by Nora Roberts
“Oh no, you don’t,” she muttered. “I’m still in charge here. You don’t want to embarrass us both in front of company, do you?” A touch of the knees, a firm hold on the reins, and Kelsey pressed her on, bringing Honor to a full halt when they were closed in by the gate.
“It’s not so bad, is it?” she murmured. “And you hardly have to spend any time in here at all. What really counts is once you’re through.” Slowly, they walked out the other side, circled, and repeated the process.
“She’s got good hands,” Moses commented.
“She looks more like Naomi than ever on the back of a horse.” Gabe tucked his hands in his pockets. There might have been a better way to spend the morning than watching Kelsey guide the flashy yearling through the lesson. But he couldn’t think of one. “How’s it going between them?”
“Slow, steady. It’s not a flashy sprint, but I’d say they passed the first turn when Naomi gave her that yearling.”
“She has high hopes for that horse.”
“She’s got higher hopes for the girl.” Gauging the timing, Moses angled himself to face Gabe. “I know she’s got a father, but he isn’t here. So I’m taking it on myself to tell you to mind your step. Kelsey isn’t one of the disposable types, and it would upset Naomi if you hurt her girl.”
Gabe’s face closed up. When he spoke there was none of the resentment he felt, none of the temper, only mild curiosity in his voice. “And you’re assuming I will.”
Moses plucked a cigar from Gabe’s pocket and stuck it in his own. “Don’t pull that inscrutable shit on me. My tribe held the trophy for inscrutable while your ancestors were still huddled in caves eating their meat raw. And I’m not assuming anything. The two of you look good together.” He shifted his eyes to check on Kelsey’s progress. “Just make sure you think it through. You don’t know if a roll in the hay’s going to hurt anybody until you’re picking the straw out of your hair.”
Gabe’s lips quivered into a smile. “Which tribe did that one come from? The inscrutable one or the lost one?”
“Just don’t push her over the wire too fast. She’s got heart.” Irritated with himself, Moses trudged across the grass to fine-tune Kelsey’s work.
Yes, she had heart, Gabe agreed, studying her as she listened intently to the trainer’s advice. And blue blood.
There were plenty who knew him who would say he had no heart at all. And no one would mistake his blood for blue. It hadn’t stopped him before. He didn’t intend to let it stop him now.
There were any number of women who were willing to overlook those particular flaws in his breeding. Many who had. More, he thought coolly, who would shrug aside a drunk, abusive father, a short stint in a cell, and a lingering taste for playing against the odds.
But he didn’t want any number of women, he decided while Kelsey guided her mount into the gate and steadied her in the confining tunnel. He wanted this woman.
He waited, taking out a pair of sunglasses as the sun grew stronger. The morning was slipping away, and he needed to get back to his own operation. But he drew on his store of patience, staying on the sidelines until Kelsey dismounted.
“She did well,” Kelsey said, pressing a kiss to the yearling’s cheek before offering her a carrot. “She wasn’t afraid at all.”
“I want to see you tonight.”
“What?” She turned her head, her cheek still brushing Honor’s glossy hide.
“I’d like to take you out tonight. Dinner, a movie, a drive. Your choice. A date,” he continued when she only studied him with eyes that grew more speculative. “I realize I’ve neglected that particular ritual with you.”
“A date?” She rolled the idea around. “Such as you pick me up, we go somewhere and do some planned activity, then you bring me home and walk me to the door?”
“That’s more or less what I had in mind.”
“Well, it would be different.” She cocked her head, considering. “I have to be up at five, so we’ll need to make it an early evening. I wouldn’t mind seeing a movie, say a seven o’clock show. Maybe a pizza after.”
Now it was his turn to consider. It wasn’t the sort of evening he’d expected her to choose. Maybe it was about time they learned about each other. “An early movie and a pizza. I’ll pick you up around six.” He tipped up her chin, kissed her almost absently.
“Hey, Slater,” she called after him. “Do I get to pick the movie?”
He kept walking but glanced over his shoulder. “No subtitles.”
“On a first date?” She laughed at him. “What kind of woman do you think I am?”
“Mine,” he shot back, and she stopped laughing.
There was nothing romantic about a pizzeria crowded with teenagers. Which had been precisely Kelsey’s point. Keep it casual, she’d decided. Avoid a situation where things could become too intense and try to find out what made Gabriel Slater tick.
“This is perfect.” She settled into the booth with paper place mats of Italy printed in red and green. “I’d almost forgotten there was life beyond racing horses.”
“It happens to all of us.” Amused at finding himself dining with a woman in a place that sported pictures of grinning pizzas and calzones on the wall, he stretched out his legs. “You’ve taken to it quickly, and in a big way.”
“A talent of mine. Or a flaw, depending on your point of view. Why do anything if you don’t do it full out?” She relaxed and propped her feet on his bench. “That way you either reap the glory, or you crash and burn.”
“Is that what you’re after, Kelsey? Glory?”
She smiled. “I always get glory and satisfaction confused.” She glanced up at the waitress, back at Gabe. “Your pick. I’ll eat anything.”
“I won’t. Bring us a small—”
“Large,” Kelsey corrected him.
“Large,” he said with a nod. “Pepperoni and mushrooms, a couple of Pepsis.”
“Very conservative,” Kelsey noted when the waitress walked off.
“I like to know what I’m eating.” It came, he supposed, from a lifetime of scrambling for scraps. “Speaking of which, wasn’t it you who ate about two gallons of popcorn less than an hour ago?”
Still smiling, she toyed with the simple gold chain around her neck. “Movie popcorn doesn’t count. It’s simply part of the experience, like the music score.”
“Was there a music score? Hard to tell.”
“So I’m shallow,” she said with a shrug. “I like action films. I actually wrote a script once, for this course I was taking. Lots of good battling evil in car chases and gunfire.”
“What did you do with it?”
Absently she tapped her foot in rhythm with the Guns N’ Roses number blaring from the jukebox. “I got an A, then I put it away. I decided against sending it off because if anyone actually bought it, they’d start changing everything and it wouldn’t be mine anymore.” The waitress served their drinks in big red plastic cups. “Besides, I didn’t want to be a writer.”
“What, then?”
“Lots of different things.” She moved her shoulders, then leaned forward for her cup. “It always depended on my mood. And the courses I was taking.” Her smile was quick and slightly off center. “I’m very big on taking courses. If you want to know a little about anything, from computer science to interior design, I’m your girl.”
“Makes sense. You grew up with a college professor.” He lifted his cup. “Knowledge is sacred.”
“That’s part of it, I suppose. But mostly I figured if I tried enough things, sooner or later I’d hit on the right thing.”
“And have you?”
“Yes.” She sighed. “My family would be quick to point out that I’ve said that before. But this is different. I’ve said that before, too,” she murmured. “But it is. Nothing I’ve done has ever felt as right as this, as natural. As real. God knows I’ve never worked as hard in my life.”
To remind herself, she glanced down at her hands. They were toughen
ing up, she thought. She liked to believe she was toughening up with them.
“What about you? Have you hit on the right thing?”
He kept his eyes on hers. For an instant she thought she saw secrets behind them, and hungers that had nothing to do with the scents of garlic and melted cheese.
“It’s possible.”
“Do you always look at a woman so that she thinks you could start nibbling away at her, from the toes up?”
His lips curved, slow, easy, but his eyes didn’t change. “No one’s ever asked.” He laid a hand on her ankle, which rested on the seat beside him, and began to caress it. “But now that you mention it, it might be an interesting way to end the evening.”
The waitress plopped down their pizza, along with a couple of white plastic plates. “Enjoy your meal,” she said automatically, and hurried off to fill her next order.
“I love the atmosphere here.” Cautious, Kelsey put her feet on the floor and sat up. “But I got off the track. I was asking about your farm. Have you found what you wanted there?”
He used a plastic knife to separate some slices, then slid one onto her plate, one onto his. “It suits me.”
“Why?”
“You know, darling, you might have made a mistake giving up writing. At least journalism.”
“You can’t have the answers without asking the questions.” She took her first bite, stinging with red-pepper flakes, stringy with cheese, and sighed with approval. “At least with some people. Don’t you like questions, Slater?”
He avoided that one and skipped back to the one before. “It suits me because it’s mine.”
“It’s that simple?”
“No, it’s that complicated. You don’t want to spoil the evening with a rundown of my life story, Kelsey. Bad for the appetite.”
“I have a strong stomach.” She licked sauce from her thumb. “You know mine, Gabe. At least several of the highs and lows. There’s no moving to the next stage for me without some understanding of who I’m moving with.” She continued to eat while he frowned at her. “That’s not an ultimatum, or a guarantee. It’s just a fact. I’m attracted to you, and I like being with you. But I don’t know you.”
If she did, he knew there was a good chance her other feelings would dim considerably. Long odds. Well, he’d played them before. When the prize was rich enough. “Let me tell you something about yourself first. The only child of a devoted daddy. Well connected, sheltered. Spoiled.”
The last rankled a little, but she wouldn’t deny it. “All right. It’s true I got almost everything I wanted when I was growing up. Emotionally. Materialistically. I suppose a lot of it was to make up for the lack of having a mother. But I didn’t notice the lack.”
“A big house in the suburbs,” he went on. “Good schools. Summer camp, three squares, and ballet lessons.”
If he was trying to annoy her, he was succeeding. Coolly, she chose another slice. “You forgot piano, swimming, and equestrian.”
“It’s all part of the whole. Proms, the college of your choice, and a big splashy wedding to top it off.”
“Don’t forget the long, tedious divorce. What’s your point, Slater?”
“You haven’t got a clue where I came from, Kelsey. I’ll tell you and you still won’t understand it.”
But he would tell her, he decided. And see how the cards fell.
“Maybe I’d go to bed at night not quite hungry. There might have been enough money for food that time, or I’d managed to steal or beg enough. Kids make good panhandlers, good thieves,” he added, watching her eyes. “Adults feel sorry for them, or overlook them.”
“A lot of people are put in the position where they have to ask for money,” she said carefully. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“That’s because you’ve never had to ask. Or take.” He rattled the ice in his cup, then set it down. “At night I’d probably be listening, or trying not to listen, to the fighting going on in the next room. Or my mother crying. Or the neighbor earning an hour’s pay with some faceless john. If I was lucky, I’d wake up in the same bed I went to sleep in. If I wasn’t, my mother would come in in the middle of the night, and we’d sneak out before we were tossed out because my father had lost the rent money again.”
She saw the picture he was painting for her, and it was dark with harsh edges. “Where did you grow up?”
“Nowhere. It might have been in Chicago, or Reno, or Miami. In the winter we stuck to the south, because the weather’s better and the tracks run longer. It might have been anywhere. Places all look the same if you’re broke and running. Of course, the old man would say we were just moving on. That he was working on a big score. My mother scrubbed toilets so we didn’t starve, and he took most of her pay and blew it on the horses, or the cards, or how far a fucking grasshopper would jump. It didn’t matter what the bet was as long as he could flash a few bills and play the big shot.”
He spoke without passion, the bitterness barely a flicker in his eyes. “He liked to cheat. Mostly he was good at it, but if he wasn’t, my mother scraped enough together to keep him from getting his arms broken. She loved him.” And that was the most bitter of all the pills he had had to swallow. “Lots of women loved Rich Slater.”
He continued to eat, as if to prove to himself it didn’t matter anymore. “He liked to hurt them. Some women keep coming back for another fist in the face. They wear their black eyes and split lips like badges. My mother was one of those. If I tried to stop him, he’d just beat the hell out of both of us. She never thanked me for it, used to tell me I just didn’t understand. She was right,” he added. “I never understood it.”
“There must have been somewhere you could have gone. A shelter. Social services. The police.”
He simply looked at her, the flawless complexion, the breeding that went down to the bone. “Some people get swept into dirty corners, Kelsey. That’s the way the system works.”
“No, it doesn’t have to. It shouldn’t.”
“You’ve got to look for help, expect it to be there, have the nerve to ask for it. My mother didn’t do any of that. She kept her eyes down, expected nothing, asked for nothing.”
It was Kelsey’s eyes that held him now, the horror and the pity that darkened them.
“But you were only a child. Someone should have . . . done something.”
“I wouldn’t have thanked them for it. I grew up being taught to spit if I saw a cop, to think of social workers as interfering paper pushers whose job it was to keep you from doing what you wanted. So I avoided them. Sometimes I went to school, sometimes I didn’t. Christ knows he didn’t care, and my mother didn’t have the energy left to reel me in. So I did pretty much as I pleased. The old man liked me to hang out with him, sometimes to shill, or to drum up a game of my own. And if I was there I could make sure some money was left once he got too drunk to care.”
“You must have thought of running away, of getting away from him.”
“Sure, I thought about it. But I figured if I stayed, I could keep him from beating her to death. And I did, for what good it did any of us. My mother died in a charity ward. Pneumonia. I gave it six months, squirreling away the money I made hustling games or jobs at the track. Then I took off. I was thirteen.”
And tall for his age, he remembered. Canny. Already old.
“The old man caught up with me a few times. The problem was I had a taste for the horses, so I usually ended up at a track. So did he. He’d knock me around, shake me down. I could usually buy him off.”
“Buy him off?”
“If I’d been having a run of luck, I’d have money. A couple of hundred would send him off to a game of his own, or the nearest bar.” Of course, Gabe thought, the price had gone up since then. “Every time I cut loose, I’d start over—with one thing in mind. One day I’d have my own. He wouldn’t touch me. Nobody would. You’re not eating.”
“I’m sorry.” She reached out and caught his hand firmly in hers. “I’m reall
y sorry, Gabe.”
It wasn’t pity he was looking for. He realized now that he’d wanted her to be horrified, wanted her to look at him and cringe back. He’d have an excuse then, wouldn’t he, to step away from her and stop the headlong race to a future he couldn’t see.
“I spent some time in jail over a poker game I wasn’t quick enough to spot as a sting.” He waited for her to comment on that, but she said nothing. “I was a small fish, but I got reeled in with the big ones. When I got out, I was smarter. I worked some short cons, but I was more into gambling than the grift. Working at stables was a good way to earn a stake. And I liked the horses. I stayed clean because I didn’t like prison. I didn’t drink because every time I started to I smelled my old man. And I got lucky.”
Finished, he sat back and lit a cigar. “Understand better now?”
Did he really think she couldn’t see the anger, the scarred-over hurt? People might pass by their table and see a man chatting over a meal, enjoying the company. But if they looked into his eyes, really looked, how could they miss that cold, steely rage? Determined, she put her hand back on his.
“Maybe I can’t understand the way you mean. But I think I know it was a nightmare to live with an alcoholic who—”
“He’s not an alcoholic,” Gabe cut in, his tone frigid. “There’s a difference between an alcoholic and a drunk, Kelsey. No twelve-step program is going to change the fact that he’s a drunk, a mean one, who likes to beat up on women, or anyone weaker than he is. And it wasn’t a nightmare. It was life. My life.”
She withdrew her hand. “You’d rather I didn’t understand.”
He turned his cigar, stared at the tip. He hadn’t realized that simple, unquestioning sympathy would bring so many memories, and the feelings that went with them, swirling to the surface. “You’re right. I’d rather you look at me and take what you see. Or leave it.”
“We’re both a product of our upbringing, Gabe. One way or another. I’m not going to care about someone because of what they seem to be. Not again. And if you want me, you’re going to have to accept that I care.”