Wondering what she meant by the last, Curran said, “I’ll be keeping that in mind, then. I assume you do have a place for us to stay the night?”
“Yes, of course,” Belle said, finding a smile. “A very comfortable guest house for you, as promised, and cozy quarters for your assistant in the renovated stable that also houses the farm office.”
Curran turned to Ned. “Perhaps you could settle us in?” He wanted to appraise the situation alone.
“Of course.”
“If you just drive around that way,” Belle told Ned, “you’ll come to the guest house, and behind that the stables with your quarters.”
“Good enough.”
Ned hopped behind the wheel even as they all heard further commotion from Finn. Curran quickly took his leave.
Rounding the house, he saw the barn fronted by a round paddock. He stopped in the shadows opposite, so that he could have a look without being seen himself.
A great flash of deep red caught his attention.
Finn, agitated.
The source of the stallion’s irritation had her back to him. Taller than average, she had curvy, childbearing hips, Curran noticed. Her shoulder-length curls of medium brown were struck with gold.
He willed her to turn, to face him, so that he could get the full picture.
But Jane Grantham’s concentration was focused on getting a halter on the stallion. She had no idea that she was being watched.
She and Finn were playing a serious game of advance and retreat, for he was having none of the leathers she offered. Each time she lifted the halter toward his head, Finn would roll his eyes, stomp his hooves and squeal in protest, then dart away from her.
Curran watched intently, noting the woman’s strange gait as she turned with and approached the horse. Perhaps part of the problem, he thought, already analyzing. Finn was in a fragile mental state caused by an accident of some sort. Jane’s odd gait might signal danger and be enough to alarm him further.
Five minutes went by. Ten. And yet she got no closer to her goal.
Fifteen.
Tiring of the futility, Curran was about to announce himself, when the Grantham woman almost had the stallion, the halter creeping inches over his nose. But at the last moment, Finn threw up his head and wheeled around, his powerful shoulder grazing her.
Though the contact appeared minimal, she couldn’t keep her balance and spun to the ground.
Curran flew toward the paddock, hearing her soft cries split the air.
Sobs that gave way to keening.
Not the sound of physical hurt, but something that went deeper. More intimate.
Something that kept him silent.
He drew close enough to see her huddled on the ground, folded in on herself, rocking, crying as though her heart was breaking.
Or perhaps it had already been broken, he mused.
Her soft wail split his chest and curled around his own heart, and for a moment, stole his very breath.
An eye to Finn told him the stallion was equally bothered by her keening. But rather than retreating to a far corner of the paddock as Curran expected him to do, he approached the Grantham woman, though on an oblique angle, nearly walking past before turning to eye her.
That was when Curran got a good look at the horrifying scars that now marred the chestnut’s beauty.
What the hell had happened to him? Curran wondered.
Then Finn did the most amazing thing.
The stallion moved in until his neck hung directly over her curled, shaking body. Dipping his head, the horse snorted in her hair and chewed at it a moment before lifting his head.
Finn stood there, then. Quiet. Unmoving. Protective.
Looking for all the world like an equine bodyguard.
A force vibrated between horse and human so strongly that Curran felt it like a physical blow. He concentrated, psychically eavesdropped, tried to grasp the bond, to make it his own so that he could read it, and for his trouble was plunged into a waking void.
For a moment, the dark consumed him, as did the negative energy that quaked through him with a life of its own.
Fear…hatred…horror…
He felt them all.
But from whom? The horse? Or the woman?
A flash of something solid hurtling toward him through the haze of his mind…
A startled Curran popped back into the moment.
All was the same. Horse and human inexorably connected by some horror he could not yet fathom. He backed off, unwilling to break their bond.
Besides, he needed time alone to gather his thoughts. To figure out what had just happened.
To best decide how to approach not only the stallion, but the woman herself.
TAKING A DEEP BREATH to help her calm down, Jane grew aware of the big, warm body protecting hers.
“Ah, Finn, we make a fine pair, don’t we.”
She reached out to touch one of his scars. Her fingertips barely brushed him. His flesh quivered and he stepped back with a nervous whinny.
She let her hand drop.
“Don’t worry. Enough for today. For both of us.”
Then she had to figure out how to get back up off the ground. Nearly three months since the surgery and still she hadn’t mastered some of the simplest movements that she had once taken for granted.
Awkwardly, she rolled to her good knee, and placing her palms flat against the earth, pushed up and staggered to her feet. Somehow, the ground felt different beneath the left one. The knee didn’t tolerate the dips and rises. So often, she stepped wrong, which could mean agony for hours or even days. Luckily, the fall hadn’t kicked up the pain.
Moving to the fence, she was irritated that her gait had been further affected.
Damn limp! she groused to herself as she grabbed her cane. When would she be free of it?
“Come, Finn, it’s time to go inside,” she murmured.
The stallion rolled his eyes at her and backed up.
Now the cane was spooking him. No doubt its similarity to a length of pipe, she thought. But at the moment, she needed it, so she spoke in low tones and moved in slow motion as she herded him toward the open barn door.
Though he bucked once in protest, his rear hooves never came near her. Had someone else tried this, it would have been a different story—an injury, possibly worse. The stallion was powerful enough to kill. And he was crazed, perhaps permanently. He no longer could differentiate between friend and foe.
Once inside the barn, he had no choices. She had blockaded the area so that he could only go directly into his own stall without passing the few mares still stabled there. She had actually moved half of them to another barn so as to cause the least amount of disturbance.
Whatever it took, she thought. Anything, anything, to restore him to Finn mac Cumhail, to his former self. If not, all was lost.
Him.
Grantham Acres.
Herself.
Then, again, perhaps it was too late for her…or for any of them.
Setting fresh oats in his feeder, she crooned, “Come, Finn. Come to me and be my lad.”
He’d obviously had enough of human company, even hers, for he turned his back on her and shoved a nose in the corner, where he lipped at some invisible treat on the wood.
Jane’s mood darkened.
She wasn’t making any headway with the stallion, and she was the only human he would even tolerate. That brutal night had, in some strange way, bonded Finn to her. Only she could enter his stall or feed him or groom him, though at times he made that impossible, too. His trust was limited by the fear that lay just below the surface, always ready to explode. At least one trainer whom she’d gotten to work with Finn had taken his life in his hands—Finn had cornered him and threatened him with bared teeth.
Now Finn’s life was in her hands alone.
An impossible burden.
Sighing, her shoulders sagging under an invisible weight, Jane turned from the stallion and left the barn.
>
Not wanting to face her grandmother or her sister, Susan, who should be home from the day’s compulsory summer-school session by now, she crossed the yard to the farm office, where she meant to go over the books yet again.
Perhaps she had missed something. Some money she could use to pay the most imminent bills.
Entering the office, whose walls were wainscoted with the same deep mahogany that lined the insides of all three lavishly executed barns, she stopped square in the middle of the Turkish rug that softened her footfall. The leather chair behind her heavy wooden desk was occupied, and while its back was to her, it wasn’t empty.
The light cast through the arched windows illuminated a muscular arm and a powerful hand holding the framed photograph from her desk—her with her parents, taken just before Daddy had died.
“Who are you…and what do you think you’re doing?”
The man who whirled around in her chair to meet her angry gaze was black-Irish handsome. Dark hair spilled over a high forehead and equally dark eyebrows arched over intense blue eyes. His smile forced a dimple into his right cheek, giving him a roguish air.
“Getting to know all I can about Grantham Acres,” came a soft reply. He set down the framed photograph where it belonged. “Curran McKenna, at your service.”
“Curran McKenna,” she echoed. “The trainer?”
“The same.”
Her mind raced. Finn. He was here because of the Irish Thoroughbred, she was certain. But why? How? Had news of the stallion’s madness spread all the way to Ireland? Had he come to claim the truth?
“Explain.”
“When I received a letter from you,” he began, the Gaelic lilt to his voice becoming suddenly more pronounced, “asking for my help—”
“I wrote you no letter!”
“But you are needing my help, now, aren’t you?”
Her denial didn’t seem to faze him. Suddenly it all came clear to her. “Nani…my grandmother. She’s the one who invited you to come here.”
“So she told me a while ago.”
“Look, Mr. McKenna—”
“Curran.”
“I’m sorry for your trouble, but I can’t use you.” He was an A-list trainer with world-class clients. “I’m sorry you’ve come on a fool’s errand. I’ll reimburse you for your plane tickets and any other expenses—”
He waved a hand. “Not necessary.”
“—but you’ll have to go.”
“Why?”
“Because I say so!”
Exasperated, she wished he would just leave. She wasn’t about to humiliate herself by explaining that she couldn’t afford his services.
That she would have to top off one of her credit cards just to see him home.
That she had lost all hope and dared not believe in another stranger.
“And what of your grandmother?” Curran asked. “Don’t her wishes have any merit? She apparently went through some trouble to get me here.”
“She was trying to help.”
“Aye. As am I.”
If only that were possible. “You can’t.”
“Not if you won’t let me try.”
“Finn won’t let anyone but me come near him. Several highly respected trainers in the area have already tried and failed. To be truthful, I’m lucky that I don’t have a lawsuit on my hands over injuries.”
“But I have not yet tried.”
He didn’t even pretend to hide his arrogance. Jane crossed her arms over her chest and challenged him with a fierce stare, which he met head-on.
Trainers who had worked with her breeder father before her had vested themselves in trying to help her for the sake not only of his memory but for Grantham Acres itself, a respected breeding farm in the Lexington area for more than a century. All to no avail. All had given up with the same advice to her—to put down the dangerous stallion.
She moved in to the desk so she could get a better look at the man who thought so highly of himself. Up close, he was even more devastatingly handsome than she’d realized, a fact that set her nerves on edge.
“And what, may I ask, is so special about you?”
He grinned. “I do have a reputation.”
“Yes,” she said dryly, even as her pulse surged at an awareness that she deemed inappropriate. He had a different beautiful woman on his arm at every photo op. She read any paper or magazine possible if it had to do with Thoroughbreds and racing, and so she had seen many such photographs over the past three years. “I am aware of your reputation. But what does that have to do with Finn mac Cumhail?”
“When I was working for Maggie Butler, I was the one who handpicked him at the yearling sale.”
“You trained Finn?”
“Gentled him, yes.”
A ray of hope broke through her dark mood. Finn knew Curran McKenna.
So what? an internal voice asked. Finn only trusts you and not very far at that.
Realistically, Curran McKenna would still be the enemy, Jane realized. And then she would have put Finn through more agony for nothing. No, her best bet was to keep working with him herself. She was the only one who had a chance of getting through to the stallion.
“I’m sorry, but my mind is made up,” she said firmly. “You need to leave at once.”
Curran rose and rounded the desk so that he stood inches from her. Though she was taller than average, Jane had to crane her neck to look up at him. He stared into her face as though studying her—for what, she couldn’t fathom. She only knew that he made her horribly uncomfortable.
And she wouldn’t show her discomfort by stepping back as she wanted.
A test of wills. Why?
And why did the trainer’s very presence disturb her anyway? she wondered, knowing the sooner he was off the property, the better for her.
When he finally stepped away and left with only a nod, she felt much like a deflating balloon. Tension poured from her in a rush and she sagged back against the desk for support.
Jane stared at the door for a moment, fully expecting Curran McKenna to step back inside to renew the argument.
That he didn’t almost disappointed her.
She got hold of herself and rounded the desk, her intention to get at the farm books. But upon sitting in her chair, she felt the leather was still warm, and the air around it filled with Curran’s male scent.
Shaking the sensation was more difficult than it should have been. His presence lingered like a soft caress. Only when she noted her desk calendar did she pierce the veil.
The pages were turned to the wrong date. Someone—Curran McKenna?—had flipped the pages forward two weeks. But what reason would the trainer have had to rifle through her appointments?
The open entry knotted her stomach—the date was that of the Thoroughbred Millions. The very date Finn mac Cumhail might have saved Grantham Acres.
Jane only prayed that she hadn’t brought him and the farm itself to ruin.
JANE GRANTHAM WAS an open book.
The new trainer Curran McKenna wasn’t.
Hoping one of the mares wouldn’t give him away, he slid from the shadows in the barn and made his way to the back exit, where he fled into the open and across the pasture, over the fence and into the woods.
He hadn’t expected complications.
Curran McKenna—why the hell was he here?
For the stallion, of course. He’d gentled the chestnut once and no doubt intended on working his magic on the animal a second time.
McKenna’s presence gave him pause. It complicated things, and the situation was overly complicated now.
He would just have to be careful.
Act with impunity…but act he would. Whatever it took.
His time was running out.
Chapter Two
“Why doesn’t Jane want me to work with Finn?” Curran asked Belle Grantham when he joined her in the drawing room of the main house for a before-dinner drink.
Claiming he had some old cronies to look up, Ned
was off to some pub in Lexington for the evening, so it was just Curran and the family.
“I don’t profess to know my granddaughter’s mind,” Belle said, handing him a bourbon.
She busied herself straightening the liquor bottles on an antique cart. This evening, she wore a flowing dress and seemed very much at home in this elegant room.
Fringed pillows lined a curved clay and cream sofa that wrapped around one corner. A chandelier hung from the thirteen-foot ceiling. And a baby grand piano was nestled into a corner alcove, backed by an ebony screen with gold-leaf overlay. Portraits graced one of the clay-colored walls, not of people but of horses.
“I think you know your own blood well enough.” Curran took a seat in the chair next to the fireplace, the mantel of carved black marble. “She’ll be needing my help with Finn, then. She admitted as much before she told me to leave.”
If not in so many words. He’d sensed Jane Grantham’s emotional swing in a very visceral way, and he wasn’t about to dismiss any possibilities. Not yet. Not until he got to the bottom of things. And then he would decide.
“She’s very proud.”
“And troubled,” Curran added.
“Yes…well.”
If Belle knew more than she’d indicated earlier, she wasn’t forthcoming. Suspecting he had at least some idea of the problem—having seen for himself some major signs of neglect in the farm buildings and knowing the stalls in one of the three barns were all empty—Curran took a sip of his Kentucky bourbon and changed tactics.
“So, you’ve lived on this glorious estate for how long?”
Brightening, she sat at the edge of the couch, a glass of red wine in hand. “Since I was a young woman. I was nineteen when I married Lawrence.”
“You were involved in the business.”
“I still am. Actively. If I retired, what in heaven’s name would I do with myself?”
Guessing that despite her youthful looks, Belle was in her early seventies, Curran gave her credit for being able to handle such physically demanding work. Probably the very thing that kept her young, he thought.
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