AllFreeNovel
Share Us
With a grimace she turned her attention back to the check book and finished paying the month-end bills. She wasn’t exactly strapped for money, but each month her assets seemed to diminish. There was still a large, outstanding mortgage against the property, and several major repairs to the barns couldn’t be neglected much longer.
If she regretted anything, it was allowing Ellery to build the expensive house. “You can’t be a horse breeder unless you look the part,” he had said with the confidence of one who understands the subtleties in life. “No one will bring their mares here if we don’tlooklike we know what we’re doing.”
“It’s not the house that counts, it’s the quality of the stallions and the care of the horses,” Tiffany had argued uselessly. In the end, Ellery had gotten his way. After all, it had only taken a quick signature at the bank—his signature—to get the loan to rebuild the house into a grand, Southern manor.
“This is California, not Kentucky,” she had reminded him. “No one cares about this sort of thing.” But her protests had fallen on deaf ears and Ellery had taken up wearing suits with patches on the sleeves and smoking a pipe filled with blended tobaccos.
The house was finished only six months before the accident. Since that time she had lived in it alone. It was beautiful and grand and mortgaged to the hilt. Ellery hadn’t seen fit to purchase mortgage insurance at the time he took out the loan. “Money down the drain,” he had commented with a knowing smile.
“I must have been out of my mind to have listened to him,” Tiffany thought aloud as she pushed the ledgers aside and stood. How many years had she blindly trusted him, all because he had saved her life? She shuddered when she remembered the time she had seen Ellery, his face contorted in fear, as he dived in front of the oncoming car and pushed her out of its path.
Maybe it had been gratitude rather than love that she had felt for him, but nonetheless they had been married and she had depended upon him. Andnow there was a chance that he was still alive.The thought made her heart race unevenly.
After grabbing her jacket, she sank her teeth into her lower lip, walked outside and turned toward the broodmare barn. A chilly wind was blowing from the west and she had to hold her hair away from her face to keep it from whipping across her eyes. Mac was leaning over the railing of one of the stalls in the barn. His sharp eyes turned in her direction when she approached.
“I was just about to come up to the house,” he stated, a worried expression pinching his grizzled features.
“Something wrong?”
“No . . . but it looks like this lady here—” he cocked his head in the direction of the black mare restlessly pacing her stall “—is gonna foal tonight.”
Instead of the usual expectation Tiffany always felt at the prospect of new life, she now experienced dread. The mare in question, Ebony Wine, was carrying another of Moon Shadow’s foals.
“You’re sure?” she asked, surveying the mare’s wide girth.
“Aye. She’s a week overdue as it is, and look.” He pointed a bony finger at the mare’s full udder. “She’s waxed over and beginning to drip.”
“Has she starting sweating?”
“Not yet. It will be a while—sometime after midnight unless I miss my guess.”
“But everything else looks normal?” Tiffany asked, her knowing gaze studying the restless horse.
“So far.”
“Let me know when the time comes,” Tiffany ordered, patting the mare fondly.
“You’re not going to wait up again?”
“Of course I am.”
Mac took off his hat and dangled it from his fingers as he leaned on the railing of the stall. “There’s nothing you can do, you know. What will be, will be.”
“You can’t talk me out of this. I’ll give Vance a call and ask him to come over.” She took one last glance at the heavy-bellied mare. “Come up to the house and get me if anything goes wrong, or if it looks like the foal will be early.”
Mac nodded curtly and placed his frumpy fedora back on his head. “You’re the boss,” he muttered, placing his hands in the back pockets of his trousers. “I’ll be in the tack room if ya need me.”
“Thanks, Mac.” Tiffany walked outside but didn’t return to the house. Instead, she let herself through a series of gates and walked through the gently sloping paddocks away from the main buildings.
When she neared the old barn, she halted and studied the graying structure. Once the barn had been integral to the farm, but the vacant building hadn’t been used for years. Ellery had insisted that the horses needed newer, more modern facilities, and rather than put money into modernizing the old barn, he had erected the new broodmare barn and foaling shed.
The weathered building with the sagging roof was little more than an eyesore, and Tiffany realized that she should have had it torn down years before. Its only function was to store excess hay and straw through the winter.
She walked toward the barn and ignored the fact that blackberry vines were beginning to ramble and cling to the east wall. The old door creaked on rusty rollers as she pushed it aside and walked into the musty interior.
It took a few minutes for her eyes to adjust to the dim light. How many years had it been since she had first seen Ellery? She had been standing near the stalls, making sure that the horses had fresh water when he had startled her.
Before that fateful day, she had seen him only from a distance. After all, she was only a trainer’s daughter. A nobody. Tiffany doubted that Ellery Rhodes realized that when he hired Edward Chappel, he took on Edward’s eighteen-year-old daughter, as well.
