If Wishes Were Horses. Carolyn McSparren

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СКАЧАТЬ great horses and riders.” Liz shook her head. “They adored him.”

      Vic sighed. “I wish I had Frank’s charm. We could use a few hundred-thousand-dollar sales right about now.”

      “Charm? Charm? He made Marine boot camp look like a first-class cruise to the Bahamas.”

      “We won. We made money. We had a full barn. We had happy customers and top-notch horses. That’s results.”

      “Results. Right.” Liz turned away, her chest heaving. She’d finally learned to pity Uncle Frank about the time she turned twenty. Before that. he’d terrified her. He couldn’t show affection, he couldn’t praise the people he cared about, not even Vic. Certainly not his gawky niece.

      Yet for all his grumpy bullying, Uncle Frank had taken her in after her mother’s sudden fatal heart attack and her father’s grief made living at home impossible for her. Frank had tried to love her, an eleven-year-old de facto orphan, in the only way he knew. He drove her to ride better, higher, stronger. And when she cried he seemed baffled. Memories of those sessions still made her hyperventilate. What would confrontation with Mike Whitten do to her breathing? She didn’t doubt for a minute that he could bully with the best if he thought it would work for him.

      The worst part was that despite his size and that lantern jaw, something about Whitten turned her on. He radiated confidence. He was in great shape. Probably played handball three times a week and had a personal trainer so he could impress the ladies on the tennis court at the racquet club. He wore no wedding ring, and Angie Womack had told her there was no Mrs. Whitten.

      She wondered why such an obvious catch was running around without a wife in tow. Little Miss Pat probably fed arsenic to possible queen consorts the minute Daddy showed any interest in them. The girl didn’t seem eager to share.

      The kid certainly had her father wrapped around her little finger. Pat held the key to the Edenvale contract, and if Vic said they had to get it to stay solvent, then Liz would do everything in her power to make that happen, even if she had to turn that kid into a centaur.

      It wasn’t that she didn’t like kids. She rode against kids every day in the hunter ring. But ValleyCrest had always catered to adult riders.

      As Uncle Frank’s exercise girl from the time she was old enough to sit a horse, Liz had been too busy after school to make friends her own age. She’d moved into the adult world when she was barely into her teens. She’d had crushes on the few teenaged boys who rode, but she’d been tall and so bony, and they’d always gravitated towards the cute little debutantes.

      So here she was at thirty-seven with nobody in her life except her aunt and the animals, and that was the way it was likely to remain. At least it was peaceful. The dogs and cats never yelled at her.

      She watched her aunt bending over the feed sacks, Vic’s youthful body lithe and strong. Liz often caught the longing in her aunt’s eyes when her niece swung into the saddle. Please God, Liz prayed. Let me never lose my nerve the way she did, never cringe at the thought of cantering down on a big fence. She knew it could happen to anyone, even someone as talented and fearless as Aunt Vic had been.

      Vic was a great manager, a great teacher, but Liz knew how deeply it must hurt never to sit in a saddle.

      All those years that Uncle Frank had tried to bully and cajole her out of her fear, Vic never fought back. Liz finally told him if he said one more word on that subject, she’d leave. Since by that time Frank Jamerson weighed over three hundred pounds, and had no one but Liz to ride his horses, he’d tried hard to watch his mouth from that moment on.

      He never knew that after their fight Liz had walked out of the room and thrown up. Only Aunt Vic and Albert knew that angry words wounded Liz much more deeply than broken bones and concussions.

      Now Liz was faced with Mike Whitten and his whiny kid, and probably a bunch of other equally bratty kids with bullying mothers and fathers.

      She walked up the front steps to her cottage, opened the door to the screen porch, made her way across into the cluttered living room and felt her sweat freeze in the air-conditioning as suddenly as though someone had thrown a bucket of ice water on her.

      “What a jerk!” A raucous voice spoke from the shadowy corner.

      “Am not.” Liz said.

      Jacko, her small gray parrot, hung upside down from the perch in his large wicker cage and regarded her over his shoulder with beady eyes.

      “What a jerk?” he wheedled.

      Liz laughed. “I wish you’d learn to say something else, anything else. How about ‘I want my dinner.’” She reached for the parrot seed on the window ledge behind the African violets.

      “What a jerk!” The parrot bounced up and down in ecstasy.

      “Keep that up and I’ll bake you into parrot potpie.”

      “What a jerk.” The parrot sighed and stuck his beak into the seeds.

      “You’re probably right.” Liz sank into the shabby sofa. It definitely needed new springs and new upholstery. She closed her eyes. Unbidden, Mike Whitten’s face loomed up behind her eyelids. She blinked. “Oh, hell,” she said. “That’s just what I need.” She pointed to the parrot. “And you, not one word. You got that?”

      “What a jerk,” the parrot replied. This time he sounded as though he meant it.

      CHAPTER THREE

      THE VAN FROM Edenvale School arrived fifteen minutes late on a cloudless Monday morning. By nine-fifteen the temperature already hovered around eighty-five, but a steady breeze kept the humidity down.

      Liz had been up doing her chores since six. When she heard the van, she turned off the water hose and set it down, walked to the front door of the stable and watched as three girls and two boys tumbled out of the van.

      No Pat Whitten. Liz gave a sigh that was half relief, half disappointment. She wouldn’t be burdened with the kid, but she also wouldn’t see Mike Whitten. Why on earth she should want to was beyond her. The man was one step short of an ogre. That little Friday trip to his office to present him the syllabus for the camp had more than proved that.

      After making such a big deal about the blasted syllabus, Whitten kept them waiting fifteen minutes, then barely glanced at the sheaf of papers Vic handed him. He hadn’t been rude exactly. Just cool. No, dammit. Downright cold. She’d been certain he’d turn them down.

      But he hadn’t. He’d called late Friday afternoon to accept their terms without a quibble. Vic had set down the phone carefully, then turned a relieved face to Liz. “At least we can pay the feed bill,” she said.

      “Yeah, but can we stand what we have to do to get the money?” Liz answered.

      Today would definitely answer that question. Liz lounged against the open door to the stable. The kids formed a ragged line in front of her and eyed her warily. Only then did she introduce herself.

      A moment later Aunt Vic and Albert came out of the stable. Liz introduced them to the children and made her first stab at learning the campers’ names.

      They stared at Albert’s bulk with awe. The broad grin on his dark face made СКАЧАТЬ