Paradise County (7 page)

Alex stopped walking and pursed her lips. He was the most obnoxious man she had ever dealt with. She didn’t like him, didn’t want any more to do with him, and had already derived a considerable degree of
pleasure from the thought that, when she walked out of here, she never had to set eyes on him again. Yet he had a point, and as angry as she was she wasn’t fool enough to ignore it.

Gritting her teeth, she pivoted to face him. “All right, Mr. Welch. I take it back. You have your thirty days’ notice again. But that’s all it is. Thirty days, which you are to use to divest Whistledown Farm of its horses. Is that clear?”

She held his gaze for a long, and what she hoped was an authoritative, moment.

His lips thinned, and she thought he was going to start arguing again. But instead he nodded once, curtly. Victory, Alex thought, especially if one disregarded the clenched fists at his sides and the rigidity of his stance. She did disregard them, turning her back on him again and stalking out of the office and across the barn, conscious that he was following her every step of the way.

“Bitch,” Joe muttered furiously under his breath, stopping at the barn door and scowling after Alexandra Haywood’s retreating form. His hands were clenched into fists at his sides and a pulse pounded like a kettledrum in his temples. Thirty days to dispose of twenty-two horses. Hell, he hated to part with even one, especially under conditions like these. But it didn’t seem like he had much choice. Much as he hated to acknowledge the truth, she had the right to order him to sell them if she wished.

After all, they were
her
horses.

“Bitch,” he said again, louder.

“Man, that woman is
fine.”
Tommy came up behind him, clapping a hand down on his shoulder, his voice admiring as he watched Alexandra Haywood’s shapely black leather-clad backside wiggle toward her car. Her sleek blond hair was a bright beacon against the overcast sky. “I wouldn’t mind having that as
my
boss. If you’re lucky, maybe she’ll chase you around your desk. ’Course, you wouldn’t catch me running.”

Joe ignored that. Wishing he could shut the woman’s edict out as easily as he could his view of her person, he moved, stepping forward and sliding the barn door closed with a rattle and a click. Then he turned, looking around his barn with a grim expression. Well over half his income had just walked out the door, taking with it nearly every dream he had been building on for the past eight years. He couldn’t quite seem to take it in.

His goal of building an internationally recognized racing stable had just been blown all to hell. And he had to deliver the coup de grâce himself by selling all the Whistledown horses. Within thirty days, yet. And merry Christmas to you, too, Miss Haywood, he thought grimly.

He would sooner open a vein.

“Holy hell, Joe, you look like a dog done mistook your leg for a tree! What’s up?”

Joe took a deep, hopefully calming breath. Blind rage never helped anyone do anything except have a heart attack. He and Tommy went way back: they’d been friends since they’d been in Miss Maureen’s kindergarten class together, and they knew each other well. Besides, there was no keeping this secret: news of what was going down would ricochet around Simpsonville and, indeed, the larger world of racing like a shot as soon as he started looking for potential buyers for his
—her—
horses. It was that kind of town. It was that kind of business. Everybody knew what was going on with everybody else, and there was no sense in fighting it.

“She fired me. Said she’s selling the farm. Ordered me to sell the horses. Within thirty days.” His voice was hard. Inside he was starting to ache. Suleimann, Toreador, Silver Wonder—God, he loved Silver Wonder! As one of the mares in foal to Storm Cat, she was worth approximately half a million dollars. He could never afford to buy her himself… .

Tommy’s eyes widened. “You’re shittin’ me, right?”

“I’m not shittin’ you, Tommy.”

“The bitch!” There was outrage in Tommy’s voice, and Joe took some small degree of comfort from hearing his own sentiments echoed so exactly. “That’s hard, man. Real hard.”

“Yeah.” Joe grimaced. Tommy looked at him awkwardly, clearly not knowing how to express his obvious sympathy.

“You know, Joe, I don’t like to question your dad’s judgment—the main reason being that when it comes to horses he’s usually right—but I don’t think that horse he talked you into—that Victory Dance—is worth anywhere near thirty thousand. Where’d you say he found him?” Ben came walking toward them shaking his balding head. Six-one and wiry, Ben had short, mud brown hair surrounding a rapidly enlarging chrome dome, and a perpetually worried look that his friends put down to a constant fear of losing his remaining hair.

“At a claiming race at Pimlico,” Joe said absently, already beginning to run through a mental Rolodex of possible buyers. If it had to be done, then he was going to do his damndest to do it right, because he wanted nothing but the best for all of his
—her—
horses. Getting them all placed properly, especially at this time of the year, was going to be a tough trick to pull out of his hat. Thanksgiving was just around the corner, and three weeks after that was Christmas. Horsemen got holiday fever just like the rest of the country.

Happy holidays to you too, Miss Haywood.

“Ben, man, Joe’s been fired. She’s selling Whistledown Farm. He’s gotta sell all of ’em. His horses.” Tommy spoke in a hushed voice, like he was announcing that Joe had terminal cancer or something.

“Don’t try to BS me, Tommy.” Ben was a friend from kindergarten days, too. They’d all known each other for so long that they were practically family. Which had its good points, and its bad.

“I ain’t BS’ing you. It’s God’s honest truth.”

“Yeah, Ben, it’s the truth,” Joe said wearily before Ben could ask him for confirmation, as he knew he was getting ready to do. Ben stopped walking and looked at Joe, concern plain on his face.

“What are you going to do?”

Joe shrugged. He was so angry he could chew nails, and hurting worse by the minute too, but he wasn’t going to show it any more than he could help. “They’re her horses. I guess if she says sell, I’m gonna sell.”

Ben was shaking his head. “Can she just waltz in here like that and
do
that? Don’t you have some kind of contract or something?”

Joe stared at Ben, arrested. In the face of Alexandra Haywood’s bombshell, he’d stopped thinking clearly, apparently. Every year he signed a piece of paper sent down by a lawyer of Charles Haywood’s. The first time he’d actually read it. It had last crossed his desk in September. The matter had become so routine that he had barely glanced at it before scribbling his name. But it was a contract engaging him to manage Whistledown Farm, and to act as private trainer for the Whistledown horses. A legal, binding contract that, if his memory served him correctly, ran through December of the following year.

“You know what? I do.”

The three regarded each other in silence for a moment.

“So go tell Attila the Hon the news.” Tommy grinned suddenly at his own joke. “Attila the Hon—H-O-N—get it? Kinda catchy, don’t you think?”

Joe’s answering smile was grim. “What I think is that I’m going to go have a little chat with Miss Haywood. Before she starts calling auction houses, or something.”

Six

B
y the time Alex parked the car in Whistledown’s driveway and got out, she was as down in the dumps as she had ever been. She had delivered so much bad news to so many people lately that she should have been used to it, but still it bothered her. Even when the recipient was as obnoxious as Joe Welch.

Unpleasant as her interview with him had been, at least it had the virtue of being over, she reminded herself. She had assumed the mantle of leadership that her father’s death had thrust upon her and done what she had to do. She should be proud of herself for handling a difficult situation—and a difficult man—with the requisite firmness. Her father would be, if he knew. But she didn’t feel proud. What she felt was—tired. So very, very tired. As if she could go to bed right now and lie down and sleep for days.

As if her burst of temper had leached away every remaining bit of her strength.

What Welch didn’t know was that she hated to part with Whistledown and its horses too. He’d been right: her father had loved both the farm and its animals, and if she could have she would have kept the farm going as a tribute to him. He’d looked forward to his regular
biannual visits as his favorite escape from the pressures of a high-stress life. He’d even jetted in on summer weekends occasionally, stealing time from whatever else he was doing to check on the progress of a favorite horse. Whistledown was one of the few purchases he had made simply for his own pleasure, with no thought of financial gain. But there was no help for it. The farm was an expensive luxury that they could no longer afford, and it had to go.

If she’d done as her lawyers had suggested and left Joe Welch to them she could have avoided today’s unpleasantness, she thought. The farm was a minor holding, after all. She could have just stayed at home in Philadelphia and concentrated on getting on with her life.

But she’d had to come. Insisting on visiting Whistledown Farm to give Joe Welch the bad news personally had been little more than a ploy to get herself here. She had ignored the advice of her friends, who had argued that the visit would be too painful, and turned down the escort of her lawyers by the simple technique of just saying no: they worked for her, after all. She had needed to come to Whistledown Farm, and she had needed to come alone. Badly. The façade of coping well that she had assumed since her father’s death was starting to crack, she feared. The truth was, she was not coping well at all. She felt empty, numb, frightened, betrayed. When the matter of disposing of Whistledown Farm had been broached to her she had experienced a fierce, urgent, totally irresistible need to come to the place that her father had loved so well; the place where he had died. She needed to see where it had happened, to absorb, if she could, some sense of how and why. Otherwise, she feared she was never, ever going to be able to come to terms with his death.

Her father—a suicide? It just didn’t seem possible: suicide was not in her father’s character as she knew it. Which begged the question: Just how well had she known him after all?

She had thought that she had known him very well indeed. Apparently she had been wrong.

Alex took a deep breath, filling her lungs with cold damp air as she climbed the steps to Whistledown’s front door. Dwelling on her loss did no good, she knew, and so she forced her thoughts in another direction.
Stopping as she reached the porch, she turned back to look out over the countryside. It was beautiful even on so unlovely a day. She could turn in any direction and see acre upon acre of rolling fields. A total of exactly two houses were visible—one distant roof, and, a mere two fields to the left, the white clapboard farmhouse in which Joe Welch and his family lived. Horses fastened into scarlet blankets—scarlet and white were the Whistledown colors—dotted the fields like roving wildflowers.

The house itself had been built of massive stones decades before the Civil War. Years ago, someone had modernized the kitchen, added bathrooms, and updated the plumbing and electricity, but otherwise the house was unchanged. The original stones had long since been painted white and embellished with a double front porch boasting six soaring Corinthian columns. It looked like something straight out of
Gone with the Wind.

The first time she’d visited had been just after her father had bought the place. She’d been fifteen, in the throes of dealing simultaneously with adolescent pudginess, rebelliousness, and a brand-new stepmother (number three, Alicia) who was a slim-as-a-reed, mean-as-a-snake former model. The family visit had lasted two interminable summertime weeks, and had included her father and her three-year-old half-sister, Neely.

By the next summer Alicia had been history, and the concept of a family visit anywhere had never been repeated.