“You don’t have any kids?” She hoped her question sounded casual.
“Never been married.” The statement so carefully held no inflection it should have stopped her from commenting. It didn’t.
“You’re kidding.”
Joe shot her a glance. “Why’s that so surprising?”
“Because you’re, ah…” Fumbling for words, she settled for the truth. “You’re a hunk. I can’t believe some woman didn’t snap you up.”
“Like a tasty fly?” he asked wryly.
Teresa couldn’t resist it. She chanted, “There was a young woman who swallowed a fly…”
“And now she’ll die?” he concluded.
Of happiness, maybe, Teresa thought, but had the sense not to say.
“I guess the whole analogy is a little—” she grinned “—distasteful.”
He groaned. “Oh, God, a woman who likes puns.”
“Didn’t someone say it’s the highest form of humor?”
“Are you sure it wasn’t the lowest?”
“You should have heard us in vet school,” Teresa said cheerfully. “We were bad.”
“Question is, are you hungry?”
She blinked and looked around. Heavens, they were parked in front of the restaurant. How long had they been here while she blathered?
“Starved,” she admitted. “A day of standing around always makes me think about food.”
He started to circle the truck, presumably to get the door for her; she didn’t wait. If he wanted a lady, he could look elsewhere. But all he said was, “Things no better at work?”
“Heck no.” Teresa sighed. “Let’s talk about something else.”
Over enchiladas, they did. She chattered on about her years of school; he merely shook his head when she asked if he’d gone to college.
“How’d you get started in logging?”
“Summer jobs,” he said easily. “By the time I got out of high school, I was already a cutter—I was the one who climbed the trees to top ’em, or take some limbs out. Pay was too good for me to bother looking around for any other line of work. My boss encouraged me to learn to cruise—that’s estimating what a stand of timber is worth, so you can make a realistic bid on it. I always had a head for math.” He shrugged. “Got some money put away, went into business for myself. Now I keep six other men working.”
“You’re a family of entrepreneurs.”
“Who wants to work for someone else?” His gaze was shrewd. “Isn’t that why you bought into a practice?”
She paused in the midst of cutting her enchilada. “I suppose so. Well, partly. It’s not the money-making side of being a vet that interests me. I wanted more responsibility. In Bellevue I worked at this big clinic with half a dozen vets. It was like I just put in my time—I didn’t make the overall decisions, which sometimes bothered me. For example, I thought our charges were too high. Especially for preventative medicine. I wanted us to keep neutering and vaccination costs to the very minimum. The partners smiled and told me I wasn’t looking at the big picture.”
“You’re an idealist.” The faintest of smiles lurked in his eyes.
Teresa wrinkled her nose. “I suppose so. But partly I was being selfish, too. I was bored. In vet school I especially enjoyed the large-animal work, and we didn’t do any of that where I worked. I was hoping for a mix.”
“Which you found.”
“In theory.”
“They’ll come around,” he said quietly.
“Damn straight they will.” She frowned at him. “I’m going to get every one of those farmers to admit I’m the best vet they’ve ever had!”
“You show ’em.” His smile seemed a bit rueful, and she wondered why.
“Do you think a man could do a better job?” She tilted her chin up in challenge. “Come on. Be honest. What if you needed a mechanic to fix that…that hundred-thousand-dollar monster you had out at my place the other day. Would you hire a woman?”
“Skidder. And it cost a hell of a lot more than a hundred thousand.” Joe set down his fork. “Yeah, I’d hire a woman if I thought she was the best mechanic. You can’t outmuscle a machine that size, or a horse or a cow. You need to outthink ’em. I’ve seen Jess with those horses of hers. She’s a small woman. Those Arabs would do damn near anything for her.”
A sigh escaped Teresa, leaving her deflated. “Sorry. I get worked up.”
“It’s your livelihood.”
“I don’t like injustice.”
“Prejudice of any kind isn’t pretty.”
She almost asked what he knew about it. A handsome white male—he had it made, right? But she’d be a fool to leap to that kind of easy assumption. A kid could be the odd one out for any number of reasons. A teacher friend had once told Teresa there was a “leper” in every class, as if the group as a whole could only bond through rejecting someone who didn’t fit. Teresa had memories of some kids she’d gone to school with who didn’t fit. Looking back, she couldn’t even remember why. Maybe they gave off the wrong pheromones or something.
Not that there was anything wrong with Joe Hughes’s pheromones.
Figuring she’d pushed the limit on sensitive subjects, Teresa backed off over coffee. “Since clients won’t let me treat their animals,” she said, “I’ve been doing most of the billing and follow-ups. Do you ever have trouble collecting debts?”
His mouth curled. “I just tell ’em I’ll be back with the skidder and take their roof off in pieces. Check is usually in the mail.”
She laughed. “Okay. So we should get a rabid Doberman and plan to turn it loose on anyone over thirty days late?”
“There you go.” The smiling intimacy in his eyes was enough to make her think about other even more intimate expressions—and about the approaching end to the evening.
Surely he would kiss her. She hadn’t been on a date where the man didn’t at least give her a peck on the lips. Although truth to tell, she hadn’t been on that many dates. After Tom’s death, she had gone into shock. It must have been a year or more before the numbness began to wear off, letting her be mad as hell at him. And miss him.
She was embarrassed to remember her astonishment when a fellow vet asked her out to dinner and to the symphony. She’d almost blurted, “Me? You want me to go with you? Why?” Then a vague memory of such rituals had clicked in, and she’d realized that, yes, he was a man and, yes, she was woman. Both single. Good Lord, he was interested in her!
She’d gone; why not? She knew him, if not well. It seemed an easy reintroduction to the world of dating. She wasn’t all that impressed, either with that date or the scattered few that followed. She never had liked groping for conversation or realizing halfway through dinner that she didn’t want that wet mouth to cover hers.
No such problem tonight. Obviously she’d been celibate too long. That had to be the explanation for why she kept staring at Joe’s hands, big and tanned and callused, and imagining how those calluses would feel against her skin. Tom had been an airline pilot. Smooth well-kept hands. Nothing like this man’s.
And that mouth, tight and controlled. He tilted it into a smile from time to time, even grinned roguishly, but somehow she never had the sense he was really relaxing. Oh, yes, she’d like to see him lose control.
At this point