Maybe he should do what Liz Carlyle was doing—go back to school for a year and pick up an additional specialty.
He had a specialty, blast it. He was the best damn veterinary surgeon in the South—possibly the United States.
Yet he spent his nights watching television and his days spaying cats.
Maybe he should sign on for a tour of duty at one of the big African parks—they always needed vets. He could certainly afford six months of little or no money. Ngorongoro, maybe, or Kruger.
His partner, Rick, would have a heart attack if Mac even suggested a six-month leave of absence. He had responsibilities to the clinic.
“Your kitties are waiting for you,” Nancy said from the door.
“Shaved and prepped?”
“No, Doctor, I thought I’d leave all the prep work to you,” Nancy said with a sniff. “Of course they’re prepped. Come on, get your rear end in gear. You’ve got a full schedule, as you might know if you’d bothered to read what I left you.”
“Someday I’m going to fire you!” he called after her.
“One can but hope.”
He grinned. Anytime he started feeling sorry for himself, Nancy brought him up short. No matter how he snapped and snarled occasionally, he was doing the thing God had put him on this earth for, and doing it well.
Nancy, on the other hand, had been an up-and-coming professional Grand Prix show jumper on the verge of the big time—long-listed for the Olympics. Then the degeneration in her cervical vertebrae progressed so far and so fast that riding became agony for her.
Three operations had relieved most of the pain, but she could never ride again. She seldom talked about her neck, and when she did, she joked about it. But every time a horse came into the clinic, whether it was a small pony or that Percheron mare with the foal, she would go back to the stalls on her lunch hour to pet and hug it. Her eyes were always suspiciously red afterward.
Mac and Nancy worked steadily, and as usual, once he was immersed in surgery, he lost track of everything except the creature in front of him.
He didn’t hear the door to the surgery swing open behind him. “Thought you said ten o’clock,” Mark Scott said.
“Damn!” Mac looked over his shoulder. “Give me five minutes.”
“Go on, Doctor,” Nancy said. “I can close for you.”
He nodded and stripped off his gloves and mask as he followed Mark into his office.
“Okay, what do you want money for?”
“Marriage has made you suspicious,” Mac said as he slumped into the chair across from Mark. “How’s the kid, by the way?”
“Since Sarah’s been bringing her to work, you probably see more of her than I do.” Mark’s lean face split into a smile that could only be described as beatific. “Smartest child ever born, and the prettiest, which you’d know if you ever bothered to play with her.”
“Can we change the subject? I have a proposition for you.”
Mark rubbed his hand over his hair. “What is it?”
“I want to hire two more vet techs—one surgical and one nonsurgical.”
“We have Nancy for small animals and Jack for large animals.”
“They take vacations and get the flu. They are human, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“Sure, but I never imagined you did. We job out when we need extra help. There are plenty of people out there looking to work with animals for zilch money, which is what we pay.”
“I’m aware of that,” Mac said. “I want somebody I can train from the ground up to do what I want done in the way I want it. Nancy reads my mind. I need someone else who can do the same thing.”
“The woman’s tougher than I thought if she can stand to probe into that mind of yours.”
“I want to start advertising today, put the word out among the other clinics for somebody who has some experience and wants more—somebody willing to do the scut work.”
Mark sighed. “Okay, let me run the numbers. If they work out, you got it.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. I’d appreciate your starting with a part-timer until I’m certain the practice can bear the freight of a full-time surgical trainee. Maybe Alva Jean or Nancy knows somebody who’d be interested.”
Mac stood up. “I’ll ask. Now, Nancy needs me back to remove a steel pin from a Labrador’s hip. It’s starting to push through the skin and cause an abscess.”
“Thank you for that pretty picture. Come see us sometime. I’ll tell Sarah to bug you.”
“Yeah, right.”
He worked straight through lunch, which meant Nancy did too. At four o’clock she watched him finish off the final suture in the ear of a Border collie that had misjudged the distance between his ear and the horn of the ram he was herding. The ear had been nearly torn off and was bleeding profusely when the farmer carried him in.
Now the owner came out of the waiting room twisting his John Deere cap in his hands. “He gonna be all right?”
“Fine,” Mac said. “He’s groggy, but you can take him home. He’s had antibiotics and I’ll give you some more. The sutures should dissolve in ten days or so.”
“Poor old Ben.”
“He’s not old—I’d say under two,” Mac said.
“Little over a year. No, I meant this might set him back a tad when he faces down his next ram. You have never seen a more embarrassed dog than ole Ben was when that ram tossed him ass over teakettle down the pasture.”
“Well, we saved the ear, so he won’t bear the scars of his encounter.”
“Thanks, Doc. Wouldn’t think of running livestock without my dogs. I’m too old, too lame, and they’re a damn sight smarter than I am.”
As Mac turned to go back to his office he came face-to-face with Kit Lockhart. The wind had tossed her hair, and the sunlight from the west-facing window turned her eyes to emeralds.
Coming this close to her had a visceral impact on him that unnerved him.
“Can I take Kev home?” she asked.
He stepped back from her and composed his face. “Haven’t had a chance to check him out today, but I would have heard if there was a problem,” he said, speaking slowly and letting the sun fall on his face. “Come on back.”
He noticed she held a harness with a bright orange pad that said Working Dog on it. A much smaller version of the gear he’d seen used on Seeing Eye and helper dogs.
She caught his eye. “Kevlar’s on duty all the time,” she said. “The harness is for his protection so people don’t distract him in public.”
“Does it work?”
She grinned. “Almost never. Everybody still wants to pet him.”
As he started back toward the kennel, Mabel Halliburton called out to him, “Dr. Mac? When you have a minute I need to ask you something.”
He nodded.
Kevlar had been moved from ICU to the regular recovery kennel area in the next room. He opened Kevlar’s cage and picked him up, carefully