“What’s your name?” he asked, once she’d stopped long enough to draw breath.
“My name?” She grinned inanely. “Oh, my name. Yes. I see. Amy. My name is Amy.”
“Amy . . . ?” He raised a questioning eyebrow.
“Hmmm? Oh, sorry.” It suddenly dawned on her what he was asking. “Price. I’m Amy Price. You’ve probably heard of my father, Jimmy.”
Dylan did a double take. Bobby had described Jimmy’s daughter as hugely overweight. But this girl was, if not exactly slim, then certainly no more than pleasantly plump. With her smooth, pale skin and shy, searching eyes she reminded him of a newborn calf: tentative, awkward, but in her own way quite beautiful.
“So you? Jimmy? Wow.” Now it was his turn to be inarticulate.
It took them about fifteen minutes to untangle the whys and wherefores: what they were both doing in New York, what had brought Amy to the gallery, how long each of them were staying, before the conversation inevitably turned to Milly.
“How is she?” asked Dylan. Unlike Summer and Bobby, he had never blamed Milly for the current nightmarish situation with Comarco at Highwood. She might be many things, but he couldn’t think her spiteful, or Machiavellian enough to sabotage her old friends so deliberately. Cranborn must have duped her the same way he duped Bobby. Those two had more in common than either of them wanted to admit.
“Not great,” said Amy. “She feels awful about what happened at Highwood.”
“It’s still happening,” said Dylan, shaking his head sadly. “The lawsuit’s ongoing, and those assholes are all over the ranch like vermin. That’s part of the reason I’m here. Figured if I could sell some pictures, maybe I could contribute a little bit to the legal fund, you know? If we lose the case, my family’ll lose their home, their livelihood. Everything.”
He had no idea why he was telling her all this. They’d only just met. But something about her made him want to open up.
“She really didn’t know, you know,” said Amy. “Milly, I mean. About Comarco and what Todd was up to. She wants to put things right more than anything. Do you think Bobby . . . ?”
Dylan shook his head. “Not right now. You gotta remember, even before all this Comarco bullshit, Milly was riding high with that whole ‘English cowgirl’ thing. The naked pictures.” He blushed. “That really hurt Bobby. He felt she was making fun of our way of life, our heritage, exploiting it in the worst possible way. I guess it’s hard to understand if you’re not from a cowboy family.”
“Not really,” said Amy. “I understand. Milly can be very insensitive sometimes.”
“Yeah.” Dylan smiled. “Bobby too.”
They fell silent then, both wanting to prolong the encounter but neither of them able to think of anything sensible to say. In the end they were interrupted by Chance who, after a long yawn, started whining for Amy to get him a drink.
“I guess I ought to be getting back.” She sighed.
“Oh.” Dylan looked crestfallen. “Really?”
“I’m afraid so,” she said, glancing over at her increasingly fractious brothers. The cool air of the gallery seemed to have revived them, worse luck.
“Well, look, we should keep in touch, right?” Scrawling his e-mail address on the back of one of Carol Bentley’s business cards, Dylan handed it to her. “I’d love to read some of your poems one day.”
“Oh. Sure,” said Amy, grinning from ear to ear like the Cheshire cat. It was the first time a man had ever given her his number unprompted—never mind a man as wonderful as Dylan. “Definitely.”
Ten minutes later, she was skipping through the West Village, oblivious to the boys squabbling, and clutching Carol’s business card to her chest like a talisman. She felt awash with a happiness so strong she could barely describe it, let alone control it. Ignoring the cynical stares of passing New Yorkers, she found herself laughing out loud and doing little pirouettes of joy all the way back to the hotel.
“We should keep in touch!” She repeated the words over and over, trying to conjure up the image of his face as he’d said them. “I’m Dylan McDonald. Let’s keep in touch!”
For the first time in her life, she was properly, head-over-heels in love. With Garth she’d been obsessed. But this was different. It felt right in a way that things with Garth never had.
“Please,” she prayed silently. “Please, please, God. I’ll do anything you want. I’ll be sweet to the boys and Candy, I’ll go to church. Anything. Just please, let him like me back.”
The day of the Belmont dawned fine and bright with only a light breeze rustling the trees in leafy Elmont.
By midmorning, a hundred thousand people would have descended on this sleepy suburb, famed only for its spectacular racetrack, Belmont Park, to witness the final and, many felt, most exciting of the Triple Crown races. This year the Derby and the Preakness had been won by two different colts, so in one sense the pressure was off. But on the other hand, the field was unusually wide open, which added an extra frisson of possibility for newcomers like Rachel.
If ever she was going to make an impression on Jimmy Price, this was her shot.
Thankfully, she’d slept well last night—not least because she’d been bored to death at dinner by Randy Kravitz’s wife, who’d insisted on giving her the most long-winded history lesson about the Belmont Stakes.
“Not many people realize it,” she droned, “but when August Belmont started the race, it was run in the Bronx. The Bronx! Can you imagine? Back in the 1860s?”
Rachel yawned. She couldn’t imagine.
By the end of the night she was armed with more statistics about Belmont Park than any rational human being ought to know. It was a 430-acre plot, had the world’s largest grandstand, was the largest dirt racecourse anywhere in the world, and was, as Mrs. Kravitz must have reminded her a minimum of six times, “the greatest jewel of American racing.”
Fucking snore. As if she gave a shit.
But even Rachel had to admit there was a certain energy about the Belmont that was different from anything she’d experienced in England. For anyone serious about Thoroughbred racing—owners, trainers, and jockeys—it was the pinnacle of their year. Owners fantasized about their jockeys lifting the coveted silver bowl, with its figure of Fenian, an early Belmont champion, adorning the lid. Jockeys imagined themselves as the next Eddie Arcaro or Bill Shoemaker, legends who’d won this most taxing and prestigious of races six and five times respectively.
“Of course, the one for you to beat is Julie Krone,” Mrs. Kravitz told Rachel over coffee. “Randy knew Julie very well. She was the first woman to win. 1993 I think it was. Colonial Affair.”
But by then, Rachel had switched off.
She knew exactly who she had to beat. And it wasn’t Julie fucking Krone.
Unlike Rachel, Bobby had had a terrible night.
He was staying in some dive of a motel on the outskirts of town—anything to save a bit more money—but this was one economy he soon came to regret. Not only was the bed rock hard, with sheets made of some awful synthetic material that seemed specially designed to keep him drowning in his own sweat, but a broken faucet in the bathroom had dripped all night long like some kind of Chinese water torture, even after he’d painstakingly stuffed it with a rolled-up washcloth. By the time the first rays of dawn made their way through the grimy window above the bed, his eyes were so red he looked like one of those cartoon characters whose eyeballs shatter with exhaustion along the bloodshot fault lines, clinking into a million pieces on the floor. And if it were possible, he felt even worse.
Sipping grimly at a double-strength Starbucks coffee on his way to the track, he reflected again just how important today’s race would be. If Thunderbird did well, he would at least be able to feel slightly less guilty about the risk he’d taken buying him. And if he didn’t? Well, Bobby wasn’t going to think about that.
With every penny he earned going into the legal fund to fight Todd and Comarco, there was nothing left for the ca
ttle business, and the ranch he’d left at the start of the year when he began his training tour was on the brink of collapse. A few weeks ago, he’d even had to let go two hands who’d grown up at Highwood and whose fathers had worked for the Camerons for more than three generations. It was heartbreaking.
Wyatt had offered to break the news for him, but Bobby wouldn’t hear of it, insisting on flying home to tell the men in person.
“I may not be much of a boss,” he said, his guilt making him sound angry, “but I sure as hell don’t need another man to do my dirty work for me. Call me a fool if you want to, Wyatt. But I’m no coward.”
With Highwood on the brink of disaster, going in on a three-man syndicate with Barty Llewellyn on a colt he’d never even seen looked more than a little reckless. But Bobby’s instincts told him it was a chance worth taking. Barty wasn’t a man given to melodramatic displays of excitement, but when it came to Thunderbird he was like a kid at Christmas.
“Trust me,” he’d said, in that one memorably breathless phone call six months ago, right after Comarco showed up. “If you don’t get your ass on a flight to Kentucky and see this horse right now, today, you’re gonna regret it for the rest of your life.”
Bobby knew then that the gray colt would be something special. And so he turned out to be: flighty, unpredictable, but bullet fast when the mood took him. His only regret was that Barty got to be the one who trained him. Not that Llewellyn wasn’t one of the best in the business, but Bobby would have dearly loved to spend more time with the horse himself. Still, it wasn’t to be. With training jobs scheduled back to back all over the world to pay the attorney’s fees, his travel schedule for the first six months of the year had been torturous. He’d had to content himself with hearing about the triumphs of Thunderbird’s debut season secondhand. Even so, with every phone call from Barty reporting another win or success at another major trial, his spirits lifted. It was sad to say it, but at the moment Thunderbird’s early promise was about the only positive, hopeful thing in his life.
He ought really to be in Ireland today, in the middle of a lucrative two-week training job. But he couldn’t bring himself to miss out on seeing Thunderbird’s first Belmont. Some things were still worth being irresponsible for.
Parking his rented Chevy in one of the reserved trainers’ spaces, he marched across Belmont Park’s famous grassy backyard, oblivious to the lush landscaping—towering oak and sycamore trees, and the two distinctive infield lakes—that earned the track its reputation for beauty.
“There you are.” Barty, normally as calm as a Zen master on race days, sounded unusually anxious. “I thought you were gonna be here by ten? Damian’s already on his way down to the weighing room.”
“Sorry,” said Bobby, rubbing his eyes, partly out of tiredness and partly in response to Barty’s deep purple-and-pink-striped blazer. “I had a rough night. That’s, er, quite a jacket you’re wearing.”
“Thanks,” said Barty without irony. “It’s lucky. It’s the clothing equivalent of feng shui.”
Fag shui, more like it, thought Bobby, but he didn’t say anything. Llewellyn’s dress sense had always been a law unto itself, and racetracks across America would be duller places without it.
Just then a brunette in skintight white jodhpurs and shiny black boots sauntered past, giggling over her shoulder as she caught him gazing appreciatively at her shrink-wrapped ass.
“Jesus, don’t you ever quit with that?” Barty shook his head. “This is no time to be focusing on your dick, kid.”
“I know that,” said Bobby, tiredness making him snippier than he meant to be. Actually, his libido had been in hibernation for so long, he’d rather surprised himself by noticing the girl at all. Normally, training tours were open season as far as fucking around was concerned. Often it was only the thought of the girls that made being away from Highwood bearable. But this time, he simply hadn’t had the energy. Whether it was that the girls weren’t as hot as usual or the financial stress that made him tired all the time or the thoughts of Milly—confused, angry, desperate thoughts that wouldn’t go away no matter how hard he tried to shut them out—he didn’t know. But whatever it was, his “batting average,” as Sean used to call it, was at an all-time low.
“Look, sorry,” he said. He didn’t want to fall out with Barty, especially not today. “I slept like crap last night. I think I’m just feeling tense, you know?”
Barty nodded. He hadn’t gotten a lot of rest himself.
“Why don’t you go take a look at him? He’s over there.” He nodded toward a big silver trailer almost abutting the paddock. Thunderbird stood serenely on the grass in front, being rubbed down by two of Barty’s grooms. “Happy as a clam, by the look of him.”
Grinning, Bobby set off in that direction, only to find himself almost knocked off his feet by a girl in full silks, a jockey, coming the other way.
“For fuck’s sake, look where you’re going!” she hissed, despite the fact it was quite clearly she who had run into him.
The British accent instantly caught his attention.
“Rachel?” His surprise was genuine. Though he’d read some of her interviews slagging off Milly and was vaguely aware she was in the States and riding for Kravitz, he had no idea she was entered today.
“Oh. It’s you,” she said, with as little enthusiasm as it was possible to inject into only three words. Like Bobby, Rachel never forgot a slight. His rejection of her at Mittlingsford might have been two years ago, but it was seared into her memory banks for all eternity. “What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be running after cattle or mending fences or . . . whatever it is you do?”
Wow. He’d forgotten quite what a poisonous little madam she was.
“Actually, I have a horse running today. Thunderbird. Damian Farley’s riding for us.”
“Don’t know him,” she said dismissively, as though all the top U.S. jockeys were her personal friends and anyone not known to her was by definition an insignificant nobody. “Anyway”—she smiled maliciously—“I’m surprised you have time to spare for racing nowadays.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, perhaps I’m wrong.” She fluttered her eyelashes innocently. “But didn’t I hear that you were losing your family farm or something? I’m sure I did.”
“I’m not losing anything,” said Bobby through gritted teeth.
“No? I thought Milly’s boyfriend—well, her ex-boyfriend, you know, the good-looking one—I thought he’d taken the place over? That must have been terribly tough for you. You know, Milly sleeping with the enemy, as it were.”
She gave another tinkling little laugh. If she hadn’t been a woman, Bobby would have hit her.
“It reminded me of something you once said to me, actually. At Milly’s play. Do you remember?” Bobby looked at her blankly. “Something about only liking women you could trust. Wasn’t that it?”
Each word was like an arrow twisting in his heart, but he wasn’t about to give Rachel the satisfaction of showing it.
“Looks like you picked the wrong girl, as far as trust goes. Wouldn’t you say?”
“What I’d say,” he said, forcing a smile, “is that Milly had one thing dead right. You are a bitch. And you are quite fucking tragically obsessed with her. Why is that, by the way?”
Showing none of his self-control, Rachel exploded in righteous fury like a boiled-over teakettle.
“I am not obsessed with her! She wishes,” Rachel spat.
“Oh, come on,” said Bobby, who was starting to enjoy turning the tables. “Don’t tell me you’re dating that tool Jasper because you actually like him. Even you have more taste than that.”
She spluttered but couldn’t quite bring herself to contradict him on that point.
“That was purely to get at Milly,” said Bobby. “As was buying Newells.”
“I’m selling it now,” Rachel said, for want of anything better to say.
“And starting this whole war of words in the
press,” said Bobby, ignoring her. “If that’s not obsession, I don’t know what is.”
He had no idea why he was sticking up for Milly. After the way she’d let him down, and then having the brass balls to try to send him a goddamn check. As if he’d ever touch a penny of her English cowgirl, T-Mobile money. But Rachel’s self-satisfied, mean-spirited needling was just too much for him.
“Luckily,” she said, belatedly regaining her composure, “there are very few things less important to me than your opinion, Bobby. Now if you’ll excuse me”—she turned on her heel, deliberately flicking her blond comet’s tail of hair into his face as she did so—“I’m late for the weighing room.”
Two hours later, Candy Price was up in her VIP seat, staring at her husband and wondering exactly how much longer she could bear to share his bed.
“Come on, Garth, you lazy son of a bitch!” Jimmy roared at the top of his lungs. “Move your fuckin’ ass!”
Candy smiled. She remembered saying something very similar to Garth herself, at another New York racetrack only last year. Boy, did that seem like a long time ago now. She couldn’t think what she’d ever seen in that idiotic peacock Mavers. Other than the fact that he wasn’t Jimmy, of course.
Watching her husband’s fat face grow redder and redder with each rising decibel, and the ugly purple veins at his temple begin to throb, she felt sure it couldn’t be very wrong to hope for a heart attack. She’d given him five of the best years of her life, after all. Was a massive, instantly fatal coronary too much to ask in return?
It was only since she’d started seeing Todd that Candy had begun to find her marriage genuinely unbearable. Normally she had no trouble closing her eyes and thinking of her inheritance when Jimmy started pawing her—but not now. She’d had lovers before, of course, scores of them. But she’d never pined for any of them the way she did for Todd. She knew it was obsessive and impulsive and foolish, but she simply didn’t care. Not since her teens had she felt so recklessly, hopelessly besotted. She wanted him, constantly, and Todd gave her every reason to believe that the feeling was mutual.