voice she’d heard soothing a frighten, crazed horse. Soothing her as gently.
“Jackson?” Gold-tipped lashes lifted. As she risked the turn to face him, eyes once as brilliant as a bluebird’s wing were shadowed with more than physical hurt. Her gaze cleared, settling on his frowning features. As she remembered the night and the clock, deducing where she was, she checked a sharply drawn breath. Agony as sharp as the first crushed her ribs and spine in its vise.
Jackson watched her pallor grow more ghostly, and under his breath he cursed a man called Todd for sins he couldn’t name, and himself for his own folly. “You’re safe, Haley. And, because of you, so is Dancer.”
“Dancer.” The name fell from stiff lips as she remembered the stallion suffering the throes of madness. “He’s alive?”
“Thanks to you. He’ll need some time to recover, but eventually he should be good as new.”
“How? When?” Haley was discovering there was a gap in her memory. The last she remembered was taking her hand from Jackson’s and slipping into Dancer’s stall.
“You guessed right on the cause of his symptoms. He was on the edge of another siege when you got the needle in him. Whether it was the needle, the injection, or the cycle of the fits, Dancer sidestepped into you, pinning you against the stall wall.”
To Jackson’s disgust, by the time he’d recognized Haley’s intent, it was too late. Dancer had knocked her away as if she weighed nothing at all. She’d crumpled into a heap nearly beneath the horse’s flying hooves before Jackson could get to her. The time it took to tear open the stall door so that he could shield her was the longest of his life.
“You have a bad bruise.” Because he’d let her go. “And you’ll be sore awhile.” His fault, for calling her at all. “But Coop says you’ll be right as rain in a week or so.”
“Coop? Cooper.” She focused on the name, questioning and interpreting all at once. She heard nothing else Jackson said once she knew he was speaking of the dashing Davis Cooper, Belle Terre’s physician and bachelor extraordinaire. Her escort for the concert. A friend who, over dinner, had subtly made her aware that he’d like more than friendship from her.
Abruptly, in her rush to answer the call to River Trace, she’d left him with barely an explanation or a backward glance. Not the way to treat a kind and gallant man. A would-be lover.
Haley struggled to sit up, unaware that in her cautious efforts the broad shoulder of the shirt she wore slipped down her arm. “I should have called him. I should explain.” Not sure what Davis Cooper should know, or how she could begin to explain what she didn’t understand herself, she abandoned the muddled thought. “I need to apologize.”
“For what, Duchess?” Jackson zeroed in on the little of the ramble he could decipher. “For doing your job? And doing it too zealously and too well?”
An understatement and a far cry from what he’d expected of her. No matter that she was Lincoln’s associate, or that his brother would not choose a partner with lesser standards than he expected of himself. In his own stubborn mind-set Jackson knew he’d been unreasonable, believing only the worst of her.
“How I do my job isn’t the point.”
“Isn’t it?” A questioning eyebrow inched up. A typical Jackson Cade reaction, usually accompanied by a teasing smile. But at the moment, with his conscience in turmoil, the typical Jackson Cade was having trouble finding anything to smile about. “Do you really believe that?”
“Of course I do. My work, underdone or excessive, isn’t the point of the apology. Common courtesy is. Cooper behaved like a gentleman, the least I can be in return is considerate.”
Touché, Jackson thought, though he knew there was no intended barb in the remark. He suspected she’d tolerantly filed away the memory of his behavior in the barn as one more Cade foible. If she remembered at all. Suddenly Jackson wasn’t sure he liked being dismissed so easily. Even at his insufferable best.
Indifference. The passiveness of indifference was the last thing he expected from Haley Garrett. As she lay in his bed, with his shirt refusing to stay properly in place, he had no idea what he wanted. Or didn’t want…except indifference.
“You can pay your dues to protocol later,” he suggested after a pause in which his damnable shirt slipped another mesmerizing inch. “But…” He stopped, then continued his lecture. “I assure you an apology is neither due nor expected.
“Had the circumstances been reversed, don’t fool yourself into thinking Coop would hesitate about leaving you. In the middle of a concert, in the middle of dinner, in the middle of…” His teeth clenched, briefly halting the outpouring. “Never mind about that one. What I’m saying is, that if a patient needs him, Coop’s like a horse with blinders. Because he’s so single-minded himself, he’ll understand about last night.”
Haley couldn’t be so certain. “Maybe. If he knew the whole story, and how grave Dancer’s situation had become.”
“He knows, Haley. Coop was here last night.” With a careful touch, Jackson leaned her back against a stack of pillows and adjusted the shirt. More for his own comfort than Haley’s. He was perturbed by what a glimpse of the curve of her bare shoulder had done to him. This was hardly the time or place for lust.
In any time or place, he reminded himself, the Duchess was all he’d schooled himself to dislike in a woman.
“Cooper’s here? Now?”
With the repetition of Cooper’s name, something altered in her face, even the shade of her eyes seemed to change. Jackson wasn’t sure what it meant, and he discovered he didn’t like it.
“It’s morning.” The paling sky had turned from red-gray to ever-changing blue. Light fell through ancient panes joining the dim glow of a single lamp. “Time all good little surgeons were at their operating tables.”
“Morning?” She had forgotten the striking clock.
“It was morning before you finished in the barn. It’s only a little later now.” There were no roses in her cheeks, but like her perception, her color improved by the minute.
Turning her head carefully, Haley realized she was in a very masculine bedroom. Obviously Jackson’s bedroom, not a guest bedroom. “That means I’ve been here for the remainder of the night?”
“What there was left after Cooper examined you.”
“Cooper examined me?” As her mind cleared, she realized she sounded like a broken record. She laughed, and rued the impulse.
“Maybe you think Coop is deserving of an apology, but he would disagree. The way he sees it, he was an unchivalrous idiot to let you drive to River Trace alone. He arrived less than a minute after Dancer did his number on you.”
“His number? On me?” Her back felt more as if a steam-roller had flattened her, not a horse.
“He bucked, flinging you like a ball.”
“You got me out.” She didn’t remember, but it wasn’t a question. Jackson might dislike her, he might regard her veterinary skills and professional dedication as suspect, but he wouldn’t stand idly
