by JoAnn Ross
“Yeah.”
“Well, you might be able to lie to yourself, boy. But not to old Pete. You’re feelin’ about as low as a snake in a rut, and things aren’t going to get any better around this place until you’re back doin’ the work you love.” He put the lid on the kettle and turned down the flame to a high simmer.
“You were born to train horses. I’ve known that from the first day I saw you gentling that filly who’d tripped coming out of the gate at Louisiana Downs. I told Jenny that night that I’d never laid eyes on a kid with more natural horse sense.
“You’ve got a bunch of Angus MacKenna in you, Alec. Racing is in your blood as much as it is in those Thoroughbreds. So how about doing us all a big favor and quit trying to be some clone of Cliff Huxtable and whatever the name of that guy was who played the know-it-all stepfather on The Brady Bunch.”
“So why don’t you just tell me what you really think?”
“Haven’t been a lot of owners knocking at our door since you knocked Wellesley off that barstool. Seems this Legends Lake, glitchy as he is, might just be your last chance.”
Alec was not yet prepared to admit that he was down to last chances. “The season’s just beginning. There’s still time for something to turn up.”
While Pete mixed up some dumplings to go with the stew, Alec went upstairs to call Zoe to dinner. She was talking on the phone, as she seemed to do most of the time.
“He is so rad, Jen!” She giggled, sounding much more like a normal teenage girl than the petulant Lolita wannabe who’d called him to the phone. “Of course Alec doesn’t know. Are you kidding? My stepfather is as straight as they come. He’d freak if he even saw Jake’s tattoos.
“Oh, God, they are sooo cool, Jen. He’s got this dragon on his right arm that looks just like it’s breathing real fire. And a killer devil with the weirdest red eyes that look like they’re glaring straight at you on his left biceps.”
It took an effort, but Alec managed not to freak. Not quite yet, anyway.
“The first time I kissed him I thought I’d faint. Or maybe melt …”
There was a nerve-racking pause.
“Of course he uses his tongue! God, Jen, he’s not some immature high school kid. He’s nineteen. He knows what to do with a woman.”
He was not eavesdropping, Alec assured himself as Zoe continued to enumerate all Jake’s less than honorable attributes. The kind guaranteed to strike terror in the heart of any parent.
The hell he wasn’t.
Assuring himself that as her stepfather and legal guardian, it was his duty to protect a defenseless child, Alec learned that Jake wore a black leather biker jacket over the tattoos, had a pierced tongue, for Christ’s sake, and heaven protect them all, the bastard had dared to invite Zoe to run off to California with him.
Zoe, apparently, had decided to do just that.
The tattoo-painted, metal-pierced, hog-riding gangster—who undoubtedly also dealt dope, Alec thought darkly—was after Zoe the way a fox stalked a chicken who’d wandered too far from the pen.
The terrifying thing about it was, short of locking her in a closet for the next few years or getting out his grandfather’s old Winchester 30-06 and waiting beneath Zoe’s window for the cretin to show up, Alec couldn’t think of much he could do to stop her from making a disastrous mistake.
He could try to talk some sense into her. Share some wisdom born of his own youthful mistakes. But if earlier attempts at conversation were any indication, his parental words of warning would undoubtedly fall like small stones into a deep dark bottomless well.
Opting for action over talk, he went back downstairs to his office and used the second line to place a brief, but highly satisfying call to the local sheriff’s department.
6
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Alec took the piece of paper with Kate O’Sullivan’s phone number on it and placed the call to Ireland.
“Well, I expect there’s only one answer for it,” she declared in the musical cadence of the Irish west after he’d explained the problem.
“And that is?”
“You’d best be bringing him home. So I can get to the bottom of what’s bothering the poor dear horse.”
It was definitely a long shot. Alec didn’t have an iota of proof that Kate Fitzpatrick O’Sullivan would be any better able to figure out what the hell was wrong with the horse she’d bred than he could.
Alec didn’t believe in magic. But having stabled the horse at her stud for its first year, she obviously knew the colt better than anyone else. If he could find a way to calm Legends Lake down enough that he could be trained to win the Derby, Alec would have taken him to hell to make a deal with the devil himself.
“I’m not going,” Zoe declared after Alec had broken the news that they were going to Ireland. The magenta spikes may have deflated a bit in the night, but they had enough goop on them to keep them from moving when she tossed her head.
Trying to conduct the conversation on more level ground, he sat down on the end of the bed. “You know, you might just have a good time in Ireland.”
“Yeah, sure. When I’m not playing Little Bo-Peep with all the damn sheep and being dragged to all those Catholic churches for confession, I’ll probably have a fucking dandy time.”
Even knowing that she was trying to shock him, Alec found it disconcerting to hear the F-word coming out of those same lips that had once so sweetly kissed him good night.
“Do you have anything all that important to confess?” he asked casually. “Other than the shoplifting?”
“No.”
“Well then, I guess you can take that stop off your itinerary.”
“Why can’t you just leave me here? I can take care of myself.”
Alec resisted the impulse to point out that she hadn’t been doing a real bang-up job of that lately. “Sorry. Where I go, you go. That’s the deal I worked out with your probation officer.”
“I’d rather kill myself than go off to some boring, dead-end place like Ireland.”
“You’re exaggerating.” He reached out and took her hand. “About the suicide. Aren’t you?”
“I might not be.” She snatched her hand away, refusing to look at him. “Suicide is, after all, a popular choice of my generation.”
“Zoe.”
He didn’t bother to censure the concern in his voice. The odds were she was merely jerking his chain, looking to get a reaction. Well, if that’s what she wanted, that’s what she was damn well going to get. This was too serious a matter to bluff.
“Tell me the truth. Are you even a little serious? Because if you are—”
“I’m not going to kill myself, okay?” She was out of bed and across the room in a shot, the long legs revealed by the oversize nightshirt reminding him of a filly’s. “I wouldn’t give everyone the satisfaction of getting rid of me that easily,” she said out the window toward the weathered blue mountains.
Anger. Pain. Need. They were all there, surrounding her like a dark force field so strong Alec could almost reach out and touch it.
“If I thought staying here would be a good thing for you, I’d turn down the training job in a heartbeat, Zoe. But there’s just too much bad stuff going on in your life right now, what with the shoplifting—”
“They have stores in Ireland,” she reminded him pointedly.
Another threat. Unspoken, but heavy enough to hover in the air between them. “True. But Jake MacAllister isn’t in County Clare.”
Her head spun back toward him. He watched the comprehension dawn in expressive eyes that looked as if they’d been lined with lumps of Appalachian coal. “You listened in on my private phone conversation!”
“Not on purpose,” he hedged, wondering who was the liar now. “I came upstairs to tell you that supper was almost ready and—”
“You eavesdropped!” She was looking at him as if he were no better than pond scum. “You invaded my privacy.”
“Accidentally,” he stressed yet again. “B
ut to tell you the absolute truth, I’m glad I overheard you talking about him. The guy’s trouble, Zoe.”
She raised her chin. “Maybe I like trouble. Or maybe I’m bad. Did you ever think of that?”
He gave her a long look and wondered if he looked as miserable as she did right now. “Nah. I don’t think so. But Jake is, Zoe.”
“You don’t know him,” she repeated stubbornly. Petulantly.
An instinct Alec didn’t even know he possessed warned him to tread carefully. The last thing he wanted was to create some Romeo and Juliet forbidden love scenario that would have her more determined to run off with the guy.
“I know his type. Guys like him hang around the track. They may be more into horses than Harleys, but at the core they’re pretty much the same.”
She glared at him, then turned her back, giving him the silent treatment. Alec waited. Dust motes danced in the sunshine slanting through the window, a woodpecker hammered away at the eaves and a mockingbird hidden in one of the Southern pine trees sang its morning song.
“Pete’ll have your breakfast ready any time.” He stood up and had reached the open door when he paused.
“By the way, you don’t have to worry about Jake showing up before we leave.”
“Why not?”
“He was picked up last night. Seems he had some methamphetamine on him. Quite a lot, as it turns out. Enough that the sheriff is holding him on suspicion of possessing a controlled substance for sale.”
The nice thing about settling down in the home-place where you’d grown up was that you could call upon those old connections. Alec had gone to school with Sheriff McCall; in fact, he and Jeb McCall had smoked their first cigarettes behind Jeb’s daddy’s tobacco barn the summer they’d turned twelve. With that shared history, it had only taken a single call to accomplish the protective maneuver.
Zoe impressed him, just a bit, by cursing at him in French, then German, then, just in case he hadn’t gotten her drift, in English.
Alec was halfway down the stairs when he heard the unmistakable sound of a water glass hitting the doorframe. Then shattering. Next something that sounded like a book thudded against the wall.
“Sounds like a real doozie of a grand mal tantrum,” Pete said over the screams coming from upstairs when Alec entered the kitchen. The father of now-grown daughters, he appeared to take Zoe’s temper in stride as he shoved a mug of coffee into Alec’s hand. “You’re doing the right thing.”
The usually unflappable older man flinched, just a little, as the slamming of the bedroom door shook the two-hundred-year-old house.
“I sure hope you’re right.” Alec took a long drink of Pete’s high-octane brew and idly wondered if Kate O’Sullivan’s magic touch worked on teenagers.
In the end, they decided Pete would stay in Kentucky, preparing for the stable of Thoroughbreds Alec still optimistically hoped to acquire. Since, despite her recent rebellion, Zoe was an honor student, the principal agreed to a lesson plan she could study on her own while in Ireland, which would save the hassle of enrolling her in school for the short time Alec planned on being out of the country.
Visibly sulking about having been dragged away from her planned assignation, five days after Winnie’s phone call, Zoe studiously ignored Alec on the flight to Ireland. From the time they left the house, she kept her Discman earphones on, her magenta head bobbing to whatever sounds were undoubtedly destroying her eardrums.
Once on the plane, she continued to treat him as if he didn’t exist, burying her slender nose in the stack of glossy magazines she’d packed into her warning-flare-orange backpack. The magazines boasted bright covers featuring young, all-American models who could have appeared in an ad promoting the wonders of milk while screaming fluorescent script addressed some apparently vital teen girl issue.
Are you ready for SEX? Ditch the doormat! Love your body now! To be or not to be—a VIRGIN! Priss-Proof Prom—Frocks that Rock!
Other than wishing Zoe would actually want to do something as normal as attend a prom, Alec found little comfort in the topics offered.
At least he’d gotten her away from that tattooed and studded Harley Romeo. Maybe not in the logical, talk it out way that Ward Cleaver or Ozzie Nelson might have done, but at this point in his life, when some aliens on a planet in a galaxy far far away seemed to be zapping Zoe’s frontal lobe with random particle beams, Alec decided to be grateful for small favors.
His small satisfaction disintegrated when he was greeted after clearing customs by a tall, dark-haired giant.
“Welcome to Ireland.” The man held out a huge, work-roughened hand. “I’m Michael Joyce, a friend of Kate O’Sullivan’s. I own the farm that adjoins her stud. I’ve come to fetch you and your horse.”
“Mrs. O’Sullivan didn’t come herself?”
“Oh, Kate’s a bit tied up at the moment, but she’ll be greeting you and your daughter personally at the stud once she takes care of unexpected business.”
The horse breeder was not making the best of first impressions. But having come all this way, Alec had no choice but to continue on to the farm. After introducing Zoe, who loftily informed the farmer that she was not Alec’s daughter, it was time to load Legends Lake into the trailer Michael Joyce had brought.
Fortunately, Winnie hadn’t been exaggerating about the colt being a good traveler. He came off the plane as if he’d just taken a quick little jog around a track rather than flown across the Atlantic, practically prancing into the trailer without a moment’s pause.
“That went well enough,” Michael said.
Alec murmured an agreement. If he hadn’t actually seen it with his own eyes, he never would have believed that the cheerful, personable horse was the same terrified one who’d jumped that fence.
They climbed into a truck that smelled of wet dark earth and the burning peat that drifted on the winter breezes this time of year in the west of Ireland. Between the two men, Zoe slouched down, her eyes hidden by a pair of oversize sunglasses as she tuned them out.
Alec’s early irritation about Kate O’Sullivan’s no-show at the airport faded as the road twisted through a maze of hedgerow-separated fields, over narrow stone bridges, through the center of the tidy medieval town of Castlelough—the brightly painted shops reflecting a Celtic optimism in this land of soft days and rainy nights—and out again, past whitewashed slate-roofed houses, peat bogs and enchanting winter gold hayfields lit with silvery, pale green frost in the shadows where the sun had yet to reach.
“I’ve visited here before,” he said to Michael, who was driving with one huge hand casually draped over the top of the wheel. “But the scenery always catches me by surprise.”
“’Tis a grand place, that’s for sure.” Michael frowned briefly, thoughtfully. “There was a time when I didn’t appreciate it. When I was younger and felt a need for adventure.”
“That’s probably natural,” Alec allowed. Hadn’t he once felt the same need to leave his mountain home? Of course, he’d also been running away from his father’s reputation as much as running to anything in particular.
“Especially for those born on an island. But I’ve traveled the world and now, like the prodigal son, I’ve come home, taken a wonderful woman to wife, have a darling daughter who holds my heart in her wee hand and most days I forget that dark time away from home.”
Alec suddenly recognized both the name and the face. “You’re the Michael Joyce. The war photojournalist.”
“That I am.” The fleeting frown suggested that this may not be one of the giant’s favorite topics.
“I have one of your books. The one on Bosnia. I remember thinking at the time I bought it that if only it could be sent to every leader in the world, it might go a long way in stopping wars.”
“Ah, now isn’t that a lovely thought? Unfortunately, experience, along with the tragic history of my own country, has me believing that it would take more than a book of photographs to stop men from trying to kill one another over a bit o
f land or ideology. Especially—”
He suddenly broke off his planned statement. His curse, while in Irish, needed no translation.
Alec followed Michael’s frustrated gaze across a field to where a lone tree clung to the edge of a cliff. Stopped a few yards from the tree was a huge yellow bulldozer. Behind the bulldozer stood at least a dozen men wearing white hard hats. Between the huge machine and the tree stood a single woman.
“Bloody damn. I was afraid of this,” Michael muttered.
“Afraid of what?”
Michael sighed wearily as he pulled off the road onto a bit of grass that was fortunately not bordered by either hedge or stone. Since Irish drivers were known for speeding as if they believed their narrow curving roads were NASCAR racetracks, Alec definitely wouldn’t have wanted to risk parking the horse trailer on the dirt shoulder.
“I was afraid she’d get it into her foolish, stubborn head to make a grand stand.” His brogue, which hadn’t been all that pronounced when they’d met, had thickened.
He reached down, grabbed a 35mm camera from beneath his seat, then opened the driver’s door. “It appears, Mr. MacKenna, that you’re going to be meeting our Kate sooner rather than later.”
7
“KATE?” ALEC NARROWED HIS EYES at the lone, rebellious figure, clad in a long red wool cape adorned with swirling Celtic symbols. “That’s Kate O’Sullivan?”
“That’s herself, all right.” Michael sighed heavily. “She’s a lovely woman, our Kate is. As close to my heart as me own sister. But I wouldn’t be denying that she does tend to have her own unique way of stirring up trouble.” Flinging the camera strap over his shoulder, Michael began trudging across the field.
After instructing Zoe to stay put in the cab of the truck, Alec quickly caught up with Michael Joyce.
“What’s she doing out there?”
“Would you believe me if I told you that she’s rescuing faeries?”
“You can’t be serious.” Terrific. He’d come all this way across the Atlantic Ocean to hand Winnie’s precious horse over to a madwoman.