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That he cared little for her sort was patently clear. Yet even at his coolest he was, without fail, ever gallant, ever pleasant, ever respectful. Without fail, to all but the inexplicable pariah, Haley Garrett. For whom he reserved a special hostility. A vitriolic antipathy she didn’t understand, escalating with each inadvertent encounter.
Even now, perversely, for reasons only he knew, in his dislike the need to humiliate her was stronger than his desperation. Which made no sense, for added to the legend was his even greater love of horses. Jackson Cade of River Trace was a breeder of some of the world’s finest stock. One who spared neither time nor expense to insure their excellent care.
Despite an unmistakable distrust of his brother’s partner in their veterinary practice, his attitude was senseless in the extreme. Haley couldn’t begin to comprehend his motives or to fathom their origin. But, since it was doubtful he could ever address her in genial terms, much less explain her sins, she’d given up trying to understand this contrary, cantankerous Cade weeks ago.
Indeed, if it were only this frustrating man, she would turn on her booted heel, leaving River Trace in the dust and Jackson Cade to reap the consequences of his unbridled arrogance.
But the problem wasn’t just the enigmatic Jackson Cade. There was the horse and its strange malady. In the midst of this standoff, troubled sounds had begun to drift from a distant stall. Proving, as Haley feared, the embattled quiet had been only the respite of overwhelming fatigue.
Because she couldn’t turn her back on any hurting creature, she put resentment and quelled anger aside in favor of ethical prudence and compassion. “If it will make you feel better, I apologize for my costume, Mr. Cade. I was attending a dinner following a concert,” she explained. “When you called, I considered the situation an emergency. I still do. If you’ll let me, I’d like to help. To do that, I need to examine the horse while it’s quiet. Which, from the sounds I’m hearing, won’t be long.”
Jackson Cade, whom she knew from his brothers had been trained from childhood to behave in a gentlemanly manner, had the grace to look ashamed of his behavior. But only for a single moment, for in the next he was covering the faltering of his dislike with a brusque gesture and a mocking bow. “Be my guest, Duchess. The problem with Dancer has stymied the best of us.”
“So,” Haley snapped with rare impatience, “as a last resort you decided to give me a shot at diagnosing.”
“Something like that.”
When he straightened from a sweeping bow worthy of a Knight of the Round Table, his blue gaze only vaguely mocking, eyes as blue waited for his. Ambushing him. Catching him off guard. In that naked glimpse Haley saw beyond the anger to hurt and fear. Jackson Cade was half mindless with worry because he cared so very much. His horses were more than a business. More than dollar signs. And like it or not, like her or not, Haley Garrett was truly his last resort.
“In that case,” she responded, still keeping his gaze, “I’d best make this good, hadn’t I?”
Turning away, she addressed the older man, who waited with an oddly pleased and knowing expression. But Haley couldn’t be concerned with any more peculiar masculine behavior. “Jesse, if you would go with me to Dancer’s stall…”
“I’ll go.” Jackson stepped closer. Even as the shortest of the Cades, he towered over her only a fraction less than a foot.
“No.” He was so close, so imposing, she had to steel herself against the urge to step back. “Thank you, but no,” she said in rephrase, hoping to avoid another confrontation. “I need a cool head. You’re too emotionally involved to think clearly.”
“This is my land, Dancer’s my horse, Doctor Garrett.” Eyes that could smile and warm female hearts were arctic blue.
“Your horse but my patient, Mr. Cade,” Haley reminded him without returning his heavy-handed sarcasm. Without looking away from his piercing glare, she asked quietly, “Ready, Jesse?”
“Never readier.” The slender cowhand pushed away from the wall where he’d leaned to watch the show. Now he was all business. “The hands took the other horses to pasture. Dancer’s fit was catching. Part of what you heard over the phone was them, wild and getting wilder, though they didn’t see what Dancer was imagining.”
“A concert, you say?” Jesse changed subjects adroitly. Tossing the question over his shoulder, he led Haley down a corridor intersecting the main part of the barn. “I ’spose that means you had a date. A good-looking filly like you, dressed in pretty finery, be a shame if you didn’t.”
Whether there had or had not been a date or an escort was none of Jesse’s business. But he was nearly as famous for his superstitions and harmless, gossipy curiosity as for his horse sense. For the latter, Haley admired and liked the wily old fox.
“Thank you for the compliment, Jesse. It’s nice to know you think I’m a ‘good-looking little filly.’” Smiling at the lumbering hitch in his step, she knew he was waiting for the punch line, and decided she wouldn’t prolong the suspense. “And, yes, I had a date for the concert. For dinner, too.”
Wide shoulders too heavy for his lanky form twitched, even as he resumed a smooth stride. “Guess it couldn’t’ve been Daniel Corbett, since he would’ve been conducting.”
This took prying to a ridiculous level, even for Jesse. But Haley had dealt with enough contention for one night. It wouldn’t hurt to satisfy his determined curiosity. “It was chamber music, Jesse, not the orchestra. Daniel didn’t conduct.”
“Oh?”
Hearing mounting curiosity in the questioning word, wondering why he should care, she gripped the heavy bag, intending to shift it from one tired hand to the other hand. Before the move was completed, the bag was taken from her. Jackson had stepped forward. Medical bag in hand, he matched his stride to hers.
As she looked up at him, she realized that in the shadowed hall his features were haggard and incredibly weary. Excusing his insolence, in that moment her tender heart went out to him. But, certain the last thing this strong, hotheaded man wanted was sympathy, she turned her attention back to Jesse, who rattled on.
“I beg your pardon?” Haley hurried to catch up with the loquacious cowboy, and to keep Jackson at a comfortable distance. “Sorry, Jesse. I’m afraid I wasn’t listening.”
“Humph! You don’t have to beg nothin’ here, little girl. Considering Jackson’s bark’s worse than his bite, you don’t have to be afraid, neither. What I was sayin’ is, what with conducting and all, Daniel must be pretty interesting.”
“Daniel’s certainly interesting.”
“I ’spose that short answer means you ain’t gonna say just exactly who your date was?”
Wondering why she cared that Jackson was hearing this conversation, she brought it to an end. “As a matter fact, I’m not. I came to treat a horse, not to discuss my social life.”
Grinning again at Jesse’s grunt of frustration, she slowed her steps as he slowed. When he stopped at the bolted gate of a stall, in a gasping breath her grin was swept away.
Cade’s Irish Dancer was known in informed circles as a magnificent stallion, a most valuable stud. Or he had been.
Haley had never been afforded the coveted opportunity to study him in the flesh. But she’d read about him, poring over his photographs in breeder and veterinary journals. Yet if she hadn’t been told the exhausted creature cowering in the battered stall was the legendary horse, she wouldn’t have believed it.
His coat was soaked with sweat and matted. His head drooped, his tail hung dull and lifeless. Gone was the proud bearing of the much-sought-after stud that had once, no doubt, been as arrogant as his master. At a glance, he appeared to have lost a tremendous amount of weight. But given the short duration of his seizure, she knew it was likely severe dehydration.
Though it didn’t explain Jackson’s hostility toward her, Dancer’s condition was cause enough for his mood.
“Jackson,” she whispered, oblivious in her alarm that she called his given name. “How long has he been like this?”
“It began several hours ago.” He waited a pace behind her. “The onset was like this, first lethargy then a few minutes of erratic behavior. Dancer’s temperamental. It seemed like a fit of exceptionally bad humor at first. Then the madness started. We tried all we knew to calm him. Finally, both Jesse and I—and even all the hands—exhausted every avenue.”
“Tell me.” Haley’s racing mind searched for answers. “Tell me everything. Don’t leave out the smallest detail.”
It was Jackson who answered, which was only natural. Dancer was his horse, the greatest source of his livelihood. More than that, the stallion’s anguish was his anguish. When he finished explaining every treatment, she found he’d been thorough and practical. His mind quick, he was well organized and sensible. More reasons to be puzzled by his reaction to her.
Mulling over all he’d said, Haley nodded. Thinking hard as she studied the horse that was a pitiful remnant of the awesome creature he’d been, something nagged at her. Something Jesse had said, recalled briefly by Jackson’s explanation. But in the shock and duress it had slipped from her mind.
“But what?” Out of habit, with no sign of vanity, she absently tucked a slipping hairpin into place. “Jesse!”
“Yes, ma’am. Still here.”
“What was it you said?” Closing her eyes, as if blocking out her surroundings would bring the elusive thought within reach, she muttered, “Something about the other horses.”
“I don’t recall the order, but it was something about the other horses reacting to Dancer, and the hands taking them to pasture.” Sliding back his broad-brimmed hat, Jesse peered at her from the shadows cast by overhead lights. “Does that help?”
Haley took a closer look at the stall, hoping for the spark of the thought. The effort changed nothing. She was as confounded as Jesse or Jackson.
Jackson? When had she begun to think of the stiff-necked man as Jackson? she wondered. Especially since it was unlikely they would ever be on a first-name basis as she was with his brothers Adams and Jefferson, who didn’t avoid her.
Abandoning thoughts of the stubborn, arrogant Cade, returning to the elusive memory that teased at her mind, she admitted honestly, “Maybe it will help. Then again, maybe not. Perhaps the thought was too far-fetched to stick.”
“Jesse said one other thing.” Jackson came to stand by her, resting his arms on the stall door. In close proximity, mixed with the scent of hay and horse, Haley breathed in a pleasant woodsy fragrance that suited a man like Jackson. Except, what did she know of the kind of man he was? Or what would suit him?
In that rare moment, regret that he resented and disliked her so adamantly surfaced. In more amenable circumstances, she believed he would have been a gentleman, a man she could admire. One whose friendship she would value.
A pipe dream. It took two to make a friendship. Of all the emotions rampant between them, friendship was not one of them. Nor would it ever be. Unaware of her melancholy sigh, or that Jackson looked at her with something in his eyes that would have shocked her, focusing on the horse, Haley asked, “What was it?”
Jackson had lost the thread of concentration. Brows only a little darker than his auburn hair lifted in question. “‘It?’”
“Sorry.” This was her night for apologies. “I didn’t mean to speak in riddles. Just wondering aloud what else Jesse said.” She glanced at the cowhand, but he shrugged. Jesse had no answer or had delegated that responsibility to the younger man.
“What probably struck you as odd,” Jackson volunteered again, “was his comment that the other horses weren’t seeing what Dancer was imagining.”
“Imagining?” She looked into eyes bearing no shred of anger. “Jesse thought the horse was imagining something?” Before either man could respond, she questioned Jackson. “Did you?”
“At the time, I didn’t think of anything but preventing Dancer from hurting himself.” Unconsciously, he brushed a roughened finger over the start of a bruise. Tomorrow he would have a colorful cheek, maybe a shiner. “Now that I remember Jesse saying it, yes, Dancer acted as if he was hallucinating. Maybe having a sort of seizure, which is ridiculous.”
Hallucinations. Seizure. Induced by an exotic foreign substance? She’d seen it once before. The horse died, because the diagnosis had been made postmortem. If she was lucky… “Jesse, get me a syringe. Jackson, take my bag to a better light.”
When both had done as she’d asked—she was working so quickly and thinking so hard—she hadn’t realized she had given orders. Or that Jackson Cade had obeyed without question. When the syringe was prepared, she stopped to explain. “I think I’ve seen this before. If I’m right and I move quickly enough, we can save your Dancer. But you have to realize this is little more than a wild guess, a gamble. Luck of the draw, so to speak.
“If we had time for tests…”
“Which we don’t,” Jesse reminded her grimly.
In a regretful tone she warned, “If I’m wrong…”
“What you try could kill him.” Oddly, as if he would spare her the grief of the words, Jackson stated the inescapable truth.
“Yes,” she admitted, for there was no other answer.
“In this condition, he’ll die if you don’t try,” Jesse put in, but Haley and Jackson were concentrating so intently on each other, neither heard. Neither needed to hear, for they knew.
“Last ditch,” Jackson murmured.
“So it would seem. But Dancer’s strong…there’s a chance this could run its course before his heart gives out.”
“No,” he disagreed. “You didn’t see him. Even if the next seizure is lighter, he won’t survive it.”
“Then will you trust me? Will you take the risk that I’m right?” Haley knew she faced the challenge of her career. As she’d warned, anything she did from this point on would be sheer guesswork. But with every other avenue exhausted, guesswork was all they had. All there was time for before another onset of Dancer’s madness. Dancer’s deliberately induced madness.
Haley caught a startled breath. Deliberately induced? Certainty came out of nowhere. But every intuition shouted deliberate. The word resounded in her mind like an echoing bell.
She knew little of the operation at River Trace, still less of its stubborn and scornful proprietor. Stubborn and scornful with her, she amended, for she knew of his reputation as a laughing, flirting, kindhearted gentleman. Once, long ago, she’d known his gentleness. Times change, people change. Perhaps the young man who had been kind to a younger, obviously forgotten Haley Garrett, had changed. Perhaps he’d made enemies. Vicious enemies.
A concept she understood all too well. One not beyond the realm of possibility. After all, Jackson Cade had certainly done his best to make an enemy of her.
Dancer tossed his head, then staggered and whickered, a prelude to the screams that had brought her here. “Imagining,” she whispered in a troubled tone, more certain than ever that she was right. There was hope for the horse now, but little time.
Laying a hand on the stall door, she started to enter when a hard, calloused hand covering hers stopped her. “Don’t,” Jackson said. “Whatever this is, it comes in stages. At his worst, he’s too dangerous for you to take this risk. I’m sorry.”
True regret flickered over his craggy, attractive face, startling Haley. Before she could protest that this was her job and that this was neither the first nor the last time she would face a dangerous creature, his clasp tightened, his fingers circling the back of her hand and her palm.
“I shouldn’t have interrupted your evening, Duchess.” This time the name lacked the sting it had carried before. If this hadn’t been Jackson, if he hadn’t proven time and again he had little use for her as a vet or a person, it could have been a nickname. The sort a friend might bestow on a friend.
Friends? Mutely she scoffed at her choice of words. Of the things she and Jackson might become as a result of this night, she’d already decided friendship could never be one of them.
“But you did make the call. A call I’ve waited…” Haley stopped short, only then admitting it was true. She had waited for his call, for the day he would need her. A startling admission she would need to give greater thought…but later, when his blue gaze didn’t burn into hers, making anger and animosity meaningless.
Gathering scattered thoughts, she turned her attention to the cause of her journey. “I’m here for a purpose. Your horse needs attention. Now, Jackson, before it’s too late.”
“He’ll be dangerous. Too dangerous.”
“Because he’s a fighter, yes, he will,” Haley agreed. “But he’s only restless now. Whatever this is, it’s building. If I move quickly, hopefully I can find what I’m looking for. If I do and if my half-educated guess turns out to be lucky and right, what I’m trying might counteract it.”
“‘Educated guess’? ‘Luck’?” It wasn’t an admission he’d expected. He’d set his mind so strongly against her, he’d never considered what he should expect from her.
Pretending his touch and the softening of his demeanor didn’t incite emotions she wasn’t ready to deal with, Haley was determined to do the job she’d been summoned to do. Glancing at a clock visible beyond Jackson, she found this exchange that seemed to go on forever had, from beginning to now, spanned just nine minutes. Even that little time was too much. Too long.
Certain she was losing her window of opportunity, if there was one, she restated an inescapable truth. “You’ve never wanted me here. That you’ve called me tonight can only mean that you knew anything I might do was a last-ditch effort.
“Look at him, Jackson.” Because she’d seen beyond the stubborn arrogance, because she’d felt the pain he guarded so carefully, she called his name softly. Hardly aware of what she did, with her free hand she touched his shoulder in compassion. “Time’s running out, for Dancer and for me.”
“No.” Jackson couldn’t explain why he was resisting this. He’d called for her help. When all else had failed, Dancer’s survival rested, finally, in Haley Garrett’s hands. The hands of a duchess, despite the calluses and blunt nails.
Over the telephone, it was a matter of course to consider that she should do this. But when she stood before him, so tiny and yet so determined, he realized how impossible it was that she face a half ton of maddened horseflesh.
“You can’t. When I called, I didn’t realize…” His voice drifted into silence. His hand tightened over hers, his shoulders lifted, as he made a choice consigning Dancer to certain death. “I’m sorry, Duchess. I shouldn’t have interrupted the concert or your date with Daniel.”
“It wasn’t Daniel, and this is what I trained years to do. Why I relocated in Belle Terre and joined Lincoln’s practice.”
The exhausted stallion snuffled and took a stumbling step. Haley looked from Jackson to the horse and back. “Dancer isn’t the first crazed creature I’ve confronted in my life and in my work. He won’t be the last.”
“Let her go, Jackson.” Jesse spoke into the impasse. “I’ve seen your duchess in action. She can handle this and Dancer. Probably better than you or me.”
As Jesse distracted him, Haley moved beyond Jackson’s grasp. Syringe ready, she slipped through the stable door.
Two
Jackson Cade stood at the bedroom window. The bedroom he’d chosen as his when he’d bought the derelict farm the once-proud plantation had become. In debt up to his ears to the Bank of Belle Terre, he’d worked day and night, pouring his heart and his soul—and every spare penny—into the land.
When the effort seemed too much, his goal too impossible, it was this window and the view that kept him going. It was his measuring stick, the tally of his successes and his failures.
“How many times?” he wondered out loud. How many times had he stood here in dawn’s light, watching the changes a day brought to the land. The changes his labor wrought as he reclaimed first one pasture then another. Acre by grueling acre.
Even with Lincoln and Jefferson helping, progress had been slow. More times than he could remember, he’d wanted to give it up. To count River Trace as Jackson Cade’s folly. Then he would stand at this window at dawn. As his heart lifted with the sun, burdens seemed lighter, and impossible was only a word.
His first stud had been mediocre, not in keeping with the horse’s own bloodlines, but its colts had had a way of reverting to an excellence that had gone before. A gamble, but there had been those willing to take the chance for that rare, splendid colt.
With the stud fees he’d added a second stud and another pasture, and his name became a whisper in all the right circles. Jackson Cade and Cade horses became a coveted secret. Then Adams sold Cade Enterprises, insisting a share of the absurd sum go to his brothers. They became silent legal partners, having no idea they were partners, whom Adams credited with being as responsible for the ridiculously simple invention a competing company fancied.
When the dust of the family battle settled, there were funds earmarked to set Belle Reve, the floundering family plantation, aright, and to keep it that way. Millions were left to be divided between brothers. Adams would have it no other way.
Gus Cade’s sons, who had known nothing but hard work and penny-pinching times, were suddenly free of their beloved tyrant. And affluent into the bargain. But little had changed in their lives.
Adams stayed in the lowcountry and married Eden, the woman he’d loved forever. With her, he began rescuing the uninhabited and neglected houses of Belle Terre’s infamous Fancy Row. Bringing grace and dignity to derelicts that a century before, in an accepted practice, grandly sheltered mistresses and second families of wealthy Southern planters and businessmen.
