the national champion Magnum Psyche bloodlines. I had a look at him—he’d be too much horse for a lot of people.”
“She bought herself a young stallion? “ Clay asked, then whistled.
Nate slapped a hand on Clay’s shoulder. “Did I mention I’m glad you’re here?”
“I haven’t unpacked and you have a special project for me,” he said, trying to disguise his pleasure.
Nathaniel grinned. “You don’t fool me. You were a little afraid of being bored and now you’re relieved that there’s a difficult horse coming. It’s written all over your face. Come on—Annie made pot roast. You’ll think you’ve died and gone to heaven.”
Two
Lilly was a bit shaken as she drove away from the Jensen stable. The new assistant was drop-dead gorgeous and totally flirting with her. He didn’t have to carry two fifty-pound sacks of feed at a time into the feed room! A show-off, trying to impress her with his strength, his bulging arms, as if that would make her life worth living.
Well, he was in for a few surprises if he wanted to get a rise out of her. First of all, she’d grown up around a lot of Native males and had them all figured out. Many of them developed self-esteem issues in adolescence, stemming from the discrimination they faced, and it seemed one of the best ways they could feel better about themselves was by reeling in a girl. That pumped ‘em right up, got their testosterone flowing, kicked their confidence into gear. Well, she’d been reeled in, cruelly dumped and survived it; she wasn’t going there again!
And most of them, at least the ones she had known, had old-fashioned ideas about calling all the shots. From the time they glanced down and noticed they were males, they assumed the dominant role. Well, Lilly had enough on her plate with a grandfather who liked running things. That was one of many reasons she stayed away from other Native men. She was capable of taking care of herself and not at all afraid of being a woman on her own. In fact, she rather liked it.
Then there was that whole Hopi/Navajo thing; their tribal traditions and customs. Tons of it was ingrained in her as her grandfather never let it go. She never tried to deny her connection to the Native community, but she’d been trying to get some distance from all of that for a long time. She felt she could be a proud Hopi woman without being constantly steeped in all the old tribal stuff. After all she was also French, German, Polish and Irish—or so her mother had told her grandfather. She never did give Lilly’s father’s name, but she knew his heritage.
Lilly’s mother, only a teenager herself when Lilly was born, had left her to be raised by her grandparents. She ran off, no one knew where. Friends from the Hopi reservation had heard that Lilly’s mother died, but had no proof or details. But Lilly and her grandparents had never heard from her again, and neither of them had bothered trying to find any more information about her.
Her grandfather was a strong, formidable man. When her grandmother was alive, he’d treated her as if she were made of solid gold, but Grandma still let him make all the decisions. Lilly was not looking for one of those old-world tribal relationships either—one of the reasons that when she did date, which was rare, she stuck to the beige race and avoided those too-hot-to-handle Native men.
She’d been in love with a Navajo once. She had been a mere child of thirteen and he’d been eighteen. He’d pressed every button she had—he was a temptation so powerful she had defied her grandfather to be with him. But she’d gotten much more than she could handle. And when their relationship had met its tragic end, she swore she’d never be tempted by another like him. Never.
No doubt that was why the sudden appearance of Clay shook her. He was at least equal in handsomeness to that long-ago boy who had devastated her. No, not equal. Clay might have been the most beautiful man she’d ever seen. Huge. Powerful. Exotic.
Lilly drove the pickup around yet another curve en route back to the feed warehouse when she came upon something that caught her attention—a black mound in the grass on the other side of a poorly maintained barbed wire fence. A horse, lying on the ground. It was not an altogether unusual sight, but Lilly slowed. As she neared, she kept sensing that something was not right about this. Then she saw the horse thrashing on the ground.
When Lilly and her grandparents had lived back on the Hopi reservation, she’d been around her neighbor’s horses a great deal, and had done a lot of riding as a young girl. But since Lilly and her grandfather had moved to California when Lilly was thirteen she’d been around feed more often than the animals that ate it. Her grandfather had bought the feed and grain business, but he didn’t keep any livestock. She rode rarely now, and only in the last couple of years, but she still remembered a lot about horses.
She pulled onto the shoulder and watched the horse. The mare jolted suddenly, rolled a bit, then stood and attempted to stretch out, curling her lip and pawing at the ground with her front hooves and kicking with her hind. Then down she went again.
Shit, Lilly thought. That horse was sick. Very sick. The only house in sight was on the wrong side of the road, but maybe someone there could direct her to the owners of this pasture, this horse. She went to the house, and an unshaven man in a T-shirt answered the door. He didn’t know the name of the horse’s owner, but he knew where it came from. He gave her directions up the road to the next turnoff and another quarter mile to an old farmhouse and barn. She went quickly, and what she found there stunned and confused her.
She called Dr. Jensen’s cell phone at once. “Nathaniel, I found a sick mare by the side of the road and the owner’s property is deserted. It looks abandoned. No one in the house, all the furniture’s gone, a couple of real skinny dogs are hanging out around the barn, the feed bin’s half-full of grain and trough’s empty. The horse is rolling, kicking, curling, sweating …”
“Where are you, Lilly?”
“Off 36 and Bell Road at a crossroad called Mercury Pass, but there’s no road sign. A neighbor directed me to this old farmhouse. The horse is rolling around just off Bell near 36.”
“I know the property,” Nathaniel said. “That’s the Jeromes'. As far as I know, they just had the one horse—a twelve-year-old black mare. But I haven’t been out there in about a year … maybe longer.”
She was, in fact, a very pretty black mare with back stockings and a diamond on her forehead. “That’s her. She’s a beauty. And she’s in a bad way.”
“I’ll be there soon as I can,” he said, clicking off.
Lilly wanted to get back to the horse, but she couldn’t resist a quick check of the barn and around the outside to be sure there weren’t any other casualties—horses, goats, cows or chickens. The small corral was neglected and full of manure, the barn was a filthy mess, manure and trash littering the place. There was no gear for the horse in the barn that she could see, no bridle, saddle or grooming gear. Behind the barn she found a chicken coop, the door left open, a few broken shells on the ground and a lot of scattered feathers. Had the chickens been left as food for the pumas, coyotes and wild dogs?
She’d seen enough. She jumped in the truck and sped back to the roadside. The horse was up again, stretching out her legs and curling her lip. She was in abdominal pain—that was clear. She kicked at her midsection a little, unsuccessfully, and then she was on the ground again, rolling around before lying listless and sweating. Lilly jumped the fence and kneeled at the horse’s head, stroking her snout and murmuring that everything would be all right, though she wasn’t the least confident about that.
It
