Zeph Undercover by Jenny Andersen Read Free Book Online Page B

Allie said, stopping at the last stall.
    “Ah…it’s big?” he ventured, taking a step back. While he tried to think of something more intelligent than “It’s a different color,” Allie looked into the stall. “Uh oh,” she said, and yanked the half-door open.
    “What?” Zeph said.
    “Help me,” she demanded, disappearing inside.
    Visions of delivering babies in taxis and emergency appendectomies on kitchen tables danced through his head. He could handle those, at least the delivering babies ones, but horses?
    “Now.”
    The urgency in her voice yanked him into action and he dashed into the stall, wary of the smelly piles that seemed to be unavoidable whenever horses were in the vicinity. But only clean straw met his anxious gaze.
    Allie tugged on the leather straps around the horse’s head, apparently trying to lead him outside. Zeph approached reluctantly, ready to help, but leaped away when the horse kicked at its belly. The hollow thunk it made had him flinching. The horse’s rear end sank toward the ground.
    “Don’t let him get down,” Allie panted. “Yell. Flap your coat at him. Hurry.”
    Her urgency infected him. He ripped off his jacket and flapped, yelling like a maniac and feeling like an idiot. The horse stopped sinking and let Allie haul him outside.
    She kept going, out of the barn and around the stable yard. He walked outside to join her. “What’s going on?”
    “Colic.”
    “What?”
    “He’s got colic.”
    Human babies got colic. He’d heard people in the office complaining about walking the floor all night. Big deal. Everyone was sleepless, but not worried, not like Allie with that life-or-death wrinkle in her forehead. “Like a baby?”
    Allie’s expression didn’t alter. “Like a baby. His stomach hurts,” she said. “But horses can’t throw up, so whatever’s wrong in there just stays put. It can be fairly minor, or lethal, or anywhere in between.”
    “You’re a vet. Is he…?”
    “Don’t know yet. And vets can’t always fix colic.” Her mouth set in a grim line, totally unlike its usual soft, tempting curve. “Go to my truck and get...” She reeled off a list of things. “Hurry.”
    He hurried. When he got back, she had him stir together a mess that looked like nothing a living creature would ever eat. “Yech.”
    “Bran, molasses, and oil. We hope it will grease the skids. So to speak.”
    Somehow she got the stuff into the horse and went back to walking it, looking marginally more hopeful.
    “Now what?” he asked.
    She put the horse back in its stall, leaving the door open with only an inadequate looking rope across the opening to keep it inside. “Now we wait. And watch.” She got a couple of folding chairs out of the barn and set them up way too close to the open door and the horse inside. She pulled her phone out of a pocket and called Monty to report.
    Zeph scooted his chair closer to Allie’s and took her hand. Her laser focus on the horse didn’t waver while she took it back, and there he was, running second best to a damned horse.
    Again. Just the way it had been all summer when they tried to meet at the horse shows which were the only reason Allie ever left this isolated whistle stop. Except for school, of course.
    Her voice broke into his unhappy thoughts. “Are those the only shoes you brought?”
    Of course not. Along with the dress shoes he never traveled without, he’d brought casual shoes for this trip: two pairs of loafers, running shoes… “No.”
    “Boots?”
    “No.”
    “You’d better get some. Those things will get ruined in no time.”
    ‘Those things’ had cost a small fortune. “Okay.” Her concern warmed him. Maybe she didn’t hate him. Maybe the icy shoulder business was an act.
    He leaned back in his chair and considered the possibility that he’d fallen into an alternate universe. That must be it, the only way he could explain that he, Zephram Granger, sitting in the middle of a stable on a chair that