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.
Lincoln brought his veterinary office and equipment to state-of-the-art, bought a Jaguar, a pied-à-terre on a secluded street in Belle Terre and left the rest for Adams to invest.
And Jeffie?
Jackson smiled as the name tumbled into his thoughts. Who knew about Jeffie? He still hunted, still fished, still painted. He worked with the horses at Belle Reve and River Trace. And still had no idea the female population practically swooned at his feet.
A low laugh sounded in the pale darkness of Jackson’s bedroom as first light gleamed beyond the window. A laugh of pleasure in his youngest brother. For, if all the rest of their lives had changed little, Jefferson’s hadn’t changed at all.
“Nor mine, truly.” His life, his workload, his goals, were the same. Only River Trace had changed. Most of his own share of what he would always think of as Adams’s millions had been poured into the farm. First replacing a barn that had burned. Arson, but with no motive discovered, nor any suspect.
Except the Rabbs, a local family waging a one-sided feud. An old enmity, sparked by jealousy of the Cades’s misperceived wealth and anger over too many lost brawls. Jealousy and anger that turned to hate and danger and threatened tragedy.
With no proof and no more incidents, he’d filed his suspicions away. After the barn, he’d recouped and restored the last of the acres included in the original grant on which River Trace had been built. And, finally, the breeding stock. The studs, more and more costly studs.
Last came Cade’s Irish Dancer. The stallion on which he’d gambled his dreams and the financial future of River Trace.
“I almost lost it,” he muttered. “In a single night, I almost lost the dream.”
As if it had lifted out of the east pasture, the sun climbed slowly into the sky, casting light over fields of grain waiting to be harvested. Miles of white fences gleaming like rose-gold ribbons traversed and intersected the velvet green of rich, grassy pastures. Horses snuffling dew-beaded grass were sleek and sassy, and so beautiful it hurt to watch them.
Paradise. Yes, for Jackson, the land he surveyed from his bedroom window was no less than that. Paradise lost, but for a tiny slip of a woman. A brave, savvy, fool-hearted woman, a woman he’d been determined to dislike from his first glimpse of her.
He’d rejected her help time and again. Yet when he called, she came. He insulted her, she kept her cool. He acted the boor—keeping her dignity, she made him the fool.
When all he had lay on the brink of destruction, with perception, compassion and ill-advised courage, at great cost to herself she had cared for a maddened creature and saved the day.
“No.” He turned from the window to the bed where she slept, recovering from her near brush with death the previous night when a crazed Dancer had flung her violently against the wall of his stall. “She saved the night, my horse, and my home.” Crossing to the chair where he’d spent all but the last few minutes keeping watch, he settled down to wait for Haley Garrett to awake.
The grandfather clock in the foyer had boomed the hour five times since Jackson Cade had put Haley in his bed. Four of those times she hadn’t heard or stirred. On the fifth, she did.
Slowly, not quite awake, not quite asleep, her lashes fluttered but didn’t lift from her cheeks. As the clock fell silent, a frown crossed her face, then was gone.
Six o’clock. She was late. She should be worried, but couldn’t muster the energy. Not remembering the night, thinking only of the time, she stirred, beginning a languid stretch, and a sharp pain threatened to slice her in two.
“Oh-hh.” An unfinished breath stopped in her lungs. Lashes that had just begun to rise from her cheeks at last, fluttered down in an effort to seal away a world too bright and an agony too sharp. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t move, as muscles across her back and midriff held her in paralytic misery.
Denying the pain, she tried to move again, and her teeth clenched a second too late to bite back a groan. A sound that brought with it the fleeting stroke of a hand across her brow. One offering comfort, but she didn’t understand.
“No,” she whispered hoarsely, and turned away.
“Shh. Everything’s all right, thanks to you. You’re all right,” a voice assured.
Thanks to you. Thanks to you. She’d heard the routine before, trying to soothe what couldn’t be soothed, undo what couldn’t be undone, by planting a lie. God help her, she’d heard it all before and didn’t want to hear it again. Keeping her eyes closed tightly, weary of an old struggle, she whispered, “Don’t.”
Haley was too tired. The words hurt too much. “Just don’t.” In the darkness of her world she shuddered as the bed dipped beneath his weight. “Go away, Todd. Leave me alone.”
“Shh,
