Harlequin American Romance proudly launches MILLIONAIRE, MONTANA, where twelve lucky souls have won a multimillion-dollar jackpot.

Six titles in this captivating series—

JACKPOT BABY by Muriel Jensen (HAR #953)

BIG-BUCKS BACHELOR by Leah Vale (HAR #957)

SURPRISE INHERITANCE by Charlotte Douglas (HAR #961)

FOUR-KARAT FIANCÉE by Sharon Swan (HAR #966)

PRICELESS MARRIAGE by Bonnie Gardner (HAR #970)

FORTUNE’S TWINS by Kara Lennox (HAR #974)

Dear Reader,

It’s that time of the year again. Pink candy hearts and red roses abound as we celebrate that most amorous of holidays, St. Valentine’s Day. Revel in this month’s offerings as we continue to celebrate Harlequin American Romance’s yearlong 20th Anniversary.

Last month we launched our six-book MILLIONAIRE, MONTANA continuity series with the first delightful story about a small Montana town whose residents win a forty-million-dollar lottery jackpot. Now we bring you the second title in the series, Big-Bucks Bachelor, by Leah Vale, in which a handsome veterinarian gets more than he bargained for when he asks his plain-Jane partner to become his fake fiancée.

Also in February, Bonnie Gardner brings you The Sergeant’s Secret Son. In this emotional story, passions flare all over again between former lovers as they work to rebuild their tornado-ravaged hometown, but the heroine is hiding a small secret—their child! Next, Victoria Chancellor delivers a great read with The Prince’s Texas Bride, the second book in her duo A ROYAL TWIST, where a bachelor prince’s night of passion with a beautiful waitress results in a royal heir on the way and a marriage proposal. And a trip to Las Vegas leads to a pretend engagement in Leandra Logan’s Wedding Roulette.

Enjoy this month’s offerings, and be sure to return each and every month to Harlequin American Romance!

Melissa Jeglinski

Associate Senior Editor

Harlequin American Romance

Big-Bucks Bachelor

Leah Vale

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For Melissa Jeglinski,

for giving me this wonderful opportunity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Having never met an unhappy ending she couldn’t mentally “fix,” Leah Vale believes writing romance novels is the perfect job for her. A Pacific Northwest native with a B.A. in communications from the University of Washington, she lives in Portland, Oregon, with her wonderful husband, two adorable sons and a golden retriever. She is an avid skier, scuba diver and “do-over” golfer. While having the chance to share her “happy endings from scratch” with the world is a dream come true, dinner generally has come premade from the store. Leah would love to hear from her readers, and can be reached at P.O. Box 91337, Portland, OR 97291, or at www.leahvale.com.

Books by Leah Vale

HARLEQUIN AMERICAN ROMANCE

924—THE RICH MAN’S BABY

936—THE RICH GIRL GOES WILD

957—BIG-BUCKS BACHELOR

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Prologue

It took everything Jack Hartman had not to end his day by getting kicked in the head. But since he’d already given the Masons’ prized Angus cow more help than she appreciated delivering her calf, Jack couldn’t blame her.

Preferring his skull intact, he leaned more weight on his hand that held the cow’s jerking hind leg still. At the same moment her stomach contracted, he pulled as hard as he dared on the fragile front legs of the stuck calf—all the lathered cow, her musky scent thick in the air, had been able to push out on her own. The muscles in his arms and back strained with the effort, but he didn’t quit. Failing to deliver an animal that had the slimmest chance of survival was never an option for this particular vet.

Even if success was bittersweet.

His pull was enough, and the calf’s head emerged, followed quickly by the rest of the baby in a wet rush. Steam rose from the calf in the frigid January air let in by the ever-widening gaps between the boards of the Masons’ barn walls. Jack let go of the cow’s back leg and caught the calf, easing the newborn to the thick straw covering the largest stall in the barn. While Kyle and Olivia Mason might not be able to afford to fix up their old barn, at least they took excellent care of the animals within.

Jack barely had time to clear the calf’s nose and mouth to help it pull in its first breath before the baby’s mother had turned and taken up her motherly duties of licking and nudging her calf to stand. He straightened and backed away to let the cow’s natural instincts do their job.

A hand clapped on his shoulder and he turned to meet Kyle’s grin. About twelve years older than Jack’s thirty-three years, Kyle Mason was starting to show his age—in the graying of his dark brown hair at the temples, visible beneath his green John Deere baseball cap, and the belly where the beer he used to be able to work off now settled. Kyle and his wife, Olivia, were good people. They’d been there for Jack when he’d needed it, and Jack was glad to be of some help to them.

Kyle squeezed Jack’s shoulder before releasing him. “I knew if anyone could save those two, you could.”

Jack shrugged and grabbed a towel from the fence to clean his hands off. Until four months ago when he’d finally found some help, he’d been the only veterinarian in the little town of Jester, Montana. And before he’d come eight years ago, they’d had to beg someone to come over from the much larger town of Pine Run, about twenty miles southwest of Jester. But the townsfolk’s faith in his abilities warmed him just the same. “She only needed a bit of help.” He nodded at the calf. “That little fellow was almost too big for his own good.”

Kyle’s face lit up. “A bull?”

“A bull,” Jack confirmed, using a clean corner of the towel to wipe his too long hair, its light brown darkened by sweat, out of his eyes. He really did need to make time to let Dean Kenning, the town’s barber, take a whack at it.

“Hallelujah. Maybe I’ll finally be able to afford to fix up some things around here.”

Jack followed Kyle’s gaze with his own, taking in the boards warped from the extreme southeastern Montana weather and the farm equipment wearing more rust than green paint. But the Masons had held things together better than some folk around here. “I’m sure you’ll get a good price for him in Pine Run. Might even be worth the trip to Billings.”

Before Kyle could respond, the sound of Kyle’s wife of almost twenty years, Olivia, frantically calling for her husband and Jack reached them. “Kyle! Jack! Ky-le! Jaaack!”

While Jack knew that Olivia Mason wasn’t given to hysterics—being a teacher in the town’s lone school that housed all the kids, grades K-12—one glance at Kyle told Jack something serious must be going on to generate that sort of noise from her. The concern building in Jack’s chest was mirrored on Kyle’s face.

They had barely left the stall to go see what was wrong when Olivia barreled through the barn door, letting in a burst of frigid air that lightened the heavy smell of cattle considerably. Her light brown hair flew in her face and the hem of the serviceable blue shirt-dress she’d worn to work swirled around her slim form along with the snow that had followed her in. Most telling of all, she hadn’t put a coat on.

They rushed toward her.

She was crying. And laughing. “Oh, Kyle, sweetheart, you’re not going to believe this. And Dean said you, too, Jack. Oh, my word, all of us!” She spread her arms, then pulled them back in to cover her mouth. Squealing behind her hands, she started to bounce up and down, looking like a teenager instead of a woman in her early forties.

Kyle grabbed her upper arms to still her and bent to look her in the eye. “Olivia! What is it? What happened?”

She slid her hands from her mouth to her flushed cheeks. “We’re rich, Kyle! All of us. We’re all rich!”

Just as confused as Kyle clearly was, Jack took a step closer to her. “Olivia—”

She stopped him with a wave of her hands, then took a deep breath and straightened, encouraging Kyle to let go of her. Despite her visible effort to calm herself, her voice was still shaky. “Dean Kenning called. The lottery. One of our twelve tickets hit. We won. And not just enough for a pizza party, like last time. We won the jackpot. The fifteen of us won the lottery!” She squealed again and launched herself into her husband’s arms, nearly knocking his green cap off.

Jack stumbled a step back as if it had been his arms Olivia had jumped into, gripping the towel he still held tightly in his hand. He couldn’t believe it.

He had never before played with the loosely defined Main Street Merchants who’d been pooling their money and having Dean drive into Pine Run each week to buy tickets in the Big Draw lottery for the past eight years. As long as Jack had been living in Jester.

But Wyla Thorne had decided not to play anymore, her optimism running as thin as the town’s luck, and yesterday morning as Jack was heading into the Brimming Cup for his daily apple Danish, Dean had stepped out of his barbershop to yell across the street at Jack to ask if he wanted to take Wyla’s place. For the heck of it, Jack had thrown in a dollar. Talk about it paying off.

Now he had more than enough money to do what he needed to do.

Kyle loosened Olivia’s hold around his neck to ask, “How much? How much was the jackpot up to this week?”

Olivia released him and stepped away, her pretty face glowing. “Forty million. We get to split forty million.”

Kyle whooped and swept his wife up into his arms again, then twirled her around.

Jack’s own head was spinning. Forty million. “How—” his voice cracked and he had to try again.

“How many ways? Did I hear you say fifteen of us played?”

Kyle stopped so Olivia could answer. “Yes, fifteen total. But married couples only count as one, if they put in only one dollar. Counting Kyle and I, the Perkins, and the Cades as one each, the money will be split twelve ways.”

A familiar stab of pain pulsed in Jack’s heart at the mention of married couples. He closed his eyes, giving the pain time to settle in to its usual steady ache.

Setting Olivia down, Kyle mumbled to himself and counted on his fingers, obviously doing the math, then said, “After they halve it for taking the lump sum payout, which we did, right?”

Olivia nodded.

“And after taxes, I think that’ll leave us all with something like one million, one hundred thousand and change.” He moved his mouth as he silently ran over the numbers again, ticking off on his fingers, then waved off his apparent need for accuracy with a frustrated sounding noise. “Anyway, it’s definitely well over a million dollars. A million dollars.”

He whooped again and whipped off his baseball cap to hit it against his leg. “Damn, Olivia, no more money worries for us!”

Jack absently twisted the towel between his hands as he wandered back toward his stuff.

Over a million dollars.

More than enough to finally get him out of Jester and open a new practice in some other state.

Somewhere far from the memories of all that he had lost here.

The only thing left to do was get his new partner, Melinda Woods, more established, then he could take off.

And maybe, just maybe, make a new start.

He might be able to finally outrun the pain.

Chapter One

Two months later as Jack sat at his desk, the slight rattle of aluminum blinds against the clinic door brought his gaze down from a pet pharmaceutical company’s wall map of where rabies most often occurred in the United States. He’d been fantasizing again about where he’d set up shop next. Through the open door of the clinic’s lone office he saw that his partner in the Jester Veterinary Clinic, Melinda Woods, had just burst into the lobby as only a petite, shy woman could, barely rattling the blinds to announce her arrival.

Since she normally didn’t make any noise at all when she came in, Jack knew something was wrong. His gut tightened and he frowned. The last thing he wanted was Mel upset. She was the key to his being able to leave Jester.

As she strode toward him, he met her glowering gaze, surprised to find her big brown eyes sparking in a way he’d never seen before. His gut tightened still more. “What’s up, Mel?”

“Pigs! That’s what. Pigs.”

Jack’s eyebrows went up. “Pigs?”

She stopped beside the coatrack next to the office door. “Like I don’t know from pigs. Me! Of all people!” Yanking her big, tan corduroy jacket off her shoulders, she muttered darkly when the sleeves of her red flannel shirt clung to the jacket’s quilted lining. The resulting static electricity had the fine strands of long, blond ringlets that had escaped her ponytail rising in a crazy dance around her head.

She looked more than a little wild around the edges, a far cry from the quiet, efficient woman Jack had grown used to in the six months they’d worked together. It had taken him a long time to find someone willing to work in such a small town so far from anything, and the fact that that someone was as easy to get along with as Melinda was nothing short of a miracle.

Hopefully nothing had happened to change his surprisingly good luck of late.

His confusion and concern mounting, he repeated, “Pigs?”

“The Websters’ pigs—oh, excuse me,” she jerked a hand from her coat sleeve to hold it up in clarification, “prize-winning hogs.” Her tone dripped a sarcasm he’d never heard from her before. “Mr. Webster won’t let me near his prize-winning hogs.”

She flung her coat down on the desk that butted against his, fluttering the paperwork he should have been attending to instead of daydreaming about moving. While they were rarely in the office at the same time, there was plenty of space for them both to handle the paperwork the clinic generated, which historically wasn’t enough to warrant hiring any office staff.

Though business had certainly picked up since he’d won part of the lottery. Funny how being rich suddenly made a guy popular. Annoyingly popular.

Settling his elbows on the armrests, he sat back in his wooden chair, the swivel mechanism creaking. “Bud Webster wouldn’t let you near his hogs? You’re kidding.”

“Trust me, you have no idea how much I wish I were.” She plopped down in her matching chair, which made nary a peep. She, however, let out an exasperated sounding huff and dropped her delicate chin to her chest.

Jack’s concern trumped his puzzlement. He’d never seen Melinda like this. From what he could tell, she loved being a vet, and had never once complained about her work, the town or the population of Jester. Just the opposite.

She often spoke highly of the people she was getting to know, even though her shyness made the process slow, and Jack suspected incomplete. He doubted many in town knew just how smart Melinda was. She’d come highly recommended by one of his former professors. What if she changed her mind? What if she decided Jester wasn’t the place she wanted to be after all?

A spurt of panic had him leaning toward her. “What exactly happened?”

“Just what I said. Mr. Webster wouldn’t let me near his hogs.” She lurched to her feet and started pacing the small office, her square-toed work boots clomping heavily on the dark blue vinyl floor. “He said he doesn’t want ‘no slip of a woman doctoring his hogs.’ Slip of a woman,” she grumbled, “I’ll show him a slip.”

Jack pulled back his chin. He’d yet to see a critter cross Melinda’s path that she couldn’t keep a strong, tight hold on, despite being no more than five-four, and she always handled everything with quiet capability. He’d never seen her express herself with so much…passion before.

And despite how threatening her upset was to his intentions to leave, he had to admit the fire in her eyes suited her. But it was a fire that, for Jack’s long-term plans, needed to be doused.

“Of all the pigheaded males, that pig farmer has got to be the pigheadedest of them all…” The rest of what she said was lost behind her hands when she reached up and rubbed at her makeupless face as if she were trying to scrub away her frustration.

She dropped her hands and planted them on her jean-clad hips. “He wants you to do the vaccinations.”

“Because you’re…you’re…” he waved a hand at her, struggling to describe her in a way other than the fact that she was outweighed by most large dogs “…not very big?”

She rolled her eyes and threw out a hip. “No. Not because I’m petite. Because I’m a woman, Jack. Nothing more than that. Mr. Webster doesn’t want a woman vet to work on his ranch. And he doesn’t care that I grew up on a farm surrounded by pigs, along with just about every other kind of animal.” The fiery spark in her eyes turned to a watery shimmer and her defiant expression started to crumble slightly. “I know from pigs, Jack.” Her voice sounded a little strangled.

His own throat closed up in response. He hated to see a woman cry. It was one of the reasons he’d become a veterinarian instead of a physician. You didn’t have to come up with something good to say to make a suffering animal feel better.

Worried by the degree of her aggravation, he rose from his chair and went to her, placing what he hoped would be calming hands on her shoulders. He felt her rigid stance instantly soften and melt. “I know you do, Mel. But the old guard—farmers like Bud Webster—they’re still living in a different century. And I don’t mean the most recent one. They’ll see soon enough that you know what you’re doing.”

“How? When they won’t let me through the gates?”

Her heat seeping into his palms, Jack realized with a jolt that this was the most contact he’d had with a woman in five years and dropped his hands from her slender shoulders. He turned to look at the map on the wall again. At all the places he could go.

The need to leave Jester and the pain that ate away at his insides like a slow-growing cancer flared white-hot. He could have left the day he’d received his lottery check, but he’d wanted to see Melinda securely established in the practice he planned to simply sign over to her so he could leave with no strings attached.

If some of the townspeople refused to accept her, though…

He pulled in a heavy sigh and ran a hand through his hair. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t stay. Jester held too many memories, too many dreams that would never be realized. Even the dingy statue on the Town Hall lawn of Caroline Peterson, atop her horse, Jester, the town’s namesake, brought echoes of laughter and the true story about how the wild horse was really tamed—not with grit and bluster, but patience and sugar.

He turned back to Melinda, absently noticing how her high temper had added an attractive flush to her already sun-kissed cheeks and a golden glow to eyes he had previously only thought of as brown. “Pretty soon they won’t have a choice if they want to keep their prize-winning hogs healthy.”

Her finely arched blond brows came together, then she stilled. “How so?”

“They can’t very well refuse to let you treat their livestock if you’re the only vet within miles.”

JACK’S WORDS hit Melinda like an unexpected blast of frigid, Montana winter air, freezing the breath in her lungs as quickly as fog to glass. While he’d been talking about leaving since the day he’d given her a spot in his practice, she didn’t want him to go.

Granted, the prospect of virtually being handed an established veterinary clinic had been the sweetest part of the deal when she’d first signed on, but even without that offer she probably would have agreed to partner with Jack because Jester was exactly the sort of place she wanted to spend her life. She could continue to live in her beloved home state of Montana, be close enough for her mother to afford to call and check up on her like she insisted on doing every Sunday, but still be far enough away from the father Melinda had never been able to please. The one thing she couldn’t change about herself was the fact she’d been born a girl.

Then there was Jack, himself.

She’d never forget walking into this office for the first time and nearly being floored by how handsome he was. He’d been sitting with the heels of his brown work boots propped on the corner of the desk, his long, muscular legs stretched out in jeans. The light chambray shirt he’d had on clung to his broad shoulders, and where he’d left it unbuttoned at his neck showed off a sprinkle of chest hair that matched the thick, slightly wavy light brown hair hanging to his collar. His position, along with the set of his square jaw and wide, sensuous mouth, exuded such confidence and animal magnetism it was a wonder she could speak at all.

But unlike her father, and even the guy she’d thought she had a future with in college, Eric Nelson, Jack had wanted to hear what she had to say, so he’d coaxed her past her nervousness and awareness of him enough that she’d landed the partnership despite her relative inexperience. She’d still had to prove herself, though, which was something she had plenty of experience with.

Even on that first day he’d mentioned leaving Jester, that because he’d lost his wife—a loss that had instantly made her ache for him—he should move on, away from Caroline’s hometown. But he’d talked so often since then of leaving without ever taking steps to do it that she’d ceased to believe he actually intended to leave. He seemed so ingrained in the town, so a part of its pulse.

She forced herself to pull in a chest-warming breath. “You say that like you mean it.”

A muscle in his jaw flexed. “This time I do.”

Melinda felt gut punched. She struggled not only to breathe, but to keep the air moving in and out steadily. Today just wasn’t her day. She should have stayed in bed with her cats asleep on her feet.

But she’d never been the type to hide from life. To temper her father’s disappointment over her being a girl, she’d pulled more than her weight around their farm while growing up, whether he noticed or not. It wasn’t her fault she was not only female, but short and quiet. Being the only kid on a farm a long way from most everything, with no one but animals to talk to, didn’t make for a sparkling conversationalist.

She couldn’t retreat and complain to her critters over this one, though. Simply venting wouldn’t make her feel better, wouldn’t allow her to accept the outcome, because, bottom line, the outcome was unacceptable to her.

Jack couldn’t leave.

She met his gorgeous green gaze, for once blocking from her mind how they exactly matched the sweetest grass in springtime, and dared to ask, “Why now? I sort of figured that when you didn’t leave two months ago after picking up your share of the lottery that you’d decided to stay.” He was such a part of Jester, she couldn’t imagine the town without him.

Just as she couldn’t imagine her life without him. She was such a fool, but she couldn’t help it. From their very first meeting she’d wanted Jack Hartman. He’d been so kind, dropping his feet from the desk and leaning his elbows on his knees to make his powerful body smaller. He’d coaxed her to talk about herself, about the kind of veterinary practice she wanted to make her life’s work.

All he’d wanted was a partner he could leave his practice to.

He shifted his gaze to the wall. “I didn’t leave after I got the money because the timing wasn’t right then.” He went back to the file cabinet and reached up to straighten the framed photo on it, his fingers lingering. It was something he usually did only when he thought no one was looking.

She usually was. He drew her gaze to him like a skittish creature is drawn to a soothing voice. She knew she shouldn’t be attracted to him, had heard all about his painful past. Jester was such a small town. Everyone knew everyone else’s business. Or at least thought they did.

Thank goodness no one knew how she felt about Jack. She’d already once had to publicly suffer for loving a man who hadn’t loved her back, ditching her ugly in front of a crowd of their friends at college when someone better came along. She could never face that sort of humiliation again. Though it was sheer torture, she was much safer loving Jack in secret.

Her romantic sufferings aside, she wouldn’t trade for anything the happiness she felt working with him, often going days without actually seeing him if one or the other of them was out on calls. But walking into the office after he’d been there, the faint smell of his no-nonsense aftershave lingering in the air and the wonderful scrawl of his handwriting on notes he’d leave her about where she was needed next never failed to make her smile. The notes were always about work, but their informality always warmed her heart, despite that he almost exclusively used his nickname for her, Mel.

That casual shortening of her name, while undoubtedly unconscious, drove home the fact that he didn’t see her as a woman. It was so stupid that the one man to have given her the thing she craved most—respect for what she did—pretty much from the start, was the one man she wanted to notice what she had to offer as a woman. She rubbed a hand over her face again. She really needed to pick a side and stick to it.

Dropping her hand to her lap, she asked, “But the timing is right now?”

Jack cleared his throat in a telling way then said, “I can’t stay.”

Melinda’s heart twisted and ached in her chest. For the millionth time she wished she could pull him to her and heal him. But all she would probably end up doing would be making a bigger fool of herself. Even if Jack were to notice what she could offer him as a woman, there was a very real chance that what they said about him around town was true—that he’d never get over the death of his wife and their unborn child. How could she compete with the memory of the kind of love she could only dream about?

She couldn’t.

Instead of risking embarrassment by trying to comfort him, she asked, “Why now, Jack? Hasn’t it been five years since…” she trailed off, unable to put to words what caused him such pain. He’d never spoken to her directly about the car accident. Though she knew from people like Dean Kenning, who thought the world of Jack, that he hadn’t been with his wife, five months pregnant, when the accident had happened. A fact that only deepened the wound to Jack’s psyche.

Jack finally nodded, running a finger down a clearly familiar course on the dark-wood frame. “It’s been five and a half years, actually.” He gave a half shrug. “But time isn’t going to make any difference. This town holds a lot of painful memories for me, and I don’t think one hundred years could make them go away.”

Melinda closed her eyes, Jack’s pain reverberating inside of her even with the desk separating them. She never could have withstood such a loss. The fact that Jack had weathered such an awful thing without becoming bitter and useless made Melinda love him all the more. Too bad that when it came to love, she simply didn’t measure up.

He surprised her by continuing. “Jester was Caroline’s town, you see. She was the one who’d grown up here. I’m from Yakima, over in Washington, but my parents have since moved to Florida to be near my older brother and his wife. Caroline and I met at Washington State University.” He waved a distracted hand at his framed diplomas on the back wall.

“Even though her family had moved to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, right before she started high school and are still there, she wanted to come back to Jester. A couple generations back, her family had settled the town.” He glanced up at Melinda, the color of his eyes deepened to moss by the memories. “You know that statue on the Town Hall lawn?”

“Of course.” She walked or drove past the moldering looking bronze statue of a woman on a bucking horse everyday. She rented a little house just down from it on the other side of the street. One of the first things she’d learned about the town was the legend of how Caroline Peterson—a mere slip of a woman, no less—had broken the seemingly unbreakable stallion, Jester. It was telling that the old geezers back then had named the town after the horse instead of the woman on him.

“Well, that woman is my Caroline’s ancestor and namesake. My wife felt she belonged in Jester. She loved the idea of being connected to a place. So after the wedding, we moved here.”

“But you don’t feel connected to Jester? Even after eight years?”

“It’s Caroline’s town.” He looked back at the framed photo of the pretty brunette with the glowing smile that Melinda hadn’t been able to keep from studying when alone in the office. How could a woman not smile that way with a man like Jack in her life? Then to have that life cut so short…the unfairness of it all had made Melinda weep inside.

She crossed her arms over her aching heart and faked a nonchalance she didn’t feel. “Where will you go?”

Jack cleared his throat again and visibly pulled himself from his thoughts—probably memories of his beautiful wife and the future they’d planned together—by straightening his strong back and squaring his broad shoulders. “I don’t know yet.”

“You don’t know?”

“No. I haven’t decided…exactly…where…” He moved toward the map on the wall.

Relief flooded her, providing just enough hope to bolster her. “So you’re not leaving town soon.”

“I am.”

His simple statement, said with such conviction, slapped her hope down for good.

“I’ve only stayed this long because I couldn’t leave the town without a vet. But then you came. Now I just need to get you established before I leave.”

His mention of her being established brought back her anger in a rush, only now it was coupled with the bitter taste of yet another fantasy that would never become reality. “I don’t see how that’s ever going to happen when some people in town won’t let me treat their animals.”

“Given no choice, they’ll come around.”

While she had never disagreed with him in the entire six months she’d known him—never had cause to—Melinda shook her head adamantly. Even if she wasn’t crazy about him, she wanted—needed—the farmers to respect her because of her abilities as a vet, not because she’d be the only vet available to them. She needed more time to prove herself. To prove she was as good a vet as any man.

She had to convince Jack to stay longer.

Just as important, she needed to squelch her feelings for him completely so she could concentrate on earning the respect she craved more than anything else. Even more than love.

Chapter Two

“You can’t go, Jack.”

Melinda’s blurted declaration startled Jack from his musing about where he might move to, where he could go to outrun the past. He’d never seen this sort of assertiveness from her before. Melinda was normally very quiet yet affable.

He’d grown so comfortable with her gentle presence, her reliability, that he occasionally forgot whether she was in the office or out on a call when he was treating a small animal in the examination room.

She was also a damn good vet. She had a way of handling the most difficult of animals, large or small, seemingly reassuring them that she would make whatever pain they might have go away. He had no reason to worry about leaving the animals of Jester in her capable hands.

He’d never seen this side of her, though. He raised his brows at her.

Melinda’s cheeks reddened, but her determined stare didn’t waver.

Why didn’t she want him to go?

His mind drew a blank. He knew she could handle the practice. He tilted his head at her and asked, “Why not?”

Her jaw worked, but her full lips remained sealed and she looked away before he could figure out what emotion her big brown eyes held. Finally, she said, “Because…well, because…” she trailed off and started to fidget.

Alarm swelled in his gut. What if she’d decided she didn’t want to stay either?

He opened his mouth to coax her reasons out so he could convince her otherwise but the crash of blinds against the door to the clinic stopped him.

Jack looked over the top of Mel’s head in time to see Mary Kay Thompson complete her entrance into the clinic—twice as loudly as Mel had—with a flip of her shoulder-length, permed blond hair, no less, and clutching her obese orange tabby cat, Pumpkin, to her chest.

He would have gaped at Mary Kay’s outfit if he hadn’t grown so used to her outrageous—and downright foolish, considering the weather—getups. Today she’d put on open-toe, yellow shoes with low but spiky heels, bright orange-and-yellow flowered tight pants that only reached her sculpted calves—Mary Kay was the only person he knew of around Jester to have her very own stair-climbing machine. Instead of wearing a parka or heavy coat like a sane person, she’d pulled on a vinyl-looking, unlined, bright yellow slicker. He’d lay money on the guess that she had on a matching tank top beneath the slicker.

The woman routinely risked hypothermia in the name of fashion. Or more likely, in blatant attempts to attract a man. Since his lottery win, Jack had the unfortunate distinction of being that man.

She swiveled toward the office door. “Jack! Thank goodness you’re in.”

He suppressed a groan. It wasn’t that Mary Kay wasn’t a nice gal, it was just that she was so…ragingly single. Most eligible men—whom she should have realized by now he wasn’t one of—in these parts steered clear of her. Thanks to Pumpkin, a run-of-the-mill barn cat Mary Kay insisted was a rare type of Persian purebred that only he could treat, Jack had no choice but to weather Mary Kay’s determination head on.

He cleared his throat. “Actually, Mary Kay, I was just on my way out. But Dr. Woods, here, can take a look at Pumpkin—”

“Now Jack,” Mary Kay interrupted. “You know how delicate Pumpkin is.”

Jack looked skeptically at the rotund, very robust appearing cat hanging over Mary Kay’s arms. The only delicate thing about Pumpkin was the silly pink, rhinestone-studded collar and matching leash Mary Kay put on him. Didn’t the woman realize she was living in a very rustic part of Montana?

“I really don’t think he can bear the upset of being handled by a stranger. No offense, Melinda.” Mary Kay’s apology to Mel sounded genuine, despite her absurd reasoning.

It hit him that Mary Kay was yet another Jester resident to snub his partner for a ridiculous reason. He glanced at Mel. She had crossed her arms over her chest, and though she was smiling reassuringly at Mary Kay, her smile looked tight around the edges. Great.

“Please, Jack.” Mary Kay reclaimed his attention. “There must be something wrong with Pumpkee. He’s been coughing that awful cough again.”

The cough the cat had yet to cough in anyone’s presence other than Mary Kay’s.

And because she lugged the huge thing everywhere with her—probably for warmth—Jack had a hard time believing Pumpkin was anything but fat and spoiled. Still, he was duty-bound to check the cat out.

“All right, Mary Kay. I’ll take a quick look at him.” Jack gestured toward the clinic’s lone examining room.

Mary Kay smiled triumphantly and headed in.

Jack leveled a look at Mel. “I want to finish our discussion. This’ll only take a second. Okay?” If needed, he’d go blue in the face convincing her that she could handle the practice on her own.

She shrugged and looked away. He couldn’t tell if the fight had gone out of her, or if Mary Kay’s additional refusal to let Mel treat her animal had been the straw that broke Mel’s spirit. Lord, he hoped not.

The pestering he was getting from Mary Kay and some of the other ladies in the area, not all of them single, with supposedly sick animals and a shared fantasy of landing themselves a millionaire, was becoming too much to take. He needed Mel happy so he could leave. Soon. The constant reminder of his availability had made the memories of the reasons behind it that much harder to bear.

“I’ll be right back,” he assured her.

She waved him off and sat down, her attention on the paperwork stacked in once neat piles on his desk.

Jack blew out a breath and turned to leave the office. As he walked out he grabbed his seldom-used white lab coat off the rack next to the door and pulled it on. As armor went, it was a sorry thing, but as of late his professionalism was the only defense he had against women like Mary Kay. The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that after one of the entertainment news crews that now routinely haunted Jester had followed him out on a call and caught on tape his attempts to calm a bucking horse, he’d been dubbed The Big-Bucks Bachelor by the press. As if he didn’t have reason enough to get out of town.

He made a point to leave the office door open as well as the door to the exam room after he went in. He didn’t want to give any sort of impression to anyone.

Mary Kay obviously felt the opposite. Rather than placing Pumpkin on the exam table, she’d set him on the ground and had hitched one of her hips on the table. She’d managed to strike a pose with the subtlety of an alpha female, with her jacket off her shoulders—he’d been right about the tank top, only it was white, and very thin. She’d catch pneumonia for sure this winter.

She eyed the open door, then surprised him by calling out, “Oh, Melinda, I almost forgot. I noticed on my way in that your truck is parked right under a huge icicle hanging off the clinic’s sign. While that truck of yours is already kind of beat-up, you might want to move it before that icicle drops and you end up with a great big dent in your hood.”

The sound of Melinda’s chair scraping on the vinyl floor reached them, and Jack turned in time to see her leave the office. With her coat dragging behind her and muttering in a very un-Melinda way under her breath, she stomped her way to the front door.

After Melinda left, Jack turned back to Mary Kay. Her smile would have made any feline proud.

“Everyone knows how much she loves that crummy old truck,” she said by way of explanation.

It was true. Melinda made no secret about her pride in her truck, willing to take the ribbing doled out to anyone who actually washed a work vehicle on a regular basis in the dead of winter. As a born and bred Montanan, she should know better. Although she’d once mentioned that the truck had been the only thing her father had ever given her. He’d thought there’d been a shadow of pain darkening her brown eyes after she’d said it. She’d had the chance to elaborate, but she hadn’t. And he hadn’t asked. It wasn’t his place to pry.

Flashing a saucy grin, Mary Kay returned her attention to Jack.

He pointedly shifted his attention to Pumpkin, who looked annoyed over having to actually touch the ground. “Okay, big fella, lets have a listen to those lungs.” He started to squat down in front of the cat, but Mary Kay grabbed hold of the lapels of his lab coat and hauled him against her.

Surprised and off balance, Jack had no choice but to flatten his hands on the polished metal table and lock his elbows to keep from toppling onto her. The strength of her mercantile-bought perfume made his eyes water.

Apparently oblivious to his distress, in a surprisingly accurate Marilyn Monroe-like breathlessness, Mary Kay said, “Let’s stop beating around the bush, Jack, and just do what animals like us are supposed to do.”

His gaze went instinctively to the other door out of the exam room, the one that they brought contagious or severely injured small animals through. But she had too good of a hold on him. “Mary Kay, please,” Jack demanded. He tried to straighten away from her, but she turned out to be remarkably strong.

“No, I’m the one willing to beg. I’m willing to do anything to be the one tamed by your great, big, strong hands,” she purred and once again tried to pull him down with her onto the table.

No way was he going to let that happen. But his worn-thin professionalism kept him from physically removing her from his person.

“Don’t fight it, Jack. We’d be so good together. Can’t you see that? Haven’t you felt it building over the years, darling?”

Positive he hadn’t exchanged more than the usual pleasantries and professional advice regarding Pumpkin, he adamantly shook his head. “Really, Mary Kay—”

“Shh.” She cut off what was going to be a fervent denial by placing the pads of her pink-polished fingertips of one hand over his mouth. “No. You’re right. This isn’t the time for words, it’s time for action. Let me show you just how lucky you really are, Jack.”

He tried to take a step back, but Pumpkin, undoubtedly looking for revenge against the usurper who’d taken his place on his mistress’s lap, had circled Jack’s legs and wound the leash that Mary Kay still had looped over her wrist around him. It was all Jack could do to keep from falling backward on his butt or forward onto Mary Kay.

If it came to it, he’d pick hitting vinyl in a heartbeat. He would have never dreamed Mary Kay would become so aggressive in her bid to land a millionaire. Though he shouldn’t be surprised. Even the mayor’s assistant, Paula Pratt, had suddenly shown up with a pet so she’d have an excuse to come to the clinic. The mayor, after all, hadn’t been one of the group he’d dubbed The Main Street Millionaires.

Mary Kay tugged again, her bright blue eyes glinting with determination. “Give me one good reason why not, Jack. Just one,” she huskily challenged, leaning yet closer in a clear invitation for a kiss.

Ten compelling reasons instantly came to mind, but none of them were particularly flattering to Mary Kay. While her pursuit of him, obviously fueled by his newfound wealth, was extremely annoying, it didn’t earn her his cruelty. But thanks to the effort involved in trying to keep his balance and avoid her puckered lips lined in a shade a heck of a lot darker than her coral lipstick, his brain had a hard time coming up with a nice reason.

The first and foremost truth popped from his mouth. “Because I’m already involved with someone.” He always would be.

Mary Kay froze, then frowned. His state of perpetual mourning had never been a secret in Jester, and was the main reason he’d been left alone by the women in town. But over a million in the bank apparently overrode their pity.

The skepticism plain on her meticulously made-up face, she pulled back and challenged, “Who?”

Now he’d stepped in it.

Figuring the rest of that particular truth wouldn’t buy him a respite but instead earn him the standard lecture on the benefits of moving on, he mentally scrambled for a name. He couldn’t just make a girlfriend up, even one who might live out of town. He was far too visible around Jester, and didn’t leave often enough to get a story like that to fly. Besides, in a town of 1,500 people, everyone generally knew everyone else’s business.

Just when Mary Kay’s frown was turning to exasperation, the clinic’s door opened and Melinda returned with a blast of cold air that matched her icy expression. With a glancing glare in their direction that let him know Mary Kay had sent Melinda on an unnecessary trip outside, Melinda stomped back into their office.

It dawned on Jack that the only woman he spent any amount of time with alone was his currently grumpy partner. He could easily be having a relationship with her that no one would know about.

Without further thought he announced, “Mel. I mean, Melinda. I’m currently involved with Melinda.” And just in case Mary Kay expected him to be willing to cheat, he threw in, “Seriously involved.” He took advantage of Mary Kay’s shock and extracted himself from her grip.

Looking down, he stepped out of the tangle Pumpkin had made of the leash. He started in on the explanation he was certain she would demand. “Since we work together, we’d prefer to keep it quiet, you understand—” He looked back at Mary Kay, and her expression stopped him.

She was softly saying, “Ah,” and nodding her head as if he’d just pointed out something obvious, like the fact chicken coops stink.

She slipped off the examination table. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place, Jack? Sheesh,” she muttered as she bent to pick up her rotund cat. “I could have spent all this time hanging at The Heartbreaker Saloon, working on Dev,” she groused on her way out of the room.

Jack’s brows went up. That had been easy. A little too easy. His luck couldn’t be that good. “So you don’t want me to take a look at Pumpkin?” he offered while following her into the small waiting area.

“Naa, that’s okay.” She waved him off as she continued toward the front door. “Pumpkee’s tougher than he looks.”

Considering that Pumpkee looked like the feline equivalent of a Sumo wrestler, that was saying something.

“Well, if you’re sure…” he trailed off, hoping his pleasure over his excuse working wasn’t too obvious.

“I’m sure. Catch you later, Jack.”

“’Bye, Mary Kay, Pumpkin.”

Jack closed the door behind her and whistled low through his teeth. That had been a close one. While lying wasn’t his thing, no matter how white the lie, in this instance it had certainly been the lesser of two evils. He doubted he could have convinced Mary Kay that the only woman he would ever want in any way was already gone from his life.

That fate had already decided he would spend his life alone.

Besides, he was leaving Jester.

He turned toward the office, intent on making sure Melinda was on board with his plan, but she was already heading out into the waiting area, her coat on and her vaccination kit in hand.

“Where are you going? I want to finish our discussion.”

She stepped around him and made for the door. “Sorry, Jack. But I’m due out at Wyla Thorne’s place in fifteen minutes. At least she doesn’t mind having a woman vaccinate her pigs.”

He pulled in a deep breath and followed her. “We’ll get everything straightened out, Mel. I promise.”

The look she gave him as he held the door open for her said, yeah, right.

But he meant it.

He had no choice.

JACK HAD ALL of an hour of peace, having finally forced himself to focus on the paperwork that needed to be done, before the blinds on the door rattled again. He braced himself, wondering which supposedly love-struck lady with a mysteriously ill pet would appear next.

He sent up a silent prayer that it wouldn’t be the mayor’s curvaceous, blond assistant, Paula Pratt. Her newly acquired, tiny beige Chihuahua, Angel—the dog’s original owners had called him Killer—was only happy snuggled up inside the front of the woman’s coat, and whenever she drew close to someone, the dog growled. It sounded eerily like her abundant breasts were snarling. And whatever it was that little dog had wrong with him, only a truly gifted animal psychologist could cure.

Jack’s prayer was answered when much older and rounder Stella Montgomery came through the door, her platinum-blond curls protected from the weather by a clear plastic rain hat and her peacock blue, heavy winter coat brushing the tops of her sheepskin-lined boots. She caught sight of him in the office and her seemingly permanent smile widened.

He automatically smiled in return. Stella was a real sweetheart. She lived over at Gwen Tanner’s boardinghouse, and was forever seeing to everyone’s happiness and the health of their love life, where warranted. But she never went there with him.

Not minding the interruption since it was Stella, he pushed his chair back and stood. “Well, hello, Stella.” He came around his desk and went to greet her. “How are you today?”

“Oh, I’m marvelous, Jack. Just marvelous.” Her pleasantly plump cheeks held more of a rosy glow than usual. And her blue eyes positively twinkled.

“Good. Good.”

She smiled at him.

Puzzled, Jack waited, but she didn’t explain her presence. To his knowledge, Stella didn’t own any pets.

She simply smiled at him some more.

Rocking back on his heels and burying his hands in the pockets of his lab coat that he’d forgotten to take off, he asked, “So, what can I do for you? Do you need help moving something…?”

“Oh, no. Nothing, really. I just thought I’d stop by and say hello. I noticed Dr. Wood’s truck isn’t out front. Is she on a call?” She reached up and patted at very curly hair through its protective barrier in a very feminine way.

A sizzling arc of panic went to ground right through the bottoms of his feet. No. Not Stella. She had to be in her mid- to late-fifties.

But she was also single.

Then the reminder of why she was still single cooled him in a rush of relief. She had loved and lost also, though she and her young man hadn’t had the chance to marry, their engagement ending tragically with his death. Stella, along with ol’ Henry Faulkner who had lost his wife ten years ago, understood why Jack didn’t feel the necessity to move on.

Still, her obvious delight made him nervous. “Yes. Melinda is out at Wyla’s, I believe. Vaccination time. Can I get you some coffee, tea…” He was pretty sure Melinda had heated some water before she left the first time this morning and had a decent selection of instant coffee and tea bags to warm them up after being out treating livestock in the freezing weather.

“You are a dear, but no, thank you.” She found an escaped blond curl and tucked it back undercover. “Oh, you know, Irene and I thought we’d do some baking. What sort of cake do you like best, Jack?”

“Cake?”

She smiled even more sweetly and nodded encouragingly.

He shrugged. “Chocolate, I guess.”

“Chocolate. Wonderful. With raspberry filling?”

He shrugged again, wondering what his opinion had to do with anything. “That’s always good.”

“Wonderful, wonderful.” Her pleasure was amazing. “Well, I better let you get back to work. Have a wonderful day, Jack.” She wiggled her fingers at him and was back out the door before he had a chance to respond.

Wonderfully bemused, he stared at the door for a moment, then went back to his desk. That was odd. Especially considering the fact it was Gwen who usually did the baking. She made the most incredible pastries. He made a mental note to stick his nose in at the bookstore across the street, Ex-Libris, where Amanda Bradley let Gwen sell her baked goodies, and snag a muffin or two before he headed home. Perhaps Stella and Irene Caldwell, who also lived at Gwen’s boardinghouse, were helping out in the kitchen. That was very likely, since Irene treated Gwen more like a granddaughter than a landlord. He shrugged and went back to work.

Not fifteen minutes passed before Irene blew into the clinic’s waiting room, a cheery yellow scarf tied over her gray hair and a puffy, quilted black coat bundled around her. In her early sixties, Irene had really found a place to belong when she moved into the boardinghouse six years ago. Her husband had passed away four years before that, and without any children of her own, she’d been too alone.

She spied Jack and headed for him before he had time to get up. “Jack, dear! I’m so glad you’re in. I have a quick question for you, if I may?”

He set his pen down. Clearly, this was going to be one of those days. “Of course, Irene. What can I do for you?”

“Not a thing. It’s only that Stella and I are making a tape of everyone’s favorite slow songs for, ah, for the Founder’s Day celebration dance, and we were wondering what your favorite is? To dance to? Ah, slow?”

“I thought you and Stella were baking today.”

“Are we?”

He raised his brows. Doddering was one thing these older ladies were not.

“Oh, yes.” She put a hand to her cheek and laughed. “Of course we are. But we’re also making a tape. Of music. To dance slow to.”

Jack immediately thought of the song he and Caroline had danced to for the first dance at their wedding. On the sly she’d arranged for the band to start out with a traditional love song, then switch to playing a punk rock song about a white wedding. She’d laughed so hard at the look on his face. If only they could have stayed in that moment. Happy. Safe.

His thoughts must have shown in his expression, because the smile lighting Irene’s softly lined face faltered. Not wanting to distress her, he threw out the first song that came to mind.

She smiled in obvious relief. “Ooh, that’s a good one, Jack. Thank you, dear.” She turned on her sensible heel and hurried out.

The door had barely shut behind her before it opened again. Only this time it wasn’t to what he considered a friendly face. Marina Andrews, the blond TV news reporter from a station in Great Falls, along with her cameraman, who’d made Jester their home away from home since the lottery win, came into the waiting room. He could understand their attention right after the win. What had happened had been newsworthy. To a point. And certainly for a limited amount of time. In Jack’s mind, that time was up. Their continued attempts to dig up a story where there wasn’t one anymore was wearing on him.

And that big-bucks bachelor routine definitely hadn’t earned them any points.

“Dr. Hartman, might we—”

The phone rang.

Saved by the bell. Jack held up a stilling hand and picked up the receiver with the other. “Jester Veterinary Clinic. Dr. Hartman speaking.” He put on the airs for the sake of his audience.

“Jack, it’s Ruby Cade.”

“Hey, Ru—”

“I need you, Jack. Right now.”

For the first time in nearly two months those words coming from a woman didn’t illicit dread from him. Not only was Ruby married, she was a fellow lottery winner. Though Jack couldn’t recall the last time he’d seen Ruby’s husband Sam around town. Since Sam was a military man of some sort, his absence shouldn’t be cause for note. But Ruby owned The Mercantile just down Main Street from the clinic with Honor Lassiter and lived in the apartment above the store.

And she didn’t have a pet.

He cleared his throat. “Ah, what can I do for—”

She cut him off. “It’s that damn goat, Jack. The one that’s been hanging around town.” Her upset was clear in the quaver of her voice. “It must have wandered into my back storeroom when we were unloading a delivery earlier. Now it’s got its head stuck inside a damn bucket and is crashing all over the place. It kicks when we try to get a hold of it. Please, can you come right over and help us before it destroys my stock?”

Ruby never swore, and it was strange to hear her so rattled. But she had been unusually emotional ever since the lottery win.

“I’ll be right there, Ruby.” Jack hung up, thankful he had an excuse to leave. He grabbed his bag from the floor next to his desk, checking quickly to make sure it contained his heavy-duty clippers. If he recalled, the little billy goat that made occasional forays into town from who-knew-where had horns long enough to keep its head stuck in a bucket.

He stood and went to the coatrack near his office door and pulled his heavy, dark brown canvas barn jacket off the rack. Slipping into it, he met the eyes of the eager reporter. The cameraman’s face was already buried behind his camera. “I’m sorry, but I have to go.”

“Can you just answer a couple of quick—”

He held up a hand again. “It’s an emergency. Sorry.”

Marina’s face glowed, clearly having picked up the scent of opportunity. “We’ll come along.”

Irritated and knowing that telling them no didn’t work—they simply followed along at a distance—Jack nodded. “Okay, just give me a sec.”

He turned and headed for the examination room, but realized he didn’t want to leave them inside with access to his office. He whirled and headed back toward them. “Why don’t you go ahead and wait for me in your van. Give you time to warm it up.”

Marina nodded in agreement. “Sure. Good idea.”

Her cameraman opened the door for her, and then Jack held it for him as he maneuvered the expensive video camera unit through the doorway. Jack closed the door, turning the lock as quietly as he could. He then headed straight for the examination room and out the other door that led out back, effectively ditching the news crew. His gut told him the last thing Ruby needed was to have her upset featured on the evening news. And it would be, because she was a fellow winner.

Besides, since he only had to pass Faulkner’s Hardware and The Brimming Cup, then cross the side street Mayor Bobby Larson had had the ballocks to rename Big Draw Drive to reach the back of The Mercantile, he’d be shortening the time it took him to get there.

As he made his way along the backside of the Main Street businesses, which looked much smaller than they did from the front with their old-west style facades, all Jack could think about was how nice it would be to move some place where he could do his job without having to slip out the back door of his own clinic.

A place where no one knew who he was, or could remind him of his pain.

Chapter Three

Melinda dragged her feet up the side porch steps to the little house she rented on Mega-Bucks Boulevard late that afternoon, weary to the bone. She should have been exhilarated after having her work praised as much as it had been by Wyla.

But when the thin, sour-faced woman wasn’t complimenting Melinda on her veterinary skills, she was griping. From afar, of course. With plenty of hired hands to do the work, Wyla no longer went anywhere near the animals that her last husband had been forced to “give” her after a nasty divorce. But she still stood in the pig barn door and griped and griped. About everything.

Though she’d been smart enough to keep her complaints about Jack, and the insinuations she’d been making around town that he stole her money by opting into the lottery after she’d opted out, to the minimum. She must have known Melinda wouldn’t stand for it. It was no secret he had her loyalty. Blessedly, the fact that he also had her heart remained a secret.

Wyla’s negativity had simply beaten Melinda down in a way wrestling several dozen pigs never could. She definitely couldn’t wait to seek comfort with her critters over this day, and had come straight home after finishing up at Wyla’s rather than stopping in at the office like normal. The paperwork, and Jack’s talk, could wait.

How was she going to talk him out of leaving without revealing too much? She shook her head at the seeming impossibility and let herself into the house. She’d been told when she first moved here that she needn’t worry about locking her doors. After the lottery win, however, the town sheriff, Luke McNeil, had advised everyone, even nonwinners, to take precautions. There were a lot more strangers in town now, thanks to its new notoriety.

The side door of her house opened right into a tiny laundry room. After she greeted her fat, notched-ear, half-blind, gray-and-black tabby cat and his timid, snow-white counterpart, per her routine, she stripped off her filthy and smelly work clothes—today the scent being eau de hog—and tossed them straight into the clothes washer. Down to her French-cut, cotton underwear and bra, she trudged through the little kitchen, the harvest-gold linoleum cold under her feet and the eager cats dangerous around her ankles.

She bought herself some safe-walking time by stopping to refill their food bowls, then went through the cozy living room to the short hall that the bathroom and her bedroom opened off from. Heading straight for the shower, she did her best to wash away the day behind a white with blue dog-paw print shower curtain.

The mud and manure were easy, requiring only a little soup and a nail brush. Wyla’s negativity succumbed under the force of the massage setting on the shower head. Bud Webster’s chauvinism required a few choice words that echoed nicely off the bathroom’s white and blue-flecked tile. But no matter how hot or hard she ran the water, Jack’s words, his pain, appeared to be with her to stay.

Turning pruney and needing to see to her other animals, Melinda gave up, turned off the shower and stepped out of the tub. She towel-dried her long curly hair as best she could, combed it out, then donned the pink satin pajamas and terry cloth, powder-blue robe with white clouds that she kept hanging from a ceramic cat’s paw on the back of the bathroom door. Out of the pockets of the robe she pulled thick woolen socks the cats assumed were some other weird creatures she’d taken in. She put them on, then went to tend to the rest of her menagerie.

The cats had already been seen to, but her parakeet with the broken beak needed water and her barbecue-singed guinea pig needed more pellets in the cages in a corner of the living room. In the laundry room she slipped her stocking feet into oversize rubber boots and went out into the fenced backyard.

She saw to her three rabbits in their hutch next to the house, added fresh straw to her two pigmy goats’ little shed to keep them warm through the very cold night, and coaxed her beloved, three-legged dog into the house. A mutt of some kind, mostly Australian shepherd she figured, he had been the first animal she’d rescued after moving out on her own, and his tenacity and good nature inspired her to keep at whatever she was doing no matter how tempted she was to give up. The silly thing loved to be outside in his doghouse, no matter how frigid the weather, but Melinda insisted he come in with her at night, as much for her and her need for company as for his health.

Kicking off her boots then reaching for an old towel to dry his white, black and brown coat, she met his warm, brown eyes as she rubbed the snow from him. “This was one of those days, Pete. I think even you would have stayed in bed.”

He sneezed as if to pshaw her, then hopped away into the kitchen.

“Fine. Cats know how to pity.” Melinda followed him, washed up, then made herself some soup, turning the TV on to the news while her dinner heated.

With her soup in a great big mug painted black and white like a Holstein dairy cow—a gift from her mother—Melinda went into the living room to eat. She cozied up on her dark brown, overstuffed couch and allowed the cats to settle in close enough to comfort but far enough away to keep their hair out of her soup.

She’d only taken two sips of the rich broth when the logo the local press, with the mayor’s help, had come up with for Jester since the lottery win—Millionaire, Montana—flashed on the screen next to the anchor’s head. Melinda rolled her eyes. Not again. She knew there had to be more important things going on in the world than whatever piddling dirt they’d managed to dig up on the lottery winners.

Then a picture of the Jester Veterinary Clinic came up on the screen and gained Melinda’s complete attention. The anchor started talking about Jack—or more accurately, the Big-Bucks Bachelor—and how he wasn’t going to be a bachelor for long. Melinda gaped at the TV, stunned by what she was hearing.

Then they went to commercial.

Her heart stalled in her chest despite her brain’s immediate attempt to scoff it off. But the panic hovering in the wings was unquestionable and terrifyingly intense. Could it have happened again? Could she have again fallen for a man who had eyes for someone else without her knowledge?

No. Jack couldn’t be secretly involved with someone.

Mary Kay Thompson, sitting coyly on the exam table, came to mind. Melinda tried to reject the notion, but Mary Kay had managed to get rid of Melinda for a while. But why not just close the door if they wanted to fool around?

Melinda shook her head, sloshing her soup. No. Not Mary Kay. Not anyone. It couldn’t be.

Still, she’d never experienced a more agonizing commercial break in her life.

The news came back on.

According to an unnamed source, the anchor continued, Jack Hartman—and they put up a picture of him so there was no doubt it was her Jack Hartman—was engaged to be married.

With the conversation of earlier today still ringing in her ears, Melinda’s brain won out. Jack hurt too much to have moved on. A guilty relief rushed through her so fast it almost made her dizzy. How embarrassing for that reporter.

Then Melinda’s picture, obviously taken from a distance then enlarged, showing her hair flying in a mess and a fierce look on her face, flashed on the screen. And the news anchor, sounding extremely certain, announced that fellow veterinarian Melinda Woods was the lucky gal to finally rope Jack.

Jaw slack, Melinda stared at the screen, oblivious to the soup running onto her surprisingly absorbent robe.

JACK STARED UNSEEING at the barbecue sauce he stirred, thinking about the thieving stray dog he’d capped his day off by failing yet again to trap. After he had escorted the bucket-head billy goat from Ruby’s back room, freed it from its five-gallon hat by docking its horns and turned it over to the kid who owned it with a lecture on proper fencing, he’d gone to check the trap that he and Luke had set for the dog in the scrub bushes behind The Mercantile.

An awful lot of the townsfolk would simply prefer the sheriff shot the dog, fearing it was a wolf. But Luke, either because of his Native American heritage or just the plain fact he liked animals, had come to Jack instead. They’d managed to get close enough to the animal to clearly see that it was actually a German shepherd-husky mix whose thick, grayish-brown coat made it look like a wolf at first glance.

Jack also had been able to see—as it hightailed away from them—that the dog, a male, had been neutered, so Jack knew it was simply a stray rather than a true feral dog. It had undoubtedly been abandoned by someone along the highway, because Jack knew that no one in or around town had ever owned a dog like that.

The mutt didn’t deserve to be shot, especially since the worst it had done so far was tear into garbage bags and make a mess. And though he’d never admit it, deep down, he felt a strange kinship with the dog. They were both just a couple of strays.

So he and Luke had set up and baited a trap, but the dog hadn’t fallen for it yet.

Jack glanced outside through the kitchen window, the view of the snow falling gently within the reach of his back porch light framed by the frilly white-and-blue checked curtains Caroline had sewn. If the weather continued to be this nasty, though, he was sure the poor dog would eventually have to take the bait.

He sighed and checked his watch, wishing he’d been on the ball enough to have thought to go back into his office and grab some paperwork that needed to be done before he’d slipped out on the news crew. But he hadn’t imagined that they would camp out at the clinic waiting for him to show again.

Either way, Melinda would have taken care of what had needed to be done in the office. Good thing, too. Those vaccines and medical supplies weren’t going to reorder themselves.

The sauce bubbled up at him and brought him back to the task of making dinner. He normally didn’t take the time to make himself a regular meal, but he’d been forced to come home early today, and he’d certainly had the time. Heck, he might as well go as far as to fix a salad. He ducked outside to check the chicken breast he was grilling on the back porch, turning the heat up to combat the freezing air temperature, then came back inside and went to the fridge to get salad makings.

A knocking—make that a pounding—on his front door stopped him. Annoyance flared to anger in his gut. He’d figured that if the news crew really wanted to talk with him they would eventually come to his house when he failed to show his mug on Main Street today. He’d just figured they’d be more polite about it.

He strode from the kitchen through the dining room to get to the front door of the house he and Caroline had bought when they moved to Jester. A lecture on manners poised on the tip of his tongue, he yanked open the door, then blinked in surprise when he found Melinda standing on the raised wooden porch that ran the length of the front of the house.

Her hair hung in long, dark ringlets, clearly damp, and while she had on her usual heavy coat, underneath she wore what looked like dark pink satin pajamas tucked into knee-high rubber barn boots. Her getup, coupled with the glitter of worry in her big brown eyes and the way she’d clamped her full bottom lip between her teeth sent Jack’s heart straight into his empty stomach. Oh, no, what now?

“Mel, what—”

“Jack. Thank goodness you’re here. I looked for you at the clinic, since your truck is still there, but it was empty and locked up, and I hadn’t seen you anywhere on Main Street—”

Understanding dawned on him, along with a hefty dose of guilt. She’d thought something had happened to him. “Ah, Mel, I’m sorry to have worried you. Come on in out of the cold.” He tried to usher her inside, but she took the time to step out of her barn boots, leaving them on the porch. He was momentarily distracted by the thick, fuzzy gray socks she wore. No wonder she’d had to wear those great big boots. Those socks wouldn’t fit into anything else.

Once inside, he automatically reached to take her coat.

She unbuttoned the heavy coat and started to pull it off, but her attention was on the turned-off TV in the living room. “I’m guessing you didn’t watch the news.”

“No. I haven’t had…it…on…” He trailed off when he caught sight of what was under her coat. He’d been right, she did have pajamas on. The top wasn’t the slightest bit risqué—it had long sleeves and was buttoned all the way up to the collar, only slightly veed neckline—but the fluid satin skimmed her breasts, breasts Jack had noticed but had never given a second thought to. Now he was giving them so much thought he couldn’t think about anything else. And he couldn’t quit staring. He made a blind grab for her coat.

Apparently not noticing where his attention lay, she delivered the coat into his hand. “Well, you should have been watching the news.”

That brought his gaze back to her face. Her expression was ominous.

“Why?”

“Because we were on it.”

He groaned and went to hang her coat up in the nearby closet tucked beneath the stairs. “Jeez. I should have known dodging that news reporter and her cameraman wouldn’t keep them from running some sort of story anyhow. That’s why I’m here, but my rig is still at work. I ducked out the back door to keep from having to talk to them.”

He should have at least found out what they wanted to talk to him about, rather than finding out about it after the fact.

“So you haven’t talked to the newspeople at all lately?” There was an odd, strained quality to her voice.

Before he could consider why, he caught the sound of the barbecue sauce he was making for the chicken bubbling. He started toward the kitchen. “No. Not since they dubbed me the Big-Bucks Bachelor. They pretty much blew their chances with me after that.”

He waved at her to follow him. “Come on into the kitchen. Because I came home so much earlier than normal, I’m grilling some chicken.”

She screwed up her face. “You’re barbecuing? In this weather?”

“Of course I am. I’m a guy.” He went to the stove and turned down the sauce, then glanced back at her pajamas, unfortunately noticing how her surprisingly full breasts moved beneath the satin. “Have—” his voice cracked and he jerked his gaze to her face. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Have you eaten?”

She scoffed. “I tried, but I’m afraid my robe ended up getting more of my soup than I did.” She looked down at herself, as if checking for stains, and let out a soft gasp. She crossed her arms over her chest, flattening the fullness of her breasts.

He tightened his stomach muscles against his body’s shocking interest. This was Mel, for God’s sake. She was his partner, his co-worker, the professional he was going to leave his practice to. And she was the least appropriate person for his body to decide to come out of a five year dormancy for.

With a little, self-deprecating laugh, she said, “I forgot I took my robe off because it was soaked. I guess I should have put some regular clothes on.” Her gaze came back to his. “But frankly, I wasn’t thinking of anything besides talking to you. My gosh, Jack, you’re not going to believe this.”

“Ever since Bobbie renamed the street I live on Lottery Lane, I’ll believe anything, Mel.” He picked up the wooden spoon to taste his sauce.

“Even that they announced on the news tonight that you and I are engaged to be married?”

Jack sprayed dark red sauce on the white tile back splash. “What?”

“They ran a story about how the Big-Bucks Bachelor, which would be you, isn’t going to be a bachelor for long. And apparently I’m the lucky gal to have finally roped you.”

“What the—where in blue blazes would they come…up…with…” He remembered what he’d said to Mary Kay only just that morning and slapped a hand to his forehead, his stomach folding in on itself with dread. “Oh, no.”

Melinda’s brows came together sharply and she uncrossed her arms. “What?”

His little lie couldn’t have been blown so out of proportion so fast, could it? He shook his head, dismissing the notion. “No. It couldn’t be from that.”

She tucked her rapidly drying hair behind an ear and moved closer to him. He stupidly noticed how beautifully formed and delicate her ear was, how it so perfectly matched her dainty jaw and slender neck. No wonder some of the farmers didn’t think she could handle their livestock.

Jack knew, though, that under all that femininity, which somehow, to this point, had been missed by him, was a woman as capable as the next guy. A woman who wouldn’t appreciate being used by him to get out of an uncomfortable situation with another woman.

From low in her throat she said, “What’d you do, Jack?”

For the barest second he considered not telling her about what had happened with Mary Kay. But Melinda would learn of it eventually, or at least some mutated version of it. He pulled in a deep breath. “Remember when Mary Kay came in with Pumpkin earlier?”

She threw out a hip and crossed her arms again, this time unconsciously tucking them beneath her breasts and pushing them upward. He could see the deep cleavage that was formed where the neckline of her pajama top veed and left him with no doubt about the fullness of her breasts.

Jack’s mouth went dry.

“Yes. She sent me schlepping out into the cold for no good reason. There was no icicle threatening my truck.”

He ground his teeth as his previous annoyance with Mary Kay bubbled into something more serious. “I figured as much. She just wanted you out of there so she could try to jump me.”

Melinda’s brows shot up. “Excuse me?”

“She’s trying to snag herself a millionaire. Any way she can. And as you’ve probably noticed, she’s not the only one.” He ran a weary hand through his too long hair. “It was kind of humorous for a little while. A very little while. But they’re taking it too far.”

Thinking of Paula Pratt, he added, “Anyone who would get a pet just to hit on a guy needs to have her head examined.” He blew out a breath. “Anyway, Mary Kay wouldn’t take no for an answer, and short of physically removing her from the premises—not to mention my body—the only way I could think of to put her off was to claim to already be involved with someone.”

Melinda’s cheeks gradually became the same shade as her pj’s. “How’d my name…”

“Mary Kay insisted on knowing who I was involved with.”

“So—so you said it was me?”

Guilt replaced his anger toward Mary Kay. “Yeah. You happened to walk by just then…” He vaguely waved a hand, remembering the moment. “Besides, you’re the only one who made sense. I mean, what other woman do I spend any amount of time alone with?”

She shifted her gaze to the sauce gently bubbling on the stove. “But we’re just working.”

“You and I know that, but Mary Kay was obviously more than willing to believe there’s been more than work going on. And for the record, I only said that we were seriously involved. I never said we were engaged. And I also asked her to keep it to herself.”

Mel made a noise. “Please. When I first moved here it only took me a matter of days to realize if you wanted to keep something a secret, you had to keep it to yourself.”

“I know, I know. I’ll admit I wasn’t thinking much beyond getting Mary Kay to leave me alone.” He gave a slight shrug. “It did work, though.”

“Why didn’t you just tell her you’re leaving town?”

“I doubt that would have put her off. She’d probably be all over the chance to come with me.”

Melinda made a noncommittal noise and picked up the spoon to stir the sauce.

Guilt made his back teeth ache. But what was done was done. “I suppose you’re mad.”

“I just want to know how we’re going to straighten it all out. I mean, it’s not just Mary Kay, anymore. And it’s not just that we’re seriously involved. Everyone thinks we’re engaged.” She looked up at him, her brown eyes soft and reflecting the warmth of the kitchen light. “Engaged, Jack.”

He slapped a hand to his forehead yet again. Suddenly the rest of his day made sense. “Oh, man. Stella and Irene stopped by wanting to know my favorite kind of cake and slow song.”

“You don’t think they’re planning our wed—”

He waved her off before she could finish. “No, no. They wouldn’t take it that far.” He silently prayed they wouldn’t. To keep from worrying her further, he said, “I’m positive they only want to make sure that they have all the bases covered.” He gave a rueful laugh. “Granted, they kept interrupting me, but at least they weren’t throwing themselves at me.”

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