“I’ve slept in stalls and on park benches. Having a roof over me is enough.”
He glanced down at her. “Your father … was a good man.”
“He was no better or worse than anyone else.”
It was impossible not to wonder who the woman’s mother was—or how anyone could have put up with Jeb long enough to have a child with him: Jeb Landis was a legend in the industry, the trainer of more stakes winners than any other man, alive or dead. He’d also been an alcoholic sonofabitch with a gambling problem as big as his misogynistic streak.
One thing Edward was not worried about was whether this Shelby could handle herself. If she could survive living with Jeb? Working an eighteen-hour shift on a breeding farm would be a piece of cake.
As they came up to Barn B, the motion-activated exterior lights came on and horses stirred inside, clomping their hooves and whinnying. Entering through the side door, he bypassed Moe’s office and the supply rooms, and took her to the staircase that rose up to what had once been a hayloft stretching the full length of the massive roof beams. Sometime in the seventies, the space had been converted to a pair of apartments, and Moe had the front one that looked out over the drive.
“You go first and wait for me at the top,” he gritted. “It takes me a while.”
Shelby Landis hit the stairs at the kind of clip he had once enjoyed but had failed to appreciate, and it felt like it took a hundred thousand years to join her on the upper floor.
And by then, he was out of breath to such a degree he was wheezing like a stuck tire.
Turning away from her, he found that there was no light shining under Moe’s door, but he wouldn’t have bothered the man with any kind of introduction anyway. With the Derby running in less than forty-eight hours, the man, assuming he was home, would be passed out.
Especially considering one of their two horses might have to be scratched from the race.
As Edward went across and tried the doorknob to the other flat, he didn’t know what he was going to do if it was locked. He had no clue where keys might be—
The door opened wide, reminding him that he was in the minority of paranoids out here on the farm. The light switch was to the left on the wall, and as he clicked it on, he was relieved that the place didn’t smell too musty and that there was, in fact, a couch, a chair, a table, and a tiny kitchen that made the galley one he had look industrial by comparison.
“Did your father ever tell you why I owe him?” he said as he limped over to a darkened doorway.
“No, but Jeb wasn’t a talker.”
Flipping a second switch, he found that, yup, there was a bedroom and bath, too.
“This is what you’ve got,” he said, pivoting around and becoming exhausted as he measured the distance back to the door.
Fifteen feet.
It might as well have been miles.
She walked over to him. “Thank you for the opportunity.”
She put out her hand and met his eye—and for a moment, he felt an emotion other than the worm of anger that had been churning and burning in his gut for the last two years. He wasn’t sure how to define it—the sad thing was, though, he wasn’t sure he welcomed the shift.
There was a certain clarity to having such a unilaterally hostile operating principle.
He left that palm hanging in the breeze as he dragged his body over to the exit. “We’ll see if you thank me later.”
Abruptly, he thought of the whole don’t-cuss, no-alcohol thing. “Oh, one more rule. If my drapes are drawn, don’t bother me.”
The last thing he needed was for her to find out he cavorted with loose women. And paid them for the privilege. He could just imagine that conversation.
“Yes, sir.”
He nodded and shut the door. Then slowly, carefully, executed his descent.
The truth was, Jeb Landis had been the one to turn him around, such as he was. Without that man’s swift kick in the ass, heaven only knew whether Edward would still be on the planet. God, he could remember with such clarity the trainer coming to see him in that rehab hospital. In spite of Edward’s no-visitors, no-exceptions rule, Jeb had gotten past the nursing station and marched into his room.
They had known each other for well over a decade before that intrusion, Edward’s interest in, and ownership of, racing horses, coupled with his previous commitment to being the best at everything, meaning that there was only one man he wanted training his stock.
He would never have predicted the guy to be some kind of savior for him, however.
Jeb’s come to Jesus had been short and to the point, but it had gotten through, to the extent it had, better than all the cajoling and handholding had. And then a year after Edward had moved in here, thrown out his business suits, and decided this would be his life, Jeb had told him he was leaving the Red & Black and going to California.