Then Laila strode in and took over, and the image shattered—the reality was blood and mess and snapped orders, and he’d accepted the role of assistant.
But she couldn’t stanch the bleeding; no medicine currently known to veterinary science could stop the inevitable. Yet with blood on her hands and tears streaking her white face, Laila had kept going, trying delivery by rope, sedating the mare into unconsciousness first—but it had been obvious to Jake from the first glance that this birth was far from divine.
The mare was always going to die, and she did, at 5:00 a.m. Laila had finally taken the shotgun and ended the mare’s suffering, refusing to let him or anyone else take on the grim task.
It was midday now. The bell for the meal had been sounded ten minutes before. Jake knew better than to try to make Laila go into the dining room for lunch. Watching her work through the night and morning, he realized something about the woman he had seduced, bullied, cajoled, pushed, prodded and guilt-tripped in his determination to make her his.
Laila was destined for far greater things than to be the wife of a nameless jackaroo.
Her skills had him in awe. Her emotions didn’t get in the way of her job, they enhanced it. She didn’t give up when he, a one-time breeder, would have called it natural attrition and let the foal die. She’d forced pumped milk down its throat, made it swallow, tried to give it a taste of life—a life it didn’t want.
Why did that sound familiar?
He shook his head and made his way to the kitchen of the homestead to get two plates for them, as he’d done this morning for breakfast, and for the cups of tea Lena Appleyard had brought out. No way would he leave Laila. She was beyond exhaustion—but at least she wouldn’t be cramping. He was glad he’d thought to ask Marcie to pack Laila’s tablets.
She’d taken one without thought this morning when he’d handed her the water and pill.
“Thanks,” she’d said briefly, barely knowing who he was, then thrust the empty glass back in his hand and continued treating the foal.
She’d slept for about twenty minutes—the most she’d take—at 6:00 a.m., while he kept up the force-feeding and cajoling the foal. She’d laid on a bed of hay covered with a horse blanket, turning to ice when he’d tried to talk her into finding a sofa or a bed inside. “Do I tell you how to do your job?”
He couldn’t argue with that. She didn’t need his advice. She was a damn fine vet.
And deserved her chance to finish her degree and start her own practice.
He had to face facts. Just because he didn’t deserve to get on with living life to the full, it didn’t give him the right to drag Laila down with him.
Jake felt the decision coming at him like a fast train hurtling down the track toward him. The life change he’d refused to even contemplate for five years was imminent, no matter how he tried to remain deaf and dumb to it.
He blanked out the thought, grabbed the plates of food with a murmur of thanks and headed back to Laila; but when he returned to the warm, deliberately darkened stables, he heard the soft sound he’d learned to dread.
He dropped the plates without thought and ran to her. Seeing her hunched over herself, rocking back and forth while she sobbed, he felt his chest constrict, then explode.
He scooped her up in his arms and held her close as she cried. Feeling the rightness of her inside of him, part of him, without thinking about it. “I’m sorry, Laila, I’m so sorry. You did all you could—”
But Laila shook her head. “She’s drinking,” she whispered against his cheek.
He turned his head, and saw that it was true. Weak suckles at best, but the foal was drinking from the mare.
Hesitant to burst her bubble, he tried to find a tactful way to say what he needed to.
“I know,” she murmured, her breath stirring against his cheek. “Without her mother, she probably won’t make it, especially since she’s a racing breeder, not a stock horse.”
Perversely, hearing her say it fired up his arguments from the other side. “Fostering can work. Back home, we had no less than six breeding foals that made it after we lost the mare, and they went on to—” Then, realizing what he was saying, he clamped his mouth shut.
Laila stiffened, and jerked out of his lap. “I have to apologize to Ron for the mare. No,” she said when he made to follow her. “I’m not a child. I don’t need your strength. So make yourself useful, and get the plane ready. I want to go home.”
If Jake could kick his own butt, he’d have done it right then. Why did he wreck it every time Laila was starting to trust him? It was as if he was deliberately sabotaging himself—
He blinked, frowned and shook his head and, before his mind could take over again and wander into dangerous emotional territory, got to his feet and headed for the house to thank the Appleyards before readying the plane.
Two hours of silence from Laila left Jake feeling more unnerved—and more talkative—than he’d been in five years.
The look haunted him still.
Returning from the primed plane, he saw two men with Laila: one was Tom Appleyard, the other a stranger…possibly Dave Randall, the veterinary surgeon he’d called himself over an hour before. Laila’s head was lowered, one hand half-lifted.
“Even if I could have come in time, the mare would have died anyway. The blood loss all but guaranteed it. I told Tom at the start that she was a racer, but not the best for breeding,” he added, with a pointed glance at the old-school ringer and new player in the racing stakes.
Laila’s ponytail slipped over one shoulder as she shook her head. “No, I should have done more—I don’t know, something.”
Tom Appleyard muttered something—and obviously Laila agreed with that, because she nodded, slow and unutterably weary. “I know. I’m sorry, Tom. You don’t know how sorry.”
Jake strode over to give support whether Laila wanted it or not. “This can be sorted out later. Laila needs rest. She’s been up all night working on the mare and foal. She is pregnant, remember,” he added with slight emphasis—enough to make Tom shift on his feet and give an uncomfortable glance at Laila’s hand, rubbing her rounded belly.
“Thanks for coming, Laila,” Appleyard said awkwardly. “You saved the foal, which is more than I’d have been able to do.” But it was clear he’d expected Laila to pull a rabbit out of a hat—or a miracle out of her bag of tricks, and was still disappointed in her.
He supposed the stubborn old coot needed someone to blame for his stubbornness and stupidity in not calling sooner, and Laila wasn’t arguing.
That struck him with unexpected force. Laila wasn’t arguing. His feisty earth angel, strong and wise, had nothing to say for once…but the sudden look she gave him was the one haunting him still, as he was about to descend onto the Wallaby airstrip.
The silent, almost blinded desperation. Please get me out of here…
She didn’t resist as Jake took her hand and led her to the plane—she’d just wandered along with him, climbed into the plane when he told her to, clicked her belt in place and sat there. Unseeing eyes staring out the window. Fingers sitting quiet and obedient in her lap.
He’d tried everything he could think to say—he’d even tried to provoke her into a fight by ordering her to bed as soon as they reached Wallaby; but there was no response, not even a shift in her breathing. She’d gone to a place inside herself where he couldn’t follow, and he didn’t know if she wasn’t letting him in, or if she didn’t even know he was with her.
“Descending into Wallaby,” he all but snapped, as tired as she was and filled with a resentment that wouldn’t fade. Why wouldn’t she talk to him? “No doubt the family will be waiting to hear all about your triumph today.”
Checking her with a swift glance, he couldn’t tell if she’d given any response; but—no, something had changed and he’d missed it. The blinded look was still there, but she seemed—trapped, somehow…like a poor, slow old wombat trying to cross a highway with a road train bearing down on it,
seeing the inevitable but unable to change it.
The hunted deer look. Stricken and terrified and helpless…and still she didn’t fight.
“It was a triumph today, Laila,” he said, driven to exempt her from blame. “You saved the foal’s life. Nobody could have saved the mare, but the foal—”
“Please.”
She didn’t say any more, but she didn’t have to. The one word shouldered a burden of guilt and carried a cartload of shame, and it silenced him.
He’d been shouldering that burden and pushing that cart around for years.
He landed the plane, and moved it into the big old shed they used as a hangar, wishing he knew what to say, what to do to make this better for her.
Laila opened her side of the plane and hit the ground running, her passivity gone in an instant. With the awkward gait of growing pregnancy she headed straight for the house, without an instant’s pause or even a thank-you-for-all-your-support-today, Jake.
He stalked after her, hard and fast, feeling overlooked, treated as if all he’d done for her wasn’t enough…as if he was—invisible…
Laila bolted through the door as if she couldn’t get away from him fast enough—but no way was he leaving it like this. If she could tell her family, tell Jimmy her secrets, she could talk to the man she was going to marry—
There were too many echoes in his head, in this place…in Laila’s words. Too many echoes of the past in everything she did and said, rising up to accuse him. This place, this woman, was haunting him as much as home.
No! He tore up the stairs and opened the screen door before he could give in to the screaming need inside him to turn and run, to be alone and safe again in his solitude.
She was almost up the stairs to the second floor by the time he reached the open living area, with Joe, Marcie and Glenn all frightened, anxious and about to tear up after her.
He stopped about ten feet behind them, lost in her face. The tears. The suffering. The blame and self-hate. The silent pleading as she looked at him—only at him.
Pushing past Glenn, he ran up to her. Seeing her eyes drenched in desperate yearning for a redemption she didn’t believe she’d find, the panting breaths and terrible, unbearable need, he pulled her close, then lifted her into his arms and carried her to her room.
No one could understand a need for sanctuary more than he…and he’d give it to her, even though he could feel that train of inevitability hurtling at him at a thousand miles an hour.
CHAPTER TEN
LAILA felt the familiar comfort of her cushion-top bed envelop her, her comforter cover her; but she couldn’t sigh and roll into sleep. Her mind kept rolling the film of the past sixteen hours, rewinding and replaying it over and over, as she searched for the clue she’d overlooked, the one tiny clue to what happened that she’d dismissed as unimportant.
If she couldn’t find it, the mare’s life would be lost for no purpose.
Seven years of training had meant little, faced with reality; beneath the pressure of life and death, she’d lost every technique taught to her.
With the mare’s death, she’d seen her lifetime’s ambition turned to dust and ashes before her eyes. Her life, her sense of self-worth, for years had been wrapped up in this one investment: that she’d be a good…no, a great vet. She’d wanted to save animals for as long as she could remember. She still remembered the time when she’d brought home the funnel web spider and Dar took her to the hospital, convinced she must be dying of a bite.
“Let it out, Laila. The family won’t come in, not while I’m here.”
The voice, the words snapped off the stupid, irrelevant memories, yet somehow soothed the turbulence inside her. He understood. How could she face them after her failure today?
“You won’t find it, you know,” he said quietly. “There’s no rhyme or reason, and nothing you missed. It was too late by the time we got there. It would have taken a miracle to save her.”
Why did that absolution seem to come to her mind as if across a universe of time, slow and distorted? Her anguished heart craved the balm, yet it reached her like a cold echo of truth. She couldn’t make her mouth open; her tongue cleaved to her mouth, refusing to work.
Her first call out shouldn’t end like this!
The bed dipped and swayed as he sat beside her, then lay down, taking her in his arms to halt the shivers with his warmth. “I know, baby, I know,” he mumbled, kissing her hair. “It means so much, and you’re an amazing vet. But you can’t perform miracles, Laila, no matter how much you want to. She was dying before we got there. You kept fighting for her long after a lot of people would have put her down.”
Couldn’t he see that was the problem? Her every dream, every thought of her first call out was of saving a creature in distress—but all she did was to add to the suffering of the poor mare, because she hadn’t been good enough…because she’d refused to let her go.
She couldn’t take the comfort he offered. Though she’d never felt such tenderness from him, she remained stiff and unyielding in his arms.
After long moments lying entwined in silence, together skin to skin yet never further apart, he whispered, “You had me in awe today, you know that? The way you fought for the mare and foal. You saved one when I was sure neither could be saved.”
From deep inside, a screaming protest tore out of her soul, yet when the words came, they were soft and sad. “You don’t understand.”
She felt the tiniest relaxing of his body, and realized how tense he’d been until she spoke. “I don’t think anyone could understand where you’re at right now better than I do,” he muttered, low yet harsh with a strange relief.
Why? After all these months, did this mean he finally cared about how she felt?
All she could do was to shake her head. Now it seemed the words were her driving force, and she couldn’t stop them if she wanted to. “I failed. The mare died—the foal lost her mother—because I wasn’t good enough.” She gulped, but the rock-hard pain in her throat refused to shift. “What makes me think I can look after my baby? I don’t know a thing about babies—”
“Whoa, whoa.” Startled by her leap in logic, Jake laid a finger across her lips. “Laila, you’ll make yourself sick. This can’t be good for the baby.”
Her head lifted; wild-eyed, she stared at him. And then, slow and sort of crazy, she laughed. “See? I’m a bad mother already.”
“No. No, you’re not. Laila, stop this!” He grasped her by her shoulders, not shaking her, but holding with a grip she couldn’t pull away from. “There’s no connection between losing the mare and your ability to raise the baby.” He sighed, wishing he knew the right words, any words, to help her. “I realize you’re hurting right now, but try to get this in perspective. It was a mare. Prize livestock, yes, but still livestock. You’re an Outback woman. You know the statistics. The cycle of nature out here is that we’ll lose between eight to fifteen percent of stock. Appleyard was a fool to bring a racing mare out here and breed her against advice.”
Wrong words, obviously. She just shook her head.
“Don’t let this affect your confidence, Laila. You’re going to be an amazing vet. You need to get back up on the—bike,” he said, after almost saying horse. “Don’t give up after only one—” Failure? Loss?
It still wasn’t working. She lay passive in his arms, feeling like a rag doll. Lost in self-blame, torturing herself for a tragedy that was always going to happen—
You can’t blame yourself, Jake. Jenny was beyond help. It was too early for the baby.
You know Jen, always stubborn. We all told her to take it easy…
She would want you to get on with life!
In a shock too profound for words, Jake watched her…and saw through a warped mirror to the man he’d been five years ago. A man fallen so far down the loss and blame spiral he couldn’t see the hands reaching out to him, the stumbling words of redemption, the loving friends and family trying to heal him.
He hadn�
�t believed in redemption then. Five years later, he still didn’t believe he deserved it, or the love and healing people held out to him, from his anxious family to the mighty, loving Robbins clan. So how was it now that he found himself repeating the words his family and friends had said to him five years before?
She’d reached out to him. Somehow she knew, must know that he understood; that his past was the key to her own healing.
So do it. Tell her. Tell her the truth.
All the lights went out inside him, leaving him shivering and cold. The only connection he had to life and warmth was the woman beside him, the woman who’d risked her pride and heart over and over to reach him, to heal him—the woman whose entire life had changed, and not for the better, by meeting him. The woman who now seemed as lost as he’d felt during these past five years.
She didn’t deserve this suffering. If it was allowed to continue, it would stain her self-confidence as a vet, if not as a mother. She wouldn’t even be here at Wallaby now if he’d used protection that night, instead of thinking only of his own pain and his comfort.
He had to help her.
Without thinking about it, he reached backward to turn off the lamp, and the soft glow of a gathering dusk filled the room with intimacy, an illusion of privacy and safety. He closed his eyes and tried to breathe; but he could only draw in the basics to stay alive as he blurted the words he’d held in for too many years.
“Her name was Jenny. She was my wife, and pregnant with our daughter, Annabel.”
Laila had become completely still. He didn’t need to open his eyes, though: he could feel her coming to life, just by hearing her breathing change. She was listening. She was open to him, and not about to interrupt with unnecessary questions on who she was.
“When she had eight weeks to go before the birth, it was muster. Burrabilla is a working cattle property with over two thousand head of good Poll Herefords. I had to get the year-lings to sale—it was my responsibility, but I could see Jenny wasn’t comfortable—she’d barely slept the night before, and she held her back as she walked. She wanted the nursery painted pink, with baby mobiles and a little-girl border put under the picture rails. I told her I’d do it after muster was done.” He shrugged, and dragged in a quick breath of air before expelling it. “I should have seen her pain, and stayed home with her.”
Harlequin Romance Bundle: Crowns and Cowboys Page 28