Dreamless

“Many times.” Jake pushed his leather desk chair back and smiled.

“I swear—” Donna stepped into the office and flopped onto the leather sofa opposite the desk. “She makes me so nervous. I cannot imagine the two of you ever being married!”

Jake smiled again. What would he have done these past three years without Donna Morales? A licensed practical nurse, a mother of three perpetually hungry college-age sons, and an ardent Catholic, Donna whipped up the foods Dad loved, kept their rambling ranch house passably clean, and, best of all, was so honest and plainspoken that even Jayden had come to trust her.

Donna’s quiet, reliable husband, Jose, had worked for Jake for years, cutting hay, cleaning barns, fixing fence and talking to the Andalusians in soothing Spanish. Soon after Lana packed herself off to her daddy’s house, Jose had mentioned that the couple could sure use some extra income, with three boys studying engineering over at the university—and Jake, he had pointed out gently, could sure use Donna’s kind of help.

At first Donna wore herself out, beating a path from the hospital to the ranch the minute her shift was over, arriving just about the time the school bus dropped Jayden at the road. But before long, Jake offered to make her position full time. She and Jose had prayed about it for about two seconds, then jumped at the deal. Jose and Jake’s main hand, Buck Winfrey, had always been friendly, and they soon got into the habit of hitting the ranch house of a morning, looking for Donna’s home-baked treats. Sometimes they’d grab a quick cup of coffee with Mack. Donna called the three older men “the boys” in the same tone she used for her sons. Jake didn’t mind the traffic in his home. His life, Mack’s life and, most of all, Jayden’s life would be awful lonely without that little ensemble running in and out.

And in the past year, Donna had become a trusted confidante to Jake where it concerned his father’s declining health. She seemed to be able to put a calm, cheerful, down-to-earth slant on the discouraging daily incidents that came with Alzheimer’s disease. If the woman had known anything about horses, Jake decided, she’d be dang near perfect. Except that she weighed two hundred pounds and her unkempt frizzy hair was died the color of day-old coffee and her little mustache was thicker than Mack’s. But Jose seemed to think she was a goddess.

“I shouldn’t have left your dad alone with that woman.” Donna looked slightly embarrassed. “Honest to Pete, I don’t know why I let her get to me.”

“It’s okay.” Jake stood and threaded his arms into the sleeves of his denim jacket. “Dad’s asleep in his chair. I’ve gotta get out to the barns.”

“What’ll I do with these?” Donna held up the plastic grocery sack she’d carried in.

“Here—” Jake held out his hand for the carton of cigarettes. “I’ll give the smokes to Buck. He’s not picky about the brand.”

She handed him the cigarettes, then pulled out the expensive cookies. “And these?”

“Have the boys already been here?”

“Cleaned out my cinnamon rolls an hour ago.”

“Then, I guess you and Jayden can have a little party when she comes home from school.”

“Oh, not me. I’m on a diet.” Donna winked.

“Yeah, me, too.” Jake winked back. He grabbed another apple—his standard snack—out of the basket that Donna kept filled on his desk. “So how about a nice big pan of sour-cream chicken enchiladas for lunch?”

Donna flapped a chubby palm at him. “Behave yourself and get on out to the barns!”

AS JAKE PULLED A GOLF CART up to the barns in the eastern pasture, he saw Buck Winfrey opening the south-facing barn doors. On a chilly day like this, Buck might even have the space heaters going. Jake trusted Buck, a veteran of the horse trade, with all such decisions.

Just inside the doors, two barn boys were blanketing this year’s heavily pregnant broodmares for a walk in the sun. Jake was worried. The mares, normally placid, were dancing away as the barn boys held up the blankets. How high-strung had the quarter horses become? Jake had kept the Andalusians, thoroughbreds and quarter horses cycling this winter. Of those, the quarter horses were the biggest worry.

Losing an Andalusian or thoroughbred foal to prematurity would be costly, but early quarter horses, a full year behind the growth curve, might hurt the Cottonwood Ranch reputation for years to come. In the horse-breeding business, Jake himself was a rare breed, raising both racing and show horses. He valued his reputation, which was his father’s, which was his grandfather’s, as if it were an actual commodity.

The booming seemed considerably louder on this side of the valley. As he parked, Jake saw one of the old pickup trucks, loaded with hay, pulling around beside the barn. With his skinny arms raised over his head, Buck signaled the driver to go out far, past the water troughs. The farther he took the hay into the field before dumping it, the farther the mares would run for the feed and the longer they would stay out in the sunlight while they ate, getting needed exercise and sunshine.

“Buck!” Jake hollered, waving.

Buck ambled toward him, his cowboy’s gait loose, easy, reflecting the wiry older man’s attitude about life. He pushed a battered baseball cap back on his bald pate.

“What’d that McClean gal have to say about this damn racket?”

“She’s taking me to court.” Jake got out of the cart.

“Say what?” Buck cupped an ear against the intermittent noise of the crushers. “Taking you where?”

“To court!”

“Court!”

“Silly, isn’t it?”

“What the hell for?”

“I expect so she can drive her concrete trucks through this ranch.”

“By God, she will not,” Buck asserted. He pushed his hat farther back and spit into the straw at his feet. Then he fished a cigarette out of his breast pocket.

“Let’s hope not. But I’ve decided a court hearing could be useful. It’ll give me a chance to ask the judge to shut down this noise permanently. I told Edward to ask for another restraining order.”

“That’ll show ’er.”

“How’re the mares?” Jake set off toward the barn.

Buck double-timed it to keep up with Jake’s long legs. “Bailadora and Encantadora just about kick their stalls down every time that damn thing starts going ka-boom.”

As he reached the barn door, Jake could hear the disturbed whinnying of his two most beautiful Andalusians. The plaintive sound made his chest tight. He opened the heavy steel door, and once inside the dim barn, the echoes of the horses’ cries felt suffocating to him. Jake never broke stride on his way to the mares, but reached into a coffee can nailed to a post and grabbed a handful of sugar cubes on his way by.

He went straight to the mares, soothing them with his voice. “Whoa, girls. Facil. Fah-ceel. Easy. Easy.”

The whinnying stopped, and first one, then the other, came to the stall’s bars to nip a sugar cube off his palm. He popped one into his own mouth while he patted the mares’ withers, each in turn.

Jake found that the ritual calmed him as much as it did his animals. For the first time all day, he felt his shoulders relax, felt his breath filling his lungs fully. This was where he found peace—in the barns, in the fields, with the smell of clean hay and healthy horseflesh around him. These beautiful animals, their solidity, their strength, their warmth, had calmed him ever since he was a small boy, reaching up into his grandfather’s pocket for a sugar cube. Even as a man of thirty-five, with all the responsibilities a man could bear, Jake still found that a little time out in the barns, with the taste of a plain sugar cube melting in his mouth and the feel of horseflesh under his palms, could make the world seem sane again.

“It’s the same for you, isn’t it, my lovely ladies.” He spoke to the horses. “A sugar cube and a pat from old Jake can soothe just about anything.”

But even under his calming touch, the tension in the mares’ muscles communicated loudly to Jake through his fingertips. How long could they go on like this? This constant noise was an untenable situation, one he’d never encountered on the peaceful Ten Mile Flats. If C. J. McClean started blasting with dynamite, he’d have an early, or perhaps even dead, foal on the ground before the week was out. He’d wager these mares would drop early, or he hadn’t been a horseman for the past twenty years.

LANA LARGEANT WHEELED her Lincoln Navigator around the first bend in the road that climbed the Sullivan ridge and sucked in a breath. Glorious!

Even in their skeletal state, anyone could see that the homes in The Heights were destined to be first class. They rose up on the hillsides with the steeply pitched roofs and magical lines of the rambling English country manors that she’d grown to love when she and her parents had traveled to equestrian shows in Europe. The midmorning sun created long shadows over pockets of mist under the tall trees and along the deep sandstone creek.

Oh, my! The landscaping possibilities on this slope were endless. Already this developer, this C. J. woman, had erected curving rock retaining walls, gradual terracing and winding stone pathways, all of which lent a quaint, fairy-tale charm to the common grounds. The place embodied the kind of character and style that women like Lana lusted after.

Lana had always fancied this piece of land. Coveted it. When married to Jake, she had occasionally ridden her personal Andalusian mare, Isadora, up onto the hillside. Nowadays she didn’t get over to this side of the Flats often.

Twice, she’d secretly contacted Helen and Caroline, the elderly Sullivan sisters and begged to buy the property from them. But the sisters had said that would never happen. So why, now, had the old ladies finally sold it to this C. J. McClean person? And how on earth had that woman managed to get the development under way so quickly? In a way, the overnight change in the place unsettled Lana, as if some interloper had sneaked in during her absence and stolen something from her.

One. Two. Three houses under construction, and pads cleared for six or seven more. She slowed the Navigator to a crawl, unconcerned that the construction workers might notice her. The Navigator was new, she was wearing her shades and it had been ages since her picture had been in the paper. As she circled the cul-de-sacs, she might have been any well-to-do woman out scouting for properties—not the daughter of Stu Largeant, the longtime mayor of the City of Jordan. Not the ex-wife of horse rancher Jake Coffey, who had apparently already been up here this morning, throwing his weight around with that McClean woman.

Lana wondered what this C. J. McClean looked like. Mack had called her young, but the woman couldn’t be too young if she was overseeing a costly development like this. Unless, like Lana, she was using family money to make her way. Hadn’t there been some McCleans in the home-building business in Jordan, way back when? Hadn’t there been a scandal? Didn’t somebody die or something?

The Heights. Already Lana was itching to live in one of the mansions on these slopes. Right above Cottonwood Ranch. Right next door to Jayden…and Jake. Daddy would definitely have to see this place. But at the thought of her father, Lana stopped her dreaming. Hadn’t she told herself that the Navigator was the last expensive thing her father would ever buy for her? How would his control over her ever end if she didn’t end it?