She said the right horse would make it less scary.”
Nice of her, giving an opinion on something she knew nothing about. On the other hand, Darcy needed all the encouragement she could get. “Maybe you can do some riding when you’re at school.”
“Mom told me I was useless around horses.”
“Your mother…” Jonah clamped down on the impulse to speak his mind concerning his ex-wife. “She was upset that day, Darcy. You’d just fallen off and broken your arm. The horse was still running loose. You know she didn’t mean what she said.”
He glanced over, and saw that Darcy’s long-fingered hands were clamped into fists in her lap. “She said it later, too. While they were putting the cast on my arm.”
“Damn her.” This time the curse erupted before he could stop it. He couldn’t believe even Brittany would be so cruel to her own daughter. Brittany, of course, hadn’t bothered to confess what she’d said until a month later, while they sat on opposite sides of the emergency room waiting for the doctors to pump half a bottle of pain pills out of Darcy’s stomach.
He cleared his throat. “Sorry. Obviously, I have some serious problems with your mother, or else I’d still be married to her.” He wanted to share a smile with Darcy, but she was staring out the window. “You’re with me now, so don’t worry about getting hassled like that anymore.”
She didn’t turn around. Finally, though, she murmured, “The teachers…”
“The teachers at Hawkridge are there to help you, and not just with schoolwork. They’re more like friends you can count on to listen and support you when you’re having problems.” He hoped so, anyway, for Darcy’s sake. No thirteen-year-old girl should be desperate enough to attempt suicide.
His stomach rumbled, and Jonah switched to a more cheerful topic. “It’s been a long afternoon and I’m starving. How do you feel about pizza for supper? I hear there’s a pretty good place in town. We could stop there before we go back to the hotel.”
Darcy gave him another of those defeated shrugs. “Pizza’s fattening.”
More of her mother’s wisdom, no doubt. “We’ll walk around town afterwards, look in the shop windows and work off the calories.” His stepdaughter didn’t answer. “Or we could go swimming in the hotel’s heated pool.”
“I can’t wear a swimsuit.”
“Darcy…” Jonah started to protest, but pulled himself up short. He wasn’t sure what the right response would be—as the only child of two only children, he lacked the sisters and female cousins who might have provided experience. His instincts about women were obviously lousy, otherwise he would never have gotten involved with Brittany…or Cindi or Annelise or Jacqueline…in the first place.
At least Brittany was the only mistake he’d married.
“Well,” he said, braking as they approached the town limit of Ridgeville, “most pizza restaurants offer salads, too. But I hope you’ll have a piece or two of the pizza. Otherwise, I’ll have to eat the whole thing myself. And then I’ll have to walk for hours to work it off. I might not get to sleep tonight.”
He thought he heard a snort of amusement from Darcy. He’d take that as progress.
But he hoped The Hawkridge School could do better. And he prayed that Jayne Thomas and her staff would show him how to avoid making mistakes with this fragile soul for whom he’d taken responsibility. Now that Brittany had transferred custody to him, he planned to move to Ridgeville within the next few weeks. Living nearby, and without his ex-wife’s constant interference, Jonah hoped he could learn to be the parent Darcy needed.
Business-wise, planning and construction of the school’s stable, along with his other projects in Atlanta and Charlotte, would allow him to start up his solo firm in North Carolina on a solid financial basis. Without the Hawkridge commission, though, he couldn’t cover his expenses. He’d have to spend another year in New York, working with his prima-donna boss and going not-so-quietly insane.
So whether she knew it or not, Ms. Ruth Ann Blakely held his future in her hands. If he didn’t win her support on the stable, he wouldn’t be his own boss for at least another year. More important, he wouldn’t be able to give Darcy the support he knew she needed.
But the argumentative, assertive Ms. Blakely would not be easy to win over. And given his lousy track record with women, Jonah didn’t have a clue what approach to take!
Chapter Two
Someone had set fire to the sky.
Or so it looked to Ruth Ann, studying the sunrise during her walk from her cottage, on the main campus, to the stable. Red-gold clouds hovered just above the treeline, reflecting pink light onto the mist rising off the mountains.
“Red sky in morning, sailor take warning,” she told herself. “I wonder if that still holds true when we’re four hundred miles inland and a mile above sea level.”
Two hours later, with her horses fed but half the stalls still needing to be cleaned, she propped her chin on her hands, gripped around the handle of a manure fork, and gazed at the gentle rain falling outside the barn windows. “I guess it is true. We’re going to have rain for Moving-In Day.”
Waldo, the twenty-three year old Percheron, stuck his huge white head over his stall door and whickered in her direction. Ruth Ann moved closer to rub the soft white hair on his cheeks and throat. “No time for a ride today, old man. I’ll be down at the school until dinnertime, helping the girls get settled.”
He pushed his nose into her hand, and she knuckled the velvety pink skin between his nostrils. “Yes, even in the rain. We’re all gonna be chilled and damp by the end of the afternoon. I hope they’re planning spaghetti for dinner.”
The horse lipped her fingers. “This new cook makes some strange choices, though. She served spinach quiche for lunch one day during summer school—whatever made her think teenagers who’d spent the morning hiking and swimming in the summer heat would want eggs and spinach for lunch? What do you suppose Cook thought when most of the pieces of her green and yellow pie returned to the kitchen untouched?”
Lightning flashed outside, followed quickly by the growl of thunder. Waldo turned away and paced to the outside door of his stall, settling in to contemplate the weather.
“Just as well,” Ruth Ann murmured to herself, and to the horses around her as she hurried to finish her work. “I’ve got to be at the dorm by nine. I hope there are more dads here this year than last. I really don’t want to spend all morning schlepping luggage in the rain.”
Just in case, though, she donned her raincoat and pulled rubber boots over her sneakers. She checked the various buckets set under the leaks in the roof and emptied those more than a third full.
“That’ll hold us till lunchtime,” she told Patsy, a dark bay thoroughbred mare. “I’ll rush back while the girls and their folks are eating. Be good.”
The Hawkridge stables were located half a mile from the main house and the dormitories, an easy walk across the lawns and meadows of the grounds. Driving her pickup truck to avoid the rain required Ruth Ann to use the four-mile service road running through the forest surrounding the estate. Here and there, the trees were starting to show
