“You didn’t drive such hard bargains a few years ago when all you could afford was an old gelding only worth five hundred dollars on a good day,” Mac reminded him. “Now you’re traipsin’ around in five-hundred-dollars boots.” But he grinned. “Howsome-ever, you got yourself a deal on Miss Kitty.”
Jed grinned back, held out a hand, and they shook. “You sure have changed, boy,” Mac commented for at least the tenth time. “Sure have.”
“Reckon so.”
Changed, yeah. He was working on himself, fixing himself up as if he’d never noticed what he looked like before, which he hadn’t. As they walked silently past the huge barns and well-kept lawns that made up the nucleus of the Circle Ten, Jed took a moment to consider everything he’d bought since coming home from Sancia Island a month ago. He had a five-thousand-dollar gold watch and an expensive new wardrobe. He also had a black Ferrari and five new mares, some of which cost more than he’d made rodeoing in his entire life.
If money couldn’t buy happiness, it could at least keep him distracted from thinking about Thena. Of course, among his purchases were two dozen books, whose titles included Mystical Islands of the Georgia Coast, French for Beginners, Movie Classics of Yesteryear, and The Annotated Works of Charles Dickens. He assured himself that just because he liked to spend all his spare time reading the subjects that interested her didn’t mean that he thought about the lady herself all the time.
Mac’s wife, Barbara, a stout brunette in dungarees and—as if it were usual ranch attire—a silk shirt, came out of the family’s huge ranchhouse and crossed the yard excitedly, waving her arms. “Jed, if you don’t find some way of letting that danged hotel of yours know how to reach you, your attorney’s gonna have a conniption.”
“It’d do him good,” Jed drawled wryly. “He doesn’t get much exercise.”
“He’s been lookin’ for you for two days. The hotel manager traced you up here.” Barbara held up a note she’d taken. “This is the message your lawyer left at the hotel: ‘Trouble at your island,’ ” she read. “ ‘Clients of mine were attacked by local woman and her dogs. Woman in jail. Dogs in jail. Clients pressing charges. Call me about this situation immediately.’ ”
Barbara Bullock looked up quizzically. “What kind of wild woman lives on your island?”
Jed was already running toward his truck. “One I hope to marry someday,” he called back over his shoulder.
The Dundee municipal police force, which consisted of Chief Archie MacKay and Deputy Roy Payne, was casual and friendly. So was the municipal jail, which consisted of five cells with whitewashed concrete walls, a front desk, Archie’s office, and a meeting room that doubled as Roy’s office and the site of the local Masonic lodge.
Dundee had no dog pound, and Archie was too nice a man to send Rasputin and Godiva to the county pound, miles away, so he let them share Thena’s cell. Her cell was cheerful by ordinary jail standards, but it was still a cell, with one high, narrow window in the back wall and a single, depressing light fixture overhead.
By standing on a chair, Thena could almost see out the window. As she had done every afternoon for the past three days, she perched on the cell’s sturdy metal chair and tilted her face as close to the window as she could, worshiping the scent of fresh air and the narrow ray of sunlight. Rasputin and Godiva lay morosely on the cell bunk, their eyes trained on the window with a misery that equaled her own.
She might have to go to jail for weeks, even several months. The developers said she’d shot at them. In truth, she’d only fired the shotgun in the air, but it was four to one, their word against hers. The attorney appointed by the county had explained the possibility of a jail term. She couldn’t afford the combination of her bail, a fine, and the hospital costs incurred by the two men Rasputin and Godiva had bitten.
Rasputin and Godiva … worst of all, the developers wanted them put to sleep, and the attorney had said that was a distinct possibility too. Her dear companions would die for crimes they had committed at her urging, minor crimes, just nibbles. They hadn’t done much more than break the skin on two well-padded male rumps.
Thena wiped a few recalcitrant tears off her face and dried her hands on the gauzy yellow pants she wore with sandals and an orange top. She grasped the edge of the cell window with both hands and stood on tiptoe, straining to put her face directly in the midst of golden sunlight.
She heard the door to the cell area open, but didn’t bother to turn around or get down from the chair. Roy, a round-faced young man with thinning black hair and wide eyes, wandered in periodically to offer sympathy and snacks, so Thena assumed that he had come to visit. She waited apathetically for his high-pitched voice to split the silence.
“Thena.”
The voice was anything but high-pitched. Her name rumbled off it like low thunder. It was unmistakable.
Thena whirled around and got down from the chair with shaking legs. Her eyes flew to the calm, lean face and hazel eyes she’d drawn so lovingly, so many times. Jedidiah. Rasputin and Godiva clambered off the bunk, their tails wagging as if this traumatic situation finally made them admit that he was their friend.
But he wasn’t a friend. He’d sent the developers. Thena didn’t move, didn’t speak as her long-simmering fury mingled with her shock. He looked back at her with troubled eyes, reading those emotions. Behind Jed, Roy stood grinning broadly.
“Mr. Powers has gotten all the charges dropped!” he chirped. “You’re free! And the dogs too!” He stepped forward and unlocked the cell door.
Free. The word obliterated every other concern, including puzzlement over why Jed had come to help her. Thena cried out without meaning to and clasped her hands to her mouth. When the cell door opened, she rushed out with the dogs right behind her. Wordlessly, recklessly, she ran down the short hallway, flung open the door to the reception area, and headed for light and fresh air and freedom.
When Jed finally caught up with her, she was kneeling on the lawn in front of the jail, her face raised to the sun and the breeze. The dogs rolled in the grass with their own display of ecstasy.
Jed lowered himself beside her, sitting on his bootheels. She didn’t acknowledge his presence at all, for which he was glad, because he needed a few seconds to swallow the lump in his throat. The sight of her wistfully trying to look out the window in the cell had torn him up. He understood her love for being outdoors; he knew what torture the cell must have been. He hurt for her. He cursed Chester Porter Thompson the fourth and his independent decision to send developers to Sancia.
“Miss Witch, you sure know how to get in trouble,” he said softly.
She turned to look at him, her eyes glittering like cold silver stars. “I’ll hate you for the rest of my life.”
Nothing changed about Jed except the look on his face, which went from tender to stunned. “I just got you off the hook,” he reminded her in a distracted voice. Couldn’t she see that he was innocent, that he was here because he loved her?
“But you let me sit in jail for three days, first. It was a terrific revenge tactic.”
Stark, wounded anger replaced his amazement. “I didn’t know what had happened until this mornin’. I caught the first plane out of Cheyenne, as soon as I heard.”
She paused, surprised. Then a new thought flared inside her. “But you sent the developers.” She wanted him to hurt the way she’d hurt during the past few days. “You’re just a backwoods drifter with no concern for anyone or anything but yourself. How could I have ever thought you’d understand why Sancia is too beautiful to destroy? You don’t know anything about beauty.”
“My attorney sent the developers. I didn’t even know they were comin’ here, dammit.”
“Your attorney is negotiating to sell Sancia?”
“Yep.”
“At your direction.”
He nodded slowly, defeated. “Yep.”
She raked his new appearance with a disgusted gaze, arrogantly dismissing the creased slacks, the monogramme
d sports shirt, the gleaming wristwatch, and the beautiful boots. “I don’t know why I ever thought you were worth my trouble,” she added, her voice breaking. “You can buy success, but you can’t buy class. Your mother was a Gregg and she had class. But you didn’t inherit it.”
That was too much torment, too much provocation. He’d heard taunts like that before in his life, but none had ever hurt him more than these of Thena’s. He struck back viciously. “Seein’ as how you think so badly of me,” Jed told her in a low, vibrating voice. “I’ll live up to it. I’ll bulldoze everything on Sancia and sell every horse for dog food. Includin’ Cendrillon.”
Neither of them was surprised when she slapped him. Jed stood slowly, barely noting the stinging of his jaw, feeling dead inside, his body following commands that he wasn’t conscious of giving it. Thena stood too, staring up at him with a grief that momentarily eclipsed everything else. For one brief instant he thought she was going to reach out to him. But she turned quickly, called her dogs in a tearful voice, and walked toward the city docks, toward her island and her life. The man who loved her had just promised to destroy both.
Eight
Nothing could be more violent or more magnificent than the thunderstorms that crashed into the Georgia coasts every August. Ordinarily, Thena loved the wild lightning that streaked between the sky and the ocean; she loved to stand at the edge of the forest and let the wind tear at her hair and body. It made her feel closer to the world, and in the aftermath she was somehow new again.
But tonight’s storm was an enemy that seemed to know that she was too depressed and tired to resist its battering force. Seeing Jed in Dundee that afternoon, hurting him and being hurt so badly in return, was all she could think about. The storm frightened the island horses, and Thena looked out her living room window to find the small herd gathered in the woods just beyond her yard. Cendrillon had led them to a spot she considered safer than any other.
The sight made Thena’s chest tighten with love for them and fear for their future, both immediate and distant. Carrying a big lantern, she went outside in the cool, lashing rain and walked among the herd. Most of the horses knew her and let her touch their heads with a reassuring, gentle hand. The others, their eyes wide under soaked forelocks, retreated a little into the woods and watched her anxiously. She stood for a long time, her head bowed, leaning against Cendrillon’s warm shoulder.
Thena smelled the pungent warning in the air a few seconds before the lightning struck. She grasped Cendrillon’s mane and screamed just as the bolt roared down from the night sky and split a huge live oak two dozen yards away. Thena stared in horror as the oak ripped from crown to roots. The torn halves fell in opposite directions, crushing the smaller trees and the palms.
Weak with fear, Thena woozily held the lantern up. She gasped and ran forward as the light revealed a gray yearling trapped under the limbs of the smoking, devastated tree. “Easy, ma petite,” she soothed, stroking the colt’s straining neck. He didn’t seem to be hurt, just pinned. But his legs thrashed in wild resistance, and she knew it was simply a matter of time until he did hurt himself.
Thena studied the tree anxiously. The limbs were nearly a foot in diameter. She had nothing but an old, dull ax in the barn, so she couldn’t cut them. Thena ran to get an old buggy collar and logging chains her grandfather had brought to the island. When she returned, she slid the collar over Cendrillon’s steaming, wet neck and locked the heavy chains in place on either side.
It seemed to Thena that hours passed before she finally got the chains fastened around the tree. The gray colt lay still for periods, petrified by the strange activity, then thrashed dangerously until he was too tired to continue.
Nearly exhausted herself, breathing raggedly, water streaming down her face, Thena went to Cendrillon’s head and wound a hand in the little mare’s mane. “Pull, chérie, pull!” Cendrillon’s small hooves dug into the thick, sandy soil. Her neck bowed down and her haunches flexed with tremendous effort. The tree limbs slid nearly a foot, skimming lightly from the colt’s barrel to his hindquarters. He squealed in new terror and began to fight, hanging a hind foot in the smaller limbs.
“Quiet, stay quiet!” Thena called to him. She unbuckled the chains so that Cendrillon was free, then ran to the colt’s side and knelt down, trying to ease his leg out of the tangled branches. “We’re going to get you out of this, somehow! There’s got to be a way—”
A tremendous clap of thunder nearly deafened her. The colt lurched up on his front legs and fell back. Thena wrapped both arms around his neck and tried to hold him down. The wind gusted sharply, and Thena cringed as a two-hundred-foot pine tree toppled beyond the far side of the barn.
It was difficult to think rationally amidst such awesome violence. Suddenly Thena cried out at the thought of what Sarah Gregg must have gone through, the overwhelming fear and desperation as she fought to save her Arabians from the hurricane almost forty-five years ago. H. Wilkens had found her pinned under a tree much like this one, her neck broken. Thena’s heart pounded with dread while she looked at deep, dancing shadows as the oaks flung themselves back and forth in the lantern light. “Sarah!” she screamed as if begging for help. “Sarah!”
The wind howled. Thena pressed her face into the colt’s soggy gray mane and cupped her hands over his eyes to shield them from the rain a little. The dogs crept up and huddled by her again; Cendrillon stood in the edge of the lantern light, snorting and jumping every time a limb cracked somewhere in the woods.
A few minutes later, Thena heard a repetitive splashing sound through the din. She squinted into the darkness with alarm, watching Cendrillon twist about and stare toward the sound too. The dogs barked lustily, but without malice. Thena turned to look at them in bewilderment, amazed at the welcoming tone of their voices. When she looked back her breath caught in her throat.
A figure in a yellow, hooded rain slicker appeared in the lantern light. Even before the hood fell back, Thena recognized Jed’s tense face in the shadows. A deep, serene conviction flowed through her, even though she knew it was highly imaginative. But why else would he be here at night, in a storm? Sarah had drawn her grandson home.
“Jedidiah!” He knelt in the rain beside her, his eyes frozen on her face. He grabbed her shoulders with rough hands.
“Are you hurt?” Jed yelled.
She shook her head. “But Cendrillon can’t pull this limb off the colt! She needs help!”
His hands left her shoulders, cupped her face, smoothed her matted hair back, and traced the contours of her wet skin as if he were convincing himself that she was truly all right. He pulled the rain slicker off and draped it around her shoulders, then he walked quickly to Cendrillon. Thena stroked the colt’s head as Jed turned the mare around and reattached the chains.
This time, as the mare pulled, Jed pulled too. Thena scrambled up and tugged the branches away from the colt’s hind leg. The big limbs over his body moved by inches, but they moved. And five minutes later, the colt leapt to his feet, free. He galloped vigorously into the woods.
Thena staggered to Cendrillon, feeling giddy, and helped Jed remove the logging chains and collar. Then she slapped the shaking mare on the shoulder and yelled, “Follow your friend and keep him out of trouble!” Cendrillon disappeared into the inky forest at a trot, her white tail streaming out behind her with ghostly luminescence.
Thena faced Jed, her chest heaving, and the shock of his sudden appearance began to register. His rich brown hair was plastered to his head and he was breathing just as hard as she was. They stared at each other for several seconds, no words capable of asking or answering all the questions that hung in the air. Finally he bent and got the lantern. By some silent signal, they walked to the porch, where the dogs had already retreated now that the excitement was over.
Or was it over? The storm around them was beginning to fade, but there were other tempests to consider. Thena sat down on the top of the porch steps. Jed sat down beside her, and she gazed i
n amazement at the dirty mess that had once been his very nice pair of western boots. His soaked slacks and sports shirt clung to the athletic contours of his body.
He ran his hands across his hair and frowned at her frank scrutiny of his ruined appearance. “No class,” he said tersely. “Just like you told me.”
Thena faced forward and lowered her head into her hands. “What kind of crazy man did you hire to bring you to Sancia at night, in a storm?”
“Farlo. Who else? But the storm hadn’t started when we left Dundee. Once he left me at your dock, it took almost an hour to walk here.”
“Thank you for what you did just now.” Thena fumbled to make sense out of all that had happened. “You helped save a horse you plan to turn into dog food.”
“Oh, hell.” The exasperation in his voice hinted that she knew better than to believe what he’d said earlier about the horses.
Thena held out her hands and looked at him in angry supplication. “Then why are you here? What do you want now?”
His mouth thinned in dismay. “It’s my island, and I reckon I can visit it anytime I want to.”
“In the dark, in a storm?”
Her haggling destroyed his patience and accomplished the nearly impossible. It made him yell. “Yes, dammit, in the dark and in a storm!” He reached into a back pocket on his slacks and withdrew a document, which he presented to her stiffly. “The deed,” he rasped. “Take it. This heap of shells and everything on it isn’t mine anymore. It’s yours.”
Thena stared at him in speechless shock. Her face pale, her stomach tingling with a disturbing hint that she might cry, Thena took the paper and glanced at it. True. Unbelievable, but true. Sancia was hers.
Her voice sounded small and fractured. “Why, Jedidiah?” She couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t think.
“I want you to understand something,” he answered fiercely. Her gaze came up and absorbed the pride and dignity in his expression. “I do have class. I can recognize somethin’ beautiful when I see it. I’ve seen it in Wyoming, out there in mountains that make a man want to cry because they’re so pretty, and in prairies that go on forever until you think that the sky is the only thing that brings ’em to an end. And I’ve seen what’s beautiful here. I don’t understand this kind of beauty, but I know it’s special. I think you know that I couldn’t ever have gone through with those godawful things I said today. I can’t hurt this place … and I can’t … hurt you.”
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