Don't Mess With Texans

Don't Mess With Texans
Peggy Nicholson

By the Year 2000: SATISFACTION!What have you resolved to do by the year 2000?Susannah Mack: The tabloids call her the most spiteful woman in America! Not only that–she's inadvertently destroyed R. D. Taggart's life in what appears to be nothing but a vendetta against her ex.R. D. Taggart: He's a veterinarian who's finally put his past behind him. But then he gets caught in the cross fire between a blue-eyed Texas hellcat and her vindictive ex-husband.Tag plans on doing whatever it takes to collect on his damages and somehow resurrect his reputation. But first he has to find Susannah–the beautiful woman who's stolen his life, his heart and his peace of mind.Don't Mess with Texans is a madcap caper about love, marriage and…getting satisfaction!

“She pay with cash or check?” (#u36592cd4-87d2-53a7-87c2-a67b0a4ac535)Letter to Reader (#uc6f0d399-561b-521c-b56a-c3f24e67bceb)Title Page (#u6b03c2b6-3ced-5873-8770-4f3d0613dfd3)Dedication (#uc8f325a7-7e70-544b-b4d0-c0ca61ee6ea3)CHAPTER ONE (#ud336f803-e3f2-576a-861d-663275c33515)CHAPTER TWO (#u257564b4-6008-5d4c-b496-413412c5d150)CHAPTER THREE (#u38b789ba-f664-5618-8eab-c5da3cf01da9)CHAPTER FOUR (#ucd941778-8643-56f9-bd95-be37dcc89cb5)CHAPTER FIVE (#u37d7404f-8ac4-5c70-8a2d-d1428b9a7af9)CHAPTER SIX (#ue1bc2eb5-660d-5bb0-beeb-0e61a8cd0fbe)CHAPTER SEVEN (#uc845d903-af93-505e-b82b-83a1ba641ae3)CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY SIX (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

“She pay with cash or check?”

“Something better, Doc. She said she was fresh out of cash.” Carol Anne plucked something shiny from a drawer and dropped the tiny object into his palm. “Here’s how she paid. She said to send her the change care of this address—” she waved a piece of paper at him “—once we’ve hocked it.”

Tag lifted the ring to the light “A diamond!”

“If you believe that, Doc.... It’ll be a zircon, I guarantee, worth fifty if we’re lucky.”

They both looked up as headlights swept the room, followed by a second pair, then a third. Brakes yelped in the parking lot Doors slammed.

As Tag threw open the door to the clinic, another car wheeled in off the road.... No, this was a van. With the logo of the local TV station emblazoned along its side. It was a media frenzy. With its prey in sight.

“Dr. Taggart! Why did you perform unauthorized surgery on the finest racing sire ever bred in America?” Voices receded into the yammering din of white noise. Somewhere, Susannah Mack was laughing at him. laughing at him while his life ended up in ruins.

“No comment” He’d save his comments and his own questions for the one woman who could answer them. He gazed into the cameras, because he knew she’d be watching. Read it in my eyes, Susannah. You can run. You can bide. But I’m gonna get you, if it’s the last thing I do!

Dear Reader,

“She’s from Texas,” my oldest friends roll their eyes and say whenever I stick out my chin, take the law into my own hands and charge off to seek Justice—and usually find Trouble instead. Like the time I dognapped one hundred and twenty pounds of bellowing mutt that was terrorizing our neighborhood at 3:00 a.m. and tied him to the police station back door, with a doggy confession looped round his shaggy neck. (I’ve been barking again.) Or the time this five-foot-two-inch woman got indignant and tried to stop a large and irate shoplifter all by herseff—not one of my better ideas.

And maybe my friends’ explanation is the best one—call it a mental holdover from the Wild West days, when Texas Rangers were few and far between. So if a lady wanted justice—or revenge (which we all fondly imagine to be the same thing)—well, she just had to find it herself.

Whatever, this Texan found it easy to imagine a woman like Susannah Mack, who needed revenge—shoot, she earned it!—and who was spunky enough, indignant enough and reckless enough to fight for it against overwhelming odds. And then to imagine her ideal partner in adversity—Dr. R. D. Taggart, a man practical, tough and tender enough to see his Texas Pistol safely through her wildest schemes to the happy-ever-after ending she so richly deserved.

So here’s Susannah’s story. I had a lark writing it, and I hope you will reading it. All the best!

Peggy Nicholson

Don’t Mess with Texans

Peggy Nicholson

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

This book is for my mother, Marguerite Grimes, the first

horsewoman I ever knew. Her endearing spunk and

stubborn gallantry inspired my heroine,

Susannah Mack. It’s also for Ron duPrey,

only my sun and moon and a northwest breeze

at dawn.

With special thanks to John Civic, D.V.M., for his

kind advice on veterinary procedures. Any technical

mistakes this author may have made were despite

his bemused help—You want to what?—rather than

because of it.

CHAPTER ONE

SIX HOURS AFTER SURGERY, the tomcat was looking like a keeper. “Gums couldn’t be pinker,” Tag assured him. So he wasn’t bleeding internally. He let the cat’s upper lip drop and the torn slashed at his leather glove, then retreated to the back of the cage. Reflexes coming back nicely after anesthesia. His pupils were equally dilated and no wider than they should be. “So what day of the week is it?” Tag murmured, and got a sing song growl in reply.

“Wednesday, right. First week in January, last year of the century.” The car that hit him last night must have just grazed him, breaking his jaw as it tossed him aside. But his brains didn’t seem to be scrambled. “And who’s the president?”

The tom’s ragged ears stayed flattened to his furry skull. Another subsonic moan issued through wired jaws.

“Who cares? You wouldn’t give three fleas and a dead rat for every politician in the country,” Tag translated. “Can’t say I blame you.” Neither would he. Politics was a pastime for comfortable people with time on their hands and steady paychecks coming in. For his and the cat’s kind, survival was the name of the game. And living well was its best revenge.

Still, to live well this stray would have to learn to tolerate humans. Because as soon as he mended, Tag meant to find him a home. He hadn’t spent half the night patching him up just to boot him back out on the street when he was healed. He shut the cage door, then lingered, talking soothing nonsense till the cat stopped growling.

“Got time for a paying customer, Doc?” Carol Anne Kopesky, Tag’s medical technician/receptionist, frowned at him from the doorway leading to the front of the clinic. Hired some twenty years ago by Tag’s senior partner, Dr. Higgins, and trained by that grimly practical gentleman, she took his same dim view of charity cases. And now that Higgins had suffered a mild heart attack and taken a leave of absence, Carol Anne was watching their bottom line with even more than her usual zeal. Tag was earning for two now, till Higgins returned to the Green Mountain Veterinary Clinic next Monday. And even then he would only be practicing part-time.

“Mrs. Allen’s in room one,” she briefed him as Tag stretched his tired bones to his full six feet, one inch. “With her Irish setter, Jebbie, for his yearly checkup and vacs.” She lowered her voice. “A month late. I was afraid we’d lost them to you-know-who.”

A new practice had opened in Bennington, twenty miles to the west, last summer. Their competition was a small-animal man with glitzy new facilities and all the toothy charm of a TV game-show host. Higgins had brought Tag in as his junior associate to counter that threat.

A bell rang as the clinic’s front door opened.

“That’ll be Mrs. Rafferty with Gigi,” Carol Anne added as a yap-yap! like two strokes of an ice pick to the skull rang out from the reception room. “Here to have her toenails trimmed, and don’t even think of suggesting we knock her out to scale her teeth. Gigi has a delicate constitution.” She rolled her eyes and departed.

“Right.” Let the day begin. Tag rotated his shoulders under his white coat and headed for exam room one. Four hours’ sleep last night, and five the night before, with that false alarm out at the Great Dane kennel on the edge of town. A firsttime mother’s delivery, except that she hadn’t. No doubt she’d drop tonight—about the time he dropped off.

Three dogs, two cats and a molting parrot later, he heard a truck rumble down the driveway. Tag injected the last c.c. of distemper vaccine into a squirming Lab puppy and glanced up in time to see a dusty two-horse trailer, hitched to a pickup, glide past his window and on to the barn. Damn. Somebody who hadn’t heard that Doc Higgins was out of commission.

Higgins ran a mixed practice, serving small animals and large, for what had been a rural farming community. But dairy farms were giving way to computer analysts’ country retreats, where the largest animal in residence was more likely an English sheepdog than a sheep. Tag, in keeping with changing times, was a small-animal specialist. Unless the occupant of that trailer had a very simple problem, he wouldn’t be much help.

“You’d better go see,” he advised Carol Anne as he set the syringe aside and took hold of the puppy before it could leap off the table. “Paws like pie plates, he’s going to be a bruiser,” he added to the proud owner. “Have you thought about obedience school?” The bell chimed at the front door. Driver of the truck and trailer, he supposed.

While Tag gave his views on various trainers around the state, he listened with half his attention to the voices down the hall. Carol Anne’s was rising and taking on a hard edge. Some sort of disagreement going on out there? Her opponent’s responses were barely audible, a low liquid murmur and pause, insistent for all its softness. A woman, he thought. Any man would have recognized Carol Anne’s no as no and stomped off by now.

“So Carol Anne can give you Mrs. Dearing’s number.” He eased patient and owner out the door and down the hall toward the debate. “I believe she has a class starting next month.” He gave the puppy a farewell ear scratch. “Meantime he’s looking terrific. You’re doing a great job with him.”

As they reached the reception room, a girl—woman—spun away from the desk to face him. Hair the color of marigolds, flying out from her head as she swung. Cheeks pink with emotion, big eyes meeting his own like a slap. “Are you the doctor?”

High-heeled boots rap-tapping on the linoleum, she came at him. For a moment Tag thought she’d march right into the puppy’s owner, but at the last instant the women do-si-doed and she was toe-to-toe with him, looking up. Despite threeinch heels, she stood no higher than his heart. Pointy chin, lush lips. “You’re Dr. Taggart?” She caught his sleeve.