Adelaide, the Enchantress

by Kay Hooper

  I have to watch her race. I have to love her.

  He heard the second race announced, but dimly. Dimly. He had to love her. There was no choice. He had known all along, but wouldn’t let himself see it. Had known that that other fearful pain could never hurt him more than it did now, because he had already given her the power to hurt him.

  The muffled thunder of hooves reached him then, and Shane tensed, his entire body straining toward the race. He listened, his mind following every stride, his heart pounding in sick dread for a small figure in colorful silks.

  After an eternity it was over, and he felt the shakiness of relief when she was named winner again. Safe. She was safe. He only then became aware of Sydney’s quiet presence by his side.

  She was neat and serenely lovely, only a smudge of brown marring her left cheekbone. There were rubber gloves in her hand, and she was looking up at him with compassion in the deep gold eyes.

  “You hate it, don’t you?” The slow, musical voice, oddly gentle now.

  Somewhat to his surprise, Shane found it easy to confide in this tranquil sister of Addie’s. “I hate it. I’m afraid for her.”

  “She has to do this. She wouldn’t if she didn’t have to.”

  “I know.” He sighed, feeling the inner tremors gradually fade away, leaving him with the memory that he had been hurt—but only a hazy conception of the tearing pain.

  After a long moment Sydney spoke very softly. “Addie can’t bear seeing anything or anyone in pain. It’s the chink in her armor. She doesn’t show it much, but it tears her up inside.”

  He looked swiftly at Sydney, but found her gazing at Addie as the middle sister ran toward them.

  She reached them, breathless and flushed, having changed from her silks in record time. “Oh, damn, we’ve got to hurry!” she panted.

  “Manda’s in place,” Sydney told her calmly. “And the other truck’s parked just out of sight of the gates. We’ll make it.”

  Addie stood on tiptoe to kiss Shane swiftly, responding to his instant hug with that surprising strength of hers. “Wish us luck,” she said, then raced off with Sydney.

  Shane stood gazing after them for a long moment. It had taken her sister to tell him something he should have known for himself, seen for himself, and that both shamed and humbled him.

  She had made no fuss over his obvious fear and pain, and had rode her races with the concentration she needed. But deep inside her, where no one could look on it, his pain was ripping her apart.

  He had known she hurt, but he hadn’t known how much.

  Chapter 5

  “Get his hock, Sydney; there’s a big white patch.”

  “Why do I have the end that kicks?” Sydney asked in exasperation, stepping back hastily when Resolute lifted a rear leg in an annoyed and threatening manner.

  “Because he’s calmer when I’m at his head.” Addie worked quickly with the liquid dye, altering her lovely gray horse into a muddy brown one. Resolute, offended as one would be whose bloodlines could be traced back to the origins of his kind, snorted and sidled and threatened to kick Sydney, whom he normally tolerated.

  But at last the job was done and Addie and Sydney dashed out of the stall, leaving behind a Resolute who was wet, brown, and unhappy.

  “Shane? How’re you coming?” Addie asked, crossing the hall to the washing area, where another horse was having its color changed—this one from brown to gray.

  “Well, the brown dye comes off,” Shane said, briskly hosing down the patient horse and watching rivers of dirty-looking water flow into the drain. “How about you two?”

  “Resolute is brown,” Addie said, then paused as the distant sound of laughter reached them, along with the alarmed squawking of the public address system. “And I can hear Manda doing her part to divert attention.”

  They had been lucky that the barn housing Resolute was virtually empty. Two other stables near the far end held horses, but neither was racing today and their grooms, like everyone else in the stable area, had rushed out to watch the ludicrous spectacle of a dozen five- to six-feet-tall emus, each weighing about a hundred and twenty pounds, racing about on the track while they held up the start of the sixth race.

  “Now I know why you wanted the truck to look like an ambulance,” Shane said dryly. “So no one would notice it parked near the track.” He shook his head, concentrating on washing brown dye off a rear leg to reveal the horse’s true gray color. “But where on earth did she get the emus?”

  “You probably don’t want to know,” Addie reflected. “I don’t want to know. We’ve got only a few minutes left, Shane. I told the guard at the gate I was just bringing in the horse to tighten a shoe.”

  “And he swallowed that?”

  “Well, I’ve done it before. My equipment’s usually here, and he knows me. But he’ll check, of course, to make sure I’m taking a brown horse back out.”

  “I’m almost done. Is Resolute dry?”

  “It shouldn’t matter; the trailer’s dim inside.”

  He nodded, then glanced out the small window in the washing area and started laughing. He could see the track clearly from this angle and the craziness going on out there was hilarious.

  “What’s she doing?” Sydney asked rather anxiously.

  “It looks,” Shane said, “as if she’s getting men organized in lines to drive the birds back into the truck. And it isn’t working.”

  “I hope she remembered to wear gloves from the moment she got the truck,” Addie murmured, using a scraper on the gray horse to squeeze water out of his coat.

  “Who’ll take the birds back?” Shane asked, kneeling to dry the forelegs of Resolute’s double.

  “Somebody official, I imagine,” Sydney answered dryly.

  Addie stood back a few moments later, gazing critically at the horse. Reasonably dry now, he looked remarkably like Resolute. But his eye was calmer, almost lazy, and one glance at his teeth would have told anyone who knew anything about horses that he was older than Resolute.

  “He’ll do,” Shane said, also stepping back to study the horse.

  “Unless Tate gets a good look at him.” Addie’s tone was absent. “Otherwise, we’re safe, I think. None of the grooms or trainers have been close to him.”

  Shane nodded. “And it’s well known that you exercise Resolute at odd hours, so nobody’ll expect to see him worked in the mornings. But you’ll have to hustle to exercise him without being seen now.”

  Addie nodded in agreement. Resolute would be stabled after today in a barn no longer in use near another of the Melbourne tracks, and she’d have to go over before dawn every morning to work him without being seen. She had deliberately chosen that track, however, not only because of the deserted barn, but also because two gray horses were stabled and worked at that track. So if she were seen, hopefully no one would think twice about it.

  As long as she wasn’t timed, that is.

  While Shane walked the ringer for Resolute in a small circle to dry his coat faster, Addie went to get Resolute, who was damp, brown, and irritable, but allowed himself to be led down the hall to the trailer and loaded into it.

  She thought briefly that it was a good thing her stallion’s dependence on his stablemate was slight; Resolute had been moved without Sebastian before, and was reasonable without his little friend as long as the separation was fairly short.

  But Addie forgot the reverse was not true.

  She returned from the trailer to find that Shane had stabled the other horse and closed the door, and Sydney’s amused gesture brought home to Addie that they’d left one tiny consideration out of their calculations.

  Sebastian.

  It took only one curious nudge from the gray horse whose name was, oddly enough, Ringer—they’d have to avoid using that name, for certain—for the koala to know that this was not his friend. Ears flattened in annoyance, Sebastian climbed down from his perch on the door and began waddling down the hall toward the trailer.

  “Oh, no,�
�� Addie said blankly.

  Shane followed the gaze of the two sisters and grimaced. “Damn. Forgot that, didn’t we?”

  Addie went to retrieve her pet, talking to him in a definitely coaxing tone as she carried him back to the stable. But Sebastian clung to her neck and stubbornly refused to be transferred to his post.

  Shane returned to the washing area to peer out the window. “They’re beginning to drive the birds off the track,” he reported. “And some of the grooms are coming back. We don’t have much time left.” He strode back to Addie. “Come on, give him to me. I’ll see if I can convince him. And if I can’t, I’ll still be here holding him when you get back.”

  Worried, very conscious of time running out, Addie accepted his help. She was pleased to see Sebastian reach for Shane without waiting to be handed over, and caught a look of surprise on Sydney’s face as the koala hung on to the man.

  “We’ll be back as soon as we can,” she told Shane, then hurried toward the trailer with her sister.

  “I’ve never seen Sebastian take to anyone but you,” Sydney said to her sister.

  “He loves Shane, even if Shane doesn’t realize it.”

  “Maybe,” Sydney suggested, “Sebastian loves Shane because you love him.”

  Addie didn’t bother with a denial. “Maybe he does.”

  Jacto materialized out of the shadows at the trailer. “Surely he does.”

  Addie laughed a little as all three climbed into the truck hitched to the trailer. “Do I wear my heart on my sleeve?”

  “Yes,” her sister and Jacto answered at once.

  Not at all dismayed by the news, Addie merely grinned at her companions and drove the truck toward the gates.

  —

  When Addie and Sydney returned to the track sometime later, it was to find Manda seated on a bale of hay near Ringer’s stable, chin in hand. Amused, she was watching Shane still trying to convince Sebastian to accept his new stablemate.

  “You furry freak of nature,” Shane was saying in a gentle, persuasive tone. “One horse is just like another. Sit on the door, you misbegotten excuse for a bear.”

  Nose to nose, brown eyes stared into green, neither pair giving an inch. Addie and Sydney stood watching, a grin on the middle sister’s face and a smile on the elder’s.

  “Sebastian,” Shane went on kindly, “you’re the most absurd-looking creature I’ve ever seen. If I took you home to Kentucky, all our horses would run from you in terror. This is a nice horse, a friendly horse. Sit on the door, you tailless, shaggy beast, or you’ll ruin all our plans. And you won’t get any more eucalyptus,” he added in an inspired tone.

  Whether Sebastian understood the threat or simply decided to give in, no one would ever know. In any event, he released a peculiarly human sigh of long suffering and reached for the post near Shane. As Shane helped in the transfer, the koala settled his round bottom on the top of the half door and pointedly turned his face away from the curious horse in the stable.

  Hearing the gentle salute of applause, Shane turned in surprise to find he had an audience. More self-conscious than embarrassed, he managed a faint grin. “Well. With any luck, he’ll stay there.”

  “If not, you can charm him again,” Addie said, smiling at him.

  Shane was startled. “That’s your bailiwick. I just talked to him man-to-man.”

  “Of course you did.” She looked at her younger sister. “Any problems?”

  “Not a one.” Manda grinned. “I think they’re debating now about where to take the emus, but the sixth race was run.”

  “Then when Tully gets here, we can go….”

  —

  The groom Addie had hired showed up promptly when expected, and they left him feeding Ringer and bemusedly trying to make friends with Sebastian. The young man was not just a groom, Addie had explained to her henchmen, but also moonlighted as a security guard—his muscular build testifying to his ability to deal with anyone bent on making mischief. Confident of his abilities, they left him watching over their trap with clear minds and returned to the hotel in Melbourne. It was late, and neither Sydney nor Manda chose to leave on their long return trips until morning.

  Escorted to dinner by three lovely and charming women, Shane managed somehow to keep up with those lively minds without being overwhelmed by the force of them. Still, by the time he went to his room late that night, he was thanking the fates that there was only one Delaney woman bent on marking him with her own particular brand of magic.

  Three of them, he mused, could start a war. Or stop one. Three of them could make a king forget his crown, or a sheikh his harem.

  Heaven knew that just one of them had wrapped his heart in invisible threads he couldn’t break even to save himself pain….

  —

  Thursday and Friday were frantically busy days in which nothing unexpected happened. No attempt was made on the horse that everyone at the track seemed to have accepted as Resolute. Shane and Addie were at the track at dawn and remained after sundown, one of them always near the stable.

  Addie did blacksmith work on a dozen horses and rode eight races with three wins; she was tired both evenings, but never so weary that Shane’s passion found less than a complete response.

  She watched him often during those days, knowing he was struggling, knowing that each race hurt him. If he had meant less to her, she would have ended things between them to spare him further pain. But because he meant so much, she had to go on hurting him.

  Her mind told her it was a selfish decision, that no one had the right to hurt another. But her instincts urged patience, and her heart told her that what they had was worth the pain of them both.

  And it was pain. To see him walk away from her each night with longing tugging at them both. To see his face after a race, so still and set, the green eyes dark with torment. He tried not to let her see, but Addie did. And sometimes she hurt so much that her desperate determination to race wavered.

  If she could only go on until the Cup…then it would be over. One way or another, it would be over.

  —

  “Tate took three of their horses to Sydney yesterday for the weekend races.”

  Addie looked at Shane, understanding what he was telling her. “And nobody’s tried to hurt Resolute.”

  “Who else has a motive, Addie?” They were standing at the mouth of the barn hall, listening to the end of the sixth race of the day—the only one she hadn’t ridden in. Shane was leaning back against the wall; he didn’t look at her and his voice was steady.

  “If Resolute were…eliminated, you know Nightshade would be the favorite for the Cup. You’ve already beaten their horse once, and not by a slender margin. If Tate wants a winner, he’ll have to get Resolute out of the way.”

  “Not like that.” Addie shook her head, unwilling to believe such a thing of her childhood friend. “It would be a—a hollow victory. He’d know Nightshade wasn’t the better horse. He wouldn’t want to win that way, Shane.”

  Shane turned finally, his shoulder against the building, and gazed down at her. “I think our ringer’s safe for the weekend, Addie. I don’t think anyone will try to get to him—Tate’s in Sydney.”

  “You don’t know him,” she retorted, hearing the stiffness in her voice, conscious only of the weary sadness of fearing that an old friend would hurt her for the sake of a race.

  “No, I don’t, dammit,” Shane said shortly. “But I know he’s a man on the rack, an angry, bitter man who loves you and hates you and has to go through you to win that damn race!”

  Addie stepped back away from him, shaking her head almost unconsciously. For the first time, it was too much, just too much, and she couldn’t take any more. She was tired and tense and worried, and she was hurting Shane, hurting Tate…hurting herself. She didn’t want to hurt anyone. All her defenses were down, and he was pushing again, pushing her to believe something she didn’t want to believe. And he didn’t seem to understand she just wanted him to hold her and tell her sh
e could do what she had to do, because she didn’t believe in herself anymore.

  “Don’t…do this,” she whispered, his face blurring because hot, aching tears were rising in her eyes. “If he isn’t what I think he is, then maybe you aren’t either.”

  Shane pulled her into his arms, his face white. “I’m sorry. Addie, I’m sorry.” He held her tightly, his cheek resting on her silky hair, feeling her weariness, hearing in her shaken voice the grieving bewilderment of a child whose illusions were crumbling. His own voice was unsteady and his heart beat with the slow heaviness of remorse. He had hurt her.

  “Don’t cry, darling. And don’t listen to me. I’m a jealous fool: you know Tate better than I do.”

  Her voice was muffled against his chest. “Shane, he let me ride his pony when I didn’t have one. Let me help exercise their horses when I was sixteen. He was like my brother for so long, before everything changed. I couldn’t feel what he wanted me to feel—but he wouldn’t hurt me for that. He wouldn’t hurt me to win a race.”

  “All right.” Shane framed her face in warm hands, turning it up for his gentle kiss. “All right, sweetheart.” His thumbs brushed away her last tears. “I never wanted to make you cry. I just wanted you to go away with me this weekend, and I thought…”

  “You thought that if it seemed obvious Tate was behind the trouble, I could leave our trap because he wasn’t around?”

  “Yes.” Shane’s eyes were dark, restless.

  She met his flickering gaze, and something in her heated abruptly with awareness. She thought this might be her last chance, thought that if Shane took her away from the track and horses and problems, his fear of her racing wouldn’t be able to stand between them.

  “You aren’t racing again until Monday,” he said huskily, having long ago memorized her schedule. “We could leave tomorrow morning after you exercise Resolute, then come back on Sunday.” His thumbs were moving compulsively, shaping her cheekbones. “There’s a place I’ve heard about, a peaceful and beautiful place. I want to take you there, Addie. I want us to be together for a couple of days, with no hectic schedule. No talk of horses or racing or problems.”