bad right now, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. Don’t tell my mom.”
“Tell her what?” Heather teased, adding a wink. So far, she’d given him the impression that she was a fairly serious person. Coming from her, the playful gesture seemed out of place, but he welcomed the glimpse of her lighter side. Maybe the classy vet wasn’t so prim and proper, after all. “I’m assuming this kind of thing happens a lot on a farm. Do you have a first aid kit?”
“Behind the seat.”
She climbed up the metal steps and unhooked the faded red case that hung from a set of rusty hooks. When she rejoined him, she opened it and eyed the scant contents with a doubtful expression. Picking up a tube of antibacterial ointment, she squinted at it before giving him a chiding look. “This expired five years ago.”
“Huh. How ’bout that?” That made her glare, and he held up his uninjured hand in a placating gesture. “Don’t blame me. Most of the time, I just wrap a bandanna around something like this and keep on working.”
“It’s a wonder you’ve never gotten an infection. Or tetanus,” she added ominously, eyeing the bleeding gashes on his hand.
“I got my shot.”
Again with the suspicious stare. “When?”
He had no idea. His years drifted from season to season, dictated more by what was going on around the farm than by the calendar. When you spent most of your life waking with the sun and finishing in the glare of tractor headlights, it was easy to lose track of pretty much everything else. To his mind, one of the best inventions ever was the automated payment system. Ever since Bekah had walked him through covering his handful of bills that way, he hadn’t missed a single payment. It was awesome.
“That’s what I thought,” Heather continued, adding a sigh that made it clear he wasn’t the first person she’d run across who ignored what she considered to be the important things. Glancing around, she stopped when she noticed something in the distance. “Is that a house?”
“Yeah, it’s mine. Why?”
“I don’t suppose you have something there to get this cleaned up properly?”
“’Course I do,” he retorted. “I’m not a moron.”
“Good. We’ll do what we can there and then you should get to the nearest clinic. You really need to have that looked at by a doctor.”
“You’re a doctor.”
“A people doctor,” she corrected him in a clipped, don’t-mess-with-me tone. “I can do the basics, but this needs to be stitched, and you need a specialist for that. You shouldn’t take injuries like this lightly, Josh. They can get worse in a hurry.”
Normally, he hated being lectured as if he were a troublesome child, but this one came in a voice laced with genuine concern. Realizing that this compassionate woman meant well, he put aside his aversion to being told what to do and nodded. “Okay, but that storm’s coming in real fast, and I wanna finish plowing this section before it starts raining. I’ll go into town to see Doc Sheppard when I’m finished.”
“You’ll go now,” she insisted, glowering at him. When he glowered back, she gave him a wry smile. “Or I’ll tell your mom.”
“You haven’t even met her yet.”
“Imagine how awkward that would be for all of us. ‘Hello, Mrs. Kinley, nice to meet you. By the way, your youngest son is a stubborn mule who cares more about working over a few extra acres than taking care of his health. I just thought you’d like to know.’”
“All right, I get it. Man, you’re a pain,” he added as he got to his feet and glared down at her.
“That won’t work on me, country boy,” she informed him airily as she rose to stand. “I’ve seen the business end of an angry bull up close, so you don’t scare me.”
Brushing past him, she started off at a pace quick enough that he had to hurry to catch up. Her legs were a lot shorter than his, so it took him only a few strides. “Why was he mad?”
“Who?”
“The bull,” Josh pressed. “Was he mad at you or someone else?”
“Some genius trucked his favorite cow off to another farm while he was watching. They’d been together for years, and he didn’t appreciate them taking her away from him.”
Her perception of the animal’s emotions impressed him. Petite as she was, mothering a helpless kitten had seemed like a natural fit. It should have been a real stretch for him to picture her facing down a raging bull, but for some reason he had no trouble envisioning it. Maybe it was the spunky attitude she’d shown, or her no-nonsense approach to his injury.
Or maybe it was something else completely. Since he’d never met anyone like Heather, he had no frame of reference to enable him to make that kind of judgment. So he did what he usually did when he was perplexed by an unanswerable question. Put it out of his mind and moved on.
“How are the kittens doing?”
“The bigger ones seem comfortable enough, but the tiniest one worries me. She doesn’t seem to feel connected to them at all.”
“Maybe she’s not.” Heather gave him a quizzical look, and he explained. “This time of year, there’re lots of new kittens around, either in people’s outbuildings or the woods. The mothers instinctively move them from spot to spot, and it’s not uncommon for one of them to get hit. If the kittens are out in the open, someone will bring them in to the center like Sierra did today.”
“Do you have a lot of barn cats on the farm?”
“About a dozen, I’d guess. They’re great for rodent control, so we’re happy to have ’em.”
“Are they catchable?”
“I guess we could figure out a way to get ahold of them,” he replied. “Why?”
“If we neuter them and give them some basic vaccines, they won’t add to the feral population, and the ones you have won’t pass along any nasty diseases.”
“Huh. I never thought of that.”
“Most people don’t,” she commented sadly. “In rural towns like this, you don’t even notice wild cats because there are so many places for them to hide. But many of them are sick, and they keep adding to their numbers until the health of the entire population is compromised. You don’t hear anything about it until a rabid stray bites a person, and then it’s all over the news for a few days before some other story takes over.”
The bitterness in her tone got his attention more than the words. “It sounds like you’ve been up on this soapbox before.”
“For all the good it’s done,” she said bitterly. “The last clinic I worked at during my residency, they called me the ‘crazy cat lady,’ and not in a nice way.”
“Gave them a reason to ignore you.”
“Yes,” she acknowledged with
