He let go. But when he looked in her eyes, he knew. She’d known exactly the type of proposition he’d had in mind—and it’d infuriated her.
“My proposition was to treat all of your injured horses, not just Dasher.” She was shorter than him but somehow she managed to look down her nose. “I recognize they’re under the care of Dr. Miller, but I can help them in a way he can’t, free of charge.”
He’d gone from being amused to feeling like a putz in two seconds flat. “How do you know I have more than one injured horse?”
“Track gossip says you have three, and that one of them is still undiagnosed despite spending a small fortune in vet fees.”
Holy—he’d have to talk to his staff about blabbing to perfect strangers.
“One of them had a fractured sesamoid. There’s not much you can do about that.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Why don’t you let me decide that?”
“When?”
“The sooner we start, the better.”
He should tell her no. He didn’t need her poking around in even more of his business. Lord, for all he knew, this might be a ploy. A way for her to get into his business. To find something she and her friends at CEASE could use against him and maybe other horse breeders.
“Look, I appreciate the offer, but I can’t exactly afford to pay you for experimental vet care. With Dasher out of commission it’s going to make it hard for ends to meet as it is.”
“I told you, there’s no need to pay me.” She crossed her arms in front of her. “I’ll do it all for free.”
Wow. She must really want to get the dirt on him.
Yet as he stared into her eyes, he didn’t think that was true. She didn’t look at him with malice in her eyes. Sure, she might still be irked over his whole “proposition” comment, but that wasn’t what this was about. She stared up at him earnestly, and he could tell she waited with bated breath for him to answer.
Free vet care.
He’d spent a small fortune on Summer, the bay filly he’d been hoping to race and then breed. They’d found nothing wrong. Doc Miller had suggested he haul the horse up to UC Davis for a full-body scan, something he had neither the time nor the money to do, and it’d been heart-wrenching to admit they couldn’t do anything else for her. He’d still breed her when she was old enough, but if he could discover what was wrong...
“Be here tomorrow around ten. I’ll pop in after morning workouts and show you what we’ve got.”
She hadn’t expected him to agree. He saw her golden-brown eyes widen for a moment.
But then she relaxed. “Okay, then,” she said with a glance toward the food she’d brought. “I’ll just pick that up tomorrow.”
“You’re leaving?”
“Dinner was great.”
She sidled toward the door.
He leaned back against the counter and asked a question that had been on his mind all afternoon. “Why?”
She paused. “Why, what?”
“Why are you doing this?”
She stood in his kitchen, her red hair so wild and untamed his fingers itched to grab a curl and tug it. The tips of it sparkled like the depths of a fire opal, the gold flecks matching the sparkle in her eyes.
“I want what’s best for your horses. All horses. So many ex-racehorses are tossed away, but if we could get yours better, send them on to second careers, it might help your bottom line and help me to prove there’s no need to kill a horse simply because it can’t race again. Plus, if something I do helps them, then it might help others, and maybe there’ll be one less horse sent to slaughter.”
Something in her eyes changed while she said the words. She no longer seemed nervous. She wasn’t peeking glances at his lips anymore, either. She faced him square on and he knew she’d remembered who he was then and, more important, what he did for a living. He doubted she’d ever let him get close to her again.
Too bad.
* * *
SHE HAD HERSELF firmly under control the next morning, or so she told herself. Still, her pulse raced as she pulled into the same parking spot as yesterday. It’d dawned another cool and crisp day, the kind of day that made horses frisky and the scent of fresh-cut grass hang in the air. The sun against the side of the white barn nearly blinded her. She took a deep breath as she emerged from her car, wondering where he was.
“In here,” she heard him call.
She headed toward the barn, and the moment she spotted him standing in the middle of the aisle, a friendly smile on his too-handsome face, she knew she’d been kidding herself.
Control. Bah.
“Welcome back,” he called.
His black brows lifted when he smiled, and the edges of his eyes crinkled, and it was such a damn friendly smile it made her teeth click and then jam together. Handsome, hunky, hazardous-to-her-health son of a gun.
“Bet your racehorse friends would keel over if they saw me here today.”
It was the only thing she could think to say, but it was true. She knew she wasn’t liked at the racetrack, and that was okay. As long as she saved horses’ lives, that was all that mattered.
“You’re probably right, but what they don’t know won’t hurt them.”
In other words, he didn’t want it known that she was helping him. The words shouldn’t surprise her or bother her, but they did. She tried to hide her disappointment by saying, “Wow. This is nice.”
Like the house on the hill, the stable was a showpiece. She’d been so distracted yesterday she hadn’t paid much attention, but today she’d noticed that while the outside might be nondescript—a simple whitewashed building with an A-frame roof—the inside was a different story. Old-fashioned open-box stalls stretched down both sides, the kind with three-quarter walls and swooping Regency-style grills atop them. The bars were made out of black iron, higher in the back than in the front, but the change in altitude was accomplished with an almost roller coaster–like curve—very swanky. The face of each stall had the same type of bars, one on the left side and one on the right, gently swooping toward each other and meeting in the middle at the stall door. It was as if she’d been transported back two hundred years—well, except for the rubber mats covering the barn aisle. They even had tack trunks—large wooden boxes that held bits and bridles and maybe even a saddle or two—in between the stalls, although they were covered in red vinyl, the crimson color matching the blankets and halters hanging from the stall fronts.
“Actually, more like amazing,” she amended.
“Yeah, my mom had pretty good taste.”
He’d just come from the track, and so he wore a red polo shirt with JJJ stitched across the left breast. She could smell the sweat and horses on him and it should have served as a reminder of what it was she was here to do. Instead she found herself simply inhaling the scent of him and then fighting the urge not to close her eyes.
Way to rein in those hormones!
Clearly fifteen hours away from him had done little to cool her jets.
“I like the old-fashioned look of the place,” she admitted.
He lifted his cowboy hat, then ran a hand through his ample hair, leaving indented rows where his fingers had touched. “Yeah, although my dad complained the entire time that everything was just fine the way it was.” Like a cloud covering the sun, a shadow formed in his eyes. “He never understood the need to show off.”
Unlike my mother.