Hannah looked at him. Tall, dark and handsome is as tall, dark and handsome does, and at the moment Alex Coleman wasn’t doing it for her at all. Which was strange, because she’d spent the past sixteen years of her life dragging around a crush on the man that probably matched the size of Texas and parts of Oklahoma. Not that he ever noticed. Not that he ever would notice.
Shaking herself back to attention, Hannah pulled on tight latex gloves and examined the mare, being careful to avoid the animal’s sharp hooves as she confirmed Alex’s own conclusion. “Breech, and too late to turn her,” she said, gathering her instruments for what would be a difficult birth.
There were alternatives. Cesarean, for one, but even that was risky, as one of the foal’s legs was already partly out of the birth canal. There was nothing else to do but reach in, find the other leg and pull like hell. Not exactly fancy, but the last resort usually isn’t.
“Can you do it?” Alex asked, obviously figuring out what she planned to do.
“I can do it,” she muttered from between her clenched teeth as she literally reached inside the mare, all the way up past her elbows. “Got it!” she said after long moments of fruitless searching, grabbing onto the foal’s legs, praying the birth canal had softened and widened enough to allow a safe passage for the foal.
“Small foal, thank God,” she said, pressing her head against the mare’s flank as she eased the second leg beside the first and waited for the next contraction. “Probably early?”
“Yes, early,” Alex said, soothing the mare. “She’s rolling her eyes again.”
“Contraction coming. Hold on, here we go,” Hannah said, then took a deep breath. She felt as if her arms were being crushed in a vise, as the mare tried to expel the foal and her arms from its body. She had a moment to rethink the gloves, as she was afraid she might end up losing one of them inside the mare.
“Watch the spine,” Alex warned.
“I…know…that,” Hannah gasped, for the first time worried that her strength wouldn’t be enough. But she’d gotten both back legs clear of the birth canal, and that was the biggest trick. One more contraction ought to do it. “Come on, little lady,” she crooned. “Come on and give us another push. You can do it.”
Her hands and arms still inside the horse, Hannah closed her eyes and visualized the drawings in one of her textbooks. Hands here. Position the foal, trying to turn it so the spine isn’t against the mother’s spine. Be careful of the cord. Wait for the contraction. Pull. Pull.
“Here it comes!” she shouted as the mare’s womb convulsed again and the animal screamed in pain. Half cradling, half turning and pulling, Hannah breathed a silent prayer and, moments later, felt the foal slip into the world. Ass backwards, but here just the same.
“Keep holding her head while I check both her and the foal,” Hannah ordered Alex, deftly dealing with the aftermath of the violent birth.
“What is it? Is it a mare?”
Hannah sneaked a quick look as the foal, typically light, as an Arabian destined to be coal-black looked at birth. “Nope. You’ve got yourself a new stud, Mr. Coleman, and he’s a beauty. Small, but a beauty. Oh, just look at that face! A perfect dish shape. A real champion!”
Within minutes, Khalahari was tending to her foal, both of them standing in the stall, the foal wobbly on his legs but already trying to nurse, and Hannah was stripping off her gloves, trying not to shake. It had been her first breech birth, not that she’d admit as much to Alex Coleman.
“Thank you,” he said as they left the stall, on their way to the large washtub at the other end of the stable. “I’m sorry I was so rough on you, but…well…”
“You thought how could klutzy Hannah Clark know anything about birthing a baby,” she completed for him as he turned on the water and handed her the soap, which she dropped, so that it clunked heavily in the bottom of the metal washtub.
Crisis over, klutziness back. It figured.
“Yeah, something like that,” Alex said, picking up the bar of soap and handing it to her again. “Anyway, I apologize. You did a terrific job.”
“I heard about this foal from my dad,” she told him, concentrating on soaping her hands. “It’s Jabbar’s, isn’t it? The original unplanned pedigree, registered pregnancy.”
“A gift from the Fates,” Alex said, handing Hannah a clean towel. “Desert Rose Khalid. That means—”
“Eternal. Yes, I know. It’s a lovely name.”
Alex tipped his head to one side, looked at her quizzically. “Arabic is one of the classes at the veterinary school?”
“Not really,” Hannah answered, avoiding his smile, which had the power to reduce her to a puddle of insecurities and unnamed desires. “Arabians are of special interest to me, because there are so many stables around the area, of course, but also personally. They’re just such beautiful, graceful animals.”
And an Arabian horse never looked better than when Alex Coleman sat one in the costume class of a competition, wearing snow-white Arab costume banded in gold, with a snow-white kaffiyeh on his head, ropes of gold weaving forming the agal that held the headdress in place.
The focus of such an event should still be the mount, the decorative bridle and other trappings, the proud lift of head and tail. But not when any of the Coleman boys were in the saddle, dressed in their ceremonial costumes. Then all eyes were on the dark-haired, dark-eyed men, their uniquely kinglike posture and ease, the deep golden tan of their skin against their kaffiyehs, the almost sensual thrill that filled the air when one of them rode into the ring.
Yes, all three were magnificent, but it had been Alex who had caught Hannah’s attention, and dreams, ever since she’d stood on the sidelines sixteen years ago, at the impressionable age of twelve, and knew that she had just lost her heart to the unattainable.
“Hannah? Hannah, are you listening to me?”
She shook herself out of her dream, rather surprised to see Alex standing in front of her in a deep brown corduroy jacket and skintight jeans. “Huh?” she said, and then blushed to the roots of her honey-blond hair.
“I said, I want to apologize again, and thank you. You came through like gangbusters, totally calm and professional.”
“You say that as if you still don’t believe it,” Hannah remarked, carefully stepping around a fallen rake, mentally seeing herself stepping on the tines so that the handle snapped upward and knocked her cold. Proud of herself, she turned her head to say something else to Alex—she wasn’t sure quite what—and felt her flannel shirt snag on a nail, ripping the sleeve as she instinctively pulled herself free. “Oh, God.”
Alex was biting his bottom lip, manfully trying not to laugh at her, she supposed.
“That’s the nail where we usually hang the rake, using the hole in the handle.”
“Yeah, figures,” she answered, her cheeks so hot they were stinging her eyes. Her stupid deer-in-headlights, too-big baby-blue eyes. Blond hair, blue eyes, and not quite five feet and three inches of too-slender body. All in all, at the ripe old age of twenty-eight, she felt
