Texas Tornado (Part two of The Mc Kenzie Sisters, sequel to His Brother's Keeper)

Tori McKenzie has always assaulted life with a 'take no prisoners' bravado that has served her well. She believes you do the best you can and then get on with it. No whining, no excuses. Completing her veterinarian degree and returning home to practice with her family at Sanctuary has always been her plan, so when an offer to do an interim job in Texas is brought to her attention, she barely gives it a second thought. Until her sister Mac tells her she should do it. That it'd be good for her. No one questions Mac's advise when it comes to life experiences, as she has always been wise beyond her years and was the reason they'd all survived after their parent's death. Mac has an innate sense of what a person needs and when. So Tori filled in the application and sent it in, never imagining she'd be chosen. However only a short time later, when the agreement contract arrived, she packed her truck and loaded her canine companion and started what she called her 'Quest to the West'. No matter how much she'd been looking forward to going home to what she'd always known, she realized that Mac was probably right. What a person wanted and what they needed were rarely the same thing. What she needed wasn't in South Carolina right now. For now, she needed something else. Texas fell squarely into the 'something else' category. So she started out her journey on a positive note and with the full intention of getting everything she could out of the next year. Arriving to find herself unexpected, essentially homeless, mostly unwanted and the only vet serving miles and miles of cattle and horse ranches was enough to throw her usual self confidence a little off kilter. Then to get caught up in an illegal scam with as many loose threads as an old afghan and find herself framed for it is enough to have her calling for back-up. That has always meant her sisters and brothers from SC, but she finds help in other places too, some quite unexpected. Texas has a lot of lessons to teach Tori and growing up in itself is painful enough, but dealing with feelings that have always been alien to her like lust and love, desires and wants, fear and death, anger and anguish and ghosts that won't go away is enough to make her feel fragile, fractured, scattered. It isn't a feeling she likes, nor is it one she plans to sit with any longer than absolutely necessary, so with the same determination it took to get her to the Lone Star State, she leaves it and all it means behind. That includes a cowboy as hard as the land he rides who is too afraid or too stubborn to let go of old hurts and take a chance on new possibilities. Will he let her drive off into the sunset? Or will he realize that the best thing Texas has ever had to offer him is about to blow out like a summer storm?