A Billionaire's Love: Wine Country Romances, #3

By Natasha LeCroix

When veterinarian Marley Clark is called in to treat an injured horse found wandering down a road near Napa, she instantly butts heads with the owner of the rehabilitation stables. Elijah Reed is gorgeous but grumpy, rich yet rude, and reminds her all too much of a spoiled ex-boyfriend she dumped in college.

Nobody knows where this sweet-tempered, elderly horse came from, or who she belongs to either. Caring for her allows Marley to see a different side of the handsome billionaire. The untimely death of his girlfriend has caused him to retreat into himself and his work, Marley coaxing him little by little out of his shell.

Love is a gamble, and past hurts have made them both afraid to throw the dice. Can he hold her close without feeling like he's betrayed his late girlfriend? How can she trust him when all of her romances have proven to be disappointments? A Billionaire's Love is a 69K standalone in the steamy Wine Country Romances series, a story about loss and hope and second chances, and a horse who needs a home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Natasha LeCroix
• Release date: Aug 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386738312

Book preview

A BILLIONAIRE’S LOVE

Wine Country Romances

by Natasha LeCroix

Copyright 2017 by Natasha LeCroix

Cover image courtesy Depositphotos

Cover by Devorah Mast

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Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Epilogue

Chapter One

Got another one for you, Marley.

Is it a full moon or something? I spluttered, an icy drop of water sliding down the back of my neck. Out the windows of the office, the drizzle was turning into a steadier downpour. What gives? It’s like every large animal in a fifty-mile radius all plotted together to have a crisis on the same day!

They did, Gayle said wearily as she buttoned up her sweater. It was chilly in here, the thermostat set to broken and the repairman not due to come until tomorrow. A space heater rattled and turned on the floor by Gayle’s feet. The phone’s been ringing off the hook since I sat down this morning. The last ten minutes is the longest it’s gone without a caller, and I finally got a chance to pee. She was the only other person in the office, and the parking lot was nearly empty of work trucks. Everyone was out.

I sat down heavily in the chair beside her desk. My feet ached and my hair was flattened to my scalp. The clock overhead ticked to seven, making it now eleven hours straight that I’d been on the run. Napa. Sonoma. Petaluma. Napa again. Marin. Rohnert Park. Back to Petaluma. Napa. There had been nasty lacerations and overdue castrations and skipped vaccinations, colic and a tooth extraction and a heap of miserable three-day old lambs with diarrhea caked down their hind legs. Between cases there was stalled traffic and accidents and flooded lanes, since the sky had not stopped leaking for more than a minute since mid-morning. Every time I’d sloshed back to my truck from one case, it was to find two to three new messages in my voicemail with more.

Most days I was pretty busy, but this had been insane. And then there was an irritating Sad Alpaca on top of everything, the office code for an owner who wasted a vet’s time with complaints ranging from trivial to imaginary. I’d just returned to the office from one of those, hoping it was time to go home, but now there was another case.

Wrestling a granola bar out of the damp pocket of my jacket, and wondering if I was getting the chair wet, I sighed. If it’s another Sad Alpaca, can’t it wait until tomorrow? The roads are a mess. It took me over an hour just to get to Bright Equestrian Center, and all to have to convince a crazy woman that her gelding isn’t flirting with her when he drops his junk. He just gets relaxed in the cross-ties.

Gayle’s groan was heartfelt as she lifted the lid of the glass jar of candy she kept on her desk. Skimming out several black jellybeans, she popped them into her mouth and shook her hair-sprayed helmet of graying locks. Not a strand moved. "Was that all she was going on about? You’re kidding me."

That was it. A horse standing there calm as calm can be with his penis out.

That woman! She called three times screeching into my ear that something was terribly wrong with her new horse and his you-know-what. She couldn’t bring herself to say it. His down-there, his man part, his private area, his ding-dong, his doodle, his pee-pee and wiener, and more I can’t remember . . . Penis! Just say penis! Penis, penis, penis! I was screaming that in my head the whole time. Gayle rubbed her temples and laughed. She was so hysterical I couldn’t get a clear answer from her about anything. I thought he had a cancerous growth from the way she was going on about it.

Nothing was wrong with him. Something was very wrong with her. She yelled over and over that nobody told her male horses did this sort of thing, and if they had, she would have gotten a mare. Finally, the manager came over to us and told her that she needed to cool off or he was going to have to ask her to leave. You should have seen the faces of the teen girls there.

Pity her new horse.

Resigning myself to the fact that I would not be going home any time soon, I said, So, what’s the new case?

It’s one of Morty’s regular clients, but he says he can’t make it, Gayle replied.

We exchanged a look. That was all that needed to be said. Green Valley Clinic was co-owned by three veterinarians, two of whom were gentlemanly, hardworking older fellows. The third partner was Morton Gerber, who I suspected would have sported a shelf full of trophies for laziness if he wouldn’t have had to walk up to the stage to collect them. He loved passing off his work to the practice’s four junior vets so he could do whatever it was that he did all day long, and I was the most junior vet of all.

Glancing between me and her computer screen, Gayle said, Sonoma law enforcement received a call late this afternoon about a horse wandering alone down a rural road. An Arabian mare, gray, skinny . . . It looked like she had escaped, but they sent uniforms to inquire at the farms and stables nearby. Nobody is missing a horse; nobody recognizes her; there’s no brand or distinguishing marks on her. It could be that she belongs to some place farther out than their search range, or that she was dumped.

Poor girl!

Have you ever heard of Brigid Stables?

No.

Owned by a man named Elijah Reed. You can’t take a horse to the city pound, obviously; they aren’t set up for livestock. Mr. Reed runs a program for local horses in situations like these, abandoned or abused, rehabilitating them if he can and putting them up for adoption. This mystery Arabian is being taken there now and will need an examination. She’s got some cuts. Morty said when you get there to park in the grass beyond the little bridge. Don’t block the driveway. It’s the only way into or out of that property.

Thunder rumbled menacingly overhead. How far away is it? I asked.

Gayle gave me an apologetic look.

Of course. Heaving myself up, I dropped the empty granola wrapper in the trashcan. All right. I’m off then.

Dirkie has been itching to see that place, Gayle offered. If you want to wait fifteen minutes for him to get here, he would probably ride along with you.

No, that’s all right, I said hastily. The next veterinarian up the totem pole was skinny-as-a-straw Dirk Rogol, and he asked me out nearly every time we saw one another. He was cute in a geeky way yet sort of an oddball, and I couldn’t get past a grown man who called himself by his childhood nickname of Dirkie.

I stopped in the restroom first to clean up a bit. There was nothing I could do about the various stains on my work pants, but I washed a streak of mud off my forehead and combed out the tangles in my dark hair before setting it back in a neat ponytail. One of my favorite professors had advised me to cut it off if I wanted anyone to take me seriously as a farm vet, and I had laughed until I almost cried. Nobody was going to take me seriously. I was five-two on a tall day, female, and still got carded regularly at twenty-seven years old. Short hair wasn’t going to help.

They were going to laugh at me, and sometimes they did laugh when I dropped out of my giant work truck. Then I took down a sheep to check an udder, and they stopped laughing. I was little, but surprisingly wiry.

Several minutes later I was on the road again, my GPS guiding me turn by turn. Brigid Stables was northeast of downtown Napa. Rain hammered down on the roof of the truck as I drove, the wipers going furiously and traffic puttering along. The granola bar had brightened my mood considerably, and I rustled around in my cooler to snag another one.

Thunder growled like a caged bear and lightning flashed across the darkening sky in white forks. I found myself smiling as I opened the wrapper. Growing up in southern California, I could count the good thunderstorms I’d experienced on one hand. I had probably gone through more earthquakes. My out-of-state friends in college had been petrified at the prospect of an earthquake, not quite believing me that native Californians just shrugged when one hit, picked up whatever had gotten knocked down, and generally went on with life.

Thunderstorms were still something special to me. Once I got home, I would fix some hot cocoa, wrap myself up in a blanket, and crack the window so I could listen to the celestial roar of it from the sofa. It had been a wet winter all over the state, sorely needed after a succession of dry ones. Forage had gotten so expensive that some farmers were forced to cut the size of their herds.

Stark vineyards stood silently in the winter wind, and homes were closed up snugly for the coming night. A Christmas tree glowed in a window though the holiday was four weeks ago. With my on-call hours, a trip to my mother’s or father’s house hadn’t been in the cards, but that was all right. Mom wasn’t a holiday person anyway; we sent gifts to one another, talked on the phone, and called it a day. Dad just did whatever his latest girlfriend was doing, and his latest girlfriend was a hipster who railed incessantly against the commercialism of holidays while wearing skinny jeans with the logo cut out. Her home in Irvine was lovely but odd: an antique typewriter perched on a cable spool table, the spice racks shaped like triangles, and her two thousand books organized by color along the wall of her living room. It made trying to find a particular volume downright impossible.

Clementine was somewhat weird but she meant well; Dad liked her and that was what mattered. Sooner or later he would have another girlfriend, because two to three years in any relationship triggered his grass-is-greener glitch. He switched partners like a kid switched sports, but luckily for me, he was a much better father than he was a partner. I had a younger half-brother through him and one of his many former girlfriends.

Traffic thinned, and then melted away entirely. I was off the beaten track now, my truck rumbling past homes and vineyards and wooded areas in turn. Mountains loomed to my right, eventually becoming indistinguishable in the darkness. Then all I could see was what my headlights and the occasional streetlamp illuminated. There were no other vehicles or foot traffic around; the whole of Napa’s humanity had fled indoors.

Brigid Stables was nestled at the base of a hill. Though there wasn’t a sign, there was no way to confuse it for anything else; it was the only driveway on this stretch of a storm-swept road crowded on both sides by shaking trees. Deep puddles flooded the lanes, my foot pressing down on the brakes as I came upon them. If tonight’s storm was everything the forecast promised, this road was going to be washed out. The ground was already saturated from a succession of storms over the last two weeks. There was nowhere for this new water to go.

I turned into the driveway. Lights illuminated a short bridge about ten feet further down. It stretched over a gully raging with water. Frothing and spitting against rocks, drops splashed up onto the slick planks of the bridge. I eased the truck over it, the bridge groaning like an old man with a bad back.

Don’t block the driveway. Continuing along, I spied a grassy area. It butted up to the fence of a sizeable turn-out with thick grass and several trees. In high school, I’d had a part-time job cleaning stalls and grooming, and I pitied the horses in their small, dusty, dirty old turn-out. This one was what a turn-out should be, a place to graze, play, and roam a little, and I couldn’t even see all of it.

Over to the right was a ranch house, and the barn was straight ahead. I pulled off the driveway into the grassy area and instantly realized my mistake. The tires sank through the grass and into the mud below immediately, my foot stomping on the brakes too late. Rookie. Slamming the truck into reverse, I attempted to back up.

No luck. The truck whined and mud flew, but I went nowhere.

Had Morty done that on purpose? Told me to park in the grass in the hopes I would sink? No. He was lazy, not malicious. He had undoubtedly been told to park there on visits in better weather, and passed the information along without any thought. And then I hadn’t put any thought into it either. Dumb.

I tried to back up again. Wind pummeled the truck from side to side as the rain thickened. In despair when I only succeeded in burying myself deeper in the muck, I called the clinic. It went to voicemail. Gayle, are you still there? I asked. I’m having truck trouble. Call me back when you get this. I think I’m going to need to be towed.

Spreading light caught my eye and I turned to the barn, where a door was opening. A figure with a flashlight stepped out, hunched over against the wind and rain. Well, I wasn’t going anywhere, so I might as well examine this horse. Reaching into the back, I got my boots. Then I rolled my seat back and kicked off my shoes to pull them on.

Once my jacket was zipped up and my hood was pulled over my head, I checked on the figure. It looked like a man, and he was almost to the truck. I pushed at the door against the wind to open it. Then, cautiously, I stepped down to the ground.

The wind banged the door into my back. Holding onto the side of the truck for balance and to keep from sinking, I closed the door and squelched over to the driveway. All four tires were sunken in to the wheel wells.

His features lost in the hood, the man was standing at the back of the truck. He was watching my progress, the beam helpfully turned down so I could see where I was stepping. His hand shot out when I staggered by the hitch. Gloved fingers wrapped around my arm to steady me, and with another step I made it to wet but solid ground.

Good job, he said sarcastically.

Thank you, I snapped in return, shaking him off and opening the back to get what I needed. Gayle had said the horse was lacerated.

The guy walked around to stand on my other side. Whether he was purposefully acting as a windbreak or not, his presence was welcome. I stuffed my pockets full and closed the back. Everyone at the clinic was going to laugh at me for this. We all made mistakes, especially in the first few years, but it was far more enjoyable to hear tales of someone else’s follies than one’s own.

Rain drove down on our heads as we started for the barn. Thunder rumbled and the wind tugged at my hood. I didn’t speak again, nor did he; it could wait until we were inside. The beam of the man’s flashlight showed drops hitting the ground so hard they bounced back up.

Gayle would call for a tow truck at once. How long it would take one to get here, however . . . There was nothing I could do about that. After the horse was treated, I would just have to get comfortable in the driver’s seat and twiddle my thumbs until rescue came. It was a good thing I had tomorrow off. This was going to be a late night.

Once we were closed into the barn, the man turned off the flashlight and hung it by its strap from a hook on the wall. The storm carried on unabated outside as I lowered my hood. The air smelled sweet from good hay, and half a dozen roomy stalls were piled with fresh straw. Divided three to a side, a large center aisle ran between them. The tack was maintained and neatly put away, and a clipboard hanging from a nail beside me bore a daily schedule of names and feeding times, most of the boxes checked off.

Everything was well-lit, clean, and tidy. In fact, Brigid Stables was one of the nicest places I had ever seen. Had I owned a horse, I would want it to live at stables as tended as these. The cost, though, would kill me.

The man hung up his dripping jacket on a hook beside the flashlight. Then he turned to me. Did you forget to bring the vet? he asked.

Here was a guy who could make a woman’s heart stampede just with an offhand glance in her direction. Tall and barrel-chested, with sandy hair and sun-kissed skin, he looked like a television cowboy brought to life. All he was missing was the hat.

Why did the sexy ones have to be the most sexist? I am the vet, I corrected him with my most innocent smile. Two could play this game. My name is Marley Clark. Could you run and tell your boss that I’m here? That would be really sweet of you. I need to talk to the big man himself, Elijah Reed.

Irritation crackled between us. Gotcha, I thought.

You’re the vet, Elijah said, his brown eyes flat.

I hope so, or else I’ve been paying off someone else’s student loans.

What happened to Morty?

He’s busy, so I was told to come. Has the horse arrived yet?

Horse is here.

Speaking with a patience that I did not feel, I said, May I see her?

He nodded down the aisle. Left side, middle stall.

The first two stalls I passed were occupied by older draft horses. The horse-crazy little girl forever alive in my heart squealed with glee; draft breeds had always been my favorite. These were old-school Percherons, bred for lots of hard pulling work instead of their flashier, less stocky counterparts. A white mare and a black gelding, their noses were deep in their feed buckets as they ate lustfully. Just like the stables themselves, they were clean and tidy and brushed until their coats fairly gleamed.

Elijah followed along at my side. A big head poked out of the stall next to the black gelding, this one belonging to a younger chestnut with a white streak between his eyes. Whickering to us for attention, Elijah stepped over to pat his nose. Go on, Happy, have your dinner, he muttered.

Then I saw the mystery Arabian. She was a lovely gray color, but the contrast between her and the other three horses was striking. Standing in a corner of her stall, she was dirty and dejected. Blood had dried down her side from a cut. Her mane and tail were trimmed, but tangled with twigs and leaves. Although noticeably underweight, she was not severely so. I estimated her to be between fourteen and fifteen hands, with a sturdy Polish frame.

She had some water and feed when she came in about an hour ago, Elijah said. The cops took pictures of the state she’s in, but they’ll need an official report from you to add to their file on her. She was shaking like she was cold when they got hold of her, but it’s not just that.

What do you mean?

Men make her nervous. The only one she’d load up for was the woman officer. Then she went in placid as anything. I dried her off as best I could, she was drenched from being rained on, I picked her hooves too, they were caked with mud, but she’s scared half to death of me.

Did she act aggressively towards you?

No, just shying away and shaking.

Undoing the