Sun Kissed (17 page)

Why couldn’t the experts understand that nothing was ever as simple as they wanted to paint it? Marriage, for instance. Where in their theories did they allow for deep religious convictions that forbade divorce? Where in their theories did they explore habits and beliefs and behaviors and doctrines that had been drilled into a woman all her life? And where in their theories did they allow for the possibility that some women were simply too proud to quit or too humiliated to admit to the world that they’d made a stupid mistake?

In her case, all of those things had applied, with an additional dash of pure terror that Steve would follow through with his threat to take half of everything her father had worked and sweated all his life to give her. Yes, she’d remained in the marriage. In the beginning she’d honestly believed Steve’s need for other women was due to something lacking in her, and she’d tried exhaustively to please him. Cooking. Dressing up for him at night. Never contradicting him in front of others when he made a poor business decision.

She’d known he was an alcoholic. Right after he got a
ring on her finger and consummated their marriage, the booze had come out of the closet. Some evenings he would pick a fight with her just to have an excuse to storm from the house, and then he’d come back in the wee hours of the morning, reeking of whiskey and another woman, so drunk he could barely walk.

Toward the end, the physical abuse had begun. Just a light slap across her mouth when they argued. Just a push to set her off balance when he got mad. It hadn’t been serious at first. But then he had escalated, sometimes breaking dishes, sometimes dragging her up the stairs when he wanted sex and she was too furious or hurt by his constant infidelities to sleep with him. And finally the beatings.

Samantha lifted her face to the sky and let the breeze cool her hot cheeks as she remembered those times. She hadn’t remained in the marriage for very long after the violence began, but looking back, she realized now that even a day would have been too long. It had done something to her way deep inside, snuffed out something that had once been clear and bright. Innocence, she guessed. She’d gone into the marriage believing in love, marriage, commitment, and forever.

And why not? Her father had taught her by example to believe in all those things. To this day, nearly thirty years after her mother had died giving birth to her, he still never looked at another woman. He’d found his one true love—his sweet, precious Emily—and he’d told Samantha more than once that he could never settle for anything less. Her mother had been his everything, and if he looked for fifty years, he’d never find anyone else quite like her.

“Samantha?”

At the sound of her name, she gave a violent jerk.
Tucker.
The yard light shining behind her limned him in shimmering brightness, defining his sharply chiseled features with shadows and frosting his hair with silver. He stood at the opposite side of the rail gate, looking in at her. There were twelve outdoor holding areas. How on earth had he found her?

“You startled me.”

He nodded and folded his arms over the gate, one knee bent, his other leg stretched out behind him. “I’m sorry. I need to talk to you.”

“About?”

“Tabasco. Come morning, I’d like to take him to my clinic. I’ll be able to monitor his kidney and liver functions more closely there. I want to make arrangements with Isaiah before he leaves to come back with our trailer in the morning.”

“I have a trailer. I can transport him.”

“I’m sure you have a top-notch trailer, but ours is sort of special.”

From somewhere out in the stable yard, Isaiah hollered, “Tucker’s version of a horse ambulance! The only thing it lacks is a siren and lights.”

Tucker huffed and sighed. “Brothers. Don’t you love ’em? I’ve spent half my life pretending he isn’t related to me.”

Samantha giggled. The sound burst from her, as unexpected as it was inappropriate, but somehow it felt wonderfully good.

“You’re hearing me,” he said.

“Oh, yes, I’m hearing you
exactly
. It’s pretty awful, isn’t it, with the family resemblance to contend with?”

“Family resemblance?” Isaiah yelled something else that was indecipherable. Tucker grunted and swore under his breath. “Try having a twin. Then you’ve got
real
resemblance issues.”

In the darkness, a poor imitation of a siren’s wail rose toward the moon. Tucker listened for a moment and then shook his head. “Do you have a gun? I’ll put him out of his misery.”

She laughed again. “Only a shotgun for rattlesnakes. It’d be messy.”

“True.” He shifted his weight and threaded his fingers through his hair. “And if his conjoined-twin theory holds water, I’d probably be lost without him.”

Samantha could empathize with that sentiment, too. For all her grumping about Clint, she loved him dearly and wouldn’t know what to do without him in her life. She sighed softly, allowing some of her anger to slip away.

“So what’s the real story on the horse ambulance?” she asked.

“I just have our trailer set up to transport sick equines. Took the divider out, for one thing, to create one wide stall. Tabasco’s weak. If he goes down, there’s room for him to rest comfortably. I also installed hooks and clips so I can keep him on the IV.”

Samantha pushed erect. Her feet had gone numb, and needles pricked her heels as she walked toward him. “Sounds pretty high-tech to me. All right, sure, let’s use your trailer. That will be better for him.”

Tucker motioned the okay to Isaiah, and a moment later she heard a truck door slam closed, followed by the rumbling ignition of a diesel engine. Tucker drew open the gate for her; then they walked together back toward the arena. In the distance, she could hear Isaiah’s pickup going
thump-ka-chunk
, his headlights sending bobbing flashes of yellow light into the sky behind the buildings.

“Beautiful night, isn’t it?” Tucker said.

Samantha hadn’t really noticed. “Yes, gorgeous.”

He opened the personnel door and stood back for her to enter. After stepping in behind her, he said, “Blue is doing great. If he consumed the morphine around ten, like Jerome figures, I think he’s through the worst of it. He shouldn’t need any more naloxone.”

“It may have been more like eleven when he actually got the cob,” she informed him. “Jerome was working alone, there are a lot of horses, and Blue’s stall is at the back.”

Tucker fell into step beside her. “I still think he’s through the worst. Morphine wears off after four to six hours. He’s going to be fine now. If you’d like to grab some sleep, no worries. I’ll be here until Isaiah comes back with the trailer in a few hours.”

Samantha had no intention of leaving Tabasco, and de spite what Tucker said, she didn’t feel comfortable leaving Blue yet, either. “I’m fine. Raising horses, you get used to going without sleep.” She rubbed her palms dry on the legs of her jeans. “Tucker?”

He tipped his dark head to regard her. “Yes?”

“I’m sorry about the scene with my brother. I’m sure
it was as uncomfortable for you and Isaiah as it was for me.”

His blue eyes twinkled warmly down at her. “That was a scene? You should be around my family.”

She shook her head. “Oh, no. I have it on good authority that we Harrigans hold the all-time record for creating scenes.”

“Not true. Enter the Coulter clan. Six kids, five of us married, and of those five, most of them starting to have kids. My older brother, Zeke, married a singer and nightclub owner with two kids and a zany extended family whose sister, Valerie, once arrived at a family gathering wearing a handkerchief skirt over a thong with a rhinestone in her navel.” At Samantha’s amazed look, he lifted his hands. “Would I lie to you? Then there’s Jake, six-foot-four in his stocking feet, who married Molly, a plump, whiskey-haired munchkin who now controls the financial portfolios of practically everyone in the family and isn’t shy about critiquing our spending habits during family dinners. Normally that might only make for interesting conversation, except for the fact that she’s got this amazing talent for ferreting out secrets and exposing them over the crème brûlée, like the time Zeke’s wife, Natalie, paid almost a thousand dollars to have his name tattooed inside a heart on the left cheek of her butt, and the tattoo artist got the spelling wrong.”

Samantha gulped back a startled laugh. “You’re kidding.”

“Who’d kid about something like that? Zeke was so upset he wanted to sue. It cost him another thousand bucks to get the first letter removed and redone. And I
can’t forget my baby brother, Hank, whose wife has congenital cataracts and lattice dystrophy. She’s early on in her second pregnancy, which could make her go temporarily blind again, so Hank is constantly blending algae-green protein shakes for her to drink and killing everyone’s houseplants.”

She cocked her head. “Their houseplants?”

He nodded. “Carly pours the shakes in a flowerpot every time Hank turns his back, and he blends the shakes at all of our houses. Not that I blame her. They smell like putrid seaweed. But he’s convinced Carly’s corneas will remain healthy if only she’ll drink the stuff four times a day. When he catches her dumping a drink into a planter, the fight is on, and in my family, any upheaval draws in at least half the people present. Trust me, the Coulter clan’s familial altercations are far more entertaining than anything the Harrigans could come up with.”

Samantha momentarily wondered if he was stretching the truth to make her feel better, but then she decided the profiles were too outlandish to be fabricated on such short notice. Some of the tension eased from her shoulders.

“It sounds as if you have a very interesting family.”

“Interesting isn’t the word. You can’t imagine what it’s like when twelve to fourteen adults and X number of kids are all talking at once about how much it will cost to remove a D from my sister-in-law’s butt and replace it with a Z—or how pissed Zeke got when our mother, God bless her frugal soul, suggested they just leave the wrong man’s name on Natalie’s posterior because no one but Zeke would ever see it, anyway.”

“I concede,” Samantha said with a laugh. She took a deep breath and slowly released it. “Your family definitely has mine beat, hands down. But please accept my apology. It was rude of both Clint and me to quarrel in front of you.”

“Apology accepted. But I still maintain that you have nothing to apologize for. It’s been one hell of a night. Everyone’s tense. Tempers flare. It’s no big deal.”

Tucker continued to move back and forth between the two horses for the remainder of the night, keeping a close eye on both animals’ vital signs. Staying awake gave him plenty of time to mull over all that Clint Harrigan had told him about Samantha’s past. No wonder the lady was so reluctant to let down her guard. She’d been hurt—very badly hurt, and in the worst possible way—by her husband.

The knowledge made Tucker even more determined to save Tabasco. She’d suffered enough pain and disappointment in her young life. He didn’t want to see her endure anything more, especially not at Steve Fisher’s hands.

As the night deepened to black just before dawn, the ambient temperature inside the stalls grew chilly. Tucker was freezing and hadn’t thought to bring a coat. As he entered Tabasco’s stall for another listen to the horse’s heart and respiration, he chafed his arms through his shirtsleeves.

“Damn, there’s a bite in the air,” he said to Samantha.

She had draped Tabasco with a blanket, but she sat without cover on the straw, her slender shoulders pressed to the wall. In the yellow glow of the stall night-light, she
looked frighteningly pale and fragile, and he worried that staying up with the horses had exhausted her to the point of illness. She looked dazed, and when she met his gaze full-on, she had a hollowed-out appearance. Rosary beads were twined through the slender fingers of her right hand, yet another thing about her that was different from any other woman who’d ever interested him. Samantha Harrigan was devoutly religious.

Tucker had admired the lady’s courage from the first moment he’d seen her, standing toe-to-toe with a ham-fisted drunk twice her size. But now his respect for her deepened even more. Except for the silent tears he’d glimpsed on her colorless cheeks a few times over the course of the night, she hadn’t wept. Instead she’d worked tirelessly to make her horses more comfortable and had helped him in any way she possibly could. He’d lost track of how many times she’d cleaned Tabasco’s stall. Every time the young stallion urinated, which he was doing frequently because of all the fluids that were being pumped into him, she forked up the soiled straw and brought in fresh. When there was no task for her to perform, she sat and kept a constant vigil.

If love and prayer could perform miracles, and Tucker believed they could, Tabasco would beat all the odds and survive.

As the sky lightened to a steel blue streaked with rose, Tucker’s own exhaustion got the better of him, and he nodded off. He had no idea how long he dozed, only that the soft, choked sounds of muffled sobs jerked him awake. He blinked and brought his bleary vision into focus. Samantha stood with her arms wrapped around her
stallion’s neck, her face pressed against his mane. She was weeping as if her heart might break.

Tucker tried not to move or reveal in any other way that he was awake. Years ago, when his sister, Bethany, had been paralyzed in a barrel racing accident, he had wept just that way, and he understood her need to grieve in privacy. A lump rose in his throat as he watched her through lowered lashes. Her pain was so intense, he could almost feel it. He wanted to go to her—if only to press a comforting hand to her shoulder. But he instinctively knew she would reject any such overtures, just as he would in the same situation.