Showdown
Wearily, she heaved herself to her feet and wandered into the bathroom. Now, what the hell had she done with that electric razor?
Meanwhile, over at the McDonald house, Bobby was sitting at the kitchen table with Wyatt and Dylan, who’d just gotten back from running some errands in Los Olivos. He was simultaneously sorting through two months of mail, listening to a summarized update of ranch business, and picking at a slice of Maggie’s mouthwatering coffee cake.
“I do have one piece of good news,” Wyatt was saying, as Bobby read and put aside another angry-red phone bill. “We have a guy comin’ up to meet with you tomorrow, first thing. Wants to talk about quarter horses.”
Bobby pricked up his ears. “Really? An investor?”
“Could be,” said Wyatt. “Name of Todd Cranborn. Says he knows you, or he knew Hank or something. Even claims to have met me before, although I’m darned if I can recall it. Anyhow, he’s a real estate guy from the city. Apparently he’d heard you were thinking of starting some sort of training school here and were looking for funds.”
“Interesting.” Bobby rubbed his chin thoughtfully, scratching the back of his hand on half an inch of blond stubble. “But why would a real estate guy be interested in a quarter horse farm?”
Wyatt shrugged. “No idea. Figured you could get into all that. All I do know is that he’s the only fella so far who hasn’t mentioned the word ‘oil’ to me. As far as I can tell he’s serious about investing, and he’s certainly rich enough to help us out.”
“Cranborn,” muttered Bobby to himself. “It kinda rings a bell. Dyl?”
“Never heard of him,” said Dylan, cramming the last of Bobby’s slice of coffee cake into his mouth. “But beggars can’t be choosers, right? If he’s got the cash—”
“We’re not beggars, Dylan,” chided his father.
“Not yet,” said Bobby. “But let’s face it, we’re cutting it pretty fine now. If it’s a choice between our friend Mr. Cranborn or Wells Fargo foreclosing, I know which horse I’m backin’. And he’s interested in quarter horses you say. . . .” Already his mind was wandering off into fantasy, picturing state-of-the-art, air-conditioned stables and an indoor school, with a long, sandy stretch of gallops up on the hill.
“Let’s just see what he has to say, shall we?” said Wyatt, cautious as ever. He’d always been more of a pragmatist than Hank, and he wasn’t against Bobby’s horse training idea. Ranching, like every other business, had to evolve in order to survive. He knew that. As long as they weren’t vandalizing the land with oil wells and diggers, and there were still cattle on the hills, he was happy enough.
What worried him was the thought of Bobby leaping into something blind. Or, worse still, trying to build a new business before he’d dealt with the debts crippling the old one. He’d always been an impetuous kid, and he always, but always, thought he was right.
“Enough shoptalk,” said Dylan, who was sick to the back teeth of hearing about investors and bankruptcy. “How was England? And what’s this Miss Milly really like?”
“She’s pretty,” said Tara, who had just come in after settling Milly in at the big house. “Small but with an amazing figure.”
“Please,” said Summer, glancing up from the Steinbeck novel she’d been glued to for the past three days. “She so is not. I think she looks kinda masculine.”
“Oh, no, now I wouldn’t say that, would you, Bobby?” asked Maggie, joining the debate from the other side of the kitchen where she was sprinkling the last of the topping onto the cobbler.
“I don’t know,” he said moodily. “I never really thought about it.”
Summer positively glowed with satisfaction at this response. She saw the way Milly had been looking at Bobby outside—like a teenage Priscilla Beaulieu drooling over Elvis—but evidently any feelings she might have for him were entirely one-sided.
“You never thought about it?” said Dylan. “You never thought about it? Bobby love-’em-and-leave-’em Cameron never thought about whether or not she’s cute?”
“She’s seventeen, Dyl,” snapped Bobby. “Okay? She’s here to ride and to work. She’s a good kid, but that’s it.”
“Okay. Sure,” said Dylan, raising an eyebrow at Tara. Bobby was famously quick to lose his temper but never normally with him; and certainly not over something as innocuous as a bit of teasing about a girl. “I was just curious, that’s all.”
A couple of hours later, his curiosity was satisfied. He’d spent the tail end of the day out mending fences with Wyatt, and by the time they got home again they were late for supper. His mother was tearing her hair out at the stove, struggling to keep the zucchini from disintegrating into a mess of green, overcooked slime.
“There you are!” she said, frowning. “About time.” Lateness for meals was a cardinal sin in the McDonald household.
Lifting up a vast pot of potatoes, she began straining them over the sink, blasting her already flushed face with still more hot steam. “These were ready twenty minutes ago, you know,” she said. “Tara, can you bring the butter over to the table, please, darlin’? And where is Milly?”
It wasn’t like Maggie to get irritable, but ruined meals were one of her particular bugbears.
“I’m here.” Milly appeared in the doorway, rubbing her eyes sleepily. “So sorry I’m late. I had a hot bath and lay down on the bed for five minutes, and I’m afraid I was out for the count. You should have woken me.” This last was to Bobby, who immediately found himself trying to banish from his head an image of a flushed and naked Milly sprawled out on her bedspread. The effort seemed to plunge him back into a grouchy mood.
“Sorry,” he said gruffly. “I got caught up with work.”
“Well, never mind, never mind,” said Maggie kindly. She didn’t want the girl to feel unwelcome and was already regretting her earlier, abrupt tone. “You go squeeze in next to Dylan over there and we can get started.”
Milly smiled nervously. She wasn’t normally shy, but the McDonalds all looked so tanned and beautiful and healthy, not to mention completely at ease in one another’s company. Sitting next to them she felt like the creature from planet Zog: pale, awkward, and hopelessly out of place.
After waking up so late, she hadn’t had time to make as much effort as she’d have liked for her first night at Highwood. She’d opted for the first half-reasonable thing she’d pulled out of her suitcase: a clean pair of white jeans and a dusty pink cashmere sweater, under which she was already starting to burn up in the heat of Maggie’s kitchen. She had, at least, been able to wash her hair, and though still slightly damp it already shone like polished wood down her back. For makeup she’d made do with a swipe of mascara and lip gloss, pinching her cheeks on her way across the yard from the big house in place of the blusher that had broken apart in her bag, ruining at least three T-shirts, and had to be thrown away.
“Hi. I’m Dylan.” A grinning, black-haired boy moved over to make a space for her. He looked like a boxer, with his broken nose and oddly crooked mouth, as different from either of his sisters as they were from each other. But he did have Wyatt’s coloring, and the trademark McDonald electrically-charged smile. Like his father, he shouldn’t technically have been attractive, but somehow he just was. If she hadn’t been so madly in love with Bobby, Milly could easily have fancied him.
“Bobby tells me you’re the next Joe Badilla, Jr.”
“Who?” said Milly. Then, remembering Bobby had mentioned this name to her at Newells, added, “Oh, the quarter horse jockey? Yeah. I mean”—she blushed suddenly—“not, ‘yeah, I’m the next him,’ but ‘yeah, I know who he is.’ Bobby told me.” She glanced across the table at Bobby, wondering if he’d remember, but he was deep in discussion with Wyatt and didn’t look up.
After a brief lull in conversation while Maggie helped everyone to chicken pie, leeks, and potatoes, a rapid-fire interrogation of Milly began in earnest.
“So,” asked Maggie, once the topics of English fashion, the royal family, and
whether or not Milly had ever seen David Beckham in the flesh (she hadn’t) had been fully exhausted by Dylan and Tara. “How are you settlin’ in over there. Do you like your room?”
“Oh, I adore it,” enthused Milly. “I love all that Victorian furniture, the bath, the wrought-iron bed. It’s beautiful, like something out of an old Western film. I feel I should be wearing a crinoline or something.”
Summer, who’d maintained a stony silence thus far, gave her a withering look. “Trust me,” she snapped, “Highwood is nothing like a Clint Eastwood movie. You can forget all your romantic visions of cowboys and Indians. If that’s what you’ve been expecting, you’re in for a tough few months.”
“That’s not what I meant,” said Milly, stung. She wondered again why this girl had it in for her. “I wasn’t trying to be patronizing or anything.” She willed Bobby to stick up for her, or at least look in her direction, but he seemed determined to ignore her tonight. She tried not to mind. After all, he hadn’t been home in months and he must have tons of work to catch up on, not to mention seeing all his old friends again. But she still found herself wishing they could be alone again, as they had been on the long journey from England. For the most part he’d ignored her then, too. But somehow she preferred being ignored without an audience.
“Oh, don’t mind her,” said Dylan, shooting Summer down with a reproachful frown that she pretended not to understand. “She got up on the wrong side of bed this morning, that’s all.”
Seething, Summer retreated into her shell. First she’d enchanted Bobby, and now the little witch had Dylan sticking up for her too. He’d only known her five minutes! Watching Milly tucking into her mother’s potatoes, she said a silent prayer that God might make her choke on them.
Dylan, meanwhile, was utterly charmed. How could Bobby not have let on what a knockout Milly was? Okay, so she was seventeen, but come on! She wasn’t seven. That incredible hair, the cute freckles, the pink sweater clinging so tightly to her high, round breasts, like two cashmere grapefruits; from where he was sitting it was all good. He’d love to paint her.
Once the main course was over, he and Summer cleared everyone’s plates and returned to the table with bowls filled to the brim with apple and walnut cobbler smothered with lashings of fresh cream. Milly had been too preoccupied trying and failing to get Bobby’s attention to enjoy her chicken pie, but now she suddenly realized how famished she was. She didn’t think she had ever seen anything quite so fattening in her entire life, and yet all the McDonalds looked like walking gym adverts. They must take an awful lot of exercise.
“My God, I can’t eat all that!” she said aghast when she saw the size of her helping. “My mother would have a coronary. I’ll turn into a whale.”
“I’d taste it first if I were you,” said Wyatt. “One bite of Maggie’s cobbler and you won’t be able to stop yourself. She’s a legend in this valley for her cooking.”
Milly tried a spoonful and closed her eyes in ecstasy. He wasn’t kidding. It was divine.
“And you needn’t worry about becoming a whale either,” said Bobby.
It was the first unsolicited comment he’d made to her all evening, and for a second her eyes lit up. Was he actually about to pay her a genuine compliment?
“From tomorrow on you’ll be working so hard, you’ll work it off like that.” He snapped his fingers for emphasis. “You’re gonna need all the energy you can get.”
Milly took another mouthful, trying to hide her disappointment. Was that all he cared about? Her bloody energy levels?
“Hell, she doesn’t need to worry about gainin’ weight anyway,” chimed in Dylan. “She has a beautiful figure as it is, but a couple of extra pounds wouldn’t hurt. It’s nice to see a woman with some curves.”
Milly smiled back at him gratefully. Why couldn’t Bobby ever say lovely things like that?
“Well,” she said, “it may be nice from a man’s point of view. But it’s not so great for a jockey. I’m already borderline heavy for racing.”
“In that case,” said Summer, extending one long, slender arm right across the table and swiping Milly’s bowl away, “I’ll have yours. I can eat anything. I never gain weight.”
“Summer!” hissed Maggie, shocked. Her youngest daughter was behaving very oddly this evening. “Leave other people’s food alone.”
“What?” Summer threw her arms wide in a gesture of wronged innocence. “She just said she’s borderline heavy, didn’t she? I’m only trying to help.”
Help my ass, thought Milly furiously. Little Miss Cheekbones was really starting to get on her tits.
So much for the sweet little sister Bobby had told her about. Summer was about as sweet as a pit bull.
Later, once everyone else had turned in for the night, Dylan accosted Summer as she came out of the bathroom.
“What was that all about at supper, with Milly?” he asked her.
“All what?” she said innocently. She was wearing one of his baggy, old white shirts as a nightgown, with her feet snuggled into a pair of ridiculous fluffy teddy bear slippers and her hair scraped back into a bun. She looked, in short, like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, but Dylan knew different.
“You know very well what I mean,” he said. “I’ve never seen you so hostile. What have you got against her?”
Summer shrugged. As close as she was to Dylan, she wasn’t about to admit her feelings for Bobby to him or anyone.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t put my finger on it. There’s just something about her I don’t like. Like the way she was going on about how amazing England is.”
“She wasn’t ‘going on’ about it,” said Dylan reasonably. “We asked her questions and she answered them.”
“She’s six months younger than me,” Summer went on, ignoring him. “But already she thinks she’s gonna be the next big thing in quarter horse racing. I mean, where does she get off, you know?” She was on a roll now. “It’s gonna be months till Bobby gets this training idea off the ground anyway. And in the meantime we’re gonna be stuck with her, hanging around like a bad smell with nothing to do. You know she’s gonna be worse than useless around the ranch.”
“All I know,” said Dylan, putting his arm around her, “is that you sound like you’re seriously jealous.”
“Jealous?” Summer tried to look shocked. “Of her? Please! Don’t make me laugh. She’s got the conversational agility of a retarded toad, and she’s been beaten with the ugly stick big-time.”
Dylan couldn’t help but laugh at that. “She has not!”
“Well, I think she has,” said Summer, pouting. “Anyway, I bet I can ride the pants off her any day of the week.”
“You’re not even interested in riding,” said Dylan. “You’re going to LA to become a billionaire lawyer, remember?”
“I didn’t say I was interested,” said Summer. “I just said I bet I could beat Milly, that’s all. According to Bobby, she’s barely been near a horse for two years. And before that she only raced Thoroughbreds. How hard could it be?”
“Well, I think you should give her a chance,” said Dylan. “You’re not being fair. She’s miles away from home, and this place must seem pretty alien to her. At the end of the day she’s here for a while, whether you like it or not, so you might as well make an effort to try and get along.”
“Hmmmm,” Summer grunted grudgingly. “Just as long as she makes an effort to get along with me. Because so far, I don’t see what Bobby or the rest of you see in her.”
And with that she flounced off to bed, leaving Dylan to his own, very different thoughts of Milly and what her future at Highwood might hold for all of them.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Todd Cranborn pressed a button by the steering wheel and smiled as the roof of his four-hundred-thousand-dollar Ferrari Marinello peeled back with a satisfying swoosh, allowing the bright Santa Ynez sunshine to pour down into the car.
It was a beautiful day and the sun seemed to be shining on
him metaphorically, as well as physically. His lawyer had called last night to tell him that the local residents’ legal challenge to his acquisition of the Buellton land had finally bitten the dust. Thank God. With his Indian partners, he would now be able to start building the low-cost housing that had made him such a rich man, perhaps as soon as next month. God bless Native America!
Idly, he wondered how much money the petitioners had wasted on pursuing him so far—three hundred, maybe four hundred thousand dollars? He hoped they choked on it, every last small-minded, Protestant, middle-class one of them.
But it wasn’t just the property deal that had put him in such a good mood. He also had high hopes for today’s meeting at Highwood.
Obviously his primary interest in the place, like everybody else’s, was the oil. But he also looked forward to the challenge of outwitting the notoriously arrogant Bobby Cameron. Through his property deals in rural California, he already knew a little bit about the cowboy mentality: their ludicrous pride in their archaic culture, their romantic obsession with ranching and “the land.” He knew it would be a mistake to go wading in with a blank check and all guns blazing, and an even bigger mistake to betray an interest in Highwood’s oil.
Hank Cameron had been stubborn and stupid as a mule. From the little he knew of Bobby, Todd imagined he would be just as bad, if not worse when it came to business negotiations. The trick would be to use that arrogance to his own advantage. Like a judo master, he must turn his opponent’s strength against him.
Quarter horses. That would be the carrot. What the kid needed, of course, was to restructure his debt and pull the property out of its current financial quagmire. But what he evidently wanted was to build a quarter horse training facility. The Bobby Todd remembered was just the kind of spoiled, arrogant, rebel-without-a-clue type to put his wants before his needs. To put his wants before everything, in fact.
Knowing this, he’d spent the past two days boning up on the breed, and now felt fully equipped to talk about their heavy muscling, sprinter’s speed, and the awesome versatility that helped them to excel at everything from flat racing to dressage to rodeo events, as if he actually gave a shit.