Mr. Miracle (Harlequin Super Romance)

by McSparren, Carolyn

  She began to struggle, her whimpers as pitiful as a kitten crying for its mother.

  He gripped her doggedly while the mare took one step, then two.

  Vic began to keen in his ear.

  “It’s all right, lass. Jamey’s here. Jamey’s got you.”

  One more step, he thought, just one more step. The mare obliged. Then Jamey slipped his right foot out of the stirrup and in one smooth move slid off the horse with Vic still clutched in his arms.

  They landed on their feet in the soft arena with their bodies molded together from nose to knee.

  Up till now he’d been able to concentrate on his job. Now his body awakened to the fact that he held a warm woman close. God, she felt good!

  “You bastard!” Vic howled. She kicked at him, tore herself from his arms and brought her fists up to flail against his chest. “You stupid, rotten, vicious SOB! You’re fired! No, dammit, you’re dead!”

  He caught her wrists. She continued to struggle and scream at him.

  He brought his face close to hers. “Listen to me, woman! Listen to me! You did it! Dammit, don’t you understand? You did it!”

  For an instant she continued to fight with tossing head and eyes squeezed shut. Then she froze again.

  Her eyes and mouth both snapped open. She stared straight into Jamey’s eyes and gulped.

  “Uh-oh,” he said, and let her go.

  She clapped both hands over her mouth and bolted from the ring. He followed her.

  He saw her round the corner into the washroom the students used, saw her drop to her knees and heard her retch.

  He found a clean dish towel, wet it under cold water, folded it and walked over to the washroom door.

  She was on her knees in front of the open toilet. Her retches had slowed to dry heaves. He carefully laid the cold wet towel across the back of her neck and dropped to his haunches beside her. After a moment he put an arm around her shoulder.

  “Don’t you touch me,” she said without raising her head.

  He smiled at the single curl of dark wet hair at the nape of her neck. A lovely neck, long and smooth and asking to be kissed.

  If he wanted to lose his lips, that is.

  Still, she hadn’t sounded entirely murderous.

  “Have you quite finished being sick?” he asked.

  “None of your business, dammit.”

  “If you have,” he continued as though she had not spoken, “we’ve left that mare wandering around in the arena alone. By now she’s probably stepped on her reins and rolled on her saddle. I suggest we go bring her in.”

  “You did it. You get her.”

  “I’ll wait, thank you.”

  He sprawled on the couch and propped his feet on the scarred coffee table. In a moment he heard the toilet flush and water run in the sink, then the sounds of Vic’s rinsing her mouth.

  She stood in the washroom door with the towel still draped around her neck. Her skin was so translucent he could see the blood flow at her temples.

  “Why? Can you just tell me that before I cut your heart out and make you eat it?”

  For a moment he entertained telling her the truth, the whole truth.

  No, but he could tell her his heart’s truth. “You wanted it.”

  “I did no such thing!”

  “You’re lying to us both. I’ve been watching you, love. I’ve seen your eyes follow the riders. I’ve seen the envy and the hunger.”

  “All right. I wanted it, but I knew damn well I could never have it. I’d come to terms with it. What gave you the right to decide to fix me?”

  He shrugged. “You never came to terms with it.”

  “Listen, you arrogant jerk, do you think I didn’t try for years to get back on a horse?” She pulled the towel from her neck and threw it at the sink. It fell on the floor, but she ignored it. “I tried psychiatrists and psychologists, antianxiety pills and antidepressant pills, not to mention yoga and tai chi and vitamins and hypnosis, for God’s sake!” She jammed her hands into her pockets and turned away, saw the towel, bent to pick it up and dropped it in the sink.

  “I managed to get behind the wheel of a car again, and I can do anything around horses that they need, except set my foot into the stirrup.” She threw up her hands and laughed. “I used to come down here at two in the morning, throw a saddle on one of the saddle racks and try to climb up and sit there. I couldn’t do it. I’d wind up sweating and shaking.”

  He hadn’t moved. She turned to look at him. “And now all of a sudden you’re here for what—two days?—and I’m going to be riding a Grand Prix course?”

  “Yes, if that’s what you want to do.”

  “Oh, right.”

  He came to his feet and stood before her with his legs apart and his hands on his hips. “Now you listen to me, lass.” He pointed toward the arena beyond the door. “You just rode a horse. You did it! And you’re going to keep doing it until you don’t need my arms around you or my whistle in your ear. Maybe hypnosis couldn’t do it, but Jamey McLachlan can!”

  She bit back a nasty reply and simply glared at him. After a moment she said, “How?”

  He grinned and raised a wicked eyebrow at her. “Because I’m a Gypsy, love. Because I have a way with animals and you, lass, are nothing more nor less than an animal, just a bit more easily spooked than most.”

  “Go to hell!” She pushed past him and ran out the front door of the stable. He could hear her pelting up the driveway toward the house. Well, he’d tried. He walked out to the arena where the mare stood in a semitrance, picked up her reins and began to walk her back to the barn.

  When he reached the door, he stopped. Silhouetted in the far door stood Vic. For a moment they stared at each other without speaking. Jamey was almost afraid to breathe. She took one step forward and raised her hands, palms out.

  “Do you really think it’s possible?”

  He let out his breath in a great whoosh. “Yes.”

  She nodded. “What have I got to lose?” She walked over to him and stroked the mare’s nose. “So what’s the program?” Her hand was shaking, and he could see the frantic rise and fall of her chest. He could guess how much this was costing her.

  “Come on back out to the ring.”

  She backed away. “Not tonight.”

  “Right this minute.”

  “Can’t you be satisfied?” She turned away from him and hugged her chest as though she was freezing.

  “I’ll have you safe in my arms. No responsibility for yourself. No decisions to make.”

  Her head whipped around. “How did you know...?”

  “Because that’s how I felt. Everything that happened. This—” he looked at his hand with curiosity as though still surprised to find it was not the hand he’d grown up with “—the things that happened at the yard. All of it. My fault. And I was afraid that whatever decision I made would lead to more catastrophes. That’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it?”

  “I killed a man. Do you have any idea how that feels?”

  “Killed a man? I heard you crashed, that it wasn’t your fault. It was his. Everyone said so, including the lawyers.”

  “That doesn’t matter. I was the professional, don’t you see? I should have seen it coming, been able to avoid it somehow.”

  “Bull.”

  “Intellectually I can see that. But in my gut I’m terrified it’ll happen again.”

  “Not with me hanging on to you, lass. Now, you take yourself a good deep breath and walk beside me out to the arena. We won’t do much, but by heaven, woman, you will get back on that mare with me tonight.”

  In the end she allowed herself to be persuaded, and Jamey did not let the mare take more than a few steps before he stopped her and slid Vic from his arms and down the side of the horse, then jumped down to land beside her. She was quivering.

  “You going to throw up again?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, while you’re thinking about it, you can ta
ke the tack off this mare and put her away. I’m a hardworking man and I deserve a break.”

  She managed a tiny smile.

  He sank onto the bale of hay in the aisle, propped his arms on his knees, dropped his chin into his hands and watched her.

  It was as if her long-held fear had somehow diluted her sense of femaleness by building up a sort of exoskeleton. She needed a man to hold her and kiss her and make love to her until her shell melted to reveal the warm woman inside.

  He longed to be that man.

  But that would be an even greater betrayal than the one he was already perpetrating.

  “Do YOU STILL WANT ME in your house?” he asked after a supper of soup from a can and sandwiches made with the rest of the ham. “I can make a pallet in the barn. There’s no more ‘eau de mouse.’ ”

  “You can stay here, although you might consider whether or not you’d be safer down at the barn. You may want to lock your door tonight. I may just creep up the stairs and slit your throat.”

  He leaned his chair back on two legs and grinned. “You can creep up my stairs anytime you like, lass.”

  She blushed furiously and covered it by going to the counter to pour herself another cup of decaf. He smiled. She knew what he meant all right.

  She stood with her back to him and said softly, “Listen, about what we did tonight... I don’t want anyone else to know.”

  “Of course, lass.” His chair thumped to the floor. He got up and went to her, took her by the shoulders and turned her to face him.

  “Everyone would be so helpful, cheering me on and secretly worrying I’d fail again. I don’t think I could stand that.”

  “Our secret,” he said. “As long as you want it to be.”

  “Besides, riding double on a mare as broad as a pool table and with about as much pizzazz is hardly the same as sitting on Angie’s Trust Fund.”

  “It’s only a matter of degree.”

  She slipped out of his grasp. “I may never be able to face jumping a fence again.”

  “One thing at a time.”

  “I’m going to bed. I feel as though I’ve been ridden hard and put away wet.”

  “So do I.” He kneaded the muscles at the small of his back. “We’re not teenagers any longer, you and I.”

  “Well, I’m not, certainly.”

  Minutes later she stripped and stood under the water from her shower with her face raised. At least a portion of the water that flowed down her cheeks and over her shoulders was salt from the gush of tears she couldn’t seem to stern. She felt as though a dam had broken somewhere deep within her, and she was standing in the path of a flood that threatened to wash her away.

  How long had she worked to convince herself that riding didn’t matter? That she was a valuable person without it? That her failure did not completely circumscribe her very being? How long since she had even allowed herself to think about it or to question the status quo? She and everyone around her tiptoed around the issue, but like the proverbial elephant in the corner, it was there, whether she acknowledged it or not, and suddenly for no reason it had begun to trumpet.

  No. There was a reason. Jamey McLachlan. He’d turned her world upside down, questioned her assumptions, refused to accept her view of herself the way everybody else did. Why couldn’t he?

  He left her miserably uncomfortable. She remembered how comfortable she’d grown with the walking cast on her leg in the hospital. She’d learned to compensate for its weight and the changes in her balance. She used her crutches like an expert.

  Then one day the cast had been cut away. She was left with an emaciated, goat-cheese white leg that refused to respond. She had to releam balance, fight the endless pain of therapy, the agony of new demands on her body. There had been times—too many—when she’d longed to have the nice safe cast back again. Times when she had fought to move her knee one more centimeter while the tears ran down her face.

  This was worse. This pain was psychic—soul pain. And the muscles had not been used for more than twenty years. Agony.

  Was it worth it?

  She leaned against the back wall of the shower. She had a good comfortable life among people who accepted her. If she attempted this and failed, she’d have another weight to add to the one she already carried. If she attempted it and succeeded, she’d have to redefine herself in everyone’s eyes.

  More agony.

  She leaned down and flicked the shower off, then turned off the taps. She stepped out of the shower, grabbed a towel and glimpsed her naked body in the steamy mirror.

  Suddenly she wondered if she’d have the nerve to show her body to a man again. Not a bad body—still slim and well-toned, but not the nubile body of a twenty-year-old. “Gravity, you bastard!”

  What would Jamey McLachlan think if she actually did creep up those stairs and slide into bed with him?

  He’d probably run for the barn, dragging his pillow and blanket behind him.

  And if he slept naked? Lovely sight. The clothes he wore didn’t leave much room for the imagination. And the feel of his arms around her! Lord, it would be almost worth the terror of getting back on a horse just to feel those arms locked around her again. He made her feel so safe.

  And that was a different feeling for her. Usually she was the one who made other people feel safe. And she always projected a calm, rational, oh-so-sensible persona. Even Angie, who ought to know better, looked to her for marriage counseling.

  Meanwhile, Vic spent her life trying to act as though she was indispensable, because if anybody ever caught on to the fact that she was just about the most dispensable creature on God’s earth, they might do just that with her—dispense.

  Jamey McLachlan had tuned in to the frightened creature that lurked inside her. And it didn’t seem to bother him any more than Mr. Miracle’s bad manners had.

  Funny, that remark about her being just another animal should have rankled, but in a way she took comfort in it. She was no different from Stripes—crawling up Jamey’s shirtfront to purr in his ear. Something about him said, “Trust me, I will not hurt you.” And something in her answered, “I will.”

  As she toweled her hair and pulled a comb through it, she asked herself again, Was it worth it?

  “Damn straight!” she said, and flung her wet towel at the towel rack.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “THERE’S CROCUSES breaking through the dead leaves on the lawn. In February. I cannot believe it!” Jamey shouted.

  “We’ll have jonquils in bloom in another week,” Vic said easily. “We’ll also probably have at least one or two snows and maybe an ice storm or two, interspersed with days when you’d swear you were in the middle of April. What’s it like now where you come from?”

  “We’re close enough to the coast to get the warm winds from the Irish Channel, but it’s still bitterly cold in winter. The days are short. Life slows down, but the chores are harder. We spend as much time as possible trying to keep warm.”

  “No central heating?”

  “Not the kind you’re used to. We use peat fires. Wonderful smell, but it’s roast on the front and freeze on the backside.”

  “Yuck.”

  “Ah, but I’d like to show you May. The tenderest days you ever saw and the gorse yellow as butter pats.”

  “And heather?”

  “In May? Not bloody likely. Heather’s August. Have you never been to Scotland?”

  “Never. I’ve been to England, of course, but so many years ago it hardly counts.”

  They worked side by side down the aisles, cleaning out the stalls and refreshing the shavings. They had slipped into an easy rhythm that allowed them to chat along the way.

  “It’s lovely up Oban way with rhododendrons big as houses, otters in the ponds...”

  “Sheep?”

  “Indeed. Now’s lambing time. Mad for sheep to give birth in this weather, but that’s what they do. Makes the wool thicker, so they say.” Jamey dumped a wheelbarrow full of clean shavings into the
center of the stall in which they worked and began to flick them to the sides with easy strokes of his manure fork.

  “And your family? They have sheep?”

  “My stepfather’s family has a fair amount of everything. Or had.”

  Vic glanced over at him. The tone of his voice shut the subject down as totally as though he had punched the off switch on a computer.

  “And your father?” Vic persisted.

  “Long dead. And a complete bastard, from what I hear. I was a baby when my stepfather adopted me.” He leaned for a moment on his fork. “I owe him my life and all my loyalty.”

  Odd choice of words. All my loyalty. My life? “What does the rest of your family think about your odyssey to see the world on the back of a horse?”

  “They think I’m crazy.” He said the words flatly with no hint of humor. “Maybe I am, but I’ve no choice. I pay my debts.”

  “What debts?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  She opened her mouth to press him further, although he obviously didn’t want to talk about his life or his family. She was a Southern woman. She wanted to place him carefully where he belonged in his dynasty. She swore to winkle out his story before he left.

  Left? The sudden pain of the word startled her. She didn’t want him to leave. Not yet. Perhaps never. She looked forward to seeing him in the morning, to finding his notes propped on the coffeepot. There might never be another wild kiss like the one after the poker game, but it had awakened longings in her she had long forgotten.

  “Why haven’t you remarried?” he asked with that weird facility he had for reading her mind. “Your husband’s been dead several years now, hasn’t he?”

  “Nobody’s asked me.”

  That wasn’t quite right. There was a man. When ValleyCrest was at its lowest ebb financially, Vic had even considered marrying him. He had plenty of money, rode to hounds and could probably have been convinced to offer his hand if she’d pursued the matter. And been willing to sleep with him, which she hadn’t been.

  Not that her marriage to Frank had been such a great passion. But she swore that if she ever considered marriage again, it would be to a man who at least occasionally considered her needs before his own. Vachel Connaway might dance attendance and send her flowers, but he was spoiled rotten and bone lazy.