The Curvy Vet and the Billionaire Cowboy (He Wanted Me Pregnant!) (8 page)

Russ receded into the distance. Night was falling, the mountain paths a maze of shadows. Another few minutes, and I’d be out of sight….

I pulled hard on the reins. Only years of training stopped Constantine from rearing up and throwing me. Instead, he stopped gently and then turned his head to look at me as if to say, “
What?”

I just stared ahead of me.

A moment later, Russ rode up, still shirtless. “Thank God,” he said. “I thought I was going to lose you.”

I just pointed ahead of us, and he gasped.

No more than forty feet away, the mustang was walking shakily through the trees towards the lake. It looked even weaker than before, its legs shaking, its head moving awkwardly.

Chapter 8

My panic faded away. My breathing slowed down.

“Holy…” said Russ. He hesitated. “Will you stay? Will you help me?”

I hesitated. And then nodded.

He let out a long sigh of relief. “Stay here while I get a rope on her.”

I nodded dumbly and watched as Russ approached the horse. He didn’t try to hide himself and sneak up on her. He let her know he was coming, whispering nonsense to her the whole way. Moving so carefully and slowly that he almost became part of the scenery, something the horse could trust.

He was a natural. It was the first time I’d seen him work with a horse and watching him was awe-inspiring. This is what he should be doing. This is what he needed to be doing.

I watched as he petted the horse, very gently, and slipped the rope around its neck. It looked at him with panicked, confused eyes. God knows what the poor thing was seeing or hearing, through its delirium. We could only hope it didn’t try to bolt or kick.

Russ motioned me over. Luckily, my medical gear was still in Constantine’s saddle bags. I dismounted, grabbed my gear and a couple of lanterns and hurried over to him. When I got there, he gave me a long look and I nodded.
We’ll talk later.
And then I got to work.

The signs weren’t good. The horse’s temperature was up to 105° and I could see she was barely able to move her head or swallow. We filled Russ’s hat with water and propped it up on some gear so that she could reach it more easily, and she drank greedily. But she could barely swallow. I didn’t want to say it, but it looked as if we were too late. The disease was just too far progressed.

“What can you do for her?” asked Russ. When I looked across at him, he’d gone pale in the lamplight.

“I can try to help her through it,” I said, prepping a needle. “I can dose her up with corticosteroids. We can try to get a line into her and give her fluids—that may help.” I looked around. “This isn’t the best place to be doing this, though.”

He nodded. “I know. Just…do your best. Please.”

Russ soothed the horse while I gave her a shot of steroids to help her fight the infection and an antipyretic to try to get the fever down. Then I found a vein and ran an IV line. There was no drip stand, so I had to hang the bag from the branch of a tree and hope to God the horse didn’t move and rip it out of the vein.

“That’s it,” I said.

Russ looked at the horse as it tried to choke down water. “That’s
it?
Can’t you do anything else?!”

I felt that familiar double-punch of guilt and frustration all vets—all doctors too, I guess—get when they face a relative. I ran a hand through my hair. “I can give her anticonvulsants if she starts to convulse. Otherwise, we keep the fluids going and monitor her. Her immune system will either fight it off by morning, or….”

He stared at me and then stared at the horse. “We found her too late, didn’t we?”

I shook my head, thinking exactly what he was thinking.
If we hadn’t had breakfast. If I hadn’t been so useless and had ridden a little faster. If we hadn’t had sex. If, if, if.

He nodded sourly and I went cold inside.
Damnit.

We settled down to wait.

***

It was a long, long night, Russ stroking the horse’s neck for hour after hour while I hung new IV bags and dosed her again with drugs, pushing the dosage as much as I dared. There was a tension between us and it was all the worse because of the intimacy we’d shared. Several times, one or the other of us would try to start to talk, but we were both too on edge.

The horse slumped to her knees, and eventually onto her side, where she lay panting and writhing.

Around midnight, Russ noticed her breathing was quieter. “Does that mean she’s improving?” he asked.

His voice was so hopeful, I almost wanted to lie to him.
This is a shitty, shitty job,
I thought. “No,” I said. “It means the paralysis is setting in. Her lymph nodes are swollen so much her throat is closing up. She can’t breathe.”

He looked at me, aghast. “
Do
something!” He was trying to keep his voice low so as not to scare the horse, but I could see he was starting to lose it.

I shook my head. “There’s nothing I
can
do! I’m sorry, Russ.”

He slumped down on the ground. I sat down too, the horse between us, and listened to her breath growing fainter and fainter. I knew that I wasn’t supposed to get attached, as a vet, and when it does happen it’s usually some animal you’ve been treating for years, not one you’ve just met. But this horse meant the world to Russ…and now, to me, too.

By morning, she’d be dead. Russ was going to have his heart broken twice in one day, all thanks to me.

Chapter 9

I leaned forward and put my head on my knees in despair, hot tears rolling down my cheeks.
Take a chance,
people had been saying to me my whole life. And just once, I’d taken one. Just once, I’d dared to think that a man could like me. And look how it had worked out.

The tears were running freely, now, dripping down my cheeks and falling to the grass like the first drops of rain. This was only the beginning. Tomorrow, we’d have to have that horrible, awkward conversation, with me making it clear I wasn’t the sort of woman he thought. I couldn’t live in the country and have kids and marry some guy! It was all too much, too fast, and about seventeen worlds away from what I knew.

I listened to the horse’s desperate, labored breathing. Some vet I was. I couldn’t even help her breathe. If I was just back in Cheyenne, in an operating theater—

Everything seemed to slow to a stop.

“Shit,” I said quietly.

In the near-darkness, I heard Russ turn. “What?”

I’d taken one chance, and it had ruined everything. Now the question was: was I brave enough to take another one.

The tears were still running down my face, but they were slowing. I wiped them away and shook my head. “I have an idea,” I said. “And I wish I hadn’t, because it scares the hell out of me.”

I took a long, slow breath, trying to stop the tears…and control my rising panic.

“What is it?” Russ asked.

“She’ll breathe okay if we can just open up her airway,” I said. Then, not quite believing I was saying it, “I could try to intubate her.” I lifted my head and looked at him.

“That’s where you put a tube down her throat?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“What do you need, to do it?”

I looked around at the dirt and the rocks. “An operating theater,” I said in a neutral tone. I looked at the lanterns, barely pushing back the gloom. “Lots of light, so I can see what I’m doing.” I looked at the horse, still delirious and thrashing on the ground. “And the horse needs to be sedated.”

He looked at me. “Can you do it?”

“I have no idea. I’ve never tried to do it like…this. You’re going to have to hold her.”

I pulled out the intubation kit. I’d only brought it out of habit. Actually using it in the field hadn’t crossed my mind. Certainly not in the dark. Certainly not on a feral, delirious, un-sedated horse.

“Can’t you give her a shot of something, to calm her down?” asked Russ. He looked as scared for me as he did for the horse and I didn’t blame him. I could easily wind up with a mangled hand or a hoof through my skull.

“Too late,” I said. “From the way she’s breathing, we do this now or not at all. I just wish I’d thought of it sooner.”
Yeah, looks like it’s my day for regrets.

Russ hung the lanterns where they’d do the most good and wrapped his arms around the horse. I didn’t know if he was going to be able to do much, if she decided to lash out, but I was glad he was there.

Oh dear God. Am I really going to do this?
I could feel the fear climbing inside me, taking control of my mind, freezing up my hands. I was going to have another full-on meltdown, and the horse was going to die.

I looked at Russ.
No. Not this time.
And I forced the fear back down.

“Get ready,” I said. “Gag going in….”

I had to wait until she opened and then shove the thing into her mouth, trying not to think of how powerful those jaws were, especially when she was riled up with fever. Trying not to think of words like
lacerate
and
break
and
sever.

She opened.

I shoved.

The gag went sideways and my hand went in too flat, too deep.

Her teeth closed on my wrist. I sucked in air through my nose, keeping my lips pressed hard together to stop me screaming, because if I screamed she’d panic and I’d probably lose my hand.

I was okay. Just. The gag must have lodged between the back teeth, preventing her mouth from fully shutting, because the teeth were digging into the skin but weren’t going any deeper.

“Are you okay?!” Russ’s voice seemed to come from a long way away, and I had to shake my head to clear it.

“Yes,” I said, keeping my voice neutral, trying to hold back the panic. A second later, the horse opened its jaws and I pushed the gag into place. Immediately, the horse whinnied in fright, trying to pull away, but its muscles were weakened and Russ held on for grim life.

I pulled my hand out. There were teeth marks around my wrist, some of them already turning purple with bruises, but the skin wasn’t broken and I could still move everything. “Okay,” I said. “Now the hard part.”

I picked up the tube and inserted it gently through the gag. The horse immediately tried to close its mouth, but couldn’t. So she started to buck and twist its head instead. Russ did his best to pin her head to the ground without hurting her. “Hurry,” he panted.

I looked at the tube in my hands and felt sick. I tried to tell myself that you intubate by feel anyway, so it didn’t matter that I couldn’t see.

But in an operating theater I’d be able to see the position of her throat. She wouldn’t be panting and bucking and twisting. It was like trying to thread a moving needle in the dark. And I couldn’t be rough and just force it in. The last thing she needed was bruises and swelling on her throat.

“Please,” said Russ. “Please, Amanda. You can do it.”

I closed my eyes—there was so little light it made no difference anyway. I tried to see my old anatomy textbooks in my mind.
Over the tongue. Into the larynx. Through to the trachea.
I lined it up, felt for the opening…and pushed.

The horse gave a panicked groan and then there was a whistling gasp from the tube. I put my cheek to the end to make sure.

“She’s breathing,” I said, and sat back on my heels in relief, running my hand through her mane. Russ wrapped his arms around me and hugged me from behind.

***

With more drugs in her system and the airway taped in place, the horse’s breathing became a little easier. I gave her a sedative to help her deal with the unpleasant tube in her throat and we sat beside her for the rest of the night, stroking her. By dawn, the drugs had started to ease the swelling around her throat. By mid-morning, she was restless enough that I figured she could breathe on her own, and slid the airway out.

I expected her to try to take my hand off when I removed the gag, but she stayed still. Maybe she understood that I’d helped her.

It would be days before she fully recovered, but her temperature was slowly dropping and she was starting to move her head a little more easily. I told Russ, hesitantly, that I thought she was going to make it.

He pulled me into another hug, squashing me against his chest, his chin against the top of my head. “That’s great,” he said. “Now listen.”

It caught me unawares. I’d been all ready to start my horrible, heart-breaking speech. “Um….”

“I’m not a goddamn fool,” he said gently. “I get it. I’m sorry. I was so excited to finally have you that I rushed into everything.” He sat me down on the ground. “I shouldn’t have talked about a wedding. God, I can’t believe I said that. Or Wyoming. Amanda…” He took my hand in his. “I love you. I. Just. Do. I loved you from the first moment I saw you. We can take this as fast or as slow as you want to take it. And it can be anything you want it to—just as long as I don’t lose you.” He looked imploringly into my eyes. “
Please
say I haven’t lost you.”