Page 18 of Josephine and Clay

“I’m serious, Jo. You’ve been here early every day this week, and you’ve reorganized the treatment room so many times I can no longer find anything unless I ask you.”

“That sounds like a you problem.”

He laughs. “Just go to the feed store.”

I bite back the smile threatening at the corners of my mouth and reach for my jacket. The truth is, I do like being sent out on errands. It gives me a purpose with a beginning, middle, and end. A task I can complete cleanly. And the rhythm of this place is almost comforting, and already settling into me after only a month in Buckhorn.

The clinic might be small, but it’s mine. A job I worked hard for, for years.

I just hope Buckhorn follows, and that I soon start to feel like I belong here too, because it’s all I have. Being a veterinarian in a small western town was never glamorous enough to impress my family. But it suits me.

The work is clear. Animals need help, and I know how to help them. There’s a steadiness to that, a kind of logic, while life outside of work has always been less tidy.

I head down Main Street, the spring air bright and dry against my face. Buckhorn in the late morning has a kind of scrubbed, sun-baked charm to it. Pickup trucks line the curb, wooden signs creak above storefronts, and a pair of older women stand outside the bakery talking with the solemn intensity of people discussing either a church fundraiser or someone’s divorce.

Around here, I’ve learned, it could easily be both.

I pass Buttercup Bakery and catch the warm smell of sugar and cinnamon drifting out through the open door. Across the street, someone's unloading sacks of seed from a truck bed while a boy in a baseball cap chases a red heeler that has clearly stolen something.

Everything in Buckhorn feels both slower and more watchful than any place I’ve lived before, in a way that makes it clear people notice things here. Who comes and goes. Who’s eating lunch with whom. Who looked tired at church, or bought flowers on a Tuesday, or left the bar with a man they just met.

My jaw tightens as I keep walking.

That was five days ago, and I’ve managed, through discipline and sheer refusal to think about it too hard, not to combust from embarrassment.

Mostly.

It isn’t the sex itself that keeps blindsiding me at inconvenient moments, though that certainly hasn’t helped. It’s the fact that I behaved like someone I don’t recognize.

Impulsive, reckless, entirely too willing to let a charming bull rider with dangerous eyes and a mouth built for trouble walk me home and straight into my bed.

I still don’t know what possessed me.

Actually, that’s a lie.

I know exactly what possessed me. It had broad shoulders, rough hands, and the kind of attention that makes a woman feel as if she’s gone from background detail to the only thing in focus… which isn’t a useful thought to be having right now.

I straighten my spine and push through the door of Buckhorn Feed & Supply.

The smell hits first. Grain, leather, dust, and old wood warmed by sun. There are shelves of feed, hardware bins, tack hanging from hooks, stacks of hay bales near the back, and an old register counter up front that looks as if it’s seen fifty years of gossip and has no desire to retire.

Virgil Tucker’s nowhere in sight, but a girl about my age is behind the counter, leaning over a receipt book and chewing the end of her pen.

She glances up when the bell over the door jingles.

“Oh. Hi.” Her face brightens with immediate recognition. “You’re the new vet.”

I slow, offering a polite smile. “Yes… am I that obvious?”

She laughs. “In Buckhorn? Extremely. I’m Penny.”

“Josephine.”

“I know,” she says, then winces. “That sounded creepier than I meant it to. Just… people talk, and I’ve seen you around. Plus my grandpa said Dr. Harris finally hired someone competent enough to stop him complaining about his knees while delivering calves.”

Despite myself, I smile properly. “That’s an aggressively flattering introduction.”

She beams, pleased with herself for getting me there. Penny Tucker’s pretty in an easy, bright way. Blonde ponytail, clear skin, pink gloss, lashes that probably don’t need mascara. She has the open, quick energy of someone who’s never once in her life tried to make herself smaller in a room.