Sun Kissed (21 page)

“Have you ever seen water so clear?”

Samantha was so distracted by the warmth of his fingers curled around hers that she only dimly registered their surroundings.

“Look at that trout! Isn’t he a whopper?”

She gave herself a hard mental shake and leaned forward to see. Just then Max gamboled up onto the boulder, bumping against the backs of her legs. Just like that, off she went. Still holding her hand, Tucker made a gallant attempt to save her from falling, but his riding boots slipped on the rock, he lost his footing, and both of them plunged willy-nilly into the water, Samantha doing a belly flop, Tucker landing butt-first.

Water went up Samantha’s nose and down her throat. She shot to the surface, coughing, sputtering, and gasping for breath. About three feet away, Tucker, minus his Stetson, treaded water, his hair flattened like a skullcap and droplets glistening on his dark eyelashes. Max barked excitedly from the rocks, clearly delighted that his human companions had finally decided to have a little fun.

“Are you all right?” Tucker asked.

Just then catching her breath, Samantha managed to croak, “Fine, I think, except that I’m sinking.”

Her boots were full of water and pulled at her feet like cement blocks. Thrashing with her arms, she tried to swim toward the bank, but she’d never been a strong swimmer and felt herself going under despite all her efforts. Just as the water reached her mouth, Tucker hooked
a strong arm around her waist, lifted her up, and swam with her toward shore.

When he could finally touch bottom, he said, “No worries, honey. I’ve got you.”

Still in over her head, Samantha clung to his neck as he pushed closer to shore. Moments later he deposited her on the bank, his arm still clenched around her waist. For a moment that seemed to last an eternity, she stood pressed full-length against him, unable to drag her gaze from his. She felt his heat and the hard planes of his body. Everything within her felt as if it were melting. Her heart pounded like a trip-hammer, and her breath came in shallow, jagged bursts. She was sure he meant to kiss her, and if he did, she would be in big trouble. He filled her with physical yearning that she’d never experienced with Steve. It was madness. She knew it was madness. But right then clear thinking eluded her.

Tucker broke the spell by releasing her. Running his palms over his hair to rid it of water, he blinked as if he’d been poleaxed. He looked downstream for a long moment, then directed a burning glare at his barking dog. “Hang it, Max, that hat cost me almost two hundred dollars. Now it’ll end up in the Pacific Ocean! One of these days I’m going to wring your damned fool neck.”

Still shaken by the near occasion of intimacy, Samantha released a tremulous laugh. “Oh, now, he didn’t mean to do it. He’s just big and clumsy.”

“And dumb.”

She sat on a rock to tug off her boots and pour out the water. “He isn’t dumb. I remember reading somewhere that rottweilers, border collies, and Australian shepherds
are the three smartest breeds.” She stuffed her feet back into her boots and looked up at him. “Don’t be mad. How did you end up with a rottweiler, anyway? Most vets I know have herd dogs.”

“Max is a herd dog. He just herded us straight off that rock into the river, didn’t he?”

Samantha burst out laughing again, the sensual tension that had sprung up between them moments before almost forgotten. Because they were already wet, they spent the remainder of their respite at the river romping with Max in the shallows, throwing sticks for him to fetch, and trying to help him catch minnows. They were no more successful at fishing than the canine had been.

When they were finally back in the truck, Samantha said, “Thank you, Tucker. This has been fun.”

He flashed her a dazzling grin. “It was my pleasure.”

A few mornings later Tucker brought in a giant breakfast burrito for their first meal of the day, which he divided with a scalpel and served up on paper towels. Samantha had grown accustomed to joining him for takeout meals at his desk and sat across from him without invitation. As they chewed food and sipped steaming mugs of coffee, they each broke off pieces of burrito for Max, who clearly considered himself deserving of his share.

When the meal was almost finished, Tucker looked Samantha dead in the eye, assumed a solemn expression, and said, “You can take Tabasco home today.”

Samantha almost choked on a bit of ham. “What?”

His firm mouth twitched at one corner. “His levels have dropped again. He’s not out of the woods yet. I
won’t say that. But he’s come far enough to be off the fluids and monitors. You can take your baby home.”

The news filled Samantha with gladness but also with a strange, inexplicable sense of loss. Her time with Tucker was almost over. Despite all her efforts not to, she’d come to enjoy being with him, maybe even to need being with him. Sharing simple meals like this one. Watching him as he pored over medical tomes. Working beside him as he treated Tabasco. Once she returned to the ranch, she’d see him only briefly when he came out to check on her horse. She wasn’t sure why that made her so sad, only that it did, and the realization made her feel all mixed-up inside.

She carefully set down her cup of coffee, removed the paper napkin from her lap, and pushed to her feet. She couldn’t speak past the huge lump that had come into her throat. Before she embarrassed herself, she fled the office and ran to the bathroom, the only place in the clinic where she could hide behind a locked door.

Once there, she sat on the commode, still struggling against tears, her emotions in such a tangle that she couldn’t make sense of them. She was delighted that Tabasco had improved enough to go home. She was absolutely
overjoyed
, in fact. For days on end she’d spent nearly every moment frantically praying he wouldn’t die. So why did she feel this overpowering urge to cry? It was silly. No, more than silly, it was
stupid.

Tucker tried to concentrate on his work. Tabasco wasn’t the only sick horse in his clinic, after all. He had a mare with colic and had to periodically put her on a
stomach pump to infuse her belly with special fluids in an attempt to break up the blockage in her upper intestine. He also had two post-ops, one who’d needed a tendon repair and another who’d gotten tangled in barbed wire, cutting up its legs.

As Tucker paced the hall, he told himself he couldn’t, absolutely
couldn’t
, linger outside the restroom, wondering if Samantha was all right. But she’d been in there for thirty minutes. He wondered if she was crying and could only shake his head at the thought. He’d delivered good news. He had expected her to jump up and down with joy. Instead she’d turned white as a sheet.

Females. He would never understand them. His mother, his sister, and all his brothers’ wives occasionally baffled him to the point where he could only scratch his head. They didn’t see the world the way men did; that was for damned sure.

As Tucker worked with the colicky mare, he wondered who’d come up with the phrase “the war between the sexes.” It wasn’t a battle to be waged, but a mystery to be solved, and he had a feeling few men succeeded at the task.

Maybe that was a good thing. If the world were made up of only left-brain thinkers, there might be no poetry or great pieces of art or delicate china, and Tucker needed beautiful things in his life almost as much as he did the analytical and scientific.

Riley, the senior tech, came into the stall where Tucker was working. He hemmed and hawed for a moment, and then he finally said, “Ms. Harrigan has been in the john for over half an hour. I need to take a leak.”

Tucker looked up from where he was crouched near the mare. “You’ve got the same equipment I do, Riley. Step out behind the building.”

“What if someone sees me?”

“If you’re not smart enough to make sure no one sees you, what are you doing working as a tech in my clinic?”

Riley rolled his eyes but nevertheless exited the building, leaving Tucker to regret almost snapping the man’s head off. Still, it was no big deal that the restroom had been occupied for thirty minutes. No female techs were working a shift, and Samantha surely deserved the same consideration that she’d so readily shown to others.

Tucker couldn’t count the times he’d heard her ask everyone in the building if they needed to use the facility before she grabbed a quick shower. He’d also heard her offer to help the technicians with the more menial tasks. She’d cleaned stalls, forked hay, washed out water troughs, assisted with feedings, and all but taken over the coffee counter, making sure a fresh pot of java was always available and sometimes even making the rounds with cups filled to the brim, fixed just as each technician liked it.

If she wanted to hog the restroom for a few minutes, she’d earned the privilege.

Tucker finished what he was doing and descended on the john. But when he stood in front of the door, he couldn’t bring himself to knock. She would come out when she was ready. All she needed was a little time away from prying eyes, and he respected that.

Some news flash that was. He’d come to respect almost everything about her.

He remembered coming upon her in the middle of the night as she knelt in the straw by her cot, saying a rosary. He recalled walking in another time to find her sharing that same narrow cot with Max, her slender body curled around the dog’s massive shape to make room for two. He thought of the many times over the last few days that she’d shared her food with the silly dog as well, one bite for herself, one bite for Max, each offering followed by a light pat on the rottweiler’s broad head.

She was a gentle creature, his Samantha, and as sweet as they came. She loved animals with a depth and constancy that made him almost jealous, because he’d developed a yearning to have her look at him that way.

I’m in love with her
. It hit him like a brick between the eyes. After all these years it had finally happened. For the life of him, he couldn’t say how, exactly. It sure as hell hadn’t gone according to his plan, which involved months of dating and lots of romantic evenings so he could try a woman on for size. He’d never even kissed Samantha, let alone been intimate with her. And they’d never had a long conversation, sharing their thoughts on life, either. He’d always considered that to be an absolute must. You had to know a person before you could love her, right?

Only he’d fallen for her anyway. The soft curve of her lips right before she smiled. The pain in her lovely brown eyes when her heart was breaking. The way she counted off Hail Marys on her fingertips when she was too busy to sit in the corner with her beads. The light, gentle way she patted Max’s head and the soft murmur of her voice.

He supposed he did know her, in a way, perhaps better than he might have come to know her in a dating situation.
He’d seen her in good moments and in bad, and probably at her worst a few times as well. He knew she looked just as pretty with straw in her hair as she did coming fresh from the clinic shower with her clothes stuck to her damp skin and long curls hanging in wet ribbons over her shoulders. He had also come to understand on a purely emotional level that had nothing to do with reason or logic that she was everything he’d ever wanted in a woman.

Only where was the magic? Tucker had watched all his brothers fall in love, and to a man, they’d gone around in happy dazes with goofy grins on their faces, barely hearing when they were spoken to and replying in fits and starts, their minds clearly elsewhere. Tucker didn’t have an urge to grin. Instead he felt as if his stomach were a wet rag being wrung out by brutal fists.

She didn’t love him back. That was the bottom line. Sometimes he wasn’t even sure if she saw him as a man. He was just Tucker Coulter, the vet. And whenever he dared to step over that invisible line, trying to take their relationship to a deeper level, she withdrew from him. That day by the river when he’d almost kissed her, she’d gone as tense as a coiled spring.

When forty-five minutes had passed, Tucker returned to the restroom door and rapped his knuckles on the wood.

“Samantha, are you all right?”

To his surprise, the door swung open, and the next thing he knew his arms were full of delicious feminine softness that smelled faintly of dog because she’d shared her bed with Max again last night.

“Thank you, Tucker,” she whispered fiercely against his collarbone. “Thank you so much for all that you’ve done.”

At the back of Tucker’s mind, he knew and accepted that she clung to him only out of gratitude. But another part of him grabbed hold of the moment, and he gathered her close against him, acutely aware of how she felt in his arms.
Right, absolutely right.
He wanted the seconds to last forever. He wanted to believe that she felt some small measure of affection for him.

Then she drew away, and the moment was gone. Rubbing beneath tear-swollen eyes with quivering fingertips, she smiled tremulously up at him. “I’m sorry. I feel like an idiot. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

There was nothing wrong with her, not as far as he could see, but that was a thought better left unspoken.

“Tabasco isn’t completely out of the woods,” he reminded her. “I just think he’s strong enough to go home now.”

She nodded that she understood, but Tucker wasn’t sure she heard him. He could only hope that she wasn’t setting herself up for a devastating disappointment.