The Bourbon Thief(9)

“You know you love me,” she said. “You know I’m your favorite.”

“I don’t even like you, Rotten. Not one bit.”

“Oh, you like me. You like me many bits.”

“Love you or hate you, you can’t go riding. I have spoken.”

“You have to let me go. You work for us. You have to do what I say.”

He stared her down and that stare felt like a rolling pin or worse—a steamroller. She gave him a steamroller back.

“You don’t sign my paychecks, Rotten. I work for your granddaddy, not you.”

“I wish you worked for me. I’d pay you to kiss me and fire you if you didn’t.”

“I realize I’m the last man who needs to be stereotyping anyone, but apparently everything I ever heard about redheads is true.”

“Levi.”

“What?”

“They’re fighting again.”

Levi gave her a tight-lipped look like he wanted to be nice to her but it went against his grain.

“What is it this time?” Levi asked.

“I don’t know. They won’t tell me. But I know Momma wants to move out and Granddaddy doesn’t want us to.”

“Didn’t y’all use to live in your own house?”

She nodded. “We did until Daddy died.”

“You want to move out?”

“I’d rather live in here in the stable than in any house when they’re fighting like this.”

“That bad?”

“Yeah,” she said, then she grinned at him. “Plus, you’re out here. I’d trade Granddaddy and Momma both for you.”

“Good God, go. Go away. Shoo. Ride your damn horse and leave me alone. But if Kermit gets a leg stuck in a mudhole and throws you and breaks your neck, don’t come crawling to me to fix it. Your head’ll have to hang there on your shoulders all lopsided.”

“Merci, mon capitan.” She grabbed him by the arms, kissed both his cheeks and saluted him like she was a junior officer and he her French captain.

“You are out of your damn mind,” he muttered as she raced to Kermit’s stall.

“Can’t hear you,” she sang out. “I’m riding in the wind with joy at my feet and freedom in my hair.”

Levi unlocked the door where he kept their saddles. They were too expensive, she knew, too tempting for thieves. Also, Levi knew if he didn’t lock them up, she’d steal them to go riding whenever she wanted, which wasn’t what she wanted, though she would protest otherwise if asked. Half the fun of going riding was bugging Levi until he let her go.

Once she’d saddled Kermit, she led him out to the riding trail that began at the end of the paddock. She hadn’t been too keen on the idea of moving in with her granddaddy after her father died. She’d loved their old house, a rambling brick Victorian in Old Louisville, but there wasn’t much horseback riding in the city. No horses meant no stables. No stables meant no grooms. No grooms meant no Levi. Oh, yes, she’d gotten used to living out here in the Maddox estate, Arden, with her granddaddy pretty quick after laying eyes on her grandfather’s groom. But more and more her mother and grandfather had been fighting their ugly whispering fights, and Tamara hadn’t been kidding when she’d said she’d rather live in the stables than the big house.

Once out in the cold air, Tamara decided maybe a shorter ride was a better ride. Muddy trails meant a slow pace and a nervous pony. Her ears burned with the cold and her nose dripped. She swiped at it with her sleeve and was glad Levi wasn’t around to see that unladylike maneuver. She and Kermit picked their way down the main path that led through a couple hundred acres of trees. Fall had stripped the leaves off the trees, but there was still something beautiful about the barren forest. Not barren at all despite appearances. Not barren, but only sleeping. She sensed the sap under the bark, and the wood drinking up all the water in the ground from the days and days of December rain they’d had. Even bare the trees seemed brutally alive to her. They were bursting to wake up and release the green in them, counting the seconds until spring when they could stretch and bloom and eat warm wet air like candy.

Tamara found her favorite rock, a big chuck of limestone she liked to lie on in better weather, and used it to dismount. After tying Kermit to a tree trunk, she squished her way through ankle-deep mud and muck to the edge of the river. It was high today, higher than she remembered ever seeing it, and darker, too. Faster. It smelled different, a thick, pungent odor like dead fish and dirty metal. It made her nose wrinkle. As the water tripped over the rocks, it turned white like ocean waves. She’d inherited ocean fever from her father, not that he’d ever admitted that was where he went on his business trips. He’d never had to tell her, though. She’d found the sand in his shoes. When she told him to take her with him next time, he’d winked at her like that had been his plan all along.

Instead, he’d shot himself in the head somewhere in South Carolina three years ago while on one of those business trips, and she still didn’t know which beach that sand had come from.

“Come back, Daddy,” she said to the river. This river met up with the Ohio, which met up with the Mississippi, which met up with the ocean. And water could turn to vapor and rise up into the sky. There was nowhere water couldn’t go. If she gave the water her message, maybe it could find her father. “I miss you. You were supposed to take me to the beach, remember? You were supposed to take me with you.”