My Dearest Cal (2 page)

Chaney dragged a bright red bandanna from his pocket and wiped the sweat off his leathery face. He grinned. “At my age, I’d be damned glad of the
chance. ‘Cept for the watching, of course. I don’t go in for none of that kinky stuff.”

Cal laughed. “Come to think of it, you probably would, you old reprobate. Your courting technique doesn’t seem to appeal to your four-legged friend, though.”

“Son, I know more about what appeals to horseflesh than you will if you stick around here for the next forty years. Devil’s Magic is as ornery and cussed as they come. Ain’t a danged thing I can do if this critter’s got it into his head to take the day off.”

He glared at the huge black horse in disgust. “Ain’t a stallion in that barn I don’t understand, ‘cept for this one. If you ask me, winning all them races went to his head. Even that highfalutin stud you brought back from England ain’t as difficult as he is.”

A faintly critical
meow
sounded from the corner, where a fat marmalade cat regarded them haughtily. Wherever Devil’s Magic went, that cat was sure to be close by. According to Chaney, the only way to get the horse into a trailer was to send the cat in ahead. At the sound of yet another meow, Devil’s Magic’s ears pricked up. As if he’d been waiting for a cue, he suddenly turned his attention to business. It appeared that the mare was just what he’d been looking for all his life, after all. With any luck, Mrs. Henry Robert Dolan’s prized Thoroughbred mare would catch and eleven months from now would drop a foal sired by one of the biggest money winners in Florida racing history.

It went against Cal’s grain to stand by and watch Chaney do most of the work, but owning a horse-breeding operation was still new to him. He’d been raised in Texas, but about as far from horses as a man could get. The lack of knowledge wasn’t something that worried him, though. As he had with every business he’d ever bought he’d hired himself one of the best men he could find to run it with him. Chaney Jackson had a reputation as an intuitive, no-nonsense manager. He had set ideas about everything from feed to barn design, ideas his previous boss hadn’t given him the rein or money to implement. Cal was giving him both, and they’d improved both the buildings and the paddocks so much within the first three months that owners had been quick to move horses into the new barns.

Once he’d taken care of the facilities, Cal had plunged into learning everything he could about Thoroughbred breeding and pedigrees, going straight back to the introduction of Arabian stock into England.
The General Stud Book
had become his bible. From the first, he was anticipating that day down the road when he’d have a string of the finest Thoroughbred stallions standing at stud. Devil’s Magic was at the center of his plans. If everything came together as he expected, by then the business would be ripe for a takeover and he would be bored again.

It never took long for the restlessness to settle in. He was a quick learner and an instinctive entrepreneur. If he’d had more patience and more ambition, he’d be a billionaire by now, head of some international
conglomerate and regularly quoted on the front page of the
Wall Street Journal
. Instead he’d been willing to settle for knowing that he had a few million in the bank, give or take the money he’d set aside to get Silver River Stables on its feet. It was more than enough to give him his freedom whenever he chose to take it.

“Why’d you buy this place anyway?” Chaney asked later that night, when they’d settled down on the porch of the graceful farmhouse that sat amidst acres of some of the most beautiful horse country in Ocala, Florida. The night air was cool and rich with the scent of grass and horses, faintly reminiscent of some of those special days in his youth when his father had let him go along with him on fruitless, humiliating job-hunting trips to ranches across Texas, ranches owned by men in the oil business who hadn’t lost their shirts the way Cal’s daddy had.

“You don’t know a danged thing about horses, that’s for sure,” Chaney added with the bluntness Cal had come to admire. It was the first time, though, the older man had let himself ask a personal question, though Cal had no doubt at all the question had been nagging at him for months now. “All them books and magazines you read don’t make up for doing. Did you ever see a horse up close before you signed the papers to take over here?”

Cal sipped on a beer and stared into the dwindling light as he considered the truth of Chaney’s statement and his understandable bafflement. He supposed his decision to buy a Thoroughbred stud farm did seem
odd to a man like Chaney who’d spent his whole life around horses and understood that world the way Cal knew about investing and making money. Unfortunately he didn’t have an answer that made much sense. He’d been drawn to this place the first time he’d seen it. He hadn’t been able to explain it then and he still couldn’t. He settled for evasion.

“I picked a winner once at Santa Anita,” he said. “A real long shot. Paid pretty decent money. I guess I got hooked.”

Chaney snorted with disgust. “Big deal. I’ve picked a bundle of surefire winners. Don’t have to mean I know diddly about breeding.”

“But you do,” Cal noted matter-of-factly.

“I do, indeed.”

“Which is why I need you.”

“That’s the danged truth. I still don’t get it, though. This operation didn’t come cheap, even the way they’d been lettin’ it go. If you got enough money to buy this place and that new stallion you picked up over in England, you could do just about anything you wanted to. There’s things a whole lot less risky than breeding race horses.”

“And I’ve already done most of ’em,” Cal said. “Every one of them required that I sit indoors all day long. No matter what the business, it was getting to be dull and predictable. I was driving around out here one day, thinking about the future, when I saw this place was for sale. I decided a good risk was just what I was looking for.”

Even in the shadowy light, Cal could see Chaney’s
disbelieving expression. “Just like that? You bought a whole danged farm just like that?”

“Just like that.” It hadn’t been quite that simple, of course, but pretty darned close. It had taken days of cutthroat negotiations, and even then his accountant had very nearly had apoplexy. If Joshua hadn’t been his closest friend, he’d have fired him. Instead he’d tolerated the nonstop arguments, then ignored them. Joshua still refused to set foot on the farm, preferring to mutter his comments about follies and muleheadedness via long-distance.

The ability to make decisions that seemed whimsical and impractical to others was one of the few real pleasures his wealth gave him. Maybe too much thinking would have made him overly cautious, would have kept him from the riskier ventures, which were often the ones that proved to be the most exciting challenges. He wasn’t much into introspection, but one thing he knew about himself: he did dearly love a challenge. Once the challenge faded, he knew it was time to move on.

Chaney rocked, staring thoughtfully toward the horizon. Cal waited, rocking rhythmically beside him and wondering why he’d never realized before that endless peace and quiet didn’t necessarily equate with boredom. If he’d had to analyze the way he felt right now, he would have said he was contented. It surprised him. Contentment wasn’t a state of mind with which he was all that familiar.

“A man like you, impulsive and all,” Chaney began,
giving him a curious, sideways glance. “You must get yourself into a hell of a mess with women.”

Cal chuckled at the understatement. Whole gossip columns from Dallas to New York had been devoted to
that
subject. “I’ve been known to, my friend. I’ve been known to.” There wasn’t a whit of regret in his tone, though sometimes in the darkest hours of the night he had a few.

The old man’s gaze narrowed, and the rocking chair creaked to a stop. “You ain’t gonna have some woman coming chasing after you here, are you? Not that it’s any of my business, of course, but I’m not crazy about working at a place where some woman’s fussin’ and changin’ everything. Old man Courtney and I, we did okay here the last few years. Can’t say I was happy about the way he let business slide after his wife died, but we settled into our routine. I kinda got used to the way things were with just us menfolk around, you know what I mean?”

“I know, and that’s definitely not something you need to worry about,” Cal promised, thinking of just how good he was getting to be at severing ties. He was thirty-seven now, and he’d had twenty years of practice. There was no one looking for him and, sadly he supposed, no one he regretted leaving behind.

“When I move on,” he assured Chaney, “I never leave a forwarding address. Keeps life a whole lot less complicated.”

Chapter Two

I
t took Marilou Stockton exactly three days, four hours and twenty-seven minutes to trace Cal Rivers to the newly named and recently renovated Silver River Stables in Ocala. She would have found him sooner if she hadn’t taken time out between phone calls to sit on the sand under a palm tree for the first two days of her month-long Florida vacation. Those few hours in the sun had slowed her investigation down, but they’d definitely been worth it.

For the first time ever, her fair skin was developing a nice golden glow and, best of all, she could breathe again. She actually felt healthy instead of waterlogged, which meant it was time to take care of business. Once that was done, she could really get into some serious relaxing. The anticipation of day after
leisurely day under these clear tropical skies made her hurry.

She gulped down her large glass of fresh-squeezed Florida orange juice and toast, sacrificing her lazy walk on the beach in favor of studying her maps and the directions she’d been given by Cal Rivers’ Palm Lane mail carrier. The carrier had turned out to be a woman in her twenties with a long memory and a talkative nature. She’d revealed that there’d been no forwarding address. Instead the mail was initially picked up weekly from the post office by a Mr. Joshua Ames, who’d had some sort of power of attorney. The mail had long since stopped coming, though, and so had this Mr. Ames.

“Too bad, too,” Priscilla reported to Marilou. “He was a real hunk.”

Since she didn’t go to see him, Marilou couldn’t attest to the man’s physical attributes, but she could swear that he was about as talkative as one of those monks who’d taken a vow of silence. The instant she’d mentioned Cal Rivers on the phone, he’d clammed right up. She wondered what a man had to pay for that kind of loyalty. The only thing she’d managed to extract was an unwitting admission that Cal Rivers was still in Florida.

Which meant that he probably had a Florida driver’s license.

Which meant that with a little resourcefulness—Priscilla had an old boyfriend who was a cop—Marilou was able to get his new address from the Division of Motor Vehicles. Once she had that, Priscilla had
been more than happy to help her figure out the best route to take to Ocala.

By 9:00 a.m. on the fourth day of her vacation, with a renewed spirit of optimism, she was in her rental car and headed for Ocala. She figured it would take her three hours, four at the most, to actually meet Cal Rivers, senior face-to-face, hand over the letter for Cal Rivers, junior and be on her way back to the beach.

For the most part her calculations were accurate. The drive took exactly two and a half hours through terrain that changed from sand and palm trees to fields of green shaded by moss-draped oaks. She was so caught up in the dramatic shift from beach resort clutter to open spaces and Southern-style architecture that she missed the entrance to Silver River Stables and wound up going several fascinating miles out of her way. By the time she figured it out, she’d wasted nearly half an hour. In retrospect, she realized it was probably an omen.

Armed with more precise directions from a chatty gas station attendant, she finally found the discreetly marked gate. As she drove through, she noted wryly that the postal box was crammed so full of junk mail it was spilling onto the ground. Apparently this Mr. Cal Rivers had a thing about the mail. She ought to cart the whole batch up to him and dump it in his lap.

Then, again,
that
mail wasn’t her worry. The letter in her purse was the only one she was here to deliver, and the sooner she did that and got on with the rest of her vacation, the better she’d like it. If she hurried,
she could still be back under that palm tree with a piña colada by midafternoon. With any luck, there was still time for an adventure or two before she went back to her humdrum life in Atlanta.

Marilou parked her car in the vast shade of a sprawling live oak. As she walked toward the house, she noted the fresh coat of paint, the geranium-red trim and the sweeping veranda with a couple of well-used rockers facing west. There was something comfortable and cared-for about the house that reassured her about Cal Rivers, until she spotted the row of empty beer bottles lined up along the railing. She hadn’t considered the possibility that the man might be an old drunk, an itinerant drifting from town to town only one step ahead of the law. Maybe that was why he’d vanished from Palm Lane and taken such care to cover his tracks. Her hand poised to knock, she hesitated for an instant, her gaze fastened on those bottles.

“Lady, this here’s private property,” growled a voice as rusty as an unoiled gate hinge. Marilou whirled around and found an old man dressed in dusty jeans and a well-worn, Western-style shirt. He regarded her suspiciously. “Whatever you’re selling we don’t want any.”

“I’m not selling anything. I’m looking for a Mr. Cal Rivers and his little boy.” She smiled. He kept right on glaring.

“Ain’t no little boys around here.”

“What about Mr. Rivers? Is that you?”

“Nope.”

“Is he here?”

His gaze narrowed. “What do you want with him?”

She could be every bit as discreet as Joshua Ames. She said primly, “My business with Mr. Rivers is personal.”

The man’s scowl deepened, carving ruts in his weathered complexion. Finally he muttered something about knowing it was too good to be true, shoved a battered cap back on his head and stomped off, stirring up a trail of dust. She had no idea if he was going to get Cal Rivers or simply abandoning her here. Just as she was about to go off after him, she heard his voice again.