“Name’s Jamey McLachlan,” he said, and stopped. “You’d be the exercise rider with the broken wing.”
“Angie Womack, yeah. Trust Fund’s momma.”
“Fine animal. Opinionated.”
Angie giggled. “You might say. Where’s Vic?”
“Dealing with a contractor.” He swung off the horse.
“Don’t let me stop you. Where on earth did you materialize from?”
“I’m a fortuitous Scottish saddle burn come to rescue the damsel in distress.”
“And just my size,” Angie said. “My, my, if I weren’t married... Oh, well.”
She followed Jamey to the wash rack and leaned against the wall while he took the tack off the horse. Then she picked up a brush and began to groom the other side.
“Your marriage, my loss,” Jamey said with a gallant bow.
“Ooh.” Angie rolled her eyes. “Aren’t you the sweet-talking liar, though?”
Within two minutes she’d managed to ferret out every bit of information he was at liberty to tell her about his cover story.
“So you’re responsible for the blessed peace and quiet from Mr. Miracle?” Angie asked. “And you’re going to exercise and groom the horses, muck the stalls, clean up that hellhole upstairs, plus feed and water? You have a couple of clones hiding in the office?”
“There’s just one of me. But I work fast.”
“I’ll bet you do,” Angie whispered. For a moment her eyes went flat, but by the time he looked up she was smiling again. “Ready to ride another horse?”
“Ready for a change of pace. Come and talk to me while I muck out a stall or two.”
“I’d offer to help, but with this stupid thing...” Angie waggled her sling at him.
He set to work, balancing the manure pick with his weak right hand and using the strength of his left to lift. Angie watched him, unaware that each time he hefted the fork a twinge of pain shot from his fingers to his elbow. “How well do you know Vic?” he asked.
“Very well and for a long time. I grew up with her niece, Liz, the one who’s just gotten married and run away to Florida for two months. Why?”
“Why doesn’t she ride?”
“Not doesn’t. Can’t.”
He set the fork down. “Listen, I saw the woman ride once a donkey’s years ago when I was still in school. Now I mention riding and she flies apart at the seams.”
Angie looked at him a moment without speaking. “Nearly everybody on this side of the Atlantic and a good many people on the other side know the story. It’s yesterday’s news. Nobody mentions it—they just take it for granted.”
“So? How’d she lose her nerve? That’s what it is, am I right?”
“A little more than that.” She perched on a tack trunk and swung her feet. “You probably saw her not long before her accident.”
“Accident?”
“Yeah. She was riding a Grand Prix jumper at Madison Square Garden—the one with the lousy practice area—and some fool going the wrong way crashed into her over a jump. The horses escaped with a few bruises and scrapes, but the other rider was killed instantly, and Vic nearly cashed it in, as well. She had a concussion, cracked skull, broken pelvis and a bunch of other broken bones—I don’t remember all the details. Anyway, she was in a coma for a while, then in traction and casts and therapy and God knows what all for almost a year, during which time the other guy’s family sued the Garden, Frank Jamerson, who was her husband and her trainer, the city of New York, the American Horse Shows Association and probably God Himself, for all I know.”
“What happened?”
“In the end she won, but it cost a fortune in legal fees before the thing was settled, and cost her a good deal more in anguish. Then when she finally did get home, the first day she came down here she went totally berserk. Took months before she could touch a horse and months more before she started working with them. She didn’t drive a car for years, and I don’t think she’s driven the tractor or flown on an airplane since.”
“There are therapies and medication to control panic attacks.”
“Oh, she tried ‘em. They helped some, but the doctors said she didn’t have a real phobia—what she had was ‘remembered trauma.’ Maybe if she’d been able to climb back on that horse five minutes after she crashed, she’d have been all right. When I fell, I got back on the horse and walked around the arena while I waited for the ambulance. I was in agony, but I was more scared that if I walked away, I’d be like Vic—and I couldn’t bear not to ride again.”
“And she’s all right with it?”
“As all right as you can be when the thing you’ve lived your life for is suddenly taken away from you.”
Jamey nodded. “Maybe it’s time she got it back.”
Angie’s eyes widened. “Don’t even try! I mean, she’ll pass out or have a stroke or something. Let the poor woman be.”
He smiled. “Of course. Not my place.”
“It certainly is not. She’s perfectly content the way she is.” Angie took a breath. “She’s the toughest, most organized person I know. There’s not a need she doesn’t meet. I mean, here she is running this barn single-handed, overseeing the house renovation, teaching lessons, medicating the horses and being everybody’s mother confessor. She’s amazing.” Angie turned her head and a broad grin spread over her face. “And heeeere’s Victoria.”
Vic strode down the aisle toward them. “Those contractors are going to drive me into an early grave. Hi, Ange. How’s the collarbone?”
Jamey leaned against the stall door and remembered Angie’s words
There’s not a need she doesn’t meet.
Maybe it was about time
somebody
starting meeting a few of
hers
. And that somebody was going to be Jamey McLachlan.
ANGIE ELBOWED VIC into her desk chair and plunked herself down across from her. “Have you lost your mind?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Oh, I agree he’s gorgeous, but you can’t take strangers in off the street and put them to work.”
“You were perfectly charming out there. I assumed you two had made friends.”
“What’s that got to do with it?” Angie asked. “I am a Southern gal. I’d be polite to General Sherman until he turned his back on me. Who is this guy, anyway? Where’d he come from?”
“An old friend of mine from England, Marshall Dunn, sent him to me.” Vic bristled. “He rides like an angel—and not a
fallen
one, unlike somebody I could mention.”
Angie blushed. “Okay, you don’t have to rub it in. But if you’d give me a couple of days, I could find you somebody to take my place.”
“Not necessary. Give me some credit, Angela Womack. I checked him out. He’s temporary help. Period.”
“Watch him is all I say. He seems very nice, but then so do most con men.”
“What would he be conning me out of? My feed bills? My manure pile?” She stood and pulled Angie to her feet by her good arm. “Go home and get better. Don’t worry about me. I can look after myself.”
After Angie drove away, still grumbling, Vic began to relax. Neither she nor Jamey brought up the subject of her riding, and they fell into an easy rhythm. Vic groomed and tacked so that each time Jamey finished exercising one horse, the next would be waiting on the wash rack for him.
While he rode, Vic took horses to paddocks and brought them in, and mucked at a stall or two. At noon Angie returned with burgers for everyone, but left again soon after lunch. Jamey had an idea that she wanted to speak to Vic privately, but didn’t see how to bow out during lunch without seeming discourteous.
At about four o’clock clients began to show up to ride their horses. Vic introduced Jamey, taught three private lessons while he finished mucking out stalls, fed and watered.
He had left the stallion outside all day and made no attempt to bring him in until nightfall about six, when the last of the clients had left.
He waited until Vic was in the office, then cross-tied the stallion on the wash rack and began to groom him, all the while whistling softly. He fitted a bridle on him, slid on his saddle and cinched the girth. The horse wriggled and stamped, but accepted the tack with no overt signs of fear. Obviously it wasn’t the first time he’d worn a saddle. Jamey flipped the stirrups up over the horse’s back and cinched them together with a short length of line so they wouldn’t bang against the horse’s sides, then he fitted a lunging cavesson over the bridle.
“What on earth are you doing?” Vic asked from the office door.
“Getting ready to exercise this brute.”
“You’ll get killed. I don’t even know if he’s saddle broke.”
“I can tell he’s saddle broke, all right, but beyond that I have no idea.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Well, somebody’s got to do it sometime, lass, unless you expect this boy to lollygag around in a pasture until somebody snips his groceries and makes him into a gelding—and that, if you’ll forgive my saying so, would be an awful thing.”
“Men! I promise if he kills you I’ll bury your corpse under the manure and deny I ever knew you.”
“Fair enough, lass. Now open that gate for me.”
Vic watched from the arena fence as Jamey began to lunge the stallion, sending him galloping away in a large circle at the end of the lunge line. The moment he hit the end he began to buck—huge, snorting crow-hops, kicking out with his hind legs.
“Good!” Jamey said as the horse began to race around the arena.
“Yes,” Vic said.
Jamey looked at her questioningly.
“Listen, you, I do know my business,” she said. “He’s just a juvenile delinquent who doesn’t know his job, but he’s not vicious. And somebody somewhere has tried to teach him manners.”
“Indeed they have.” Much better than he’d had any reason to hope, Jamey thought. He clicked and chirruped, called “trot” and amazingly enough, the horse slowed to a wild uncoordinated trot.
“Good Lord,” Vic said. “Look at that trot. It’s downright gorgeous! That’s no jumper, that’s a dressage champion—or will be once he finds out where his feet are.”
“Agreed.” Jamey clucked again and watched the horse settle to a long-limbed walk. He reversed the stallion and went through the same permutations once more. Then he called to Vic, “Give me a leg up here.”
“Now I know you’re nuts. You’ve ridden what—a dozen horses today? You must be rubber-legged.”
He cocked his head. “You know, you’re right. That’s enough. I’ve still got to work out where I’m sleeping tonight.”
“Where you slept last night, obviously,” Vic said. “That room behind the hayloft is no cleaner than it was yesterday.”
“I swept up the mouse droppings,” Jamey said.
“You didn’t get rid of ‘eau de mouse.”’
Jamey shrugged. “Now there you have me. Give me a bed tonight, and tomorrow I’ll scrub the room down with disinfectant and deodorant. And if you’ll allow me to take you out to dinner this evening as part payment for the bed.”
Vic shook her head. “Nope. I’m much too tired. I will, however, split a pizza with you. Deal?”
“Deal.”
They settled the stallion, then walked out of the stable side by side. Jamey tossed Vic a rider’s black velvet hard hat. “Here. This is for your ride up the hill on the BMW this evening.”
Vic shook her head. “No way. Tonight we go by truck. My truck. I drive. And then you can take it to pick up the pizza. They refuse to deliver this far out in the country.”
“Then I’ll put the bike in the stable, shall I? And lock the door?”
“Be my guest, but we don’t have many thieves. Open the tailgate on the truck so the dogs can hop up for the ride home. Oh, and you may have to pick Max’s rear end up. Basset hounds are not the world’s best leapers.”
JAMEY FOLLOWED Vic’s directions to the Italian restaurant. While he waited for the pizza to come out of the oven, he found a pay telephone by the rest rooms and called his farm in Scotland collect. After half a dozen rings and his uncle Hamish’s disgruntled agreement to accept the charges, Hamish sputtered, “Good God, lad, do you have any idea what time it is here?”
“Sorry, Uncle Hamish. This is the first chance I’ve had for a private chat. The horse is everything I hoped—at least he seems to be so far.”
“You’ve found him, then?” Hamish suddenly sounded fully awake.
“I think so.” Jamey gave him the story. “But don’t call me at ValleyCrest unless it’s an emergency. How are you and Uncle Vlado doing?”
“We’re fine. Everything’s all proper and accounted for. Nothing’s missing this time.”
“Nothing would’ve been missing last time if the pair of you had been in charge rather than my brother and my darling wife,” Jamey said.
“Aye, but just so you know. Have you ridden the beast?”
“Not yet Uncle Hamish, do you remember my last year in school when you and Jock took me with you to Hickstead for the horse trials? I must have been sixteen or so.”
“I remember Hickstead. I don’t remember any year in particular.”