his pie already half finished. Meri took a bite, humming in appreciation as she glanced at her sister, Ann. Dean, Ann’s husband of two months, snugged an arm around Ann’s waist, his chin nuzzling her long red hair. The expressions on their faces were serious enough to have Meri putting down her fork again.
“How bad is it?”
“Soldier didn’t look too steady when we got him back from Texas,” Ann explained. “Then we found him down this morning.”
“Oh, no.” A horse that couldn’t rise to its feet on its own strength could quickly die, because its organs wouldn’t function properly, especially its lungs. A horrible fear struck her. If that horse was dead... She abruptly sat forward again and faced Stark Burns. “What did you do?”
He set down his fork, swallowed and calmly wiped his mouth with a paper napkin before bracing his forearms on the tabletop. “I slung him,” he said.
Meri blinked. “Slung him?”
Sitting back, Stark crossed his long legs. “I brought in a hoist and a specially designed sling, got him to his feet, drew some blood for testing and set him up on IV fluids.” He crumpled the napkin in his hand and tossed it onto his plate. “It’s encephalitis, a particularly virulent strain I’ve been reading they have down in Texas.”
Meri’s heart thunked. Encephalitis was a deadly disease. She cast a desperate glance around the table. “Don’t we vaccinate for that?”
“Yes,” Rex said, “but it wouldn’t have covered this strain. This was recently brought up from Venezuela.”
Meri put her head in her hands. “This is the last thing Dad needs right now.”
“We know it, sis,” Ann agreed softly.
“And we’re all praying,” Dean said.
Burns pushed back his chair and rose. “Horse’ll need tending through the night for a while.”
Rex nodded. “We’ll take turns.”
Stark Burns shook his dark head. “Nope. The possibility of pneumonia is too great when a horse has been down. I’ll be staying nights.”
“Let us know if you need anything,” Callie said as Burns’s long legs carried him toward the hallway flanking the back staircase.
“I’m used to this,” he assured her. “I’ll just run back to my place for some gear. See y’all in the morning.”
Meri narrowed her eyes as he disappeared from view. She would be keeping a very close watch on him. Maybe he hadn’t put down Soldier. Yet. But neither would he—if she could help it—let her father’s horse die. The others trusted Dr. Burns implicitly, but they had no medical training. She knew enough to assess the quality of his treatment, and she would do so whether he liked it or not.
* * *
Shoving a package of clean paper coveralls into his kit, Stark glanced around the Spartan interior of the small room where he slept most nights, trying to think if he’d forgotten anything. Exhaustion tugged at him, but when did it not? Pushing it aside, he ticked off supplies in his head, listing medications and equipment bundles, his hands gliding over each as he recalled them. The air mattress and sleeping bag were kept in the truck. Deciding that he could use a clean pair of socks, he reached into a drawer. His hand struck the small framed photo that he could not bear to display or resist looking at once he’d touched it.
The smiles always shocked him, especially his own, but there he was, tossing his daughter over his shoulder like a sack of grain, while she squealed and her mother laughed. Belinda’s ninth birthday. Such a happy day. He could almost hear her giggles.
Don’t drop me, Daddy! Don’t drop me!
Hold still then, Belindaworm. Mommy, give her that birthday spanking, and be sure she gets one to grow on.
Except there had been no spanking, and she hadn’t grown. It had been a joke, and less than five months later, they’d both been dead.
Words he couldn’t forget rang through his mind.
I just want to watch this football game. Then we’ll go.
Whatever you think best, sweetheart. We’ll leave whenever you’re ready.
Ten minutes earlier. If they’d just left ten minutes earlier. The grief, nearly four years old now, swamped him, guilt digging its claws deep.
He swiped his thumb over his daughter’s face. He’d studied genetics in college. Dark eyes and hair were supposed to be dominant, but Bel had inherited his dark hair and her mother’s sky-blue eyes. His blonde, blue-eyed wife had been all things lovely, but his daughter’s combination of light and dark had fascinated him.
He shoved the picture back into the drawer and closed it, snagging his kit from the narrow bed as he whirled away and left the room.
Exhaustion pulled at him, so he took three cans of energy drink from the refrigerator in the dispensary. He wouldn’t get much sleep tonight, but he rarely slept well even when he worked himself to the point of exhaustion. On the other hand, only work and slumber let him escape the emptiness, grief and guilt.
He drove from his place on the edge of War Bonnet back to Straight Arrow Ranch. The Billings place was by far the biggest concern in the area. Two square miles in size and well run, the ranch apparently turned a good profit. Though the comfortable, sprawling old house couldn’t hold a candle to the home near Ponca City that Stark had walked away from after the deaths of his family, he couldn’t have gone back. He and his wife, Catherine, had built that place, pouring their hearts into every brick, board and stone. He never wanted to see it again.
Parking the truck to the side of the red-dirt road that separated the Straight Arrow home from the outbuildings, Stark shouldered his kit and automatically reached for his hat. Thinking better of that, he left the wide-brimmed black felt on the seat and got out.
Cool autumn air washed over him as he reached into the back for his bedroll. He hoisted it onto his shoulder, curling his arm around it, and trudged toward the stables, choosing the lit path on the backside of the building. Coming to the welded metal corral fence, he shoved his backpack and bedroll through the lower rungs and onto the ground, then climbed over and dropped down. He shouldered his gear again before going inside the darkened building. The light at the end of the long row outlined the shapely feminine form standing at Soldier’s drooping head.
Meredith Billings was the very last person Stark wanted to see tonight. In fact, she was the last person he wanted to see most days. Those accusatory blue eyes and her obvious disdain pierced him clear through every time. Sighing, he started forward, listening to half-a-dozen horses blow and shift as he walked down the long aisle. She waited, petting the butternut sorrel’s neck and casting glances into the dark as Stark drew closer.
He didn’t say a word, mostly because he knew it needled her, but partly because this was the first time she’d approached him in private. She obviously had something on her mind. He waited for her to come to the point as he carefully stowed his gear, placing the medical kit atop a nearby blue plastic barrel, then unrolling the bedding behind the open gate of the stall. Because the equipment to hoist a downed horse required a minimum of nine feet in clearance, they’d had to rig it from the stable’s central beam, which meant Soldier actually stood, supported by the sling,
