A Love Like Ours Page 4

  As soon as she’d been old enough, she’d started volunteering at the stables of local trainers. She’d mucked stalls, walked horses, run errands. By sixteen, she’d earned herself her first job as an exercise rider. Throughout college and the years since, many things had changed, but her riding never had.

  For her, it was therapy. Riding worked her muscles while quieting the noise in her brain to a single focus: the horse. Whenever she finished a morning of exercising Thoroughbreds, she felt the way she did after a Pilates class—both energized and relaxed. Mentally reset.

  She’d miss her horse therapy if she only did art. And if she only rode horses, she’d miss her creative outlet. Doing both was her way of straddling the best of both worlds. Not to mention, her income from her books plus her income from riding paid the bills.

  Today she’d taken an optimistic approach and dressed in what she typically wore to exercise horses: leggings, boots, and a knit top under a lightweight jacket. Her helmet and vest waited in her Jeep if needed.

  The sleek and muscular bodies of the horses became clearer as they emerged from the mist, their manes and tails tossing dramatically. Then Lyndie’s view of them obscured again as they journeyed away. The sight, so full of mystery and beauty, caused Lyndie’s imagination to stir.

  She’d already done one book on horses and cowboys and a separate one on a kingdom full of pink and purple ponies. But the fairy-loving girls probably wouldn’t mind the inclusion of a horse—no, a unicorn—in their book. A fairy and a unicorn could set off together on some sort of quest. . . .

  So far, finding her way with her fairy story had been like bumping around in an empty, pitch-black room. But suddenly ideas were shifting through her mind in a kaleidoscope of bright, fresh patterns.

  “Good morning.”

  Lyndie glanced up to see Bo approaching. “Good morning.”

  Kindness radiated from his gray eyes, marked at the outer corners by laugh lines. Bo had a way of making a person feel comfortable in his presence. He was dressed similarly to Jake, but wore no hat. Though both brothers had dark hair, Bo shaved his close to his skull.

  “Has Jake seen you here yet?” he asked.

  “Yes. He didn’t look too happy about it.”

  “Interesting.” Bo took her measure, half-smiling. “I remember how you and Jake were as kids.”

  “So do I.”

  “If we can convince him to hire you, I think you’ll be good for him.”

  “I’d like to be,” she answered honestly.

  “Then let me see what I can do. C’mon.” He led her from the stand to a position along the outside of the rail near where Jake stood. “Hey,” Bo said to Jake.

  “Hey.”

  “I’d like to see Lyndie ride. Is that okay with you?”

  Bo might be the horse farm manager, but Lyndie knew that as trainer, this track fell under Jake’s domain. The employees and these wildly valuable Thoroughbreds were his to command.

  Jake looked across his shoulder and met her gaze, his eyebrows drawn down beneath the brim of his hat.

  She returned his stare levelly, powerfully cognizant of the difference in their heights. He’d probably forgotten that her small stature and pleasant expression hid a backbone of iron. Say yes, she willed him. Give me a chance, Tall, Dark, and Brooding. Say yes.

  He said nothing. His attention returned to the track.

  She peeked at Bo.

  Bo appeared unruffled by Jake’s gruffness. Entertained, even. He beckoned to a hand-walker. “Juan?”

  The man approached.

  “Can you bring out one of the horses?”

  Juan nodded. “Which one, sir?”

  “Jake?” Bo asked.

  Still, Jake hesitated. Still!

  Lyndie caught herself biting her lip.

  “Let’s get her up on one of the horses,” Bo prodded. “It’s the least we can do for Mom’s best friend’s daughter. Right?”

  Jake exhaled roughly, his breath fogging the cold air. “Gold Tide,” he told Juan.

  Lyndie could only assume Gold Tide was the name of a horse. Victory rang through her. “I’ll get my gear.” She took off before Jake could change his mind. All the way to her Jeep and back, she couldn’t quit grinning.

  She’d donned her protective vest and secured the chin strap of her helmet by the time Juan met her at the mouth of the track with Gold Tide. The black filly stood calmly, her nostrils flaring to catch the morning’s scents.

  Jake checked the Thoroughbred’s girth strap, then cupped his hands to offer Lyndie a leg up. With a powerful sense of déjà vu, Lyndie set her foot in his hold and swung into the saddle.

  “Take her as easy as you can,” Jake said. “She’ll take a big hold of the bit. Keep her to an easy gallop.”

  “Will do.” Excitement and an indisputable sense of rightness, of homecoming, twined within Lyndie as she and Gold Tide set off together.

  ———

  Jake wasn’t sure what to do to his brother. Shooting him with a shotgun would be faster but strangling him with his bare hands would be more satisfying. “What do you think you’re doing?” he growled, his attention riveted on Lyndie as the mist did its best to steal her from view.

  “I’m helping you,” Bo answered.

  “You’re definitely not helping me.”

  “I think I am. You just don’t know it yet.”

  Bo, who usually knew what he was talking about, had no idea what he was talking about. Help him? His brother was dead wrong if he thought bringing Lyndie here would or could help him in any way.

  Jake had been telling himself to be glad that he’d gotten his first visit with her out of the way. Since their families were linked, he’d known he’d see her from time to time. Their first meeting should have made him better able to handle future meetings.

  It had gone the other way. Her unexpected presence this morning upset him just as much as her first appearance, if not more. Maybe because she’d broken into his private training session uninvited. Maybe because he’d been unable to get her out of his head since Tuesday.

  It was ridiculous. Lyndie James had rarely entered his mind in recent years. It was only when something made him remember the first twelve years of his life that he thought of her.

  He’d see a lake and recall that she’d been the one to hand him the knotted rope the first time he’d swung out over Lake Holley and jumped off. Dru would talk about shooting, and he’d remember the time he’d shot a bull’s-eye at their homemade slingshot target, and that Lyndie had been the one who’d clapped. An acquaintance of his would sprain a wrist, and Jake would recall the time he’d fallen out of a tree and broken his arm. On that day, he’d landed on his back, and Lyndie’s face had been the first to block out the sun above him.

  And none of that explained why she had the power to rattle him now. He was a thirty-two-year-old war vet. He hadn’t seen her in a long time and should feel toward her like he would a stranger. He wanted to feel that way about her. It made him mad that instead, her nearness slammed him with a confusing mix of resentment and protectiveness.

  Bo came inside the track to lean against the rail next to Jake, casually hitching a boot heel against a rung. “Well?”

  “I still want to strangle you.”

  Bo had the bad taste to chuckle.

  Jake had selected Gold Tide for Lyndie because he could depend on the filly to obediently do what Lyndie asked. Even so, worry circled through him so powerfully that he had to set his jaw against it. Exercise riders and jockeys were injured and killed every year when they fell on their necks, took a spill and were trampled, or got hung up in a stirrup and dragged.

  As she galloped past, he noted every detail of her posture and balance. All these years later, her light hair still curled and snapped behind her. She still moved with a horse intuitively, which for some stupid reason caused his chest to ache. Her experience was evident in her form. She rode safely, expertly following the instructions he’d given her.

 
“The suspense is killing me,” Bo said.

  “I can hope.”

  “What do you think of her?”

  “She’s good,” Jake admitted.

  “Did you know she’s been exercising Mark Osten’s horses at Santa Anita for years?”

  “No.” Osten had an excellent nationwide reputation.

  “I gave him a call yesterday. He couldn’t say enough good things about her. He told me that she’s hardworking and reliable. He trusted her with horses he wouldn’t trust to other riders. She exercised Unhindered for him.”

  Unhindered, a young horse full of raw power, had won multiple stakes races. Jake would never want to put Lyndie on an animal as headstrong as Unhindered.

  “She’d be a great hire for us,” Bo stated.

  Jake narrowed his eyes. Lyndie had only been riding his horse for ten minutes and already she had him anxious for her well-being and furious with himself because of it. Ninety percent of him wanted her to leave. The other ten percent had gone rebel. That part wanted her to stay, which scared him even more than the prospect of her taking a spill off Gold Tide. “I’m not interested in hiring her.”

  “Why?”

  “Too much history there.”

  “Make new history. It’s time.” Bo stepped forward, bringing them shoulder to shoulder as they both continued to watch Lyndie. “She tried to jockey for a few years, back when she was twenty-three, twenty-four. She couldn’t get enough trainers to take a chance on her and had to give it up. Osten told me that if he’d known then what he knows about her now, he’d have put her on his horses.”

  Jake grunted. “Don’t you have work to do, Bo?”

  His brother laughed. “Nothing more important than this. You and I both know that good exercise riders are hard to find around here. She’s better than good. She’s the best prospect you’ve got.”

  Jake held his tongue.

  “It almost seems to me like God arranged the timing just right,” Bo said.

  “Or that I’m the brunt of a bad joke.” Most of his staff had been with him for the full eight years that he’d been training for Whispering Creek. He rarely had available openings for exercise riders.

  “Why don’t you just commit to take her on for the season at Lone Star?” Bo suggested.

  Resistance sharpened inside Jake.

  “Lyndie can start now and continue working for you when we move our horses to Lone Star’s barn in April,” Bo said. “When Lone Star’s season wraps in early July, she won’t go with you to New York for the summer because it would mean leaving her family. You’ll only be taking her on for a total of four months.”

  Every spring Jake ran a contingent of horses at Lone Star Park’s track, located forty-five minutes from Holley, as well as a contingent in Florida under the care of an assistant trainer. When summer came, Jake took some of his horses to New York to race. In the fall, Kentucky. But Lyndie, who needed to remain close to her sister, would be limited to Texas.

  “The season at Lone Star Park is fixin’ to start.” Bo said. “If you don’t hire her, one of the trainers there will snap her up. We treat our horses better than they do, Jake. When our horses get to Lone Star, they’re ready. Another trainer might put her up on a horse who’s not.”

  How did Bo know what to say to push a knife into the softest parts of him? He didn’t want Lyndie working for him, but he wanted her working for another trainer ten times less.

  Four months.

  His work had been his sanity for a long time. It was all he did. Training Thoroughbreds to run to their full potential, his only goal. If Lyndie could assist with that goal, could he bring himself to deal with her for four months?

  How much damage could four months do?

  “I’m here,” Lyndie called as she let herself into her parents’ house.

  “I’m reading to Mollie.” Her mother’s voice drifted to her from the hallway that housed the bedrooms.

  “Be there in a sec.” Lyndie entered the living room. “Hi, Grandpa.” She gave the old man’s shoulder a squeeze. “How are you today?”

  Awkward with affection, he patted her hand indecisively. “All right, I guess. In other words, doing my best.”

  Her father’s father was one of a rare breed: an eighty-five-year-old male who’d outlived his wife. When he’d become a widower two years ago, there had been no discussion about him living independently. Grandma had spoiled Grandpa Harold. Asking him to cook, clean, buy groceries, or iron for himself at this point would have been akin to throwing a babe into the woods.

  Lyndie’s parents had taken him in, bringing their number of adult dependents to two.

  “The Golf Channel keeps running commercials,” he stated. “That’s all I’ve seen today. Ads.”

  Grandpa spent approximately twelve hours a day watching the Golf Channel. When Lyndie’s dad arrived home from work in the evenings, the programming switched to Thoroughbred racing and whatever sport happened to be on ESPN. The two of them, who looked like older and younger versions of football coach Jimmy Johnson, sat side by side in a matched set of blue-and-green plaid recliners. Both preferred to wear khakis—Grandpa’s far more high-waisted—shiny golf shirts, and gold wedding rings.

  Whenever Lyndie’s mom forced Grandpa Harold to get out of the house and go to the senior center or take a walk, Grandpa grumbled the entire time.

  “If I could figure out how to use this fool control remote,” he said, “I’d change the channel.”

  “The remote control?”

  He gestured toward it with disgust.

  Lyndie picked it up. “What channel would you like?”

  “I guess the O Network will have to do.”

  Lyndie cocked her head. Talking to Grandpa Harold was a bit like decoding a riddle. “Oprah’s channel?”

  He reared back, staring at her like she’d offended him. Oops. She’d flunked the riddle.

  “Goodness, no, girl. The entertainment channel. Oprah? Oprah’s not entertaining.”

  “E! Entertainment Television?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  Lyndie found E! for him. The Soup was on. She stayed beside him for a few minutes because there were only two ways to commune with Grandpa: watch TV with him or bring him food on a tray.

  Beyond the TV, a triangular-shaped wall of windows overlooked a grove of live oaks. The two-story A-frame home her parents had purchased had been built in the ’80s on a ten-acre wooded lot by a Dallas family in want of a weekend getaway. Because of Mollie’s medical expenses, money had always been in scarce supply for Lyndie’s mom and dad. But thanks to the value of homes in Southern California, when her parents had sold their house in Altadena, they’d been able to afford this place, plus put the excess toward a chunk of hospital debts.

  “Knickerbockers,” Grandpa said.

  “Hmm?” Another riddle to solve.

  “The Knicks, in other words, the basketball team from New York? That’s what they used to be called. The Knickerbockers. You know what I mean?”

  “Umm . . .”

  “Go on back now and say hello to your sister.”

  Lyndie placed the remote at his side, then made a pit stop in the kitchen to wash her hands. Germs were Mollie’s enemy.

  When she entered her sister’s room, Karen James lowered the book she’d been reading aloud, one of the Forsythia Castle series. “Hi, honey.” She was propped up against a burst of pillows, Mollie next to her.

  “Hi, Mom.” Lyndie gave her a quick hug.

  “We just read the part where Princess Adelaide and her army of giants defeat the goblins,” Karen said.

  “Awesome.” Lyndie went around the queen-sized bed to sit on its far side. She took hold of her sister’s hand. “I’m here, Mollie.” Mollie turned her head toward Lyndie. “Wouldn’t it be cool if the two of us had an army? We could wear golden suits of armor and draw swords made out of crystal.”

  Mollie listened attentively, her eyebrows raised. Lyndie continued talking so that Mollie could pro
cess her nearness.

  A tragedy at birth had resulted in cerebral palsy so severe that it had left Mollie blind and nonverbal. She had very little control of her muscles and was the victim of numerous daily multi-focal seizures. To simply get through a day, Mollie required breathing treatments, tube feedings, and a percussion vest to shake her lungs because of her chronic lung disease.

  Despite all that, at this very moment, Lyndie could read a smile in her sister’s eyes. Mollie’s eyes were her main window of communication, and the gentle sweetness there caused a lump to form in Lyndie’s throat. She continued speaking through it.

  The James family considered it a miracle that Mollie had lived to her current age of twenty-seven. God had somehow sustained her frail body. The only thing Lyndie knew for sure was that He’d used their mother, in part, to do it. Karen’s dogged love and optimism had refused to let Mollie go and likewise refused to let her husband or Lyndie fracture under the strain of Mollie’s condition. It hadn’t come without cost to herself.

  At some point during her latter high school years, Lyndie had begun to recognize that her mother needed a degree of mothering. If Lyndie didn’t keep an eye on her mom, her mom had a tendency to run herself into the ground. When that happened, then the whole family would begin to come undone. Thus, Lyndie did almost all the grocery shopping for her parents’ household and the scrub-the-sinks type cleaning. Her mom managed the rest, except for cooking, which she’d given up for good one famous day in 1997. Since that day, the Jameses had gotten by on sandwiches, frozen meals, or soup at dinnertime.

  “Do you remember how old you were when I read the Forsythia Castle series to you?” Karen asked. “Fourth grade?”

  “Yep, fourth. You also read the Sugar Spun books to me and the Raven’s Flight series.”

  “That’s right!”

  “It’s all your fault that I ended up painting things like knights and dragons.” Lyndie stretched out on the bed, sticking two throw pillows under her shoulder and facing her mom with Mollie between them. “None of my art will ever hang in museums, you realize.”