The Taming Of Jackson Cade

Jackson had lost the thread of concentration. Brows only a little darker than his auburn hair lifted in question. “‘It?’”

“Sorry.” This was her night for apologies. “I didn’t mean to speak in riddles. Just wondering aloud what else Jesse said.” She glanced at the cowhand, but he shrugged. Jesse had no answer or had delegated that responsibility to the younger man.

“What probably struck you as odd,” Jackson volunteered again, “was his comment that the other horses weren’t seeing what Dancer was imagining.”

“Imagining?” She looked into eyes bearing no shred of anger. “Jesse thought the horse was imagining something?” Before either man could respond, she questioned Jackson. “Did you?”

“At the time, I didn’t think of anything but preventing Dancer from hurting himself.” Unconsciously, he brushed a roughened finger over the start of a bruise. Tomorrow he would have a colorful cheek, maybe a shiner. “Now that I remember Jesse saying it, yes, Dancer acted as if he was hallucinating. Maybe having a sort of seizure, which is ridiculous.”

Hallucinations. Seizure. Induced by an exotic foreign substance? She’d seen it once before. The horse died, because the diagnosis had been made postmortem. If she was lucky… “Jesse, get me a syringe. Jackson, take my bag to a better light.”

When both had done as she’d asked—she was working so quickly and thinking so hard—she hadn’t realized she had given orders. Or that Jackson Cade had obeyed without question. When the syringe was prepared, she stopped to explain. “I think I’ve seen this before. If I’m right and I move quickly enough, we can save your Dancer. But you have to realize this is little more than a wild guess, a gamble. Luck of the draw, so to speak.

“If we had time for tests…”

“Which we don’t,” Jesse reminded her grimly.

In a regretful tone she warned, “If I’m wrong…”

“What you try could kill him.” Oddly, as if he would spare her the grief of the words, Jackson stated the inescapable truth.

“Yes,” she admitted, for there was no other answer.

“In this condition, he’ll die if you don’t try,” Jesse put in, but Haley and Jackson were concentrating so intently on each other, neither heard. Neither needed to hear, for they knew.

“Last ditch,” Jackson murmured.

“So it would seem. But Dancer’s strong…there’s a chance this could run its course before his heart gives out.”

“No,” he disagreed. “You didn’t see him. Even if the next seizure is lighter, he won’t survive it.”

“Then will you trust me? Will you take the risk that I’m right?” Haley knew she faced the challenge of her career. As she’d warned, anything she did from this point on would be sheer guesswork. But with every other avenue exhausted, guesswork was all they had. All there was time for before another onset of Dancer’s madness. Dancer’s deliberately induced madness.

Haley caught a startled breath. Deliberately induced? Certainty came out of nowhere. But every intuition shouted deliberate. The word resounded in her mind like an echoing bell.

She knew little of the operation at River Trace, still less of its stubborn and scornful proprietor. Stubborn and scornful with her, she amended, for she knew of his reputation as a laughing, flirting, kindhearted gentleman. Once, long ago, she’d known his gentleness. Times change, people change. Perhaps the young man who had been kind to a younger, obviously forgotten Haley Garrett, had changed. Perhaps he’d made enemies. Vicious enemies.

A concept she understood all too well. One not beyond the realm of possibility. After all, Jackson Cade had certainly done his best to make an enemy of her.

Dancer tossed his head, then staggered and whickered, a prelude to the screams that had brought her here. “Imagining,” she whispered in a troubled tone, more certain than ever that she was right. There was hope for the horse now, but little time.

Laying a hand on the stall door, she started to enter when a hard, calloused hand covering hers stopped her. “Don’t,” Jackson said. “Whatever this is, it comes in stages. At his worst, he’s too dangerous for you to take this risk. I’m sorry.”

True regret flickered over his craggy, attractive face, startling Haley. Before she could protest that this was her job and that this was neither the first nor the last time she would face a dangerous creature, his clasp tightened, his fingers circling the back of her hand and her palm.

“I shouldn’t have interrupted your evening, Duchess.” This time the name lacked the sting it had carried before. If this hadn’t been Jackson, if he hadn’t proven time and again he had little use for her as a vet or a person, it could have been a nickname. The sort a friend might bestow on a friend.

Friends? Mutely she scoffed at her choice of words. Of the things she and Jackson might become as a result of this night, she’d already decided friendship could never be one of them.

“But you did make the call. A call I’ve waited…” Haley stopped short, only then admitting it was true. She had waited for his call, for the day he would need her. A startling admission she would need to give greater thought…but later, when his blue gaze didn’t burn into hers, making anger and animosity meaningless.

Gathering scattered thoughts, she turned her attention to the cause of her journey. “I’m here for a purpose. Your horse needs attention. Now, Jackson, before it’s too late.”

“He’ll be dangerous. Too dangerous.”

“Because he’s a fighter, yes, he will,” Haley agreed. “But he’s only restless now. Whatever this is, it’s building. If I move quickly, hopefully I can find what I’m looking for. If I do and if my half-educated guess turns out to be lucky and right, what I’m trying might counteract it.”

“‘Educated guess’? ‘Luck’?” It wasn’t an admission he’d expected. He’d set his mind so strongly against her, he’d never considered what he should expect from her.

Pretending his touch and the softening of his demeanor didn’t incite emotions she wasn’t ready to deal with, Haley was determined to do the job she’d been summoned to do. Glancing at a clock visible beyond Jackson, she found this exchange that seemed to go on forever had, from beginning to now, spanned just nine minutes. Even that little time was too much. Too long.

Certain she was losing her window of opportunity, if there was one, she restated an inescapable truth. “You’ve never wanted me here. That you’ve called me tonight can only mean that you knew anything I might do was a last-ditch effort.

“Look at him, Jackson.” Because she’d seen beyond the stubborn arrogance, because she’d felt the pain he guarded so carefully, she called his name softly. Hardly aware of what she did, with her free hand she touched his shoulder in compassion. “Time’s running out, for Dancer and for me.”

“No.” Jackson couldn’t explain why he was resisting this. He’d called for her help. When all else had failed, Dancer’s survival rested, finally, in Haley Garrett’s hands. The hands of a duchess, despite the calluses and blunt nails.

Over the telephone, it was a matter of course to consider that she should do this. But when she stood before him, so tiny and yet so determined, he realized how impossible it was that she face a half ton of maddened horseflesh.

“You can’t. When I called, I didn’t realize…” His voice drifted into silence. His hand tightened over hers, his shoulders lifted, as he made a choice consigning Dancer to certain death. “I’m sorry, Duchess. I shouldn’t have interrupted the concert or your date with Daniel.”

“It wasn’t Daniel, and this is what I trained years to do. Why I relocated in Belle Terre and joined Lincoln’s practice.”

The exhausted stallion snuffled and took a stumbling step. Haley looked from Jackson to the horse and back. “Dancer isn’t the first crazed creature I’ve confronted in my life and in my work. He won’t be the last.”

“Let her go, Jackson.” Jesse spoke into the impasse. “I’ve seen your duchess in action. She can handle this and Dancer. Probably better than you or me.”

As Jesse distracted him, Haley moved beyond Jackson’s grasp. Syringe ready, she slipped through the stable door.

Two

Jackson Cade stood at the bedroom window. The bedroom he’d chosen as his when he’d bought the derelict farm the once-proud plantation had become. In debt up to his ears to the Bank of Belle Terre, he’d worked day and night, pouring his heart and his soul—and every spare penny—into the land.

When the effort seemed too much, his goal too impossible, it was this window and the view that kept him going. It was his measuring stick, the tally of his successes and his failures.

“How many times?” he wondered out loud. How many times had he stood here in dawn’s light, watching the changes a day brought to the land. The changes his labor wrought as he reclaimed first one pasture then another. Acre by grueling acre.

Even with Lincoln and Jefferson helping, progress had been slow. More times than he could remember, he’d wanted to give it up. To count River Trace as Jackson Cade’s folly. Then he would stand at this window at dawn. As his heart lifted with the sun, burdens seemed lighter, and impossible was only a word.

His first stud had been mediocre, not in keeping with the horse’s own bloodlines, but its colts had had a way of reverting to an excellence that had gone before. A gamble, but there had been those willing to take the chance for that rare, splendid colt.

With the stud fees he’d added a second stud and another pasture, and his name became a whisper in all the right circles. Jackson Cade and Cade horses became a coveted secret. Then Adams sold Cade Enterprises, insisting a share of the absurd sum go to his brothers. They became silent legal partners, having no idea they were partners, whom Adams credited with being as responsible for the ridiculously simple invention a competing company fancied.

When the dust of the family battle settled, there were funds earmarked to set Belle Reve, the floundering family plantation, aright, and to keep it that way. Millions were left to be divided between brothers. Adams would have it no other way.

Gus Cade’s sons, who had known nothing but hard work and penny-pinching times, were suddenly free of their beloved tyrant. And affluent into the bargain. But little had changed in their lives.

Adams stayed in the lowcountry and married Eden, the woman he’d loved forever. With her, he began rescuing the uninhabited and neglected houses of Belle Terre’s infamous Fancy Row. Bringing grace and dignity to derelicts that a century before, in an accepted practice, grandly sheltered mistresses and second families of wealthy Southern planters and businessmen.