So why was the operation bleeding money?
Clicking her tongue, she set off into a trot, rising and falling with the posting position as the wind breezed through her ponytail, that small stray bit of hair that was poking out under her helmet. The cool Kentucky wind was growing cold as the sun set. Kentucky was set up in the corner of the Appalachian Mountains, nestled beneath Ohio, and spring was a weird time in the country; during the day it was almost warm enough, a promise of summer. But once the sun was down, the cold began to set in immediately. March still had bite left to it and, for now, Samantha wanted to be home and untacking her stallion before her hands froze off.
As they approached the stables together, its bright red roof glinting in the sun, Sam finally slid off her horse and ran the stirrups up. Then she patted Tornado’s long and sweaty neck, smiling back at him.
“See, now that’s the exercise we both needed, isn’t it, buddy?”
He snorted and pulled her toward the stables. The young colt knew the routine. As soon as she brushed him down, then he’d be ready for his salt cubes and other treats. Someone desperately wanted his extra carrots today, but that made sense. She’d run him hard and could see the sweat slicking his forelock to his head. He needed all the protein he could get, too. Hoping to get back to her routine, Sam knew she’d be trying to run him more, to do anything to get out of the routine of the office and the endless rows on the excel spreadsheets that never made sense, no matter how hard she tried.
They were going to lose the farm, and she knew it. She just wasn’t sure, short of finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, if there was anything she could do to stop it.
Sighing, she clicked her tongue once more and walked with her steed back to the old building. It would need some painting again, and one of the doors had cracked from another horse kicking it a few weeks ago. That would take some money to fix. Again, things added up on a farm, and it kept her up nights.
“Alright, Tornado, let’s get you settled.”
* * *
“I just don’t get it,” she said, tempted to throw the damn mouse across the room, as if that would make the numbers any less dire.
“What’s that?” Andy said, frowning back at her.
Despite her mood, she stifled a laugh. Andy had one of those massive handlebar mustaches, the kind that made him look like he was about to go roughriding out on the plains with Wyatt Earp. When he frowned, it made the whole thing wriggle across his face.
“I don’t understand where all the money is going. I have no freaking clue. We have great sales, great breeding reputation. We haven’t had any illnesses and, yes, there are always repairs, but it’s never been more than we could handle before. It’s not like we developed some damn sinkhole or had to weather an ice storm. I don’t get why we’re bleeding money.”
“I don’t know either. You father kept the books until his surgery, and I respect that. A man’s finances are his own. Still, I’ve always thought of Gerry as responsible.” Andy shook his head. “Maybe there were old loans he took out that he never wanted you to know about.”
She paused and sighed, pressing the bridge of the nose with her fingers. “You mean things from when Mom was sick?”
“I didn’t say that. I just said that sometimes there are things a man keeps hidden for a reason,” the old hand replied.
“And I get that Dad has his pride. God knows that drove me crazy before he admitted his left hip was so bad off.”
“A man…”
“Has got to do what a man has got to do,” she said, puffing up her chest and forcing her voice to go as deep as it could. “And John Wayne died of cancer after filming a movie on a nuclear testing ground. Sometimes manning up doesn’t do a thing. Sometimes you have to ask for help.”
“Maybe, but they were his books.”
She sighed and raked her hands through her long, honey-gold hair. It tended to tangle when she did her accounting work. She’d twist it back into a bun and secure it with a pen, but that never held it for long. Over a long session, she’d pull out tendrils and fidget with the pen until it was a mess all over again. Once, her Bic had snapped and she’d had a patch of hair the color of a Smurf for two days.
“That’s not good enough. If he were in trouble, all he had to do was ask…unless,” she stopped, her eyes growing wide with understanding. “You think that he didn’t know. I know between the surgery and maybe Mom’s anniversary coming up, he’s been very much hands off. I just can’t tell by how much.”
“He seems chipper now that he can ride again. Frankly, you have to talk to him. This farm has been in his family for four generations. He can’t have it yanked out from under him with no warning. Ain’t no way to do a man,” Andy said, taking in a deep breath and spitting out his chaw into the nearest spittoon.
Gross. Is it too much to ask for no tobacco in the office?
Glaring back at him, she gestured to the old bronzed urn. “You know you’re dumping that.”
“I always do, princess,” Andy replied, hearkening back to a nickname she’d begged her dad and the hands to stop calling her when she was entering high school. “Either way, you can’t solve this problem in the books by yourself. If you could, you’d have done it. I don’t think you have however much it is lying around.”
However much was close to five million dollars. They barely had enough left, according to the books, to keep the farm running for the next year, and that was only if they assumed that no huge sicknesses, weather emergencies, or other general farm disasters happened. The odds that Murphy’s Law would leave them alone, maybe give Sam a full year to figure out how to either become a consummate bank robber or possibly run to Vegas to win the money needed, were extremely low.
Andy wasn’t wrong. If she had five million, then she wouldn’t be terrified about all the money she owed everyone, about losing the only home she’d ever known, the place she’d lived, not only with her parents, but her grandparents back when she was just a kid.
A strong hand was on her shoulder as Andy gripped it hard. For a guy north of sixty, he was still strong. It was probably all the mucking out of stalls he did. “You know, it’s going to be alright.”
“How?”
“I think things always get better when you got your kin with you in on it. You just need to tell him.”
Sam shook her head and gathered up her purse and other accoutrements. “Easier said than done.”
* * *
The smell of meatballs, thick with garlic and oregano, hit her nose the minute she walked into the old farmhouse. Technically, her dad had fully inherited the house when she’d been nine, and it had been his to redecorate if he’d wanted. But no. It was still decked out in the gingham and flannel that her grandparents had loved, still had a doily over the ancient horsehair sofa, and still had a scuffed up, standing piano in the corner of the living room. It was a time capsule, a testament to life in Kentucky decades upon decades ago.
If they lost the farm and the land, the house would go with it.
The last thing she could see was her father settling in an apartment near some of the big medical complexes out by the university. After hand-carved bannisters and chair molding, how could he go to a soulless manila wall and cheap laminate counters? How could he leave the last place Grammy and Grandpa had been? The garden in back where her mother’s ashes had been spread?
Neither of them could leave that.
Tossing her purse onto the floor, she steadied her shoulders and put on her biggest smile. It didn’t matter how distressing the figures had been or what Andy’s level-headed advice was. She had returned home after college to keep an eye on her dad and decided to run the farm when he couldn’t beyond that. She’d promised to be the shoulder her father could cry on, to be the person who would keep him safe. Maybe it was a reversal of the parent-child dynamic but she bore it determinedly because he was all she had.
So tonight, she would just enjoy him and the mouth
-watering hints of oregano and paprika tickling her nose.
“So, it’s Gerry Cutter’s famous spaghetti.”
Her dad, goofy as always, wore a chef’s hat, some big poofy white thing that served as an ode to Chef Boyardee. Standing tall, he added a pinch of Texas Pete to the mixture. Sam knew that, if she weren’t there, he’d have added at least a tablespoon. He loved everything so hot it would make you sweat the second it moved over the tongue.
There was no shortage of TUMS in their house.
“Indeed,” he said, grinning back at her and continuing to stir the sauce and meatballs mixture. “I was feeling so good after my hike that I wanted to make you a taste of Italy.”
“The closest to Italy you’ve ever been is that restaurant on Versailles Drive.”
“It’s a good place!”
“It’s clearly using Prego,” she said, tasting the sauce her dad whipped up, “and so are you. It doesn’t even have the chunky tomatoes or onions.”
“Look, I am giving you a taste of Italy. It’s a spicy meatball,” her dad continued, grinning, in a terrible accent that sounded more like Mario the plumber than anyone who’d ever been near Sicily.
“Yes, congrats on your mastery of pouring in hot sauce,” she mocked, sticking out her tongue. “You did a good job, though. Just enough zing.”
“But not so much zing you’re hugging porcelain,” he finished.
She rolled her eyes. His cornball humor had always made her gasp and groan in front of her friends in high school, but she’d somehow missed the bad puns, silly jokes, and overall goofiness in college. It was nice to see it again, especially when his hip pain had rendered him so dour lately.
“I get it. But really, Dad, you didn’t have to cook.”
“Oh, I know what this is,” he said, turning back to the boiling noodles.
“You do?”
“Yup, sure do,” her dad said. “I saw the doctor on Monday. He said that I was doing okay. In fact, he said I had great powers of recovery. It’s been almost five months and I’m feeling like I’m fifty again. It’s great.”
“Still, you don’t need to make me dinner,” she hedged, knowing partly how silly her concerns were.
Her dad did hike the hills of their property once a day, and he rode one of their old mares now on the trails. The doc had forbidden any serious jumping or barrel racing for at least another year, but her dad was always one to push boundaries. Sam didn’t want him to feel he had to be serving her, too. What kind of caretaker would she be if she let him? Of course, a voice in her mind that sounded suspiciously like Andy, chided her:
You can’t be Superwoman, can’t keep saving him.
She told that voice to shut the hell up. Sam had one more big save she had to figure out, had to coordinate, and that was how to come up with five million dollars. Right, and after that she’d create peace in the Middle East and invent a fat-free cookie that didn’t taste like cardboard.
“It’s just, you knew I was going to be home from the office. I could have fixed us something.”
“This is the only meal I can really get right.”
“You mean it’s the only thing that doesn’t end up frozen, burned, or completely hard as a rock,” she corrected, grinning again, despite the situation. “I know. I just…if you need me to do something, then it’s okay to let me know.”
“I can do some things for myself. I’m not an invalid. I’m through the hard part,” he insisted. “You just sit down at the table and let me get all the food out there for you. It’s something that would make Chef Ramsey eat his angry British heart out.”
“I don’t doubt that,” Sam replied earnestly, her mouth gone to Pavlovian levels of slobber as she waited for dinner. “But if you want me to cook for the next week, I will.”
“I don’t,” he said, getting out two plates. “Maybe I want to hone my skills so no one gets chipped teeth.”
“You do steaks on the grill okay,” she pointed out helpfully.
“I do at that, but I’ll level with you darling. I was starving and you were running so late over at the farm.” He stilled. “Is everything alright?” He looked back at her with wide eyes.
Sam bit her lip and then nodded. “It’s going to be fine,” she said, trying to mean it, promising herself she’d fix it. No matter what Andy said, inside her mind or out of it, there was no point in telling him and ruining his good mood right now. She would find a way to fix this before bringing it to him, even if she had no idea how.
Chapter Two
“Come on Midnight Runner! Come on! Goddamn it!” Sheikh Harun Bahar cursed and flung his tickets away as his horse rounded the bend. They were still several lengths from the end but the winning horse had already made its way across the finish line to the fanfare of everyone in the stands and the yell of the hick calling out the races. “This is the third time.”
People stared at him, women with eyes wide as they adjusted their ridiculous and massive derby hats, and men who were fanning themselves with their own tickets. He wondered how many of them had picked White Lightning from Cutter Farm over his own Midnight Runner. If they were smart, all of them had. He had no idea why he was failing. He’d been a success at everything else back in Dubai. Whether it entailed constructing shopping malls or breaking land on luxury golf resorts, he always had a nose for a winning business.
Until now.
Now, he’d started up with horse breeding. He didn’t directly do it. No, there were staff here he checked in on every few months who were supposed to be handling his line of thoroughbreds. A few were direct descendants of the horses his mother had bred back home. But his mother’s gift for breeding and even that vaunted lineage that had wowed the crowds and outraced some of the fastest horses in the Middle East seemed to be failing him here. Currently, he’d make more money selling Midnight Runner to the glue factory than he would by continuing to run him. The sheikh certainly shouldn’t be betting on him, which said everything about the disaster his horse venture was.
If he weren’t a billionaire, he’d have lost his shirt today on the damn horse, and that was unacceptable.
Shaking his head and shoving his fists into his pants pockets, Harun weaved in and out of the crowd around him. The luxury box at the downs was spacious, but he wanted to go out to the crowd. He had some so-called trainers to berate, and for the actual owners of the steeds, there was the socializing after. Maybe it was a tradition held over from the old days, maybe even back to Royal Ascot in England. This was all sport of course, another way for the landed and the wealthy to show their prowess off.
If Harun could manage to have any prowess at all among the crowd, he’d be grateful. With a losing set of horses, and the general lack of understanding about the ins and outs of Kentucky society, he got the cold shoulder at all of these post-race soirees.
This afternoon was no different. As he milled around the party room, laid out with a collection of chilled shrimp, cocktails, and even pâté, the rest of the crowd parted from him like Moses and the Red Sea. It half made him want to breathe quickly on his hand to make sure it wasn’t his breath, but that would have been too embarrassing. Besides, it wouldn’t have helped. He didn’t reek; he just didn’t know how to break into the close-knit Kentucky racing society, and having a losing glue stick for a race horse wasn’t helping matters.
Serving himself a plate, he smiled politely at a few men and women who passed his way. It was a marvel if any of them even gave him the time of day. Part of him wished by now, and after a couple years of futile trying, that he’d just give in to his cousin’s advice and give up the horse dream. It was just that it was connecting him more closely to his mother than he’d ever been before and, frankly, there was something to be said…at least a little…for not being naturally gifted at something. Until now, he’d succeeded out of the gate. The more he and his horse racing business struggled, the more determined he grew to make something out of it. Sheikh Harun Bahar had never wiped out co
mpletely at any venture, and he’d be damned if now was going to be that time.
The entrance of two people—an older man with a slight limp and a much younger woman—interrupted his contemplation. The crowd cheered and a few of the men tossed up their ten gallon hats at their arrival. No one had to tell him that these two had to be the owners of White Lightning, the famous Cutter Family. Until now, he’d only spied their lead trainers at the events. The rumor was that Gerald had been ill, recovering from surgery, and the daughter, whose name he couldn’t remember, was stuck running all the nitty gritty. Even though White Lightning had trashed him thoroughly before, he’d never seen the people who kept the prize money so continually out of his grasp.
Gerald, despite his limp, seemed younger than Harun would have thought. Part of him assumed any man who needed major surgery was either elderly or had seriously scarred and bruised himself. Mr. Cutter was neither. With graying—almost silver—hair and crow’s-feet prominent with his ruddy tan, he seemed fairly healthy for an old farmhand and horse breeder. Whatever procedure had kept him down these past months hadn’t bowed either his spirit or his gregariousness. No, he was slapping the others on the back and raising a toast of Kentucky bourbon to the celebratory masses. Defiant and larger than life. It made it too easy for the woman beside him, in her plain black dress and veiled hat, to melt into the wall paint behind them.
But only a fool would see past her.
Her eyes were a striking shade of blue, like the Aegean Sea, and they sparkled with intelligence as she started moving through the crowd. Her cheeks were rounded—cherubic, as his mother would say—and it complimented her obvious curves. Her torso overall was sleek but her hips were generous, and Harun shifted on his feet, trying to calm himself a bit. Part of him could imagine digging his fingers into those hips, imagine dragging her into a corner and letting nature lead them both. No, the young Miss Cutter was extraordinary, and that was hard enough. The fact that both of them were the conquering heroes while he was just another competitor who’d been left in their dust chafed him.
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