Safe Haven (Xcite Romance)

by Germain, Shanna

  ‘I’m your only rescue friend!’

  Shar lifted her brow in question and Darrin nodded in answer. ‘Yes, she’s bitching,’ he said, although he was pretty sure Shar could hear every word that Kallie was saying.

  He sat down on the hay bale farthest from Toddy’s stall and pulled up his pant leg, having a bit of deja vu as he heard the horse stamping its feet behind him. Shar kneeled down and used her fingers to explore the bite. Only once did it hurt hard enough for him to clench his teeth together.

  ‘Not bad,’ she said. She turned to her friend, fingers flying, and a second later Kallie went off, all but stomping her feet and pouting.

  ‘Giving her more shit about me?’ he asked.

  She watched his face intently, and it took him a second to remember she’d probably been reading his lips. She shook her head. ‘No, I sent her on a silly errand so I could ask you what your intentions are with her.’

  ‘I ... uh. What?’

  She waited, as though she was expecting him to say more. He wasn’t sure he had any more. He tried to dig into his thoughts on it, but it was a jumble of confusion between what she’d told him she’d needed – which was, clearly, not him – and what he could give and what he needed and ... He shook his head, willing his thoughts to settle before they exploded into a mulch of complete confusion.

  ‘Let me try that again,’ he said.

  ‘I hoped you would.’

  ‘Boy, I see why you two get along.’

  Shar rewarded him with a smile, but didn’t let him off the hook by saying anything.

  ‘I’m here until I get the go-ahead from you to leave,’ he said. ‘She has the farm to take care of and I have, well ... I have a job to go back to.’

  ‘That’s what you want?’

  Shar was doing something to the back of his leg that was both soothing and tingling, her fingers following the path of his aching and knotted calf.

  ‘Does it matter ... Ow, God. What are you doing, amputating?’

  ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘But I could. I’ve never done one, but I hear they’re not too bad ...’

  ‘Funny,’ he said.

  ‘Do you think it’s what she wants?’ Shar asked, pushing herself up and pulling down his pant leg in a single, fluid motion. ‘To be with a man she doesn’t love?’

  ‘I never asked her ... Wait. What?’ For a second, he thought she meant him, but that was all wrong, right? They’d just met. Granted, they’d had great sex, great fantastic, oh my God hot sex, but love was a little fast, right? Except that he knew it wasn’t. Not for him. The things he felt for her were beyond what he’d felt for someone in a long time.

  Which is when the second part of Shar’s question whacked him hard in the chest. To be with a man she didn’t love? Clearly Shar didn’t mean him.

  ‘Oh,’ he said as realisation hit him. ‘She’s going back to big-truck man ...’ That’s why she wanted him gone. That’s why she’d said she had a solution. Was that also why she was fucking him, one last fling before she went back to the safety of a man who could save her farm? ‘Crap,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Shar asked.

  ‘I just realised what Kallie meant when she said–’

  ‘When I said what?’ Kallie was standing in the doorway, a tall man standing behind her. Darrin recognised him from the truck incident.

  ‘Nothing,’ Darrin said at the same time that Shar said something with her fingers that made both Kallie and the truck man scowl.

  ‘Erik, this is Darrin. Darrin, Erik.’

  ‘We’ve met,’ Erik said, with a short nod in Darrin’s direction. Darrin nodded back, finding his breath as stuck as his voice. He felt a stupid urge to challenge the man to a fist fight or an old-fashioned duel or something. Ridiculous. He’d known Kallie was going back to him. She’d told him. And he’d said yes anyway. The splitting of his heart that was happening in his chest, that was all his own fault.

  ‘Somewhere we can talk, Kallie?’ Erik said.

  Neither Darrin nor Shar said anything more as they watched Kallie nod and lead Erik toward the house.

  Chapter Eleven

  DAMN BOYS. DAMN DOGS. Damn Shar.

  It was a continual mantra, one that went around and around in Kallie’s brain as she walked along the fence line, checking for down spots. Darrin was leaving. Hunting season was coming. Fall and Erik. Monetary safety and sadness of the heart, all tangled together.

  She’d said no to Erik, that was the thing. Turned him down outright. Even if she couldn’t have Darrin – and that was something she wasn’t willing to think about, not yet, because she could feel the small tear happening in her heart, in her chest bones, in the place where she breathed and walked and lived and she knew it would kill her if she paid any attention to it at all – he’d shown her that she didn’t have to settle. That somewhere there was a man who turned on her heart and her mind and her lust, who met her in all the ways she needed and wanted to be met.

  So she’d done the impossible thing. She’d turned Erik down, and then she’d gone out to the barn to realise that Shar and Darrin had left. Darrin’s motorcycle and camera were gone. They’d even taken Gauntlet. She didn’t know what that meant, but she couldn’t think about that right now either.

  Finding a small hole, the wires bent by the heads of horses as they’d searched for good grass outside the fence, Kallie knelt to fix it, her hands working deftly at their task as her mind did the same with its own.

  She’d figure out a way to save Safe Haven. Even if she had to sell off one of the back pastures, or a couple of acres of the woods. I hope you can forgive me for that, Nana, and she thought her nana would understand. ‘Your land and your love are the two things you must always take care of,’ Nana had always said. It seemed to Kallie that sometimes you had to choose one over the other. She could only hope she was choosing the right one.

  She made her way along the pasture, stopping at places that didn’t really need her attention, but unwilling to go back to the empty barn, the empty house. Unwilling to see the places where Darrin had stood or slept or held her. Unable to smell his scent in her house, see whatever objects he’d invariably left behind.

  A soft rustle made her turn, still on her knees. Gauntlet, coming through the grass at a wriggly puppy pace, followed closely by Darrin. He held something behind his back, his grin so wide it nearly took up his whole face.

  ‘Kallie,’ he said. And there was something new in his voice.

  ‘I quit my job.’

  She didn’t know how to respond to that. Tried to push herself up from her crouch and found herself floundering. The puppy seemed to think it was all a game, and tried clambering onto her lap.

  ‘What?’ she said. Which was only a quarter of all that was happening in her brain.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. He came to her and pulled her up with one hand, Gauntlet curling into the crook of her curved arm as she rose. ‘I quit. I feel amazing. I should have done that so long ago. But I just didn’t, well, you helped me see that I didn’t have to go back to it. That I could do what I loved and still–’

  ‘That’s great,’ she said, interrupting, trying to get him to stop talking. She knew she should have been excited for him – he was holding her by the arms, he was right in front of her, and still she could barely swallow around the heavy thrum of her heart. ‘I’m really glad for you.’ And she was, but he was still leaving and she was still broke and feeling broken and all she wanted was to crush herself against him and beg him not to go. Still, she stood straight, held herself up, even though she felt like the world was spinning.

  ‘I want to show you something,’ he said.

  He brought his camera out from behind his back, and turned it toward her. It took a second for her to realise what she was seeing: An image of her and Toddy, the big horse taking a carrot from her hand, his velvet-soft lips carefully moving over her palm, his eyes half-closed, her own grin wider than she’d realised.

  ‘I didn’t know you were there for that,�
� she said.

  ‘And more,’ he said. ‘Here.’

  He handed her the camera and she flipped through the images. Her and Gauntlet playing in the grass. The horses running wild across the green. The sun coming slant over the barn in the morning. One of angoras, caught in motion, sniffing at Gauntlet through the wire cage. With each one her heart broke, but also levied. It was as though he’d captured everything she loved about the farm. As though he’d somehow captured her very heart in pictures.

  ‘They’re beautiful,’ she said.

  ‘I forgot what I loved,’ he said. ‘You reminded me.’

  Kallie flipped to a new picture, one of her, lying in bed naked, the puppy curled against her. She looked at peace. She looked like she was home.

  Tears came, unbidden, warm against the chill of her face.

  ‘Well, you’re not really supposed to cry about that.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, trying not to sniffle.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’

  Think? About what? ‘They’re beautiful.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘About using them. For the farm. To save the farm.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t want you to sell or rent or give anything to the big truck man,’ he said. ‘I want you. I want to be here with you. I want to help you with the farm – even with that damn horse that bit me, because, yeah, that hurt, but if that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t still be here.’

  Kallie shook her head, confused. What was he talking about?

  ‘I already said no to Erik.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘That’s even better. Say yes to me then.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘The pictures. We can sell them, turn them into postcards, photos, T-shirts, hell, I don’t care. There’s so much beauty here. People want more beauty in their lives. They need it. They forget every day. We’ll remind them.’

  Kallie stood, stone-faced. Her breath was stuck somewhere between her heart and her mouth. She could feel her heart beating in her wrists. The things he was saying, were they even an option? To have the farm, and him, and whatever this thing was with photos?

  ‘Shar gave me the idea,’ he said. ‘So if it sucks, you can blame her.’

  ‘She did?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The photo idea anyway. The other idea, I came up with all on my own.’

  ‘What other idea?’

  ‘To love you, of course,’ he said.

  ‘You love me?’ Was she ever going to say something smart? Where was her brain, her breath?

  ‘Duh,’ he said, which made her laugh and then breathe and then she could speak and move forward to wrap her arms around him. He hugged her back, the camera swinging behind her and hitting her in the ass.

  ‘Can we really do that? Support the farm with photos?’

  ‘Are you questioning my talent?’ he asked. ‘Besides, Shar said if that didn’t work we could do a nude charity calendar. You know, shave the rabbits and stuff.’

  ‘I’m going to have to thank her for that one too,’ Kallie said.

  ‘OK, fine, that may have been my idea.’

  ‘Jerk,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Now, do you suppose we can have wild, fantastic sex without one interruption or another? Because that would be really, really nice.’

  ‘Let’s see what we can do about that,’ she said. ‘But not out here.’

  He pouted, in that sweet way she loved, and she leaned in and kissed his lower lip, a soft nibble that brought back all the desire she’d been carrying for him, let it sweep over her and into him. Would this thing work? She didn’t know. But she felt, for the first time in a long time, that she was not just exactly where she needed to be, but that her heart was too.

  She knelt and scooped Gauntlet up in one arm.

  ‘Race you home,’ she said.

  ‘You’re already home,’ he said, laughing. But he ran after her anyway, ran after her and caught her and kissed her in the strong, warm circle of his arms.

  ‘So are you,’ she said.

  Epilogue

  ‘YOU’RE DOING GREAT, BIG boy,’ Kallie told the newest recruit, a young Thoroughbred who’d arrived just last week. She’d stalled the colt with Toddy, and right now the big horse was doing his best to calm the baby. How far he’d come. How far they’d all come.

  Kallie held out a carrot to Toddy, and he came to her and lipped it off her palm as she brushed his mane out of his eyes. He no longer bit, and in truth, he was ready to go to a new home, but she had decided to keep him here, at Safe Haven. If it hadn’t been for him, she wouldn’t have Darrin and Gauntlet. She wouldn’t have Safe Haven. She wouldn’t even have herself.

  Slipping out of the stall, she shut the door and smiled at the payment schedule written on the barn blackboard. The bank had given them more time to pay, and in the end, they hadn’t needed it. Darrin’s photos had sold not just to people who wanted beauty in their lives, but to a couple of big companies Darrin knew from his LA work, who’d wanted them for ads. The farm was hers, would always be hers. And Darrin had said he’d stay as long as she’d have him. Which in her mind was a very long time.

  As she crossed the lawn toward the house, she saw Darrin sitting on the front porch. He had a camera in his lap, but he was just looking out at the horses in the pasture. Gauntlet was asleep on the step between his legs, already growing out of his puppyhood, his muzzle resting on Darrin’s shoe. The two of them looked like they belonged there, more than anything had ever belonged at Safe Haven.

  Kallie was overwhelmed by a sudden urge to drop everything and run to them both. Instead, she forced herself to stroll slowly, to experience the pleasure of watching them come closer and closer as she neared.

  ‘Your smile gives you away,’ Darrin said, his own smile making an appearance.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said.

  But of course, she did. She knew exactly what he meant. And he knew it – he crooked his pointer finger at her as if taking an invisible picture, the cursive tattoo now clearly readable along his curved skin. Smile.

  Kallie sat down on the steps beside him, her leg touching his, one hand reaching down to ruffle the pup’s ears. Darrin reached across her and kissed her, and she leaned into his mouth with a quiet sigh of contentment and want. Between their feet, Gauntlet yawned without opening his eyes, then rose and turned three circles on the step before plopping back down, his tail thumping the wood.

  Home, the wagging tail seemed to say. Home.

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