The Taming Of Jackson Cade. Bj James

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