He awoke the next morning confused about where he was.
Mariah’s tiny apartment, he suddenly recalled.
The sun was just coming up. Zach rolled over and spied Mariah next to him. She lay there completely oblivious to the world and as he thought about the competent, caring woman she’d been the evening before, his heart did an odd little flip. He could get used to this, he admitted, used to waking up next to her. The thought should have scared the crap out of him. He’d never been a big believer in long-term relationships. Suddenly, however, he could understand the appeal.
He kissed Mariah awake. And when her eyes didn’t open right away, he kissed her neck, then her ear.
“Mmm,” she moaned.
“Wake up, love,” he said softly. “Busy day.”
He pulled back, pleased to note her eyes were open. In the near darkness her hair looked almost brown and she had so much of it, it looked as if she lay on a pillow of hair. He shoved a stray lock of it out of her eyes as she stared up at him. He had a feeling she studied his face.
“You’re still here.”
“Of course.”
She glanced toward her kitchen, the place where she lived the size of a foaling stall, so it wasn’t far away.
“What time is it?”
“Six something.” He could have sworn she frowned. This time he studied her. “Worried what your friends might think?”
Her pupils flared. “No. Of course not. I just don’t want to be late to work.”
“You won’t be.”
He tried kissing her again. She wouldn’t let him. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“Baloney.” He swiped another lock of hair out of her eyes.
Her lashes swept down. “I just don’t know where this is headed.”
“And that scares you?”
She didn’t answer.
“Because you should know it scares the shit out of me.”
Brown eyes jerked back to his own.
“So let’s just take this slow, okay? That way, neither one of us does something stupid.”
Her eyes darted around his face, seeming to search every inch of it. What she saw must have reassured her, because she said, “Okay.”
He smiled at her again before rolling out of her tiny bed and grabbing his clothes. “I almost hate to ask, but do you think you’d mind looking at that horse I told you about last night?”
“Why would I mind?”
He glanced back at her, pulling on his jeans. “I don’t want you to think I’m using you.”
“Aren’t I the one that’s supposedly using you?”
“I know. Ironic, isn’t it?”
“Bring him in this afternoon. I’ll text you a time when I get into work.”
“Sounds good.”
He left before he lost his willpower and did something that would result in both of them being late, but he found himself whistling on his way home and then later on his way to work.
It was a good thing he had Mariah’s visit to look forward to, because his day turned to shit the minute he got to the track. Apparently someone had told one of his best clients that he was seeing Mariah and it didn’t sit well with the man that Zach was dating “that damned animal-rights activist.” The man threatened to pull his horses out of training. Zach told him to go ahead, and that was that but the loss of him would put another dent in Zach’s finances. He tried not to think about it too much when he went to get Cash out of his stall so he could take him to see Mariah. Honestly, he’d be glad to get away. Judging by the looks on some of his fellow trainers’ faces, word had definitely gotten out that he was dating the enemy.
His cell phone interrupted him.
“It’s me,” Mariah said. “Don’t come right now. I have a farm call not far from the track. I could swing by afterward.”
His stomach tightened at the mere thought of her showing up at his work, especially given some of the hostile stares he’d been receiving. But then he told himself he was being ridiculous. His peers might not like Mariah, but they’d never be overtly rude to her, not while he was around. She’d be okay.
“Sure. Come by whenever.”
He couldn’t shake the feeling, however, that bringing her to the track would be a mistake. Didn’t matter how many times he told himself otherwise.
The feeling only grew worse when Wes showed up, his usual smile firmly in place when he said, “I hear you’re going to be the doom of us all.”
Zach looked up from the feed instructions he’d been writing down. “Don’t tell me you’ve heard the rumors, too?”
Wes’s green eyes were full of amusement. “Yup. I hear she’s gathering intel on us all. We’re all going to be on 60 Minutes when she blows the lid off horse racing in her tell-all.”
“You’re kidding.”
Wes lifted his hands, his smile growing even more amused. “Wish I was.”
Zach glanced around, spotting one of the trainers who’d glared at him earlier in the day—Manny Diaz.
“I say let them sweat. I trust your judgment. They should, too.”
Zach ran his hands through his hair. “The problem is she’s coming here this afternoon.”
Wes’s eyebrows shot up. “You invited the enemy?”
“She’s looking at Cash.”
“I thought Dr. Miller already did that.”
“He did, but I asked Mariah for a second opinion.”
“When’s she coming?”
Zach glanced at his cell phone. “Any minute now.”
“Right on. I’m sticking around to watch the fireworks.”
“It won’t be that bad.”
“Maybe you’ll get lucky and they’ll refuse to let her in.”
“Wes—”
The rest of what he’d been about to say was interrupted by the sound of a diesel engine. Everyone in the vicinity turned, but no one gave the white veterinary truck a second glance. It wasn’t until Mariah slipped out, her bright red hair instantly visible, that he saw a few heads turn.
“She’s a vet?” he thought he heard someone ask.
“Oh, yeah,” Wes said. “This’ll be interesting.”
Chapter Eighteen
Mariah froze the minute she got out of the clinic’s truck. “What?” she asked Zach and Wes, who were both staring at her. She smiled at Wes in greeting, the man grinning back in a way that made her instantly suspicious. “What’s going on?”
“We’re waiting for the lynch mob to form,” Wes said.
“Oh.” She smiled and shook her head.
“Ignore him,” Zach said, smiling, too, but it was a forced grin. “Glad you could make it. Cash’s right here.” He walked to a bay horse’s stall. “He still looked off to me this morning, but it’s no worse than before.”
“Bring him on out,” Mariah told Zach, admiring the beautiful stallion he led forward. She went up to him and held her hand out. “Hey there, son.”
“Do you want me to trot him?”
Mariah shook her head. “Just walk him forward, then turn him sharply to the right.”
Zach’s row of stalls had an overhang and he set off beneath it, the other horses in the stalls peering out at him, some of them moving forward so they could get a better look. When Zach made a sudden turn to the right, she could see instantly what he meant by the horse stepping oddly.
“Okay, same thing but to the left.”
When he headed back toward her, Mariah looked past the stallion and straight into the eyes of a man who clearly wasn’t happy to see her. Manny Diaz. She recognized him from her protests in the past. Big, dark and with a temper. He’d always made it clear he didn’t like her. Based on the rumors she’d heard about him drugging horses, she didn’t muc
h like him, either.
Zach turned the gelding toward her and she could tell immediately the horse was more sore on the inside right wall than the outside.
“Okay, come on back.” The horse’s ears perked up as they headed toward his stall and beneath the shade of the overhang. “I see what you mean about being sore. He’s not dead lame, but he’s definitely favoring that leg when he moves from side to side.”
There was some swelling, too, above the coronet band near the top of the hoof. Not unheard of with a festering abscess but still troubling, especially since the official diagnosis had leaned toward a stone bruise.
“Let’s take some film, if you don’t mind.” She glanced at Wes. “Maybe you can help me out while Zach holds the horse. We were shorthanded when I left, so I don’t have an assistant today.”
“Not a problem.”
When she went back to her truck, she glanced down the barn aisle. Manny had been joined by another man and they were very clearly talking about her.
She returned with the portable X-ray machine as well as the film and the block of wood she had horses stand on, but the whole time she set things up, she could feel eyes boring into the back of her head. She knew Zach saw it, too. He shot her a reassuring smile, but she felt like the reptile in a petting zoo. Thank goodness everything was digitized, which made the process quick and easy.
“There it is.” She motioned for Zach and Wes to come to the back of her truck, where her laptop was open on the tailgate. “Look. See this? His coffin bone is chipped.”
“Son of a—” Zach still held Cash’s lead rope and he glanced back at the horse as if silently reproaching the horse for his injury.
“I’ll be,” Wes said. “Gotta admit, looked like a stone bruise to me.”
Mariah shook her head. “Usually with a stone bruise they’re sore all the time, but he was stepping funny only when he moved a certain way.”
“Thank God I didn’t race him.”
And there it was, the reminder of what he did for a living and how destructive it could be. She was glad he wouldn’t be racing Dasher again once the horse had healed. “You would have raced him?”
“No, but Doc Miller told me it would be okay if we did, but I disagreed. I was going to suggest to the owner that we give him time off.”
And here was a reminder that he wasn’t like the other owners and trainers. He cared.
“It’s lucky you didn’t.” She turned her attention back to the horse. “The good news is he’ll likely make a full recovery. The biggest concern is infection, but if we start him on a course of antibiotics, he should be fine.”
Manny was walking by. They all three looked up. Mariah wasn’t surprised to spot his glare, but the man’s brown eyes slid over her in such a way that she shivered.
“Manny,” she heard Zach call out to the man in greeting.
The trainer shot them all a glare.
“Whew. You could fry an egg with that death ray,” Wes said.
“He hates me,” Mariah said softly.
“They all hate you.”
Mariah glanced at Wes sharply. “Well, not me. I have better taste than they do. And not Zach, but you should hear them talking.”
“What else are they saying?” Zach asked quickly.
Wes shrugged. “That she’s using her good looks to get you into her bed. That she’ll dump you the moment she manages to make us all look bad. That she burns children at the stake.”
Mariah wasn’t surprised. What did surprise her, however, was the ferociousness in Zach’s eyes.
“Well, you can tell them from me that they’re all wrong. All Mariah wants to do is help horses. She’ll do whatever it takes to accomplish that, including helping me. She’s never charged me a dime for her services. She only wants to help. Tell them that.”
She wanted to hug Zach, she really did. She felt her cheeks color, but it wasn’t out of embarrassment or discomfort. Her cheeks flushed because suddenly she wanted to cry.
“Hey, it’s not me that has the problem,” Wes said, lifting his hands.
Zach got her, Mariah thought. He really, really got her.
“I know.” Zach shook his head. “They just drive me crazy with their closed-minded thinking.”
Mariah glanced up at Zach, a sense of pride filling her. Her whole body glowed with warmth and happiness and something that felt like...
Love?
She took a deep breath. Whatever it was, she’d never felt anything like it.
“I would just ignore them,” Wes said. “They’ll learn.”
“They will,” Zach said. Then he glanced down at her. “Come on. Let’s finish up.”
You’ve been seduced by the dark side. Jillian’s words echoed in her head.
And she finally admitted that she had been.
* * *
THEY WERE INSEPARABLE from that day forward. Mariah still avoided the track even though he told her she had nothing to hide. As they worked to get Dasher and then Summer sound, she seemed to come to terms with what he did for a living even if she refused to go to his “office.”
The day of her meeting with the board of directors, he was just as nervous as she was, but nothing had ever made him more proud than when she stood up in front of her fellow CEASE members and the board of directors and gave her speech about forming an animal-welfare league. Since he was in a relationship with Mariah, he opted out of the vote, but he needn’t have worried. The board unanimously agreed to get behind her idea. Even her friend Jillian seemed to approve.
“That’s a step in the right direction,” Jillian said afterward, but when her gaze caught on him, her expression changed. “Considering.”
Considering what?
“I know,” Mariah said. “Considering they’re evil racehorse owners.”
Jillian laughed, hugging her friend.
But the woman’s smile faded behind Mariah’s back. Her eyes spoke to Zach and Zach alone.
You hurt her, and I’ll kill you.
He nodded. She stepped back. “I’ll see you at the Grand Prix this weekend, right?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Jillian smiled. “Good. I’ll see you there.”
The woman walked away without another backward glance.
“She doesn’t approve of us,” Mariah admitted softly.
“She’ll get over it.”
That night they made love with a tenderness that left Mariah in tears. Zach had never thought about marriage before, not after watching his parents destroy each other, but for the first time he found himself wanting to spend the rest of his life with one person. She’d become his best friend, someone he could talk to about his fears of losing the ranch, who hugged him when he’d had a bad day and who shared his love of horses. The only fly in the ointment was her unwillingness to have anything to do with his horse-racing business. Still. It wasn’t a deal breaker. She worked diligently with Dasher—with great results—so much so that Zach was beginning to wonder if perhaps they could race him.
“So what do you think?” he asked as he trotted Dasher one last time along the side of the vet clinic’s stabling area. It’d been two months since she’d taken over his care. Two months of painstaking therapy and exercise, all of which had resulted in a horse that hadn’t taken an off step in weeks. She’d helped Summer, too. They’d injected the filly with a fluid that had helped to build more soft tissue in the bones of her foot, and it had worked.
“He looks good.”
He halted the horse, walking beneath an access road lined by walnut trees. “What did his ultrasound look like?”
“Amazingly clean.” But she didn’t seem as pleased by the news as Zach might have expected. “I even had Dr. Saffer give them a look. He agrees. It’s hard to tell he ever had an injury.”
; “Good enough to race?”
It was as if she’d just given him a diagnosis of terminal cancer, he admitted, and he knew why.
“Zach, we talked about this weeks ago. It’s not a good idea to race him.”
“I know, but he’s doing so good. You told me yourself he’s as good as new.”
“Not good enough to race.”
He disagreed. He’d seen the X-rays and the ultrasound. Not only was his injury healed, she’d said herself the leg was probably even stronger than it had been before.
“I’m not going to race him, not right away. I just want to haul him to the track. Give him a test run.”
But she didn’t want him to. He saw her take a deep breath. She stood in a patch of sunlight, her troubled face perfectly illuminated. When her brown eyes met his own, they were filled with hurt. “You promised me you wouldn’t.”
“I never promised.” He took a deep breath, too. “Okay, maybe I implied he wouldn’t be raced, but I honestly didn’t think he’d get better. If I had, maybe I’d have made my intentions more clear, but even you said he was ready to ride again.”
“There’s a difference between riding and racing.”
“You mean to tell me what Dandy’s doing is somehow less risky than what Dasher does on the track?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Well, is it?”
She didn’t want to answer him and he knew he’d raised a good point. Still, he softened his tone.
“Mariah, I’m not going to push him. I’ll let him stretch out a bit and see how he does. Nothing big. If he gets sore, we’ll go back to plan A.”
“Sore? What if he tears it again? This time catastrophically? What if he ends up permanently lame? Do you care that he might live out the rest of his life in pain?”
“Couldn’t he do that jumping?”
“That’s different. Hunter/jumper people take better care of their horses.”
He couldn’t believe she would say such a thing. Then again, he could. He glanced at Dasher, the animal’s black coat looking spotted beneath the light of the trees. It was as if he stood on a piece of earth, one that suddenly opened up, a wide chasm separating the two of them.
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