by Nora Roberts
Down at the barn, horses were being worked, stalls cleaned, troughs filled. Her body still ached enough to prevent her from resenting the fact that she’d been banned from the routine for a week.
She glanced around as the door opened behind her, and she smiled at her mother. “Gertie?”
“She’s feeling better. She’s fussing.” With a sigh, Naomi sat, stretched out her legs. She thought about pouring coffee from the pot Kelsey had on the table, but she felt entirely too lazy. “I’m using guilt to keep her in bed for another day or two. If she gets up, I’ll worry.”
“Sneaky.”
“Whatever works. Right now she’s buying out the shopping channels. How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine, until I look in the mirror.” She grimaced. Over the last two days some of the bruises had faded, but others had blossomed. “Until I do, it all seems almost like a dream. I don’t know if it’s just a stage I’m stuck in. I know I killed a man, but I can’t seem to feel the horror of it.”
“Don’t try. You did what you had to do to protect yourself. And me.” Naomi lifted her face to the sun. “I don’t even remember him, Kelsey. Not really. I suppose I saw him around the track now and then. Maybe even spoke to him. But I don’t really remember. I keep thinking I should, that it all should be vivid in my mind. How can I not remember a man who had so much to do with the way my life turned out?”
“He never mattered to you. And he knew it. That was part of the anger that built up in him. He found a way to make you pay, and to make a profit.” She pushed the plate of croissants toward Naomi.
“Sun Spot,” Naomi murmured. “God, I loved that horse. Yes, he certainly made me pay.”
“She—Grandmother—used Alec Bradley for that, for a lot of things. And Cunningham.”
“Bill.” On a long breath, Naomi shook her head. “He’s so much more of a fool than I guessed. And what good did it do him, Kelsey, then or now?”
“He didn’t pay before. But he’ll pay now. The police, the Racing Commission, they’ll see that Cunningham pays for what he did to Pride, and to Sun Spot.”
“All those years ago. No one ever put it together.”
“It might have ended there, with the lies and the misery, if Gabe hadn’t come back. If he hadn’t drawn an inside straight.” She smiled as Naomi tore off a corner of a roll. “If he hadn’t made himself into the man he is.”
“And if you hadn’t fallen in love with him. That’s something that smooths away the worst of it, Kelsey. When I think of what could have happened—”
“It didn’t. Rich Slater paid the price for his part in it. And the case is closed. Self-defense.”
“I suppose it was foolish of me to lie to the police.” She tossed the bite of roll aside. “He didn’t believe me. It’s ironic, isn’t it? Once I told the truth, once I lied. Neither worked.”
“You were trying to protect me.” It was time to say it, Kelsey told herself, and she hoped the full meaning would be understood. “You tried to protect me before, when I was a child. You were wrong both times. And you were right both times.”
“No easy answers.”
“It’s taken me a long time to realize there isn’t always only one.” She pressed her lips together before continuing. “I’m grateful for what you’re doing for Milicent. No, please don’t stiffen up on me. I’m grateful, even though I can’t resolve it in my heart, even though it’s a lie. I’m grateful.”
“What difference would it make now, Kelsey? To have the whole story come out and destroy what’s left of her life?” The birds were singing, and the sound was comforting. “It wouldn’t give me back those years. It wouldn’t change what happened to Mick, to Pride, to Reno.”
“She’s responsible for that, for all of it.” Shame and bitterness warred inside Kelsey. “No matter that she couldn’t have meant anyone to die, she’s responsible. Hiring other people to do what she considered necessary to protect the family name? What name does she have now?” Kelsey demanded. “What honor?”
“And that’s what she has to live with. I don’t do this for her.”
“I know.”
Naomi lifted a brow. “It’s not entirely unselfish, either. I don’t want to go through it, to live through the press, the police. And I have the gift of knowing you believed me. You believed in me enough to stick.”
“I wasn’t the only one who believed you. And everyone would know what happened with Alec Bradley, what happened with Pride and all the rest if the story came out.”
“I don’t care about everyone.” Naomi decided she’d pour coffee after all. “I talked it over with Moses last night, and we’re agreed.” She smiled, adding cream to her coffee. “When a woman has a man who’ll stand by her through the worst, the rest is easy.”
Naomi glanced over at the sound of a car pulling into the drive. “That’s probably Gabe.”
“It better be. We were supposed to go over these menus for the reception over breakfast.”
“Then I’d better leave you two alone to do it.”
“No, why don’t you stay? That way you can agree with what I’ve already decided and give me the edge.”
Kelsey leaned forward, took her mother’s hand. “I love you.”
Emotions swirled up, then settled beautifully. “I know.”
Kelsey rose and started across the patio to greet him. Her eyes widened as they shifted from Gabe’s to her father’s, then back again. “Dad?”
“Oh, Kelsey.” Instinctively Philip framed her face with his hands. Nothing Gabe had told him had prepared him. “Oh, sweetheart.”
“I’m all right, really. It looks much worse than it is. I was going to come see you in a couple of days.” When she looked more presentable, she thought, and shot Gabe a telling look.
“Your young man was right to tell me the whole story. The whole story,” he repeated, staring into her eyes. “You left out a great many details when you phoned me, Kelsey.”
Another kind of lie, she thought. The sin of omission. “I thought it best. I only wanted you to know I was all right before the papers reported it. And I am all right.”
“So I’m told.” He looked back at Gabe, then his gaze shifted, locked over Kelsey’s shoulder. She moved aside and stood between her parents.
“Dad wanted to see that I was all right,” she began.
“Of course he did.” Naomi nodded, and kept her hands at her sides. “Hello, Philip.”
“Naomi. You look well.”
“So do you.”
“Ah . . .” Kelsey groped for some way to ease past the awkwardness. “Channing’s down at the barn. Why don’t you walk down with me, Dad? You’ll get a kick out of seeing him work, and he can show off for you.” She looked helplessly at Gabe.
“I’m sure you’d like to talk with Kelsey,” Naomi said. “I was just on my way down to the barn myself. I’ll tell Channing you’re here.”
“No, I—” Philip began, then composed himself. “Actually, I’d like to speak with you. If you have the time.”
“All right.”
“Let’s take a walk,” Gabe murmured, and grasped Kelsey’s hand.
“I don’t know where to begin, Naomi. Gabe told me everything. Everything,” Philip repeated, heartsick. “He was kind enough to wait for me when I went to see her. I had to see her,” he added, “before I came here.”
“I understand.”
“Understand?” Unbearably weary, he slipped his fingers under his glasses and pressed them to his eyes. “I can’t. I can’t understand. All that she did, all the pain she caused. And when I confronted her, she was unbending. Unshakable,” he said, and dropped his hands. “She sees nothing that she did as anything but necessary. Men died, but she feels no responsibility. Not to them, not to you.”
“And that surprises you?”
He winced. “She remains my mother, Naomi. Even knowing all I know. I’ve thought of hundreds of ways to try to apologize, and none of them begins to cover it. What she did. What I did.” He
took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes again, then replaced them. “And the simple fact is, I don’t know what to say to you.”
“It’s over, Philip.”
“I let you down. All those years ago, I let you down.”
“No. There was a time I thought that. It helped, but it wasn’t really true. I wasn’t what you wanted me to be. Whatever she’s done, Milicent wasn’t responsible for that. Only for making sure you realized it.”
“She could have prevented you from going to prison.”
“Yes.”
“And what she did now, to you—to Kelsey.” His breath caught as the image of his daughter’s bruised face swam into his mind. “My God, Naomi. She might have been killed.”
“She protected herself. And me.” She studied him, the pain in his eyes, the baffled disbelief behind it. “I can’t tell you not to feel what you’re feeling now. Kelsey was hurt, was forced to defend herself by taking a life. And you and I will never forget it. We’ll never forget who started the chain of events. Maybe,” she said slowly, “that’s enough punishment for Milicent.”
“There’s nothing I can do”—Philip’s voice faltered, broke—“nothing I can do to make up for it.”
“There’s nothing you have to do. Despite everything, Kelsey has what she wants. And so do I.” Her lips curved softly. “I have everything I want. The farm, a man who loves me. My daughter. You did a wonderful job with her, Philip. I always knew you would.”
“She’s so like you.” He studied the woman who had been his wife. So much had changed, and so little. “Good God, Naomi, if I could go back, do something. Anything.”
“You can’t.” He’d always been so fair, she thought. So honorable. Now he suffered because no amount of fairness, no amount of honor could wipe away the pain. “We wanted things from each other that neither of us could give. And we made mistakes, mistakes we used against each other, and that other people used against us. We were both victims of someone else’s needs, Philip.”
“You paid dearly for it.”
“I’ve gained, too. She loves me. It’s just that simple. Just that marvelous. So let’s leave the rest where it belongs. Closed.” She drew a breath. “You know, I always wondered how I’d feel if I saw you again.”
“I wondered, too. How do you feel, Naomi?”
“I’m glad to see you, Philip.”
“Do you think we should leave them alone for so long?”
“Yes, I do.” To prove it, Gabe gave her a helpful nudge. “They have old business to settle.”
“But—” Kelsey looked back over her shoulder. They were still standing, yards apart. “He looked so sad.”
“His world’s been shaken, badly. It’ll settle again. Maybe not quite in the same way, but it’ll settle.”
“Candace won’t let him brood for long.” Still, she dragged her feet. “Gabe, what made you bring him here?”
“We’re closing the circle,” he said, “before we start our own.”
“I like the sound of that.” She tipped her head toward his shoulder. “You’re awfully smart, Slater. And sneaky, too, going behind my back to bring him here.”
“Going to see him was my idea. Coming here was his. He needs to make his peace with Naomi.”
“He will.” She smiled to herself. It was, after all, her personal fairy tale. “I love it here,” she murmured. “I love everything about here. Think of the champions we’ll make, Gabe.”
“Are we talking horses?”
She shook her head and laughed up at him. “Not only horses. Is that okay with you?”
“That’s just fine with me.”
He walked with her away from the barn, from the crews, toward the rising hills where mares grazed with their foals, and horses raced their shadows.
“Next spring, a foal will be born. His dam from Three Willows, his sire from Longshot.” He turned her into his arms. “I’ll remember the day he was conceived, how I looked at you and wanted you to belong to me.”
“And I do.” She linked her arms around his neck. “So, what’s next?”
“We’ve got a fresh deck.” He tapped his pocket. “Anything can happen.”
“Anything? Well . . .” She drew his mouth down to hers. “Deal them.”