The Taming Of Jackson Cade

Cade’s Irish Dancer was known in informed circles as a magnificent stallion, a most valuable stud. Or he had been.

Haley had never been afforded the coveted opportunity to study him in the flesh. But she’d read about him, poring over his photographs in breeder and veterinary journals. Yet if she hadn’t been told the exhausted creature cowering in the battered stall was the legendary horse, she wouldn’t have believed it.

His coat was soaked with sweat and matted. His head drooped, his tail hung dull and lifeless. Gone was the proud bearing of the much-sought-after stud that had once, no doubt, been as arrogant as his master. At a glance, he appeared to have lost a tremendous amount of weight. But given the short duration of his seizure, she knew it was likely severe dehydration.

Though it didn’t explain Jackson’s hostility toward her, Dancer’s condition was cause enough for his mood.

“Jackson,” she whispered, oblivious in her alarm that she called his given name. “How long has he been like this?”

“It began several hours ago.” He waited a pace behind her. “The onset was like this, first lethargy then a few minutes of erratic behavior. Dancer’s temperamental. It seemed like a fit of exceptionally bad humor at first. Then the madness started. We tried all we knew to calm him. Finally, both Jesse and I—and even all the hands—exhausted every avenue.”

“Tell me.” Haley’s racing mind searched for answers. “Tell me everything. Don’t leave out the smallest detail.”

It was Jackson who answered, which was only natural. Dancer was his horse, the greatest source of his livelihood. More than that, the stallion’s anguish was his anguish. When he finished explaining every treatment, she found he’d been thorough and practical. His mind quick, he was well organized and sensible. More reasons to be puzzled by his reaction to her.

Mulling over all he’d said, Haley nodded. Thinking hard as she studied the horse that was a pitiful remnant of the awesome creature he’d been, something nagged at her. Something Jesse had said, recalled briefly by Jackson’s explanation. But in the shock and duress it had slipped from her mind.

“But what?” Out of habit, with no sign of vanity, she absently tucked a slipping hairpin into place. “Jesse!”

“Yes, ma’am. Still here.”

“What was it you said?” Closing her eyes, as if blocking out her surroundings would bring the elusive thought within reach, she muttered, “Something about the other horses.”

“I don’t recall the order, but it was something about the other horses reacting to Dancer, and the hands taking them to pasture.” Sliding back his broad-brimmed hat, Jesse peered at her from the shadows cast by overhead lights. “Does that help?”

Haley took a closer look at the stall, hoping for the spark of the thought. The effort changed nothing. She was as confounded as Jesse or Jackson.

Jackson? When had she begun to think of the stiff-necked man as Jackson? she wondered. Especially since it was unlikely they would ever be on a first-name basis as she was with his brothers Adams and Jefferson, who didn’t avoid her.

Abandoning thoughts of the stubborn, arrogant Cade, returning to the elusive memory that teased at her mind, she admitted honestly, “Maybe it will help. Then again, maybe not. Perhaps the thought was too far-fetched to stick.”

“Jesse said one other thing.” Jackson came to stand by her, resting his arms on the stall door. In close proximity, mixed with the scent of hay and horse, Haley breathed in a pleasant woodsy fragrance that suited a man like Jackson. Except, what did she know of the kind of man he was? Or what would suit him?

In that rare moment, regret that he resented and disliked her so adamantly surfaced. In more amenable circumstances, she believed he would have been a gentleman, a man she could admire. One whose friendship she would value.

A pipe dream. It took two to make a friendship. Of all the emotions rampant between them, friendship was not one of them. Nor would it ever be. Unaware of her melancholy sigh, or that Jackson looked at her with something in his eyes that would have shocked her, focusing on the horse, Haley asked, “What was it?”

Jackson had lost the thread of concentration. Brows only a little darker than his auburn hair lifted in question. “‘It?’”

“Sorry.” This was her night for apologies. “I didn’t mean to speak in riddles. Just wondering aloud what else Jesse said.” She glanced at the cowhand, but he shrugged. Jesse had no answer or had delegated that responsibility to the younger man.

“What probably struck you as odd,” Jackson volunteered again, “was his comment that the other horses weren’t seeing what Dancer was imagining.”

“Imagining?” She looked into eyes bearing no shred of anger. “Jesse thought the horse was imagining something?” Before either man could respond, she questioned Jackson. “Did you?”

“At the time, I didn’t think of anything but preventing Dancer from hurting himself.” Unconsciously, he brushed a roughened finger over the start of a bruise. Tomorrow he would have a colorful cheek, maybe a shiner. “Now that I remember Jesse saying it, yes, Dancer acted as if he was hallucinating. Maybe having a sort of seizure, which is ridiculous.”

Hallucinations. Seizure. Induced by an exotic foreign substance? She’d seen it once before. The horse died, because the diagnosis had been made postmortem. If she was lucky… “Jesse, get me a syringe. Jackson, take my bag to a better light.”

When both had done as she’d asked—she was working so quickly and thinking so hard—she hadn’t realized she had given orders. Or that Jackson Cade had obeyed without question. When the syringe was prepared, she stopped to explain. “I think I’ve seen this before. If I’m right and I move quickly enough, we can save your Dancer. But you have to realize this is little more than a wild guess, a gamble. Luck of the draw, so to speak.

“If we had time for tests…”

“Which we don’t,” Jesse reminded her grimly.

In a regretful tone she warned, “If I’m wrong…”

“What you try could kill him.” Oddly, as if he would spare her the grief of the words, Jackson stated the inescapable truth.

“Yes,” she admitted, for there was no other answer.

“In this condition, he’ll die if you don’t try,” Jesse put in, but Haley and Jackson were concentrating so intently on each other, neither heard. Neither needed to hear, for they knew.

“Last ditch,” Jackson murmured.

“So it would seem. But Dancer’s strong…there’s a chance this could run its course before his heart gives out.”

“No,” he disagreed. “You didn’t see him. Even if the next seizure is lighter, he won’t survive it.”

“Then will you trust me? Will you take the risk that I’m right?” Haley knew she faced the challenge of her career. As she’d warned, anything she did from this point on would be sheer guesswork. But with every other avenue exhausted, guesswork was all they had. All there was time for before another onset of Dancer’s madness. Dancer’s deliberately induced madness.

Haley caught a startled breath. Deliberately induced? Certainty came out of nowhere. But every intuition shouted deliberate. The word resounded in her mind like an echoing bell.

She knew little of the operation at River Trace, still less of its stubborn and scornful proprietor. Stubborn and scornful with her, she amended, for she knew of his reputation as a laughing, flirting, kindhearted gentleman. Once, long ago, she’d known his gentleness. Times change, people change. Perhaps the young man who had been kind to a younger, obviously forgotten Haley Garrett, had changed. Perhaps he’d made enemies. Vicious enemies.

A concept she understood all too well. One not beyond the realm of possibility. After all, Jackson Cade had certainly done his best to make an enemy of her.

Dancer tossed his head, then staggered and whickered, a prelude to the screams that had brought her here. “Imagining,” she whispered in a troubled tone, more certain than ever that she was right. There was hope for the horse now, but little time.

Laying a hand on the stall door, she started to enter when a hard, calloused hand covering hers stopped her. “Don’t,” Jackson said. “Whatever this is, it comes in stages. At his worst, he’s too dangerous for you to take this risk. I’m sorry.”

True regret flickered over his craggy, attractive face, startling Haley. Before she could protest that this was her job and that this was neither the first nor the last time she would face a dangerous creature, his clasp tightened, his fingers circling the back of her hand and her palm.

“I shouldn’t have interrupted your evening, Duchess.” This time the name lacked the sting it had carried before. If this hadn’t been Jackson, if he hadn’t proven time and again he had little use for her as a vet or a person, it could have been a nickname. The sort a friend might bestow on a friend.

Friends? Mutely she scoffed at her choice of words. Of the things she and Jackson might become as a result of this night, she’d already decided friendship could never be one of them.

“But you did make the call. A call I’ve waited…” Haley stopped short, only then admitting it was true. She had waited for his call, for the day he would need her. A startling admission she would need to give greater thought…but later, when his blue gaze didn’t burn into hers, making anger and animosity meaningless.

Gathering scattered thoughts, she turned her attention to the cause of her journey. “I’m here for a purpose. Your horse needs attention. Now, Jackson, before it’s too late.”

“He’ll be dangerous. Too dangerous.”

“Because he’s a fighter, yes, he will,” Haley agreed. “But he’s only restless now. Whatever this is, it’s building. If I move quickly, hopefully I can find what I’m looking for. If I do and if my half-educated guess turns out to be lucky and right, what I’m trying might counteract it.”

“‘Educated guess’? ‘Luck’?” It wasn’t an admission he’d expected. He’d set his mind so strongly against her, he’d never considered what he should expect from her.

Pretending his touch and the softening of his demeanor didn’t incite emotions she wasn’t ready to deal with, Haley was determined to do the job she’d been summoned to do. Glancing at a clock visible beyond Jackson, she found this exchange that seemed to go on forever had, from beginning to now, spanned just nine minutes. Even that little time was too much. Too long.

Certain she was losing her window of opportunity, if there was one, she restated an inescapable truth. “You’ve never wanted me here. That you’ve called me tonight can only mean that you knew anything I might do was a last-ditch effort.

“Look at him, Jackson.” Because she’d seen beyond the stubborn arrogance, because she’d felt the pain he guarded so carefully, she called his name softly. Hardly aware of what she did, with her free hand she touched his shoulder in compassion. “Time’s running out, for Dancer and for me.”

“No.” Jackson couldn’t explain why he was resisting this. He’d called for her help. When all else had failed, Dancer’s survival rested, finally, in Haley Garrett’s hands. The hands of a duchess, despite the calluses and blunt nails.

Over the telephone, it was a matter of course to consider that she should do this. But when she stood before him, so tiny and yet so determined, he realized how impossible it was that she face a half ton of maddened horseflesh.

“You can’t. When I called, I didn’t realize…” His voice drifted into silence. His hand tightened over hers, his shoulders lifted, as he made a choice consigning Dancer to certain death. “I’m sorry, Duchess. I shouldn’t have interrupted the concert or your date with Daniel.”

“It wasn’t Daniel, and this is what I trained years to do. Why I relocated in Belle Terre and joined Lincoln’s practice.”

The exhausted stallion snuffled and took a stumbling step. Haley looked from Jackson to the horse and back. “Dancer isn’t the first crazed creature I’ve confronted in my life and in my work. He won’t be the last.”

“Let her go, Jackson.” Jesse spoke into the impasse. “I’ve seen your duchess in action. She can handle this and Dancer. Probably better than you or me.”

As Jesse distracted him, Haley moved beyond Jackson’s grasp. Syringe ready, she slipped through the stable door.

Two

Jackson Cade stood at the bedroom window. The bedroom he’d chosen as his when he’d bought the derelict farm the once-proud plantation had become. In debt up to his ears to the Bank of Belle Terre, he’d worked day and night, pouring his heart and his soul—and every spare penny—into the land.

When the effort seemed too much, his goal too impossible, it was this window and the view that kept him going. It was his measuring stick, the tally of his successes and his failures.

“How many times?” he wondered out loud. How many times had he stood here in dawn’s light, watching the changes a day brought to the land. The changes his labor wrought as he reclaimed first one pasture then another. Acre by grueling acre.

Even with Lincoln and Jefferson helping, progress had been slow. More times than he could remember, he’d wanted to give it up. To count River Trace as Jackson Cade’s folly. Then he would stand at this window at dawn. As his heart lifted with the sun, burdens seemed lighter, and impossible was only a word.

His first stud had been mediocre, not in keeping with the horse’s own bloodlines, but its colts had had a way of reverting to an excellence that had gone before. A gamble, but there had been those willing to take the chance for that rare, splendid colt.

With the stud fees he’d added a second stud and another pasture, and his name became a whisper in all the right circles. Jackson Cade and Cade horses became a coveted secret. Then Adams sold Cade Enterprises, insisting a share of the absurd sum go to his brothers. They became silent legal partners, having no idea they were partners, whom Adams credited with being as responsible for the ridiculously simple invention a competing company fancied.

When the dust of the family battle settled, there were funds earmarked to set Belle Reve, the floundering family plantation, aright, and to keep it that way. Millions were left to be divided between brothers. Adams would have it no other way.

Gus Cade’s sons, who had known nothing but hard work and penny-pinching times, were suddenly free of their beloved tyrant. And affluent into the bargain. But little had changed in their lives.

Adams stayed in the lowcountry and married Eden, the woman he’d loved forever. With her, he began rescuing the uninhabited and neglected houses of Belle Terre’s infamous Fancy Row. Bringing grace and dignity to derelicts that a century before, in an accepted practice, grandly sheltered mistresses and second families of wealthy Southern planters and businessmen.

Lincoln brought his veterinary office and equipment to state-of-the-art, bought a Jaguar, a pied-à-terre on a secluded street in Belle Terre and left the rest for Adams to invest.

And Jeffie?

Jackson smiled as the name tumbled into his thoughts. Who knew about Jeffie? He still hunted, still fished, still painted. He worked with the horses at Belle Reve and River Trace. And still had no idea the female population practically swooned at his feet.

A low laugh sounded in the pale darkness of Jackson’s bedroom as first light gleamed beyond the window. A laugh of pleasure in his youngest brother. For, if all the rest of their lives had changed little, Jefferson’s hadn’t changed at all.

“Nor mine, truly.” His life, his workload, his goals, were the same. Only River Trace had changed. Most of his own share of what he would always think of as Adams’s millions had been poured into the farm. First replacing a barn that had burned. Arson, but with no motive discovered, nor any suspect.

Except the Rabbs, a local family waging a one-sided feud. An old enmity, sparked by jealousy of the Cades’s misperceived wealth and anger over too many lost brawls. Jealousy and anger that turned to hate and danger and threatened tragedy.

With no proof and no more incidents, he’d filed his suspicions away. After the barn, he’d recouped and restored the last of the acres included in the original grant on which River Trace had been built. And, finally, the breeding stock. The studs, more and more costly studs.

Last came Cade’s Irish Dancer. The stallion on which he’d gambled his dreams and the financial future of River Trace.

“I almost lost it,” he muttered. “In a single night, I almost lost the dream.”

As if it had lifted out of the east pasture, the sun climbed slowly into the sky, casting light over fields of grain waiting to be harvested. Miles of white fences gleaming like rose-gold ribbons traversed and intersected the velvet green of rich, grassy pastures. Horses snuffling dew-beaded grass were sleek and sassy, and so beautiful it hurt to watch them.

Paradise. Yes, for Jackson, the land he surveyed from his bedroom window was no less than that. Paradise lost, but for a tiny slip of a woman. A brave, savvy, fool-hearted woman, a woman he’d been determined to dislike from his first glimpse of her.

He’d rejected her help time and again. Yet when he called, she came. He insulted her, she kept her cool. He acted the boor—keeping her dignity, she made him the fool.

When all he had lay on the brink of destruction, with perception, compassion and ill-advised courage, at great cost to herself she had cared for a maddened creature and saved the day.

“No.” He turned from the window to the bed where she slept, recovering from her near brush with death the previous night when a crazed Dancer had flung her violently against the wall of his stall. “She saved the night, my horse, and my home.” Crossing to the chair where he’d spent all but the last few minutes keeping watch, he settled down to wait for Haley Garrett to awake.

The grandfather clock in the foyer had boomed the hour five times since Jackson Cade had put Haley in his bed. Four of those times she hadn’t heard or stirred. On the fifth, she did.

Slowly, not quite awake, not quite asleep, her lashes fluttered but didn’t lift from her cheeks. As the clock fell silent, a frown crossed her face, then was gone.

Six o’clock. She was late. She should be worried, but couldn’t muster the energy. Not remembering the night, thinking only of the time, she stirred, beginning a languid stretch, and a sharp pain threatened to slice her in two.

“Oh-hh.” An unfinished breath stopped in her lungs. Lashes that had just begun to rise from her cheeks at last, fluttered down in an effort to seal away a world too bright and an agony too sharp. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t move, as muscles across her back and midriff held her in paralytic misery.

Denying the pain, she tried to move again, and her teeth clenched a second too late to bite back a groan. A sound that brought with it the fleeting stroke of a hand across her brow. One offering comfort, but she didn’t understand.

“No,” she whispered hoarsely, and turned away.

“Shh. Everything’s all right, thanks to you. You’re all right,” a voice assured.

Thanks to you. Thanks to you. She’d heard the routine before, trying to soothe what couldn’t be soothed, undo what couldn’t be undone, by planting a lie. God help her, she’d heard it all before and didn’t want to hear it again. Keeping her eyes closed tightly, weary of an old struggle, she whispered, “Don’t.”

Haley was too tired. The words hurt too much. “Just don’t.” In the darkness of her world she shuddered as the bed dipped beneath his weight. “Go away, Todd. Leave me alone.”

“Shh, shh. Easy,” A deep voice, not the obsequious wheedle she expected. “I’m not Todd, Duchess. I don’t think I’d like to be. But I won’t touch you if you don’t want me to.”

The voice she’d heard soothing a frighten, crazed horse. Soothing her as gently.

“Jackson?” Gold-tipped lashes lifted. As she risked the turn to face him, eyes once as brilliant as a bluebird’s wing were shadowed with more than physical hurt. Her gaze cleared, settling on his frowning features. As she remembered the night and the clock, deducing where she was, she checked a sharply drawn breath. Agony as sharp as the first crushed her ribs and spine in its vise.

Jackson watched her pallor grow more ghostly, and under his breath he cursed a man called Todd for sins he couldn’t name, and himself for his own folly. “You’re safe, Haley. And, because of you, so is Dancer.”

“Dancer.” The name fell from stiff lips as she remembered the stallion suffering the throes of madness. “He’s alive?”

“Thanks to you. He’ll need some time to recover, but eventually he should be good as new.”

“How? When?” Haley was discovering there was a gap in her memory. The last she remembered was taking her hand from Jackson’s and slipping into Dancer’s stall.

“You guessed right on the cause of his symptoms. He was on the edge of another siege when you got the needle in him. Whether it was the needle, the injection, or the cycle of the fits, Dancer sidestepped into you, pinning you against the stall wall.”

To Jackson’s disgust, by the time he’d recognized Haley’s intent, it was too late. Dancer had knocked her away as if she weighed nothing at all. She’d crumpled into a heap nearly beneath the horse’s flying hooves before Jackson could get to her. The time it took to tear open the stall door so that he could shield her was the longest of his life.

“You have a bad bruise.” Because he’d let her go. “And you’ll be sore awhile.” His fault, for calling her at all. “But Coop says you’ll be right as rain in a week or so.”

“Coop? Cooper.” She focused on the name, questioning and interpreting all at once. She heard nothing else Jackson said once she knew he was speaking of the dashing Davis Cooper, Belle Terre’s physician and bachelor extraordinaire. Her escort for the concert. A friend who, over dinner, had subtly made her aware that he’d like more than friendship from her.

Abruptly, in her rush to answer the call to River Trace, she’d left him with barely an explanation or a backward glance. Not the way to treat a kind and gallant man. A would-be lover.

Haley struggled to sit up, unaware that in her cautious efforts the broad shoulder of the shirt she wore slipped down her arm. “I should have called him. I should explain.” Not sure what Davis Cooper should know, or how she could begin to explain what she didn’t understand herself, she abandoned the muddled thought. “I need to apologize.”

“For what, Duchess?” Jackson zeroed in on the little of the ramble he could decipher. “For doing your job? And doing it too zealously and too well?”

An understatement and a far cry from what he’d expected of her. No matter that she was Lincoln’s associate, or that his brother would not choose a partner with lesser standards than he expected of himself. In his own stubborn mind-set Jackson knew he’d been unreasonable, believing only the worst of her.

“How I do my job isn’t the point.”

“Isn’t it?” A questioning eyebrow inched up. A typical Jackson Cade reaction, usually accompanied by a teasing smile. But at the moment, with his conscience in turmoil, the typical Jackson Cade was having trouble finding anything to smile about. “Do you really believe that?”

“Of course I do. My work, underdone or excessive, isn’t the point of the apology. Common courtesy is. Cooper behaved like a gentleman, the least I can be in return is considerate.”

Touché, Jackson thought, though he knew there was no intended barb in the remark. He suspected she’d tolerantly filed away the memory of his behavior in the barn as one more Cade foible. If she remembered at all. Suddenly Jackson wasn’t sure he liked being dismissed so easily. Even at his insufferable best.

Indifference. The passiveness of indifference was the last thing he expected from Haley Garrett. As she lay in his bed, with his shirt refusing to stay properly in place, he had no idea what he wanted. Or didn’t want…except indifference.