Unforgettable: A Loveswept Classic Romance (6 page)

Giggling, Philip ran down the steps and into her arms. Tibbs followed. The dog sat at Lettice’s feet and whined like an unhappy puppy, until she deigned to scratch his ears.

“This is Mr. Tough Guy?” James asked as he joined Anne on the portico, jerking a thumb at the dog.

Fiery sensations flooded Anne’s body at his closeness. She forced herself to ignore them, and scowled at the van instead. “Tibbs adores her. I have no idea why.”

“I take it from Philip’s remark that Battle Cry hasn’t arrived yet?” James asked, the hope of a contradiction clear in his tone.

“Not yet,” Anne said, grinning. “Why do I think that old saying about if wishes were horses is apt right now?”

He laughed. “Very apt, Annie. If it were true, there’d be a thousand Battle Crys on your doorstep.”

She grimaced at the name Annie, but let it go. “If there were, then we wouldn’t be this excited about one.”

He chuckled, and Anne realized that their sharing a joke was as insidious to her control as him touching her. More. She could always excuse a physical response as just that. Nature’s attraction circuits did not discriminate at times. But she couldn’t dismiss emotional intimacy so easily. His generosity with her mare and his clear plan to keep the horse here through the breeding season confused her. He wasn’t behaving quite like the James she thought she knew. She felt as if an invisible barrier were slowly and steadily crumbling inside her, and she had no idea how to shore it up again. The thought was disturbing.

She looked around for a distraction, and immediately found a second complication in her life to focus on. She had allowed her grandmother the time to greet Philip and Tibbs before confronting her over the van. It was more than enough time
now. Excusing herself, Anne strode down the steps to Lettice.

“Grandmother, this is more than your necessities,” she said when she reached her.

“I would prefer a kiss of hello for a greeting,” Lettice said, all too clearly ready for a fight.

“Of course.” Anne kissed her on the cheek, then laid down the law. “The men will unload only your clothes, your toiletries, your jewelry, and three things you absolutely
cannot
live without. The rest goes back to your place.”

“Now, just one minute,” Lettice began.

Anne cut her off. “I will be checking before the van leaves, and if you try to sneak in anything other than what I have just listed, it will be put back on the van. If you defy me and have everything moved in, I will have my people move everything back out, and they will be instructed to dump it on your front lawn. You are my guest, and as such I will treat you with gracious hospitality. I only ask the same of you, Madame.”

Lettice stared regally at her. Nobody moved, nobody breathed in the stunned silence. All of them waited for the mega-ton explosion that was sure to come.

“Six things,” Lettice finally said.

“Four,” Anne countered.

“Five.”

Anne smiled. “Four, and that’s it. It was a nice try, Grandmother. Now cut your losses.”

Lettice harrumphed, then turned to the moving men. “You heard my granddaughter, gentlemen.”

“I warned you that you wouldn’t get away with it,” James said to Lettice as the men opened the back of the van.

“Don’t be an ‘I told you so,’ James,” she snapped
before going around to the back of the van to pick her four things.

Anne sighed with relief.

“Wow!” Philip exclaimed. “Nobody tells Grandmother Lettice what to do, Mom.”

James grinned at her. “Nice shootin’, Anne. You got her right in her good manners.”

She grinned back. “I do feel like I just lived through the O.K. Corral.”

Her gaze had been focused on his eyes. Now it began to wander, and she found it fixing on his mouth. She wondered what it would be like to feel his lips on hers again. Would they take her to a glorious paradise? Or would they fill her with a scorching heat? It had been so long since that one kiss between them. Part of her was terrified that she was even wondering, and part of her wanted to know the answers.…

“Boy, when’s that horse getting here?” Philip asked, drawing his mother’s attention. He stared up the drive.

“Yeah,” James added. “When’s that horse getting here?”

Relieved to be distracted from her traitorous body’s response, Anne smothered a chuckle at the two of them. But her brain echoed the same thought. Now that she had settled with her grandmother, when the
hell
was that horse getting here?

Lettice regally marched up the steps, the moving men following her, loaded down with suitcases. “I know the way, Anne,” she said, and swept into the house.

Anne grinned and glanced at James. Abruptly she realized they couldn’t just stand there, staring at each other, while they waited for Battle
Cry. Her heart couldn’t take it, for one thing. But the alternative of inviting James inside for coffee seemed too cozy. Not exactly the signal she wanted to send. Unfortunately, she had no choice without being rude.

Screwing up her courage, she asked, “Would you like coffee while we wait?”

His smile almost melted her. “I’d love it.”

They went inside. She was all too aware of James walking directly behind her, his steps matching hers. It reminded her of a big cat stalking its prey … patient, watchful … all that power under control … waiting for the right moment to reach out and take …

The kitchen, with its everyday utensils, brought a needed dose of common sense to her unruly imagination. James might be an attractive man, but he was just a man. Getting involved with him would be a mistake. She’d already made one, and she wasn’t about to make another.

She poured them both coffee and settled across the kitchen table from him. He said nothing, but simply gazed at her, his eyes pinning her. Her face heated, and she couldn’t quite catch her breath. His gaze lowered to her breasts. Her nipples tightened.

Move, she told herself. Say something. But her body was melting under his hot, sensual gaze, and she wanted nothing more than for him to reach out and touch her, kiss her.…

Philip skipped into the kitchen, chattering away. “Grandmother Lettice says she’ll take me to the art museum and to see the dinosaurs.…”

Anne flopped back in her chair, released from the sensual purgatory James had created within
her with just one look. One look! She was in deep trouble.

“Get Lettice to take you through the armory room at the museum,” James said, sounding completely uneffected. “They have weapons over two thousand years old.”

“Really excellent!” Philip exclaimed.

As the two of them discussed war gear through the ages, a vague uneasiness settled over Anne. James seemed to enjoy talking to Philip. She would have thought he wouldn’t be bothered with a child. But far from condescending, he was genuinely interested in Philip’s opinions. And Philip was clinging to every word. Enjoying children was a side of James she hadn’t expected. The image she’d had of him slipped further off its pedestal, leaving her even more confused.

They no sooner finished their coffee when a second van was heard roaring along the drive. Philip spoke for the adults when he shouted, “Finally!”

They all hurried back outside. The drivers had been sent a map with instructions on where to unload the horse. Clearly, a mixup had occurred, and to Anne’s horror she watched the van take the right turn off the circular drive toward the mares’ stables, not left toward the stallion barn.

“Stop!” she screamed, waving and running toward the van. “Not that way!”

“Not that way!” Philip shouted, his tone echoing his mother’s panic.

The driver waved back, and she realized he’d taken both her and her son’s motions for a welcoming. The windows of the cab were rolled up and the man couldn’t hear her. The van continued on around the drive. Anne ran after them,
her son running with her. Most of the mares were in heat, and there’d be hell to pay when the stallion got within scent of them.

“Why are we running?” James asked, jogging up alongside her.

“That’s the mares’ stables,” Philip said, panting. “The horses’ll all go crazy if they’re put together. We gotta stop them before they get too close. Otherwise, Battle Cry’ll go nuts.”

Anne was grateful her son had answered. She didn’t want to waste the breath. All of them ran faster.

They were too late. They arrived at the first courtyard of the mares’ stables to hear clattering hooves and something heavy banging against the inside walls of the horse van. This was topped by loud whinnying and human curses, also from inside the van. From the stables came dozens of answering whinnies and more banging, while the mares in the paddocks outside were running restlessly, their foals at their sides. Her people were scurrying around, trying to calm the animals, but nature was having its own fireworks show. Nothing but distance would stop it.

“Dammit! Move that van!” Anne shouted as the driver and an assistant simultaneously opened the cab doors. “Follow the drive all the way around. Now, move it!”

“But … but …”

“You heard the lady,” James roared. “Move that van!”

The men slammed the doors shut in hasty compliance. From the back of the van she heard “About bloody damn time!”

With a screech of tires, the van zoomed off
around the rest of the drive. Her face heated from the run and from embarrassment, Anne was relieved to see it go … and resentful that it had taken James to get the driver to pay attention. After all, she was the owner of the farm, not he. She had always hated not being taken seriously—she had even quit racing when she discovered the other jockeys “eased up” on her because she was a woman. She could never be sure she had truly won a race, or if the men hadn’t ridden all-out against her. And yet she was in a male-dominated business. Sometimes she just had to grit her teeth and accept help from “the great big man.” Still, the whole incident was humiliating. James was probably thinking she was a nincompoop. She wished she could start the day over and make a much better impression with him.

Otis, her head groom for the mares, strode over to her. “Who was the idiot who did that?” he demanded.

The idiot wasn’t important. The mares were. Concerned, Anne asked, “What about the mares, Otis? Do you think this upset them too much?”

“Probably not as much as it upset the stallion. The mares should be okay. They’re calming down now.” They could hear the panicked whinnying and restlessness abating. Otis chuckled. “Poor Battle Cry. He probably thought it was a deliberate torture to smell all the ladies and be trapped inside that little bitty box.”

Anne couldn’t help grinning at his description. Otis was small and dark and had a knack for knowing when the mares would be most receptive to a stallion. She was lucky to have him, and she knew it.

Philip tugged at her sleeve. “Mom? Can we go see Battle Cry now?”

“Yeah,” James said, grinning excitedly. “Can we?”

Anne smiled at him. She couldn’t have stopped the smile if she tried. And she didn’t want to try.

“Go, go, Anne,” Otis said, shooing her with one hand. “Your mares will be fine. Go see to their new husband.”

With a last wave they were again on the run.

James glanced at the woman next to him with a mixture of admiration, tenderness … and lust. Annie Kitteridge was something, he thought. She’d gone toe to toe with her grandmother, and that had taken quite a bit of courage. Truthfully, he wouldn’t want to face down Lettice. Then Anne had been ready to take the van driver apart for his mistake, and in the next breath was genuinely concerned for the well-being of her mares. Now she was ready to handle the arrival of a prized and very touchy stallion.

He noted her face was flushed, her jaw set with determination, yet that look only made her seem young and vulnerable, just as he remembered her from that summer long ago. His heart twisted. She moved with a grace a dancer would envy, and her light scent, like clover on a dewy morning, spun enticingly through his senses. She challenged a man to break through the steel and find the softly petaled rose underneath.

“All these horses,” he said breathlessly as they jogged between the fenced pastures. “And we’re running like Carl Lewis on the five hundred.”

“I prefer Flo-Jo,” Anne said. She laughed. “I’d say Battle Cry is pretty free of quirks, wouldn’t you?”

“And loving the idea of retirement,” he added, grinning at her.

She blushed and glanced at her son. James realized it might not have been a good remark to make in front of Philip, but the boy was already pulling ahead of them, his attention obviously on getting to the barn first. James liked the boy. Philip had the same look of determination as his mother, combined with a child’s excitement. He knew exactly how the boy felt.

They arrived at the stallion barn just in time to see the back of the van opened and the ramp being laid out. Inside the dim interior a robe-covered horse was still prancing restlessly, but not frantic enough to burst its restraints.

“I heard,” were the first words from Anne’s head stallion groom, Curtis.

Anne nodded to the tall young man. James had missed Curtis on his first visit to the farm. As he was introduced, he decided the man was a little too tall and too young for his liking. Also, he gazed at Anne with a proprietary look that James didn’t care for. Even knowing he had no claim on her, James was bothered by Curtis more than he cared to admit.

“When he calms enough to back him out of the van,” Anne said briskly to Curtis, “put him into one of the paddocks. He can run the rest of his excitement off there.”

“Right.”

Curtis was a man of few words, James observed.

The first thing out of the transport van was not Battle Cry, but a small gray-haired man who immediately turned on the hapless driver and his assistant.

“You nearly sent my boy to the glue factory!” he shouted, not at all sounding like their coworker. “What the hell happened back there?”

The two men nearly fell all over themselves trying to explain about misreading the map. The gray-haired man glowered ominously, then snorted. “If there’s any damage to my boy, I’ll see everyone here sues your company for giving us two of the biggest dummies the good Lord created!”