The Auction a Romance by Anna Erishkigal Page 15

  "Thanks, Julie."

  "You're welcome," Julie said. "I don't know about you, but I learned the hard way not to get involved with a man until he gets his previous woman out of his system." She raised one devilishly red eyebrow. "Unless, of course, you can entice Mr. Hunky Cautious Boss to let you give him a ride."

  "Julie!!!" My cheeks turned scarlet with guilt.

  Julie laughed, a delightful sound that reminded me of church bells.

  "I kinda thought you might feel that way," Julie said. "Don't you worry, though. Adam, he takes after his mother. He won't make a move on you unless he's certain you're the ONE."

  She gestured towards the outside door, through which we could hear the girls yabber ecstatically as they took turns riding Polkadot around his paddock. "C'mon. Let's go outside to check on the girls."

  Chapter 15

  Pippa pounced on her father that night during a simple supper of roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and sautéed greens from Linda Hasting's garden.

  "Daddy?" Her silver-grey eyes sparkled with hope. "When are you going to buy me a horse?"

  Adam choked on the chicken thigh he'd just taken a bite out of.

  "I, um, mpff..."

  Pippa's gaze grew calculating.

  "Last time I saw Mommy, she said she'd buy me a horse if I tell Aunt Roberta I want to go and live with her."

  My jaw dropped at this blatant manipulation.

  Adam's blue-green eyes narrowed into an accusatory glare. I threw my hands into the air to communicate, 'hey, it wasn't me!' Adam turned his attention to his daughter.

  "We, uhm … I'm not sure we'll have a place to put one."

  "What's wrong with the barn?" Pippa shook her head in a way that reminded me of a disapproving adult. It was, I suspected, a gesture she'd picked up from her mother.

  "We, uh … I still don't know where the court will let us live."

  I pretended to be interested a small, pitted rust-spot which marred the chrome edge of the Formica table. This was more information about Adam's divorce than I'd gotten in the entire month I'd lived here.

  "Why can't we just live here, Daddy?" Pippa said. "I like it here. And I get to see you almost every night?"

  "Mommy wants us to move back to Brisbane."

  "Mommy hates Brisbane."

  "No she doesn't," Adam said. "Mommy loves the city."

  "Mommy hates Brisbane!" Pippa burst into tears. "I know she hates it, because the minute you weren't there, she always left me with Mrs. Richardson and traveled someplace better!"

  Adam gave me a look which was halfway between an accusation and 'help me out, mate? I don't have a clue what to say.'

  "Excuse me," I said. "I have to use the toilet."

  In matters of horses, I might have contributed something useful, but this had to do with Adam and his divorce. I stopped in the hallway to eavesdrop as soon as I'd cleared their line-of-sight.

  "Your mother, she, uh…" I heard Adam say.

  "She abandoned me!" Pippa shouted. "And then she left me again!"

  Something warm and furry brushed against my leg. Thunderlane whimpered, a refugee from the argument in the kitchen. I reached down to slide my fingers through his silky black fur.

  "Your mother has issues," Adam said. "But it doesn't mean she doesn't love you."

  "Then why did she just throw me away?" Pippa sobbed. "She went away, and she hasn't called me even once!"

  A chair scraped. I could tell from the way Pippa's sobs suddenly became more muted that Adam had moved around the table to hug his daughter.

  "Mommy hasn't called because she's angry at me," Adam said.

  "What about last summer? She wasn't angry with you then!"

  My ears perked up. Yes. The horse camp. Something had happened there, but whatever it was, neither Adam nor Pippa cared to talk about it. What Adam said next was too low for me to decipher, but from his tone of voice, he was telling his daughter the same sort of lies my father used to tell me whenever I'd thrown myself into his arms and wept how much I hated my mother.

  The sobbing subsided. I heard the scrape of Adam's chair as he sat back down and the clink of silverware against the stoneware plates. I walked back into the kitchen to finish my supper. Pippa sat forlornly with her shoulders hunched forward, her eyes battleship grey as she smushed her arugula unappetizingly into her mashed potatoes. Adam wore the perplexed look of a dog that'd just been kicked.

  "So?" I said with false cheer. "Did you tell your father about your play date with Emily?"

  Adam stiffened.

  Pippa gave me a weak grimace.

  "Emily let me ride Polkadot again." Pippa sniffled and rubbed her nose. "He used to work on a station with the cows."

  "Oh?" Adam said.

  "Yeah. She's been trying to teach him dressage, but Rosie told her to hold the reins a certain way, and sure enough, Polkadot already knew how to walk sideways. I thought only English horses did that?"

  "A half-pass is an important skill," Adam said. "When you cut a steer out of the herd, your horse has to move in whatever direction you need to direct the cow, especially if you want to rope him for branding."

  "Rosie said her father was a toreador back in Spain."

  Adam gave me an inquisitive eyebrow.

  "It's like a jackaroo," I explained. "A toreador is a cowboy who is skilled enough to handle the un-castrated bulls. Torro means bull."

  "Is that like the man who shakes a red cape and stabs the bull with a sword?"

  "That's a matador, not a toreador," I said. "A matador is a showman who fights the bull on foot. A toreador is a horseman, like a jackaroo or vaquero, but instead of a lasso, they use a garrocha, a long, wooden lance to steer the bulls. A toreador has a higher level of showmanship than a vaquero, but what they do is very similar."

  "Ahh… That would be like my brother, Jeffrey," Adam said. "He was a cutter like my father. He always knew when a bull was about to charge."

  "Were you a toreador, Daddy, when you were a little boy?"

  "No," Adam said. "I was never as good as my brother." His smile faded. "I was nothing more than an ordinary vaquero."

  I remembered what Julie said, that all the girls in town had gone for his bad-boy brother … even though they looked almost identical. I'd known boys like that growing up … even had teenage crushes on a few … but with Harvey in my life, no bad-boy had held my attention until after my mother ordered Harvey killed.

  "There is nothing ordinary about a vaquero," I said. "When I visited Spain, all the toreadors wanted to impress me because I was Alfonso Xalbadora's daughter. I didn't like them. They put their horses at risk with their crazy stunts."

  "You sound like my mother," Adam said. "She had it out with my father after my brother almost got gored. Jeffrey was damned lucky his horse took the brunt of it or he'd have suffered a lot worse than a broken arm."

  "Was his horse okay?" Pippa asked.

  Adam's expression grew solemn.

  "We had to put him down," Adam said. "The bull hurt him too badly to save."

  "But why didn't you bring him to the horse doctor?" Pippa cried out.

  "We did, honey," Adam said. "But the veterinarian said he'd never be sound again."

  "Sound?"

  "Able to work," Adam said. His eyes darted to me. I read the subtle plea for help. That Gitano sense of knowing whispered what must be going through his mind.

  My father was a hard man. If it didn't serve a purpose, he had no use for it, and that included a horse that was no longer able to work…

  So? Adam's father had been like my mother? Although in my mother's case, she had no defense at all. She'd simply been furious the vet wanted $1,500 to treat the impaction in Harvey's intestine. Had she paid to fix him, he would have been good to ride again in a few weeks.

  "It means the horse was in so much pain it was kinder to put him to sleep than to force him to live," I said.

  "Oh." Pippa's mouth pursed into a sad, wistful expression. "Poor horse."

  "
Yes, poor horse," I said. "Which is why your father won't buy you one until he's certain you're mature enough to not do what your Uncle Jeffrey did."

  Adam shot me a look of purest gratitude.

  "But how will I make any friends if I can't ride in the pony club?" Pippa said. "All of Emily's friends ride there. She said if I asked you, maybe you'd let me ride too?"

  I met Adam's gaze, unsmiling. I wasn't about to help him wiggle out of this one.

  "I, uhm, I'm not sure if we can afford it right now," Adam said. "A good horse costs a lot of money. Especially one who's safe for a ten-year-old girl."

  "What if I use my own money," Pippa said. "That's what Emily did. She saved up her money until her mother let her buy a horse."

  Adam's expression shouted 'help!' I forced my face to remain neutral.

  "How much money do you have?" I asked her.

  "Eleven dollars and fifty-five cents," Pippa said. "I had more, but I used it to buy My Little Pony horses."

  "You're going to need a lot more than eleven dollars to buy a horse," Adam said.

  Not as much more as you seem to think….

  "Maybe I could call Grandpa and ask him to give me some money?"

  "No!!!" Adam and I blurted at the exact same moment.

  Having watched my mother outmaneuver my father in court, any mention to the Jackson Oil patriarch that Pippa's father was about to play the horse card would no doubt end up with Pippa being given an entire stable full of Godolphin Arabians … all wearing reins which led back to full custody with her mother.

  "If somebody just gives you a horse," Adam said, "you won't appreciate it any more than my brother Jeffrey did."

  Ah! Pippa … keep working on him. He just moved from 'no' to 'maybe.'

  I cut in before Pippa could grow frustrated enough to burst into tears. "Why don't you tell your father what kind of work Emily did to earn her money?"

  Pippa's silver gaze met mine. For a kid who came across as young for her age, sometimes, when the mood suited her, she could be frighteningly precocious.

  "Emily's mother gave her an allowance of five dollars a week," Pippa said, "and she worked for her grandfather to get some more. It took her a long time to save, but when she got halfway there, her mother took her to the auction and paid the rest."

  "But we still don't know we're we'll live at the end of the summer," Adam said.

  Pippa's face fell. Her silver-grey eyes welled with tears.

  "But what if I bought it with my own money?" Pippa said.

  Adam gave me a pointed look. I refused to meet his gaze.

  "Let me think about it, sweetheart," Adam said. "Okay?"

  We finished supper, and then it was time for a game of Clue before Adam herded his daughter into bed. I showered and dug out my textbook, and then waited patiently, pretending to read as Adam's resonant baritone filtered through the door, reading to his daughter a story about a fairy and a unicorn.

  At last Adam came out and headed into the living room without first taking his shower. He didn't go into the kitchen to dig out his usual conversation opener of a bottle of beer, but sank into his favorite orange chair to regard me with an intense expression. I shut my book and prepared to take my lumps.

  When Adam didn't speak, I decided to open the conversation for him with an underhanded attack.

  "Do you want me to stop taking Pippa to play with Emily?"

  Adam looked surprised. He leaned back in his chair.

  "She seems … happy."

  "Yes. She is happy. Everybody needs to have a friend."

  Adam leaned forward to pick up the beer he usually placed on the coffee table as a prop and frowned when he remembered he hadn't gone into the kitchen to fetch one. When his aquamarine gaze did meet mine, their cobalt depths swirled with worry.

  "Pippa is … fragile."

  "She's ten years old. Her parents are going through a bitter divorce. She's clinically depressed. And she doesn't have any friends. Oh … and besides being ditched by her mother for the summer to run off with some hot billionaire from Venezuela…"

  Adam flinched.

  So, the media reports are true? I moved in for the kill.

  "… Pippa is almost a year behind her age group academically, which means even if you do enroll her in school, the other kids will call her stupid."

  Adam looked as though I'd just drop-kicked him in the nuts and left him bleeding on the floor. If there was one thing I'd learned from my mother, it was how to eviscerate your opponent with the truth.

  "Yes." Adam's voice came out a hoarse whisper.

  "Which is why I've gone out of my way to help her settle in here; the exact same thing your mother was trying to do before she died. We need to build up your daughter's self-esteem enough that she'll start talking to real friends instead of imaginary fairy queens and plastic unicorns."

  Adam leaned back in his chair and stared at his hands.

  "I'm afraid."

  "Of what, Adam?"

  "Of pushing Eva too far. If I knew for certain..."

  "Knew what, Adam?"

  Adam wrapped his arms around himself as though a cold chill clawed at him from the grave. He opened his mouth as if he wished to say something, his eyes filled with torment, and then he looked away. The muscle in his cheek twitched beneath his skin as he wrestled with whatever internal demon transformed him from the man who could wrangle a snake into the angsty, wounded creature that became paralyzed at the mere mention of Eva Jackson's name.

  "I'm afraid if Pippa sets down roots here," Adam said, "it will cause even more damage when I have to uproot her in a couple of months."

  "She needs a home Adam!"

  "She has a home," Adam said. "She lives with me."

  "Does she? You're gone all of the time. She doesn't even have her own room, but bunks in your dead brother's room. She doesn't go to school. And every time she tries to tell you she made a new friend, you get all paranoid that somebody might find out you're here. This isn't a home! It's a survivalist bunker!"

  Adam flinched as though every word was a punch to the gut.

  "I don't know if we can stay," Adam said.

  "Whether or not you stay is entirely within your power!" I shouted. "So don't put that on me. And don't put it on your ten-year-old daughter! Pippa needs you to man up and start making some decisions!"

  A flash of temper caused Adam's jaw to harden, but he was a controlled man, even-tempered and slow to anger. I jutted up my chin, but I refused to devolve into histrionics, which was what, I suspect, his wife would have done to get her way. I waited for him to think about what I'd just said. The silence grew deafening until my own heartbeat thundered in my ears.

  I watched Adam waiver. My father once asked me to help him break a wild brumby stallion … big, beautiful, and spooky as hell. Adam reminded me of that stallion, hungry to be patted, terrified to trust.

  Be still, Rosie… Let the wild brumby stallion come to you…

  The silence got to him far worse than the most vociferous shouting match. His shoulders slumped.

  "You don't understand," Adam said at last. "It's not up to me. Eva petitioned the court to force me to move back to our former marital home. She claims, by moving away, I've interfered with her right to see her daughter."

  Anger gurgled in my gut. "That's not stopping her from picking up the phone!"

  Adam leaned back and rubbed his temples.

  "She said … she doesn't want to talk to me."

  "Bullshit!"

  Adam grimaced.

  "That's what my barrister told the judge."

  I studied the way, at the mere mention of Eva Jackson's name, my stud stallion of a boss shriveled as though he expected, at any moment, to get jabbed in the belly with a pair of riding spurs.

  "What did the judge decide when she filed the motion to make you return to Brisbane?"

  "He took the matter under advisement and said he'd render his decision after the trial."

  I laughed. "In other words, you wo
n."

  Adam's eyebrows rose up with surprise.

  "No, he, uh … he issued a temporary order until Roberta Dingle could investigate Pippa's best interests."

  "There's nothing temporary about a temporary order," I said. "The judge gave you time to get Pippa settled in."

  "That's what my mother said," Adam said, "but…"

  "What did your solicitor tell you?"

  "He, uhm…"

  Adam ran his fingers into his hair and clenched his head as though he feared at any moment his head might explode. He looked so vulnerable with his head bowed that, had the coffee table not sat between us, I probably would have given him a hug.

  "I thought everything would be okay," Adam said softly. "Eva never really wanted Pippa; she viewed her as a burden. I told myself, if I extricated myself slowly, she'd barely even notice we were gone. But then my mother died and Eva filed a motion to partition this station. She wants half of it, and I don't have enough money to buy her out."

  All of Adam's hemming and hawing, his evasiveness about enrolling Pippa in school, and his refusal to speak of what would happen at the end of the summer all became suddenly clear. The man feared being evicted from his home as much as I did.

  "I thought her father is one of the wealthiest men in Australia?"

  "He is," Adam said. "But the court only divides what you own, not your father. Eva never worked a day in her life, so anything we own, we have because -I- went out and worked to get it."

  "But she has a trust fund, doesn't she? Won't the court take that into consideration?"

  "Eva's father made me sign a pre-nuptial agreement," Adam said, "waving any right I might have to anything he put into her trust fund, especially in the event of a divorce. Everything we built together, Eva is entitled to half, including, when my mother died, a share of my parent's cattle station. But I'm not entitled to a single penny of her money."

  "But your mother died after you filed for divorce, didn't she?"

  "Yes," Adam said. "But Eva claims I only filed for divorce because my mother got sick and I wanted to screw her out of her share."

  "Did you?"

  Adam's chiseled features took on that distraught look he often wore whenever he missed his mother.