Love Story(65)
Author: Jennifer Echols

I handed him my napkin as a hint. “Were you in love with my mother?”

The half smile stayed in place on his lips. He and Hunter were both good at smiling through anything. But I saw his reaction in his eyes. He winced a little, crow’s-feet deepening and then relaxing in a split second.

“I didn’t have time,” he said, wiping his mouth.

“So it was lust,” I said.

He squinted at me. “Nnnnnn

Maybe. She was beautiful. She was also very funny. Like you. And your daddy didn’t treat her right. Like he doesn’t treat you right.”

It was my turn to wince. I hadn’t forgiven Hunter for dragging me down here on that pretense.

“That was a lot of it,” Tommy said. “She needed me. She said she needed me. The drive to rescue the damsel from the dragon is real strong, and real hard for a man to resist. That story never ends well, and I knew that going into it.”

I looked out over the track. We faced the back of the starting gate. Grooms were leading horses into it one by one. Our farm’s horse did not want to go. Nose inside, he braced his back feet outside the gate so they couldn’t close him in. Two of our grooms put their shoulders against his ass and pushed. I asked Tommy, “Why didn’t my grandmother fire you?”

Tommy watched the show at the gate, too, or seemed to. “Why didn’t she ship that filly off for dog food?”

“Because the filly meant no harm.” I recited what Tommy had explained to me when I was older and ready to listen.

The grooms managed to shove our horse inside the gate and snap the doors in place behind him before he could kick their heads off. They walked away mopping their brows with their sleeves as other grooms approached the gate with the next horse in the line-up.

“Honestly,” Tommy said, “I think she kept me on because of Hunter. She knew this was a good place for him. She’s always liked Hunter.”

“She sees herself in him,” I said. “They’re both manipulative and crazy like a fox.”

“There’s that,” he said flatly, staring out over the track, as if my grandmother and Hunter did not bother him at all. Or as if they bothered him very much. Both emotions looked the same on Tommy.

I asked, “When Hunter and I lived here, did you tell him to stay away from me?”

Tommy turned quickly toward me. By the time I looked over at him, surprise was gone from his face, but I’d seen that sudden movement.

He said carefully, “I did. Your grandmother would not have wanted to see the two of you together.”

“But you said she likes Hunter,” I pointed out. “She’s giving him her freaking farm.” At least, that’s what she thought.

Tommy nodded. “Hunter has brains like I’ve never seen. He’s smart, like his mother. He’ll do right by this farm, since you don’t want to. But it’s one thing if he gets your grandmother’s business. It’s something entirely different if he gets you. He’s not—”

Good enough is what Tommy didn’t say. The unspoken words hung in the air between us. I wondered whether he thought this was what my grandmother believed, or if he believed it himself.

“Why are you pushing Hunter and me together, then?” I asked in exasperation. “You sat there in the truck yesterday and asked us if we were hooking up.”

“I wasn’t pushing you together,” Tommy said calmly. “I was commenting on what I saw, which is that you’ve already been together. I could see it all over his face.” Tommy fished a toothpick out of his pocket and put it in his mouth.

“Really?” I asked, wishing it were true, hoping against all logic and good sense that Hunter had fallen for me and his dad had sensed this. “I’ve always found Hunter’s face unreadable.”

Tommy rolled the toothpick to one side of his mouth and talked around it. “He’s got my face.”

“Right,” I said as the starting bell clanged and the doors on the gate banged open.

15

Several hours later, Tommy and I unloaded a couple of horses at the farm, unhitched the trailer, and drove down the hill to his house. He headed right back out to a celebration with the other stable hands. My grandmother’s horse had won the last race at the Breeders’ Cup. Whenever she received a five-million-dollar purse, it was her custom to send a case of fine bourbon to the stable hands. You’re welcome.

I was done with being a stable hand, I decided, and I did not want any bourbon. My muscles ached to the point that I could feel the individual fibers scraping against each other every time I moved. All I wanted was for this horrible trip to be over. I stumbled into Hunter’s bedroom and tossed the bills Tommy had given me for my work onto the bed. They landed beside Hunter’s anatomy note cards, stacked neatly and secured with a rubber band.

I picked them up and turned them over curiously, as if I had never before seen such an exotic prize. He definitely had not left them for me to find for some reason. He might do that with his dorm room key or his wallet, but he would not play fast and loose with his homework. He must have stepped in to look for something—surely he’d left something he’d meant to take to college with him, even if I hadn’t—and he’d forgotten them.

He needed them back.

Slipping the stack into the pocket of my farm jacket, I shut the door of Tommy’s house behind me and trudged up the lane toward my grandmother’s house, taking care to stay in the long green grass, well off the road. Everybody coming to and from her party was driving drunk.

I slowed as I approached the mansion towering over me, three white stories pointing straight for a full moon in the starry sky. The driveway was full of expensive cars. I would be recognized even in my stable-boy clothes if I went through the front door, dragged from group to group of ecstatic old people, until I was forced in front of my grandmother. I waded through the cold grass around the house, across the patio, and tiptoed through the side door.

Hunter stood in the hallway, with both hands on a marble-topped eighteenth-century console table, taking a hard look at himself in the enormous mirror. I stopped. I knew he hadn’t heard me come in because he hadn’t moved. I could present him with the note cards and then

I wasn’t sure what.

I didn’t dare. He stared at himself, leaning forward as if inordinately concerned with the dark circles under his eyes.

But he stayed that way for so long that I finally took a few steps toward him. I passed the back entrance to the kitchen, which leaked dance music from the live band in the ballroom, and kept walking until I saw him from a new angle.

His eyes were closed. He was not staring at himself. He was steeling himself, and as I watched he took a final deep breath and pushed off from the console.

I skittered into the kitchen before he saw me. I walked backward until I bumped against the island—ouch, granite countertop gouging my barely healed skin—and spun around at a clinking behind me. A dark-haired figure straightened with his hands around a bowl of potato salad. Whitfield Farrell was going through my grandmother’s refrigerator like he lived here.