He’d sound like a complete idiot if he told her he and Dr. Roberts had held off using the new system because they’d assumed all the patient records would have to be input individually—a task which would have taken weeks. But she apparently did it with the click of a few buttons?
She looked up at Hunter, eyes wide. Like she was waiting for him to say something. When he didn’t, her eyes narrowed. “I think the words you’re looking for are, thank you, Isobel.”
Shit. Hunter lifted a hand to the back of his neck. This woman had him fucking tongue tied. Of course he was—she went to an Ivy League school. And yeah, he’d gone to Purdue, but he’d barely passed his classes because he was busy trying to work and pay the tuition not covered by scholarships at the same time.
But this woman—she was beautiful. Intelligent. Witty. So what the hell was she doing all the way out here?
“You know, what I don’t get is why you lied.” He stared at her.
She jerked back at his words. “What? I didn’t lie.”
“You said you grew up in a small town in New Hampshire.”
“I did.” She averted her eyes like she had something to hide. “Part of the time anyway.”
He frowned. “Were your parents divorced?”
“No,” she said quickly, then paused before adding with a slight cringe. “We had a summer house there.”
Fuck. Him.
Beautiful, intelligent, and wealthy. This woman was probably more of a goddamned princess than even Janine.
Janine, the vibrant girl he’d met in college who was so determined to rebel from her rich East Coast roots by dating and then marrying a poor farm boy from the Middle of Nowhere, Wyoming.
Of course, the romance of a working man wore off real quick once she was living the reality of being married to a small town vet just establishing his practice. Almost from the moment they’d unloaded the moving truck, she hated it here.
She couldn’t stand the people. The food. The lack of culture. How there was never anything exciting to do or places to go. Hunter had cut his hours as short as he could, he’d found special picnic spots, and he’d saved every penny so they could go spend weekends in the biggest nearby city, Cheyenne. He did everything possible to give her back something of the life she was accustomed to.
But even Cheyenne was horribly provincial to Janine’s sophisticated palate. No matter how hard Hunter tried to make up for bringing her here and to please her, it was never enough. He was never enough.
“Look,” Isobel said, “it doesn’t matter where I came from. I’m not afraid of hard work.” She jutted out her chin.
But all Hunter saw was another rich city girl, come to rough it for the summer on some lark. He wasn’t going to be caught in the cross hairs again.
“I think you missed a spot back there.” He gestured at the wall behind her.
Her eyes flashed and it wasn’t hard to imagine that she felt like hurling the bucket full of dirty water at his head. Hunter had to turn away because Jesus Christ, she was even more appealing when she was pissed.
He should have just said no earlier when Mel proposed Isobel work for him. But how was he supposed to turn Mel down? Especially with her pregnant?
Plus, he and Dr. Roberts were actually desperate for the help. Dr. Rob
erts had just turned seventy and hadn’t been doing farm calls for a couple years now. He only came in to the clinic three days a week and Hunter knew he wanted to retire. Ever since Janine… well, suffice to say Hunter had been happy to lose himself in his work for the past year. But even he had his limits. Still—why couldn’t it have been anyone other than her?
“So we’re really just not going to talk about last night?” she asked as he was almost to the hallway.
He paused and his eyes dropped closed. Why did she have to keep bringing that up? Images flashed of her underneath him. Her responsive gasps as he licked deep into her cunt. The feel of her perfect breasts and hardened nipples pinched between his fingers and thumb. The way she clutched his shoulders when he finally thrust—
“Nope,” he said without turning. Then he strode quickly down the hall before he did something really stupid like turn around, kiss the fucking daylights out of her, and beg her for a repeat of last night.
Chapter 8
ISOBEL
The nerve of that guy. Isobel threw the sponge in the bucket after emptying out the dirty, sudsy water in the clinic’s bathroom.
She’d busted her ass all afternoon. First with figuring out how to make sense of their absolute disaster of a record keeping system—seriously, she could not believe that a modern day veterinary clinic could have such an archaic method of record keeping. Using a basic Excel spreadsheet instead of a database program was little more efficient than just using all paper records! Isobel had to research how to format the records to import them. It had taken her two hours and several botched attempts to figure it all out.