Lynn Michaels

by The Dreaming Pool

  Eslin darted in front of the truck and raced for the gash in the fence. Sheets of rain glistened in the headlight beams as they raked over her, but she made it safely with yards to spare. His heart pounding in his chest and dread knotting his stomach, Gage let the truck pass, then ran as fast as the catch in his side allowed him, across the road and up the slippery bank after Eslin.

  Shattered white boards littered the muddy, rain-pooled ground where Ganylad lay on his side, partly sheltered by the low-hanging, dripping limbs of a gnarled oak. Even in the dark Gage could see that the colt’s forelegs were twisted and ruined. At his head Eslin knelt in the muck crooning to him. Lightning flashed and a strangled cry strained Gage’s throat as he saw the deep red blood oozing from Ganylad’s mangled left knee and exposed carpal bones. Except for the touch of white on his muzzle, it could have been Ganymede lying there, his flanks heaving as he struggled to breathe. A stab of pain tore at Gage’s right side, staggered him, and he went down on his knees next to Ganylad.

  Eslin looked up at him, her hair wet and tangled. Her face was smeared with dirt and soot, and her dress was torn at the right shoulder seam. The sleeve crept down her arm as she stroked the colt’s neck.

  “For God’s sake do something,” she begged, a hoarse sob in her voice. “Help him.”

  Ganylad rolled his eyes toward him and snuffled through his straining nostrils. The telltale, watery bubble in his labored gasps for air hinted at a punctured lung, maybe internal bleeding, and Gage had nothing—no drugs, no needles—nothing to ease the colt’s pain.

  “Oh, good Christ.” It was Malachi, his old, brittle voice breaking as his hand closed on Gage’s right shoulder and he slipped down into the mud beside him. “Oh, sweet Jesus.”

  “Mal,” Gage choked, “go get me—”

  “Here.” The little man hiked up the sodden sweater he’d pulled over his striped pajama top and tugged something out of his belt. “I brought it with me—just in case.”

  The pistol he held was an old, long-barreled Colt. A forty-five, if Gage remembered right. At least a dozen times he’d ordered Mal to get rid of it, told him that they didn’t use guns anymore. But the pistol had remained hung on the paneled wall of the old groom’s bedroom in the tack barn.

  “Get her away from here.” Gage nodded at Eslin and took the gun away from him.

  With a quick, grim nod Mal got to his feet and offered his hand to Eslin. She bent over Ganylad, kissed the crest of his neck, then took Mal’s hand and scrambled up beside him. The old groom slipped one arm around her and led her away as she sobbed.

  A gust of wind, gentler now as the storm began to abate, rustled the oak tree, shaking rain off the leaves onto the back of Gage’s neck and Ganylad’s quivering flanks. The colt’s eyes fluttered shut and a shuddery, pain-racked sigh heaved his lungs. Steadying himself on Ganylad’s shoulder, Gage rose on his knees, pressed the muzzle of the pistol below the colt’s ear, and squeezed the trigger.

  The recoil and the single, convulsive kick of Ganylad’s body knocked Gage flat on his back, the report echoing in his ears and rain trickling across his face. The smell of gunpowder, singed horsehair, and blood filled his nose and gagged him. He rolled onto his hands and heaved, but couldn’t vomit. He just retched, over and over again, until he nearly blacked out from the tearing pain in his side.

  Totally spent and tasting blood in his mouth again, he staggered to his feet, his own breathing ragged and labored. He careened in a semicircle and fell forward, face first against the scored trunk of the oak tree. The deeply scarred bark bit into his left elbow and a twinge of pins and needles quivered up his shoulder. His right hand slackened on the pistol, he felt it slip out of his grasp and heard it hit the ground. Digging his fingers into his hair, he buried his forehead in the crook of his arm and cried.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he had cried, but now he cried until he couldn’t cry anymore, until long after he’d sensed rather than felt Malachi brush against him to pick up the pistol and take it with him through the gap in the fence. Gage thought Mal had taken Eslin with him, too, but with a jolt realized he was mistaken when she laid her hand on his damp, chilly shoulder blade and began to rub his back.

  “Now you’ve got to help me,” he said, his voice thick and raspy.

  “How?” she asked, her hand trembling on his back.

  “Hold me,” he pleaded, his voice cracking as he pushed himself off the tree and held his left arm out to her.

  He couldn’t raise his right arm and moved unsteadily on his feet until Eslin slid beneath his elbow and wrapped herself around him, not tightly, but gently, her wet, cold face pressed against his chest. Beneath her soaked, ruined dress her body felt warm, even though she was shivering, as he swept his arm around her and laid his cheek against the top of her head. The needlelike pain that lanced across his chest every time he drew a breath eased, but the deep ache inside him that had been there as long as he could remember and that had nothing to do with the pain in his ribs only sharpened.

  “Please, Eslin, help me,” he whispered raggedly in her ear. “I saw it—”

  “Eslin!” Fitzsimmons’s big, booming voice shouted. “Eslin!”

  “What did you see?” she asked, backing away from him slightly and lifting her chin to look at him.

  “I saw the lightning and the barn—”

  He gasped at a sudden, slicing pain in his side, tried to raise his hand to clutch his ribs, and then remembered that he couldn’t move his arm. The aborted movement upset his equilibrium and made him stumble against Eslin, who tried to brace him with her shoulder. But the best she could do was break their fall, and she yelped once—with surprise, Gage thought, not because she’d hurt herself—as they stumbled and slid to their knees in the mud.

  “Es-lin!” Fitzsimmons bellowed.

  Turning as best he could with his arm looped protectively around her shoulders, Gage saw Fitzsimmons burst through the shattered fence and pause there, breathing heavily, his fists clenched, his sleeves rolled up and rain dripping off his silver beard. Scrambling up the muddy, slick bank behind him came Ethan and Malachi.

  “Eslin.” Fitzsimmons leapt toward them and closed one big hand like a vise on Gage’s shoulder and the other on Eslin’s as he pried her away from him. “Are you all right?”

  “Of—course—I—am—” She gasped the words at him angrily as she twisted and struggled to break his hold on her. “But Gage—” she yelped again, indignantly, as Fitzsimmons swooped her up in his arms. “Stop it, will you?” she shrieked at him. “Gage is hurt!”

  Rocking unsteadily on his knees and blinking at the black spots that were beginning to swim in front of his eyes, Gage reached out with his left arm to brace himself against the tree and rise, but his hand pushed against thin air and he toppled over backward in the mud. His body jerked reflexively as the rain dripping off the branches fell between his eyes, and the gnarled old limbs began to spin out of focus as Fitzsimmons stepped into his line of vision.

  “Do you believe her now?”

  His deep voice reverberated like thunder inside Gage’s head and his footsteps shook the ground as he carried Eslin, kicking and screaming and beating at him with her fists, through the break in the fence. Though his eyes blurred and his head swam, Gage shoved his left elbow under his body and tried to push himself up to go after him.

  “Easy, easy.” Ethan knelt beside him. He pulled Gage’s arm out from under him and slung it around his own neck. “Let me help you.”

  Stumbling under his brother’s weight, Ethan helped Gage get to his feet. “My God, you really are hurt! You shouldn’t be standing,” Ethan told him. “There’s an ambulance down there, you should let me get the paramedics and a stretcher.”

  “Just hold me up”—Gage panted—”long enough to punch that son of a bitch in the—”

  Nose, he meant to say, but couldn’t finish his sentence. His voice gave out on him along with his knees as blackness engulfed him and he passed out in his brother�
�s arms.

  Chapter 8

  With a multicolored afghan thrown over her barely sprained ankle, which was propped up on the coffee table, Eslin leaned back on the sofa and looked out at the pale watercolor morning that had dawned in the wake of the storm. Muted sunlight fell across a three-column headline in the sports section of the Sunday Santa Barbara News-Press which lay on the cushion beside her—Kentucky Derby hopeful destroyed after fire.

  As she gazed blankly at her winter-browned Bermuda-grass lawn, she wondered how the newspapers had gotten hold of the story so quickly. Ethan sprang instantly to mind, but Eslin couldn’t believe that even he could be quite so callous. She’d read the accompanying article three times, but there’d been no hint as to its source—and no mention of Gage.

  The sudden, loud clash of saucepan lids in the kitchen nearly startled Eslin off the couch. For the umpteenth time she gritted her teeth and wished, as Doc started singing “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever,” that he’d go home. She hated that song and he knew it. He was singing it just to get a rise out of her that would break the ice barrier she’d maintained between them since he’d dumped her in the front seat of his dark-blue BMW and sped her away from Roundtree Stables at sixty miles an hour.

  She knew now that Gage had been Doc’s ulterior motive in sending her to Roundtree, but she hadn’t the foggiest notion why he’d so suddenly spirited her away from him. His concern for her slightly sprained ankle, which he’d discovered when he’d put her down beside the car after she’d threatened to bite his ear if he didn’t, was the lamest (no pun intended) excuse she’d ever heard him give for anything. Even the emergency room staff had looked at him oddly when he’d carried her into the Harwood shortly after ten p.m. and insisted that they X-ray her left foot. Just to humor him they’d wound an Ace bandage around her ankle and sent her home. Once she’d changed into pajamas, he’d ensconced her in her bed with two pillows behind her, three under her foot, and then dozed the remainder of the night away in the chintz chair beside her.

  “Lunch—is—ser-her-her-her-her-ved,” he sang, ad-libbing the chorus in his rich basso voice as he swooped toward her through the archway that separated the kitchen and living room, carrying a teakwood lap tray, the same one Eslin had served her mother’s meals on during the final months of her illness.

  Again she gritted her teeth. He was driving her nuts, and if he didn’t go home within the next ten minutes she was going to kill him. She wanted desperately to be left alone, needed to be left alone to think about what Gage had said to her last night, what had happened to her—what had happened to both of them.

  “Here we are.” Doc placed the tray over her lap, and retreated to a blue corduroy platform rocker. “Eat while it’s hot.”

  Every Jewish-mother joke Eslin had ever heard in her life flashed through her head as she balefully eyed the bowl of chicken noodle soup, the glass of milk, and the Saltine crackers on the tray.

  “You’re doing it again,” she said flatly as she looked up at Doc. “You’re smothering me.”

  “How can you say that to me,” he asked, “after I slaved for five minutes over a hot stove to warm a can of soup?”

  “Go home, Doc,” Eslin told him bluntly, “before I throw something at you.”

  He made no move to vacate the chair. “Who are you sore at, anyway?” he asked.

  “You. I didn’t want to go to Roundtree in the first place, if you’ll recall. I liked things just fine the way they were—you kept your nose out of my life, and I kept my nose out of yours. But you insisted. I could help, you said, and besides, you added with one of your sly little smiles, it was time Rachel and I met. So I went, against my better judgment, but I went.”

  “So what exactly is it,” Doc demanded, “that you’re steamed about?”

  “Who did you think you were last night, anyway? Sir Galahad rescuing the damsel in distress from the Black Knight?”

  “I had my reasons,” he answered tightly.

  “Do you want to tell me what they are or should I tell you?” Eslin challenged.

  “All right, all right.” He sighed wearily, and started to push himself out of the chair. “I’ll go home.”

  “Don’t you dare move.”

  “Make up your mind, will you? First you want me to leave, now you want me to—”

  “I want you to tell me,” Eslin cut in hotly, “why you left a man who was very obviously hurt lying on his back in the mud last night.”

  Doc gave her a blank look. “What man?”

  “You know damn well what man.”

  “You mean Gage?” he returned levelly. “Isn’t he the man you told me last night you never wanted to set eyes on again?”

  “That’s him.”

  “Well, what an interesting turnabout.” Doc leaned back in the rocker, the platform squeaking under his weight. “Last night you said the Marquis de Sade had nothing on Gage Roundtree. What changed your mind?”

  “I was there when he shot Ganylad,” Eslin replied shortly. “I saw his face.”

  Doc’s brown eyes shifted away from her uncomfortably. “It’s odd how distraught he was over the horse.” He looked back at her squarely. “He smiled his way through his father’s funeral, you know.”

  “So what?” she retorted. “What does that have to do with your leaving him when he was hurt?”

  “Nothing. I simply find it very significant that the only two times I’ve seen that young man exhibit anything even remotely resembling human emotion—last night and when Ganymede was stolen—it’s been over a horse.”

  “We’re not discussing Gage’s emotional shortcomings,” Eslin reminded him firmly. “We’re discussing yours. You’re a doctor, for God’s sake—”

  “I’m a psychiatrist,” he interrupted her angrily, his cheeks flushing above his beard. “I haven’t practiced medicine since my residency, Eslin, and that’s pushing damn near forty years!”

  “So what about compassion?” She lifted the tray off her lap and set it down on the end table next to the sofa. “You didn’t have yours with you last night?” Eslin crossed her left foot over her right knee, yanked the butterfly clips off the Ace bandage, and began unrolling it. “All the fuss you made over an ankle that isn’t even sprained, yet you left that poor man lying there—”

  “Poor man!” Doc huffed, wide eyed and indignant. “And take your hands off that bandage!”

  “My ankle”—Eslin jerked the bandage off her foot and wadded it into a ball—”is fine!”

  Furious, she threw it at him. He caught it deftly in his right hand and glowered. Eslin glared back at him.

  “What were you and Gage arguing about in the study?”

  “Nothing,” Doc snapped. “Where did you get the ridiculous idea that we were arguing?”

  “Your head,” she returned nastily. “I’m clairvoyant, remember?”

  “It’s a private matter that doesn’t concern you,” he replied stiffly.

  “Were you by any chance discussing the real reason you sent me out to Roundtree?”

  As she watched his eyes flicker with surprise, she thought it was a damn good thing he was sitting down, otherwise he might’ve fallen down.

  “And just what,” he asked, quickly regaining control of his expression, “is the real reason I sent you out there?”

  “To determine whether or not Gage has any real psychic sensitivities.”

  A faint, smug glimmer lit his brown eyes. “And does he?”

  “You know damn well he does,” Eslin snapped impatiently. “I don’t usually mind being a psychic barometer for you, but your timing on this one was really lousy, Dr. Frankenstein. How could you be so insensitive, sending me out there to play psychic sleuth with a man who’s already in great distress and turmoil—”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” Doc overrode her loudly, “but your primary reason for going to Roundtree was to help find Ganymede.”

  “Don’t change the subject—”

  The sharp jangle of the kitchen wall
phone interrupted Eslin. She started to rise, but Doc was already out of the rocker.

  “I’ll get it,” he said, and beat her easily through the doorway.

  As mild as the sprain was, Eslin’s ankle was stiff from being wrapped all night. When she put her weight on it, pain shot up her calf. Cursing under her breath, she limped into the kitchen just as Doc reached the phone on the pine-paneled wall near the pantry and picked up the receiver.

  The disaster area that had been a clean kitchen when she’d left it at five-thirty Saturday morning distracted her momentarily, but as she heard Doc say Ethan’s name, Eslin forgot about the chicken broth congealing on the counter tops and the cracker crumbs ground into the beige-and-paprika-striped carpet. She hiked herself up on a leather stool and listened unabashedly to Doc’s conversation.

  “That’s very kind but unnecessary, Ethan.” He leaned against the wall, ignoring her. “I’m not busy this afternoon and I’d be glad to drive Eslin out to pick up her car.”

  I’ll just bet you would, she thought, but didn’t say so.

  “Oh, I see.” Doc shifted his weight and turned his back toward Eslin as he lowered his voice. “I’d like to speak to her now, if you’d call her to the phone, please…. Oh, no, I understand. I’m sure she is exhausted.” He paused and Eslin smiled. “Yes, I’ll call her tomorrow…. Yes, I’ll tell Eslin…. No, no she’s fine…. Thank you, Ethan. Good-bye.”

  He hung up the phone and glared at it.

  “You’ll tell me what?” Eslin asked.

  “Josefina’s packed your things, and Ethan’s driving your car home this afternoon.”

  Doc stroked his beard. His eyebrows drew together and a deep furrow appeared across the bridge of his nose. He looked very tired, very perplexed, and every day of his almost sixty-four years. Nonetheless, Eslin couldn’t muster one bit of sympathy for him.