Ghost Horse
Page 19
Damian was vaguely aware of Chloe going after it, but he didn’t dare look away from his opponent.
As strong and fit as he was, Theo with his broad, muscular body was more so. For every jab Damian delivered, he got one better in return. Theo was a desperate man, and Damian wouldn’t put it past him to fight dirty and do something totally unexpected.
So Damian did it first. He rushed Theo, shoulder leading, and connected with the other man’s chest just below his throat. Theo made a choking sound and they both went flying to the ground.
“Damian!”
Chloe’s cry distracted him for a second—all it took for Theo to roll over and land on his chest and wrap strong fingers around his neck, tight as a vise. Damian’s efforts to loosen the madman’s grip failed.
“Stop it, Theo, or I’ll shoot!” Chloe screamed.
Theo’s effort to strangle him intensified until Damian started to see white jags of light in front of his eyes. A shot rang out and Theo jerked. His grip loosened just for a second, but that was all it took for a gasping Damian to buck with all his strength and unseat the other man. He looked for blood oozing from anywhere, but apparently Chloe had simply shot into the air to startle him.
Theo came at him, and Damian hauled off and shoved the heel of his hand into the man’s nose.
Theo screamed in agony.
Blood spurted everywhere. Clutching his face, he rolled to the side, for the moment threatless.
Gun still in hand, Chloe rushed to Damian. “Are you all right?”
“Now I am,” he said, wanting nothing more than to take her in his arms. “Watch where you put that gun, though.”
“Sorry.” She whipped it away from him.
As he got to his feet, Damian eyed Theo, who was hunched over nursing his nose. Then he checked Chloe over, taking comfort in at least being able to touch her.
“You’re all right?”
She nodded. “Thanks to you.”
He was reaching to take the gun from her when, with a yell, the barn manager flew to his feet and threw his bigger body against Damian’s, jerking him past Chloe. The force was impossible to resist, and, wrapped in the killer’s grasp, Damian stumbled backward.
“Damian, the bluff!” Chloe screamed as the fog met them with its wet kiss. “Sto-o-op!”
But Damian couldn’t stop.
Their bodies cut into the fog, accelerating toward the cliff’s edge. Suddenly Theo stopped, released him and shoved with all his might. Damian went flying backward. He threw out his arms, and by some miracle—and a gust of wind at his back—kept his balance and stopped within inches of falling to his death.
Just then, a horse’s neigh cut across the expanse, the high-pitched sound querulous.
What the hell was a horse doing out here?
Theo didn’t seem to hear. He was focused on Damian. “This is it for you now, Damian! You’re going over if I have to go with you!”
But a lightning strike accompanied by another neigh—this one with a bugling ring—flipped Theo around looking for its source. Damian quickly moved away from the bluff edge toward Chloe even as a puff of fog turned into a gray horse. It reared on hind legs and flashed its hooves at the barn manager.
Recognizing the conformation, the way the mane dipped over the stallion’s forehead, Damian swore softly under his breath. “Centaur…”
“No! It can’t be!” Theo yelled. “You’re dead!”
The stallion’s screeched neigh cut through the fog as it headed straight for Theo, who backed up, misstepped, then flapped his arms to stay balanced.
The gray reared again, and Damian could only hold on to Chloe and watch.
Theo scrambled for footing on solid ground as the gray ghost sideswiped him. The man’s head plunged backward, his body following in a bizarre slow motion dance in midair. For a moment Theo seemed suspended, limbs flashing and twisting as he tried to catch himself.
And then he plummeted backward, headfirst, into the fog….
I GASPED AND HELD my ears against Theo’s scream that stopped only when his body thudded against the rocks below.
Damian held me pressed against him but I was too numb to do more than register that I wasn’t going to die just yet. My heart settled into something akin to a normal rhythm, and I searched the fog for the ghost horse.
When I didn’t see him, I closed my eyes….
There he is, wreathed in tendrils of fog, his gray head turning, his liquid dark eyes searching for someone.
“I’m here,” I say. “I know everything now. And you have your justice.”
The stallion snorts and bobs and I sense another presence slip out of the mists. Her hair is golden and her face is still beautiful and her hands aren’t bloated with death.
This is the way I remember Dawn.
She smiles at me and I feel from her both sadness and more. Hope. I feel hope….
Grabbing the stallion’s mane, she throws herself up onto his back. He snorts and nickers and begins to back up.
“Goodbye, Dawn,” I say, as she raises a hand and waves at me. Then horse and rider dissolve back into the mists….
“Chloe, are you all right?”
I blinked up into Damian’s worried face. The worry was something that I felt more than was able to see in the dark, since the lightning had heralded a steady, driving rain.
“I’m as good as can be expected.” I swallowed hard. “I found Dawn.” Tears began to roll down my cheeks. “She’s dead, Damian, she’s dead.”
Damian held me then, and I sobbed against his chest. Finally I could grieve for my friend who was lost to me forever.
Not forever….
The words formed in my mind and I realized that I still had memories and dreams and perhaps a distant future when I would see her again. For now, at least, Dawn’s spirit was released from being trapped here by her murder. She and Centaur could ride out of the mists and into the sun.
And I could go home to Chicago.
THE ODD THING WAS that Damian didn’t ask me about Dawn. He didn’t ask if or how I knew her. He didn’t ask. He simply listened as I told him about following the horse and finding the entrance to the tunnel and the horror inside.
Then he said we needed to call the authorities and get someone out here to claim the bodies right away. He led me back toward the house, through the woods, the trees protecting us from the rain. He avoided the area where I’d stumbled over Priscilla and I guessed that he had found her body, as well.
We were almost to the house when a series of neighs came from the barns.
“Valentine!” Damian said, suddenly running in that direction.
Sensing his panic—I knew he feared for the pregnant mare—I followed as fast as I could and prayed that everything would be all right. The last thing Damian needed was another disaster on his hands.
When I burst into the barn, he was already standing outside the stall. Tension had oozed out of his body, and he leaned his weight on the door, his attention focused through the opening at what was inside.
My own panic subsided and I joined him to watch Valentine clean the birth sack off the wriggling foal.
“Thank goodness they’re both all right!” I said with a sigh.
The dark thing I’d felt within me all night suddenly lifted from my being. The birth of a live foal…at last something to celebrate rather than to dread. The earth in balance. A life for a death. Or several.
I knew Damian and I would face another ordeal with the authorities. And I with Damian. I had to talk to him, to tell him the truth. He needed to know why I came to Graylord Pastures. And I chose now to tell him, before the authorities got it out of me.
The least I could do was prepare him.
“Damian, there’s something I’ve been keeping from you. Dawn Reed was my foster sister and my best friend,” I said, keeping my eyes focused on the mare and foal. “I knew she would never have eloped and disappeared on me. I came here to find out what happened to her.”
“I se
nsed there was more to you than met the eye.”
He sounded so…neutral. As if he didn’t care one way or the other. I swallowed hard and looked at him, and still I couldn’t tell how he felt about it.
“Yes, well, if you want me to go, I understand.”
“So you want to go?” he countered.
“There’s Nissa to consider.” I prayed he would keep the girl’s needs in mind. That he wouldn’t make me leave at first light. “When she learns that her mother is dead…”
“So Nissa’s your only concern?”
“Aren’t you concerned about how your daughter will react to what’s happened?”
“Of course I am. I’m all Nissa has left.” His jaw tightened, and it took him a moment before adding, “Whatever you decide, I won’t send her away to school.”
What I decide? Did that mean he was leaving the decision to go or stay to me? My spirits lifted a bit. He wasn’t condemning me for keeping that information secret, after all. And he wasn’t abandoning his daughter to someone else’s care.
“That’s good—forgetting about boarding school,” I said. “Nissa is going to need you more than ever.”
“You really care about her.”
“I love her.”
I wanted to say more, but I couldn’t. I looked back into the stall where the foal was struggling to stand. I had experienced death this day, but my night would end with the celebration of a new life.
Suddenly it hit me. “The foal’s coat…it’s pale.”
“Gray, like his sire.”
“Centaur?” Had that been why the foal had waited so long to be born? I wondered. Until his sire was at peace? “Odd how a new life can change one’s outlook on life.”
“Odd,” Damian agreed, turning me to look at him. “Priscilla was pregnant when I married her.”
“Damian, you don’t have to tell me—”
“I think I do. She was pregnant, but not by me.”
I absorbed that information. No wonder Nissa looked nothing like him. She certainly didn’t look like her mother.
“Who, then?” He didn’t answer. Only one name came to mind. “Theo? He couldn’t have known…he would have used it against you.”
“Priscilla did love Nissa in her way. I guess when she left me, she thought her child would be better off with me than with her or with Nissa’s biological father.”
Plus, he’d made it very lucrative for Priscilla to keep quiet, which put a new spin on why he’d paid her off to keep away from her daughter.
“Will you tell Nissa?”
“Never. Not willingly. As far as I’m concerned, Nissa is the child of my heart. She has been since the day she was born. That’s never going to change. I’m the only real parent she’s ever had. I had thought that someday…but she doesn’t need to know that she’s related to a murderer. That might destroy her.”
My heart swelled. I couldn’t love Damian more. My own father had left me because I’d been too much of a burden to him after my mother had died. But Damian had gone to great lengths, nearly bankrupting the estate in the process, to keep the girl he’d chosen to be his daughter. And now he vowed to protect her forever.
Damian cupped my cheek and tilted my face up to his. “Nissa is the only one I’ve ever really loved…until you, Chloe. My heart nearly stopped when I saw you out there near the bluffs with Theo. My daughter needs a woman in her life and I need one in mine. I was hoping that woman would be you.”
In his life…
“You mean you want me to stay?”
“Forever,” he said, kissing me. “I love you, Chloe Morgan. I can’t live without you.”
All my doubts gone, I melted inside and kissed him back with all the fervor in my being.
Forever with Damian might be just long enough.
Epilogue
Burying my best friend was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, but I got through it with Damian and Nissa and Alex at my side. To her credit, though Damian had let her go, Mrs. Avery was there with her nephew. Jack Larson might have been an opportunist, but his appearance told me he’d had some feelings for Dawn.
The week was doubly stressful since we had to deal with the authorities, giving them statements that would help them wrap up the murders. Mrs. Avery helped there, too, corroborating the clandestine affair between Priscilla and Theo. If she knew that Theo was Nissa’s biological father—and I suspected she did—she kept that information to herself. Mrs. Avery was nothing if not loyal. I was glad her nephew took her in.
Slowly, we rebuilt our lives.
When another monetary crisis came up a few weeks later, and Alex muttered, “If only we could find the Equine Diamonds,” the truth hit me.
But before I said anything, I wanted to be certain, so I sought out Nissa in her room.
“I was wondering something,” I said, going straight to the fish tank. “Some of those pieces of gravel are pretty big.” And now that I looked at them, examined their crude shape, my heart began to race. “Where did they come from?”
“The attic,” Nissa said, snuggling next to me and peering into the tank. Though she was still grief stricken over her mother, she’d drawn even closer to me than before. “There’s a great old desk up there. It has all kinds of secret compartments. I found this old purple velvet bag filled with those rocks.”
Rocks?
The Equine Diamonds had been right under our noses all along!
Nissa hadn’t realized their worth because they remained uncut. They didn’t have facets like the stones in her mother’s jewelry box.
My announcement first caused disbelief in Damian and Alex, and then when I produced the proof, celebration.
After selling most of the diamonds, Damian was able to clear the farm of debt and to give his brother enough money to start over wherever he wanted to go. Alex didn’t go far. He bought his own place down the road but chose to continue working at Graylord Pastures, at least for the time being. I figured he was a forever kind of person, also, as long as he had the option to do whatever it was he wanted.
Damian had the largest of the Equine Diamonds cut and mounted in a band of two gold horses. He gave me the stunning engagement ring for my birthday. We’ll be married on Christmas Eve.
For me life turned out better than I ever imagined. Soon I would have a husband and a daughter who both loved me and hopefully another child would soon be on the way. I am truly blessed to know in my heart that I will never again feel abandoned.
When I think of Dawn, as I often do, it is not without sadness, but then I close my eyes and hear her laughter and picture her and Centaur racing through Graylord Pastures….
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