“I don’t think so,” Sean said. “There he is.”
Annie galloped across the mare’s pasture toward the road. The moonlight glinted off her red coat and Hank’s dark hair.
“He’s bareback!” Sean shouted. “He’ll never stay on!”
“He’s going to beat them to the road if he does,” Mary Anne said. “Come on, Hank!”
Dillon’s truck—or the truck they assumed was Dillon’s—headed for the end of the driveway.
“They’re going to make it out to the road.” Sean sounded frantic. “Jake, faster!”
“I’m going as fast as I dare without lights.”
“Then turn them on,” Mary Anne said. “They must know by now we’re back here.”
Dillon’s brake lights came on. The truck skidded sideways and stopped with its left front wheel hanging out over the culvert under the farm’s driveway. He tried to back up but the wheels spun, then caught. The truck rolled backward.
Jake turned on his headlights as he stopped inches short of Dillon’s rear bumper.
Past Dillon’s truck, Jake’s headlights showed Annie standing foursquare across the gateway, effectively blocking the exit onto the road. Hank stood beside her with his hands on the reins, a big grin on his face.
A second later, the passenger-side door opened. Sarah stumbled out and bolted toward Jake and the others.
“Hey, girl, get back here!” came a voice from inside the truck.
Jake and Sean were in a dead heat for the driver’s door when the passenger door snicked shut.
Mary Anne intercepted Sarah, who was sobbing.
“Out!” Jake pulled on the door handle.
Dillon tried to inch the truck forward as though he planned to drive over the mare. He must have realized that in a collision between his baby truck and a two-thousand-pound mare, the truck could be totaled.
“Let him go!” Sarah cried. “Please, please, just make him leave!”
“I don’t think so,” Sean said as he cracked his knuckles.
“Jake, please, let him go.”
Jake leaned over and tapped on the driver’s-side glass. “I won’t hit you, young man,” he said, “if you roll down your window.”
Nothing happened.
“If you don’t, I’m going to loose my friend here on you and your truck. He’s pretty good at mixed martial arts, and I suspect he’d like to remove a few useful parts of your anatomy. Now!”
Slowly Robbie’s window slid down. Sarah gasped.
Jake leaned on the door so that his face was even with Dillon’s. “If you had managed to leave this property tonight with Sarah in your car, not even your father’s money and a team of lawyers would have protected you. If anything bad had happened to Sarah, however, none of that would have mattered to you, because you would have been dead. Now, you are probably too stupid and too mean to take this to heart the next time you decide to go quail hunting, but I assure you that this particular group will be tracking your every move.”
“You threatening me, old man?” Dillon said. He’d recovered a trace of truculence.
“Absolutely. Even the lady over there knows ways to kill you so that nobody ever looks for your body, much less finds it. Say ‘yessir.’”
A minute, then a sulky “yessir” came from the truck.
“Good. Now, if you’ll wait a moment until we remove our equine gate, you can be on your way.”
Jake popped the side of the truck with the flat of his hand, and stepped away. Annie obligingly moved out of the driveway. The truck gunned its way through, fishtailed as it made the turn onto the roadway and flashed off toward Collierville.
“Nice ride,” Jake said to Hank.
“Give me a leg up,” Hank said. “I’ll ride Annie back to the pasture. I guess I can ride so long as I don’t use stirrups.”
Sean climbed into the bed of the truck while Mary Anne bundled Sarah into the bench seat beside Jake.
“Please don’t take me home,” Sarah sniffled. “Take me back with you.”
Jake patted her knee and drove the truck down the driveway without its lights.
Once they were in the common room, Mary Anne made a mug of cocoa for Sarah, who hunched small on the sofa, hiccuping and shaking. Mickey brought her his comforter and wrapped it around her shoulders.
“Want to talk about it?” Sean asked.
She shook her head. “How did you know?”
“Saw you climbing out of your room,” Sean said. “You coulda broken your fool neck, girl.”
“But...”
“Figured you were meetin’ that boy,” he continued. “Both my girls have pulled stunts like that.”
“What were you thinking?” Mickey snapped. “I showed you everything...”
“But I had to give him a chance to explain, don’t you see? He wasn’t anything like what you told me. It had to be a mistake....”
“Because, if it was true, then you’d made a fool of yourself in front of the adults,” Mary Anne said gently. “Been there, done that. Got the T-shirt. Mine says Big Fool right across the chest.” She looked down. “What little there is of my chest.”
Sarah gave a tiny smile.
“I called him and said I had to see him. He said he’d leave work and drive right out. I mean, that proved he cared about me, you know?” She began to sniffle again. “He said we were just going to sit and talk, not go anywhere.” Her voice rose.
“Then when I started asking him about the stuff Mickey found out, he got mad.” She hunkered down in the comforter. “He called me a trailer-trash army brat who ought to be grateful he even looked at me.” She dropped her head. “He said some other stuff, too, about what he was going to teach me. Do I have to tell you?”
“I’m going to kill him,” Sean said matter-of-factly.
“No, please don’t! I just want to forget it.”
“He deserves an old-fashioned horsewhipping,” Hank said. “And we’ve got plenty of horsewhips.”
“Please, please, just let me sneak back into the house. I’m so grateful to you all, but please don’t tell my mother. She’d never trust me again.”
“Not for a while, at any rate,” Mary Anne said.
“He should be punished,” Jake said. “But since he never left the property, I don’t think there’s anything he can be charged with. Did he touch you, Sarah?”
“No, Jake. Not even when he yelled at me.”
“He was planning to,” Mickey said.
Sarah turned wide eyes on him. “Oh.”
“He’s going to try it again with someone else,” Sean said. “The next girl may not be as lucky.”
“The colonel can alert the sheriff he’s got a possible predator in his jurisdiction,” Jake said. “I don’t see there’s much else we can do officially.”
“Don’t tell Granddaddy, either!” Sarah wailed. “He’s worse than my mother.”
“Sarah, we have to,” Jake said.
“Please, Jake. Please, no. I’ll never do anything like that again. I’ve learned my lesson, I promise. Nothing happened except I got scared.”
“Sarah...”
“Okay, how’s this? Let me tell her. It’s too late tonight. Tomorrow morning I’ll apologize for shouting at her, and right after she’s calmed down, I’ll tell her what happened tonight in my own way.”
Putting as good a face on it as possible, Jake thought. “Everyone?” Nods of agreement.
“I’ll bet we’ve all done worse, even Mary Anne,” Hank said.
“Jake?” Mickey asked. “Sounds fair to me.”
“All right, Sarah, if you promise to tell her yourself first thing tomorrow morning.”
“I promise. Thank you, thank you, Jake, everyone.” She grabbed Mickey in his wheelchair and hugged
him, then hugged each of them in turn, finishing with Jake. She clung to him. After a moment’s hesitation, he hugged her back.
“How on earth am I going to get back in the house without getting caught?”
“How did you plan to do it on your own?” Hank asked.
“I figured I could climb up the drainpipe again, but I don’t think I’m strong enough really. I planned to sneak in the back door, but between the colonel and my mother. If I couldn’t climb in, I was going to sleep on the couch in the common room and tell everyone I’d come out to see Molly and Mama and all the babies.”
“That might have worked,” Jake said. “If Sean hadn’t noticed you.”
“If Sean hadn’t noticed you,” Sean said, “getting back in the house could have been the least of your worries.”
In the end, Hank and Sean lifted her to the porch roof. From there she climbed back into her window, waved at them all and disappeared.
“It’s after midnight,” Sean said when they had reconvened in the common room.
“We did good tonight, didn’t we?” Mary Anne said. “If I can handle this, I can certainly handle a teensy Welsh pony by myself.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
MARY ANNE WAS scheduled to drive Terror after lunch the next day. Charlie was surprised that she actually seemed to be looking forward to her lesson.
Once they were settled and walking figure eights in the arena, Mary Anne said almost tentatively, “Don’t be too hard on Sarah. Not like we haven’t all done that stuff or worse. I mean, who doesn’t fall for one real loser, right?”
“You can say that again,” Charlie said. “Unfortunately, I married mine.”
“Yeah, me, too. Charlie, can Terror and I try a slow trot? Will you take over if he tries to run away?”
“Yes! What made you change your mind?”
Mary Anne shrugged. “The twins. Molly is so gentle with both of them, and I think the foals really like each other. Just like me and my brother.”
“I didn’t know you had a brother.”
“Yep. He’s stationed in Germany at the moment, so he’s not under fire. My mom and dad are both gone, and he raised me. I always liked gears and axles better than I did books, so the army seemed a good fit. I have to find a way to make a living, and I don’t think I’ll be driving carriages. Husband and kids don’t seem to be in my future.”
“I don’t see why not. You’re a lovely woman.”
Mary Anne snorted. “Yeah, right.”
“Any man worth being married to won’t care about the scars, and the colonel says after your surgeries they won’t be noticeable.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it. Terror, trot on. OMEGA!”
When they finished washing Terror down, Charlie said, “You may not be able to make a good living driving carriages, but you can make an excellent one working on carriages and farm equipment. A good tractor mechanic can make a fortune.”
“Nobody’ll hire me.”
“Anyone with good sense would.”
“Thanks, Charlie.”
“Hey, ladies, it’s beer time,” Mickey called from the common room.
He handed Charlie her favorite diet soda as she sank onto the sofa, cushions back in place.
“Jake’s out by the foaling stall watching the twins,” Mickey said. “The rest of us quit early. After last night I could sleep for a week.”
“You didn’t stay up with Mary Anne last night to babysit them, did you?” Charlie asked.
“We were otherwise occupied, weren’t we, guys?”
Mary Anne glared at him.
“What? Sarah’s already told her, right? I mean it’s after lunch. What’d you do to her, Charlie? Ground her till school starts?”
“Put bars on her window, more like,” Hank said. “Good thing she’s skinny. She could have brought down that trellis and broken her neck.”
Charlie had no clue what they were talking about. Hank and Mickey were smirking into their beer bottles. Sean, on the other hand, was watching her as if she were going to explode any second. “Okay, guys, what am I missing?”
Hank and Mickey sobered instantly and refused to meet her eyes.
“She didn’t tell you, did she?” Sean said quietly.
“Sean,” Mary Anne said, and grabbed his arm. “Don’t.”
“She broke her promise, Mary Anne. It’s three in the afternoon. That’s a long time after breakfast. Charlie has a right to know.”
Charlie felt her heart lurch into her throat. “Know what? Sean, what has Sarah done? I saw her at breakfast, and she seemed a little quiet...”
“You brought it up, Sean,” Hank said. “You tell her.”
“I think you better sit down, Charlie,” Sean urged her.
Two minutes into Sean’s speech, Charlie surged to her feet and began to pace. Mary Anne cringed behind the kitchen counter. Hank tried to leave, but Charlie stopped him. Mickey didn’t even attempt escape.
Charlie went from being worried to horrified to enraged to terrified in the short space of five minutes.
After Sean finished, she glared at them.
“What possible excuse could you have for keeping this from me? All of you?”
“Jake said...” Sean started.
“Jake said?” And all her emotions fell away except for rage. How dare he?
She’d trusted him. Just like everyone else. He’d finally made a decision, and it was a doozy.
“We’d all jump off a cliff if Jake said to, wouldn’t we?” she snarled. “That’s his thing. What he’s good at. What he does! What gives any of you the right to decide to keep something this—momentous—from me. I’m Sarah’s mother! This isn’t some little prank! She could have been kidnapped, raped. Robbie Dillon could have killed her!”
“But we stopped him. He didn’t even get to the road,” Mary Anne said, her hands held up in front of her. “And she swore she was going to tell you herself. She promised Jake...”
“She promised Jake? And he made the unilateral decision to let her do it on her own time?”
“We all agreed. She was supposed to tell you first thing this morning.”
Charlie pointedly looked at her watch. “Gee, it’s nearly three. Little late, isn’t it? Actually, we’ve had lunch, haven’t we? I guess she’s not going to keep her promise. Big surprise. You think any kid would willingly tell her mother something like this? Would any of you when you were fourteen? When were you—or should I say Jake—going to decide she’d broken her promise and tell me yourselves?” She glared at each face in turn. They all looked down. “Never? If Mickey and Hank hadn’t let the cat out of the bag?”
She ran her hand across her forehead. “Oh, heck, I shouldn’t blame you. You saved her, while her mother and her grandfather slept the night away in blissful ignorance. After that stunt she pulled last night, how on earth could you trust her to tell me? She knew I’d freak.”
“Jake said...”
“She’s not his kid. Not yours, either.”
“Charlie, that’s not fair.”
“I have reached my limit of being fair and understanding. I want to rant and rave and tear my hair out. I want to love somebody who loves me back.” Where had that come from? They all stared at her as though she’d begun to speak in tongues. Which, in a way, she had.
All right, she loved Jake. So much for keeping a professional distance.
And she was going to kill him.
“You’re right,” came a voice from the doorway. “I warned you I didn’t know anything about teenage girls. It’s not their fault, it’s mine. I took her at her word. Obviously, I was wrong again. I hurt you, Charlie. I won’t chance doing it a second time.”
He turned on his heel and was gone. Charlie stared after him. Would she never learn? I
t wasn’t his fault. It was Sarah’s. And she’d taken it out on these people she cared about and on Jake, whom she loved.
They all heard the farm truck start up and drive away.
“Jake!” Charlie called and ran after him. “I’m sorry!”
The others followed him in time to see Jake slide around the corner and head toward Collierville.
“We have to stop him,” Mary Anne said.
“We can’t,” Sean said. “Too big a head start.”
“Will he come back?” Mickey asked. “He was pretty upset.”
“Of course he will, once he’s over being angry,” Charlie said. “He has to come back.” Because I can’t bear it if he doesn’t. She tried to believe her words, but they came out phony because she didn’t believe them. Worse, he might have lost himself all over again. That was her fault.
“He didn’t leave because you got angry, Charlie,” Sean said to her. “He took a chance, and in his mind, he’s made a mess of things again.”
“I didn’t mean to blame...”
“Doesn’t matter. He thinks you did.” Sean walked out. A moment later they heard Sean’s door slam.
“Oh, who’ll look after the kittens?” Mary Anne said, and ran up the stairs.
Hank and Mickey left Charlie standing there. She sank onto the sofa and buried her face in her hands.
“Mom?”
She looked up as Sarah came haltingly through the door. “I listened. Jake trusted me to tell you this morning. I promised, but I was scared to. Please don’t blame Jake.”
She already had. “You shouldn’t have put any of them in that position, Sarah. And you should have kept your promise.” She was too wrung out to be angry.
“I knew you’d go ballistic when you found out, so I kept putting it off. I’ve been hanging around outside trying to get up my nerve. You must hate me.”
“Oh, Sarah, I love you, baby. I never learned how to show you enough or tell you enough, but I do.” She took both Sarah’s hands. “Always believe that, even if I don’t say the words.”
Taking the Reins Page 20