“Hard on the man.”
“And on her, being alone.” She dropped the lead rope in her hand over a hook. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done this sort of thing alone.”
“You’re not alone now,” he said.
“No, I’m not, am I?” she said with wonder. “Surely you’re better equipped to handle this sort of thing in Scotland, aren’t you?”
He hesitated. “We’re more used to snow and mud.” He didn’t want to tell her that in bad weather there were at least twenty workers looking after the beasts and the equipment. If he chose, he could toast his feet by his peat fire and ignore the weather outside.
He didn’t choose of course, and the workers, most of whom were kin, would probably have dragged him out to fling him headfirst into a drift had he tried, but in theory it was possible.
The phone shrilled again. “Oh, bother,” Vic said. “Everyone’s going to call to check on their horses. The phone’s going to ring off the hook.”
This time, however, it was Liz.
“You’re all over the news. A real disaster. Are the animals all right?”
“Not ‘Are you all right?’ One thing about you, Liz, you have your priorities straight.”
“Well, are you?”
Vic sighed. “Fine. All fine. Are you winning everything in sight?”
“Some. More than my share. Pat’s cleaning up on her pony. The weather’s glorious. Nanny-nanny-boo-boo to you. Why don’t you leave things to Albert and Randy, hop a plane and fly down here for some R and R?”
“Elizabeth Whitten, I have not been on a plane for over twenty years, and I do not intend to start flying in the middle of an ice storm—assuming planes are even flying.”
“Well, they’d be better flying Monday because Mike is going to be in town. He says please go to dinner with him Monday night.”
Vic caught her breath and glanced at Jamey. She tried to sound delighted. “Wonderful. Tell him I’d love to go to dinner with him. Also tell him the weather is putting the contractors behind schedule.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Liz said blithely. “Mike will handle all that. He usually gets what he wants. He got me, didn’t he?”
“With a bit of help from his friends and his daughter. Go back to your Florida sunshine and don’t worry your head about your poor old aunt languishing in the midst of the new Glacier National Park.”
Before noon every client had called at least once. Vic and Jamey barely had time to nod in passing. At last Jamey turned Mr. Miracle back into his stall and shut the door on him. Vic sat on a tack trunk with her arms wrapped around herself. He sat beside her, put his arm around her and pulled her against him.
“I’m cold, hungry, my nose is running and I’ve lost contact with my feet,” she said.
“Then I suggest we repair up the hill for some much-needed lunch and a bit of a cuddle before the fire.”
“I have to check the big house. There could be a hole in the roof for all I know. You stay at the cottage.”
“Whither thou goest, love...” He pulled her to her feet. “Besides, I’ve never seen the place.”
They struggled back up the hill arm in arm, whooping whenever their feet threatened to slip out from under them, and once or twice grabbing a tree to stay upright. Smoke curled from the cottage fireplace. “Wait a minute,” Jamey said. “I’ll add a couple of logs. Should be burning nicely by the time we get back. Come inside.”
“If I do, I won’t come back out. Go. I’ll hang on here.”
He returned a couple of minutes later. “Stripes is sound asleep atop Max and Sam. They didn’t even raise their heads when I came in. The room is even relatively warm.”
“Wish I were,” she said as they trudged around the corner and on up the hill.
“I offered.” Jamey stopped and stared. “My word, so that’s the big house?”
“I can’t believe you haven’t seen it.”
“All those pine trees in the way. Looks like a few branches fell on the front steps.”
Vic picked her way carefully up the porch steps, located the key on the lintel and opened the door. The house was the same temperature as the porch—icy.
“You have a gas water heater, so why not gas heat?”
“We do have gas heat. But it’s fired electrically. So when the electricity is off, it doesn’t fire. Ergo, it doesn’t heat.” Vic stood in the broad center hall. “Do you hear any water running?”
“Not offhand.”
“We’d better check the kitchen and bathrooms. And leave the water dripping just to be on the safe side.”
As Jamey followed Vic from room to spacious room, he realized that the house was very large, with high ceilings, elaborate wainscoting and crown molding. He tried to fix the date of the architecture. Later than Georgian, certainly. Not one of those fancy antebellum plantation houses. Sometime around the turn of the century, possibly, before air-conditioning. A farmhouse for prosperous farmers. “You lived here alone before you exchanged this for your niece’s cottage?” he asked.
“I was only alone after Frank died. I was born here,” Vic said as she climbed the stairs. “I’ve never lived anyplace else until I moved down to the cottage. Of course I didn’t actually use a good deal of the house most of the time. It needed a bunch of work. As you can tell.” They passed painters’ scaffolding on the staircase. Even in the cold, the house smelled of fresh paint and new plaster. “Mike and Liz are keeping most of the antiques, although Mike is not the antique type, let me tell you. Liz told him he could be as austere as he liked in their bedroom and his study. He agreed. That was before he discovered that his daughter, Pat, planned to sleep in an antebellum tester bed with chiffon curtains and down comforters.” Vic laughed. “He had a fit.”
“Why?” Jamey asked.
“He has a thing about Pat and germs. He’s getting over it, but slowly. He still reverts from time to time.”
“Oh.”
Fifteen minutes later Vic took a deep breath. “Nothing amiss that I can see. Let’s go home and have some of your hot chocolate.”
“I would prefer to go home and have you.”
“So we both pass out from low blood sugar? Food first, then we’ll discuss this other business.”
“Not open to discussion.” He kissed the lobe of her ear where it peeked out from under the earmuffs. “I am hot-blooded and insatiable.”
“You’re as cold as I am.” She grinned at him. “Whether you can be sated remains to be discovered.”
“I shall look forward to many happy voyages of discovery.”
VIC FOUND VEGETABLE SOUP in the freezer and heated it while Jamey piled the sofa cushions on the floor by the hearth. They shared a companionable winter picnic and several cups of Jamey’s hot chocolate in front of the fire.
The day had already closed in with that gray of inclement winter afternoons. The dogs snored gently, Stripes purred softly, and Vic lay back between Jamey’s splayed legs, her head tucked under his chin, with his arms around her and hers encircling his hands. Without speaking they watched the flames leap and twist.
I shall never be as happy as I am at this moment, Vic thought. Whatever happens, this is worth it.
Jamey kissed the top of her head and whispered something.
She looked up at him. “What did you say?”
“A very present refuge in time of trouble.”
“What is?”
“This day, this place—you.”
“We’re the only human beings left in a frozen universe.”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” he said. “Now, about my satiability...”
Each time they made love it was different. This was a rough-and-tumble tangle of arms, legs, mouths and bodies that sent the dogs scurrying into the kitchen and the cat stalking away to a more comfortable spot. Afterward Jamey got up only long enough to bring the feather comforter from Vic’s unmade bed and toss it across their bodies. He lay beside her with his head propped on his bad hand and his
left drawing circles on her abdomen. “Show me your scars,” he said suddenly.
“What?” She’d been dozing, but this brought her full awake. “You’ve seen them.”
“Not to explore. They’re a part of you.”
“Not a very aesthetic part.”
“Neither are mine, but you’ve convinced me I needn’t hide them from you. Give me the same credit.”
“Men are different—they judge women solely on externals.”
“Largely true, not that I’m especially proud of it. This is different.”
“Oh, right. Tell me, would you have married your Gwyn if she’d been a hundred pounds overweight, had a single eyebrow and bad teeth?”
“Probably not. Why did you marry your Frank? Was he dashing and handsome in his youth?”
She blinked. “Frank? Lord, no. He was already burly, fought his weight constantly. And then he gave up fighting it. He was my trainer first. The relationship came later. I suppose I was looking for a father figure, never having had anybody but my grandmother, who was good-hearted, but pretty irascible. Actually, turned out Frank was more like her than like my father must have been. I was only four when he and my mother were killed.”
“So you and Frank weren’t Romeo and Juliet?”
“It was a comfortable working relationship. We had the same goals—or at least we did when we got married. I was going to be the top rider in the world and Frank was going to be the top trainer. Then I crashed and he started trying to make my niece Liz into the top rider in the world. But we no longer had the connections, and I don’t think Liz had the drive, the competitive spirit I had. And lost.”
“Nonsense. You still have it.”
“I don’t want it, thank you. Oh, I’d like to be able to take Mr. Miracle into a dressage arena and blow people’s minds. I’d even like to ride the occasional adult hunter class without falling off, but I get much more pleasure out of watching Liz and Pat and my kids win blue ribbons than I ever did winning trophies myself.”
“Your kids?”
“Susie and the others I’ve taught through the years. I think of them as my kids.” She stopped speaking, looked up at Jamey carefully and said, “They are the only children I could have, Jamey.”
“The accident.”
She nodded. “All those scars you’re so anxious to see. I lost my spleen, my gallbladder and my uterus. Livers regenerate, thank God, or I’d have died. I also lost some muscle and bone, but most of that has either grown back or been replaced with steel. They don’t make artificial female organs yet.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.” She tried to sit up but he held her down.
“Show me.”
“Oh, Jamey—”
“Please.”
“Fine,” she snapped. “Have at it.” She pulled the quilt back.
He ran his fingertips across her, tracing the fine lines. “Beautiful scars. Not a bit like mine.”
“I had professionals opening me up to repair the damage inside. You have a nasty piece of machinery ripping you from outside in.”
He bent and kissed her navel, then pulled the quilt back up over them both. “You are a very beautiful woman, Victoria. Believe that and stop hiding. It’s not necessary.”
Almost before they realized it, the hours had slipped by until it was time to feed the horses again. They were both used to timing the hours by the chores they had to do, but still, it was a wrench to untangle themselves from an almost drugged sleep in front of the fire, pull on heavy clothes and troop out into the ice once more.
Despite the weather forecast, water already dripped from the branches. The thaw had begun. Vic sighed. “Tomorrow everything will be back to normal, dammit.” She glanced at Jamey. “And Mike Whitten will be here. What on earth am I supposed to tell him about you?”
“Why should you tell him anything?”
“You don’t know Mike. He is a very discerning man. And I am a terrible liar.”
“So don’t lie.”
“Are you crazy?” She grabbed at the nearest oak as her feet slid.
Jamey stopped. “Are you ashamed?”
She wrapped her arms around the tree and closed her eyes. “Of you? No. Of me, maybe. But of what people will think, definitely.”
“What will they think, Victoria?” His voice sounded grim. “That you’ve hired a Gypsy gigolo to warm your bed? That making love to you is a condition of my employment? Is that what you think?”
“No!”
“At Connaway’s you seemed thrilled to have everyone think precisely that. What’s changed?”
“It wasn’t true, then.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“Oh, you know what I mean. We weren’t actually...you know.”
“Screwing our brains out?” He sounded bitter. He grabbed her shoulders and held her at arm’s length. “Tell Whitten everything or tell him nothing. I don’t give a damn what he thinks of me. Anyone who thinks you either would, or would have to, hire a man to warm your bed is someone I’m not interested in knowing, nephew or not. Any man in his right mind would want to make love to you, woman! Why won’t you believe that?”
“Maybe because nobody has in a long time.”
“Then they’re either fools or you were sending out strong signals that you weren’t interested.”
“What kind of signals did I send you?”
He barked out a laugh and wrapped his arms around her. “The same kind a mare sends out to that big stallion, love. ‘If you come after me, I’ll try to kick your bloody head off, but keep trying and maybe I’ll let you get round me.’ ”
“And like the stallion, you were too dumb not to keep trying.” She laid her head on his chest. “I’m glad.”
“So am I. Now let’s get those horses fed so we can explore my satiability quotient some more.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“I HATE TO ADMIT the real reason I don’t want Mike or anybody else to know about us,” Vic said as they slogged to the barn in the early darkness.
“Thought you already had. You’re ashamed of me.”
“Not in the way you mean.” Her paddock boot sank deep in a rut in the gravel drive. “Oh, bother. The ice was bad enough. Now we’re going to be up to our armpits in potholes. I’ll probably have to order a load of fresh gravel to fill them all. And spend an entire day spreading the stuff with the tractor. Drat!”
“I’ll do the spreading. Don’t change the subject What’s the real reason?”
She stopped and turned to him. “He’ll tell Liz. And Liz will definitely get bent out of shape. Wouldn’t surprise me if she got on the next plane home.”
“Why? You’re a grown woman.”
“I think everyone knows that. In fact, that may be part of the problem. You wonder why I can’t believe you’d actually be interested in me as a woman? Because nobody else believes I am anything but a middle-aged female widowed horse trainer with horny hands.”
He chortled and slid his index finger down her glove. “I’d say your hands are probably the least horny part of your anatomy.”
She slugged him on the shoulder. “I’m trying to be serious here. It’s like I’ve been typecast and nobody’s about to let me change characters in the middle of my life. To think I would even consider having an affair with anybody—much less a handsome sexy younger man—would blow their minds. You think getting tossed into a hay baler was bad? Try standing up to Liz when she comes at you with a pitchfork.”
“But can’t they see—”
“No. They can’t. I can’t, either. Or I couldn’t.”
“Do you think I’m a fortune hunter?”
Again she stopped. “At the moment I don’t give a damn. If I had a fortune, I’d probably hand it over to you gladly. But I don’t, so if that’s your motive, buster, you’ve badly miscalculated.”
“Pity. That means I’ve been expending all this passion for nothing.”
“See that you continue to do so. Okay, you want to feed or wa
ter?”
As Jamey opened the barn door, the lights came on.
“Power! Hooray!” Vic said.
“I was rather looking forward to sleeping by the fire with you.”
“Who says we can’t do that, anyway?”
Late that evening, Jamey left Vic curled up beside the fire with both dogs in her lap so that he could do one last check on the horses. The moment he looked in the gray mare’s stall, he knew there was trouble. She lay on her side with her legs stretched out and her neck arched. The swell of her belly told him she was deeply bloated.
“Bloody hell!”
Colic. The horseman’s worst nightmare. He managed to force the mare to her feet and held her halter while he bent to listen to each side of her belly.
Entirely too quiet. The bran mash should, if anything, had given her too many rumblings. She tried immediately to lie down again, but he fought her and kept her on her feet, took her from her stall and half dragged her to the telephone on the wash rack. He dialed the cottage extension. Vic answered sleepily.
“Sorry, love,” he said. “We’ve got a colic.”
“Who?” Instantly she sounded wide awake.
“Silver Cloud. She was down in her stall.”
“Give me five minutes.”
He kept the mare walking until he heard Vic’s footsteps.
“Have you given her any Banamine?”
He shook his head. “Didn’t want to turn her loose long enough to fill a syringe. We don’t want her thrashing and flipping a gut.”
“Right.” Vic returned a few moments later with a large syringe full of clear liquid and shot it into the mare’s neck. Then she, too, bent to listen at the mare’s flanks.
“We’ll have to get some mineral oil down her.”
“You calling the vet?”
Vic shook her head. “Not yet. He might not be able to get here, anyway. Temperature’s dropped and everything’s frozen over again. The roads are probably worse than before. Besides, he can’t do anything at this stage we can’t do. Can you keep her on her feet?”
“With difficulty.”
They worked over the mare, easing the plastic tube down her throat, pumping mineral oil directly into her stomach. “All we can do is keep her walking,” Vic said. She leaned against the wall. “This is not the way I’d intended to spend this night.”
Mr. Miracle (Harlequin Super Romance) Page 18
