“No,” he said, slipping one hand around her waist, then allowing it to wander idly downward to stroke her taut, muscular butt. “Should I?”
“Yeah.” She laughed, arching her lower back in response to his touch. “You should! But then you always were an arrogant son of a bitch. I was in the year above you at Solvang High. Samantha Baker.”
“Sammy.” He smiled as the dim memory clicked into place. “Anthony’s sister, right?”
“That’s right,” she said. “You remember my brother, but you don’t remember me?”
Locking eyes with him, her head cocked, she moved her left hand around to the front and, sliding it between their tightly pressed bodies, stroked the outline of his dick through his jeans.
Bobby cleared his throat.
“Your brother and his friends liked to kick the shit out of me,” he said, gripping her butt more tightly as he felt his dick start to harden. “That was memorable. But I won’t be forgetting you again in a hurry. Sammy.”
“Damn right you won’t.” She grinned, expertly opening his button fly one-handed and slipping her fingers inside. “Bobby.”
Across the other side of the barn, Summer watched the two of them glued together like limpets and bit down on her lip so hard it bled.
“Ow. Shit,” she said, grabbing a tissue from her purse and dabbing at her mouth.
“You okay?” said Tara, who was standing beside her, sipping a beer from which she’d been allowing her little sister the occasional illicit taste.
“Yeah,” said Summer unconvincingly. “I’m fine.”
“Don’t let him get you down,” said Tara, following her gaze to Bobby but misinterpreting her frown as one of sisterly rejection. “I know he’s been tough work this vacation. But Dad’s right, it’s not really you he’s mad at. Things’ll get better.”
“Look at that slut Sammy Baker.” Summer couldn’t hide her disgust. “She’s all over him like a rash.”
Tara shrugged and took another swig of Budweiser. “Who knows? Maybe that’s just what he needs? At least he’s smiling for once.”
“It is not what he needs!” snapped Summer. And turning on her heel she stalked off, leaving her bewildered sister wondering what on earth she’d done to upset her.
Three hours later, Bobby sat bolt upright in bed and moaned. A naked Sammy, her long legs wrapped around his waist, arched her back so violently her head was practically touching the sheets and clamped her muscles even more deliciously tightly around his cock.
“Come on, you fucker,” she panted. “Do it. Just do it!”
With both hands on her hips he pulled her down even harder onto him, driving into her so deeply that he half expected to see his dick boring out through her back on the other side like an electric drill.
“Jesus!” She laughed after they’d both come, collapsing off him onto the bed in a crumpled heap of satisfied exhaustion. “Did you just get out of prison or something? You fuck like you haven’t had a woman in years.”
Slumping back against the pillows beside her, Bobby stared up at the ceiling and wondered if he’d ever escape from the prison of his love for Milly. But then he looked over at Sammy and told himself firmly to stop being such a maudlin bastard. She’d just given him the fuck of his life. This was no time to be feeling sorry for himself.
“You’re incredible,” he said, leaning over and tracing a slow, lazy finger over her flat belly, still glistening with sweat. “That was . . . really good.”
“You’re funny,” she said, reaching down and rifling through her purse for a cigarette, now that she’d gotten her breath back. “‘Really good’? Is that the best you can come up with?” He looked so crestfallen, she couldn’t help but laugh again. “Don’t worry, I’m only kidding,” she said. “It wasn’t your giant vocabulary that won me over. Let’s just say we both had a majorly happy New Year and leave it at that?”
Suddenly, Bobby heard something clatter downstairs, like somebody fumbling with a door.
“What was that?”
“What?” Sammy inhaled deeply, blowing the smoke back out through her long, aquiline nose. “I didn’t hear anything.”
“That,” said Bobby, leaping out of bed and picking up a heavy lamp from the dresser as the noise came back again, louder and more protracted this time.
“Shit,” said Sammy, concerned now. Stubbing out her cigarette, she pulled the sheet up to her chin. “You think someone’s breaking in? This house is so fucking creepy.” She shivered.
“If they are,” said Bobby, winding the lamp cord around his hand and opening the bedroom door, “they’re gonna wish they hadn’t.”
Lifting the lamp above his head and letting out an almighty roar, he went thundering down the stairs, as naked and terrifying as a Zulu warrior.
A small figure, crouched in the shadows of the hallway with some sort of bag, saw him and screamed, at the same time reaching up for the light switch by the front door and turning it on.
“Milly!”
“Bobby!”
She clapped her hands over her eyes. Realizing belatedly that he was butt naked, he clapped his hands over his cock.
“What—what are you doing here?” he stammered. “I thought it was a burglar. You’re supposed to be at home.” Whipping the linen cloth off the hall table, he wrapped it sarong style around his hips. “It’s okay,” he said. “You can look now.”
Tentatively, Milly brought her hands down from her face. He could see at once that she’d been crying.
“I don’t have a home anymore,” she said, her voice already faltering. “Mummy sold the farm.”
“Oh, baby.” He moved forward to comfort her. But she wasn’t finished.
“To Rachel,” she said, unable to hold back the tears any longer. “She’s sold Newells to that bitch, and I couldn’t—” She faltered, shaking her head at the horror of it, hands fluttering as she tried to get her breath. “I couldn’t stay there . . . anymore. I needed someone to talk to.” She looked up at him desperately, willing him to understand, to break the deadlock of distance between them, to take her in his arms and comfort her and tell her everything was going to be all right. “I needed you.”
Oh God. He couldn’t take it anymore. He didn’t care if she was too young. He didn’t care about his promise. He didn’t care about anything. He had to have her. To hold her. Stepping forward with outstretched arms, his face full of the love he’d tried so hard to hide for so long, he suddenly froze. A sleepy female voice rang out from the top of the stairs behind him.
“Bobby? Is everything okay? You coming back to bed?”
Milly looked up the stairs and found herself face-to-face with the second naked person she’d seen in as many minutes. But this one was not only female but stunning, with a Victoria’s Secret figure that she obviously wasn’t remotely shy about showing off. She must have been fifteen feet away, but the unmistakable smell of sex hit Milly full in the face at once. She thought for one awful moment that she was going to be sick.
“Oh!” said the girl. She sounded more amused than surprised. “Hello. And who might you be?”
“This is Milly,” said Bobby, his deadpan voice masking his inner desolation. “She lives here.”
“She does?” said the girl. She seemed to be finding the situation funnier by the minute. “Well, I guess that makes you a naughty boy, Mr. Cameron. Doesn’t it?”
“We’re not together . . .” Milly stammered.
“It’s nothing like that,” snapped Bobby. Suddenly he hated Sammy with a passion. “Milly’s training here. Her father is—was—a friend of mine.”
“Hey.” Sammy held up her hands in innocence. “None of my business. I’m just trying to get some sleep is all.” She gave Bobby a knowing, lascivious wink. “It’s been a tiring night.”
“I should get to bed too,” said Milly, holding herself together with a titanic effort. “It’s been a long journey.”
Bobby put his hand on her shoulder, but she jumped back as if he’d ele
ctrocuted her. “I’m sorry,” he said, jerking his head back toward the top of the stairs, from where Sammy had now retreated back into the bedroom. “New Year’s Eve, you know. We’ll talk properly in the morning. About Rachel and stuff.”
“Sure,” said Milly. She smiled. But he knew he’d lost her. “You go back to bed.”
Crawling under the covers of her own bed a few minutes later, she waited until she heard his bedroom door click shut and the house was completely silent.
Then, muffling her sobs with a pillow, she cried her heart out.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Milly spent the first three months of the year working harder than she’d ever done before.
Determined to put her heartache behind her and move forward, she made a vow to herself on New Year’s Eve: She would not set foot in England again until she had enough money to buy Newells back and a foolproof plan for forcing Rachel to sell. Making it to the very top as a jockey had always been her ambition and her dream. But now it had become more than that. It had become a necessity. From now on, until the day that she held the keys to her father’s house in her hands, she would live and breathe quarter horses. Everything else could go to hell.
“Everything else,” specifically, meant both Bobby and her family. Having thrown in her lot with Rachel, Linda had become persona non grata with Milly. She steadfastly refused to take her calls at Highwood until, in the end, Linda gave up trying.
“You’re making a mistake, you know,” Bobby told her, after she’d forced him, reluctantly, to get rid of yet another call from home. “What happened happened. But she’s still your mother. She loves you.”
“Well, she’s got a funny way of showing it,” said Milly. She was sitting in the living room at the McDonalds’, in jodhpurs as usual with one of Cecil’s old T-shirts on top, hiding behind a British newspaper. But she turned it around now, flashing a half-page picture at Bobby of Linda arm in arm with Rachel and Jasper at some black-tie event or other. Even he had to admit the three of them looked very cozy. The shot must have hurt Milly.
“Anyway,” Milly bristled, “I don’t see you spending a lot of time on the phone to your mother.”
“I don’t refuse her calls,” said Bobby reasonably.
“You would if she’d sold Highwood to your worst enemy,” Milly shot back.
He relapsed into silence. He couldn’t argue with that.
Since New Year’s Eve things had been different between them for sure. But this time it was Milly who had changed, not him. He could see that she resented his well-meaning efforts to build bridges between her and Linda; that she interpreted all his mitigating arguments on her mother’s behalf as a lack of support for her.
“Don’t you get it?” she lashed out in exasperation the last time he tried explaining Linda’s behavior. “She’s betrayed everyone. Not just me but Daddy’s memory too, and the horses. How could she sell to Rachel? How could she sell at all?”
In fact, Milly was wrong. Bobby did get it. He’d tried to shield her as best he could from the awful stories he heard from friends and contacts in England: Apparently Rachel had sold most of Cecil’s stud stallions, and all the colts, including Radar and a number of others dear to Milly’s heart, to a Middle Eastern sheikh well-known for his cruel treatment of horses who were past their prime. Her rationale—that she wanted to get rid of any animals potentially tainted by last summer’s equine flu—had evidently been enough to pull the wool over Linda’s eyes. But anyone with a shred of discernment could see that her real motivation was to rub still more salt into Milly’s wounds.
But as much as he sympathized, Bobby couldn’t give Milly the one form of comfort that she wanted. And as the weeks turned into months, her sadness and longing for him hardened into a protective shell of resentment that soon made it impossible for him to offer any sort of comfort at all. All the mental and emotional energy she’d expended on him so fruitlessly for the last nine months she now directed wholeheartedly toward her racing. And even though her career was making steady, measurable progress—between January and April, he entered her in seven California events, three of which she won—she began to complain loudly that he was neglecting her training, spending too much time traveling and locked in meetings with lawyers.
Though she didn’t know it, he was actually devoting untold hours, not to mention all the cash he earned from training jobs, trying to figure out a way to legally extricate himself from his partnership agreement with Todd. Unfortunately, so far, all his efforts had been in vain.
It was the second Friday in April, and the Santa Ynez valley had been gripped for almost a week by a freak late spring cold spell. At dawn, a light frost was still clinging to the grass at Highwood, separating and stiffening each blade into tiny, white-green daggers. Later, as the frost thawed, a thick, cold, cloudlike mist descended over the pastures, snaking its way visibly around the trees and fences and clinging like a damp poultice to joints, both equine and human, already aching with the unaccustomed cold.
Milly, back from an early morning ride with Charlie Brown, Highwood’s newest resident, wandered into the McDonalds’ kitchen for a warming cup of coffee. Despite the cold it had been an exhilarating ride and she was in better spirits than she had been for days. The gorgeous red roan colt had a stride so powerful that even she had struggled to contain him as they galloped over the fields. She wondered how hard it would be to persuade Bobby to buy him from the Santa Barbara syndicate who owned him now, and made a mental note to ask him about it tonight, when he got back from his week-long training job in Montana.
“Wow,” she said, bending down to smell the massive bunch of roses and freesias, still wrapped in their white satin bow, that were lying on the kitchen table. “Those are stunning. What a scent!”
“Beautiful, aren’t they?” said Maggie, advancing upon them with a vase and a sharp knife. “Bobby sent them. For Summer.”
Immediately Milly felt her good mood draining away like pus from an abscess. Summer had found out yesterday that she’d been accepted into Berkeley to study law. Naturally, the whole McDonald clan were overjoyed; as was Bobby, who made sure he phoned the day her results came through, so he heard the good news within minutes of the rest of them.
Milly had watched Summer walk away from that call with a smile on her face like she’d just won the lottery. When she saw the flowers, she was going to go ape shit.
Milly tried not to feel jealous, but it was hard, it really was. Okay, so coming first in a stakes race at Los Alamitos might not be the same as getting into Berkeley. But it would have been nice if Bobby had at least bothered to call to see how she’d done.
Dylan, bless him, had made a bit of a fuss over her. But with Summer’s news coming the very next day, her moment of glory had been painfully short-lived.
Even if she hadn’t hated the girl like poison, it would still have hurt, watching Summer’s family, especially Wyatt, rallying around and showering her with praise and love. The whole thing made Milly miss her own father more than ever. Just looking at the flowers she felt a cattle-prod jolt of homesickness, bitterness, and grief. They didn’t even smell good anymore.
“Are you okay, honey?” asked Maggie, noticing the change in her expression with some alarm. “You wanna sit down?”
“No,” said Milly. “I mean, no thanks. I’m okay. I think I just need a little air.”
Back out in the yard, a welcomed crisp, cool breeze blew the loose strands of hair out of her eyes and she felt her head clearing.
As always when she felt low, she had an overwhelming urge to be with her horses. Today, specifically, it was Danny she needed. Crossing the yard, she made a beeline for his stall.
“Hello.” She grinned, opening the door to find herself being practically nuzzled to death by her ever-affectionate favorite. “Aren’t you a sweetheart?”
“Thanks,” a laconic voice drawled from somewhere behind her. “It has been said before. But it’s always nice to hear.”
“Jesus.” Spinnin
g around, she flicked on the light, almost jumping out of her skin. Todd Cranborn was standing in the far corner of the stable. Dressed in a dark gray woolen suit and silk tie, his black businessman’s brogues gleaming like polished jet against the straw at his feet, he looked about as out of place as Donald Rumsfeld at an antiwar rally. “You scared the life out of me. What are you doing here?”
“Well, now, that’s not very welcoming, is it?” He smiled. “Not what one would expect from”—he pulled a square of newspaper out of his pocket and began carefully unfolding it, before reading aloud—“what does it say here? ‘Solvang’s hottest new lady jockey’?”
Milly blushed. “Yeah, well, that’s the local rag, isn’t it?” she mumbled. “What else have they got to write about?”
“Record crowds at The Alameda quarter horse races last Friday cheered on the English rose,” Todd continued. “They love you out here, don’t they?”
Milly’s color went from red to purple. She looked dreadfully tomboyish in those dirty riding pants and that baggy old top, with her hair scraped back like a schoolgirl’s. But even the scarecrow couture couldn’t hide her stunning figure. And there was something endearing about her awkwardness, all the blushing and mumbling, that he found weirdly sexy.
“Relax,” he said smoothly. “I don’t bite. I was in the vicinity looking at my housing development, as it happens. Thought I’d stop by and check out my investment while I’m here.”
He laid a nervous hand on Danny’s back and the horse’s ears shot instantly backward. “I’m afraid I don’t have your way with horses,” Todd said, reaching for his inhaler and taking a deep drag of antihistamine. “D’you mind if we continue this conversation outside?”
“Oh, no,” said Milly, composing herself. “Of course not. If you’d like to come over to the big house I’ll make you some tea. It’s a bit cold to be standing outside, don’t you think?”