Legends Lake

by JoAnn Ross

  “So.” He leaned the wooden rush-seated chair back on its hind legs. “Why don’t you tell me about this idea you have for Legends Lake?”

  Enthusiasm lit her eyes as she sat back down across from him and shared her thoughts. And as he tried to keep from noticing the way her robe gaped open just a bit whenever she leaned toward him to press a point, Alec began to consider that her plan just might have merit.

  It was, granted, a little off the wall.

  But then again, wasn’t everything concerning Winnie’s crazy horse, including Kate’s mind-reading episode that had somehow given them the clue to Legends Lake’s problems in the first place? With the clock quickly ticking down to the May run for the roses, Alec decided they may as well give the idea a shot.

  Later, as he lay on his back, alone in the dark, staring up at the shadows moving across the white swirls of the plaster ceiling, listening to the patter of rain on the roof, Alec forced himself to focus on tomorrow’s experiment rather than to wonder if Kate were lying in her bed, thinking of him.

  Zoe felt it at first. The faintest touch, like a whisper, against her cheek. Thinking it was Alec, coming to check up on her again, she kept her eyes closed.

  “Zoe?” The familiar voice startled her for a fleeting moment, then, realizing she was merely dreaming, she relaxed.

  “Go away,” she muttered. “You interrupted my wedding to Justin.” He was her favorite of the ’N Sync singers and though she was far too mature to do such things now, last year she’d practiced writing Mrs. Justin Timberlake all over her notebook cover. “He thinks I’m special.”

  “So do I.”

  “Yeah, right.” It was bad enough losing the threads of her romantic dream. Losing it to argue with her dead mother was the pits.

  “You are special…. I’ve missed you so.”

  “I’ve missed you, too.” It was the truth.

  “It’s nice to know you haven’t forgotten all about me.”

  Zoe heard the need, along with the surprise and pleasure in her mother’s soft Southern drawl and mumbled something that could have been a response.

  “How are you doing, dear?”

  “Oh, great. Being an orphan’s a lot of fun.”

  “You don’t have to be sarcastic. I certainly didn’t mean to fall off that yacht. Drowning isn’t exactly a piece of cake, you know.”

  How like her mother to make this all about her. Which, Zoe admitted, now that she thought about it, it was. “I guess it wouldn’t be.” She didn’t want to think about the details. “What are you doing in my dream?”

  “You’re not dreaming, darling.”

  “Yeah, sure.” As if to prove to herself that she was still asleep, Zoe opened her eyes, hitched herself up in bed, turned on the lamp and jumped when she viewed the still gorgeous blond woman perched on the end of her bed. “This can’t be some weird drug flashback. I’ve never done drugs.”

  “Well, that’s certainly a relief.” Her mother’s smile was brighter than the stars shimmering outside the window. “I’ve always said you were an intelligent girl.”

  “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “Oh?” She lifted a perfectly arched blond brow. “Isn’t it a rather selective belief system that embraces witchcraft but refuses to accept ghosts? Especially when they’re your mother?”

  “I don’t embrace witchcraft.”

  “You believed Kate O’Sullivan drew that lightning bolt from the sky. You also believed she had a visit from her brother after he died.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “But you didn’t believe her when she told you that you could talk to me?”

  Well, they were certainly falling back into their old conversational pattern of arguing over every damn thing. “Her talking to her brother is different. Because she has powers. I don’t.”

  “Of course you do.” Zoe knew her skepticism must have shown on her face when her mother added, “You have the power of love.”

  “Yeah. Right. Look, I don’t want to hurt your feelings or anything, Mom, but this is just too freaky. So, if you don’t mind, I’m going to turn the light off and go back to sleep, okay?” She reached out, pitched the small bedroom back into darkness, rolled over onto her stomach, squeezed her eyes shut and slammed the feather pillow over her head.

  Even through her closed lids, she could see the lamp flash back on.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Because we need to talk.”

  “Why can’t we talk in the dark?”

  “Because I need you to look at me so you’ll remember what I’m about to say.”

  “Geez.” This was definitely the weirdest dream she’d ever had. Zoe wondered what kind of crazy, hallucinogenic herbs Kate had baked into that bread of hers. The pillow fell to the floor as she sat up again and stared at the white satin evening gown that fit her mother’s firm curves like a glove. Zoe had always felt like an ugly duckling next to this perfect, long-necked swan. It had been bad enough not to measure up while her mother had been alive; you had to be a real loser when even a dead woman looked better than you.

  Testing, she leaned forward and touched the bare golden arm that felt like warm silk against her fingertips, then jerked back. Could you touch a hallucination? “If you’re dead, how come my hand doesn’t go right through you?” she challenged.

  “Because if I hadn’t appeared to you this way, I couldn’t put my arms around you. And you’re a girl in desperate need of a hug.”

  Zoe found it ironic that her mother was proving a lot more perceptive dead than she’d been while alive.

  “I may be dead,” the woman said when she didn’t respond. “But I’m still your mother. And I have a mother’s instincts when my baby’s in trouble.”

  Mother’s instincts? Get real. Now Zoe knew she was dreaming.

  “You never cared before.” Zoe hated the way her voice went up a little on the end, turning what should have been a simple statement of fact into a question. Worse, she detested how she sounded like a sappy, needy little kid.

  “I did care. I just never knew how to do anything about it.” Her mother’s sapphire blue eyes swam. Could a ghost really cry? Zoe wondered. “I know it’s no excuse, but I wasn’t as old as you when my own parents died in that plane crash. I was sent to Atlanta, to live with my father’s mother, a stiff old harridan who never forgave her son for marrying, as she was always putting it, “beneath him.” If there was one thing she taught me, it was that emotions were messy and must be kept reined in. I don’t want to get into a long tear-drenched therapy session here, but I never really had a chance to learn how to appropriately handle my feelings. Which was partly why I was always messing my life up. With men and with you.”

  Hell. Now she was about to start crying. Zoe swiped the back of her hand beneath her nose. “I’m sorry.” She had to push the apology past the painful lump in her throat. “For what I said about wishing you’d die.”

  “Well, of course. I knew that at the time.”

  “I didn’t … I mean, I couldn’t …” She still couldn’t voice the fear that had wrapped icy tentacles around her heart ever since Mother Superior had called her to the office to tell her that her mother had drowned.

  “Cause my death by wishing?” Liz asked gently.

  Zoe couldn’t answer. She could only bite her lip and nod as tears trailed hotly down her cheeks.

  “Oh, of course not.” Her mother held out her arms that gleamed like porcelain in the starshine streaming through the window. Zoe went into them and as she felt herself folded into the embrace, like a baby bird wrapped in its mother’s wings, a strange peace like nothing she’d ever before felt washed over her. Flowed through her. “That’s not how it works. It was simply my time, darling. You had nothing to do with it.”

  “Mom?”

  “Yes, darling?” Liz brushed the pinkish brown hair off her forehead and pressed a light kiss atop her head.

  Zoe sniffed. Somehow, in a magic way she wasn’t even going to try t
o understand, she accepted that this really was her mother holding her in her arms, just like she’d always wanted to be held. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too, sweetheart. I always have and always will. Forever and always.” She pulled back a little, her smile warming Zoe, melting that last little stubborn bit of ice that had lingered deep down inside her. “Now, you’d best be getting back to sleep.”

  “But—”

  Liz put a perfectly manicured finger against Zoe’s lips. “Don’t worry,” she answered the unspoken concern. “I won’t be going away this time. You might not be able to see me in the future, but I promise I’ll always be there for you.”

  “Really?” Now it was Zoe’s voice that trembled with need.

  “Absolutely.” Her mother kissed her again. Smoothed a hand over her hair. Zoe felt her eyes grow heavy, her body lax as she slid effortlessly back into sleep.

  Liz sighed. Then touched her fingertips to her daughter’s cheek. “You won’t remember me coming here tonight,” she murmured as she removed the memory from Zoe’s mind. “But you will remember that I’ll always love you.”

  Tears sprang to her eyes once again. At first Liz had been surprised that she could cry after death, but it had been explained to her that all the emotions she’d kept bottled up while alive were no longer restrained. In truth, although her heart was aching, as it had been for months as she’d watched Zoe’s struggles, oddly, crying was proving a release of sorts.

  She brushed her lips against her daughter’s smooth young cheek. Then faded away, back into the world where she’d finally found peace.

  19

  KATE SPENT ANOTHER RESTLESS NIGHT, unsuccessfully chasing sleep. She’d thought she’d put worry away when she’d gotten Cadel out of her life and her house, but concerns kept circling endlessly in her mind, like a bit of seaweed caught in an eddy.

  She fretted about Legends Lake. The horse had been born and bred to run; to ban him from doing what he so clearly loved to do could well crush his beautiful spirit. Yet if she and Alec couldn’t break him of his unfortunate tendency to bolt during a race, that’s exactly what would happen.

  She worried about Jamie. He’d seemed to be doing so much better lately, coming out of his self-protective shell, no longer so obviously fearful of life. But she’d seen him casting wistful glances at the MacKenna and knew, not from any gift of telepathy, but merely a mother’s natural instincts, that he was fantasizing how life would be if only the Yank horse trainer were his father.

  All the more reason to avoid temptation, which was proving a great deal easier said than done. Especially since during those short periods of time she did drift off, her dreams were filled with the man. Kate suspected that were she to look up the definition of a “near occasion of sin,” in the catechism from her days at Holy Child School, she’d see Alec MacKenna’s face looking right back at her.

  Of course he’d be wearing that cocky smile, and there’d be that same devilish gleam in his eyes that had undoubtedly coaxed more than his share of women into bed. And his mouth …

  When just the memory of what that mouth had been doing during her hot, erotic night visions made her skin feverish and caused her blood to thicken and pool between her thighs, Kate groaned and pushed herself out of her lonely bed. There’d be no more sleep tonight.

  After dressing quietly in the dark, Kate slipped outside to a dark world draped in a cloak of misty white. She worked in the barn, cleaning out stalls by the faint yellow glow of the electric lantern, and discovered yet something else to fret about. What if the fog lingered and ruined her plans for the day? Alec was right; he was running out of time if he were to have Legends Lake cured, trained, and ready to race in the American Derby. Now that she’d given him the answer as to why Legends Lake bolted, what if he put the horse onto that jet plane and took him back home?

  “Where you knew all along he’d be going,” she reminded herself firmly. “No matter what might happen between you.”

  By the time a rosy glow arose over the peaks of the eastern mountains, the morning fog was starting to lift. Kate decided to take it as an omen that the rest of their day would go well.

  “Don’t we have a treat for you this morning, darling boy,” she crooned to Legends Lake, who returned her greeting with a whinny. She stroked his long face, scratched behind his pricked ear. He returned the affection by nibbling on her shoulder. “Shall we take you down to run on the beach, the way you did when you were a baby?”

  She often ran her yearlings on the strand, as her father had before her, and his father before him, because the exercise was good for building muscle. Kate did not think it was mere good fortune that for as long as anyone could remember, no horse bred and trained here for its first year had ever broken a leg.

  “Just remember,” she said, as she began to saddle the colt, “neither Alec nor I would ever do anything to hurt you.”

  “I sure as hell hope he can understand that.”

  Kate turned to glance over her shoulder, her smile dying half-born as all the air left her lungs in one giant whoosh. She’d felt this way before, the first time she’d had the wind knocked out of her after falling off Finnegans Wake when she was no more than four years old. She could still remember lying on her back in high meadow grass, convinced she was going to die, and the way her da, kneeling beside her, had taken her childish hands in both of his strong large ones and assured her she wouldn’t be leaving them anytime soon.

  “I’d be wishing the same thing,” she managed to say over the pounding of her heart.

  Fragrant steam rose from the mug he was carrying. “I still don’t know why you can’t just boil up some eye of newt and cast us a fire exorcism spell.”

  “I told you—”

  “Yeah, I know, you don’t do spells.” He entered the stall with her, plucked the bridle from her hand and shoved the mug into it, then slipped the bridle over Legends Lake’s head.

  She sipped the tea, which no man before Alec had ever brewed for her, watching as he finished saddling the horse, who was in his laid back, half-asleep mode that could prove so deceptive.

  “And far be it from me to call you a liar, sweetheart,” he said. “But I’m not sure I believe that, since I’ve definitely been feeling spellbound lately.”

  Despite her need for some distancing in their relationship, Kate simply could not be this close to him without touching. She reached up a hand to his cheek. He hadn’t bothered to shave and as her fingertips scratched against his face, she fantasized the scrape of that dark, sexy morning beard against her breasts and felt something warm and delicious flowing through her veins.

  “Would you be suggesting that I’d be needing magic to appeal to you?”

  “Hell, no.” He took hold of her hand by the wrist. His fingers were dark and long and easily spanned her bones. When he lifted her hand to his lips and, with his eyes on hers, began kissing the tips of her fingers, one at a time, her thoughts began to swim. “If I actually believed the effect you’re having on me was magic, it might be easier to ignore.”

  She was melting. Bone by bone. Cell by cell. Kate tugged her hand free. “I shouldn’t have done that. Touched you in such a way,” she responded to his arched brow.

  “Sugar, if you haven’t figured out that you’re free to touch me anywhere, anytime you want, then you’re not nearly as clairvoyant as you claim to be.”

  “It’s wrong of me.” She pretended a sudden, intense interest in one of the barn cats—a huge, obviously well-fed orange tabby who was taking a bath in a small pool of stuttering sunlight. “All these mixed messages I keep giving you.”

  “Don’t worry.” He tipped a finger beneath her chin and turned her gaze back to his. “I’ll sort them out.”

  He dipped his head and touched his mouth to hers. Unlike his earlier kisses, which had felt like lightning bolts striking from out of a clear blue summer sky, this kiss was infinitely gentler. Softer. But unmistakably seductive.

  Her lips yielded beneath his.
Parted. His tongue dipped in, teasing hers into a sensual dance. Desire rose, slow and smooth as silk. Her mind began to float and her body felt as light as one of the bright helium-filled balloons Mrs. Monoghan down at the mercantile gave Brigid each and every shopping day. If she hadn’t spent several childhood years trying unsuccessfully to levitate, Kate might have believed that they were floating several inches above the fragrant straw.

  “We’d better get going.” He nipped at her bottom lip. “Before I forget my vow to behave like a gentleman. Especially since Zoe could come looking for me and it wouldn’t set a real good example if she discovered me tumbling you in the hayloft.”

  Kate knew she was in serious trouble when the idea of being tumbled in the loft sounded absolutely grand. “Would Zoe be coming with us, then?”

  “Yeah. The munchkins are coming, as well.”

  “Munchkins?”

  “Little people. It’s how Zoe thinks of your kids.”

  Kate smiled at that. “She’s beginning to fit in.”

  “Yeah. Which worries me about what’s going to happen when it’s time for us to go back home.”

  Kate didn’t want to think about Alec returning to America. Not now. Not while she could still taste his kiss on her lips.

  “Well, won’t we have to make sure she takes home many happy memories?”

  Kate’s plan, as she’d explained it to Alec, called for them to run another series of races, but this time on the beach, where there’d be less chance of Legends Lake getting injured by leaping a fence, or stumbling in a foxhole while tearing wildly across the rocky meadow adjacent to the turf track. She’d rung up the same group of men, who arrived with their horses, looking even less eager to participate in the mock event than they had the first time.

  The fog, which had been as thick as soup when he’d first walked out to the barn, was burning off as the west awoke to the first rays of the sun. A bit of vapor still floated in the salt air like silent ghosts and curled around the horses’ fetlocks like wispy gray ribbons. The white sands still held a strange glimmer of moonlight.