The Haviland Touch

by Kay Hooper

  Drew’s long, powerful fingers, surprisingly gentle now, were methodically examining her arms and legs for injuries. Spencer gazed up at him and thought that he looked a little pale, but his voice was cool and steady when he replied to Mike.

  “Nothing broken. I think she just had the wind knocked out of her.”

  “I’m fine,” she managed, albeit in a breathless voice, as she struggled to sit up.

  “Easy,” Drew ordered, slipping an arm around her shoulders for support.

  Spencer was glad for his assistance, because the motion of raising up made her head swim for a moment. “I’m fine,” she repeated in a stronger voice, and then couldn’t help but laugh. Beau, pushed back by Drew when the men reached her, kept trying to get his head down to her and was frustrated because Mike was holding the reins and trying to keep the horse away from her.

  “Stay put,” Drew said in a sharp voice, but she ignored that and got to her feet anyway. He rose with her, an arm still around her until he was sure she was steady.

  Though she was honestly grateful for his aid, Spencer didn’t waste any time moving away from him; she couldn’t forget what had happened between them last night. So she stepped toward the horse, reaching out to stroke the velvety nose gently.

  “It’s all right, Beau, it was my fault,” she murmured, taking the reins from Mike’s relaxed grasp. “I threw you off balance, didn’t I, boy?” She looked aside to Mike. “He didn’t hit the fence, did he?”

  Mike shook his head. “No, he went around. Spencer, are you sure you’re all right? The way you hit that fence—”

  Trying to reassure him, she said solemnly, “A forward one and a half out of the saddle. I’d give it a seven-point-six. At least two points off for not keeping my feet together.”

  He gave a short bark of a laugh, unwillingly amused. “And your arms were windmilling, too. Lousy form.”

  Spencer grinned at him. “Next time I’ll try the forward pike position. Will you give me a leg up, please?”

  “Hey, you don’t have to—”

  “Prove anything. I know. It’s Beau I’m thinking about, Mike. I need to take him over a few jumps and then finish with this one, or he’ll think it was his fault I came off.” She kept her gaze determinedly on Mike. Drew wasn’t saying a thing, and even though she was strongly aware of his presence just behind her, the last thing she wanted was to have her self-confidence threatened by his undoubted mockery.

  Mike shook his head, but stepped up to give her a leg into the saddle. Spencer landed lightly and found her stirrups, gathering the reins as she settled into place.

  “Put the bars back where they were,” she said, still avoiding any glance at Drew. She waited for Mike’s resigned nod, then turned the horse away from the jump.

  She admitted honestly to herself that she was still shaken by the fall, and the stinging sensation across the small of her back told her there’d be a bruise there within hours, but Spencer also knew she had three more horses to ride today—and she quite literally couldn’t afford to take time off just because she’d had a tumble. But it would have been much easier, she acknowledged silently, if Drew hadn’t been watching. She knew he was, she could feel it, and it took all her concentration to block out the sensation of his eyes on her.

  He owned horses, but kept none here, and she had the unnerving feeling he’d come here today only because someone—perhaps Tucker, she thought—had told him she was here. Was this how he meant to conduct his cat-and-mouse game? Showing up unexpectedly to remind her of his intentions? How could she cope with that tactic? And how could she keep her mind on her work when her eyes and her thoughts were continually drawn toward him?

  She was too aware of him. Even though he was dressed to blend in here—a black leather jacket over a pale blue shirt and dark slacks—to her he still seemed to stand out vividly from everything around him. Despite ten years and everything that had happened to that eighteen-year-old girl, she still saw him as a man who was larger than life.

  Spencer had to put it all out of her mind, at least for the moment. She rode the chestnut around the ring a couple of times to relax him, noting that Mike had replaced the bars of the jump as she’d asked and that both men had left the ring. Concentrating only on the horse beneath her and the jumps ahead, she put Beau to three low fences in succession, praising him softly when he took them in stride. Two more higher fences were jumped cleanly, and then she turned him smoothly to the jump where she’d fallen.

  This time he was balanced perfectly, and his stride never faltered as he cleared the striped poles with a foot to spare.

  She rode him around the ring a few more times, slowing him gradually. He was in superb condition and hadn’t broken a sweat, but she wanted him completely relaxed when she dismounted. When she finally turned him toward the gate, he was moving in the easy, almost shambling walk of a naturally gifted hunter.

  Drew opened the gate for her. Without looking at him, she said, “Where’s Mike?”

  “He had to leave to make an appointment,” Drew said, cool and calm as usual. “He asked me to tell you that Traveler was running a light fever this morning, and the vet said to leave him stabled for the day.”

  Which meant she had two mounts left to ride today. Spencer nodded in acknowledgment and rode Beau toward one of the dozen spacious barns. She dismounted just inside the wide hallway, and cross-tied the horse to be unsaddled and groomed. Stable hands did that sort of work for some of the trainers, but Spencer preferred to do all the handling herself in order to build a stronger bond with her mounts.

  She knew that Drew had followed her into the hall, and that he was leaning against the jamb of an open stable door as he watched her, but she still refused to look at him. She was afraid to look at him. She felt wary and threatened. Here at this farm, surrounded by horses and the people who worked with them, she was normally relaxed and confident; she counted on this place and her job for a much-needed note of success and triumph in her life. If she lost that, she wasn’t sure she could recover from it.

  He could take it away so easily. With his mockery, his deliberate, cutting smiles, his contempt. Despite her decision after he had gone last night to simply do the best she could and stop pretending, she hadn’t expected Drew to come here at all, much less so soon, and his presence disturbed her deeply.

  “Bartlet said you’d been training for months now,” Drew said suddenly as she carried her saddle past him to the tack room.

  Spencer put the saddle on its stand and picked up a utility tray of brushes, waiting until she walked past him again to say simply, “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  She pulled off her hard hat and riding gloves, setting both aside, then selected a brush and began grooming the big chestnut, vaguely aware that her entire back was now throbbing dully as a result of her fall. Ignoring the protesting twinges of bruised muscles, she brushed Beau in long, sweeping strokes and kept her attention fixed on the horse. “Why am I training? Because it’s the only thing I’m good at. What are you doing here, Drew?”

  “I came to return the emeralds,” he said.

  Spencer moved around to the other side of the horse so that the animal was between them; she couldn’t look over his back and she was glad of that. “Not to me, you didn’t. I sold them, you bought them—they’re yours.” A flicker of motion in the corner of her eye told her Drew had moved as well, obviously to watch her as they talked.

  “A gesture of defiance, sweet?” he asked.

  She paused in her work, one hand resting on Beau’s relaxed shoulder and the other gripping the brush. She heard less mockery than there might have been in his voice, but the milder tone hardly made his question any better. And she couldn’t help but wonder if this, too, was a part of his plan. Did he enjoy needling her? Did he derive some kind of satisfaction from her defensive denials even though he didn’t believe a word she said?

  Spencer’s hesitation was brief. There was no way to convince him he was wrong about her, bu
t she had decided last night never again to accept a role someone else wrapped around her and she clung to that determination even though she knew it left her terribly vulnerable where he was concerned. She began brushing the horse again, and said, “Not at all. The necklace doesn’t belong to me anymore. Period.” Her voice remained calm, and her grooming of the horse was firm and thorough.

  “Not even as a gift?” More mockery this time.

  “No.” Not from you. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have work to do.”

  There was a long silence, and then his voice came very softly. “Don’t dismiss me, Spencer.”

  An alarm bell in her mind jangled warningly at the anger she heard, and she felt a dim surprise at how close to the surface his temper seemed to be. That was new, hardly part of the man she remembered, and it made her even more wary of him. She had the odd notion that from the moment he had touched her last night he had been just a bit out of control—as if some dam had cracked and the pressure of stormy floodwaters was widening the fissure. A fractured dam was dangerous.

  So was a man who was a bit out of control.

  Again she stopped grooming the horse, and this time she turned to face Drew. She met his flinty gaze steadily, and kept her voice calm, consciously trying to avoid anything that would sound like a challenge or provocation of any kind. “I’m sorry if I sounded autocratic. I didn’t mean to. It’s just that I have more than a day’s work ahead of me. Work I’m paid to do.”

  “And you need the money,” he said.

  Spencer could detect no softening of his impassive features, but she hadn’t expected to. “Yes,” she said. “I need the money. I’ve run out of things to sell.” Wishing she’d stopped herself before that last faintly bitter comment, she returned to grooming Beau.

  Drew was silent while she continued with her work, and it wasn’t until she set the brushes aside and started to untie the horse that he finally spoke. “How bad is it?”

  There was no way she was going to tell him that, so she ignored the question totally. “You’d better stand back,” she warned smoothly as she turned Beau toward the stable. “My next pupil isn’t a gentleman.”

  She didn’t look to see if Drew heeded the advice, but stabled the chestnut and then went on down the barn’s wide hall to a stall at the far end. The horse she led out into the hall a moment later was a contrast to the placid Beau in almost every way. Formally named Intrepid Shadow on the papers listing his lengthy pedigree but fondly referred to as That Bloody Devil by all who knew him, the big stallion was pitch-black, rattlesnake mean, and hated everything that breathed with the exception of Spencer—whom he merely disliked.

  He tried to bite her when she snapped the lead rope onto his halter but, inured to his ways, she evaded the wicked teeth and kept a wary eye on him as she led him out into the hall. As usual, he made a spirited attempt to bolt, rearing with a squeal of rage and lashing out with both forelegs, but she was ready for that as well and never lost control of him.

  Spencer had learned a long time ago that in handling horses she could never hope to use physical strength in mastering half a ton of bundled nerves and muscle; what she depended on was quickness, skill and an intuitive understanding of how the equine mind worked. Devil was an angry creature, pure and simple, and to try either to contain that rage or to beat it into submission would have been a bad mistake. She did neither. She simply stayed out of his way when he lashed out, handled him quietly and firmly and clung like a burr to his back once she was in the saddle.

  By the time she had the big black horse cross-tied with relative safety in the hall, he had settled down a bit, but still presented the almost rigid, wild-eyed appearance of an animal on the fine edge of exploding. Drew had taken Spencer’s advice, and was standing some feet away as he watched her begin grooming the horse.

  “Are you out of your mind?” he asked, keeping his voice unusually soft. “That horse is a killer.”

  “Oh, you know him.” She kept her own voice quiet, and her hands were steady as she brushed the glossy ebony neck. “It was never proven that he killed that trainer.”

  “Do you doubt it?”

  “No,” she replied somewhat wryly, very alert to Devil’s tense stillness even as she appeared as relaxed as possible. “I don’t doubt it.”

  “He should have been put down.”

  Spencer began humming softly, interrupting the soothing sound only to speak to Drew. “Maybe. His bloodline’s priceless, and so far none of his foals have inherited his temper. Do you mind not talking for a little while? If I don’t settle him down, he’s going to erupt.”

  Drew forced himself to be silent, even though he badly wanted to swear good and loud. If Spencer had looked fragile beside the rawboned chestnut, the black made her look like a child—and a delicate one at that. One blow from the wicked animal could easily kill her, and it wouldn’t take a fraction of a second for the horse to lash out.

  She was humming, a soft, crooning sound that the stallion responded to with nervous flicks of his ears, her hands steady and relaxed as she groomed him. Drew wanted to yank her away, but he didn’t dare move a step closer, because he knew that the horse hated men above all else and couldn’t bear to have one near him. The white-rimmed eyes were fixed on the nearest man—Drew—now, and contained an almost palpable fury.

  So Drew remained motionless, filled with the icy awareness that he was too far away to reach Spencer if anything were to happen. It was a helpless feeling, and he didn’t like it. He didn’t like anything he’d been feeling since arriving here a couple of hours before. First Bartlet, then Spencer’s sudden fall and now this dangerous horse . . .

  Drew knew Mike Bartlet by reputation—and he was reputed to be nobody’s fool when it came to people. A hardheaded businessman who despised pretense and who could spot a phony across a crowded room, he had talked about Spencer in glowing terms. And not just regarding her expertise with his horses. Clearly, Bartlet had adopted her emotionally; he fretted over her apparent habit of skipping meals, her tendency to work long hours, her willingness to take on horses that other trainers wouldn’t get near, and the strain he thought he saw in her eyes.

  Drew had listened, increasingly disturbed by this picture of a woman he didn’t know. He told himself that Bartlet had been deceived by Spencer, but the assurance held a hollow note. She was here after all, doing a relatively dirty and sweaty kind of work that demanded physical strength and endurance, considerable skill and endless patience. Hardly the sort of job for a spoiled, greedy hothouse flower reluctant to damage so much as a fingernail—especially since Drew knew damned well her earnings here weren’t a fraction of the allowance Allan had given her for years.

  It didn’t jibe, didn’t fit his idea of her.

  Then she had fallen, her slight body appearing terrifyingly fragile as it had catapulted from the big horse and crashed through the fence, and Drew didn’t like to remember the sick feeling in his chest when he had watched that. The relief of finding out she was all right had been supplanted by surprise, because she had reacted to the fall with instant humor and self-blame, wasting no time in easing Bartlet’s worry, soothing the horse and climbing back into the saddle.

  Now she was just a few feet away, handling a deadly stallion that ninety-nine out of a hundred trainers wouldn’t have taken on for any price, and she was doing such a good job that the animal was relaxing visibly, calming, becoming manageable. She even made it look easy, and Drew knew it wasn’t.

  Ten years ago, jilted without warning and left to make what sense he could, Drew had believed he’d figured her out. It had seemed to fit then, his idea of her. And if his conviction had been born in hurt and bitterness, it had still been based on the facts as he had seen them. Now . . . now he wasn’t so sure. And he hated that uncertainty.

  If he was wrong about her, there had to be things he didn’t know—about her and about her motives in running away to marry another man. There had to be a reason she’d done it, and if not greed, then what? L
ove? Had she discovered that she’d loved Reece Cabot? The marriage hadn’t lasted long, and several members of the Cabot family had heavily implied to friends and acquaintances that Reece had misjudged Spencer, foolish boy, and that they’d handled the problem for him.

  A lie to save family pride? Had it been Spencer who had sought a divorce, bailing out of a bad situation and asking for nothing but her freedom?

  Drew wasn’t accustomed to feeling uncertain, and it had a gnawing effect on his temper. Wary of letting Spencer get to him and yet driven to find out for sure if he was right about her, he found himself examining every nuance of her voice and every fleeting expression he saw in her face.

  He had needled her deliberately; she had reacted without either defensive venom or coldness. Her eyes were still unreadable, but he could see the strain as well as Bartlet had. And today there was none of the chin-in-the-air haughtiness that had the power to anger him so. She was subdued but not sulky, impersonal but not chilly. He thought she was wary of him even though there was no visible sign of it, and if she was disturbed by his expressed intention of taking what had been promised to him there was no indication of that, either.

  As he watched her gradually calm the big black horse, Drew admitted to himself that he was the one who was disturbed—by her because she didn’t seem to be what he had believed her to be, and by his own emotions and motives because both were tangled and unsure. The only thing he was absolutely certain of was that he wanted her, and that he intended to have her.

  Even if she was a greedy little bitch.

  THE MAN LOOKED like any other of the dozen or so owners who happened to be at the farm that day. He was casually dressed, and wandered from training ring to training ring intently watching the horses being worked. Everyone who saw him merely assumed that he belonged there, so his presence wasn’t challenged.

  Spencer probably wouldn’t have noticed anything unusual about the watcher even if she’d seen him. She had focused her entire attention on Devil in an attempt to block out her unnerving awareness of Drew, and didn’t notice the man or his covert interest. Drew was watching her too intently to realize that the two of them were under observation. If he had noticed the man at all, he would have been suspicious; with ten years spent in pursuit of antiquities in some very rough areas of the world, Drew had developed a keen sense of potential danger and could usually sense watching eyes.