“Nope,” said Dylan. “Nothing to say, is there? Anyway”—he smiled again, his natural good humor reasserting itself—“enough about me. How was your day?”
“Fine,” said Bobby. “I had a good talk with your dad.”
Both boys had taken off their hats and carried them in their left hands now as they walked up toward the McDonalds’ house. Bobby still had his room in the big house, across the far side of the ranch beyond the corrals, but it was so vast and echoingly empty, particularly now with his father gone, that he ate supper most evenings over at Dylan’s. Dressed identically in dirty jeans and spurs, they still managed to look as different as chalk and cheese: Bobby with his long legs, loping gait, and hair as bright white-blond as a Swedish three-year-old’s; and Dylan, solid, stocky, and dark, walking double time beside him just to keep up.
“If you crack us open a couple o’ beers, I’ll tell you all about it,” said Bobby.
“Sounds good to me,” yawned Dylan. He hoped, for all their sakes, that Bobby and Wyatt’s “good talk” had resulted in the formulation of some sort of plan. Because right now, much as he might hate ranching, it was his entire family’s livelihood. If Highwood went under, so did their home and his parents’ pension, not to mention Summer’s college fund.
All of their futures were in Bobby’s hands now.
CHAPTER SIX
The weeks that followed the debs’ ball fiasco were like hell on earth for Milly.
Cecil, who usually made it his policy to stay out of the all-too-frequent mother-daughter disputes at Newells, had for once backed Linda to the hilt when he heard what had happened in London.
“After all your mother’s hard work,” he told Milly reproachfully at breakfast the morning after the ball. “That was a terrible thing to do. Terrible.”
“Well, it wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t forced me to be a stupid deb in the first place,” she snapped back, defensive because she knew she was in the wrong. “If I’d been riding at Epsom, instead of Mr. Muppet head here—”
“Change the record, Mill, before we all get a headache,” said Jasper from behind his Racing Post. Having spent the night over at Rachel’s, he’d rolled in at eight this morning, looking like the cat that got the cream, and proceeded to wax lyrical about his new girlfriend, deliberately rubbing his sister’s nose in it. “You’ve not been on horseback in two years. How out of your depth do you think you’d have been in the Oaks, hmm?” Smiling smugly, he shamelessly trotted out the expression Dominic had chastised him with yesterday: “It was Epsom, for God’s sake, not the Pony Club egg and spoon.”
Though still sore about his performance and the public dressing-down he’d received from O’Reilly’s trainer, his successful seduction of Rachel had left him on a high that nothing could spoil. After that first time in the trailer yesterday, they’d done it twice more, at her request: once on the backseat of his Range Rover on the way home, pulled over on the hard shoulder of the M11, and then again in her bedroom at Mittlingsford, the Delaneys’ exquisite Georgian rectory a couple of villages away from Newells.
Given that she was only eighteen—just a year older than Milly—Jasper was delighted to find that Rachel was incredibly precocious in bed, voracious almost to the point of nymphomania. Not only was her naked body even more magnificently voluptuous than he’d imagined—she had tits that made Pamela Anderson look like Kate Hudson—but she knew exactly what to do with it, contorting her lithe limbs into every possible position in pursuit of his pleasure and her own.
Sipping at his much-needed coffee this morning, a mental picture popped into his head of those fabulous, melonous breasts bouncing up and down in front of him, the hard candy-pink nipples brushing teasingly against his lips, and he soon found himself struggling to fight down yet another erection. By anyone’s standards, Jasper had slept with a lot of women in his time—racing groupies were ten a penny in Newmarket—but Rachel Delaney was without doubt the best shag he’d ever had. And now he’d have her on tap, permanently.
How fucking fantastic was that?
And if pulling Rachel wasn’t cause enough for celebration, he’d arrived home to find Milly being torn off a strip by Cecil for disgracing herself at the debs’ ball. Well, well, well. So Daddy’s golden girl had screwed up at last, had she?
How immensely gratifying.
Jasper hated Milly because she refused to take him seriously as a jockey and was constantly showing him up in public. Terminally pompous, he lacked any ability to laugh at himself, taking all her childish jibes as serious offenses against his dignity. He particularly disliked it when she criticized him in front of girls he was trying to impress. Never would he forget, or forgive, the time when she’d told Becca Davies, a gorgeous groom he’d been on the point of seducing last Christmas, that his nickname at Pony Club was Johnny Fart Pants. Mortifying! Even now the thought of it made him blush to the roots of his hair, something he hated doing because it spoiled his perfect complexion.
His father rarely lost an opportunity to remind him how wonderful his little sister was. It was always “Milly does this” and “Milly helped with that” and “why can’t you be more like Milly?” But this morning, he felt like quite the prodigal son returned. The calf was being fattened for him for a change. And, boy, did it smell good.
Linda was adamant that Milly wasn’t to be allowed near a horse for the next month, which meant that she would finally be out of his hair at the track. Better still, Cecil was talking about packing her off to some cookery and flower-arranging course in Cambridge during her month-long ban. For the tomboyish Milly, a whole month of feminine pursuits would be tantamount to torture.
As a punishment, Jasper thought gleefully, it was nothing short of inspired.
Ignoring his jibe about her riding, Milly turned back to her father. “Can’t you give me some other punishment?” she pleaded. “It’s crazy to ban me from the stud, Dad, you know it is. June is one of our busiest months. Who’s going to help Pablo and Nancy if I’m not around? Jasper?”
Cecil sighed. The thought had occurred to him that J. would be a poor replacement for Milly during their busy time, but he was not about to admit it now. She’d gone too far this time. She had to be punished.
“We’ll manage,” he said firmly.
“Of course we will,” said Jasper, bridling at the implication that he’d be about as welcome at the stud as a psychiatrist at a Scientology convention. “You’re hardly irreplaceable, you know.”
“Frankly, Milly,” said Linda, through thin, furious lips, “I’m surprised you have the nerve to ask your father for anything after your disgraceful performance in London.” Looking pale and tearful in her pink frilly dressing gown after a sleepless night, she’d walked in just in time to hear Milly trying to wangle her way around Cecil as usual. Well, it wasn’t going to work. Not this time.
“Yes, really, Mill,” chipped in Jasper with ill-concealed delight. “You could show poor Mummy a bit more respect.”
Slumping back in her chair, Milly shot him a filthy look, but she knew better than to push it any further. Obviously no amount of begging was going to change either of her parents’ minds.
The thought of a month away from her horses was worse even than the thought of Jasper and Rachel’s new “romance”—and that was saying something. But what could she do? She’d well and truly burned her bridges this time. She’d just have to suck it up.
Two weeks after this depressing breakfast, she was enjoying a Sunday morning lie-in—her first since she’d had to start getting up at seven to catch the bus into Cambridge for her eight-fifteen start at the horrific Madeleine Howard Home Skills course—when she was woken by a deafening crash from outside her window.
Bolting out of bed, she saw Radar, one of her father’s newer stallions, staggering backward against the side of his trailer, mucus pouring from his nose, his knees shaking and spasming grotesquely while Cecil and Nancy struggled to prop him up.
“Mill, get down here!” shouted Ce
cil, catching sight of his bleary-eyed daughter at the window. “We need some help.”
Thrusting her bare feet into a pair of trainers, she was downstairs like a shot and running out into the yard, still in her pajamas.
“Stand here, where I am,” panted Nancy. Her thin blond hair was stuck to her forehead and cheeks with the sweat from her exertions. Although strong for her size, the vet was only five foot three, and trying to hold up an animal the size of Radar was no joke. “Push your shoulder as hard as you can into his side,” she said. “I’ll run and get his shots.”
Milly obeyed wordlessly, bracing herself against the frightened animal with all her strength. She could see her dad grimacing with effort at the stallion’s rear quarters, and tried to shoulder as much of the fourteen-hundred-pound weight as she could to help him.
“Has he done this before?” she asked.
“Twice,” Cecil panted. His face was beet red already, and he was sweating like a gladiator in a heat wave. Her dad has always been a bit overweight, but now Milly noticed he was looking worryingly out of shape. “Nancy’s run every test in the book. Other than a slightly raised temperature, we can’t find anything physically wrong with him. It’s strange, but it only seems to happen when he gets sight of a trailer. Almost like a mental trigger.”
“Maybe he’s scared. A bad memory or something from when he was younger?”
“Maybe,” grunted Cecil. “But short of getting him a horse shrink, I don’t know what the fuck to do about it.”
The horse continued shaking uncontrollably, his eyes wide and wild with terror. After what seemed like an age, Nancy came running out from the house with her battered leather vet’s bag and pulled out a long silver syringe. Filling it with clear liquid from a 30-cc vial, she emptied the whole thing into his neck. Within a few seconds, his tremors slowed and then eventually stopped. Father and daughter gingerly released their pressure and stepped back. He was still unsteady on his legs and swaying a little bit, but he was standing on his own.
“All right. Take him back to the barn,” said Cecil, nodding at Nancy. “He’s clearly not fit to travel, is he?”
She shook her head, leading the bewildered Radar away and leaving her boss and his daughter leaning, winded with exertion, against the aluminum trailer.
“Thanks,” said Cecil with a small smile at Milly. The two of them had barely been on speaking terms since the whole debs’ ball disaster, and he was as glad as she was to finally be breaking the ice. “I don’t know what happened to Davey and Pablo. Or your brother for that matter. He was supposed to be helping me out here this morning. It’s a good job you were around or God knows what we’d have done.”
“Where were you taking him?” asked Milly.
“Cedarbrook Farm,” said Cecil. It was another, rival stud about twenty miles north of Newells. “Anne Voss-Menzies is thinking of buying him.” He shook his head, disappointed. “Or was thinking of buying him, I should say. I’ll have to tell her what happened and that we’re not coming. Come on.” He put his arm around her and started back toward the kitchen. For all their battles over her riding, he adored his daughter and had been almost as miserable these past two weeks as she had, watching her set off into Cambridge every morning. “Let’s give the old dragon a ring and then I’ll make you some brekka.”
The Lockwood Groveses’ kitchen was part family gathering place and part farm office. Piles of stud-related paperwork littered the old oak table, and yellowing copies of the Racing Post could be found cluttering up the window seat and most of the available space on the sideboards that wasn’t taken up with Linda’s recipe books or jars of exotic spices. Milly’s mother was an exceptional cook—yet another feminine skill her daughter had failed to inherit. Cecil was only ever allowed near Linda’s beloved cobalt-blue Aga if he was making one of his famous Sunday fry-ups.
Milly watched him as, battered old portable phone glued to his ear, he set about one-handedly scrambling a bowl of eggs while placating a difficult Anne Voss-Menzies. She smiled, remembering the fateful Sunday morning when her granny Mellon, Linda’s prissy and persnickety mother, had picked up what she’d thought was a jar of egg whites and poured it into a bowl for whisking only for a horrified Cecil to come in and announce that she’d just contaminated a semen sample worth twenty thousand pounds from one of his premier stallions. It was the last time Granny Mellon ever made breakfast at Newells—or so much as looked at a plate of scrambled eggs.
“Silly old bat,” said Cecil, hanging up and pouring the eggs into a pan of melted butter. The indomitable Mrs. Voss-Menzies was not an easy woman at the best of times and had been furious about Radar’s setback this morning. “She gave me a right ear bashing. It’s not my fault if the horse won’t travel.”
“Are you disappointed?” asked Milly, cutting two industrial-sized slabs of fresh granary bread to go with the eggs and opening the cupboard for plates.
“Nah.” He grinned at her. “I never really wanted to sell him anyway. His first crop of foals weren’t fabulous, but I still think, you know, with the right mares . . .”
Milly loved the way her dad always loyally blamed the mares if any of his stallions’ offspring proved disappointing.
“Anyway, love, how are things with you?” Pouring the steaming eggs onto two plates, he ground on some fresh pepper before setting them down with a flourish and sitting down to join her. “How’s it going at Madeleine Howard?”
Milly rolled her eyes to heaven. “Terrible,” she said, through a mouthful of egg and bread. “Can’t you do something? Ask Mum to back off? I mean, it’s really awful, Dad. The flower-arranging classes are enough to make you lose the will to live.”
Cecil shrugged, biting hungrily into his breakfast. “It’s your own fault.”
“I know,” she said. “But come on, Dad, flower arranging? It’s bad enough that you won’t let me ride, but now you’ve got me sticking bloody petunias in vases and laying out place mats! I mean, hello? This is not eighteen fifty. Queen Victoria is not still on the throne.”
Cecil laughed at her indignation and the cynical, questioning upward intonation that all the teenagers seemed to be afflicted with these days, the result of a constant TV diet of American sitcoms and Aussie soaps. She drove him up the wall at times, particularly where her riding was concerned, but he couldn’t help but admire her tenacity. He himself wasn’t one to give up on a challenge easily—but Milly never gave up at all.
He also adored her seventeen-year-old’s knack of having an answer for absolutely everything.
“You really upset your mother, you know,” he persisted. “That ball meant the world to her. And she did it for you.”
“I know,” said Milly. “I understand Mummy being angry. But that course is torture, it really is. And I haven’t been anywhere near a horse for fifteen days.”
She gave the word the same emphasis that a newly jailed prisoner might give the word “years.” Perhaps she had been punished enough? Sitting opposite him, her hair still a tangled mess from bed and wearing an old, shrunken pair of his stripy blue pajamas, she looked about twelve. Cecil could feel his resolve melting.
He thought briefly about Jasper. If only his son would show even half Milly’s dedication to the stud. The boy was almost twenty-five, but he still behaved as if the world owed him a living. He was supposed to have been at the yard at eight this morning, to help get Radar ready to travel. But instead he’d disappeared off to some party or other with the Delaney girl, and Cecil hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him since. His bed had clearly not been slept in.
“Look,” he said to Milly, who was still gazing across at him with her big pleading eyes. “I’m not making any promises. But I’ll have a word with your mother about this Madeleine Howard course. The fact is, with J. away racing so much between now and October, I could use some extra help around the yard.”
Milly’s face lit up like a camera flash.
“Just temporarily,” Cecil covered himself hastily.
“Of
course.” She nodded furiously. With her father on her side, her mother was bound to come around eventually. “I understand.”
“Michael Delaney’s about to fly some specialist trainer over from California, to work with those new colts he bought back in April,” Cecil went on. “You remember?”
Milly nodded. She never forgot a horse.
“Apparently Lady D.’s flatly refused to put the fellow up,” said Cecil. “Some bollocks about having the builders in at Mittlingsford or something. Anyway, the long and the short of it is, I offered to have him stay here. Which is fine, except that it means I’ll have to spend some time playing the gracious host, so we’ll be even more shorthanded than usual at the yard.”
“Oooo.” Milly raised an eyebrow. “Specialist trainer, eh? Victor won’t be very happy about that.” Victor Reed was Sir Michael Delaney’s trainer, who spent four days a week working his horses up at the Newells gallops.
“No,” said Cecil, unable to suppress a smile. He had never been particularly fond of the strutting, self-important Reed. “He won’t be. And actually nor am I. I’ve got better things to do than babysit some bloody Yank for Michael. But it can’t be helped. So I could use having you around, as long as your mother’s agreeable . . .”
“Oh yay, hallelujah!” squealed Milly, jumping to her feet and flinging herself onto his lap, wrapping her arms around him like a little girl.
“I told you, I’m not promising anything,” said Cecil, trying to look stern but not succeeding remotely.
“I know,” said Milly sweetly, with all the gracious diplomacy of a child who knows the battle is already won. “Just as long as you talk to Mummy. That’s all I ask.”
Bobby squatted down lower on his haunches to examine the filly’s fetlock more closely. “It’s not good,” he said, shaking his head.
He was in Florida, at the Palm Beach estate of the billionaire paper magnate and racehorse owner Randy Kravitz. Randy had hired him to work with the beautiful young horse whose leg now rested in Bobby’s hand. But if he’d realized how badly injured she was, he would never have come.
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