Sun Kissed (16 page)

“I’ll be damned. I think I’ve been mistaking grays for blue roans, then.” He flashed her a sheepish grin. “When I got here tonight, my first thought when I saw Blue was how gorgeous he is, which kind of surprised me, because blue roans don’t normally appeal to me.”

She looked affronted. “Blue roans are beautiful animals.”

“
True
blue roans.” He winked at her. “You should name one of your colts True Blue.”

She smiled but shook her head. “I name all my horses after things in my cupboards. Blue is named after a spicy
brand of smoke-flavored barbecue sauce. The others are pretty self-explanatory. True Blue is a cute name, though. Maybe my dad will use it.”

Tucker watched her push easily to her feet. That was another thing about her that he found attractive: She was in superb physical shape. Not the working-out-every-day-at-the-gym kind of good shape so common in his age group, but the kind of physical conditioning that came only from hard work. She was lean, toned, and able to move with surprising speed.

“I’m going to check on Tabasco,” she informed him.

Tucker regretted seeing her go. They’d just found some common ground and, he hoped, were becoming friends. Now she was off, aborting the conversation before it could delve any deeper into more personal subjects.

Watching the swing of her nicely rounded hips, he wondered if that wasn’t exactly her aim—to keep him at arm’s length.

A
t just a little past three in the morning, Isaiah Coulter returned with the blood panel results. When Samantha caught movement and glanced up at the stall gate, she was surprised it wasn’t Clint rousing himself to spell her for a while, or her father returning from his emergency run to the hospital. Instead she saw Isaiah’s dark, handsome face. Despite his resemblance to Tucker, she recognized him by the jacket he wore.

He waved a handful of documents. “Where’s Tucker?”

“Over with the other horse.” Slipping her rosary back into her pocket, Samantha pushed to her feet, her gaze shifting to the papers in Isaiah’s hand, which he’d rested atop the gate. Tucker’s guess about the morphine had al ready been proved correct by the successful effects of the naloxone, but she was still hoping he might be wrong about the arsenic. “What do Tabasco’s test results show?”

Isaiah shook his head. “Sorry. It’s Tucker’s place to tell you that. Just know you’ve landed yourself one fine vet.”

That told Samantha more than she wanted to know, namely that Tabasco had indeed been poisoned. Blue had
almost a half hour left to go before he would need another injection, so she walked with Isaiah to Tabasco’s stall. Tucker was adjusting the IV drip on a fresh bag of fluids. When he saw his brother, the first words from his mouth were, “Is it arsenic?”

After they entered the stall, Isaiah closed the gate behind them and thrust out the paperwork. “I’ll let you make the call on that.”

Tucker took the reports, his forehead furrowing in a frown as he scanned each page. Samantha craned her neck, trying to read the results herself, even though she wouldn’t know good numbers from bad.

Finally Tucker nodded. “Definitely arsenic, then.” He flipped to another page, scanned it, and said, “Damn, it’s playing hell with his liver and kidneys. Let’s just pray I’m not too late, and that the D-penicillamine works.”

“D-penicillamine?” Isaiah echoed. “For what, an arsenic chelator?”

“It’s been used with good success in humans,” Tucker replied, “and it has a wide margin of safety for use in animals. For a horse this size they recommend fifty milligrams three to four times a day. I’ve already given him the first injection.”

“All joking aside about the photographic memory, how the hell do you remember all this stuff?” Isaiah asked. “Do you have your laptop out in the truck so you can look it up?”

Tucker gave his brother a vaguely irritated look. “I don’t know how I remember stuff. I just do.”

Samantha’s stomach twisted into a painful knot. She gazed past Tucker at Tabasco. “Is he going to die, then?”

“I hope not,” Tucker replied. “His liver and kidney counts don’t look good. I’m not going to lie to you about that, Samantha, or make promises just to ease your mind. He’s a very sick horse.”

She gulped and nodded. “What are his chances, do you think?”

Tucker pushed a big hand through his sable hair. “I don’t know. The poison has been in his system for over a week, with no chelating agent to get it out of his body.”

Samantha closed her eyes. If Tabasco died, she would be partly responsible. When she’d learned Doc Washburn was away on vacation she should have called Tucker immediately. Instead, because she’d dreaded seeing Tucker again, she had settled for negligent care from a second-rate veterinarian.

“How does a chelator work?” she managed to ask.

“It’s an agent that helps remove heavy metals from the bloodstream. Arsenic lingers in the blood and tissues, and in large enough amounts it continues to do damage long after it’s ingested. A chelating agent acts sort of like a magnet. It bonds with heavy metals and minerals such as arsenic, allowing them to be flushed from the body.”

“Think of it as a body wash,” Isaiah inserted, “only on the inside.”

“So it
is
arsenic poisoning,” Clint said.

Samantha jumped with a start and turned to find her brother standing just inside the gate, which he’d left yawning open behind him. His face was clenched in anger, his jaw muscle ticking. Bits of straw clung to his blue chambray work shirt.

“That day at the courthouse,” he said evenly, directing
his gaze at her, “I swore I’d make that son of a bitch regret the day he was born if he ever hurt you again. It wasn’t an empty threat. It was a vow.”

Samantha shook her head, silently pleading with Clint not to air her dirty laundry in front of two strangers. But he was too furious to notice.

“I stayed away from this ranch when the marriage went south,” he went on, his voice vibrant with rage. “I looked away when I saw the bruises, telling myself you’d gotten hurt working with the horses. I lied to myself be cause I knew you didn’t want me to interfere. He was your husband, and it was between you and him, so I tried my damnedest to stay out of it.” He leaned closer to get nose-to-nose with her. “But that’s not the case now. The marriage is over, and he’s going to pay for this. I’m going to hunt him down like the worthless dog he is, and I’m going to stomp the living hell out of him.”

“Clint, that’s enough,” she tried.

“No, not nearly,” he shot back. “He gave Blue a shit-load of morphine for it to have affected him that way. Have you even stopped to wonder why?”

Samantha shook her head. “We don’t know for certain it was Steve. You need to calm down.”

“Like hell I’ll calm down. He knows how much you love Blue Blazes, and killing Blue with arsenic wouldn’t have been horrible enough to suit him. So instead he set out to make him die the most awful, goriest death possible, while you watched. Either that or he was hoping you’d be foolish enough to enter the stall so the horse could kill you. He’s a mean, rotten, lying, low-down
bastard, and right now he’s probably kicked back in a recliner, drunk as a lord, laughing his ass off.”

“Clint,
please
.”

“If I don’t stop him he’ll try again,” her brother warned. “He won’t be happy when he finds out Blue isn’t dead. And he’ll find a way to sneak back in here and do it again.”

Samantha whipped away from her brother, only to see Tucker and Isaiah staring at her with shock and pity in their expressions. She was so humiliated she wanted to crawl into a hole. She shoved past Clint to escape the stall and ran from the building.

Tucker gazed after Samantha until she reached the personnel door and disappeared outside. Then he turned to look at Clint. The man stood with his boots braced wide apart, all his anger seemingly gone, replaced by what now appeared to be hopeless regret. He was pinching the bridge of his nose. His eyes were closed. An ashen pallor tinted his sun-bronzed face.

“Damn it,” he whispered. “Why is it I can never get it right with her?”

Tucker glanced uneasily at his brother. Isaiah met his gaze for a moment and then bent his head to dig at the straw with his boot heel.

“Judging by what you just said, you think Samantha’s ex-husband did this to her horses?” Tucker was hoping for clarification and possibly Clint’s reasons for suspecting the man.

Clint lowered his hand from his eyes, curled his
thumbs over his belt, and nodded. “I don’t think; I
know
.” He gestured with his head. “And so does she.”

Tucker rechecked the IV drip and patted Tabasco on the rump. “By law I have to report this, Clint. It appears that two horses have been deliberately poisoned. If you’ve got sound reasons for thinking it was her ex-husband, I’d like to hear them.”

“She divorced him a little over a year ago, and there was a bitter court battle over the assets. Steve married her for her money, and when she finally wised up and sent him packing, he went after half of everything she had.”

Tucker nodded to indicate that he was following.

“Normally that’s fair,” Clint continued. “Two people get hitched, and they acquire assets together. But Samantha already had her inheritance when Steve came into the picture. That was what attracted the bastard to her in the first place.”

Tucker could think of many other things about Samantha that would attract a man, but he held his tongue.

Clint swung a hand to indicate the ranch. “When each of us kids turned twenty-one, our father gave us an equal share of his land and a hefty sum of money to start our own horse-breeding businesses.”

“And this guy Steve wanted half of Samantha’s share?” Isaiah asked.

“He damned near got half.” Clint’s jaw muscles bunched. “I talked myself blue trying to get her to make him sign a prenup agreement. But would she listen? Hell, no. She was young and in love, with stars in her eyes. The way she saw it, asking him to sign an agreement would
have been a slap in his face and a betrayal of their love for each other. So when the marriage went bust, he got half of almost everything. The only thing the judge refused to split down the middle was the inventory. Samantha’s horses, in other words. They were hers before the marriage, and they were the backbone of her business. Steve had his rodeo stints to bring in an income. The judge felt it was only fair to leave Samantha with some way to support herself, too.

“Steve was so pissed he couldn’t see straight,” Clint went on. “These horses are worth more than you can imagine, hundreds of thousands. One of Sammy’s regular foals can’t be touched for less than sixty grand, and that was
before
Blue Blazes won the cutting horse competition a couple of weeks ago.

“Right after the hearing, Steve waited for her on the courthouse steps,” Clint said, his voice quavering at the memory. “He was so fit to be tied by the judge’s mandate that he forgot himself and got in her face, swearing on all that was holy to make her regret leaving him. I had a lot of pent-up anger.” Clint shrugged. “If you don’t have a baby sister, you just can’t know how I hated the rotten bastard. But there I go, justifying my actions. I decked him, plain and simple. He wasn’t going to bully my sister again, not on my watch, so I tore into him. My dad and brothers had to pull me off.”

Tucker nodded. “I hope you whaled the snot out of him.” Just the thought of someone bullying Samantha, and possibly even striking her, made Tucker’s blood pressure go up several points. “It sounds like he had it coming.”

Clint studied the sick stallion through narrowed, glittering eyes. “Evidently I didn’t whale on him quite enough, not if he worked up the gumption to do this. Spineless, sneaky, backstabbing asshole. I’m gonna take him apart.”

Tucker could only imagine how deep and hot Clint’s anger ran. “We aren’t sure Steve Fisher did it yet,” he tried.

Clint cut him a disgusted look. “Maybe you aren’t. I know him. I know how he thinks. In his mind, Samantha cheated him out of what was rightfully his, so now he means to kill her horses. It doesn’t matter that he walked away with more than his fair share, or that my sister had to borrow over a million dollars from our father to settle up with him instead of selling this place. All he cares about is what he didn’t get. So he figures she won’t have it, either.”

“You need to keep a clear head, partner.”

It was Isaiah who spoke, and the unexpected comment brought Clint’s head around and some sanity back into his dark eyes.

“Tucker and I have a sister, too,” Isaiah elaborated, “and we’re a close-knit family. If anybody ever hit her or hurt her like this, we’d want to beat the hell out of him, no question about it.”

Clint nodded his approval, and Isaiah’s face broke into one of his famous grins. “But wanting to do something is different from actually
doing
it. You know? If you lay a hand on the guy, he’ll file charges against you.”

“Not if he’s dead, he won’t.”

Isaiah shook his head. “You’re not a killer. You’d just
mess him up real bad and leave him to lick his wounds. And the first thing you’d know, the cops would be hauling you away to the hoosegow. It’s better to keep a clear head and go after him through the appropriate channels. If he did this, the police will find evidence to prove it.”

“He covered his ass,” Clint insisted. “Trust me on that. He’s a saddle tramp, but he’s a smart saddle tramp. They won’t find anything that points to him.”

Samantha huddled in the corner of an outdoor stall where the fading moonlight didn’t reach her. It was dark, and it was quiet, and she needed the privacy as much as she needed the air to breathe. She couldn’t believe that her brother had said all that in front of two strangers, particularly Tucker. She didn’t want him to know she’d remained in an abusive marriage for five years. On a scale of one to ten, the shame of it went clear off the chart.

She’d watched all the talk-show debates about battered women. She knew how cruelly they were stereotyped and had heard the clinical experts wax poetic on their theories. Women like that were sick. They were game players. They were trying to satisfy a deep, quirky, psychotic need to be punished. They fell in love with men like their abusive fathers, trying to reenact their childhoods and finally come out winners. They were helplessly attracted to brutal, bullish individuals because being knocked around turned them on.

Only where did she fit into all their hypotheses? She’d never been abused as a child. Just the opposite. She’d been well loved by her father and adored by her brothers. At bedtime almost every night her dad had knelt with her
to say her prayers before he tucked her in, and then he’d read to her until she fell asleep. On those rare occasions when he’d been too busy, her brothers had filled in for him. She could still remember Zachary, only two years her senior, trying to read her
The Night Before Christmas
when he’d been barely old enough to make out the words. She’d been loved, damn it. She’d been cherished. There was nothing within her that had ever gone looking for punishment because she had some irrational, perverted need to suffer.