Biding Her Time

“Mm-hmm.” Hilary Cambria, who’d traveled with him to Kentucky from their native Australia, and who looked fresh as a daisy, gave him a pitying look. “You should be out there, dancing.” Pursing the lips Shane had always thought were one of her best features, she cocked her head to consider him. “You need to lighten up, boyo. Live a little.” She raised her glass. “Like her.”

Shane didn’t have to glance over to know whom his cousin meant. The redhead. The pool shark who bought shots for her mates and drank whiskey like one of the boys. There’d been so much laughter and melodramatic groaning around the pool table when he and Hilary had first entered the bar, he couldn’t help but notice the woman who’d been in the middle of it all.

She behaved as if she hadn’t a responsibility in the world. She dressed as if she didn’t give a damn, yet she had more men around her than a swimsuit model.

He knew without having to look again that her skin was the color of wheat, her hair a red-brown that was several shades darker than her many freckles. She was tall, strong and curvy like a milk-fed farm girl, her innocent look at odds with her bold personality.

“Live for today, for tomorrow we may die.” He’d heard her toast, and frankly it had irritated the hell out of him. He couldn’t stomach a cavalier attitude toward life, yet part of him wanted to challenge her to a game of pool and give her a real race for her money. He wanted to spend the night finding out what was truer: the sassy attitude or the fresh-off-the-farm appearance.

Another part of him knew that a woman like the redhead was simply one of life’s distractions, and he’d stopped indulging in those years earlier, when he’d realized his need to find a purpose for his life outweighed all other desires.

“I saw you watching her.” Hilary interrupted his thoughts. “She wanted to dance with you, you know. She was walking right toward you.”

Shane took a sip of his beer, buying himself a moment. He wanted to answer this well.

Returning the frosted glass to a damp cocktail napkin, he reached across the round table, laying his hand on Hilary’s. “I’m with the prettiest girl in the place. And I happen to know she’s a great conversationalist. Why would I give all that up for a dance?”

His heart sank when he saw her neat jawline tense.

“Because I’m your cousin. And because dancing… is… fun.” She spoke slowly, as if she were addressing a half-wit. “Or don’t you like fun anymore?”

Exhaling her anger, she plucked up her wineglass, her blue eyes narrowing above the rim. “You know I love you, but I can’t spend all my time babysitting so you won’t be lonely. It’s starting to put a crimp in my social life.”

Understanding her true implication, Shane responded immediately and firmly. “I’m not babysitting you.”

“Tell it to someone who hasn’t known you since you wore tighty whities.”

She took a gulp of wine, and Shane felt the awesome burden of his own ineffectualness. “What, pray tell, are tighty whities?” he asked, mostly to fill time until he figured out how to talk to her. She’d changed so much in the past year.

Surprising him, she laughed, and thankfully the sound wasn’t quite as brittle as he might have feared. “You really need to get out more. Tighty whities are men’s jocks. The plain kind. Do you know that in America, some men wear jocks that are red-white-and-blue on the Fourth of July? I wonder how they fit all the stars and stripes on there?”

She had decided to make him laugh, and she succeeded. He felt a rush of affection for the girl who had always loved everything American. He hoped this trip to the States would be a gift to her, hoped it would bring back some of her joy.

He was tempted to tease her in return, to lighten the mood still more, but when he looked at her face, he saw that she was already glancing beyond him, her expression so wistful, so rich with longing that he turned to see what was affecting her.

On the dance floor, the redhead had found a partner—a jockey, Shane guessed. Wiry, compact and several inches shorter than the girl, he looked like a dervish, spinning and kicking his seemingly boneless legs out at odd angles. Shane suspected, though, that it was not so much the jockey but the girl whom Hilary watched.

The redhead would never win a dance contest. Like her partner, she flung her arms and legs about in what appeared to be several directions at once. Given her long legs, long neck, plus the russet hair and freckles, he figured he could be forgiven, although probably not by her, for thinking she looked like an enthusiastic giraffe. Once again, his interest caught and held.

When the jockey did a crazy move, kicking one leg way in the air and then spinning around, the woman laughed and matched him move for move.

“She’s got the right idea,” he heard Hilary murmur with a catch in her voice that made his gut ache. “Dance like there’s no tomorrow.”

Her eyes swam with pain. She’d never been good at hiding her feelings, even now when, for the first time, she earnestly tried. Immediately Shane felt helpless. Then he felt the roiling frustration and anger that his helplessness aroused.

“I’m beat,” he said, watching her expression. “Mind if we head back to the motel?”

He thought he handled that relatively well, making their hasty retreat about him rather than her, but the twist of her lips said she knew exactly what he was doing, and she snapped.

“Don’t coddle me.” The rage underlying the low, frustrated growl was so unlike Hilary that even she seemed shocked.

A terrible, impotent grief choked Shane. He wanted to rail at the unfairness of a life that would harm a woman like her, but leave him standing—he, who in thirty-four privileged years had never found a purpose to his existence. Hilary had always been the one with plans, goals. Gratitude. He had been the discontent wanderer.

In a way, he wished Hilary would give him hell, vent her anger on him, say everything that was on her mind, but as swiftly as her anger spiked, it receded. Without another word, she reached for the light wrap draped over the back of her chair. Shane stood, waiting to see whether she would welcome his help or insist on maneuvering herself out of the bar.

As it turned out, she did neither. Allowing her hands to rest limply in her lap, her head bowed forward in an unconscious posture of defeat, she waited silently while he came around behind her and wheeled her back from the table. She neither looked at him nor made a sound as he steered the wheelchair between the bar’s narrowly spaced tables.

A year ago, he had been traveling through Central America digging sewers, building an hogar, desperately seeking activities to give his life meaning.

He had meaning now. The same accident that had damaged Hilary’s spinal cord had killed her parents, leaving her with sole ownership of Cambria Estates, a vineyard and winery near Sydney, Australia. Shane had returned from Central America immediately—needed. Truly needed for perhaps the first time in his life.

He’d been learning the wine business ever since, set with the task of ensuring that Cambria was strong enough to support Hilary for the rest of her life, if need be.

Standing behind the wheelchair, looking at her beautiful bowed head, he vowed that nothing would throw him off track. He had no interest in “living for today”; not when he had finally found every reason to plan for tomorrow.

Chapter Two

Quest Stables occupied a thousand acres in Woodford County, Kentucky, south of Lexington. It housed five hundred horses, and its stunning size and international reputation often distracted visitors from the land upon which it sat. That was a shame, indeed, because Quest was so exquisite, so resplendently engraved upon the landscape, that it could have been a commercial urging tourists to drop everything and visit the Bluegrass State.

It was true that guests to the stables or to Thomas and Jenna Preston’s home often commented on the artistic perfection of the surroundings. If a property could have its colors done, Quest would be a winter—bright and clear and deep. The grass wasn’t green; it was emerald. The wildflowers were amethyst and vermilion and bridal-gown white. Copses of oak and pine and aspen softened the strong summer sun, giving the impression that heaven kissed the land with gold.

Still, the pastoral elegance perceived while brunch-ing on the large veranda could be misleading. Behind the veil of gentle living, there thrummed the inevitable activity and workload of an establishment that produced world-class champion racers.

The most recent and most renowned of the Prestons’ winners was a bay stallion named Leopold’s Legacy. Two months earlier, the handsome brute had won the Derby, followed by a dazzling victory at the Preakness that suggested more wins and high stud fees in his future. He was what every owner and trainer hungered for—a horse that could become a legend.

But Legacy’s ride to the top had been marred. A routine DNA test proved that his sire was not the champion Apollo’s Ice, as originally recorded, and the Prestons, who so recently had stood in the winner’s circle, now found themselves in the middle of a breeding scandal. The reputation and financial future of the entire organization were in danger.

Most mornings for the past month, Quest’s difficulties had been the first thing on Audrey’s mind. She awoke worrying about Brent Preston, Quest’s breeder, and about Carter Phillips, their veterinarian. More than anyone, the two men were coming under suspicion from the Jockey Association. Only Thoroughbreds produced by live cover rather than artificial insemination were accepted for the association’s registration, and both Brent and Carter had witnessed the breeding of Leopold’s Legacy’s dam, Courtin’ Cristy, with Apollo’s Ice at Angelina’s Stud Farm.

Audrey knew the Prestons well and trusted them implicitly. They had been beyond reproach as employers to both her father, who had served as their head farrier for eleven years, and her since she took his place last year. Shoeing Thoroughbreds was the only work she had ever known. Her father had been her hero and best friend, and she’d trailed him like a puppy through the stables while he worked. Treating her like one of the team instead of a youthful nuisance, the Prestons had made it easy for her to follow in her dad’s footsteps.

Feeling impotent in the face of their current troubles, she had readily agreed to help by pulling names up from Quest’s database so the Prestons could contact the owners of their stabled horses. The family wanted to personally break the news that the Jockey Association had recalled Leopold’s Legacy’s Thoroughbred status, which meant the regional racing commissions refused to let him race in North America. Several owners already had withdrawn horses stabled at Quest after the first whiff of scandal, and the Prestons were hoping to stanch further losses by reaching their clients before industry gossip did.

Printing phone lists didn’t feel very proactive, but it was better than sitting on one’s hands, and if it helped Brent and Carter even a little bit, then it was worth it.

Rolling over in bed the morning after she’d danced the night away, Audrey realized this was the first time in weeks that she’d awoken to find her thoughts consumed by her own circumstances as much as by the Prestons’.

Bending an arm above her head, she gazed at the ceiling, recently painted a crisp white, and tried to guess the time without looking at the clock. It was a workday, and she almost always rose before five on a workday, but the brightness and warmth in the room suggested she’d overslept.

Of course, the warmth could be attributed to the big body in bed next to her. A faint disgust had her shaking her head. She’d been exhausted when her head hit the pillow, but she was reasonably certain she’d climbed into bed alone.

“How did you get in here?” she asked without looking over, wrinkling her nose at the answer—a rude snort in her ear.

“Seamus,” she scolded, rolling toward a hundred-and-sixty pounds of lean muscle, wiry steel-gray hair and huge feet. Four of them. “You’re supposed to be sleeping at the big house. Thomas and Jenna bought you that beautiful bed. Don’t be an ingrate.”

The mammoth Irish wolfhound responded by swiping a sleepy tongue over Audrey’s face then yawning. Hugely.

“Morning breath, Seamus.”