Abiding Love (7 page)

X
andra steered out of the Tabernacle’s lot and shifted uncomfortably in her seat. She was a little stiff from riding, but that didn’t account for the fact that her nerves were stretched to their limits or that a headache bloomed behind her eyes. No, those particular annoyances could be laid at the feet of Adam Boyer alone.

He disturbed her. Agitated her. Unnerved her. And just plain scared her silly. All for no reason. He was just the parent of a boy she was trying to help and the brother of a dear friend. There was no reason to fear him and none for her to see him except in passing. But his image still swam before her eyes.

What she needed to help her forget her problems was another ride on the amiable Fly Boy. It was a little cold today, but she’d willingly brave more than frigid temperatures to ride off this awful tension that had her in its grip.

Decisively, Xandra pulled over and called Beth on her cell phone. Not a minute later she accelerated back onto the road and headed toward Laurel Glen, excited about the day ahead. She was going to get her first lesson on how to care for her horse—when Jack found her one—and then she was going riding on God’s beautiful Sunday.

It took only minutes to get to Laurel Glen but during the drive she could feel her nerves loosen and her headache ease. When she turned off Indian Creek Road and passed under Laurel Glen’s landmark iron archway, she realized her headache was completely gone. As she tooled along the lengthy drive to the stables where she was to meet Beth and Jack, however, a worrisome thought struck her.

What if Adam and Mark decided today was a good day to take Jack Alton up on his offer of a riding lesson?

She longed to ask that very question when she met up with Beth and Jack, but she couldn’t. She shouldn’t be thinking about a student’s father on a bright Sunday morning. If she asked she’d risk giving away her inner turmoil and mistrust of Adam Boyer, and Beth would know.

Then Jack opened the stall door and her excitement renewed itself even if Adam and her confusion over him didn’t recede completely.

“Since you’re serious about horse ownership, I’ll feel a lot better with you learning a little care and feeding,” he said. “Horses look sturdy and indestructible but the truth is they’re pretty delicate creatures.
Beth mentioned that, while you’ve never cared for one, you did once own a horse.”

Xandra could only nod, remembering with a sharp pang that selling Rain had begun the whole nightmare with Michael, even if she hadn’t known then. After all this time the memory still hurt more than she would have thought. When would she be able to let it all go? Put it completely behind her?

“I—I sold him,” she finally forced herself to say, her voice reflecting some of her anguish. “We had our own stable when I was growing up, but my parents wouldn’t let us help with the horses. Mother said mucking stalls and currying our horses was unseemly.”

But then her emotions took over and a cold sweat suddenly gripped Xandra’s body; her thoughts sank into the mire of the past. Michael had objected even more strongly than her mother about her love of riding. It had taken over a year of knowing him for Xandra to learn how much more strongly. He’d thought a woman riding was improper, indecent.

She’d sold her beloved Rain at Michael’s insistence, just before they married. His reasons had sounded so logical: Rain’s age and the strain of the cross-country trip on the animal. Also, that there was nowhere to ride at the vineyard—a complete lie, she’d learned when she’d arrived at his home after their honeymoon. There she’d found a barn that could have housed Rain and plenty of space for a corral and lots of open area to ride. It wasn’t long before she under
stood that selling Rain had been Michael’s first move toward controlling her. His first test.

And in passing his test, she’d failed herself.

Then she’d gone riding two weeks after she arrived in California at a nearby horse ranch, not realizing how strange and twisted Michael’s feelings were. When she’d returned, he’d been waiting, furious, uncontrollably angry. It was the first time he’d hit her.

But he’d been so apologetic later. There’d been a problem with production. A day-labor dispute, as well. He hadn’t gotten her message at first, so he’d worried terribly. Then he’d worried more when he’d learned she was riding. Horses were dangerous. He’d been in a panic for hours over her safety. She must never ride again. She was too precious for him to lose.

She’d foolishly folded and forgiven him. She’d passed his second test and once again failed herself. She had promised not to ride anymore, just as he’d promised never again to raise a hand to her in anger.

It hadn’t been Xandra who’d broken the promise.

“But now you’ve started over and a horse is your next step forward,” she heard Beth say from what sounded like a long distance away.

Xandra found Beth’s hand on her shoulder and Jack Alton staring at her as if she were a bomb about to go off.

“Hey! Anyone here?” a voice called from the door of the stable.

Xandra’s heart, already beating double time, picked up its pace.
Adam.

She was just about to beg off for the day, when Jack called out, “In here and just in time.”

“Just in time for what?” Mark asked as he walked down the aisle toward them.

“Your riding lesson,” Beth said, and shot Jack a look. “He can learn about saddles and the like next time. Let’s get him on horseback and make him fall in love with riding first. He needs something he can share with Adam. I’ll show Xandra around the barn and give her the first care and feeding lesson, okay?”

“No problem, sweetheart,” Jack said, and grinned indulgently over his shoulder at his wife as he stepped out into the aisle. “I have the perfect horse for you to ride,” he told Mark. “She belongs to our trainer, C.J. C.J.’s away and the mare needs to be ridden. Her name’s Morning.”

“A girl horse?” Mark asked disdainfully.

Jack grinned. “You could always ride C.J.’s husband’s gelding. Cole wouldn’t mind at all.”

“No, he will not ride Mischief,” Beth said, swatting playfully at Jack’s cowboy hat over the stall door.

She stepped into the aisle and swung the wood-and-iron door closed, shutting Xandra inside, giving her time to regain her equilibrium. Through the iron filigree topping the stall walls Xandra saw Beth give Mark an affectionate hug and the boy blush scarlet.

“A lot of men ride mares, Mark,” Beth told her nephew. “There’s no stigma attached to it. Believe me, you don’t want to ride Cole Taggert’s horse. He’s too temperamental for a beginner…as my husband
well knows. Jack’s just teasing you, something he does to everyone.”

Mark nodded and turned, following Jack back down the aisle, their boots clomping on the Belgian block floor. He stopped just past Fly Boy’s stall, never having seen Xandra. She felt foolish. She should have said hello to the boy. If he saw her now, he’d think she’d been avoiding him, that she was interested in him only because she was paid to advise him during school hours. She reached out to Fly Boy, ran her hands over his neck and down his white blaze. It wouldn’t do for the quarter horse to start demanding attention of the newcomers.

“Aren’t you taking lessons too, Dad?” Mark asked in a tone that said he’d decided Adam’s reluctance to ride was out of fear.

Apparently, Mark was still looking for a chink in his father’s armor. Through the slats of Fly Boy’s stall and those of the next one along the row, she could see Adam, and she understood the look that crossed his features. It was only there for a moment, quickly masked with a cocky grin, but Xandra knew what she’d seen. The only thing that scared Adam Boyer was failing at fatherhood. She wondered what would happen if Mark figured that out.

Before Adam could respond to Mark’s gibe with more than a pasted-on grin, Jack said, “Whoa, Mark, I don’t think I could teach your father a thing about riding no matter how long it’s been since he was on a horse. Get your aunt Beth to show you the scrapbook she has on your father’s riding career.”

Adam turned to Beth, a look of such love and yearning on his face that it brought tears to Xandra’s eyes. “You kept some of the stuff I left behind?”

“I’d forgotten all about it. Jack’s the one who had to carry it here when I moved from Boyerton.” Beth crossed to her brother and they embraced. “Some of it got a little mutilated before I found it,” she admitted, her voice muffled by Adam’s shoulder until she stepped away. “I rescued it from the trash after Father had your room cleaned out. Maggie was my lookout and I was an eleven-year-old cat burglar. It was a great adventure.”

“Maggie was big on providing adventures,” he said, and blinked, his eyes going misty.

Xandra felt even worse now intruding on a private family moment. In a way she was glad, though, because seeing Adam so vulnerable over the old woman Beth had supported and cared for in her waning years gave Xandra an unexpected peek at a new side of him. He suddenly seemed less like a war-hardened bully.

It could be an act,
the cynical side of her, created by her brother and Michael, speculated.

“I wish I’d gotten to see Maggie again before she passed away,” Adam said, leaning his back against the neighboring stall. Beams of sunlight shone in his honey-colored hair. He sighed and his wide shoulders slumped a bit. “I can’t believe I only missed her by two months. She was more of a mother to me than
our real mother was. It’s hard knowing she never got all the letters I sent to the house for her.”

Beth smiled gently, wistfully, as she laid her hand on Adam’s shoulder. “She knew. She was forever telling me not to assume too much about your silence all those years. She suspected they’d destroyed your letters but said she would have been risking her job and losing me if she said or did anything about it. I’m sorry you missed seeing her, but it was bad at the end. This way you have your good memories of Maggie. She’s been at peace all these months in a much better place.”

“If you say so,” Adam said, looking skeptical.

“I do,” Beth told him. “She loved the Lord so much, Adam. She’s in heaven. Believe it. I’ll get all your stuff together before you leave today. Maybe going over some of the things that were yours when you were his age would help you and Mark relate to each other,” Beth suggested as she swatted the shoulder she’d patted so gently not a minute ago. “If you hadn’t kept buying Boyerton such a deep dark secret, I could have left it all at the house for you.”

“I just didn’t have time to let you know I was trying to buy it before I shipped out. Thanks for rescuing what you did. I owe you one, kiddo.”

“I’ll remember you said that. So are you up to a challenge?” she asked her brother. “Mischief will give you one. And it would be a big help if you’d ride him. Cole’s away and—” she laughed “—Mischief is a bit of a handful.”

“I was just going to hang out and watch Mark.”

“You’ll make the kid nervous. Come on. You never forget how to ride. You know that. It’ll be fun, I promise.”

Adam pushed off the stall and stuffed his hands in the back pockets of his worn jeans. “Maybe it is time. Ross used to let me sneak over here and ride his horse. It was the only time I enjoyed riding, so I guess this is the place to start. So tell me all about this miscreant animal of Cole’s.”

Beth hooked her arm through the crook of Adam’s and pulled him down the aisle. As their footsteps receded, she started telling him the story of how Mischief had once lured her into position and pushed her into a mud puddle.

Xandra stayed right where she was, continuing to pet Fly Boy so he wouldn’t draw attention to himself or her hiding place. She would die if Adam realized she’d been too much of a coward to face him.

Her disquiet didn’t lessen as Beth got to the punch line of her story and Adam’s laughter echoed through the stable; it grew. If he’d been handsome when angry, wary or sad, then relaxed and happy, he was devastating. Devastating to Xandra’s peace of mind, anyway.

Because with men, what you saw was
not
what you got. She should know. Her brother had looked like an angel and yet she had spent her childhood being tortured by him. Michael Balfour had seemed like Dr. Jeckyll but had turned into Mr. Hyde soon after their wedding.

What hid behind Adam Boyer’s handsome face and
glittering green eyes? And why did she keep wondering?

She leaned her forehead against Fly Boy’s, fighting off a sudden feeling of hopelessness and a loneliness so deep it had her blinking back tears. For months on the road knocking around the country on her circuitous route back here, she’d begged the God she remembered little about to deliver her home, to give her peace and strength and a new life. And He had given her all that. So why was she so sad? What was the matter with her? She had the life she’d prayed for. Didn’t she?

Adam hitched Mischief to the snubbing post in the yard and waved to Jack. He’d only ridden for an hour, his mind on Mark most of that time.

“How’s he doing?” he called to his brother-in-law.

Jack motioned him over to the exercise ring where Mark trotted a palomino. His sister’s husband, wearing a white Stetson, work jeans and a tan shearling coat, sat atop the practice ring fence with the heels of his work boots hooked on a lower slat. He looked like something out of the Old West, while he himself looked like a refugee from the armed services. Instead of riding boots, his were ones that had stomped over some of the roughest terrain he’d seen in his nearly twenty years in the Navy. His olive foul-weather jacket had nothing to recommend it save warmth and military efficiency. Adam took a deep breath of clean air that was liberally mixed with the smell of hay and horse and leather. Neither man looked as if he be
longed on an eastern horse farm, but Adam thought Jack felt as comfortable there as Adam himself did.

It was good to be home.

He shook himself out of his own introspection when Jack shouted another instruction. Jack seemed to want him to draw his own conclusion. The kid seemed to be doing well. “So he’s doing okay,” Adam said, interested and hopeful but trying not to care. This was Mark’s life, and his interests were his own.