Jimmy laughed. “A girl after my own heart. Well, we’ll have to see what we can do about that, young lady.”
If she hadn’t heard so much bad stuff about him from Bobby, Milly would probably have thought him quite a jolly, jovial figure—a sort of fat, cigar-smoking Father Christmas type. He was certainly polite and friendly, not to mention flatteringly interested in her own so-called career.
“Excuse me,” said Todd, checking the number on his cell phone as it started buzzing. “I’ll have to leave you both to it for a moment, if you don’t mind.”
As neither of them so much as glanced in his direction, he assumed they didn’t mind and, stepping back a few paces, turned his attention to his caller.
“What’s up, Jack?”
It was his lawyer, returning his call of late last night.
“Okay,” he said. “Wyoming. I think what you’re referring to is the Powder River basin methane reserves.”
Taking Todd’s silence as his cue to continue, he went on.
“Basically there’s a bunch of failing cowboy ranches out there with tons of methane sitting beneath the surface. Under Wyoming law, the cowboys only own the surface land, not the natural resources beneath.”
“Who owns them?” said Todd.
“The government. Sort of. Put it this way, the government can grant mining rights to oil and gas companies, who get to drill up the land and keep all the profits, whether the landowners like it or not. Which mostly, as you can imagine, they don’t.”
“Hmmm.” Todd’s mind was whirring. “I see. And the lawsuits?”
“Well, the cowboys don’t have a leg to stand on legally,” said Jack. “But they’ve been giving it their best shot anyway, trying to stall the gas companies. They can force ’em to do a bunch of soil reports, vegetation studies, and shit like that, which all takes time and money. Couple of ’em even got restraining orders to keep the gas men off their land. They were overturned eventually, but delays are costly.”
“I’ll bet they are,” said Todd. He’d been through similar legal wrangles with some of his housing developments and knew what a pain in the ass they could be.
“Some of the gas companies have been making cash arrangements with the landowners, just to avoid the legal hassles,” said Jack. “But officially, they don’t have to pay these guys a red cent. If gas is found and they get the state permits, they can go right on in and take it.”
California law, he went on to explain, was a little more complicated. But all the big oil and gas companies—Chevron, Devon Energy, Seneca—were looking for ways to pull the same stunt along the West Coast.
“Thanks, Jack,” said Todd, unclipping his earpiece. “I’ll get back to you.”
Well, well, well. No wonder Bobby was worried. Highwood, with all her legendary oil, must be California’s biggest sitting duck. And he wouldn’t have known a thing about it if it hadn’t been for Milly.
Glancing across, he saw she was laughing and joking with Price, her earlier gaucheness apparently gone. That new haircut he’d gotten her really made the most of her elfin features and that beautiful, wide mouth. He found himself getting hard as he thought about just how much he’d like to see those pale pink lips of hers wrapped around his dick.
The way Bobby talked about her, it was like she was a child or the Virgin Mary or both. But from where Todd was standing, she was definitely all woman.
He hadn’t entirely figured out what his next move should be, or how he should use this fascinating new nugget of information about Highwood. But now that Milly had proved herself such an effective, albeit an unwitting, mole, it was more important than ever for him to get her firmly on his side. Somehow he had to drive a permanent wedge between her and Bobby.
Suddenly Jimmy Price was starting to look more and more wedge shaped by the second.
“How are we doing over here?” He smiled his most honest, disingenuous smile at both of them.
“Mr. Price has just offered to sponsor me!” said Milly excitedly, hopping from foot to foot.
“Please,” Jimmy said, “you’re making me feel old. It’s Jimmy, okay?”
“Sorry. Jimmy,” mumbled Milly. She was making no attempt to conceal how ecstatic she was—clearly negotiation was not one of her strong points. They’d have to work on that. “But, Todd, isn’t it amazing? He says I can train five days a week at Palace Verdy—”
“Pal-os Ver-des,” corrected Todd, not unkindly.
“Yeah, there, and that you can stable Demon there—if you want to, that is, obviously. And he’s going to promote me in the papers, kind of like Rachel, but different—”
“What did you have in mind?” Todd asked Jimmy, interrupting the ceaseless flow of Milly’s excited chatter to force a word in edgeways.
“I’m not sure exactly,” said Jimmy, “but something along the lines of the ‘British cowgirl’ press she’s already started getting. ‘English rose among the hillbilly thorns’—that sort of thing. Of course, it’ll all be dependent on building her track record. But it sounds to me like your friend Mr. Cameron’s been holding her back on that front too.”
Todd nodded sagely. The more he could get other people to criticize Bobby, so he didn’t have to, the better.
“My trainer, Gillian Sanders, will be putting her through fifty-hour weeks with some of the best American quarter horses on the planet,” boasted Jimmy. “If she can’t make it with that sort of support, she’ll never make it.”
“Oh, I’ll make it Mr. P— Jimmy,” Milly piped up. “I promise you that.”
A picture of herself returning home to Newmarket as a world-renowned quarter horse star, weighed down by trophies, leaped unbidden into her mind. She imagined Rachel, her own career having mysteriously crashed and burned, dragging her suitcases miserably down Newells’s drive like a refugee—only fatter and with cellulite and spots—while she, Milly, gloriously reclaimed her home in front of a cheering crowd led by a humbled Linda, who finally admitted she’d been wrong about Rachel all along.
In the past, when Milly’d had this fantasy, it always involved her being married to Bobby. But today, for some reason, she seemed to have skipped that part. Today it was all about her, and her alone.
It was only in the car, on the way back to Bel Air with Todd, that reality began, belatedly, to reassert itself.
“I’ll have to leave Highwood, won’t I?” she said suddenly, apparently out of nowhere, as they turned onto Bellagio.
“Well, sure,” said Todd, not taking his eyes off the road. “Is that a problem?”
“Bobby might think so.” She sighed. “I mean, I doubt he’d miss me, as such,” she said sadly. “But you know he hates Jimmy.”
“Oh, now, I’m sure that’s not true,” lied Todd. “They barely know each other. Besides, Bobby cares about you, right? He wouldn’t begrudge you a once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity like this. Would he?”
One thing he had decided was that it wouldn’t pay to start bad-mouthing Bobby just yet—not directly, anyway. Better to leave things be and let the cowboy screw things up for himself with Milly. Give him enough rope and all that.
“I don’t know,” said Milly. “He might. I think he wants to keep training me himself. But the problem is, he never has enough time.”
“Exactly!” said Todd. “In all honesty, you’d be doing him a favor. He has a training stables to run, not to mention a struggling ranch, plus all his overseas work. With Jimmy, you’d be racing and training full-time. And I’m talking serious races: Los Alamitos, Bay Meadows. Maybe next year, the Triple Crown. Who knows?”
Milly’s heart thumped. The Triple Crown was the ultimate prize in quarter horse racing. Run in New Mexico, it consisted of the Ruidoso Derby in June, the Rainbow Futurity in July, and the All American Futurity on Labor Day. To compete in any one of those races, even to get to the trials, was the stuff of dreams as far as she was concerned.
Todd was right. She’d be doing Bobby a favor, setting him free from a relationship that, for wh
atever reason, was no longer working for either of them.
“Can I borrow your phone?” she asked.
He looked at her quizzically.
“I’m going to tell Bobby what’s happened. No time like the present, right?”
“Right,” he said, grinning. He was starting to like this girl more and more. “Just one small point though. Where are you going to stay while you’re training?”
“Oh.” Milly’s face fell. “I sort of assumed . . . I mean, not for the long term obviously . . . but I sort of thought . . .”
“You could stay with me?” Todd finished for her. “Relax.” He laughed. “I’m only kidding. You’re more than welcome. I’d be happy to have you.”
Summer only heard a few, screamed fragments of the conversation.
“No, I don’t care what he said. . . . Put him on the line . . . MILLY, put Cranborn on the FUCKING line!”
Bobby had taken the call in the McDonalds’ kitchen. Summer was in her bedroom directly above, supposedly studying but in reality, of course, hanging on every word of the drama unfolding beneath her with her ear pressed hard to the floorboards. Even without the additional decibels, she’d have been able to piece together the thrust of what was being said: Milly had been offered and apparently (oh joy of joys!) accepted an offer to race for an owner in LA; some guy called Jimmy who Bobby seemed to think of as the devil incarnate. And he seemed to be blaming Todd for what had happened.
At one point, she thought gleefully, Milly must have actually hung up on him, because she could hear him mumbling obscenities as he punched out the digits of another number before the roaring started again: “Don’t you DARE put the goddamn phone down on me,” he yelled. “Yes, you are . . . you ARE a child! Put him on the line, Milly, I mean it.”
Things carried on in this vein for a few more, utterly unproductive minutes, before eventually the shouting stopped and she could hear the phone being replaced and the kitchen door slammed as Bobby stormed out into the yard. Moving from floor to window, she looked out to see him striding over toward the stables, his fists still clenched in fury.
It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. Slipping out of her Abercrombie sweatpants, she pulled a burgundy sweater dress on over her head. It was an old one of her mother’s from the sixties, and she’d always loved it, but it was rarely cool enough to wear it at Highwood. Today, though, she reckoned she could just about get away with it. Pulling the elastic band out of her newly washed hair, she tipped her head upside down and ruffled it with her fingers to give it some body, before flicking it back and hurriedly applying some blusher to her cheeks and a swipe of Vaseline over her lips and eyelashes. Finally, she pulled on her favorite pair of black leather boots and ran down the stairs and out into the cold afternoon air after him.
When she caught up with him he was out in the small office he used exclusively for quarter horse work, desultorily throwing a miniature basketball toward a hoop pinned to the back of the door.
“Oh, hey, sweetheart,” he said, when he saw her come in. “Sorry about that. Did I put you off your schoolwork?”
You put me off my schoolwork just by breathing! she wanted to yell at him.
“No” was what she actually said. “You seemed upset, that’s all. I wanted . . . I thought . . .” Come on, Summer. Don’t lose your nerve. Not now. “I thought you could maybe use some company.”
Her heart was pounding so loudly she was sure he must be able to hear it. But she forced herself to walk over to the desk where he was sitting and perch on the end of it. She had one hand on his shoulder and the other resting on the bare, brown skin of her own thigh, just inches below his face.
“I knew Milly would let you down in the end,” she whispered, moving her fingers from his shoulder to the back of his neck, which she started to caress gently. “She doesn’t love you, you know. She doesn’t love you like I do.”
Clasping tighter to his neck, she brought her face down level with his and pressed her soft, trembling lips to his own.
For a second, Bobby kissed her back. She was so beautiful, after all, and so sensual and desiring and . . . there. At that moment it would have been the easiest thing in the world to make love to her, to lose himself in the glorious softness of that body, of those lips. To forget Milly, and Todd, and block out all the images of the two of them together that he’d been sitting here trying and failing to expunge from his sick, fevered imagination.
But then he got a grip on himself. This was Summer, for Christ’s sake. Little Summer McDonald!
“Don’t,” he said, pushing her away firmly.
“Why not?” Bending forward she kissed him again.
The wool of her dress was soft as a baby’s blanket, and he couldn’t help but notice the way it skimmed the top of her thighs, like the red woolen trim on a Christmas stocking. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her in a dress, let alone one as sexy as this. It took every ounce of his willpower not to rip it off her right then and there and do exactly what she appeared to want him to.
“Don’t you want me?”
“Shit, Summer,” he said, wishing to God he didn’t feel so aroused. He’d never, ever thought of her as anything other than Dylan’s kid sister—picturing her naked was so not part of the deal. “I . . . yes, of course I do. Of course I want you,” he admitted. “But we can’t.”
“Why can’t we?” Pushing away his restraining hand, she eased herself off the desk and down into his lap, burrowing her face in his shoulders and sliding both hands up under his shirt. “You want me. I want you. Why can’t we?”
“Aaaagh!” Leaping to his feet, he picked her up with both hands and put her forcibly back onto the desk, jumping away from her as if she were a rattlesnake. “Because!” he yelled. “Because we can’t, okay? Because you’re Wyatt’s daughter and Dylan’s sister. You’re Summer, for Christ’s sake. Jesus. No.”
Her eyes welled up with tears of shame and hurt.
“But you sent me flowers,” she said desperately. “And today, when we hugged, you were . . . different.”
“How?” Bobby looked horrified. “How was I different? I wasn’t different.”
“You stroked my hair!”
“I was being affectionate! Hell, Summer, I care about you. You’re like a sister to me.”
“Bullshit!” she sobbed. The humiliation was more than she could bear. “You’re just using that as an excuse. It’s because of Milly, isn’t it? That’s why you don’t want me. You’re in love with her.”
“That’s crazy,” said Bobby. But he was aware how unconvincing he sounded, even to himself. “No, that’s not it. That’s not it at all. Milly and I . . . it’s complicated,” he finished lamely.
“No, it isn’t,” said Summer. With nothing left to lose, she could at least get everything off her chest. “It’s not complicated at all. It’s simple. You want her, and you can’t have her, and now maybe somebody else is gonna have her and it’s driving you out of your mind.”
He looked miserably down at his feet. She was going to make one hell of a lawyer someday with closing arguments like that. And there he was thinking he’d done a great job of hiding his feelings. Summer’d seen right through him from day one.
“I feel for you, Bobby, I really do,” she said, tears streaming down her face as she headed for the door. “Believe me. I know what it’s like to love someone who doesn’t love you back.”
After she’d gone, he moved back over to the desk and sank back down into his chair with his head in his hands.
What a mess.
What a total fucking mess.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Amy Price adjusted the sun umbrella above her lounge chair and tugged hard at her bikini top, stretching the pale blue fabric that was cutting painfully into her breasts. A red line—part sunburn, part pressure from the too-tight elastic—was already forming at the top of her cleavage, and two unpleasant rolls of pinkish flesh were spilling out above it, like sausages protruding from a bun.
Turning over onto her stomach, she opened her book of Donne sonnets. Something of an amateur poet herself—her dream was to one day be published—she tried to lose herself once again in the beautiful language, blocking out her baby brothers’ splashing and shrieking in the pool behind her.
Usually she hated sunbathing. But she’d recently read in Marie Claire that a tan could make you look as much as ten pounds lighter, so when Candy offered to watch the twins herself for an hour in an unheard-of display of maternal affection, she’d seized her chance.
Sweating and uncomfortable, she was already starting to wish she’d opted for a decent fake tan instead—although knowing her luck it would probably have turned out streaky and orange and awful. Closing her eyes she tried to imagine herself, somewhat improbably, being sun kissed and slim for the family’s annual trip to New York in September. Not that Garth would notice her, even if she were.
Garth Mavers, a chiseled playboy from Martha’s Vineyard, was her father’s latest protégé on the Thoroughbred circuit and Amy’s hopeless obsession. A talented jockey, he was even more accomplished as a womanizer and was utterly ruthless in both pursuits. He’d slept with Amy a couple of times last season, when he’d come to California hoping to insinuate himself with her wealthy, powerful father, and she’d fallen for him hard. But as soon as Jimmy hired him, of course, he dropped her like a stone. The last thing he needed was Price’s clinging lump of a daughter around his neck, with a line of LA’s long-limbed lovelies already forming at his door.
Amy, needless to say, was devastated by his defection, though she tried her level best not to show it. She’d just reached a point where she was able to hear his name mentioned in conversation without having to run off to the restroom and cry when, a month or so ago, hideous rumors reached her that he was secretly engaged to a supermodel.
In her heart, she knew there was no chance for her with Garth, with or without the supermodel fiancée. And yet despite all the stern talkings-to she had been giving herself—he didn’t love her, he never had, he’d just used her like all the others—the thought that she would see him again in September, when he rode at Aqueduct for her father, made her heart flutter with hope and excitement.