by Diana Palmer
HE GREETED IDA, introduced himself as Dr. Mulholland and spent a few minutes examining the animal. He winced. “Well, I don’t find any more injuries, just these cuts. Who would have done this?” he added angrily, turning to Ida.
“At a guess, somebody sent by my ex-husband, who just got out of jail,” she said tightly. “He’s made threats.”
The vet’s eyes blazed. “He should be arrested and put back in jail.”
“Chance would be a fine thing,” she said sadly. “I can’t prove he was responsible. Not yet, at least.”
“If you can, I’ll be happy to testify.”
“Thank you,” she said sincerely.
He applied locals and stitched the cuts, then gave the animal an antibiotic injection, just in case, to prevent infection.
The vet sighed as he put up his tools. “If you don’t see any improvement, or if you see evidence of infection, call me, anytime. I’m always available. So is my wife, Ashley.”
“Thanks a million,” Ida said sincerely. “I love my horses.”
He smiled. “We both love anything with fur. Or without it.” He laughed. “I have one patient who’s twenty feet long and weighs over a hundred pounds.”
“Twenty feet long?” she exclaimed.
“He’s an albino python. Lovely creature, with white and yellow scales and red eyes.”
She shivered delicately. “I’m not a reptile person. I like warm-blooded things,” she laughed.
“It takes all kinds,” he said and smiled. “You call if you need us, okay?”
“That’s a deal. And thanks for coming so promptly.”
* * *
“SHE’LL BE ALL RIGHT, I think,” Laredo told her later when they were alone, in his deep, calm voice. “I’ll make spot checks out here at night. But our biggest problem is going to be who did it. You know who I suspect.”
She sighed wearily. “Yes, I know. I have the same suspicion.” She grimaced. “Why would anyone hurt a helpless animal?”
“Some men love it. They get a feeling of power. They get off on hurting things.” He wasn’t even looking at her. His hands were jammed in the pockets of his jeans and he was staring sightlessly across the pasture, reliving some trauma in his past, perhaps.
“What about Silver and the other horses?” she asked miserably.
“I’ve got a remote camera set up, and I sleep light. I’ll be watching.”
She nodded. “Do whatever you have to.”
“That I will.”
As she walked back to the house, she remembered what he’d said about men who hurt animals loving power and being aroused by it. Maybe something had happened to him, in his past, that had prompted his odd comment. But she didn’t want to get personal, even with a bodyguard, so she put it out of her mind.
* * *
A WEEK LATER there was a dinner party that she was invited to. She hadn’t really planned to go, but the hostess, Pam Simpson, was almost aggressive about it, pleading.
“You have to come. The numbers won’t work, and nobody else is free,” she lied. “Just for me, Ida. Please?”
Ida felt those words like bricks. Pam wasn’t malicious, but it was obvious that she needed a female body in place, not a friend.
“That was tactless,” Pam amended. “I could find somebody else, but I want you to come. Would you?”
“I’ll be accused of trying to hook somebody’s husband and there will be a firefight,” Ida sighed.
“No. I promise, that won’t happen. Please?”
“Oh, all right,” Ida said heavily. “But I really can’t stay long. I’m in a lot of pain. My orthopedic surgeon has me on powerful anti-inflammatories and I can’t drive when I take them...”
“No problem at all! I’ll send somebody to pick you up and take you home. How’s that?”
Ida gave in. She laughed. “Pam, you’re hopeless. But yes, I’ll come.”
“Thanks! You won’t regret it. Honest.” She hung up.
* * *
SO IDA DRESSED in a tasteful black cocktail dress, with cap sleeves, that fell to her ankles, with her beautiful back uncovered and a neckline that came above her collarbone. She looked elegant and beautiful, her pretty face accented by red lipstick and only a hint of powder. She put a black rhinestone clip in her short black hair and picked up her small evening bag.
She’d checked on her poor horse every day. Gold, as she was called, was doing well, but she was nervous, even when her colt was with her. The wounds were healing, but slowly. The mental ones, Ida considered, would be worse than the cuts. At least, Ida thought, Gold would live. That was enough. Now came the worry about whether or not Bailey had been responsible for her injuries. But Laredo had the house and yard wired like bombs, and he had outdoor cameras everywhere, along with sensors that would alert anyone listening about intruders. Bailey was going to have a hard time hurting any of her animals again, she thought angrily. But she wished he’d try, so she could have him arrested and sent back to prison.
* * *
SHE’D WONDERED WHO Pam would send for her. She was nervous of men. Pam knew that, but not why.
The doorbell rang. She slid into her long black leather coat with its epaulets and leather belt and opened the door.
She was at a loss for words. Pam had sent a rather disgruntled Jake McGuire to pick her up. He was glaring when she opened the door, but the horrified look on Ida’s face, and the beauty of her face and her slender figure in that dress, left him momentarily speechless.
“I didn’t ask Pam to send you,” she stammered. “I don’t even know who else she invited. She said she invited me just to make the numbers fit. I didn’t want to come!”
Her embarrassment touched something deep inside him that had been frozen since Mina Michaels married Cort Grier. He reached out a big, lean hand and touched his fingers to her soft mouth to stop the words.
“It’s all right,” he said gently.
Tears, visible, stung her eyes and she averted them. “Thanks,” she almost choked.
He was entranced. Her reputation would put any decent man off, but when he was alone with her, she was nothing like that reputation. She was a puzzle.
“We’d better go,” he said gently. “Careful. There’s snow on the ground.”
“It’s okay. I don’t mind snow. Ice scares me.”
“No ice. Yet.”
She locked her doors and hesitated at the steps. She had on heels that were barely an inch high and stacked, the only sort she could bear with her old injury. The snow would come up over them.
Jake suddenly swung her up in his arms and started down the steps to his car, parked right in front of the house.
Ida was like a board in his arms, frightened and too shy to tell him why.
He turned his head and looked down at her when he reached the passenger side of the big Mercedes. He stared straight into her frightened blue eyes, his own silver ones narrow and assessing while the snow fell on his wide-brimmed hat and was funneled away from her face.
She just stared up at him, vulnerable, fragile, uncertain.
“You little fraud,” he said in the softest tone she’d ever heard from him.
“Wh-what?”
He just chuckled. He put her down, opened the door and eased her inside. He didn’t elaborate on what he’d said, but he was getting some interesting information about the wild divorcée without a word being spoken. She didn’t act like any promiscuous woman he’d ever known, and there had been a few in his youth. She was far more like an actress playing a role in public to keep people from seeing the woman behind it. She was damaged somehow. He wondered who’d made her so afraid of men. Cindy had said something about Ida’s second husband. Ida had intimated that the man had been responsible for her injuries. It angered him, remembering that.
He got in beside her, glancing sideways to make sure her seat belt was
fastened before he put his on.
“Is there a big crowd there?” she asked, to make conversation.
“Five couples,” he said. “We’ll make six.”
“Pam didn’t say she’d invited you,” she said after a minute.
His chiseled lips pursed. “Same here.”
She drew in a long breath.
“She and Cindy, from the café, are friends,” he mused as he pulled out onto the highway.
Which made things very clear. Cindy had told Pam about Jake taking Ida home and coming back to get her car. The two women sensed a romance and Pam was acting to help things along.
“Oh, dear,” Ida said worriedly, and her long-fingered hands with their red fingernails crushed her small purse.
“Gossip only works if you let it,” he said.
“So they say.”
He glanced at her as they stopped at a traffic light. He could see the faint flush in her cheeks. It amused him, but he didn’t let her see it.
“How’s your mare?” he asked, unwillingly reminded of the handsome cowboy she’d hired.
“Gold? We had to get the vet. Somebody left deep lacerations all over her hindquarters, on both flanks,” she said, her voice tinged with remembered outrage.
“How the hell did that happen? Did she take a fall?”
She bit her lower lip. “We’re not sure what happened.”
He gave her a long sideways look before he turned onto the road to Pam’s house. “Not sure.”
“I can’t talk about it,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
His heart jumped. She was saying something without voicing it, and he knew it. Someone had hurt the horse. Who? Why? He was eaten up with questions and she sat there like the Sphinx, saying nothing, giving away nothing.
He pulled up in front of Pam’s house. The driveway had been cleared of snow, so Ida walked in under her own power, with Jake just behind her after he parked the car in front of the house.
“Welcome!” Pam exclaimed, hugging Ida and Jake. “I’m so glad you could both come. We have a lovely dinner. Cook’s been in the kitchen all day.”
“I’m starved,” Jake drawled. “Well, starved of home cooking, for sure. All I can make are scrambled eggs and toast.”
“Don’t you have a cook?” Pam exclaimed.
“I haven’t been in town long enough to hire one, actually,” he confessed. “I’ve been in Australia, helping Rogan assess the damage and deal with the fires. Rain would be damned welcome, I’ll tell you that.”
“We all heard about the fires,” Pam said as she led the way to the elegant dining room. “Such a tragedy. So many animals lost.”
“So many arsonists caught,” Jake replied. “I hope they lock them up forever.”
“So do I,” Ida said quietly.
He glanced at her covertly, remembering her old cat and the damaged mare. She loved animals.
“Come on to the dining room. We’re starting a little early, but I have a surprise for later,” Pam said with a covert and amused glance that Ida didn’t see.
“I love surprises,” Jake teased.
Pam laughed softly. ‘You’ll really love this one. I promise.”
Dinner was a delicately prepared chicken-and-shrimp carbonara with a crème brûlée for dessert.
“It was delicious,” Ida told her hostess with a warm smile.
The other couples echoed the sentiment. Two husbands were openly staring at Ida while their wives, a little less attractive than Jake’s dinner partner, glared.
Ida ground her teeth together. Pam noticed where she was looking and announced that they would all retire to the living room while the cook cleared away the dinner plates. She added that coffee would be forthcoming for any who wanted it.
* * *
JAKE WAS LESS than friendly as he stared at Ida covertly, noting the husbands who were almost falling over each other in an attempt to sit beside her.
He took Ida’s arm and, to the husbands’ irritation, moved her to a couple of upholstered chairs near the sofa, all the furniture facing an enormous, polished grand piano on a platform. The piano was obviously the centerpiece of the room. Everyone knew that Pam had been taking lessons.
Jake sat down beside her.
“Thanks,” she said under her breath.
He glanced at her and scowled. Her hands in her lap were shaking. Her face was pale, her posture stiff and reserved. His mind went back to the orthopedic surgeon Ida was seeing, the massive amount of anti-inflammatories she was taking. Something had happened to her. Something traumatic.
Without voluntary effort, his big hand slid over one of hers, finding it cold. His hand closed around her fingers, shocking her into looking at him.
His pale silver eyes glittered as they registered her delicate features, her soft mouth and exquisite complexion. “You’re safe,” he said quietly, without understanding why he said it.
She jerked a little, as if she hadn’t expected the words. She averted her face, embarrassed.
Their hostess came into the room, followed by a server with a silver tray laden with coffeepot, china cups and condiments. “Coffee for anyone who likes,” Pam announced with a smile as she directed the valet to a beautiful mahogany side table.
She turned. “I promised you a surprise. But it’s going to come as a surprise to my guest.” She glanced at Ida. “Would you?” she asked, indicating the grand piano.
“Oh, please, I’d really rather not...” Ida began.
Pam gently took the hand that had been under Jake’s and tugged. “Come on, chicken.”
Ida flushed. But Pam had been kind to her, after all.
The piano was beautiful, Ida noted as she sat down at the keys after positioning the bench where she wanted it.
“What will you play?” Pam asked, while Jake stared with barely concealed shock at his dinner companion.
Ida smiled. “This is one of my favorites.”
And as her fingers touched the keys, the exquisite melody of Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns,” from the 1973 musical A Little Night Music, filled the room.
Ida’s eyes closed as she played from memory, her heart full, brimming over, as her thoughts drifted to the past, when her mother listened with a rapt face to this song, sung by Judy Collins. It had been her mother’s favorite.
She played with all her skill, feeling the music in every cell of her body as it rose to a crescendo and, slowly, faded into a stunned silence.
Her eyes opened. She blinked. And suddenly there was furious applause, even from Jake.
“You play beautifully,” Pam said. “You should do it more often.”
Ida got up, a little self-conscious. She smiled. “Thanks.”
“And now that I’m through putting you on the spot,” Pam teased, “coffee?”
Ida laughed. “Please.”
* * *
“IT WAS YOU PLAYING, when I brought your Jaguar home that day,” Jake mused as they drove away from Pam’s mansion.
“It was,” she confessed. “The piano has gotten me through some very bad times.”
“Where did you learn?”
“My husband, my first husband, had me professionally taught,” she replied with a sad smile. “It was something we shared, a love of beautiful music. He played like an angel. I loved to sit and listen to him.”
“Didn’t you wonder, when you were first married?”
“You mean at the lack of physical contact?” She laughed. “I worried myself sick. I was certain that I smelled bad, or that I wasn’t pretty enough, or that he just wasn’t attracted to me at all. It was a relief, in some ways, to discover the truth.”
“You didn’t mind?” he persisted.
She studied the purse in her lap. “People are what they are,” she said simply. “He was a good and kind man who never beat me or
gambled away what we had or embarrassed me in public, the way many men do to their wives. He was fun to be with. He was very educated. We liked the same things, had similar tastes in music and politics and even religion.” She sighed. “He was the best man I ever knew, regardless of how he felt about his place in life.”
He smiled. “You’re not what I expected.”
She shrugged. “Who is, really?”
* * *
HE PULLED UP at her front door. “Your horse. How was the mare injured?”
She was taken aback by the question. She couldn’t even think up a plausible lie.
“You think it was done deliberately,” he persisted.
She hesitated, drew in a breath, then nodded.
“By whom?” he asked.
She looked at him with wide, pained eyes in the light from the map reader. She grimaced. “I...can’t talk about it.”
“Your second husband,” he guessed. “Was his name Merridan?”
“Oh, no,” she said quickly. “It was Trent. When I divorced Bailey, I reverted to my first married name, Merridan. Most of my stocks and bonds and my land holdings were still in that name anyway. I changed my will, too,” she added darkly, not choosing her words, “so that when I die, all my holdings go to various charities. He won’t get a penny.”
“There’s gossip that he was in prison.”
Her pale face turned to his. “Was. Yes.”
His face went bland. “So he’s out now, is he?” Jake asked.
She bit her lower lip.
“Out for blood, too, unless I miss my guess.”
“Blood. Money. It’s all the same to him,” Ida said.
“You think he hurt the horse?”
“I don’t know. Laredo, he’s the new man, he’s set up cameras outside, just in case...”
“Is he really a cowboy?” Jake asked.
Her small breasts rose and fell with her inner torment. “My attorneys felt that I needed some protection, on the ranch,” she blurted out.
He didn’t say a word. But he was assembling puzzle pieces in his mind. It all became clear quite rapidly.