia said, pushing back the steps once Ginger was settled in the shotgun seat, then closing the car door. Moments later she was sliding in on the driver’s side, shoving the key into the ignition, cranking up the geriatric engine. “You know how Melissa is about dog hair. You might tear a hole in her fancy leather upholstery with one of those Fu-Manchu toenails of yours.”

“ She likes dogs, ” Ginger insisted with a magnanimous lift of her head. “ It’s just that she thinks she’s allergic. ” Ginger always believed the best of everyone in particular and humanity in general, even though she’d been ditched alongside a highway, with two of her legs fractured, after her first owner’s vengeful boyfriend had tossed her out of a moving car. Olivia had come along a few minutes later, homing in on the mystical distress call bouncing between her head and her heart, and rushed Ginger to the clinic, where she’d had multiple surgeries and a long, difficult recovery.

Olivia flipped on the windshield wipers, but she still squinted to see through the huge, swirling flakes. “My sister,” she said, “is a hypochondriac.”