Love Story (18 page)

I asked, “When Hunter and I lived here, did you tell him to stay away from me?”

Tommy turned quickly toward me. By the time I looked over at him, surprise was gone from his face, but I’d seen that sudden movement.

He said carefully, “I did. Your grandmother would not have wanted to see the two of you together.”

“But you said she likes Hunter,” I pointed out. “She’s giving him her freaking farm.” At least, that’s what she thought.

Tommy nodded. “Hunter has brains like I’ve never seen. He’s smart, like his mother. He’ll do right by this farm, since you don’t want to. But it’s one thing if he gets your grandmother’s business. It’s something entirely different if he gets you. He’s not—”

Good enough
is what Tommy didn’t say. The unspoken words hung in the air between us. I wondered whether he thought this was what my grandmother believed, or if he believed it himself.

“Why are you pushing Hunter and me together, then?” I asked in exasperation. “You sat there in the truck yesterday and asked us if we were hooking up.”

“I wasn’t pushing you together,” Tommy said calmly. “I was commenting on what I saw, which is that you’ve already been together. I could see it all over his face.” Tommy fished a toothpick out of his pocket and put it in his mouth.

“Really?” I asked, wishing it were true, hoping against all logic and good sense that Hunter had fallen for me and his dad had sensed this. “I’ve always found Hunter’s face unreadable.”

Tommy rolled the toothpick to one side of his mouth and talked around it. “He’s got my face.”

“Right,” I said as the starting bell clanged and the doors on the gate banged open.

15

S
everal hours later, Tommy and I unloaded a couple of horses at the farm, unhitched the trailer, and drove down the hill to his house. He headed right back out to a celebration with the other stable hands. My grandmother’s horse had won the last race at the Breeders’ Cup. Whenever she received a five-million-dollar purse, it was her custom to send a case of fine bourbon to the stable hands. You’re welcome.

I was done with being a stable hand, I decided, and I did not want any bourbon. My muscles ached to the point that I could feel the individual fibers scraping against each other every time I moved. All I wanted was for this horrible trip to be over. I stumbled into Hunter’s bedroom and tossed the bills Tommy had given me for my work onto the bed. They landed beside Hunter’s anatomy note cards, stacked neatly and secured with a rubber band.

I picked them up and turned them over curiously, as if I had never before seen such an exotic prize. He definitely had not left them for me to find for some reason. He might do that with his dorm room key or his wallet, but he would not play fast and loose with his homework. He must have stepped in to look for something—surely he’d left something he’d meant to take to college with him, even if I hadn’t—and he’d forgotten them.

He needed them back.

Slipping the stack into the pocket of my farm jacket, I shut the door of Tommy’s house behind me and trudged up the lane toward my grandmother’s house, taking care to stay in the long green grass, well off the road. Everybody coming to and from her party was driving drunk.

I slowed as I approached the mansion towering over me, three white stories pointing straight for a full moon in the starry sky. The driveway was full of expensive cars. I would be recognized even in my stable-boy clothes if I went through the front door, dragged from group to group of ecstatic old people, until I was forced in front of my grandmother. I waded through the cold grass around the house, across the patio, and tiptoed through the side door.

Hunter stood in the hallway, with both hands on a marble-topped eighteenth-century console table, taking a hard look at himself in the enormous mirror. I stopped. I knew he hadn’t heard me come in because he hadn’t moved. I could present him with the note cards and then … I wasn’t sure what.

I didn’t dare. He stared at himself, leaning forward as if inordinately concerned with the dark circles under his eyes.

But he stayed that way for so long that I finally took a few steps toward him. I passed the back entrance to the kitchen, which leaked dance music from the live band in the ballroom, and kept walking until I saw him from a new angle.

His eyes were closed. He was not staring at himself. He was steeling himself, and as I watched he took a final deep breath and pushed off from the console.

I skittered into the kitchen before he saw me. I walked backward until I bumped against the island—ouch, granite countertop gouging my barely healed skin—and spun around at a clinking behind me. A dark-haired figure straightened with his hands around a bowl of potato salad. Whitfield Farrell was going through my grandmother’s refrigerator like he lived here.

“Erin!” he exclaimed. “Guess what I heard.”

Whitfield and I had not parted on good terms. The last time I’d seen him was the Derby party, when Hunter had told him to get his hands off my ass—the inspiration for my unfortunate stable-boy story. But if Whitfield had been sober, we would have pretended to forget all about that. For the sake of our families getting along and doing business, we would have embraced, backed off, and conversed politely, as we’d both been trained.

Whitfield was not sober. “I heard that you told your grandmother you didn’t want her fucking farm,” he slurred. “You ran off to New York City”—
ran
was a jerk of the potato salad bowl hard enough to send the plastic wrap flying off the top and sailing down to the granite top of the island—“and she gave her farm to Hunter Allen.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“And …” He held up his finger for silence, nearly dropping the bowl.

I rushed around the island and caught the bowl before it dropped, then set it on the counter.

This was a mistake, because now I was only a foot from Whitfield. He took off my cap and tossed it to the high ceiling. It rang a huge pot hanging from the rack over the island. “I heard you were playing stable hand today. I don’t understand you at all.”

“You don’t have to. I’ll see you around, okay?” I had thought I’d rather die than set foot in my grandmother’s party, but now the dance music and the crowded foyer leading to the front door were the lesser of the evils. I took a step in that direction.

He stopped me with a hand on my bruised hip. “Why are you making it so hard on yourself? Look at me.”

I should have pulled away from him. He would have been right on my heels as I entered the foyer, but then I could have escaped him in the jovial drunken crowd.

His tone and his words stopped me. “Look at me.” He spoke tenderly, the way I’d longed to be spoken to by a hero with an important message just for me.

I looked up into his eyes, which were green like the winter grass. I had talked closely with him a hundred times before. I’d never noticed what color his eyes were. And as my life veered closer and closer to the story I’d just turned in for Gabe’s class, I made a mental note of this detail to add to my story when I revised it for my end-of-semester portfolio.

“You don’t have to make it so hard on yourself,” Whitfield crooned. “It’s not a crime to inherit millions of dollars.”

“I don’t think it’s a crime,” I protested. “I just—”

He nodded. “Want to live your life without being told what to do.” His face inched closer to mine, and my urge to back away dissolved as I watched his lips. He understood exactly where I was coming from. Hunter did not.

“Just do what they tell you, Erin,” Whitfield whispered. “You’ll have the last laugh in the end because you will be the millionaire, and they will be dead.”

“Whitfield,” Hunter called sharply from the doorway to the back hall. “Get your hands off her.”

I tried to step away from Whitfield, but his fingers dug into my bruise.

Whitfield shook his head at Hunter. “Just because you say it doesn’t mean people are going to do it, Allen. You may have a hold on the old bitch, but nobody will ever forget where you came from.”

“You know what?” I interjected, trying again to pull away as Whitfield held me firmly where it hurt. “I’m just going to—”

“We talked about this last May,” Hunter boomed. “Get your hands off her or I will knock your teeth in.”

Whitfield gaped at Hunter.

I held my breath.

Hunter took a step forward.

“Okay!” Whitfield exclaimed, holding up his hands. “I don’t want you to cause a scene at
your
house, Hunter.” He turned to me. “Remember what I said.”

Hunter took another step toward him.

Eyeing Hunter, Whitfield grabbed the bowl of potato salad and escaped through the doorway to the foyer.

“Well!” I exclaimed. “That was tense.”

Hunter watched me, brows down, blue eyes dark. “I’m not cut out for this.” He rounded the island, sidestepped me, and followed Whitfield into the foyer. At first I thought he would try to catch Whitfield, but then above the crowd I saw the massive front door open and close, and I knew Hunter had left.

I pushed through the party after him. Old people stopped me and hugged me and told the roaming waiters to bring me drinks and asked me if it was true my grandmother was grooming Tommy Allen’s son to take over the farm instead of me. These were exactly the conversations that I’d dreaded, that I’d braved in coming back here to see my father.

My heart raced at the idea that Hunter was walking away from me. If my grandmother caught me here, she would insist on having a long discussion with me. By the time I got away, Hunter would be gone. I couldn’t let him go—not when he’d played hero to my damsel in distress for a second time. Not again.

Finally I extricated myself from the party and dragged open the front door. Outside in the cold moonlight, the green grass shone in long waves, but no tall blond boy waded through it or trudged along the lane. He really was gone.

Then I heard shouts and man laughter way over at the stables. My grandmother had sent the stable hands bourbon. They would be playing basketball.

Sure enough, I rounded the stone corner of the stable, out of breath and sick with worry, just in time to see Hunter, stripped to the waist, wearing only the khakis and lace-up shoes from his horse-farm-heir uniform, sail through the air in a perfect layup. His white skin gleamed spookily in the strange light. He was breaking a sweat already in the cold air, and the scar on his side stood out like a marker from some ancient magic. He dunked the ball through the netless hoop and landed flat on his feet on the asphalt parking lot.

Half the men moaned a triumphant “Oooooh!” and the other half a defeated “Aaaaaw.” Then another shirtless man pointed in my direction. “Erin!” The game stopped as I slid onto a white wooden bench against the stone wall. Several more stable hands called out to me.

“Good work today, Erin!” Tommy shouted above them. Drunk now, he was a lot happier with the job I’d done than he had been sober. “As good work as Hunter ever did, and she doesn’t complain like Hunter.”

Several of the men shoved Hunter in different directions. He didn’t seem to mind. He grinned at me, looking—proud, dared I say?

“You want to play with us, Erin?” another man asked. I don’t think he meant anything by it, but the others read innuendo into it and groaned.

“I haven’t had nearly enough bourbon for that,” I called back. “I’ll just sit here and watch, and I’ll call 911 when someone tears an ACL.”

Most of them turned away, resuming their positions for the game. Only Hunter continued to stare at me with his blond head cocked to one side, bare muscular chest shining, basketball on his hip. He sounded genuinely puzzled as he said, “You don’t have a phone.”

I opened my hands and shrugged. I recognized this uncharacteristically slow-on-the-uptake Hunter from our conversation in the coffee shop two months before. He was drunk.

“Ball!” the other men called. Hunter turned and tossed the ball into the crowd.

The game began again. I watched the men dodge each other, throw over each other, lose their balance and stumble drunkenly out of the area of play, then jog back again. I watched Hunter’s muscles work underneath his skin, his body retaining surprising grace even though bourbon had slowed his brain. Sweat darkened the blond hair at his temples. He grew hotter as I got colder, shrinking in my Blackwell Farms jacket on the hard wooden bench.

When two men leaped for the ball at once and tumbled in a tangle on the asphalt, Tommy shouted, “We gotta call this. Come inside. Next round’s on me.” The bare-chested men slapped each other high-fives and moved through a doorway golden with light, into the stable office.

Only Hunter stayed behind. He tugged his shirt out of a nearby tree. As he buttoned it he said, “Hullo, Miss O’Carey.”

“Hullo, David.” I tried to keep my voice from shaking with cold and anticipation.

He pulled his cashmere sweater over his head. “Did you remember to bring me the anatomy note cards I hadn’t forgotten?”

So he’d left the note cards in his bedroom on purpose after all, to give me an excuse to find him at the party. With tingling fingers I reached into my jacket and handed him the cards. He pocketed them, a sly grin pulling at one corner of his mouth.

“What’s with the British accent?” I asked. “They wouldn’t have talked like that in America by 1875. They might have had a lingering Scotch-Irish inflection because so many of them were recent immigrants and they didn’t have television to flatten the brogue.”

He stared at me. In my usual wonky way, I’d blathered too much information. He had started the conversation from “Almost a Lady.” I wasn’t sure what he meant by this, but I was excited about finding out. So I began the conversation again. “Hullo, David. Would you like to walk behind the stables?”

“I would soil my slippers,” he said, “and the maid would notice in the morning.”

He was reciting my story, but he was also rejecting me. I stood and pasted a smile on my face to show him it was all in fun. “Okeydoke. Tommy said he can’t take us to the airport tomorrow because he’s leaving for Churchill Downs too early, but one of the other guys will take us. I’ll see you in the—”

Before I could take a step away, he reached out and grabbed my elbow. “I was making a joke.”

“About our positions being switched, with you owning the farm and me working as a stable boy? You’re hilarious. You know what you should do with that kind of talent? You should go to college in New York and study creative writing.”

He laughed too heartily at this, tugging at my elbow. “Come on.”

I tried to slow my breathing. It formed white clouds in the frigid air, and Hunter could see how excited I was. “Where are we going?” I asked.

“Behind the stable!” he said in exasperation. He pulled me until I walked with him along the stone wall and past the last corner. As we turned and kicked through the gravel against the back wall, he stated the obvious. “I have never been this drunk in my life.”

I chuckled. “It’s part of the job description.”

His eyes widened. “It is! It really is. And it’s not the volume so much as the longevity. I think I had my first mint julep at ten o’clock this morning.”

He slid onto the lone bench against the back wall of the stable, where potential buyers could watch horses trot around the paddock. I sat next to him, but not too close, still unsure about what we were doing here. Beyond the paddock fence, the green hills rolled and rolled under the stars, gently descending to the tree line. We sat there in the silence and the cold for a few moments. I tried to memorize this: vast farm below, the depthless sky above, and Hunter beside me. Not touching me. Just there for me.

He broke the silence with a sigh. “This is so crazy.
You
should be schmoozing your way through blue-blood Kentucky, not me.”