4. Dorian
DORIAN
The farm is called Sweetwater Stables, and I’ve already decided I hate it.
Not the farm itself—white fences, green fields. There’s a woman named Deb in a fleece vest who’s been very patient with my five-year-old for the last twenty minutes. I can’t pretend it’s all negative.
I hate it because I’ve been standing in a barn, checking my phone every ninety seconds, and every time I check, there’s nothing new.
That’s somehow worse than bad news. Tristan told me he would call when he knew more, but he hasn’t called.
That means the car with no plates is still out there, lurking around in my business.
Meanwhile, here I am, watching my daughter introduce herself to an animal she’s already claimed with her whole heart from a set of pictures online.
“That’s him,” Lillie breathes, her hands clasped over her chest like some heroine from an old movie. “That’s Poptart. Daddy, that’s actually him.”
The pony is a small, brown thing with a white splotch on its nose and an expression of profound stupidity. It’s chewing. It has been chewing since we walked in. I have not seen it stop chewing once.
We picked him out last week. Rather, Lillie picked him out, and I signed for him off a listing Ms. Beaumont found online, back when the whole thing was an abstraction. A photo, a price, a delivery date. He’s paid for. He’s ours.
The plan—the plan a less distracted man would have confirmed three days ago—was that Sweetwater would deliver him to the house this afternoon in their trailer, and all we had to do today was come meet him and sign the last of the paperwork.
That was the plan. There’s a saying about the best-laid plans of mice and men. Only now do I truly understand it.
“So here’s the thing.” Deb winces, and I know before she finishes that the day is about to require something of me.
“The trailer’s in the shop. The axle went yesterday—it won’t be back until Tuesday, at the earliest. I did try to call, but I only had the office line on file, and…
” She spreads her hands. “I figured worst case, we hold him here, and you send a hauler when it suits you. He’s happy as anything. He’ll keep.”
Tuesday.
I should’ve caught it. There’s a version of me from six months ago who reads every confirmation twice and would have known the delivery was uncertain before we ever got in the car.
But that version of me isn’t spending his nights thinking about unmarked cars or his mornings thinking about a girl in mismatched socks, and so the detail slipped, and now I’m standing in a barn watching it all land on my daughter.
The light goes out of her eyes, the shoulders drooping, the terrible dignified quiet of a five-year-old absorbing a disappointment.
She has decided she’s going to be brave about it.
She hasn’t argued. That’s the part that gets me every time.
She just nods and says, “That’s okay. Tuesday is fine.
” It’s not fine, though. It’s four days, which to a five-year-old is a geological age.
Something in me refuses it.
I’m not going to reschedule this for her.
“How big is he?” I ask.
“Sir?” Deb asks, as if I’ve lapsed into a different language.
“Weight, height. Whatever the relevant figure is.” I’m already looking out toward the SUV.
I insisted on driving—this is a special moment for Lillie, and I didn’t want it tainted for her.
We do, however, have a car full of security waiting behind the SUV.
What will they think when they see this? Probably that I’ve lost my mind.
They don’t have a five-year-old.
“He’s a mini horse,” Deb says slowly, as if I don’t know. “Maybe two hundred, two-fifty pounds. Why do you—”
“Would he fit in the SUV?”
The barn goes silent. I’m fairly sure even the pony stops chewing.
“Mr. Moretti?” Quinn whispers. She looks alarmed, to put it mildly. “You can’t put a horse in your car.”
“He isn’t a horse. He’s a pony.”
“My point stands.”
“He’ll fit.” I’m looking at the animal, and I’m looking at my BMW. This is only a matter of logistics. “Fold the rear seats down. He’s the length of a large dog. People transport large dogs all the time.”
“People transport large dogs in crates, not loose in the back of a…” Quinn drags a hand down her face, and I catch the exact moment she gives up.
Roughly at the same time she looks at Lillie, who has come fully back to life and is now looking up at me like I personally hung the sun. “I guess we’re doing this,” she says.
“We are doing this,” I agree.
Deb looks like she’s witnessing a crime. “I really don’t think—”
“Wherever you need me to sign,” I decide, and that ends the discussion.
I’ve negotiated with men who held guns. I’ve sat across tables from people who wanted me dead and made them decide, over the course of an evening, that they’d rather not go through with it. I am, by any reasonable measure, a persuasive man.
Poptart couldn’t care less.
He plants all four legs in the gravel and leans back against the lead rope with the immovable conviction of something that has never once in its life been in a hurry.
“Push him,” I tell Deb.
“You don’t push a—”
“Quinn, take the front. I’ll take the back.”
“Why do I get the front?” she asks.
“Because the back is where the kicking happens.”
That gets through to her. She’s got the lead rope, and she’s crouched down at the animal’s eye level, talking to it in a low, ridiculous, sing-song voice. “Come on, buddy. It’s a nice car. It’s a luxury car. You’re gonna love it; it even has heated seats.”
Meanwhile, I get my shoulder against roughly two hundred pounds of stubborn.
Lillie stands off to the side and yells encouragement to everyone, including the pony.
Somehow, between Quinn’s encouragement about heated seats, my shoulder, and one well-timed apple, the animal lurches into the back of my car.
The suspension drops. Something creaks that has never creaked before.
My moment of triumph doesn’t last long before I realize what I’ve done. There is a small horse in the back of my BMW. Its head is between the two front seats, and it is, once again, chewing.
At first, I’m afraid Quinn hurt herself.
She’s bent over with her hands on her knees, and she’s wheezing.
It’s only when I reach for her, planning to touch her shoulder, that she waves a hand and lifts her red face.
“I can’t—” She’s laughing too hard to finish.
The silent kind that shakes her shoulders.
She wipes her eyes and looks at me before losing it all over again. “There is a horse in your BMW.”
“It’s a pony.” Then I open the passenger door for her, because I am still a gentleman, even when there’s livestock in my car. I’m not crazy about the idea of Lillie sharing her seat, but Quinn makes sure the seatbelt is buckled around both of them, with Lillie firmly in her lap.
The drive starts out fine, which I have to admit is a surprise. There is a good twenty minutes where I drive carefully, and the horse seems to be handling himself like a pro.
Until Poptart decides to unceremoniously lift his tail and deposit a substantial and steaming contribution directly onto the cream leather of my back seat. I mean, it plops. Loudly.
The sound is followed by a beat of absolute silence.
Then several things happen at once.
First, the smell arrives. Actually, arrives is the wrong word.
The smell invades. Lillie shrieks—the delighted, horrified shriek of a child who has just witnessed the single funniest and most disgusting event of her entire life and needs the entire world to know about it.
I feel her about to escalate, to become fully unglued.
Then Quinn jumps in to manage things.
“Okay,” she says, calm and bright. “Poptart said hello. That’s how horses say hello. New game. We’re gonna hold our breath like we’re underwater, okay? Deep breath. We’re divers, we’re going down.”
Lillie sucks in a huge breath and puffs her cheeks out. Quinn puffs hers out too.
“Windows,” Quinn murmurs out the side of her mouth while still holding her breath.
I put every window down, and soon, the four of us are flying down the highway at seventy with the wind roaring through, and a horse’s mane whipping around and Lillie shrieking with laughter.
And then there’s Quinn, conducting the entire operation like a woman who was born for exactly this.
It takes three staff to extract Poptart from the vehicle and install him in the paddock.
Lillie has to be physically carried inside for a bath, protesting the entire way that she wants to be with her horse.
Ms. Beaumont peels her off my hip. “I’ll take care of this,” she offers.
“You’ve obviously had a trying day so far. ”
I can’t argue with that, though it’s not the day I’m thinking about as I climb the stairs, nor is it the work waiting for me in my office.
It’s the girl climbing the steps behind me. She has to be the most composed, levelheaded girl I’ve ever met. Just twenty years old, but she handled that beautifully.
“I’m pretty sure the smell is permanently lodged in my brain,” she says with a chuckle as we enter the front hall.
“It was a memorable smell,” I agree, sniffing my shirt and wrinkling my nose. “It also clings to everything.”
“But Lillie is happy.”
I come to a stop and look at her. At first, that’s all I can do. There’s so much love in her voice. This is more than a job for her—I’ve known that for a while. She wouldn’t still be here if I hadn’t realized how genuinely she cares about my girl.
Still, it’s good to see it firsthand. I should be beyond this kind of admiration. It shouldn’t stop me in my tracks the way it does.
Here I am, downright humbled by this girl. “Thank you,” I tell her.
“It’s part of the job.”
But it isn’t. That’s what I want to tell her.
“I employ a lot of people, and I know the difference between someone doing a job and someone who’s good at their job.
” I mean it more than she knows. I’ve spent my entire life being able to buy competence.
What I watched in that car wasn’t competence.
It was a kind of grace that isn’t for sale.
I know how rare it is. “So, thank you. And for what it’s worth, I would still like to take you to your sister’s engagement party.
Consider it a thank-you for everything you did today, if that makes it easier to say yes. ”
I can practically hear her fighting with herself, while I wait patiently—at least on the outside.
Inside, I want her to say yes more than anything I’ve wanted in a long time.
“Wouldn’t it be weird, though?” she asks.
“You’re my boss. People would ask. Especially my mom.
Oh, god, she would never stop asking questions. ”
“I wouldn’t have to go as your boss.” I blurt that out before I stop to think about it. Now I’m committed. “We can pretend to be a real couple for one night. If your ex is going to be there with a date, you should walk in with one as well.”
Her face is doing something I like much too much. But then, I like everything about her more than I should. She wants to say yes. Why won’t she say it and get it over with?
Then she does. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
I feel it move through me, the thing I have no business feeling: plain, ridiculous gladness.
It’s so foreign to me that I barely recognize it.
One night with her hand in mine. One night where I can pretend, for a few hours, to be the kind of man who takes a girl to a party and has no other agenda behind it.
“Good,” I tell her with a nod. “We can iron out the details later. I’m sure you have other things to do today, even if it’s nothing more than burning the clothes you’re wearing now, since that’s what I plan to do with mine.
” Because I doubt any amount of washing will get rid of the smell of horse and… everything else.
“All right. And thank you,” she adds, then looks up the stairs. “Tell Lillie I’ll see her tomorrow.”
As far as I’m concerned, tomorrow can’t come fast enough. There’s something warm in my chest, something I haven’t felt in as long as I can remember, and I carry the feeling with me until she’s gone, and I have no choice but to continue with the rest of my day. That means finding Tristan.
He’s in the study. The look on his face tells me the day didn’t get any better while I was hauling livestock.
“That car,” he says, without bothering to ask how things went.
“It was parked on the service road this afternoon, behind the east wall. Two hours, then gone. New plates this time. They trace back through three shell companies to the Castellanos.”
Two hours behind my wall while I was in a barn. It means they’ve stopped asking where I work and started learning where I sleep, which is one short, ugly step from learning where my daughter sleeps.
“Double security again,” I decide, taking a seat at my desk. “The tree line, the east approach, everything. Find out who was driving.”
“Already moving on it,” he reports, busy typing on his phone.
I should stop there. That’s the whole of the conversation that matters. Instead, I add, “I’ll be out next Saturday evening. A few hours. Personal matter.”
Tristan doesn’t look up from the phone. “Where?”
“Engagement party at the Whitmore.” I sound too casual, and I know it. “I told Quinn I would go with her. It’s a family event.”
His thumbs stop moving before he lifts his head.
He doesn’t say anything at first, which is how I know he has plenty to say.
He’s been reading me for years, and I’ve been reading him.
He’s currently thinking about a public room, an open floor, and his boss escorting an innocent girl the same week a rival family started showing up outside the walls of my estate.
“You think that’s a good idea?” he finally settles on asking.
“It’s her family,” I remind him. “Nobody there will know me. It’s a controlled environment, completely safe.”
We have an entire conversation without saying a word, staring at each other across my desk. Then he looks back at his phone. “I’ll put two on the room,” he decides. “You won’t notice them.”
“That’s fine.”
“Dorian.” He says it to the phone, not to me. “She’s a nice girl.”
He doesn’t finish the thought, but then he doesn’t have to. I already know how it ends, because I’ve been ending it for myself for months. She’s a nice girl, and this isn’t a life you get to bring a nice girl into.
“Two on the room,” I remind him, and that ends the conversation.