CHAPTER ONE

      CAPPIE DRAKE peered around a corner inside the veterinary practice where she worked, her soft gray eyes wide with apprehension. She was looking for the boss, Dr. Bentley Rydel. Just lately, he’d been on the warpath, and she’d been the target for most of the sarcasm and harassment. She was the newest employee in the practice. Her predecessor, Antonia, had resigned and run for the hills last month.

      “He’s gone to lunch,” came an amused whisper from behind her.

      Cappie jumped. Her colleague, Keely Welsh Sinclair, was grinning at her. The younger woman, nineteen to Cappie’s twenty-three, was only recently married to dishy Boone Sinclair, but she’d kept her job at the veterinary clinic despite her lavish new lifestyle. She loved animals.

      So did Cappie. But she’d been wondering if love of animals was enough to put up with Bentley Rydel.

      “I lost the packing slip for the heartworm medicine,” Cappie said with a grimace. “I know it’s here somewhere, but he was yelling and I got flustered and couldn’t find it. He said terrible things to me.”

      “It’s autumn,” Keely said.

      Cappie frowned. “Excuse me?”

      “It’s autumn,” she repeated.

      The older woman was staring blankly at her.

      Keely shrugged. “Every autumn, Dr. Rydel gets even more short-tempered than usual and he goes missing for a week. He doesn’t leave a telephone number in case of emergencies, he doesn’t call here and nobody knows where he is. When he comes back, he never says where he’s been.”

      “He’s been like this since I was hired,” Cappie pointed out. “And I’m the fifth new vet tech this year, Dr. King said so. Dr. Rydel ran the others off.”

      “You have to yell back, or just smile when he gets wound up,” Keely said in a kindly tone.

      Cappie grimaced. “I never yell at anybody.”

      “This is a good time to learn. In fact…”

      “Where the hell is my damned raincoat?!”

      Cappie’s face was a study in horror. “You said he went to lunch!”

      “Obviously he came back,” Keely replied, wincing, as the boss stormed into the waiting room where two shocked old ladies were sitting beside cat carriers.

      Dr. Bentley Rydel was tall, over six feet, with pale blue eyes that took on the gleam of steel when he was angry. He had jet-black hair, thick and usually untidy because he ran his fingers through it in times of frustration. His feet were large, like his hands. His nose had been broken at some point, which only gave his angular face more character. He wasn’t conventionally handsome, but women found him very attractive. He didn’t find them attractive. If there was a more notorious woman hater than Bentley Rydel in all of Jacobs County, Texas, it would be hard to find him.

      “My raincoat?” he repeated, glaring at Cappie as if it were her fault that he’d left without it.

      Cappie drew herself up to her full height—the top of her head barely came to Bentley’s shoulder—and took a deep breath. “Sir,” she said smartly, “your raincoat is in the closet where you left it.”

      His dark eyebrows rose half a foot.

      Cappie cleared her throat and shook her head as if to clear it. The motion dislodged her precariously placed barrette. Her long, thick blond hair shook free of it, swirling around her shoulders like a curtain of silk.

      While she was debating her next, and possibly job-ending, comment, Bentley was staring at her hair. She always wore it on top of her head in that stupid ponytail. He hadn’t realized it was so long. His pale eyes narrowed as he studied it.

      Keely, fascinated, managed not to stare. She turned to the old ladies watching, spellbound. “Mrs. Ross, if you’ll bring—” she looked at her clipboard “—Luvvy the cat on back, we’ll see about her shots.”

      Mrs. Ross, a tiny little woman, smiled and pulled her rolling cat carrier along with her, casting a wistful eye back at the tableau she was reluctantly foregoing.

      “Dr. Rydel?” Cappie prompted, because he was really staring.

      He scowled suddenly and blinked. “It’s raining,” he said shortly.

      “Sir, that is not my fault,” she returned. “I do not control the weather.”

      “A likely story,”