Don't Mess With Texans

Tag moaned and dropped his head in his hands. With a few final words promising to keep viewers informed of latebreaking developments, the anchor wrapped up—to be replaced by a cheery jingle assuring Tag that if he used a certain breath mint, all his troubles would be over.

Tag grabbed the remote, slapped the mute, groped blindly for his Scotch. Reputable vet! Funny how they could say one thing and mean precisely the other. And once they’d put their spin on the situation... Maybe he should have talked when they were hollering their idiot questions.

His stomach revolted at the thought of himself, pleading his innocence to those carrion pickers, while half the country gleefully watched. Don’t whine, and never explain to strangers was more his style.

“Tomorrow,” he consoled himself. He’d talk with Glassman, the lawyer he’d consulted when he’d bought into Higgins’s practice. And he’d talk to Higgins—if the old man hadn’t suffered another coronary tonight watching the news.

He looked up at the TV in time to see a hulking policeman palm the top of Susannah’s crinkled-silk head, then tuck her neatly into the back of a patrol car. “Crap!” He snatched up the remote, jabbed buttons.

“—on charges of horse theft,” concluded the announcer, while behind glass, Susannah lunged for a nonexistent door handle, then rapped furiously on the window. “Just one more twist in this bizarre tale about a legendary racehorse, a jockey’s beautiful daughter from Texas and a bluegrass millionaire,” observed a voice-over as the police car set off.

The camera closed in greedily on Susannah’s face. Her lips were moving—she was calling someone? Cursing someone? Her husband, her lawyer, God...all three at once? Her expression was angry and urgent and somehow forlorn. The car turned a corner, and the camera cut away to a hotel fire in Chicago.

“Serves you right, babe. Lock you up and throw away the key, for all I care.” Not that they would. Some five-hundred-dollar an hour lawyer would be getting her out on bail in no time. Millionaires’ wives didn’t spend the night in jail.

“More’s the pity.” Tag lifted his glass to take another swallow—then deliberately set it aside. What he needed tomorrow was a clear head.

Today he’d taken it on the chin, but tomorrow was his turn. Time to start punching back. Susannah Mack Colton might be a career wrecker—a walking one-woman demolition derby!—but he’d worked too hard these last seventeen years to go down without a fight. A street fight, South Boston style. He might have cleaned up his act since his teen years, but he hadn’t forgotten a move. “Messed with the wrong vet, Blue Eyes, I’m telling you.”

So to bed, then tomorrow.

TOMORROW WAS EVEN WORSE.

It started with The Today Show and an exclusive interview with Stephen Colton, Susannah’s husband. Hearing the intro, Tag dashed in from the kitchen where he was scrambling eggs. A wide-eyed woman, he couldn’t recall her name, leaned toward a man sitting at ease in the network’s New York City studio. She rested a commiserating hand on the sleeve of his perfectly tailored suit. “I understand that your marriage was an unquestionable love match, Mr. Colton. Oh, may I call you Stephen? Yes, well, I believe Susannah was an exercise girl in your stables, Stephen, when you first met?”

Colton shook his head. Razor-cut dark blond hair, shining and flawlessly parted, didn’t stir. The guy looked to be a few years older than his own age of thirty and Tag supposed women would think him handsome, in spite of those wirerim glasses. Pretty boy, would be the male opinion. Certainly it was his.

Colton’s smile was gently nostalgic. “In the stables of a business associate of mine in Texas. I flew down to buy a promising filly.” His eyes crinkled. “Came home with two, instead.”

“Self-satisfied ass!” Tag sat and turned up the sound while the interviewer chuckled appreciatively, then switched back to Deeply Concerned. “It sounds like Cinderella and her prince! A girl who loved horses and a man who bred and raced some of the nation’s finest. So what went wrong with this perfect fairy tale?”

Colton shrugged his pinstriped shoulders. “Why do people fall out of love? Who’s to say? We came from entirely different circumstances...”

“Different worlds,” crooned the woman.

He smiled sadly. “Mint juleps in silver goblets versus Lone Star beer in longneck bottles. I suppose I was a fool to think she could ever...” He shrugged again. “Anyway, we gave it our best shot for two years, but it was time to move on. At least...I thought so.”

The woman leaned forward, hanging on his every word, her expression avid. “You mean...?”

His good humor faded. “I mean, I asked Susannah for a divorce two nights ago.”

The interviewer quivered like a springer spaniel with a rabbit in sight. “The night that she...took Payback and drove away?”

“She stole Payback later that night. Yes.”

Tag swore softly, savagely. You used me for that, Susannah?

“So it was your asking for a divorce that triggered her...”

“That and the news—which I suppose I didn’t deliver as tactfully as I might have done. Perhaps that bit could have waited till later. I also told her that I planned to remarry. That I’d fallen in love with another woman.”

“Ohhh...” The interviewer sounded halfway to orgasm. “I see. Yes. So this was an act of...spite!”

“Spite, malice and revenge,” Colton agreed in his Kentucky gentleman’s drawl. It was quicker and more mannered than Susannah’s breezy twang.

“Payback, Texas style!”

“I’m afraid they do believe in getting their own back down there. Don’t mess with Texans, or however it goes. I certainly knew Susannah had a temper and I suppose I expected... some sort of tantrum. Maybe a few dishes smashed or possibly the whole table service, but...”

“But to...smash the finest racehorse you ever bred! That anyone in America ever bred! Payback was a national treasure. I think you could say he belonged to...all of us.” The interviewer held that thought for three beats of nationwide mourning, then cocked her head and wrinkled her charming nose. “You know, Freud’s somewhat out of fashion nowadays, but might one argue that there’s almost something... symbolic in a scorned wife’s gelding—” she giggled “—her husband’s most treasured stud.”

Colton’s eyebrows shot up, but apparently he decided not to take offense. His smirk was confiding. Merrily roguish. “Ah, but I have others!”

“And a spare set of gold-plated balls for dress occasions, rich boy?” Tag snarled.

The interviewer giggled. “Other stallions, you mean!”

What had Susannah seen in this...this... Tag’s head jerked around at the smell of—“Damn!” The eggs! He bolted for his smoky kitchen.

THE DAY SLID STRAIGHT downhill from there. Reporters were camped out at the back door of the clinic when Tag went in to work. He had to wade through the baying pack, hands jammed in his pockets to keep from punching the eager faces thrust into his own.

“Dr. Taggart!”

“Dr. Taggart, would you care to comment on—”

“Dr. Taggart, were you aware that—”

“Move it or lose it, pal.” He gained the back door and unlocked it, opened it wide enough to slide in sideways—

“Taggart, how much did Mrs. Colton have to pay you to get you to geld Payback?”

An ice cube slithered down his spine. They couldn’t think he’d—He halted, half in, half out the door. “We charged her our standard fee for—” His heart dropped a beat as he remembered. At least they’d tried to charge her the usual fee for that procedure. God, Susannah’s ring! Let it be zirconium, oh, please God!

He had a feeling God had gone south on vacation this week.

He slammed the door on his own aborted statement and locked it. Fists pounded, voices rose indignantly. Did they think they owned him? If Payback was a national treasure, then what was he? National whipping boy? He half ran toward the office. “Carol Anne!”

She sat behind her counter with a stunned and mutinous look on her face, her hair escaping its pins. Beyond the locked front door, he could hear more of the same mob. “Carol Anne, did you tell anyone about the ring? Her ring?”

“And good morning to you, too, doctor.”

“I’m sorry, good morning. The ring—did you tell anyone?”

Her glower turned to a blinking stillness. She sniffed, opened the appointment book and buried her nose in it.

Control, control. If he shook her she’d quit. “Who, Carol?” She flipped to the next page, as if today could simply be skipped over. He leaned above her, a silent growl vibrating deep in his throat. She hunched her shoulders. “Doc Higgins, okay?”

Higgins wasn’t so bad. Higgins was as stingy with his words as he was with his gauze pads. He wouldn’t—