Masked Cowboy (Men of the White Sandy) (12 page)

If this was her new start, maybe she would have been better off with vanilla-pudding Greg. But that thought just made her even madder as she chugged the rest of her tea. She didn’t need Jacob to take care of her because she didn’t need any man to take care of her. She was the one in control. She was the one who walked. Every time.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Robin asked as she refilled Mary Beth’s mug. “You look pissy.”

“I’m fine. You’re the one who didn’t mail off the applications on time,” Mary Beth snipped.

“Okay, let it go. That was a week ago, Mary Beth,” she snipped back.

“Fine.” She forced an unnatural smile. “It’s gone, okay?”

Robin hugged her tray to her chest as she looked Mary Beth up and down. “You know what you need? You need to get laid.”

Mary Beth almost fell off her chair. “Excuse me. In public here.”

“Uh huh,” Robin giggled. “I bet I know just the man too.” She nodded down the street as Jacob rode into view.

Not only was he not shirtless, he was wearing a long duster coat that draped out behind him and nearly covered Mick’s haunches. His legs were invisible and his chest was completely bundled against the rapidly dropping temperatures.

“Oh, I hate it when summer ends.” Robin sighed. “Tell him I’ll be right back with his dinner.”

“No! Don’t leave me alone out here,” Mary Beth shouted after her.

“You aren’t alone,” Jacob’s deep voice rumbled from in front of her table.

“Oh, you’re talking to me today? What’s the special occasion? Is it my birthday, or are you just deigning to speak to the lowly creatures?” she barked out before she could stop herself.

He looked at her coolly, his eye holding her gaze.

“Ignore her, Jacob. She’s extra pissy tonight,” Robin sang as she came back out with his to-go bag.

“
Robin
,” Mary Beth screeched as Jacob let a lazy grin play out over his face.

“She’s sorry the show is over for the season, that’s all.” Robin giggled as Jacob took his dinner.

“Later? I’m going to kill you, Robin,” Mary Beth muttered as she tried to kick her best friend’s shins.

Jacob’s face went hard. “I heard she was pissed at you, not me. Should’ve mailed your apps in,
Šišóka
.”

Now it was Robin’s turn to blush. “Jesus, it’s like you both think I’m thirteen or something.”

“No,” he slowly replied, his eyebrow arching with glee, “I remember you at thirteen. This is worse.”

“Screw you, Jacob,” she hissed before she stalked back into the kitchen.

“Well. Glad to see I’m not the only woman you have that impact on,” Mary Beth said as she glared at him.

His gaze softened a bit as he took a deep breath. “Mary Beth—”

“Jacob? We’re ready.” Mrs. Browne stood in the doorway of the school, Kip nearly invisible in the bright light that flooded out of the doorway.

Without another word, he turned and picked up the girl who probably wasn’t his daughter and lifted her onto the old mare. He touched his fingertips to his hat and then they were gone in the cool night, leaving Mary Beth alone.

Again.

He was still wearing the coat the next morning as the winds whistled down the hills and slammed into the broadside of the barn. The air cut right through Mary Beth’s jeans, left exposed below her barn coat.

Great, she thought as he hefted the bags out of the truck. One more thing I need to buy. At least she’d planned on running up to Rapid City this Sunday with Robin. She wouldn’t have to make the extra trip.

“Where we going today?” she asked as they swung up on their horses.

“Mustangs,” he replied as he rode away from her.

“Right. Mustangs. A whole word that time,” she muttered, kicking Jezebel after him.

The wind was at their backs for the quick twenty-minute ride out to his barn. Dave was waiting for them, a worried line crossing his normally unreadable brow.

“What’s the problem?” Mary Beth demanded as she dismounted.

“They’re all blowing snot everywhere, holding their heads funny. Half of them won’t eat,” he replied as he led her into the barn.

“Strangles.”

“What?” Jacob demanded.

“It sounds like strangles. A strep infection.” She took one look at the first horse and nodded.

“Didn’t you vaccinate them for that?” Jacob asked. Was he accusing her of making the animals sick?

“It’s not a hundred percent foolproof, but it’s usually good enough. I don’t understand it at all.” She shook her head, just as confused as Jacob. “I can take cultures to be sure, but that mucous will start to turn green in a few days.”

“Already has in Bell,” Dave said with a nod to the next stall.

Poor Bell. But then, she already felt bad for the horse that was officially named Hell’s Bells. “Dave, I’m sorry, but the whole barn has to be sterilized—walls, buckets, tack, everything.”

Dave nodded as Jacob said, “Go ahead and bring in Lisa and Alex.”

“I’ll get Gary too.”

Jacob shot him a questioning look.

“Look, I know he’s only eight, but he’s got what it takes. Cleaning tack is a good place to start him,” Dave explained. It was by far the longest speech he’d ever made, and it was in English.

“Do it.”

“Warm compresses to the ones that seem to be having trouble breathing,” Mary Beth went on. “Most of them will be better in a week or so.” She turned to Jacob, somewhat surprised to see him smiling at her. For a second, it threw her. First, it had sounded like he almost wanted to apologize last night, and now, after a long summer, he was smiling at her again, in front of Dave no less. “Uh,” she stuttered, trying to remember what she was going to say. “The disease might make it past the lymph nodes in some of them. If any of them start really laboring to breathe, call me immediately.”

Jacob and Dave nodded in unison.

“Clean the whole barn, isolate the ones who aren’t symptomatic yet, and watch to see if any of them turn,” she reminded them. “I’ll take some cultures.”

Jacob whistled, and Jezebel slowly plodded into the barn.

“I didn’t know she did that,” Mary Beth exclaimed as Dave headed out to round up his help.

Jacob looked a little guilty. “I’ve been training her.”

She dug out her culture swabs and latex gloves. “You have?”

He nodded, that grin still smiling out at her from beneath the mask. “I thought you might like to have a trained horse.”

Good Lord
, she thought as she began swabbing snot from pained horses.
He’s been training Jezebel? For me? Is this how cowboys apologize for being jerks
?

Bell was in bad shape, and Mary Beth was worried the strangles had already gone to the next level, so she broke out the high-powered antibiotics and the intravenous fluids. A few others needed fluids too, but the rest of the herd just looked like it had the common cold.

Something just didn’t add up. “How did they get this? This is a vaccinated, closed herd and none of the ranch horses have had any symptoms,” she puzzled out loud as she cleaned out another mustang’s nasal passages.

“Not sure. Jack said he thought he heard strange hoof beats a few nights ago but didn’t see anything.” She’d only met Jack twice. He was the young Lakota man who stayed in the barn at night, guarding the tribe’s investments. He’d never said a word to her, almost like she wasn’t there.

Jacob went on, “That might be…nobody.” But he seemed genuinely confused by this statement. “That couldn’t be it though.”

He wasn’t the only one confused. Mary Beth stared at him, wondering what the hell he was talking about. Did he know who’d ridden in—or not? “Surely someone wouldn’t try to infect them on purpose?”

Jacob shrugged. “I’ll have Jack look around some, see if anyone left a trail. And don’t call me Shirley.”

Mary Beth tried to roll her eyes at him, but she couldn’t stop the giggle that escaped. “You sound like Robin.”

“She’s right about you, you know.”

Now that pulled her up short. There was no way he should have been able to hear Robin say she needed to get laid.

“You have been pissy recently.”

Oh, thank God, not a getting-laid discussion—or was it? “You do realize that I spend most of my days with either you or Fran, and neither one of you has been very nice to me recently? Fran I can understand. She’s not very nice to anyone, but you?”

His eye softened as he took that familiar deep breath. “Mary Beth…” he began, but again was interrupted by Dave calling them back to look at a pregnant mare.

“Yeah,” she muttered, pushing past him as she stripped off one pair of gloves and slapped on another. “I’ve got work to do.”

Two hours later, Mary Beth had exhausted her supply of gloves, saline and culture swabs. She was nearly out of antibiotics and syringes. She and Dave walked through the barn with his young recruits as she patiently explained what needed to be cleaned, why and how to prevent re-infection.

“This is important, kids,” she reminded them, looking down on the young faces. Lisa was the oldest of the three, nearly as tall as Mary Beth was and nearly as quiet as Kip. She was Alex’s older cousin, and they were both somehow related to Dave. Gary barely came up to her waist, but he paid the most attention. “The first rule of being a good cowboy is caring for your animals.”

“Roy Rodgers told me it was to be neat and clean,” Jacob yelled from Bell’s stall where he was holding hot compresses to her swollen throat.

Lisa rolled her eyes as the boys snickered. Mary Beth shot the stall a dirty look. “That works too!” she shouted back. “In this case, it’s the same thing. Jacob’s counting on you guys, so you better not let him down.”

“Dr. Hofstetter?” Alex piped up.

“Yes, dear?”

He giggled. “Did you really almost castrate Tommy Yellow Robe?”

Gary snickered again as Mary Beth went purple. Even Lisa blushed as she whacked Alex on the shoulder.

“That’s enough,” Jacob thundered from the stall, and the kids scattered to different parts of the barn.

“Is that what everyone knows me by on the rez?” she asked as she wandered back into Bell’s stall. The poor mare was nearly leaning all her weight on Jacob as he held the compresses to her throat.

“Mostly,” he replied as he looked at her fading blush. “Alex will tell everyone you turned bright red. That’ll be something different.”

“Lord,” she muttered as she took Bell’s temperature. “Down a degree.”

“Good. Can you come back tomorrow?”

“If it won’t piss McGillis off,” she shrugged.

“We’ll come here last. Might be a long evening though.”

“What about Kip?”

He looked surprised at the mention of her name, but it quickly disappeared. “Dave is trustworthy. He’ll keep an eye on you while I go get her.”

“That’s fine,” she responded nonchalantly, even though her curiosity was up. First he was talking to her again, and now Kip was a part of the conversation. He’d never talked about her at all. A new thought occurred to her. “Jacob, where was Kip when the mare was breech?”

His face was blank as he shifted the horse off his shoulder.

“Aren’t you going to tell me?” she prodded.

His lips disappeared into an angry line. “Fine. She was asleep in the tack room.”

“You brought her to the barn?”

“I don’t leave her, not at night.” And with that, he turned and walked away, leaving Mary Beth more confused than ever.

That afternoon, after Mary Beth had driven off the ranch, Jacob sat in his office staring at his phone. On occasion, Nobody had visited the barn late at night, unseen and unheard, only a new horse in a paddock in the morning to tell that he’d been there. If Jack had thought he’d heard something in the dead of night, it could have been the big, silent man.

But that didn’t fit with the man whose whole life was taking care of horses. Jacob didn’t trust Nobody much around people, but around horses? It wasn’t possible that Nobody would infect the mustangs, even by accident.

Which left what other options? The barn’s location was on a need-to-know basis—if you didn’t need to know, you didn’t know. Jacob trusted his hands—Dave and Jack and even Lisa and Gary were all trustworthy.

Who else could have infected his horses?

Jacob thought about calling Tim, but what could Tim do? If Jack couldn’t pick up a track, there wasn’t a hope in hell that Tim could.

He opened his desk drawer and pulled out the aged, thin Yellow Pages that covered most of the rez and surrounding counties. The White Sandy Clinic and Hospital was listed. Honestly, Jacob wasn’t sure if he needed a medicine man. Sick horses needed a vet, not a sweat lodge. But something about the whole situation felt
off
. More off than they had in the last three years. He hated the feeling.

It’d been years since he’d done anything spiritual. Hell, before that night when Susan and Fred had died, he hadn’t given the spirit world much thought at all. He’d been busy. The last time he’d talked with a medicine man had been…well, he’d gone on a vision quest when he was thirteen. Hadn’t seen a damn thing. Afraid to disappoint his grandfather, he’d made up a story about seeing the land from above, soaring with the eyes of an eagle.