“Tell me you’re joking.”
“Wish I was. Hip replacement, they said. They’re sending his new associate.”
Luke would have blistered the air with bad words if he wasn’t being careful not to stir up the stallion. “Whoever he is, he better know what he’s doing. And he damn well better get here fast.” Paco made a low sound of agreement. “Get me a bucket of warm water and a clean rag, will you?” Luke turned his attention back to the horse.
Since he’d raised and trained the eight-year-old himself, Candyman always responded well to Luke’s voice and his touch. When one of the other stable hands brought the bucket, the horse even allowed him a little prodding at the injury. But the area was too sensitive to touch without anesthetic. Candyman jerked his head sharply, snorting in warning when Luke tried to mop up the worst of it. He decided the cleaning could wait until Phineas Brewer’s “associate” arrived with a tranquilizer.
At least it wasn’t as bad as Luke had feared at first. With skillful stitching, it might even heal up good as new. Luke willed the time to pass quickly. He talked softly to Candyman as the minutes dragged by. The horse quivered and chuffed at him. “Easy,” he soothed, “Easy, boy…”
Where was that damn vet? The smell of blood and hay and horse filled his nostrils. Sweat beaded under his hat and ran down his bare chest. “Turn on the fan,” he commanded to anyone who might be listening. “It’s an oven in here…”
Someone flipped a switch and the stall fan spun.
Softly, in order not to spook the injured horse all over again, he spoke to Zeke, who ran the stables and now hovered close on the far side of the stall door with Paco and three other men. “Your men find what caused this mess?” Candyman’s stall and paddock were carefully constructed to be both secure and smooth-sided. A stallion, even a calm-natured one, was more curious and sensitive to his surroundings than other horses. Special care was taken to protect against sharp nails or any projection on which the prize animal might injure himself.
“We found a board knocked down in the run-in shed.” The run-in shed, located on the far side of the stallion’s paddock, was an open shelter the horse could use to get out of the sun or sudden bad weather. “A big nail was exposed, the head broken off and bloody from where he hooked his ear on it.”
“Is it fixed now?”
“You bet.”
Luke heard the crunch of tires on gravel in the driveway outside. “That the vet?”
“I’ll get him.” Zeke hustled off and returned an endless couple of minutes later. “It’s the vet, all right.”
Candyman stirred and snorted nervously. Luke patted the horse’s neck and spoke in a slow, careful tone. “Get him in here.”
“It ain’t a he.”
Luke glanced toward the stall door. Through the pipe bars, he saw the new vet.
Clearly not a he.
She met his surprised glance, a fine-looking woman, full-breasted in a white t-shirt. Her smooth olive skin was scrubbed clean of makeup and her long black hair, parted in the middle, was tied back in a low ponytail.
It was her eyes that held him, though. They were catslanted and black as midnight. He remembered those eyes. “Mercedes?”
She nodded, a graceful dip of her dark head. “Hi, Luke. How you been?”
He shook his head. Time did fly. “Little Mercy Cabrera…”
One of the hands muttered something appreciative. Another one laughed. Someone whispered darkly, “Cabrera…” Everyone knew that a Bravo never trusted a Cabrera—and vice versa.
Luke commanded, “Enough,” and the men were silent. He spoke to Mercedes. “I remember hearing you went off to college.”
“I did. Eight years ago.”
Damn. Had it really been that long? “You, and then Elena.”
“That’s right.” Her sister, Elena, a Cabrera by blood, was three or four years younger. “We’re doing all right, both of us. Moving up. I graduated from A&M. You’ll be relieved to know I passed my national veterinary board exams with flying colors.” She carried a black bag. And she looked…plenty capable. It was something in the tilt of her strong chin, in the intelligence shining in those striking eyes. Damn. Little Mercy Cabrera. Adopted into the Cabrera family when she was twelve or thirteen. It seemed to him she’d been sixteen just last week. Sixteen, meaning jailbait…
She sure looked full grown now.
“Time goes by,” he softly observed.
“Yes, it does. I’m partnered up with Phineas since last month. He wants to retire in the next few years. I’m going to do my best to fill his shoes.” She stepped close to the bars and spoke in a quiet, even tone. “Need some help with that horse?”
Candyman’s nostrils flared as he scented her. But he didn’t flatten his good ear or swish his tail, a fair indication that he would tolerate her tending him.
“Cut his ear up pretty bad.” So what if she was a Cabrera, and good-looking enough to have him thinking things he shouldn’t? Candyman needed doctoring and she was the only vet present. “You think you can stitch him up for me?”
“Can you keep him settled while I have a look?”
“Come in here. Do it nice and slow.”
So strange, Mercy thought, to be there in that stall with Luke Bravo and that beautiful, bloodied stallion in the middle of the night. Since she first came to San Antonio with her poor, doomed mother fourteen years before, she’d had a crush on the tall, golden Bravo boy. She’d seen him riding a fine horse in a parade once. And at the San Antonio winter stock show and rodeo, the big one, that used to be held at the Freeman Coliseum.
For most of her teenage years, the rugged young Anglo had filled her girlish fantasies.
Not that it could ever be more than a foolish girl’s daydreams. She was as much a Cabrera now as if she’d been born one. And no self-respecting female in her family would go out with a man who had the last name of Bravo.
The Bravos had stolen much from her people. The land she now stood on, this ranch the Bravos had renamed Bravo Ridge, had belonged to the Cabreras for hundreds of years—until Luke’s grandfather stole it from Emilio Cabrera back in the fifties. One Cabrera man had lost his life slaving for the Bravos. And another, fighting them.
“What’s his name?” she asked Luke.
“Candyman.”
“Good with the ladies?”
“A gentleman, always.”
The horse allowed her touch. He whickered softly into her palm. She performed a quick examination just to make sure there was nothing more to treat than the bloody, half-hanging ear.
“Well?” Luke asked, as she finished the exam.
She wished he’d worn a shirt as she tried not to stare at his sweat-shiny, blood-streaked, perfectly formed male chest. “I’m going to have to medicate him before I can clean and stitch him. Can you lead him out of the stall for me?”
He nodded. So Mercy unlatched the door and backed into the main part of the stable. Luke started to bring the stallion out, too. But the horse grew fractious, jerking the rope Luke had on him, blowing hard through his nostrils.
Luke was gentle. And so patient. He petted the stallion and whispered in his good ear. When he guided the horse forward again, the animal went quietly.
Mercy had the needle ready. As Luke petted and soothed the big gray on one side, she thumped the other side of the horse’s neck sharply with three fingers to desensitize it. She was good with a needle, got it