Читать книгу The Taming Of Jackson Cade - Bj James - Страница 10

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.

Lincoln brought his veterinary office and equipment to state-of-the-art, bought a Jaguar, a pied-à-terre on a secluded street in Belle Terre and left the rest for Adams to invest.

And Jeffie?

Jackson smiled as the name tumbled into his thoughts. Who knew about Jeffie? He still hunted, still fished, still painted. He worked with the horses at Belle Reve and River Trace. And still had no idea the female population practically swooned at his feet.

A low laugh sounded in the pale darkness of Jackson’s bedroom as first light gleamed beyond the window. A laugh of pleasure in his youngest brother. For, if all the rest of their lives had changed little, Jefferson’s hadn’t changed at all.

“Nor mine, truly.” His life, his workload, his goals, were the same. Only River Trace had changed. Most of his own share of what he would always think of as Adams’s millions had been poured into the farm. First replacing a barn that had burned. Arson, but with no motive discovered, nor any suspect.

Except the Rabbs, a local family waging a one-sided feud. An old enmity, sparked by jealousy of the Cades’s misperceived wealth and anger over too many lost brawls. Jealousy and anger that turned to hate and danger and threatened tragedy.

With no proof and no more incidents, he’d filed his suspicions away. After the barn, he’d recouped and restored the last of the acres included in the original grant on which River Trace had been built. And, finally, the breeding stock. The studs, more and more costly studs.

Last came Cade’s Irish Dancer. The stallion on which he’d gambled his dreams and the financial future of River Trace.

“I almost lost it,” he muttered. “In a single night, I almost lost the dream.”

As if it had lifted out of the east pasture, the sun climbed slowly into the sky, casting light over fields of grain waiting to be harvested. Miles of white fences gleaming like rose-gold ribbons traversed and intersected the velvet green of rich, grassy pastures. Horses snuffling dew-beaded grass were sleek and sassy, and so beautiful it hurt to watch them.

Paradise. Yes, for Jackson, the land he surveyed from his bedroom window was no less than that. Paradise lost, but for a tiny slip of a woman. A brave, savvy, fool-hearted woman, a woman he’d been determined to dislike from his first glimpse of her.

He’d rejected her help time and again. Yet when he called, she came. He insulted her, she kept her cool. He acted the boor—keeping her dignity, she made him the fool.

When all he had lay on the brink of destruction, with perception, compassion and ill-advised courage, at great cost to herself she had cared for a maddened creature and saved the day.

“No.” He turned from the window to the bed where she slept, recovering from her near brush with death the previous night when a crazed Dancer had flung her violently against the wall of his stall. “She saved the night, my horse, and my home.” Crossing to the chair where he’d spent all but the last few minutes keeping watch, he settled down to wait for Haley Garrett to awake.

The grandfather clock in the foyer had boomed the hour five times since Jackson Cade had put Haley in his bed. Four of those times she hadn’t heard or stirred. On the fifth, she did.

Slowly, not quite awake, not quite asleep, her lashes fluttered but didn’t lift from her cheeks. As the clock fell silent, a frown crossed her face, then was gone.

Six o’clock. She was late. She should be worried, but couldn’t muster the energy. Not remembering the night, thinking only of the time, she stirred, beginning a languid stretch, and a sharp pain threatened to slice her in two.

“Oh-hh.” An unfinished breath stopped in her lungs. Lashes that had just begun to rise from her cheeks at last, fluttered down in an effort to seal away a world too bright and an agony too sharp. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t move, as muscles across her back and midriff held her in paralytic misery.

Denying the pain, she tried to move again, and her teeth clenched a second too late to bite back a groan. A sound that brought with it the fleeting stroke of a hand across her brow. One offering comfort, but she didn’t understand.

“No,” she whispered hoarsely, and turned away.

“Shh. Everything’s all right, thanks to you. You’re all right,” a voice assured.

Thanks to you. Thanks to you. She’d heard the routine before, trying to soothe what couldn’t be soothed, undo what couldn’t be undone, by planting a lie. God help her, she’d heard it all before and didn’t want to hear it again. Keeping her eyes closed tightly, weary of an old struggle, she whispered, “Don’t.”

Haley was too tired. The words hurt too much. “Just don’t.” In the darkness of her world she shuddered as the bed dipped beneath his weight. “Go away, Todd. Leave me alone.”

“Shh, shh. Easy,” A deep voice, not the obsequious wheedle she expected. “I’m not Todd, Duchess. I don’t think I’d like to be. But I won’t touch you if you don’t want me to.”

The voice she’d heard soothing a frighten, crazed horse. Soothing her as gently.

“Jackson?” Gold-tipped lashes lifted. As she risked the turn to face him, eyes once as brilliant as a bluebird’s wing were shadowed with more than physical hurt. Her gaze cleared, settling on his frowning features. As she remembered the night and the clock, deducing where she was, she checked a sharply drawn breath. Agony as sharp as the first crushed her ribs and spine in its vise.

Jackson watched her pallor grow more ghostly, and under his breath he cursed a man called Todd for sins he couldn’t name, and himself for his own folly. “You’re safe, Haley. And, because of you, so is Dancer.”

“Dancer.” The name fell from stiff lips as she remembered the stallion suffering the throes of madness. “He’s alive?”

“Thanks to you. He’ll need some time to recover, but eventually he should be good as new.”

“How? When?” Haley was discovering there was a gap in her memory. The last she remembered was taking her hand from Jackson’s and slipping into Dancer’s stall.

“You guessed right on the cause of his symptoms. He was on the edge of another siege when you got the needle in him. Whether it was the needle, the injection, or the cycle of the fits, Dancer sidestepped into you, pinning you against the stall wall.”

To Jackson’s disgust, by the time he’d recognized Haley’s intent, it was too late. Dancer had knocked her away as if she weighed nothing at all. She’d crumpled into a heap nearly beneath the horse’s flying hooves before Jackson could get to her. The time it took to tear open the stall door so that he could shield her was the longest of his life.

“You have a bad bruise.” Because he’d let her go. “And you’ll be sore awhile.” His fault, for calling her at all. “But Coop says you’ll be right as rain in a week or so.”

“Coop? Cooper.” She focused on the name, questioning and interpreting all at once. She heard nothing else Jackson said once she knew he was speaking of the dashing Davis Cooper, Belle Terre’s physician and bachelor extraordinaire. Her escort for the concert. A friend who, over dinner, had subtly made her aware that he’d like more than friendship from her.

Abruptly, in her rush to answer the call to River Trace, she’d left him with barely an explanation or a backward glance. Not the way to treat a kind and gallant man. A would-be lover.

Haley struggled to sit up, unaware that in her cautious efforts the broad shoulder of the shirt she wore slipped down her arm. “I should have called him. I should explain.” Not sure what Davis Cooper should know, or how she could begin to explain what she didn’t understand herself, she abandoned the muddled thought. “I need to apologize.”

“For what, Duchess?” Jackson zeroed in on the little of the ramble he could decipher. “For doing your job? And doing it too zealously and too well?”

An understatement and a far cry from what he’d expected of her. No matter that she was Lincoln’s associate, or that his brother would not choose a partner with lesser standards than he expected of himself. In his own stubborn mind-set Jackson knew he’d been unreasonable, believing only the worst of her.

“How I do my job isn’t the point.”

“Isn’t it?” A questioning eyebrow inched up. A typical Jackson Cade reaction, usually accompanied by a teasing smile. But at the moment, with his conscience in turmoil, the typical Jackson Cade was having trouble finding anything to smile about. “Do you really believe that?”

“Of course I do. My work, underdone or excessive, isn’t the point of the apology. Common courtesy is. Cooper behaved like a gentleman, the least I can be in return is considerate.”

Touché, Jackson thought, though he knew there was no intended barb in the remark. He suspected she’d tolerantly filed away the memory of his behavior in the barn as one more Cade foible. If she remembered at all. Suddenly Jackson wasn’t sure he liked being dismissed so easily. Even at his insufferable best.

Indifference. The passiveness of indifference was the last thing he expected from Haley Garrett. As she lay in his bed, with his shirt refusing to stay properly in place, he had no idea what he wanted. Or didn’t want…except indifference.

“You can pay your dues to protocol later,” he suggested after a pause in which his damnable shirt slipped another mesmerizing inch. “But…” He stopped, then continued his lecture. “I assure you an apology is neither due nor expected.

“Had the circumstances been reversed, don’t fool yourself into thinking Coop would hesitate about leaving you. In the middle of a concert, in the middle of dinner, in the middle of…” His teeth clenched, briefly halting the outpouring. “Never mind about that one. What I’m saying is, that if a patient needs him, Coop’s like a horse with blinders. Because he’s so single-minded himself, he’ll understand about last night.”

Haley couldn’t be so certain. “Maybe. If he knew the whole story, and how grave Dancer’s situation had become.”

“He knows, Haley. Coop was here last night.” With a careful touch, Jackson leaned her back against a stack of pillows and adjusted the shirt. More for his own comfort than Haley’s. He was perturbed by what a glimpse of the curve of her bare shoulder had done to him. This was hardly the time or place for lust.

In any time or place, he reminded himself, the Duchess was all he’d schooled himself to dislike in a woman.

“Cooper’s here? Now?”

With the repetition of Cooper’s name, something altered in her face, even the shade of her eyes seemed to change. Jackson wasn’t sure what it meant, and he discovered he didn’t like it.

“It’s morning.” The paling sky had turned from red-gray to ever-changing blue. Light fell through ancient panes joining the dim glow of a single lamp. “Time all good little surgeons were at their operating tables.”

“Morning?” She had forgotten the striking clock.

“It was morning before you finished in the barn. It’s only a little later now.” There were no roses in her cheeks, but like her perception, her color improved by the minute.

Turning her head carefully, Haley realized she was in a very masculine bedroom. Obviously Jackson’s bedroom, not a guest bedroom. “That means I’ve been here for the remainder of the night?”

“What there was left after Cooper examined you.”

“Cooper examined me?” As her mind cleared, she realized she sounded like a broken record. She laughed, and rued the impulse.

“Maybe you think Coop is deserving of an apology, but he would disagree. The way he sees it, he was an unchivalrous idiot to let you drive to River Trace alone. He arrived less than a minute after Dancer did his number on you.”

“His number? On me?” Her back felt more as if a steam-roller had flattened her, not a horse.

“He bucked, flinging you like a ball.”

“You got me out.” She didn’t remember, but it wasn’t a question. Jackson might dislike her, he might regard her veterinary skills and professional dedication as suspect, but he wouldn’t stand idly by if she were in danger.

“With Jesse’s help.” Jackson spoke casually, leaving out every nuance of fear that had raced through him like cold fire.

He’d been wild when he’d thought she’d been crushed against the wall with all the brute’s weight. Wilder when hooves that would have cut her fragile flesh to ribbons stomped over and over, narrowly missing her as she lay unconscious on the floor. Fear and galvanizing panic had given him strength he hadn’t known he possessed. He didn’t tell her that if Jesse hadn’t kept a cooler head, calming Jackson as much as the horse, he would have killed Dancer with his bare hands. Nor that when she was safe, but he didn’t know the extent of her injuries, he was a madman.

“Then Cooper came?” Haley frowned and pressed a massaging finger against her temple as she tried to make sense of the chain of events by putting them in proper sequence.

Jackson’s head barely moved in a nod. “Cooper came.”

Like a gift of fate, Cooper had arrived in the midst of the worst of Jackson’s worry. And promptly threatened to eject him from his own barn, even forbidding him to watch, if he didn’t stop hovering and cool down. Throughout the cursory examination conducted outside the stall, Jackson had paced. Impotent, helpless, a banished animal. After Cooper’s determination that the bump on her head was simply a bump on the head, he continued with assurance that the breath had merely been knocked from her lungs when her back crashed into the wall.

Merely? Merely! Jackson had roared, adding angrily that he didn’t see much damned difference, since Haley, by damn, certainly appeared to be unconscious. Unconscious and still. Frighteningly, heart-stoppingly still.

“He examined me?” Her eyes widened. If any trace of lethargy remained, the idea of being unaware and at the mercy of three men—three disparate men—brought it to a screeching end.

“You weren’t exactly yourself.” He saw confusion and chagrin in her face. It pleased him to see this coolly controlled and professionally confident woman falter. The pleasure was short-lived as the militant conscience of a gentleman, however reluctant, kicked in. “I doubt even Superwoman would be herself after being body-slammed by the stallion from hell.”

“Body-slammed.” Haley sighed and ignored the penalty the stupidity levied. Jackson painted a good description of the little she remembered. “Knocked the breath out of me, did he?”

Though she’d paled with the sigh, she tried to hide it behind a wry smile. After hours of watching her, Jackson had grown familiar with every nuance of her mobile features. He saw the pain but respected her efforts by making no comment beyond addressing her supposition. “Among Dancer’s destructive behaviors, there was that. Along with a bump on the head.

“Which Coop assured me wasn’t as much the reason you were lying in a puddle like a discarded doll as the breath thing.” Anger kindled again as Jackson remembered how calm and controlled Cooper had been. As if a horse of River Trace causing injury to a beautiful woman were an everyday affair. “Which I told him was a damned fool thing to say. For, as far as I could see, unconscious was unconscious, no matter the cause.”

After that cynical remark from Jackson, Coop had given her something to ease her enough that she would sleep. Then he’d launched into a detailed explanation, comparing Haley’s condition with a child’s tantrum, held breath and all. Before he could stop himself, Jackson had snapped back that in case Coop was too blind to notice, Haley wasn’t exactly a child. And, in case Coop was too stupid to understand that tackling frenzied horses did not include holding one’s breath, he ought to try one or both someday.

Cooper laughed then, with Jesse’s guffaws joining in, while both watched him with smug, knowing looks. Which only made Jackson angrier, more frustrated. Which, he decided, excused him for being ornery. Explaining why Cooper’s offer to take her to Jackson’s bedroom—where, Coop pointedly reminded him, Jackson had insisted she rest and recover—was summarily dismissed. Which, to his mounting ire, produced another round of smiles.

It was the final straw when Cooper volunteered to stay. By then, finally convinced the Duchess was truly all right, and fed up with both Coop and Jesse, he nearly pushed each man out of the room. Then, gracelessly, he’d instructed Jesse to see to Dancer. With no more grace he suggested Cooper go home and wait for the next call, instead of dropping in.

Then he’d shut the door in their grinning faces.

“Why?” Jackson didn’t realize he’d spoken the word out loud. The word he’d asked himself more times than he could count as he’d sat by her bed through the few hours left of the night. Why had he been so cavalier with Haley when, after all, he had called her? When her only sin, beyond interrupting a special evening to rush to River Trace, was wanting to help? Why had he been irritable with Cooper, whose arrival had been a godsend?

And Jesse? The man worked tirelessly, asking no quarter, giving none, as he fought for Dancer and with Dancer. Jackson knew his treatment of the old hand was unforgivable.

“Ask for help, then spit in the eye of any who do,” he muttered, and turned from the bed and from Haley, to stare at the dawn that had become full-fledged morning.

“Is that what you call it?” Haley’s voice was strained as she swung her legs over the side of the bed and rested her bare feet on the floor. Bare feet. She didn’t want to think about that. Or that she was naked under the shirt she knew was Jackson’s. Except for her panties. He’d left her that small shred of pride.

“Is that what I call—” Jackson had spun away from the window. In long, hurried steps he returned to her bedside. “What the devil do you think you’re doing?”

“I don’t think, Jackson. I know.” Hands clutching the mattress, she tilted her head to meet his blazing gaze. “I’m getting out of your bed. And, if you’ll bring my clothes, out of your shirt as well.”

“You can’t.”

“No?” The anger she’d conquered hours ago for the sake of a suffering animal flared now at the fierce arrogance. “Watch me.”

The minute the words left her mouth, she knew her boast was worse than his bark. But pride wouldn’t let her back down now. She knew something of her dilemma must have shown in her face when she felt his arms circling her, lifting her gingerly to her feet.

“Thank you,” she murmured when she felt steady enough to speak. Glancing down at his muscular arms dusted with a pale auburn down, and conscious of his hands pressed against her back, strong fingers supporting, caressing, she whispered almost breathlessly, “You can let me go now.”

“Of course.” Jackson stepped back. His hands moved from her back to her shoulders, trailed down her arms, then curled over her clammy fingers. “You’re sure you can do this?”

“I’m sure. So long as I don’t need to tackle another horse anytime soon, I’ll be fine.”

Jackson laughed then, and released her. “Yes, you will, won’t you? Be fine, I mean.”

“It wasn’t the first time…”

“I know,” he interrupted softly. “Nor the last.”

“I’m repeating myself.” This time she didn’t laugh.

“Doesn’t matter.” A gesture called her attention to a door opposite the hall. “The bath’s there. A nice hot soak should feel good about now. If you don’t find all you need, just yell.”

“So long as the water’s hot, I’ll be fine.”

“Somehow I thought you would be. Since that’s the case, I’ll leave you to your bath, Duchess. In the meantime, I should be able to find some fresh clothes for you among Merrie’s things.”

“Merrie?” Haley knew she shouldn’t be surprised there was a woman in Jackson’s life. But she was. A dozen, maybe. No, not maybe, definitely. But not just one.

“Merrie Alexandre,” Jackson explained. “A university student who lived for a while with Eden and Adams. Between classes, and on weekends when she needs to escape her apartment mates, she helps here with the horses. Because she stays over when she works late, she keeps several changes of clothing here.”

Jackson let his gaze trail over Haley, lingering, remembering. But with none of the disdain of before. There wasn’t much of her. but what there was, he’d discovered, was flawless.

Lastly, his gaze returned to her hair. The mane of pale gold Dancer knocked partially from the perfect coil, and he finished taking down, untangling it before putting her to bed. Even now he remembered the feel of strands like silk slipping through his fingers, the clean fragrance drifting from it. Enchanting. Enticing. Pale locks that would bind a man to her.

There were new tangles now, and his fingers curled as he thought of smoothing them again. Jackson rebuffed the thought and the path it was taking. Instead he moved to the bedroom door, opened it and stood with escape from his own awakening desire looming a step away. “You’re smaller, but I think I can find something that will serve. But don’t worry, Merrie won’t mind.”

Before she could even think to worry, Jackson stepped into the hall and shut the door. Haley was alone. “Alone in the bedroom of Jackson Cade,” she reminded herself as she wandered to the bathroom. “It’s just as well, considering that this show of kindness is contrition of the moment.

“Next week, this will be forgotten,” Haley predicted as she turned on the taps, discarded Jackson’s shirt and stepped into steaming water. “Next week he’ll hate me again.”

“‘My apologies. Called away, but not for long. Dancer’s fine, you needn’t check him. Wait. Rest. I’ll see you home.’”

Haley read out loud the note she’d found on the bed along with a selection of Merrie Alexandre’s clothing. Crumpling the hastily scrawled missive, she let it fall to the floor along with the towel covering her from breasts to hips. Then she proceeded to dress, admiring the younger woman’s taste, and disconcerted by Jackson’s evident skill in making choices in women’s clothing.

When she’d finished, she wondered briefly where her own clothes might be. Then, with a dismissive shrug, she counted them lost. Once the towel had been dropped in the clothes chute, her hair twisted into a helter-skelter knot and secured with what pins she could find, then the bed put in order, she was ready to go.

“Not one trace,” she murmured. “He won’t even remember I was here.” Spying the note lying on the floor, she scooped it up and stuffed it into the pocket of the borrowed jeans. Making one last survey, pleased by the utter perfection she was leaving behind, she left it behind.

As she hurried to the barn, anxious to check on Dancer before the master of the house returned, Haley reflected that it felt good to be back in jeans and boots. And even the soft but sturdy blouse that tugged a bit too snugly across her breasts. Merrie was obviously slender, with a more adolescent figure. And, either she wore no bras, she’d taken all of that particular sort of garment back to her apartment, or Jackson had forgotten.

A breeze was just kicking up, in it lay the promise of rain. Nothing was prettier than a lowcountry rain falling like streaks of silver and gold as the sun would alternately hide or shine. Haley loved the autumn showers, and in anticipation she crossed the cobblestone path to the barn with a less guarded step. Her back still ached, but the soak and simply moving had eased it into a manageable state.

A draft skittered around the side of the barn, rattled the metal rings of rigging, and set a gate banging. The fabric of her shirt was supple enough to cling, sturdy enough to not be indecently revealing, and rough enough that with the movement of her body coupled with the efforts of the breeze, it brushed over the tips of her breasts, teasing her nipples to a pleasant tingle.

Haley’s soft laugh at this secret pleasure was cut short by a low, deep bellow.

“What the hell are you doing here, and why the devil are you dressed like that?”

Spinning, she nearly collided with Jackson. As he glared down at her, she smiled with a calculated pleasantness, then sobered, assuming her most professional demeanor. “I’m here to check my patient. I’m dressed as I am because these are the clothes you chose for me.”

“Then I made a mistake.”

“Evidently you did. And, given your attitude, it’s just as evident that before we’re done with each other, it won’t be your last mistake.”

“What’s that supposed to mean, Duchess?”

“You figure it out, Mr. Cade.” Smiling another, equally calculated smile, she sauntered away.

“Who’s Todd?” he called, expecting a reaction. Wanting one. Needing one.

His probing salvo produced nothing, not so much as a stumble in her step. With a dismissive waggle of her fingers, and maddeningly calm, she called back, “Todd’s no one you need be concerned with. He’s no one. No one at all, anymore.”