Chapter Eight
Eight
Seven days after beginning the affair with Maddy, she called and asked him if he could come down and check the shoes on one of the horses.
It was the middle of the afternoon, so if it was her version of a booty call, he thought it was kind of an odd time.
And since their entire relationship was a series of those, he didn’t exactly see why she wouldn’t be up front about it.
But when he showed up, she was waiting for him outside the stall.
“What are you up to?”
She lifted her shoulder. “I just wanted you to come and check on the horse.”
“Something you couldn’t check yourself?”
She looked slightly rueful. “Okay, maybe I could have checked it myself. But she really is walking a little bit funny, and I’m wondering if something is off.”
She opened the stall door, clipped a lead rope to the horse’s harness and brought her out into the main part of the barn.
He looked at her, then pushed up the sleeves on his thermal shirt and knelt down in front of the large animal, drawing his hand slowly down her leg and lifting it gently. Then he did the same to the next before moving to her hindquarters and repeating the motion again.
He stole a glance up at Maddy, who was staring at him with rapt attention.
“What?”
“I like watching you work,” she said. “I’ve always liked watching you work.
That’s why I used to come down here and give orders.
Okay, honestly? I wanted to give myself permission to watch you and enjoy it.
” She swallowed hard. “You’re right. I’ve been punishing myself. So, I thought I might indulge myself.”
“I’m going to have to charge your dad for this visit,” he said.
“He won’t notice,” she said. “Trust me.”
“I don’t believe that. Your father is a pretty well-known businessman.” He straightened, petting the horse on its haunches. “Everything looks fine.”
Maddy looked sheepish. “Great.”
“Why don’t you think your dad would notice?”
“A lot of stuff has come out over the past few months. You know he had a stroke three months ago or so, and while he’s recovered pretty well since then, it changed things.
I mean, it didn’t change him. It’s not like he miraculously became some soft, easy man.
Though, I think he’s maybe a little bit more in touch with his mortality.
Not happily, mind you. I think he always saw himself as something of a god. ”
“Well,” Sam said, “what man doesn’t?” At least, until he was set firmly back down to earth and reminded of just how badly he could mess things up. How badly things could hurt.
“Yet another difference between men and women,” Maddy said drily.
“But after he had his stroke, the control of the finances went to my brother Gage. That was why he came back to town initially. He discovered that there was a lot of debt. I mean, I know you’ve heard about how many properties we’ve had to sell downtown. ”
Sam stuffed his hands in his pockets, lifting his shoulders. “Not really. But then, I don’t exactly keep up on that kind of stuff. That’s Chase’s arena. Businesses and the real estate market. That’s not me. I just screw around with metal.”
“You downplay what you do,” she returned. “From the art to the physical labor. I’ve watched you do it. I don’t know why you do it, only that you do. You’re always acting like your brother is smarter than you, but he can’t do what you do either.”
“Art was never particularly useful as far as my father was concerned,” Sam said.
“I imagine he would be pretty damned upset to see that it’s the art that keeps the ranch afloat so nicely.
He would have wanted us to do it the way our ancestors did.
Making leatherwork and pounding nails. Of course, it was always hard for him to understand that mass production was inevitably going to win out against more expensive handmade things.
Unless we targeted our products and people who could afford what we did.
Which is what we did. What we’ve been successful with far beyond what we even imagined. ”
“Dads,” she said, her voice soft. “They do get in your head, don’t they?”
“I mean, my father didn’t have gambling debts and a secret child, but he was kind of a difficult bastard.
I still wish he wasn’t dead.” He laughed.
“It would kind of be nice to have him wandering around the place shaking his head disapprovingly as I loaded up that art installation to take down to the Mercantile.”
“I don’t know, having your dad hanging around disapproving is kind of overrated.” Suddenly, her face contorted with horror. “I’m sorry—I had no business saying something like that. It isn’t fair. I shouldn’t make light of your loss.”
“It was a long time ago. And anyway, I do it all the time. I think it’s the way the emotionally crippled deal with things.” Anger. Laughter. It was all better than hurt.
“Yeah,” she said, laughing uneasily. “That sounds about right.”
“What exactly does your dad disapprove of, Madison?” he asked, reverting back to her full name.
He kind of liked it, because nobody else called her that.
And she had gone from looking like she wanted to claw his eyes out when he used it to responding.
There was something that felt deep about that.
Connected. He shouldn’t care. If anything, it should entice him not to do it. But it didn’t.
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“No,” he returned. “I’ve done a lot of work on this ranch over the years.
You’re always busy. You have students scheduled all day every day—except today, apparently—and it is a major part of both the reputation and the income of this facility.
You’ve poured everything you have into reinforcing his legacy while letting your own take a backseat. ”
“Well, when you put it like that,” she said, the smile on her lips obviously forced, “I am kind of amazing.”
“What exactly does he disapprove of?”
“What do you think?”
“Does it all come back to that? Something you did when you were seventeen?” The hypocrisy of the outrage in his tone wasn’t lost on him.
“I’m not sure,” she said, the words biting. “I’m really not.” She grabbed hold of the horse’s lead rope, taking her back into the stall before clipping the rope and coming back out, shutting the door firmly.
“What do you mean by that?”
She growled, making her way out of the barn and walking down the paved path that led toward one of the covered arenas. “I don’t know. Feel free to choose your own adventure with that one.”
“Come on, Maddy,” he said, closing the distance between them and lowering his voice. “I’ve tasted parts of you that most other people have never seen. A little bit of honesty isn’t going to hurt you.”
She whipped around, her eyes bright. “Maybe it isn’t him. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m the one that can’t look at him the same way.”
Maddy felt rage simmering over her skin like heat waves. She had not intended to have this conversation—not with Sam, not with anyone.
But now she had started, she didn’t know if she could stop. “The night that he found out about my affair with David was the night I found out about Jack.”
“So, it isn’t a recent revelation to all of you?”
“No,” she said. “Colton and Sierra didn’t know.
I’m sure of that. But I found out that Gage did.
I didn’t know who it was, I should clarify.
I just found out that he had another child.
” She looked away from Sam, trying to ignore the burning sensation in her stomach.
Like there was molten lava rolling around in there.
She associated that feeling with being called into her father’s home office.
It had always given her anxiety, even before everything had happened with David. Even before she had ever seriously disappointed him.
Nathan West was exacting, and Maddy had wanted nothing more than to please him.
That desire took up much more of her life than she had ever wanted it to.
But then, she knew that was true in some way or another for all of her siblings.
It was why Sierra had gone to school for business.
Why Colton had taken over the construction company.
It was even what had driven Gage to leave.
It was the reason Maddy had poured all of her focus into dressage. Because she had anticipated becoming great. Going to the Olympics. And she knew her father had anticipated that. Then she had ruined all of it.
But not as badly as he had ruined the relationship between the two of them.
“Like I told you, one of David’s other students caught us together. Down at the barn where he gave his lessons. We were just kissing, but it was definitely enough. That girl told her father, who in turn went to mine as a courtesy.”
Sam laughed, a hard, bitter sound. “A courtesy to who?”
“Not to me,” Maddy said. “Or maybe it was. I don’t know. It was so awful. The whole situation. I wish there had been a less painful way for it to end. But it had to end, whether it ended that way or some other way, so...so I guess that worked as well as anything.”
“Except you had to deal with your father. And then rumors were spread anyway.”
She looked away from Sam. “Well, the rumors I kind of blame on David. Because once his wife knew, there was really no reason for the whole world not to know. And I think it suited him to paint me in an unflattering light. He took a gamble. A gamble that the man in the situation would come out of it all just fine. It was not a bad gamble, it turned out.”
“I guess not.”
“Full house. Douche bag takes the pot.”
She was avoiding the point of this conversation.
Avoiding the truth of it. She didn’t even know why she should tell him.
She didn’t know why anything. Except that she had never confided any of this to anyone before.
She was close to her sister, and Sierra had shared almost everything about her relationship with Ace with Maddy, and here Maddy was keeping more secrets from her.