Leaping Hearts(59)

“I’ll be fine.”

She was trying to reassure them both.

“Is there anything you need?” he asked.

She shook her head.

What she needed, he couldn’t provide.





10


A WEEK later, Devlin stood at the rail of his ring, one boot resting on the lower rung to give his leg relief. His face was grim. It’d been a long, hard afternoon of doing nothing but cleaning up messes. Preceded by several days of the same.

Holding the line against chaos isn’t progress, he thought. Just self-preservation.

From the day A.J. left, things hadn’t gone well. First, there’d been a water main break in the stable. That calamity caused a flood in the storage room where the feed was kept, turning eight bags of oats into mush. Then, in a freak windstorm, a tree limb had broken off, landed on his truck and turned its bed into an arboristic Barcalounger.

But the worst had undoubtedly been the Blacksmith Disaster.

The blacksmith who had been by once before backed out without explanation the morning he was scheduled to come. Fortunately, a new man was located. He arrived with the tools of his trade and in a good mood, only to leave an hour later with a Band-Aid on his forehead and a vow never to return. Sabbath had been impossible, no matter what Devlin and Chester did. Even with two grown men dangling off his head like earrings, the stallion still managed to nail the blacksmith a good one with his hind leg.

And, once the loose shoe was secure, the man flat-out refused to get within a stone’s throw of the stallion’s other hooves, saying that the horse’s combination of tender feet and good aim was an occupational hazard he could do without. The Garfield Band-Aid plastered on his forehead didn’t help. The only one to be found, it was the insult part of the injury.

Devlin was still amazed that they’d been fired as clients by someone who was used to high-strung animals. It was like getting kicked out of a family restaurant because your kids set a new standard for food throwing.

He shifted his weight, heard a crack of protest and felt his foot hit the ground.

Now I know what it feels like to be cursed, he thought, looking down at the fallen rail.

Devlin put it back in its place and made a mental note to fix it. As his eyes returned to the ring, he went back to watching Chester lunge the stallion. Standing in the middle of the arena, the man was holding on to the end of a long lead attached to Sabbath’s halter. In theory, the horse was supposed to get some exercise by moving through various gaits while traveling around in a circle.

The stallion had different ideas and was highly resistant to changing them. The first time they’d tried lunging him, he’d hauled Chester after him, turning the lead line into a towrope and the man into a drag anchor. Days later, Sabbath still hadn’t warmed up much to the idea of concentric circles. He was cantering around in an uneven and disagreeable path, thwarting the discipline and throwing up his hooves in protest.

The cause of the stallion’s bad behavior was no mystery. He was antsy to get back to jumping, and the display of theatrics in the ring was only one of the ways he was making his frustration known. Aside from the fiasco with the blacksmith’s forehead, the horse had torn two blankets off his back, shredded them to ribbons and chewed the front of his stall until it looked like a beaver had gone at it.

Sabbath was angry and they were losing ground with him but there wasn’t much anyone could do. Chester certainly wasn’t up to the task of schooling him over fences and, with his bum leg, Devlin wouldn’t have been much better. All three of them, stallion included, were in a holding pattern until A.J. returned.

It was time for her to come back, Devlin thought for the umpteenth time. And not just for the damn horse.

Like his rotten luck, the need to apologize to her had also been dogging him all week. As soon as he’d calmed down that day, he’d gone rushing back to the stable. He wanted to tell her how much he regretted being so pushy and leaving her when she needed help. He wasn’t sure what the precise words to use were, although ones like coward and bastard certainly came to mind.

But by the time he’d returned, she’d already left. And when Chester had given him her message, Devlin had been caught in an awful limbo. He wanted to track her down and make her hear him out but he had to respect the distance she’d put between them.

He knew she came to visit the stallion every day. She always showed up at lunch, confirmation, as if he needed any, that she was avoiding him. From the kitchen, he’d hear the throaty purr of the convertible as she drove up and he’d drop whatever he was doing to go over to the window and watch her walk into the barn. Each time, he hoped she’d look up at the house and come inside and he found himself assuming a daily vigil, eating his sandwiches standing at the window. He was waiting for her to give the slightest indication that she was ready to talk. Inevitably, he was disappointed. Every time, when she was finished with the stallion, A.J. would emerge from the barn with her head down, slide into the powerful car and leave.

In the days since she’d been gone, he’d thought a lot about her accident. Seeing her fall had been terrifying for him. When he’d thought about training A.J., it had always been in terms of what they needed to accomplish. The focus was on the work and the winning. Never once had he considered what watching her go down in the ring would be like. In that awful instant, when he saw her shake loose of the saddle and hit the ground, he’d been flooded with agony, and the depth of his emotion had scared the hell out of him. He’d assumed losing his horse and his career was the worst thing life could throw at him. He’d been wrong. Having something happen to A.J. was so much more terrible, and confronting that vulnerability and pain was what had made him lash out.