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The flower beds in the backyard badly needed to be cleaned up and weeded for spring, but she couldn’t get up any enthusiasm for that, either.
She needed a job, dammit! A job that she went to and worked at and then came home and rested from. A job that paid actual money and gave her actual satisfaction. She’d never been a stay-at-home housewife and mother.
What was she going to do with the rest of her life? Live on her pension? Sure, if she wanted to sweat every bill. She’d never wanted to be anything but a policewoman from the time she was five years old.
When the single thing that defines you as a person is taken from you, who the hell are you?
CHAPTER THREE
MONDAY MORNING Mac met Mark Scott walking down the hall of the clinic with his little black-and-white mutt at his heels.
“Morning.” Mac bent down and scratched Nasdaq’s ears while the little dog wagged its whole body. “I need to talk to you. Ten o’clock.”
“Okay,” Mark said, looking at Mac suspiciously. “Please don’t tell me you’ve discovered the newest piece of equipment to make you the perfect surgeon and it only costs two million bucks. I get enough of that from my beloved wife.”
“Sarah simply believes in buying the best for our clients,” Mac said with a perfectly straight face.
Mark rolled his eyes. “She’d been after me to buy the best from the first day she walked into this place. She made my life a living hell until I gave her what she wanted.” He grinned. “I got payback, though. She’s not only made me the perfect wife, she’s given me the perfect daughter. Not a bad trade-off for an ultrasound and a laser. So what do you want?”
As business manager of Creature Comfort as well as vice president of Buchanan Industries, Mark split his time between his cubbyhole in what had once been a storage room at Creature Comfort and a palatial office on the top floor of Buchanan Towers. Since Coy Buchanan—Rick Hazard’s father-in-law—had bankrolled Creature Comfort in the beginning, it was only right that Mark keep an eye on the clinic’s bottom line. However, clinic revenue had increased so much in recent months that he was around less and less these days.
“I do not want equipment.” Mac looked down at Nasdaq. “And put that dog on a diet.” He turned his back on Mark and walked toward his office.
He met Nancy coming out of his office with a sheaf of files in her hand.
“Oh, there you are,” she said, and thrust the files at him.
“And I’m supposed to do what with all this?”
“That’s a leading question, Doctor. Drink the coffee I just put on your desk and read them. You’re spaying a couple of cats at nine.”
“Great,” he muttered. Spaying cats, neutering dogs, stitching up gashes and pinning broken bones of animals whose owners let them loose in traffic. Was that all his life had become? He’d wanted to make a real difference. At least Sarah and Eleanor got to work on a variety of animals. The only time Mac saw the inside of a horse was when one of them needed his help, which, given their levels of proficiency, they seldom did. He badly needed a new challenge.
Maybe he should do what Liz Carlyle was doing—go back to school for a year and pick up an additional specialty.
He had a specialty, blast it. He was the best damn veterinary surgeon in the South—possibly the United States.
Yet he spent his nights watching television and his days spaying cats.
Maybe he should sign on for a tour of duty at one of the big African parks—they always needed vets. He could certainly afford six months of little or no money. Ngorongoro, maybe, or Kruger.
His partner, Rick, would have a heart attack if Mac even suggested a six-month leave of absence. He had responsibilities to the clinic.
“Your kitties are waiting for you,” Nancy said from the door.
“Shaved and prepped?”
“No, Doctor, I thought I’d leave all the prep work to you,” Nancy said with a sniff. “Of course they’re prepped. Come on, get your rear end in gear. You’ve got a full schedule, as you might know if you’d bothered to read what I left you.”
“Someday I’m going to fire you!” he called after her.
“One can but hope.”
He grinned. Anytime he started feeling sorry for himself, Nancy brought him up short. No matter how he snapped and snarled occasionally, he was doing the thing God had put him on this earth for, and doing it well.
Nancy, on the other hand, had been an up-and-coming professional Grand Prix show jumper on the verge of the big time—long-listed for the Olympics. Then the degeneration in her cervical vertebrae progressed so far and so fast that riding became agony for her.
Three operations had relieved most of the pain, but she could never ride again. She seldom talked about her neck, and when she did, she joked about it. But every time a horse came into the clinic, whether it was a small pony or that Percheron mare with the foal, she would go back to the stalls on her lunch hour to pet and hug it. Her eyes were always suspiciously red afterward.
Mac and Nancy worked steadily, and as usual, once he was immersed in surgery, he lost track of everything except the creature in front of him.
He didn’t hear the door to the surgery swing open behind him. “Thought you said ten o’clock,” Mark Scott said.
“Damn!” Mac looked over his shoulder. “Give me five minutes.”
“Go on, Doctor,” Nancy said. “I can close for you.”
He nodded and stripped off his gloves and mask as he followed Mark into his office.
“Okay, what do you want money for?”
“Marriage has made you suspicious,” Mac said as he slumped into the chair across from Mark. “How’s the kid, by the way?”
“Since Sarah’s been bringing her to work, you probably see more of her than I do.” Mark’s lean face split into a smile that could only be described as beatific. “Smartest child ever born, and the prettiest, which you’d know if you ever bothered to play with her.”
“Can we change the subject? I have a proposition for you.”
Mark rubbed his hand over his hair. “What is it?”
“I want to hire two more vet techs—one surgical and one nonsurgical.”
“We have Nancy for small animals and Jack for large animals.”
“They take vacations and get the flu. They are human, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“Sure, but I never imagined you did. We job out when we need extra help. There are plenty of people out there looking to work with animals for zilch money, which is what we pay.”
“I’m aware of that,” Mac said. “I want somebody I can train from the ground up to do what I want done in the way I want it. Nancy reads my mind. I need someone else who can do the same thing.”
“The woman’s tougher than I thought if she can stand to probe into that mind of yours.”
“I want to start advertising today, put the word out among the other clinics for somebody who has some experience and wants more—somebody willing to do the scut work.”
Mark sighed. “Okay, let me run the numbers. If they work out, you got it.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. I’d appreciate your starting with a part-timer until I’m certain the practice can bear the freight of a full-time surgical trainee. Maybe Alva Jean or Nancy knows somebody who’d be interested.”
Mac stood up. “I’ll ask. Now, Nancy needs me back to remove a steel pin from a Labrador’s hip. It’s starting to push through the skin and cause an abscess.”
“Thank you for that pretty picture. Come see us sometime. I’ll tell Sarah to bug you.”
“Yeah, right.”
He worked straight through lunch, which meant Nancy did too. At four o’clock she watched him finish off the final suture in the ear of a Border collie that had misjudged the distance between his ear and the horn of the ram he was herding. The ear had been nearly torn off and was bleeding profusely when the farmer carried him in.
Now the owner came out of the waiting room twisting his John Deere cap in his hands. “He gonna be all right?”
“Fine,” Mac said. “He’s groggy, but you can take him home. He’s had antibiotics and I’ll give you some more. The sutures should dissolve in ten days or so.”
“Poor old Ben.”
“He’s not old—I’d say under two,” Mac said.
“Little over a year. No, I meant this might set him back a tad when he faces down his next ram. You have never seen a more embarrassed dog than ole Ben was when that ram tossed him ass over teakettle down the pasture.”
“Well, we saved the ear, so he won’t bear the scars of his encounter.”
“Thanks, Doc. Wouldn’t think of running livestock without my dogs. I’m too old, too lame, and they’re a damn sight smarter than I am.”
As Mac turned to go back to his office he came face-to-face with Kit Lockhart. The wind had tossed her hair, and the sunlight from the west-facing window turned her eyes to emeralds.
Coming this close to her had a visceral impact on him that unnerved him.
“Can I take Kev home?” she asked.
He stepped back from her and composed his face. “Haven’t had a chance to check him out today, but I would have heard if there was a problem,” he said, speaking slowly and letting the sun fall on his face. “Come on back.”
He noticed she held a harness with a bright orange pad that said Working Dog on it. A much smaller version of the gear he’d seen used on Seeing Eye and helper dogs.
She caught his eye. “Kevlar’s on duty all the time,” she said. “The harness is for his protection so people don’t distract him in public.”
“Does it work?”
She grinned. “Almost never. Everybody still wants to pet him.”
As he started back toward the kennel, Mabel Halliburton called out to him, “Dr. Mac? When you have a minute I need to ask you something.”
He nodded.
Kevlar had been moved from ICU to the regular recovery kennel area in the next room. He opened Kevlar’s cage and picked him up, carefully avoiding the incision along his flank. He set him down on the examining table in the center of the room, and reached for a thermometer.
Kit stood silently while he checked the dog over. Kevlar whimpered a little when Mac touched his incision, but the chart indicated that all Kevlar’s kidney tests were normal.
“No fever,” Mac said. He had raised his head to look at Kit when he spoke. “He needs to stay quiet for a while, and he probably won’t feel like doing much running around for some time.”
“When should I bring him back here?”
He wanted to tell her tomorrow—just so he could see her again. But that was stupid and juvenile. Besides, she’d never fall for it. He heard himself saying, “You’re on my way home. I’ll be happy to check him out in two or three days. I’ll give you a call…” He felt his face flame.
She laughed. “Just come by. If the Jeep’s in the driveway, I’m home. What symptoms should I worry about with Kev?”
“Worry about a sudden rise in temperature, inability to urinate, whimpering…never mind that one—Emma can tell you if he cries. If he does, get in touch with me immediately.”
“Can I use a regular thermometer?”
“Right. But tie a string around the end of it before you insert it. You don’t want it to get lost. Normal for a dog is about a hundred and one. You should worry about general malaise. I’ll send you home with a bag of special dog food, but you can get it cheaper at your local pet store.”
“One thing, Doctor. I know this is going to cost a fortune. I really hate to ask, but is there any way I can space out the payments over time? Or even do some work here at the clinic to help pay my bill? I’m strong as an ox and I’m not afraid of hard work. And I’m really good with computers.”
Now her face was the one that was flaming. He could tell she hated asking him. The Saturday surgery and the aftercare would add up to a hefty sum. She was probably on disability if her accident was work-related. Maybe she was hanging on with welfare and ADC.
He realized he had no idea what she did or how she had been hurt.
“Don’t worry about it. We’ll work something out.”
Nancy came toward them. “Little guy going home with you? Big’s going to hate that. He’s fond of him.”
“Big’s fond of everything that walks, flies or swims.”
Nancy touched Kit’s arm so that Kit looked at her. “I overheard what you two were saying.”
Kit sighed. “Money’s pretty tight. I’ll pay my bill, I promise, but sometimes I can’t pay all at once. I wish I could get a part-time job, but I really don’t even know where to look. I have to pick Emma up at school unless I make arrangements. It’s not easy finding a job where I don’t have to hear. I can’t clerk in a convenience store or anything.”
“What do you do all day now?” Nancy asked.
Kit’s blush intensified. She had that clear, pure redheaded skin that showed the movement of every corpuscle. “I…get my daughter off to school, and pick her up, do housewifely things and exercise and shop.”
“You’re probably getting bored.”
“Getting bored? I’ve been bored out of my mind for the last three months. I can only take so much daytime television, even with closed captioning. And I never did learn to knit.”
Mac realized he’d been cut out of the conversation completely. Kit could concentrate on only one person at a time. He felt annoyed that Nancy had butted in until he heard what Nancy had to say next.
“You said you could use a computer?” she asked.
“I type about a hundred words a minute, actually. You have no idea how much paperwork I had to fill out before my accident.”
“Impressive speed.”
“But anybody can use a computer.”
“Not Dr. Mac,” Nancy said. “He’s a dinosaur.”
Both women looked at him with pity. He made a face at them and pulled Kevlar closer.
“So how would you feel about scrubbing cages and mopping floors?” Nancy continued.
