Читать книгу A Weaver Baby - Allison Leigh - Страница 8

“Heads up.” The warning came in accented English. “He’s got her highness with him.”

J. D. Clay gave Miguel a wry smile. “She can’t be that bad.” The man who owned the thoroughbreds she and Miguel Perez worked with had married the “highness” after all. Jake and Tiffany Forrest even had twin sons, though in the short time since Miguel had hired J.D. to work in the stables at Forrest’s Crossing, she hadn’t yet seen the boys.

“She’s worse,” Miguel said under his breath as he put a wide smile on his face while the couple in question strode along the hectic shed row toward them. “Beautiful an’ no good for da boss.”

J.D. frowned a little, but she’d quickly learned that gossip and rumor were always ripe in the stables, particularly when it came to Jake and his beauty-queen wife. They looked like they belonged on a movie screen rather than here, with dirt under their feet and the perfume of horse manure in the air.

Tiffany Forrest was ivory skinned and black haired. A modern-day version of Snow White, only this one had an elaborate race-day hat perched on her head that would have cost the dwarfs their entire mine. And her tall, athletically built husband, Jake, was simply the description in the dictionary beneath TallDarkandHandsome. Together, the two were—well, striking didn’t even come close.

They stopped next to the stalls that had very tasteful bronze FC plaques on them, and J.D. watched the man’s brown, intensely sharp gaze rove over his thoroughbreds there. One, Metal Cross, was running in the Kentucky Derby later that afternoon. His stable mate, June Cross, had won the Kentucky Oaks—a race for fillies only—the day before. “Everything set to go, Miguel?”

“Sí, sí.” Miguel was head trainer for Forrest’s Crossing and the diminutive Peruvian grinned widely. “Metal here, he gonna do it for us this year. Bring you the roses jus’ like when your daddy won ’em.”

“That’s what I want to hear.” Jake’s coffee-brown eyes skipped over Miguel’s head. “J.D.,” he greeted. “Everything looking good with our filly, there?”

Before J.D. could offer a response, the glossy woman at his side looked up at him with a smile that was only exceeded in brilliance by the jewels draped almost nonchalantly around her throat. “Jake, everyone’s waiting for us up top,” she reminded.

“We’ve got time,” Jake assured. He was still looking at them and missed the sexy pout his wife aimed his way.

J.D. didn’t. “Junie’s in great shape, Mr. Forrest,” she said as she ducked under June’s neck and moved to the far side, running the soft brush over the beautiful filly’s flank. She didn’t need to see the superior glint in Mrs. Forrest’s eyes to confirm that she was much more suitable inside the stable, than outside of it. “Metal’s going to run just as great as Junie did, yesterday.”

Jake’s smile was slightly crooked as he tucked his hand around his wife’s rail-thin waist and turned to go. “Then we’ll see you in the winner’s circle, won’t we?”

“Oh, Jake.” J.D. could hear Tiffany laughing lightly as she walked away with her husband. “Don’t go getting that poor girl’s hopes up. She’s not going to be there with us.”

J.D. kept grooming June. She already knew that if Metal ran his way to the winner’s circle, it would only be the owners, their trainer and the jockey smiling for pictures and accepting trophies and winnings. She’d be back here, mucking out the stalls and polishing up tack.

She was part of the stable woodwork while the couple was definitely Millionaire’s Row.

They were welcome to it.

Give J.D. horses any day of the week. They never disappointed her. And she never disappointed them.