“You’ll make sure Chester wraps him tight?”
“I promise.”
“Liniment. The foul-smelling one…”
“The one they both hate. I know.”
“Arlington!” Garrett Sutherland’s voice cut through the chaos as he ran to his daughter.
A.J. was muttering incomprehensible syllables.
“Are you her husband?” a medic asked Devlin while they slid her into the back of an ambulance.
“I’m her father,” Garrett interjected. “I’m going with her.”
Devlin opened his mouth to argue but the man was already climbing inside. As they shut the doors, A.J. lifted up off the stretcher, calling Devlin’s name.
Before the doors shut, he shouted out to her, “I’ll meet you there.”
When the ambulance left, he felt as if his world had ended. Again.
As he was standing there, a flashbulb went off in his face. It was a galvanizing event. He went from frozen shock to raging anger in the split second it took for the brilliant light to fade. Lunging in fury, he grabbed the camera out of the man’s hands and threw it to the ground.
“Hey, you broke my—” the man said.
Devlin gripped the photographer’s shirt in his fists and hauled him up close. “When I find out which one of you bastards let that goddamn flash go off, I’m going to crack more than a lens.”
“Easy there, boy.” Chester’s calm voice reached him in the nick of time. “Let ’im go. C’mon, now.”
Devlin pushed the man away. “Get out of my sight.”
The photographer didn’t protest any further, just gathered up the pieces of the camera and disappeared in a hurry. The rest of the press backed off.
Devlin turned and looked at Chester, who was standing with the stallion. He was finding it hard to string sentences together. “How’re his legs?”
“He’s lame. Right front. But it’ll heal.”
“Good, I’m glad I didn’t lie to her.”
When Devlin didn’t move, Chester gripped his shoulder. “Boy, look at me.”
Devlin tried to.
“She needs you.”
“I know.”
“So go on now.”
“How will you get back with the stallion?”
“I’ll give them a ride.” Devlin and Chester turned in surprise at Peter Conrad’s voice. “And you can use our facilities to rehab the horse if you need to. Anything you want, we’ve got. It’s all yours.”
“That’s right kind,” Chester replied.
Devlin said, “The stallion should go there right after the vet looks at him. He’s going to need hydrotherapy first thing tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll call ahead and have a stall waiting. You know they’ve taken her to County, right?” Peter asked him. “You get on the highway heading south—”
“I know how to get there,” Devlin said.
Peter flushed. “Of course you do.”
In a fog, Devlin went to the trailer and drove ten miles to the hospital where he’d been taken the year before. Coming back to the scene of his operations and difficult recovery was too surreal for him to comprehend. He decided it had to be a nightmare. Life’s parallels just couldn’t be so cruel.
By the time he located A.J. in the Emergency Department, an orthopedist had taken X-rays and was making his report to her and her father. When Devlin walked into the room, the white coat stopped talking.
“Devlin!” A.J. exclaimed, holding out her hand. She was propped up on a bed, one arm lying on a pillow in her lap. He went to her.
The doctor continued. “What you had was a fracture that hadn’t healed properly. The pulling motion reactivated the break, which caused the pain you felt before you fell. Then you compounded the injury by landing on it. We’re going to put you in a cast but you should be good as new in about six weeks.”
A.J. groaned.
“I see you’re one of those horse types,” the doctor said casually as he scribbled notes in her medical record. “Don’t know how you rode with that arm at all. You must have been in some kind of pain. When did you first break it?”
A.J. looked up at Devlin and watched his face tighten. “I fell a couple of weeks ago.”
The doctor looked up in surprise. “You’ve been using that arm for how long?”
A.J. mumbled something, hoping to get him off the subject.
“You’re one tough lady.” He flipped the metal cover of her chart closed. The clapping noise was loud in the tension of the room. “I’ll be back with the plaster.”
“Arlington,” her father started as soon as the curtain closed, “how could you be so reckless?”
One look from her and he stopped talking. He’d been dismissed and he knew it.
Clearing his throat, he said, “Devlin, will you be able to give her a ride home?”
“Of course.”
The good-bye with her father was awkward and rushed because A.J. was anxious to be alone with Devlin. When she finally was, she reached out to him. The arms he put around her were stiff and she felt afraid.
“Sabbath is going to be fine,” he told her with a detached voice. “Chester was going to wrap him well and your stepbrother offered the use of the Sutherland facilities to rehab him. I told them to take him there.”
“Devlin?”
He didn’t meet her eyes. Terror settled cold and hard in her chest.
“Devlin, about my arm—”
The doctor and a nurse came back into the room.
An hour later, she left the hospital with a cast and a broken heart.
During the trip home, Devlin didn’t say a word to her. When they pulled up to the farmhouse, he led the way inside. It was dark and he turned on the lights one by one, moving around the rooms of his home like a ghost. She waited for him to stop moving, her heart pounding like she’d run a marathon.
“Devlin, I know you’re angry,” she said when he came out of the dining room.
“I’m not angry,” he said.
She searched his face for any sign of warmth. There was none.
“Devlin, I’m sorry I kept the injury from you.”
“I believe that.”
“My arm’s going to be fine. I’m okay. Sabbath’s going to heal. We can resume training here—”
“Not here.”
With the bald words, A.J. felt like she’d hit the ground again.
“What are you saying?”