Devil's Gambit

  The day that her mother had walked out of her life was still etched vividly in her mind. “You must remember that Mommy loves you very much and I’ll come back for you,” Marie had whispered to Tiffany, with tears gathering in her round, indigo eyes. “I promise, pumpkin.” Then Marie had gathered her daughter close to her breast, as if she couldn’t bear to walk out the door.

  Tiffany had felt the warm trickle of her mother’s tears as they silently dropped onto the crown of her head.

  “Mommy, don’t leave me. Please.... Mommy, Mommy, don’t go. I’ll be good...Mommy, I love you, please...” Tiffany had wailed, throwing her arms around her mother’s neck and then sobbing with all of her heart for hours after Marie’s car had disappeared in a plume of dust.

  Her father’s face was stern, his shoulders bowed. “Don’t blame her, Tiffy,” he had whispered hoarsely, “it’s all my fault, you know. I haven’t been much of a husband.”

  Tiffany had never seen Marie Caldwell Chappel again.

  At first she couldn’t believe that her mother had left her, and each night she would stare out the window and pray that the tall man with the big car would bring her mother home. Later, in her early teens, Tiffany was angry that she didn’t have a mother to help her understand the changes in her body and the new emotions taking hold of her. Now, as an adult, Tiffany understood that a woman who had been brought up with a taste for the finer things in life could never have been happy with Edward Chappel.

  Edward had always been irresponsible, going from job to job, breeding farm to breeding farm, working with the animals he loved. But each time, just when Tiffany thought they had settled down for good and she had made one or two friends in the local school, he would lose his job and they would move on to a new town, a new school, a new set of classmates who would rather ignore than accept her. To this day, she had never made any close friends. She had learned long ago that relationships were fragile and never lasted for any length of time.

  After Marie had left him, Edward had sworn off the bottle for nearly three years. Tiffany now realized that his abstinence was because of the hope that Marie would return to him rather than because of his new responsibility as a single parent.

  When she was just eighteen and trying to save enough money to go to college, they’d moved to the Rhodes Farm. Edward was off the bottle again and he had promised his daughter that this time he would make good.

  It was in this very barn that her life had changed. While she’d been softly talking to one of the yearlings, Ellery Rhodes had walked in on her.

  “Who are you?” he’d asked imperiously, and Tiffany had frozen. When she’d turned to face him, the look on his even features was near shock.

  “I’m Tiffany Chappel,” she had replied, with a faltering smile.

  “Ed’s daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  Ellery had been flustered. “I thought that you were just a little girl.” His eyes moved from her face, down the length of her body and back again. An embarrassed flush crept up his neck. “Obviously, I was mistaken.”

  “Dad seems to think that I’m still about eleven,” she explained with a shrug and turned back to the horses.

  “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Why aren’t you out on your own?” It was a nosy question, but Ellery asked it with genuine concern in his gold eyes. His brows had pulled together and a thoughtful frown pulled at the corners of his mouth. For a moment Tiffany thought that he might fire her father because of her. Maybe Ellery Rhodes didn’t like the idea of a girl—young woman—on his farm. Maybe one of the grooms had complained about a woman on the farm. She had already had more than her share of male advances from the stable boys.

  Tiffany couldn’t explain to her father’s employer that she had to look after him, or that a good share of his work was done by her strong hands. Edward Chappel would be fired again. Instead she lied. “I’m only helping him out for a little while. Until I go back to college—”

  Ellery’s practiced eyes took in her torn sweatshirt, faded jeans and oversized boots. Tiffany knew that he saw through her lie, but he was too much of a gentleman to call her on it.

  Two days later, she was called into his office. Her heart pounded with dread as she entered the old farmhouse and sat stiffly in one of the chairs near his desk.

  Ellery looked up from a stack of bills he had been paying. “I’ve got a proposition for you, young lady,” he stated, looking up at her and his gold eyes shining. “Your father has already approved.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Ellery smiled kindly. It wasn’t a warm smile, but it was caring. He explained that he had worked out a deal with her father. He liked the way she handled the horses, he claimed, and he offered to send her to school, if she promised to return to the farm and work off the amount of money her education would cost once she had graduated.

  Tiffany had been ecstatic with her good fortune, and Edward, feeling that he had finally found a way to rightfully provide for his daughter, was as pleased as anyone.

  She had never forgotten Ellery’s kindness to her, and she had held up her part of the bargain. When she returned to the farm two years later, she found that her father was drinking again.

  “You’ve got to leave,” he said, coughing violently. The stench of cheap whiskey filled the air in the small room he had been living in on the farm.

  “I can’t, Dad. I’ve got a debt to pay.”

  Edward shivered, though he was covered by several thick blankets. “You should never have come back.”

  “Why didn’t anyone tell me you were sick—”

  Edward raised a feeble hand and waved away her concerns. “It wouldn’t help anything now, would it? You were so close to finishing school, I didn’t want you to know.”

  “I think you should be in a hospital.”

  Edward shook his head and another fit of racking coughs took hold of him. “I want you to leave. I’ve got a little money. Get away from this farm, from Ellery Rhodes—”

  “But he’s been so good to me.”

  Her father’s faded blue eyes closed for a second. “He’s changed, Tiff....” Another fit of coughing took hold of him, and he doubled up in pain.

  “I’m getting you to a hospital, right now.”

  Despite her father’s protests, Tiffany managed to get him out of the stifling room and to the main house. When she knocked on the door, Stasia, the exotic-looking woman Ellery was living with, answered the door.

  “My father needs help,” Tiffany said.

  Stasia’s full lips pulled into a line of disgust at the sight of Tiffany and her father. Her dark eyes traveled over Tiffany, and she tossed her hair off her shoulders. “He needs to dry out—”

  “He’s sick.”

  “Humph.”

  Pulling herself to her full height, Tiffany looked the older woman directly in the eye. “Please. Call Ellery.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “Then find someone to help me.”

  Edward’s coughing started again. His shoulders racked from the pain. “I don’t know why Ellery keeps him around,” Stasia muttered, as she reached for her coat and begrudgingly offered to drive them into town.

  Tiffany remained at her father’s side for two days until the pneumonia that had settled in his lungs took his life.

  “You stupid, lovable old fool,” Tiffany had said, tears running down her face. “Why did you kill yourself—why?” she asked, as her father’s body was moved from the hospital room to the morgue.

  Refusing help from the hospital staff, Tiffany had run out of the building, blinded by tears of grief and guilt. If she hadn’t gone away to school, if she had stayed on the farm, her father would still have been alive.

  She didn’t see the oncoming car as she crossed the street. She heard the blast from an angry horn, smelled the burn of rubber as tires screamed against the dry asphalt and felt a man’s body push her out of the way of the station wagon.

  T
he man who had saved her life was Ellery. He’d gathered her shaken form into his arms and muttered something about being sorry. She didn’t understand why, and she didn’t care. Ellery Rhodes was the only person she had ever known who had been kind to her with no ulterior motives.

  Within two weeks, Stasia was gone and Ellery asked Tiffany to marry him.

  Tiffany didn’t hesitate. Ellery Rhodes was the first person she had met that she could depend on. He cared for her, and though he seemed distant at times, Tiffany realized that no relationship was perfect.

  She wondered now if she had married him out of gratitude or grief. The love she had hoped would bloom within her had never surfaced, but she supposed that was because passionate, emotional love only existed in fairy tales.

  Inexplicably, her thoughts returned to Zane Sheridan, with his knowing gray eyes and ruggedly hewn features. He was the last person she needed to complicate her life right now, and the idea that he could shed any light on what had happened to Devil’s Gambit or Ellery was preposterous.

  But what if there’s a chance that Ellery’s alive?

  Without any answers to her questions, Tiffany headed back to the house to remind Louise that there would be a guest for dinner.

  * * *

  “YOU’RE ASKING THE impossible!” John Morris stated as he eyed his client over the clear rims of his reading glasses.

  “It’s a simple document,” Zane argued, rubbing the back of his neck and rotating his head to relieve the tension that had been building ever since he had met Tiffany Rhodes. He’d known she was beautiful; he’d seen enough pictures of her to understand that her exotic looks could be any man’s undoing. But he hadn’t counted on the light of intrigue and mystery in her intense gaze or the serene beauty in the curve of her neck....

  “A deed of sale for a breeding farm? You’ve got to be joking.”

  Zane’s eyes flashed like quicksilver. He pulled at the bothersome knot in his tie and focused his eyes on the attorney. “Just get me a paper that says that for a certain amount of money—and leave that blank—I will purchase all of the assets and the liabilities of Rhodes Breeding Farm.”

  The lawyer let out a weary sigh. “You’re out of your mind, Zane. That is if you want anything legal—”

  “I want it to be binding. No loopholes. It has to be so tight that if the buyer decides she wants out of the deal, she has no legal recourse. None whatsoever.” His square jaw tightened, and the thin lines near the corners of his eyes deepened with fresh resolve. Revenge was supposed to be sweet. So where was the satisfaction he had been savoring for nearly six years?

  “You’re asking the impossible. We’re not talking about a used car, for God’s sake.”

  “It can’t be that difficult.” Zane paced in the prestigious San Francisco lawyer’s office and ran impatient fingers through his raven-black hair in disgust. “What about a quitclaim deed?”

  The lawyer leaned back in his chair and held on to his pen with both hands. “I assume that you want to do this right.”

  “Of course.”

  “No legal recourse—right?”

  “I already told you that.”

  “Then be patient. I’ll draw up all the legal documents and do a title search...take care of all the loose ends. That way, once you’ve agreed upon a price, you can wrap it up and it will be binding. You can’t have it both ways, not here anyway. You’re not just talking about real estate, you know. There is personal property, equipment, the horses....”

  “I get the picture.” Zane stared out the window and frowned. The trouble was he wanted to get away from Tiffany Rhodes. Do what he had to do and then make a clean break.

  There was something about the woman that got under his skin, and he didn’t like the look of honesty in her slate-blue eyes. It bothered him. A lot. Whatever else he had expected of Ellery Rhodes’s widow, it hadn’t been integrity.

  Zane shrugged as if to shake off the last twinges of guilt. “So how long will it take you?” he asked, hiding some of his impatience.

  “Four weeks—maybe three, if we’re lucky. I’ll work out something temporary for the interim. Okay?”

  “I guess it will have to be. Doesn’t seem that I have much of a choice.”

  John drummed his fingers on the desk. “You’re sure that this woman wants to sell? I’ve read a little about her. She seems to be...the plucky type. Not the kind to sell out.”

  “She just needs a little convincing.”

  John scowled at the blank piece of paper in front of him. “That sounds ominous—right out of a bad B movie.”

  Zane smiled despite his discomfiture. It was a rare smile, but genuine, and he flashed it on his friend in a moment of self-mockery. “I guess you’re right.”

  “Aren’t I always?”

  “And humble, too,” Zane muttered under his breath. “Come on, counselor, I’ll buy you a drink.”

  “On one condition—”

  Zane’s brows quirked expectantly.

  “That you quit calling me counselor. I hear enough of that in the courtroom.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  John slipped his arms into his jacket and then straightened the cuffs before bending over his desk and pressing a button on the intercom. “Sherry, I’m going out for a few minutes with Mr. Sheridan. I’ll be back at—” he cocked his wrist and checked his watch “—three-thirty.”

  John reached for the handle of the door before pausing and turning to face his friend. “There’s just one thing I’d like to know about this transaction you requested.”

  “And that is?”

  “Why the hell do you want to buy a breeding farm? I thought you learned your lesson in Dublin a few years back.”

  Zane’s eyes grew dark. “Maybe that’s exactly why I want it.” With a secretive smile he slapped his friend fondly on the back. “Now, how about that drink?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  TIFFANY’S FINGERS DRUMMED restlessly on the desk as she stared at the portrait of Devil’s Gambit. For so long she had believed that Ellery and his proud horse were dead. And now this man, this stranger named Zane Sheridan, insisted just the opposite. Her blue eyes were shadowed with pain as she studied the portrait of the horse. Was it possible? Could Ellery still be alive?

  Shaking her head at the absurdity of the situation, she got up and paced restlessly, alternately staring at the clock and looking out the window toward the foaling shed. Ebony Wine would be delivering a foal tonight, Moon Shadow’s foal. Would he be a normal, healthy colt or would he suffer the same cruel fate as three of his siblings?

  She listened as the clock ticked off the seconds, and her stomach tightened into uneasy knots. Mac hadn’t come to the house this afternoon, and Tiffany was beginning to worry. Between her anxiety for the unborn foal and worries about Zane Sheridan and his motives for visiting her, Tiffany’s nerves felt raw, stretched to the breaking point.

  Seven-thirty-five. Though Zane would arrive any minute, Tiffany couldn’t sit idle any longer. She jerked her jacket off the wooden peg near the French doors and hurried outside, oblivious to the fact that her heels sank into the mud of the well-worn path. The darkness of the night was punctuated by the sharp wind that rattled the windowpanes and whistled through the redwoods.

  Tiffany found Mac in the broodmare barn, examining the black mare. His face was grim, and Tiffany’s heart nearly stopped beating.

  “How’s it going?” she asked, hoping that she didn’t sound desperate.

  Mac came to the outside of the stall and reached down to scratch Wolverine, the farm’s border collie, behind the ears. Wolverine thumped his tail against the concrete floor in appreciation, but Tiffany had the impression that Mac was avoiding her gaze.

  “So far so good,” the ex-jockey replied, straightening and switching a piece of straw from one side of his mouth to the other. But his sharp brown eyes were troubled when they returned to Ebony Wine. The mare shifted uncomfortably in the large stall, and Tiffany noted that everything was ready
for the impending birth. Six inches of clean straw covered the concrete floor, and a plastic bucket containing towels, antibiotics, scissors and other equipment necessary to help the mare give birth, had been placed near the stall.

  “Might be a little earlier than I thought originally,” Mac suggested. He took off his hat and straightened the crease with his fingers.

  “Why?”

  “This is her second foal. If I remember right, the last one came before midnight.” He rammed the hat back on his head. “Could be wrong...just a feeling I’ve got.”

  “Have you called Vance?”

  Mac nodded curtly. “He’ll be here around eleven, earlier if we need him.”

  “Good.”

  Tiffany cast one final look toward the mare and then returned to the house. Wolverine padded along behind her, but she didn’t notice. Her thoughts were filled with worry for the mare and anxiety about meeting Zane Sheridan again. He couldn’t have picked a worse time to show up.

  All afternoon her thoughts had been crowded with questions about him. Who was he? What did he want? How did he know Ellery? Why would he concoct such an elaborate story about Devil’s Gambit being alive?

  There was something about the man that was eerily familiar, and Tiffany felt that she had heard Ellery speak of him at least once. But it was long ago, before they were married, and she couldn’t remember the significance, if there was any, of Ellery’s remarks.

  She had just returned to the house and stepped out of her muddied shoes when headlights flashed through the interior of the manor as if announcing Zane’s arrival. “Here we go,” she muttered to herself as she slipped on a pair of pumps and attempted to push back the tides of dread threatening to overtake her. “He’s only one man,” she told herself as the doorbell chimed. “One man with a wild imagination.”

  But when she opened the door and she saw him standing in the shadowy porch light, once again she experienced the feeling that Zane Sheridan rarely made mistakes. He was leaning casually against one of the tall pillars supporting the porch roof, and his hands were thrust into the front pockets of his corduroy slacks. Even in the relaxed pose, there was tension, strain in the way his smile tightened over his teeth, a coiled energy lying just beneath the surface in his eyes.