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The Valentine Two-Step
RaeAnne Thayne
Certainly he had been bewitched by women before, but for rancher–and single father–Matt Harte, this was the last straw! Because of his daughter's shenanigans, he'd gotten roped into planning the annual Valentine's Day dance. And his partner in crime? Why, beautiful big-city vet–and recent Salt River transplant–Ellie Webster.Who he couldn't take his eyes off. And not for lack of trying…Ellie knew that Matt Harte didn't want her in his town, let alone on the intimate dance committee of two. But this was for her daughter's sake. It wasn't like she wanted to spend all that one-on-one time with the rugged rancher, imagining what it would be like to be his partner–for real….
“You can stop looking at me like that,”
Ellie said.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re feeling sorry for the poor little foster girl playing make-believe. I did just fine.”
“I never said otherwise,” Matt said gruffly.
“You didn’t have to say a word. I can see what you’re thinking clear as day. I’ve seen pity plenty of times. But I’ve done just fine,” Ellie insisted, lifting her chin. “And I don’t care what you think about me, Harte.”
“Good. Then it won’t bother you when I tell you I think about you all the time. Or,” he finished quietly, “when I tell you that I think you’re just about the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen standing in my barn.”
Ellie’s jaw sagged open, and she stared at him, wide-eyed.
“Close your mouth, Doc,” he murmured wryly.
She snapped it shut, knowing exactly what he was going to do….
The Valentine Two-Step
RaeAnne Thayne
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
RAEANNE THAYNE
lives in a crumbling old Victorian house in northern Utah with her husband and two young children. She loves being able to write surrounded by rugged mountains and real cowboys.
To Lyndsey Thomas, for saving my life and my sanity more times than I can count!
Special thanks to Dr. Ronald Hamm, D.V.M., animal healer extraordinaire, for sharing so generously of his expertise.
Contents
Prologue
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 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Prologue
“It’s absolutely perfect.” Dylan Webster held her hands out imploringly to her best friend, Lucy Harte. “Don’t you see? It’s the only way!”
Lucy frowned in that serious way of hers, her gray eyes troubled. In the dim, dusty light inside their secret place—a hollowed-out hideaway behind the stacked hay bales of the Diamond Harte barn loft—her forehead looked all wrinkly. Kind of like a shar-pei puppy Dylan had seen once at her mom’s office back in California.
“I don’t know…” she began.
“Come on, Luce. You said it yourself. We should have been sisters, not just best friends. We were born on exactly the same day, we both love horses and despise long division and we both want to be vets like my mom when we grow up, right?”
“Well, yes, but…”
“If my mom married your dad, we really would be sisters. It would be like having a sleepover all the time. I could ride the school bus with you and everything, and I just know my mom would let me have my own horse if we lived out here on the ranch.”
Lucy nibbled her lip. “But, Dylan…”
“You want a mom of your own as much as I want a dad, don’t you? Even though you have your aunt Cassie to look after you, it’s not the same. You know it’s not.”
It was exactly the right button to push, and she knew it. Before her very eyes, Lucy sighed, and her expression went all dreamy. Dylan felt a little pinch of guilt at using her best friend’s most cherished dream to her own advantage, but she worked hard to ignore it.
Her plan would never work if she couldn’t convince Lucy how brilliant it was. Both of them had to be one-hundred-percent behind it. “We’d be sisters, Luce,” she said. “Sisters for real. Wouldn’t it be awesome?”
“Sisters.” Lucy burrowed deeper into the hay, her gray eyes closed as if, like Dylan, she was imagining family vacations and noisy Christmas mornings and never again having to miss a daddy-daughter party at school. Or in Lucy’s case, a mother-daughter party.
“It would be awesome.” That shar-pei look suddenly came back to her forehead, and she sat up. “But Dylan, why would they ever get married? I don’t think they even like each other very much.”
“Who?”
“My dad and your mom.”
Doubt came galloping back like one of Lucy’s dad’s horses after a stray dogie. Lucy was absolutely right. They didn’t like each other much. Just the other day, she heard her mom tell SueAnn that Matt Harte was a stubborn old man in a younger man’s body.
“But what a body it is,” her mom’s assistant at the clinic had replied, with a rumbly laugh like grown-ups make when they’re talking about sexy stuff. “Matt Harte and his brother have always been the most gorgeous men in town.”
Her mom had laughed, too, and she’d even turned a little bit pink, like a strawberry shake. “Shame on you. You’re a happily married woman, Sue.”
“Married doesn’t mean dead. Or crazy, for that matter.”
Her mom had scrunched up her face. “Even if he is…attractive…in a macho kind of way, a great body doesn’t make up for having the personality of an ornery bull.”
Dylan winced, remembering. Okay, so Lucy’s dad and her mom hadn’t exactly gotten along since the Websters moved to Star Valley. Still, her mom thought he was good-looking and had a great body. That had to count for something.
Dylan gave Lucy what she hoped was a reassuring smile. “They just haven’t had a chance to get to know each other.”
Lucy looked doubtful. “My dad told Aunt Cassie just last week he wouldn’t let that city quack near any of his livestock. I think he meant your mom.”
Dylan narrowed her eyes. “My mom’s not a quack.”
“I know she’s not. I think your mom’s just about the greatest vet around. I’m only telling you what he said.”
“We just have to change his mind. We have to figure out some way to push them together. Once they get to know each other, they’ll have to see that they belong together.”
“I’m not so sure.”
Dylan blew out a breath that made her auburn bangs flutter. Lucy was the best friend anybody could ask for—the best friend she’d ever had. These last three months since they’d moved here had been so great. Staying overnight at the ranch, riding Lucy’s horses, trading secrets and dreams here behind the hay bales.
They were beyond best, best, best friends, and Dylan loved her to death, but sometimes Lucy worried too much. Like about spelling tests and missing the bus and letting her desk get too messy.
She just had to convince her the idea would work. It would be so totally cool if they could pull this off. She wanted a dad in the worst way, and she figured Matt Harte—with his big hands and slow smile and kind eyes—would be absolutely perfect. Having Lucy for a sister would be like the biggest bonus she could think of.
Dylan would just have to try harder.
“It’s going to work. Trust me. I know it’s going to work.” She grabbed Lucy’s hand and squeezed it tightly. “Before you know it, we’ll be walking down the aisle wearing flowers in our hair and me and my mom will be living here all the time. See, I have this plan….”
Chapter 1
“They did what?”
Ellie Webster and the big, gruff rancher seated beside her spoke in unison. She spared a glance at Matt Harte and saw he looked like he’d just been smacked upside the head with a two-by-four.
“Oh, dear. I was afraid of this.” Sarah McKenzie gave a tiny, apologetic smile to both of them.
With her long blond hair and soft, wary brown eyes, her daughter’s teacher always made Ellie think of a skittish palomino colt, ready to lunge away at the first provocation. Now, though, she was effectively hobbled into place behind her big wooden schoolteacher’s desk. “You’re telling me you both didn’t agree to serve on the committee for the Valentine’s Day carnival?”
“Hell no.” Matt Harte looked completely horrified by the very idea of volunteering for a Valentine’s Day carnival committee—as astonished as Ellie imagined he’d be if Ms. McKenzie had just asked him to stick one of her perfectly sharpened number-two pencils in his eye.
“I’ve never even heard of the Valentine’s Day carnival until just now,” Ellie offered.
“Well, this does present a problem.” Ms. McKenzie folded her hands together on top of what looked like a grade book, slim and black and ominous.
Ellie had always hated those grade books.
Despite the fact that she couldn’t imagine any two people being more different, Ellie had a brief, unpleasant image of her own fourth-grade teacher. Prissy mouth, hair scraped back into a tight bun. Complete intolerance for a scared little girl who hid her bewildered loneliness behind defiant anger.
She pushed the unwelcome image aside.
“The girls told me you both would cochair the committee,” the teacher said. “They were most insistent that you wanted to do it.”
“You’ve got to be joking. They said we wanted to do it? I don’t know where the he—heck Lucy could have come up with such a harebrained idea.” Matt Harte sent one brief, disparaging glare in Ellie’s direction, and she stiffened. She could just imagine what he was thinking. If my perfect little Lucy has a harebrained idea in her perfect little head, it must have come from you and your flighty daughter, with your wacky California ways.
He had made it perfectly clear he couldn’t understand the instant bond their two daughters had formed when she and Dylan moved here at the beginning of the school year three months earlier. He had also made no secret of the fact that he didn’t trust her or her veterinary methods anywhere near his stock.
The really depressing thing was, Harte’s attitude seemed to be the rule, not the exception, among the local ranching community. After three months, she was no closer to breaking into their tight circle than she’d been that very first day.
“It does seem odd,” Ms. McKenzie said, and Ellie chided herself for letting her mind wander.
Right now she needed to concentrate on Dylan and this latest scrape her daughter had found herself in. Not on the past or on the big, ugly pile of bills that needed to be paid, regardless of whether or not she had any patients.
“I thought it was rather out of character for both of you,” the quiet, pretty teacher went on. “That’s why I called you both and asked you to come in this evening, so we all could try to get to the bottom of this.”
“Why would they lie about it?” Ellie asked. “I don’t understand why on earth the girls would say we volunteered for something I’ve never even heard of before now.”
The teacher shifted toward her and shrugged her shoulders inside her lacy white blouse. She made the motion look so delicate and airy that Ellie felt about as feminine as a teamster in her work jeans and flannel shirt.
“I have no idea,” she said. “I was hoping you could shed some light on it.”
“You sure it was our girls who signed up?”
Ms. McKenzie turned to the rancher with a small smile. “Absolutely positive. I don’t think I could possibly mix that pair up with any of my other students.”
“Well, there’s obviously been a mistake,” Matt said gruffly.
Ms. McKenzie was silent for a few moments, then she sighed. “That’s what I was afraid you would say. Still, the fact remains that I need two parents to cochair the committee, and your daughters obviously want you to do it. Would the two of you at least consider it?”
The rancher snorted. “You’ve got the wrong guy.”
“I don’t think so,” the teacher answered gently, as if chiding a wayward student, and Ellie wondered how she could appear to be so completely immune to the potent impact of Matt Harte.
Even with that aggravated frown over this latest scheme their daughters had cooked up, he radiated raw male appeal, with rugged, hard-hewn features, piercing blue eyes and broad shoulders. Ellie couldn’t even sit next to him without feeling the power in those leashed muscles.
But Sarah McKenzie appeared oblivious to it. She treated him with the same patience and kindness she showed the fourth graders in her class.
“I think you’d both do a wonderful job,” the teacher continued. “Since this is my first year at the school, I haven’t been to the carnival myself but I understand attendance has substantially dropped off the last two years. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what a problem this is.”
