Jake set Charlie on her feet, held her face in both hands and kissed her fiercely.
She kissed him back. After a few moments the kiss deepened, and she opened to him, tasting him as he tasted her. Their bodies fit as seamlessly as she’d known they would. Her last conscious thought before she gave in to the pleasure of holding and kissing him was, Fire ants.
He broke the kiss first, leaving her hungering for more.
“We can’t leave them,” he whispered into her hair. “I’ll stay.”
“We’ll stay,” she said. “Together.”
The veterinarian, Kathy Waldran, drove in twenty minutes later. She found Jake sitting on one of the cushions in the aisle while Charlie, sound asleep, lay curled on the other with her head in his lap. He put his finger to his lips.
Kathy’s footsteps were enough to wake Charlie, who looked up into Jake’s face and realized with a start where she was. “Hey, Kathy,” she said, scrambling to her feet. “I’m sorry to call you out at three in the morning, but...” She stood aside. “I thought you’d want to come.”
“Oh, my goodness,” Kathy whispered. “Well, hello, mama. You got your hooves full, haven’t you?”
Mickey was the first to hear the commotion and come out to see what was happening. His whoops roused the others.
“Kittens and now twins?” Hank said. “You ladies live in fertile territory. Must be something in the water. I’d be careful if I was you.”
Mary Anne slugged his shoulder. “Won’t be yours, at any rate.”
“Ow. I sure hope not.”
* * *
SARAH BROUGHT OVER the breakfast trolley at seven, ecstatic about the twins.
Finally, over a cup of coffee and one of Vittorio’s cinnamon rolls, Kathy pronounced both mama and babies healthy and happy. “Somebody needs to keep close watch on ’em,” she said. “They’ll have to stay in the foaling stall for a few days until we’re sure they’re both strong and suckling.”
“I don’t dare put them out with the other mares and foals,” Charlie said. “Who knows how they’d react?”
“How fast can you build them a paddock?” Kathy asked. “You should have a few days anyway. Doesn’t have to be big. The same size as the stallion’s paddock outside his stall would work fine. Depending on how well they get along by themselves, you can eventually start them in the pasture with one of the quieter mares that already has a foal at foot. The barren mare is bound to want to steal one of those babies, so you’d best move her to the back pasture for a couple of weeks.”
“I’ll watch them,” Mary Anne said.
Everyone looked at her in astonishment. She blushed.
“Mary Anne, that is a shire mare,” Hank said. “She’s bigger than Annie.”
“I know, but the babies are my size. Charlie, what would I have to do?”
“Yell for help if you think there might be trouble brewing.”
“What kind of trouble?” Now Mary Anne looked worried.
“If someone got kicked or sat on or driven away from the milk spigots.”
“But I couldn’t protect them from that.”
“You can yell.”
Charlie and Kathy walked out to the foaling stall with Mary Anne and left the others drinking coffee and eating cinnamon buns.
“She said that to get out of driving Terror again tomorrow,” Mickey concluded.
Hank drained his coffee cup and set it on the counter with the other dirty dishes. “I’ll bet she wishes now she’d kept her mouth shut.”
“She’s game, I’ll give her that,” Sean said. “Let’s hope she can stick it out.”
“Let’s hope Molly doesn’t have any problems that require fast action,” Jake said.
Because the day was already hot, they set up fans to keep the babies cool. To her credit, Mary Anne took up residence on the cushions Jake had brought out, although Hank fussed because the sofa was now uncomfortable.
Charlie managed to put in a full slate of driving lessons with everyone except Mary Anne, who widened her eyes and said she couldn’t possibly leave her babies.
“The big one’s a filly, the little one’s a stud colt,” Jake said. “Took a while, but I finally got a good view.”
“So they are fraternal twins,” Charlie said. “That’s really unusual. Thank you, Jake. I wouldn’t have known about them until morning if you hadn’t wakened me. By then it might have been too late.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
AN HOUR BEFORE dinner, Charlie barged into the colonel’s study. “I have to talk to you.”
“Sure, what’s up?”
“Your granddaughter just told me—told me, didn’t ask me—that she’s going to a swim party next Saturday afternoon with a boy named Robbie Dillon.” Charlie ran her hands through her hair. She stopped in front of the antique mahogany table he used for a desk and glared at him before she began to stride up and down the room.
“What did you tell her?” the colonel asked. He put the book he was reading facedown on the table and leaned back in his leather desk chair.
“That it sounded lovely, but I needed to know who she was going with, when and how she was going and getting home again, where the party was, whether there would be parents chaperoning, who had invited her and that I needed to meet him ahead of time.”
“And?”
“Can you say ‘ballistic?’ She’d mentioned a swim party before, but apparently it’s been moved up. Turns out the kid who invited her is that boy she met once when everyone went to Collierville for sushi. According to her, this Robbie person is gorgeous and smart and everything a Prince Charming should be, plus he’s an upperclassman at Marchwood Academy. Dad, he drives his own truck.” She raked her hands through her hair again and stalked up and down the colonel’s study before dropping into the wing chair across from his desk. “He could be Jack the Ripper for all I know.”
“Surely this didn’t all come about after one meeting at the sushi house,” the colonel said.
“Hardly.” Charlie jammed her hands in the pockets of her jeans. “I knew I should be paying more attention to what she was doing on the net. Seems they’ve been emailing one another and talking on the phone while nobody’s around to listen. No wonder she’s been agitating for her own cell phone.”
“So why hasn’t he driven over here to meet you and me like any well-brought-up Southern gentleman caller?”
“According to Sarah, nobody does that anymore, like nobody dates. The whole teen scene works like a culture of germs. His excuse is that he’s working as many hours as he can at the sushi house this summer to make enough money to pay his truck insurance.”
“That sounds responsible of him. Where is this party?”
“At his house, apparently. She didn’t know the address, can you believe? She says it’s a big mansion in Collierville. He sent her a picture of it on his phone. He says it’ll be about ten kids from Marchwood that she ought to meet before school starts.”
“How late will it go on?”
“According to Sarah, afternoon after lunch for three or four hours, then he’ll bring her home. He swears his parents will be there to supervise. No booze, no drugs.”
“Why are you so worried?” The colonel leaned back and tented his fingers in front of his face. Charlie remembered that expression and called it his psychologist face. It had made her mad when she was Sarah’s age and it made her mad now.
“She’s only fourteen,” Charlie said. “Whatever she thinks, she’s lived a sheltered life on base where nothing much bad could happen to her, and if it did, there was always someone handy to rescue her. She’s asking me to send her off with a boy I have never met to a house full of people I don’t know to meet other people who may or may not even exist. I don’t care what she tells me about what is or is not done these days.”<
br />
“What did you tell her?”
“That until I meet Robbie and his parents to check them out, she’s not going anywhere with him. Period.”
“She’ll pitch a fit.”
“She already has. I am ruining her life. She’ll never be able to show her face at Marchwood. No boy will look at her after this. I tried to tell her I’m careful because I love her....”
“Didn’t work, did it? In other words, same ol’, same ol’. You said the same things.”
“And you never backed down for a minute.”
“Was I right?”
That brought Charlie up short. “Not always. After Mom died, you came down on me like a ton of bricks, when you bothered to notice me at all. Which was seldom.”
“Charlie, we were living in the District of Columbia. It’s dangerous. I had just lost my wife....”
She leaned toward him and put her elbows on his desktop. “And I had just lost my mother! That never seemed to occur to you. I never knew what to expect from you. You’d wander around for days barely acknowledging my existence, then you’d wake up to the fact that you had a daughter and order me around like one of your clerks.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“Except you never order your clerks around, do you?”
“So I can assume she won’t be at my dinner table tonight?”
“I doubt it. She’s sulking.”
“And emailing that Dillon boy about what a monster her mother is.” He chuckled. “Sound familiar?”
“I didn’t have a computer.” Charlie reached out to her father. “How do I know I’m doing the right thing? I can’t bear that she’s miserable, but I can’t let her take chances, either. She’s all I have left.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Thank you so much.”
“Oh, Daddy, You know I’m not excluding you, but I didn’t give birth to you. You know how it is.”
“Unfortunately, I do.”
“My gut tells me I’m right, but am I?”
“Probably. But it’ll cost you.”
“Doesn’t it always?” She strode out the French doors and headed for the stable to check on the twins. Why couldn’t human children be as uncomplicated?
After she saw that both babies and Molly were curled up together, she knocked on Mickey’s door. She heard the clomp of his leg braces and, when he opened the door, found him standing in front of her.
“Caught me,” he said. “Come on in. I’m doing my laps around the bedroom.”
“Why not do them up and down the barn aisle?”
“I don’t want Hank to see me fall on my nose.”
“Then go walk around in the equipment shed. As long as you don’t fall in the grease pit, you ought to be okay. The floor’s smooth concrete and you can grab ahold of the tractors if you wobble. Jake and Sean can check on you if you do it while Hank’s off driving with me. I can keep him far away from the barn.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Mickey said. “’Scuse me. Standing still wears me out worse than walking.” He sank into his wheelchair. “You threw me when you asked today what I wanted to do,” he said. “I know I can’t support myself just driving a carriage for funerals and weddings.”
“So what else?”
“One thing the army did was train me. I’m a programmer. I don’t have to ride a desk in an office with a hundred other geeks to do that. There are plenty of jobs out there for really good geeks. And I am.” He shrugged. “I can still drive a horse-drawn hearse to supplement my income.”
Charlie sat on the bed. “You’ve done some thinking about this.”
“Heck, yeah. I’m twenty-one years old and a gimp. What else do I have to do but worry about the rest of my life?”
“Not worry.”
He shrugged. “So what’s up?”
Charlie gave him a look of wide-eyed innocence. “Why should anything be up?”
“Come on, Charlie, you haven’t been in this room since you showed it to me the day we got here. Am I on report for something?”
“Just the opposite. I want you to do some data mining as a personal favor.”
“Spying? Who? Sean’s witch of a daughter?”
“Not this time. Oh, shoot, Sean, I want you to spy on Sarah.”
“Huh?”
“We’re the kind of family that wouldn’t dream of opening somebody else’s mail. I’ve always trusted Sarah, maybe too much. She never had to hide her diary or her Facebook page.”
“But...?”
“I’m not proud of it, but I need your skills. Here’s my problem.” She outlined the situation with Sarah and Robbie Dillon. “He is probably a perfectly nice boy. He’s probably telling the truth about his house, his parents, his friends. The point is, I don’t know. And Sarah is so angry at what she considers my lack of trust in her judgment that she won’t speak to me, and certainly won’t ask him for clarification. I’ve told her she can’t go to the party, but maybe if I were certain the whole thing was on the up-and-up, I might relent enough to drive her there myself, drop her off and pick her up a couple of hours later.”
“She’d be mortified.”
“Robbie Dillon’s parents would understand, if they’re the sort of people she assures me they are. But if they were the sort of people she says, wouldn’t they already have called me to introduce themselves? Wouldn’t this Dillon boy have come by to meet us even if he is working? I don’t think I’m wrong to worry about sending my daughter off with a total stranger. Can you help?”
“Piece of cake,” Mickey said. “Can I do it tonight?”
“Sooner the better. Tonight would be great.” She patted his shoulder. “Thank you, Mickey.”
“And I will walk around the shed tomorrow when Hank’s having his lesson.”
* * *
THE FOLLOWING MORNING as soon as breakfast was cleared away, Mickey nodded toward his room. Charlie followed him. Once they were inside, he shut the door behind him.
“Charlie, we got a problem.”
Charlie caught her breath. “What kind and how big?”
“Pretty bad and pretty big,” he said.
“Lay it out.”
“I should have laid that Dillon creep out the night Sarah met him,” Mickey said grimly. “Better yet, I should have let Sean lay him out. That fake hand of his is a killer.”
“Mickey, tell me right now.”
“Okay, but you better sit down. Use the bed. His name really is Robert Dillon, and he did go to Marchwood.”
She frowned. “Did?”
“He got kicked out a year ago.”
“What for?”
“I haven’t broken the school firewall yet to get all his records, but he was questioned by the police about an assault on one of the students. A freshman girl.”
“Like Sarah. Oh, Mickey. Was he arrested?” Instead of sitting, she began to pace the same circuit that Mickey took with his exercise. “Juvenile records are sealed, aren’t they?”
“No charges were filed because the girl clammed up. Dillon’s father probably paid her tuition to Harvard for four years. The Collierville paper had a squib about the incident and mentioned Robbie was being questioned. But he wasn’t a juvenile. He was over eighteen then.”
“He’s nineteen?”
“Living at home over his parents’ three-car garage. I found a picture of the house from some garden club tour. It’s a McMansion all right. He got his GED this spring. Since he was kicked out of Marchwood, he’s been picked up for DUI twice. Both times he got off with a slap on the wrist, some community service and a fine, which his father, an orthopedic surgeon, happily paid.”
“Why would he be working at the sushi place?”
“My guess is his family’s trying to make him shape up.”
�
��This is awful.” Now she did sit on the bed and drop her forehead into her hand.
“It gets worse. I did some digging in old social network stuff. I found a posting where he says he goes for young virgins with long hair.”
Charlie closed her eyes. “Has Sarah gone crazy?”
“Take a look at his yearbook picture,” Mickey said. He turned his laptop around so she could see.
Charlie blinked at the photo. “He is gorgeous.”
“He’s a rich thug,” Mickey said. “I grew up with them. It’s why I joined the army instead of going to college. Boy, was I stupid.”
“How can I tell Sarah? She’ll never forgive me for snooping. But I can’t not tell her.”
“She won’t believe you.”
“She’ll believe you, Mickey, won’t she?”
“Yeah. If I show her what I found. I can keep you out of it. I can tell her I was the one concerned about the jerk. I was feeling like her big brother, and checking stuff out is what I do. I’ll catch her when she comes over to play with the kittens.”
“Thank you, Mickey.” She kissed the top of his head.
They left Mickey’s room together and ran into Sarah coming downstairs from visiting the kittens. Apparently they were worth getting up early for. She said hello to Mickey but ignored her mother. Charlie nodded to Mickey and went to start her morning’s lessons.
She expected an explosion from Sarah after she talked to Mickey. An hour later she got it. Mary Anne had just climbed out of the driver’s seat while Charlie headed Terror. Sarah erupted out of the common room, pulled her mother into the tack room and slammed the door behind her. The rage in her face stunned Charlie. Steve’s furious eyes, Steve’s clenched teeth and fists.
“How could you?” Sarah snarled. “Mickey wouldn’t do that on his own. You told him to. I know you did!”
“Sarah, calm down, so we can discuss this sensibly.” She took a step toward her daughter with her arms open, offering a hug, but dropped them when Sarah backed away. She’d always had a temper, but Charlie had never seen her this angry.
Taking the Reins Page 18
