Almost Home (7 page)

"What?" she asked warily.

"The thought that your father might be a complete
deadbeat. Then what will you do? Welcome him into your life with open arms or
pretend you haven't really found him, that in fact you weren't even looking? It
was just a misunderstanding, a mistake."

His words hit too close to home, to the fear that had
suddenly erupted inside of her. "It won't happen that way," she said
fiercely. "He'll be a good person. He'll be strong and smart and kind and
honorable. And he'll want to know me."

Zach looked at her for a long moment. "They
should have named you Pollyanna."

"My mother wouldn't have been with him if he wasn't
a nice man," she added, refusing to let any other doubt creep into her
head.

"A nice man," Zach echoed. "Well, I
hope he turns out to be what you want. Good night Kat." He tipped his head
to her. "Sweet dreams."

Sweet dreams? She had a feeling she'd just drifted
into the beginning of a nightmare.

Chapter
4

«
^
»

M
ary Jo Baker lay on her
back and stared at the
ceiling with a growing
sense of frustration and restlessness. She was forty-seven years old and
reasonably attractive. She dyed the gray out of her blond hair and remembered
to put on makeup. So how had she come to this point—wearing a long sleeve,
white cotton nightgown to bed and listening to her overweight, balding husband
snort and shake with every breath he took? Where was the romance? The passion?
The man she'd desperately wanted to marry all those years ago?

Gone—all gone.

She had to face facts. She was married to a no-good,
cheating, lying drunk. She couldn't believe he'd let his temper get so out of
control that he'd actually thrown his drink at some woman in the bar. J.T. had
told her it was an accident, but it didn't matter. She'd gotten three calls
from so-called friends before he'd even made it home, three embarrassing,
humiliating calls. It was getting more difficult to go into town and smile,
knowing that her longtime neighbors considered her an object of pity.

The shadowy moonlight danced across her ceiling,
teasing her, taunting her. She hadn't been free to dance or sing or howl at the
moon in decades. No, she was trapped in this bed, in this room, in this
marriage, as surely as if her hands were tied to the bedpost. And she'd been a
willing prisoner, looking the other way for more years than she could count.

With a sigh, she tried to remember J.T. the way he'd
once been. She'd met him when he was going to college in
Lexington
. One of his friends worked as an
exercise rider at their farm on the weekends, and J.T. started to come along
with him. He soon became a regular visitor and a family favorite. Even her
father, William Pederson, had become a fan of J.T.'s, attracted to the younger
man's business acumen, his drive, his ambition. Her father had always wanted a
son, and in J.T. he'd found the next best thing.

No one had anticipated how time could change a man.
Over the years, J.T. had turned into a man Mary Jo barely recognized. Not all
of it was J.T.'s fault. They'd spent a great deal of their marriage trying to
have a baby. Fifteen years of fertility testing and sex on schedule had taken
their toll, and J.T. absolutely refused to raise a child not of his blood.

She told herself it was too late to change the bed she'd
made, but deep down in her heart she knew she'd have to change something. It
was one thing to give up on love and sex. It was another to lose her
self-respect and the respect of her friends.

Not to mention that J.T. was running her family business
into the ground. How could she go on turning a blind eye? She was the last of
the Pedersons, the only one who could stop the disintegration of the farm that
had been in her family for four generations.

John Thomas snorted and rolled over. He blinked open
one eye. "Did you say something?"

She hadn't, but now she intended to. "We can't go
on like this, J.T."

"Shit!"

"Don't swear at me."

"It's the middle of the night. Go to sleep."
He turned over so his back was to her. Mary Jo leaned over him. "You
can't keep getting drunk and losing control
like you did tonight."

"It was an accident.
Some woman got a little bourbon splashed on her clothes. Big deal. She was in
the wrong place at the wrong time."

"And so were you. You
didn't need to be at Golden's. And you didn't need to be mixing it up with Zach
Tyler."

"He's an asshole."

"You should talk,"
she said sharply. "I won't let you embarrass me like this. People are
talking about us."

He rolled over and glared
up at her. "I'll do whatever I damn well please."

"No, you won't."
It took a lot of courage for her to say the words, but she'd been practicing
them for weeks.

"What did you say?"

"I won't let you
humiliate me any further."

"Are you threatening
me?"

"I'm making you a
promise." She took a deep breath and dove in. "I still own fifty-one
percent of the business, and if you do one more thing to embarrass me, I'll
sell it to Zach Tyler."

His eyes widened. She'd
finally gotten his attention. "You wouldn't let your family farm go to
that bastard."

"Don't bet on it."

"Have you lost your mind?"

"No, I've found it. I'm not going to live the
rest of my life like this. I'm not going to go to my grave as a long-suffering
martyr."

"Oh, and you have it so bad, all the clothes
money can buy, a beautiful home, trips to wherever you want to go. I feel so
sorry for you."

She glared at him. "It's my family's farm that's
paid for most of those things. And this isn't about money. It's about us. If
there still is an us."

J.T. looked a little nervous now, his eyes wary. "Of
course there's an us. I had a little bit too much to drink. It won't happen
again."

"It's been happening all year. I'm not stupid, J.T.
No matter what you think about me otherwise, you better not think that."

His gaze dropped away. "I don't know what you're
talking about."

"Yes,
you
do."

Almost twenty-eight years
of marriage lay between them, but instead of the comfortable familiarity of old
lovers, they were separated by a huge wall of disillusionment, distrust, and
betrayal.

"Zach Tyler would
destroy you," J.T. said. "He's a snake in the grass."

"Well, at least he's
not in my bed, like you are." She slid out from under the sheets, grabbing
a blanket and a pillow. "If anyone is going to destroy me, it will be you.
Think about what I said, J.T., and remember—one more fight, one more affair,
one more humiliation, and I'll be on the phone to Zach Tyler faster than you
can spit."

"You're bluffing. You'd
never sell out half of your family farm to Zach Tyler."

"Try me."

* * *

"Let's
try him in the gate now," Zach said to the exercise boy who had breezed
Rogue around the training track at Stanton Farms. It was barely
6:00
A.M.
and the dirt track was soft and
moist, the heavy morning mist still clinging to the nearby trees, giving the
area an almost eerie appearance. Zach loved the early morning workouts. Here in
this mist-shrouded world, he felt like anything was possible.

The exercise boy walked Rogue over to the practice
gate where another man was waiting. Rogue should have been used to the gate by
now, but no matter how many times they practiced, he still got testy when the
gate closed behind him. And this morning was no exception.

"Get in, Rogue," Zach muttered as the horse
balked at entering the gate. "I'm going over there."

Sam Jamison put a hand on his arm. "He's got to
do it without you, just like he will at the track."

"He's a stubborn son of a bitch."

"Just like you, doesn't want to do what anybody
tells him to do," Sam said, chewing on a straw of grass as he leaned over
the rail. "Gotta have it his own way."

"If you have something to say, why don't you just
say
it,"
Zach replied, his gaze still focused on Rogue.
Thankfully, his big ugly baby finally went into the gate and came out of it
without a hitch. He motioned for the exercise rider to take Rogue once more around
the track at an easy pace. Then he turned to Sam, who was regarding him with
kindly, amused eyes. "What's stuck in your gut?" he asked.

"Rogue needs to be at Churchill. We should have
taken him straight there, instead of letting him think he could get comfortable
and lazy here at home."

"He likes being here, and we've got plenty of
time to get to Churchill."

"Rogue needs to get used to the barn there, the
atmosphere, the track."

"We've got two and a half weeks."

"Why are you stalling? Colin would like to see
Rogue there by this weekend at the latest, but he told me you're thinking the
following week."

Zach shrugged. "Rogue gets special attention
here, my attention and yours. I think it's better for him."

"You're babying him."

"I'm heating him carefully, that's all."
Zach walked along the rail as the exercise boy took Rogue off the track and
headed back toward the barns. There were a dozen more horses to be worked, but
he could leave those workouts to Sam.

He needed to get back to the barns where the early
morning chores were in full gear. It took several dozen employees to keep the
farm operating at its peak, and Zach was in charge of making sure none of those
employees screwed up.

While he would have liked spending all his time with
Rogue, he had a job to protect as well as a dream to chase, and Stanton Farms
was almost as important to him as Rogue.

Sam jogged along behind him, stopping now and then to
bark instructions at the exercise riders taking the other horses around the track.

"Wait up, Zach," Sam said as they reached
the first barn area.

"I've got things to do," Zach complained,
but still he stopped. He'd been following Sam's orders since he was sixteen
years old, and even though their positions were now on equal footing, he still
respected Sam enough to listen to whatever he had to say.

"I want you to think seriously about getting
Rogue to Churchill this weekend."

"It's too early. He'll get stale."

"What are you afraid of?"

Zach hated to admit that he was afraid of anything,
but he was. "Once Rogue gets to the track, everyone will be watching him,
clocking him, gossiping about him. You heard the talk at Keeneland. Without
that stumble at the gate, he would have won, and everyone knows it. They're
itching for another look at him. At Churchill there will be distractions and
new faces. I want Rogue quiet, rested, ready to go."

"Rogue knocked around the barn in
Florida
and you almost
had to scratch him. He stumbled at Keeneland because he didn't like the crowd
or the gate. He's fidgety away from home. He didn't get settled in at Keeneland
or at
Gulfstream
Park
. The only times he's won were the
times he got to the tracks early. Think about it."

Zach didn't have to think about it. He knew Sam was
right. He knew he was making excuses. Now that the
Derby
was so close, he was getting nervous,
thinking maybe he wasn't ready yet, maybe Rogue wasn't ready yet.

"You used to think your horse couldn't lose,"
Sam said. "Then you saw that it could happen. Now you're not so confident,
and neither is Rogue. That's why you're both skittish. The moment of truth is
about to arrive, and you're not sure you're ready."

Zach
sighed
and looked into Sam's wise old eyes. "How the hell do you read my mind?"

"Easy. I know you. I know how much you want to
win this race."