from her slender shoulders. He turned to look at the map on the wall again. At all the places he could go.
The need to leave Jester and the pain that ate away at his insides like a slow-growing cancer flared white-hot. He could have left the day he’d received his lottery check, but he’d wanted to see Melinda securely established in the practice he planned to simply sign over to her so he could leave with no strings attached.
If some of the townspeople refused to accept her, though…
He pulled in a heavy sigh and ran a hand through his hair. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t stay. Jester held too many memories, too many dreams that would never be realized. Even the dingy statue on the Town Hall lawn of Caroline Peterson, atop her horse, Jester, the town’s namesake, brought echoes of laughter and the true story about how the wild horse was really tamed—not with grit and bluster, but patience and sugar.
He turned back to Melinda, absently noticing how her high temper had added an attractive flush to her already sun-kissed cheeks and a golden glow to eyes he had previously only thought of as brown. “Pretty soon they won’t have a choice if they want to keep their prize-winning hogs healthy.”
Her finely arched blond brows came together, then she stilled. “How so?”
“They can’t very well refuse to let you treat their livestock if you’re the only vet within miles.”
JACK’S WORDS hit Melinda like an unexpected blast of frigid, Montana winter air, freezing the breath in her lungs as quickly as fog to glass. While he’d been talking about leaving since the day he’d given her a spot in his practice, she didn’t want him to go.
Granted, the prospect of virtually being handed an established veterinary clinic had been the sweetest part of the deal when she’d first signed on, but even without that offer she probably would have agreed to partner with Jack because Jester was exactly the sort of place she wanted to spend her life. She could continue to live in her beloved home state of Montana, be close enough for her mother to afford to call and check up on her like she insisted on doing every Sunday, but still be far enough away from the father Melinda had never been able to please. The one thing she couldn’t change about herself was the fact she’d been born a girl.
Then there was Jack, himself.
She’d never forget walking into this office for the first time and nearly being floored by how handsome he was. He’d been sitting with the heels of his brown work boots propped on the corner of the desk, his long, muscular legs stretched out in jeans. The light chambray shirt he’d had on clung to his broad shoulders, and where he’d left it unbuttoned at his neck showed off a sprinkle of chest hair that matched the thick, slightly wavy light brown hair hanging to his collar. His position, along with the set of his square jaw and wide, sensuous mouth, exuded such confidence and animal magnetism it was a wonder she could speak at all.
But unlike her father, and even the guy she’d thought she had a future with in college, Eric Nelson, Jack had wanted to hear what she had to say, so he’d coaxed her past her nervousness and awareness of him enough that she’d landed the partnership despite her relative inexperience. She’d still had to prove herself, though, which was something she had plenty of experience with.
Even on that first day he’d mentioned leaving Jester, that because he’d lost his wife—a loss that had instantly made her ache for him—he should move on, away from Caroline’s hometown. But he’d talked so often since then of leaving without ever taking steps to do it that she’d ceased to believe he actually intended to leave. He seemed so ingrained in the town, so a part of its pulse.
She forced herself to pull in a chest-warming breath. “You say that like you mean it.”
A muscle in his jaw flexed. “This time I do.”
Melinda felt gut punched. She struggled not only to breathe, but to keep the air moving in and out steadily. Today just wasn’t her day. She should have stayed in bed with her cats asleep on her feet.
But she’d never been the type to hide from life. To temper her father’s disappointment over her being a girl, she’d pulled more than her weight around their farm while growing up, whether he noticed or not. It wasn’t her fault she was not only female, but short and quiet. Being the only kid on a farm a long way from most everything, with no one but animals to talk to, didn’t make for a sparkling conversationalist.
She couldn’t retreat and complain to her critters over this one, though. Simply venting wouldn’t make her feel better, wouldn’t allow her to accept the outcome, because, bottom line, the outcome was unacceptable to her.
Jack couldn’t leave.
She met his gorgeous green gaze, for once blocking from her mind how they exactly matched the sweetest grass in springtime, and dared to ask, “Why now? I sort of figured that when you didn’t leave two months ago after picking up your share of the lottery that you’d decided to stay.” He was such a part of Jester, she couldn’t imagine the town without him.
Just as she couldn’t imagine her life without him. She was such a fool, but she couldn’t help it. From their very first meeting she’d wanted Jack Hartman. He’d been so kind, dropping his feet from the desk and leaning his elbows on his knees to make his powerful body smaller. He’d coaxed her to talk about herself, about the kind of veterinary practice she wanted to make her life’s work.
All he’d wanted was a partner he could leave his practice to.
He shifted his gaze to the wall. “I didn’t leave after I got the money because the timing wasn’t right then.” He went back to the file cabinet and reached up to straighten the framed photo on it, his fingers lingering. It was something he usually did only when he thought no one was looking.
She usually was. He drew her gaze to him like a skittish creature is drawn to a soothing voice. She knew she shouldn’t be attracted to him, had heard all about his painful past. Jester was such a small town. Everyone knew everyone else’s business. Or at least thought they did.
Thank goodness no one knew how she felt about Jack. She’d already once had to publicly suffer for loving a man who hadn’t loved her back, ditching her ugly in front of a crowd of their friends at college when someone better came along. She could never face that sort of humiliation again. Though it was sheer torture, she was much safer loving Jack in secret.
Her romantic sufferings aside, she wouldn’t trade for anything the happiness she felt working with him, often going days without actually seeing him if one or the other of them was out on calls. But walking into the office after he’d been there, the faint smell of his no-nonsense aftershave lingering in the air and the wonderful scrawl of his handwriting on notes he’d leave her about where she was needed next never failed to make her smile. The notes were always about work, but their informality always warmed her heart, despite that he almost exclusively used his nickname for her, Mel.
That casual shortening of her name, while undoubtedly unconscious, drove home the fact that he didn’t see her as a woman. It was so stupid that the one man to have given her the thing she craved most—respect for what she did—pretty much from the start, was the one man she wanted to notice what she had to offer as a woman. She rubbed a hand over her face again. She really needed to pick a side and stick to it.
Dropping her hand to her lap, she asked, “But the timing is right now?”
Jack cleared his throat in a telling way then said, “I can’t stay.”
Melinda’s
