Peggy Nicholson - Don't Mess With Texans

“Miz—!” The guard yanked off his hat from long habit, then stood there twisting it. “Mrs. Colton, ma’am! I didn’t recognize—”

“Hardly surprisin’.” Stephen had always insisted she dress her part around the farm. If she must wear pants, then it had to be jodhpurs with a silk shirt or a tweed jacket. Hair up in a snooty French twist. Only when she rode out with the exercise boys at dawn was she allowed to wear jeans and let her hair fly free. Funny that Stephen fell for her, looking like that, then had to change that first thing once he got her.

The guard glanced from her to the distant ceremony. “Oh. I guess he wouldn’t let you...?”

“Nope.” She’d had her lawyer ask, since Stephen wasn’t taking her calls. Word had come back promptly from on high. Translated from Houlihan’s tactful legalese, the word was, “Not in this lifetime, sugarbabe!”

Funny how little you could know a man in two years. She’d known Stephen was tough. Kentucky hardboot, they called a shrewd horseman hereabouts. But just how hard his boots were, she’d only begun to learn these past few days. She had a feeling the lesson wasn’t done yet, either.

“Sure was a shame,” Randall observed, putting his hat on and coming to stand beside her, facing uphill. “Surprised the heck out of me when I heard. That old man was so tough I’d have said Brady’d bury us all.”

“Yeah.” She’d thought so, too. But then, her own father had gone in seconds—one horse stumbling in front of his own, then the pileup from behind. Winged hero to smashed cripple in less time than it took her to scream and rush to press her hands to the TV screen, as if she could lift those tiny, flailing bodies off him. For horse folks, life usually happened fast, and it happened hard.

“But that plate in his skull, a fall on that...” Randall heaved a hound-dog sigh. “And they say he must have knocked it more than once, tumblin’ down a whole flight.”

“Yeah.” And Brady wouldn’t have been hurrying so, ’cept for me. She swallowed hard and blinked at the distant funeral.

Movement up there, looked like they were almost done. Dropping red Kentucky clay on his coffin, one by one, then trudging off over the crest of the hill.

A tall man dressed in black stepped apart from the dwindling crowd and stood staring down at them, something ominous in his stillness.

“Oh, Jeez, is that the boss?” Randall took two long steps away from her, spun toward his truck, then back again. “If he saw I was talking to you...!”

“You’re just tellin’ me t’beat it, that’s all. He can’t blame you for that.”

“Oh, can’t he?” Good jobs were hard to find out in the country. A job at Fleetfoot Farm was golden. “But you’re not going.”

“Not till it’s over, I’m not.”

“Look, Mrs. Colton, I’m real sorry, but—” the guard grabbed her arm and hustled her toward the pickup’s door “—get out of here, will you? Please, ma’am? It’s my job if you don’t.”

“Ouch, dammit, lemme go!” Even a week before, if Randall had dared lay a finger on her, he’d never have worked again in the bluegrass. Now she was fair game for anyone. The door scraped her shins as he yanked it open. He grabbed her waist and tossed her up on the seat. “You son of a bitch!” She slapped his hands aside.

He shut the door carefully on her, then held it shut, onehanded, while he stooped for her fallen hat. She gave up pushing and rolled down the window. “Bastard!” The tears that had been threatening all day brimmed and overflowed. Her face burned with the shame of it. She didn’t cry easily or often. Never before strangers.

“Ma‘am, I’m real sorry, but y’know, you started it all.”

“Ha!” She rubbed her nose and glared past his shoulder. Stephen hadn’t missed the show. Thank God she was too far away to see him grinning! He who laughs last... It was a phrase he’d always been fond of, trailing it off with a little smirk and a shrug.

“I don’t blame you for wanting your own back,” Randall was saying, brushing off her hat. “Lot of us had a good laugh when we heard what you’d done.”

Maybe the guards and the house staff had. But not her people, the grooms and the trainers and the exercise boys down in the stables. They weren’t amused. She’d met a groom on the streets of Lexington yesterday and he’d spat at her feet.

“Serves him right, I say. But he’s a hard one and they say he never forgets if you cross him. I was you, I wouldn’t hang around here. I’d want some miles between.” He offered her the hat with a pleading smile.

It was good advice. Advice she’d already given herself. She’d only stopped to say goodbye, and now there was no one left by the grave but her husband.

A word that wouldn’t apply much longer.

She took the Stetson, saw the muddy bootmark on its brim—well, damn—and sat blinking frantically. Don’t be such a stupid crybaby! She dropped it on the seat and started the truck.

“Where’re you headed for, ma‘am, if y’don’t mind my asking?”

“Texas, where else?” This kid’s had enough of the high life. Her sister would be waiting for her in Houston, with that big old terry-cloth robe she always loaned Susannah when she came calling, and endless cups of hot chocolate. They’d stay up talking all night, and Saskia wouldn’t judge.

She couldn’t get back to Texas soon enough. Careful not to look toward the distant watcher, Susannah set her eyes on the open road and drove.

CHAPTER SIX

JUNE IN KENTUCKY. Beyond those towering, wrought-iron gates, Fleetfoot Farm looked like a slice of paradise. More than a square mile of prime bluegrass, according to Tag’s guidebook. Hill upon hill of lush emerald green—bluegrass wasn’t really blue, so go figure—stitched with white board fences. Flashes of chestnut and bay as thoroughbred yearlings chased each other around a distant pasture. A shady avenue lined in century-old sycamores, rising toward a glimpse of far-off roofs, which would be Colton’s antebellum manor.

So it was her upcoming expulsion from this Eden that Susannah had been avenging when she brought him Payback to ruin. To have risen this high, then to lose it. Tag could almost feel pity for the lying little bitch.

Almost. Has he ever been raced? Gullible fool, had he really asked that?

Few times, she’d drawled, and looked him straight in the eye. God, she must have been laughing fit to burst!

A heavyset guard paused in the open door of the gatehouse. Piggy eyes moved over Tag’s rusting and battered vehicle, an ex state police car he’d recently bought at auction. Its big V-8 engine burned oil and sucked gas at an awesome rate, but as long as you fed the monster, at least it still had some speed. The guard swaggered over to its window, his smile dismissing both man and car. “You here for the tour?” A driver of a heap like this might be allowed to press his nose to the glass, catch a peek of heaven, was the unspoken assumption, but he’d have no real business with the high and mighty.

“Yep.” Tag dragged his own eyes away from the gun on the man’s hip—more firepower than he’d have expected out here in the country—as he mustered a smile. Smiling was his best disguise these days. Since January, not a single gossip rag or network newscast had caught the infamous Dr. Taggart with a smile on his face. “The tour.”

Like many of the big racing stables and stud farms of the bluegrass, Fleetfoot Farm opened its barns and grounds to its admiring public in the summer months. And the only way he could hope to gain admittance to Susannah’s ex’s estate was if he was disguised as a lowly tourist.

Because in six months of trying, Tag hadn’t managed a meeting with Stephen Colton face-to-face. Nor had he even talked to the elusive bastard over the phone. But for the few glimpses he’d had of the man on TV, his signature on the blizzard of lawsuits that drifted down on Tag’s head, his endless army of legal minions, Colton might have been a figment of Tag’s worst nightmare. An invisible hand dealing cards of misfortune.