from afar like some lovestruck teenager wasn’t the same as knowing the guy. He could be a real louse with great eyes and a bone-melting smile. She may have given him every attribute possible in her fantasies, but that didn’t mean he could live up to any of them.
“You’re driving yourself nuts, you know,” she said as she bent down and fluffed the ancient pillows on the sturdy but relentlessly ugly brown couch in the living room of the small apartment above the office.
“Hannah? Talking to yourself again? I can think of something more productive, like making my dinner.”
“Dad!” Hannah exclaimed, whirling to face her father and forgetting that she was wearing her only pair of heels. Her ankle twisted beneath her and she sat down on the couch with an inelegant thump. “I—I didn’t think you’d be home this early.”
Dr. Hugo Clark was a big man in every way. Six feet tall, he weighed over three hundred pounds, all of which had once been composed of very impressive muscle. That muscle had gone soft a few years ago, but Hannah didn’t see that. To her, Hugo Clark was still the great big man with the disapproving eyes and disappointed expression—at least it was disappointed every time he looked at Hannah, measured Hannah and found her wanting.
“Obviously not,” he said, throwing his fleece-lined plaid jacket on a chair. He never hung up his coat, or anything else. That was woman’s work. “What the hell is that on your mouth?”
Hannah raised a hand to her lips. “Lipstick?”
“You look like a tart. Just like your mother before you. All those years of school, just to make a dead set at some man. Total waste, educating a female, and I always said so. That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? That war paint couldn’t be for the animals downstairs. And for God’s sake, put something on. I can damn near see your breasts.”
Hannah squeezed her eyes shut even as she instinctively pressed her hands to her chest, hiding herself from her father’s condemning eyes and blunt speech. Twenty-eight, she reminded herself silently. You’re twenty-eight. You’re a trained, licensed vet. You’re not little Hannah anymore. Don’t let him do this to you.
It didn’t work. Pep talks weren’t Hannah’s forte, and her father had mastered the art of the cutting remark, the insulting put-down. Ever since her mother had run away when she was a child, Hugo Clark had worked on making sure his daughter wouldn’t turn into the same flighty creature Ellen Clark had been.
Twenty-eight years also meant twenty-eight years of being told she was worth nothing, would never be worth anything; told she was stupid and clumsy and unattractive, and probably immoral thanks to her mother’s blood running in her veins.
Worse, she was small like Ellen, and blond like Ellen. If Hugo Clark wanted a whipping boy to take his frustration and hate out on, he’d found it in his daughter, in spades.
Hannah stood up, one hand still pressed to her breast. “I really thought you wouldn’t be home until very late, or even tomorrow. There are…there are some cold cuts in the refrigerator,” she said, heading for the kitchen. “And soup. I made soup yesterday. Let me heat it up for you, make you a sandwich.”
“A sandwich? You call that a meal? Never mind, I’ll go out. I should have known I couldn’t count on you. Never could, never will. Just thank God I called my service and there were no emergencies while I was gone, or you would have screwed that up, too. I can’t understand it. I’ve taught you and taught you to remember your responsibilities, and what do I get? A cold supper and my own daughter tarted up to go out barhopping.”
“There was an emergency,” Hannah said, hoping to stop Hugo before he could launch into another of his long harangues about how much she reminded him of her worthless mother. “Out at The Desert Star. Jabbar’s last foal, a breech birth. Alex Coleman phoned up here on our private line, so the service didn’t know about it.”
“Damn!” Hugo exploded, slamming one beefy fist into his palm. “Lost them both, I’ll bet.”
“No, sir,” Hannah said. At times like these, it was always better to address her father as “sir.”
Her father looked at her curiously. “They handled it on their own?”
“No, sir. I did it. Alex Coleman phoned and I went out, delivered the foal. A beautiful little animal, and probably the next Desert Rose stud.”
“You…you handled it?” Hugo’s black-bean eyes widened in disbelief.
She hadn’t pleased him. Hannah could tell by the look in his eyes, by the set of his body as he stood in front of her, that she had done the very opposite of pleasing him. “I’ll get the soup started,” she said, turning for the kitchen once more.
“The hell you will. I’m going out,” he said, grabbing his jacket and heading for the door. “And you’d better be home by midnight, girlie-girl, or I’m throwing the dead bolt. You hear me?”
“I hear you, sir,” Hannah said, subsiding onto the couch once more, flinching only slightly as the door slammed and she could hear her father’s heavy tread on the stairs.
She shouldn’t have come back. She should have graduated and taken one of the dozen positions offered her, from Texas to Maine. She’d graduated at the top of her class; her options had been almost limitless.
Yet she had come home to work with her father, to help him. To prove to her father that she wasn’t worthless, that she was a good veterinarian, a competent doctor. To face him as an adult, maybe even as an equal, and prove to him—and to herself—that his lifelong assessment of her had been wrong.
“I could probably give a shrink enough ammunition to have me on the couch for the next five years,” she told herself as she stood up, sighed and walked back to her bedroom to put on the white blouse.
ALEX PARKED HIS four-wheel drive next to the SUV Hannah had driven out to The Desert Rose, noticing that she’d had it washed since that afternoon. An odd thing to do, considering it wasn’t quite spring yet, and cold, complete with rainy weather and muddy roads. His own vehicle had a crust of mud nearly up to the bottom of the windows, and he doubted he would do much more about it for the next few weeks than let nature give it an occasional bath.
Then again, Hannah was Hugo Clark’s daughter, and the man was a stickler for some things. Obviously a clean vehicle was one of them, although the man’s personal appearance wasn’t exactly out of GQ. Big and strong had softened to large and sloppy the past seven to ten years, about the same length of time Hannah had been away at school and he’d been left alone, his wife having taken off many years before that, heading for brighter lights and a bigger city.
“And away from Hugo,” Alex added out loud, shaking his head. Hugo Clark was one hell of a vet, the best around, but he had all the personality of a bear with a thorn in his paw.
Alex had never thought about it before, but now he found himself wondering what it must have been like for Hannah to grow up, motherless, with Hugo Clark for a father. It couldn’t have been much fun.
He knew that he and his brothers had been lucky. Uncle Randy and Aunt Vi had raised them as if they were their own, and even as they all missed their biological parents, none of them could ever say they were neglected or left hungry for love.
Alex looked at the dark two-story building in front of him; the boxlike veterinary office and the small apartment on the second floor. Quite a difference
