“Will I live?” I asked.
“Most definitely. Both eyes respond to the light equally, so it doesn’t look like you have a concussion. I would still prefer you see a doctor this morning. We can be at the hospital in Galena in twenty minutes.”
I had a feeling he would nag me to death until I agreed to something. “A doctor but no emergency room.” I’d had enough of hospitals before my mother died.
“Doc Haggerty won’t be in until eight.”
Which was probably two hours away. “It’ll take me that long to get ready to go.”
Damian flicked an eyebrow at me. “I see you believe in the art of compromise.”
“Survival instinct,” I said, laughing, then regretting it when my head began to throb.
“Did some survival instinct bring you downstairs in the middle of the night?”
I thought quickly for a way to excuse my being out of my room. “I was heading for the kitchen to get that dessert I missed at dinner.”
His look grew penetrating, as if he could get inside me. Because he didn’t believe me?
“I can get dessert for you now.”
“Thanks, but no. The moment has passed.”
“So what happened exactly.”
Exactly? I didn’t really know. Someone had been behind me, had pushed me…but for all I knew, it could have been Damian. Not that I really believed it. Still, I wasn’t going to tell him anything more than I had to. Even if he was guilty of nothing, he was my employer, and if he knew what I was up to, he would undoubtedly fire me pronto and send me packing.
“It was dark. I didn’t see the rug.” I had a hard time lying, so I stuck to the truth as closely as I could. “I tripped.” All true.
My story sounded good. So why didn’t Damian look convinced? Warmth flushed my cheeks, but I held his gaze waiting for the questioning to continue. In the end he nodded and held out a hand.
“Let’s see how you feel when you stand up.”
I set down the cold pack. Not wanting renewed physical contact, I used both hands on the arms of the chair. I stood on my own and turned my head slowly to see if the room would spin with it. My equilibrium seemed just fine.
“No dizziness.”
“Let’s get you to your room, then.” Damian held out his arm. “Hang on to me.”
He gave me no choice. As much as I didn’t want to, I felt it was simpler to hook my hand around his arm. I tried not to think about it, but the touch of his bare flesh got to me. The warmth spread along my fingers and down my arm and continued on until it reached my bare toes.
I took an unsteady step and fell against Damian. Suddenly his arms were around me again, and his face was so close to mine that his breath laved my cheek. Self-consciously looking into his eyes, I saw heat there that warmed me through. His lips parted…drew closer… stopped within a fraction of mine.
“Are you all right?”
The words sounded a bit choked. Just the way I felt. I felt other things, too. Beneath the soft nightgown, my nipples tightened and the heat of his body pierced me. For a moment all I could think about was his body tangled with mine in a rhythm that would bring me to the brink of madness.
I pushed against the idea, pushed against him physically so that I could breathe again. “I’m steady now.”
“Good,” he growled, not sounding at all pleased.
Perhaps he’d had like thoughts of kissing me, touching me, taking me…. Thankfully he put them aside somehow and became all business as he led me out of the library. He took it slow, especially on the staircase—torture—and I was relieved to reach my room.
“I want you to lie down. Just take it easy for a while. I’ll get an ice pack for your head and leave a message with the doc. Maybe we can get you in before hours.”
The moment I closed the door between us, I heaved a sigh of relief. It was hard to think straight with Damian so close. Quickly I changed into a pair of navy pants and a blue shirt. The nightgown made me too vulnerable in his presence. I fetched the printout from my pocket and hid it in one of my cases, after which I made the bed. By then my head was throbbing like mad, so I crawled on top of the covers.
A moment later there was a knock at my door.
Damian….
Hoping I seemed composed, I said, “Come in.”
But it wasn’t Damian who entered. Her expression disapproving as it always seemed to be when she looked my way, Mrs. Avery marched into the room and presented me with an ice pack.
“Mr. Damian said you needed this for your head.”
Hoping she would just leave, I took the ice pack from her and said, “Thank you.”
“Humph. You wouldn’t be putting people in this house to such trouble if only you would stay put at night.”
“I’m sorry if you feel inconvenienced.”
“You’ll be sorrier if you don’t keep your nose where it belongs.”
Was that a threat?
Before I could ask, Mrs. Avery was in the hall closing my door.
That sure sounded like a threat.
I put the ice pack to my head and winced. But the pain only distracted me from my dark thoughts for a moment.
Had Mrs. Avery heard me leave my room and followed me? Had I indeed been pushed and was she the one who’d done it? I knew she didn’t like me, but what reason would she have to harm me?
Unless…
Impossible. She couldn’t know who I was or what I was doing here…
Could she?
Chapter Seven
To both my disappointment and my relief, Damian didn’t take me to see Doc Haggerty, who checked me out thoroughly and sent me on my way with instructions to turn on a light the next time I decided to take a nighttime stroll.
As if he were trying to avoid me, Damian had passed on the honor of escorting me to town to his brother. At least I wasn’t on edge the whole time. Alex Graylord was charming and flirtatious as always—the exact opposite of his brooding older brother.
“We should do this more often,” Alex said as we left the first-floor office in the doctor’s house, a big place at the edge of Savanna.
“What? Have me smack my head so you can drive me to see a doctor to make sure I didn’t scramble my brains?”
Alex laughed and opened the car door for me. “Not exactly. I was talking about spending some time together, away from that place.”
That place…is that how he thought of Graylord Pastures, like it was something he wanted to avoid?
Alex was certainly handsome as sin, and charming—definitely the easier of the brothers to be around—but I didn’t want to give him any ideas about my being available. The last thing I needed at the moment was romance of any sort.
I said, “I haven’t even settled in yet.”
“No reason you need to settle,” he countered. “It’ll be time to pack up and go back to Chicago before you know.”
“A lot can happen in ten weeks.” Hopefully that was enough time to find out what had happened to Dawn.
“True,” Alex said, starting the engine. “But you might as well make the experience as painless for yourself as possible.”
He kept his voice light but I felt his tension. Unless I was reading him wrong, he wasn’t finding it painless to work for the family business. Then why didn’t he simply leave, or at least work at something else that would make him happier?
Not wanting to lose my big opportunity to get some information out of Alex, I changed the conversation, fast. “I think I’ve upset your brother.”
“Not hard to do. What does devil-boy have himself in a twist over now?”
“This is kind of weird…but the other night when I went for that walk down to the bluffs, I saw a gray horse. Damian insisted that was impossible.”
“A gray horse? By the bluffs?”
Realizing Alex’s tone had changed, I delved right in. “He told me a horse had died there. No details.”
“It was a real tragedy in more ways than one.”
“I don’t
understand.”
“Centaur’s death may have spelled the death of Graylord Pastures. Actually, the real cause is financial distress, this being one more nail in the financial coffin.”
“Surely Centaur was insured.”
“Was being the operative word. Priscilla never got around to paying that last and all-important premium.”
The words “How irresponsible” were out of my mouth before I could contain them.
Stopped at the last intersection before hitting open road, Alex glanced at me, eyebrows raised. “No kidding. Priscilla bought Centaur in the first place, not caring his purchase tanked the budget. She said we would make up the inflated six-figure price in stud fees.”
“But the stallion died before you could recoup.”
“Damian wasn’t going to keep him long enough to find out. He had him on the market…not that anyone was jumping to shell out a quarter of a million in this economy.”
“Couldn’t you have waited awhile?” I asked.
Alex shook his head. “The farm had suffered too much bad luck, and the books were already looking shabby. The past year has been unbelievable. A barn burned, tractor breakdowns, a downed fence and valuable animals on the loose…then, even though the horses were all right, losing a top client…all combined to put the farm in the red.”
A horn blaring behind us jerked Alex out of his explanation. He put the car in motion, and it took off from the crossroad with a squeal of tires.
“It must be very hard to keep a business going these days.”
“I suggested Damian think about selling before there was nothing left to sell, but as usual he ignored me. My brother won’t leave the land until they drag him out kicking and screaming.” He muttered, “Now if only we could find the Equine Diamonds, everyone could be happy.”
“Equine Diamonds?” I echoed.
“Legendary gemstones—the prize for a match race. This was back in the 1890s. An ancestor bet the farm against a bag of diamonds, that her horse was faster than that of her chief competitor. Her horse won.”
“And the diamonds?”
“Lost. Great-great-great-grandma Anna hid them someplace for safekeeping, because she never sold them. When she died, she left them to her sons in her will but didn’t reveal the hidey-hole. Maybe she thought looking for a purple velvet bag filled with uncut diamonds worth only-God-knows-how-much would keep them here forever.”
“If the diamonds even existed in the first place.”
“They did exist. There are newspaper accounts of the match race and the prize.”
An interesting tale, possibly no more. The dead horse was all too real. I circled back to that topic. “So how did Centaur fall to his death?”
“Simple. He was terrified of thunderstorms. One came up in the middle of the night. The stallion freaked and got loose.”
I thought Alex wanted to say more, but he didn’t. “So Centaur headed for the bluffs in a state of panic.”
“Unfortunately for him…and for the business.”
Throughout, Alex had talked about Graylord Pastures in a disconnected way, as if it were an entity of which he had no part. Indeed, from what he’d told me, it seemed Alex would be willing to leave the place, unlike his brother.
Was Damian such a strong personality that he would make his brother feel left out? Or was that a foolish question?
“Where exactly did Centaur fall to his death?” I asked.
“Right where you come out of the woods, opposite the clearing.”
My mind raced as I looked in that general direction—we were less than a mile from the entrance to Graylord Pastures. “So close. That’s the very area where I saw him—the gray horse.” And where I’d found Dawn’s hair clip. “Damian joked about my seeing a ghost horse. Maybe he wasn’t so far from the truth.”
I expected Alex to laugh at me the way Damian had at first, only he didn’t. He seemed a bit tense and changed the subject so fast it made my head spin.
What was it that made both Graylord brothers shy away from the topic?
“I THINK WE SHOULD make this a short morning, considering your head injury and all,” Nissa said halfway through her tutoring session.
“The morning is short enough as it is.” The girl made a face that told me she hadn’t really expected to talk me into it. She was merely testing me. “So what have you found so far?” I asked.
Nissa gave me a brief verbal survey of the horses of the world, then we talked a bit about what attracted her in a horse. I realized she’d absorbed every word when listening to her father and the other men who worked the place. She seemed to know everything there was to know about lineage, conformation and color.
“Chestnuts are my favorite,” Nissa said. “But I like grays next best.”
Chestnuts being a given, considering Wild Cherry was her personal horse.
“Why grays?”
“You don’t see them so much. We have mostly bays around here.”
“Right.” As Damian had informed me, no one in the vicinity had a gray horse.
“We did have a gray.” Nissa sighed, the sound sad. “But he had a terrible death.”
“I’m sure he’s gone to horse heaven.”
“Uh-uh. He’s still around.” She lowered her voice. “Don’t tell Dad I said so—he’d be mad again—but I saw him.”
“Saw?” So I wasn’t the only one who’d seen a gray horse? “When?”
“More than once, at night, looking out of my window.”
“You mean…like a ghost horse?”
“You’re not going to laugh at me, are you?”
I crossed my heart.
“They say when someone is murdered, their spirit stays around until something is done about it. So why not a horse?”
“You think Centaur’s spirit is hanging around to see justice done because his death wasn’t an accident?”
“Maybe.”
The stallion murdered? Was it possible that I had been visited by a ghost horse rather than by the real deal?
DAMIAN STOOD with his shoulder to the porch and watched Chloe with Nissa. He was impressed by the natural warmth she showed the girl—if only her mother had been half as attentive.
Nissa was finally healing. She’d come around with Dawn’s attention, only to sink into another morass of depression and hostility with Dawn gone.
But this time Nissa bounced back quicker than the last. She was animated. Beaming. Sharing some secret with her tutor.
All Chloe’s doing.
He’d thought Chloe Morgan a quiet thing when she’d first arrived, but she’d quickly disavowed him of that notion. She was soft. Softer than Dawn. Light-years softer than Priscilla. But she had a spine, as well, and she stood up for herself. Both were traits he appreciated.
Just as he appreciated the magic she’d worked on his daughter.
He wanted everything for Nissa. She was the one pure thing in his life. She had her whole life ahead of her, and she deserved all the good things that anyone could give her. Things he might not be able to give her now.
Fate could be a heartless bitch. It could take everything as easily as it gave. It could even take Nissa someday….
But he wouldn’t think about that now.
Chloe and Nissa were nearly head-to-head. Suddenly they seemed so serious. Damian frowned.
There was a side to Chloe that still gave him pause. She was up to something. He didn’t know what. She’d been wandering the house in the wee hours of the morning with a weak explanation. Did it have something to do with that damn horse? He needed to keep a closer eye on her. Now was as good a time as any to start.
He crossed to the gazebo. As if she sensed his gaze on the back of her neck, Chloe suddenly turned to him. Her pale gray eyes, the most prominent feature in her heart-shaped face, were opened wide, as if he had startled her.
He could get lost in those eyes….
Damian pulled himself together and looked past Chloe to Nissa, who seemed suddenly intent on her laptop
.
Curious….
“How are you feeling?” he asked Chloe. “Any dizziness? Headache?”
“I’m fine. I thought you would know by now that Doc Haggerty gave me a clean bill of health.”
“Just checking. You’re not planning on riding today, are you? I don’t have the time to go out with you.”
While Chloe looked as if she wanted to say something tart in return, she agreed with him instead. “I thought I’d skip the riding today.”
“Smart thinking.”
“No one ever accused me of being dense.”
He felt the rising tension between them when Nissa said, “Dad, stop picking on Chloe.”
“I’m not picking on her.”
“You’re always telling her stuff that you don’t have to, like she’s a kid or something.”
Wanting to smooth things over quickly, he inclined his head to Chloe. “Sorry if I offended you.”
“You didn’t.” Chloe turned to Nissa. “Your dad is simply concerned.”
“He’s always concerned about something,” she said dramatically. “Usually about me.”
“Now, Freckles, that’s how fathers act with the daughters they love,” Damian informed her.
“All fathers love their daughters.”
“Some don’t love their daughters nearly enough,” Chloe returned. “But you don’t have that problem.”
A weird turn of conversation, making Damian wonder if Chloe had a problem with her own father. “So how is this morning’s lesson going?”
“Nissa is proving to know more about horses than I knew there was to know.” Chloe grinned at the tongue twister. “I said that right. Right?”
“Right.” Damian found his lips lifting in return.
“Da-a-ad, you’re interrupting. Chloe wants us to have a full tutoring session.”
“Oh, excuse me. Just one more minute, I promise.” He looked directly at Chloe when he said, “I won’t be at lunch, so I need to ask this now.”
“Ask what?”
“Nissa is going to a birthday party in Galena this evening, and—”
“You want me to take her?”
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