Luke's Would-Be Bride

Chapter One (#ulink_dd66fcb5-eb55-5cd1-b8e4-a3f43d68deb4)

Luke Carson reached for his black bag with one hand and his black Stetson with the other, then hurried toward the door. The telephone started to ring before he’d taken his second step. Shoving his hat on his head and his bag under one arm, he grabbed the receiver and bit back a curse.

“Jasper Gulch Animal Clinic.”

He was vaguely aware of the bead of perspiration trailing down the side of his neck, but most of his attention was trained on Butch Brunner’s voice on the other end of the line. “You gotta get here as soon as possible, Luke. This is the second steer to take sick this week.”

While Butch talked on, Luke glanced at his watch and rummaged through the clutter on his desk. He never thought he’d see the day when he actually missed the gumsmacking girl who used to work for him, but in the three months since Brenda left Jasper Gulch for the lure of the big city and better job prospects, his filing system had gone from bad to worse.

It had been a long, hot day, and it was only 9:00 a.m. The drought wasn’t helping anyone’s temper, least of all his. One of the area ranchers had called around four that morning because a cow was in labor and the calf was coming breech. Luke had gone straight out there, bleary-eyed and unshaven, and hadn’t stopped since.

“Okay, Butch,” he said. “I’m due out at the Anderson ranch in a few minutes. I’ll stop at your place on my way by.”

As he hung up the phone, his elbow hooked a stack of folders, sending an avalanche of papers to the floor. He grabbed for them, missed, dropped his bag to the desk and muttered one short, succinct word befitting his mood.

A sound near the door drew his gaze.

“Excuse me. I was wondering…” A woman he’d never seen before stood in the doorway.

Even in her loose-fitting shorts and tank top, she looked tired and warm, but these days who didn’t? She had blue eyes, a mid-Western accent and, as far as he was concerned, universal appeal. Her hair might have been a little too red to be considered classically beautiful. It just so happened that red was his favorite color.

“Are you here about the ad?” he asked.

She turned her head toward him and studied him before answering. “Yes, I suppose I am.”

If Luke Carson had been a man prone to smiles, a grin the size of South Dakota would have spread across his face right then. Glancing at her fingers, which were long and tapered and bore no wedding ring, he asked, “Can you do bookkeeping?”

Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Well, yes.”

“What about filing?”

“Filing?”

“Can you do it?”

“Alphabetically? Numerically? Or by subject?”

It was all he could do to keep from raising his face and letting loose a yowling yee-ha. He didn’t even bother to scowl when the phone started to ring again.

“How soon can you start?”

She opened her mouth to speak then closed it.

“Look,” he said, glancing at his cluttered office. “I know how this must look, but there really is a method to this madness. We’re in the middle of a drought out here, and the only other vet is more than a hundred miles away. The cattle are getting rangy, the horses are jumpy, and the area ranchers and cowboys are wound up tighter than a whirlwind in May. But I pay well, and I’ll take whatever hours you can give me.”

He turned up his famous Carson charm, pulling at the brim of hat and looking intently at her. “What do you say?”

He felt her eyes on him, liking the way her gaze trailed over his face, down the column of his throat all the way to the toes of his scuffed cowboy boots. He liked it even more when she finally walked into the room.

She took her time turning around, her shirt and hair settling into place with a quiet swish. Making a show of reading his name on his vet certificate on the wall, she said, “I think I could work mornings for a while, at least. When would you want me to start?”

His heart thudded, and his breath caught in his throat. “How does yesterday sound?”

The smile she gave him went straight to his head, but when she laughed out loud, every male hormone in his body came to life.

“I guess I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” she said. “About eight o’clock?”

“Eight o’clock sounds good.”

“By the way, my name’s Jillian Daniels. Oh, there’s one more thing. Is that silver pickup truck outside yours?”

Luke nodded.

“Your lights are on.”

A split second later, she was gone. And Luke was left staring at the empty doorway of his cluttered veterinarian’s office on the end of Main Street.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d reacted so strongly and so immediately to a woman he’d just met He couldn’t remember the last time it had felt so good.

Luke came out of his musings with a start. Striding outside, he turned off his lights then released a long breath. It was hotter than blazes out here. He’d grown up here in South Dakota and was accustomed to the high summer temperatures. But this summer was different. The sun shining overhead was merciless. It was going to be another scorcher; as usual, there wasn’t a cloud in sight.

He spotted Jillian Daniels on the other side of the street, and suddenly the heat and dry weather didn’t seem so bleak. There was a new woman in town, a woman with red hair and long legs and the softest blue eyes he’d ever seen.

Luke Carson’s day had just gotten a whole lot better.

“It’s been a month, a whole month!” Boomer Brown yelled from the back of the room. “And the only women who’ve moved to Jasper Gulch have brought their husbands and kids with them.”

“Yeah!” another local shouted. “I thought you boys said that advertisement would bring single women to our corner of South Dakota.”

Luke eyed the crowd that had gathered for tonight’s town meeting, vowing to set these men straight as soon as he could get a word in edgewise, which, from the looks and sound of things, was going to be a while.

The sparsely furnished back room of Mel’s Diner was practically bursting at the seams with about thirty ranchers and cowboys and rodeo riders who’d grown weary of the long, lonely nights they faced due to the shortage of women in the area. He’d never seen so many people turn out for one of these meetings, but then, none of them had ever had so much at stake before.

It had been a month since the Jasper Review reported the comments Luke’s brother, Clayt, had made at the last meeting. It had been his idea to advertise for women to come to their town. Before anyone knew how it had happened, several big newspapers had picked up the story, coyly referring to Jasper Gulch as Bachelor Gulch. In the ensuing weeks, scores of women had come to check out the Jasper Gents. Unfortunately most of them had taken one look at the meager stores, the limited job prospects and dusty roads, and kept right on going.

It looked as if one, at least, had decided to stay. Jillian Daniels. Her name conjured up hazy images, while the memory of the smile she’d given him in his office that morning turned those images into an energy he had a hard time hiding.

It took incredible concentration to bring his attention back to the meeting. Isabell Pruitt, the self-appointed leader of the Ladies Aid Society declared, “I told you nothing good would come of this. If that advertisement draws anybody, it’ll be harlots, women of ill repute, I tell you.”

Every man in the room groaned out loud, which only made Isabell rise to her feet self-righteously and say, “Is that what you want? Is it? If it is, let the record state that I want no part of it. None whatsoever. And another thing…”

“Oh, put a sock in it, Isabell,” one of the men groused.

Isabell pursed her thin lips and gave an affronted huff. “Well, I never!”

“Yeah? Maybe you should.”

The argument that broke out between the members of the Ladies Aid Society and everyone else in the room was loud enough to bring down the roof. Luke swore under his breath and stood. Glancing to his right, he found that the other members of the town council—Clayt, Wyatt McCully, and old Doc Masey—had all risen, too.