Free That Certain Spark by Cathy Marie Hake

morning woman and an afternoon one. Even if there are some troublesome men around, Gooding has a lot of nice ladies.”
    “Yes, it does.” Leaning against the doorframe, he tilted his head toward the woman walking down the street. “And I’m going to make that one my wife.”

Six
    O h, good heavens!” Taylor dropped the pot of stew, and it splattered everywhere. “Look what you made me do! We’ve sacrificed almost half of a good pot of stew because you’ve lost your mind. I can’t believe it! I’m starving and so are you, and the only thing you can do is be ridiculous over a woman you’ve only seen for three minutes. Not even three minutes. Enoch, you have gone round the bend!”
    She waggled her finger for emphasis. “Stop and think. In the past, you had all sorts of fun running around with whichever woman suited your fancy. The two of you tired of one another, and you waltzed on to someone else. This is a small town, and you can bet all the men know Mercy Orion’s every move. I guarantee you she has men panting after her, and if this tastes half as good as it smells, men clutching diamond rings line up at her doorstep.”
    She started pacing around the mess. “Help me clean this up, and you’re going to just . . . you just . . . you don’t get a bowl of this at all because you wasted your share by shocking me so deeply that . . . Oh, you made me a blithering idiot!” Taylor glowered at him some more.
    “Take the pot on into the kitchen, Taylor. I’ll clean this up.”
    Taylor picked up the pot. “I’ll help you clean it up,” she said with a definite lack of grace in her tone. “But part of this has to go to my patient. I’ll share anything that’s left with you.”
    “No, I’ll just have a taste of it, then you can have the rest. I’m planning on having hundreds more pots of that in my future.”
    She shook her head and muttered, “Crazy man. Thoroughly crazy man. He’s gone round the bend. Whoever thought my own brother would be the one I’d have to treat for insanity? What am I going to do? I’m in a town that doesn’t want me, and my brother’s going insane. If Mother were here, she’d be telling me to watch out because trouble always comes in threes.”
    Enoch didn’t mind that his sister was muttering to herself. Courting Mrs. Orion was going to be fun.
    After a quick cleanup, the siblings returned to the kitchen, where the remaining stew went into bowls for Van der Vort and Taylor. She took a bite and smiled appreciatively, then asked, “So where were you this morning, that you came back with that big basket of apples?”
    “Out . . .” He shrugged. “Looked around a little bit.”
    “You usually tell me about your cases.”
    “Nothing much to tell.” Was this deception? He couldn’t very well tell her exactly where he’d been. The case had turned out to be a ruse, where two men had urged him to make his sister cease practicing medicine in Gooding. “It wasn’t really a case. People are rather anxious to see how I am around their animals. Since we’re from the city, I get the impression some worry I don’t know much about livestock. Think they figure I’m a dog-and-cat man who could also take care of Aunt Bertha’s prized canary in a pinch. One man—a farmer named Smith—flat-out said he’d voted against bringing me.”
    Taylor handed over the bowl with the rest of her stew. “It’s so hearty I’m already full. For him to be in town when he’d normally be doing his chores . . .”
    Enoch took a huge bite. “He had good cause: a wagonload of what seemed like two hundred kids he drove to school. His opinion was that the town ought to have waited till a Texan applied. Gooding’s been without a vet entirely, so another month or year without shouldn’t have made that big a difference.”
    “Until it’s his cow or pigs or plow horse that’s in trouble.” Affronted on Enoch’s behalf, she started pacing around the table. “Times like this, I’m so tempted