Chapter 12
Hayes
I loved working from my granddad’s study. I loved the dark wood, stately furniture, leather chairs, and smell of old books.
The study was a juxtaposition to what was on the other side of the window—the rose garden.
Usually, I loved the warmth of the study. The way it felt like a cave, shrouding me from the outside world.
But today it felt like the walls were closing in.
I pressed my fingers to my temples and tried to massage away the tension that welled on either side of my head like a vise.
It didn’t help.
Nor had the coffee I had shotgunned when I thought it was a caffeine headache.
Nor had the water I guzzled when I guessed I was dehydrated.
I had slept just fine…
The front door slammed, and I felt the knot of tension in my head pull tight. I was, generally, measured when it came to Lewis. I kept my cool when he pushed my buttons. But with the headache clamping down on my temples, I couldn’t make any guarantees today.
I waited until Lewis’s ruckus carried him upstairs before slipping out from behind the desk.
My shirt wasn’t buttoned up today. Instead of navy slacks, I was in blue jeans. The boots I had found in the depths of my closet were aged and worn, stashed away from my college days, but the fit was familiar.
Pebbles crunched underfoot as I walked down to the stables.
Mason had hauled a trailer up toward the gates earlier today, and Levi was working off the property.
The usual caravan of owners, trainers, and jockeys was sparse.
Most of them had brought in their trailers yesterday or early this morning and loaded up to make the trip to Maryland for the Preakness Stakes.
It was blissfully quiet.
No slamming doors. No stubborn clients. Just endless greens and blues.
Instead of going into the stables, I headed toward one of the paddocks where Mason had turned Maisey out this morning.
She spotted me and made a show of bouncing toward the fence line.
Elvis, the Appaloosa who had been around since I was in my early twenties, watched Maisey with annoyance. I wasn’t entirely sure why he thought she was the weird one. He was wearing the barn cat like it was a hat.
I rested my arms on the fence as Maisey bounded over with giddy pleasure. She came to a screeching halt and plopped her head over the white-painted slat.
“Hey, sweetheart,” I murmured as I held my hand out to let her get acclimated to my scent, but Maisey didn’t give a damn. She nearly knocked me over when she nuzzled her nose into my chest.
Sometimes horses were standoffish. Other times, they forgot they were thousand-pound animals and not lapdogs. Maisey had the personality of a golden retriever, while Elvis acted like an inconvenienced house cat if you had the audacity to look at him.
I laughed as she used head cuddles as a way to sneakily sniff around my shirt, hoping for a treat to be hidden somewhere.
“You’re spoiled,” I murmured.
Maisey didn’t disagree. Not finding any treats, her attention quickly shifted to something more interesting over my shoulder. I turned to follow her line of sight and immediately understood what had caught her attention.
Catherine was on a warpath to the stables. Either she didn’t notice Maisey and me staring at her as she strutted to the crisp white-and-blue barn, or she didn’t care.
I was going with the latter.
Maisey huffed and stamped her hooves, throwing a teenage temper tantrum as I peeled away from the fence and curiously followed my future wife.
I slipped into the stables not thirty seconds after Catherine, but she was nowhere to be found. The place was spotless and empty. A creak overhead was my clue. I rounded the row of stalls and slipped up the narrow staircase.
Sunlight poured in from the dusty loft windows and leaked through the corrugated metal roof like falling stars. The warm scent of hay hung heavy in the humid air.
Red-painted toes stuck out from a fortress of hay bales.
“Knock knock,” I called out, not wanting to startle her.
Catherine’s feet disappeared, and her head popped up like a gopher. There was hay stuck to the top of her hair.
“Hey,” I said as I stuffed my hands in my pockets and rounded one of the stacks of hay bales.
I remembered coming up here as a kid and feeling sheltered from the cruelness of the world. Sometimes there were too many people in the house. Sometimes the mountains were too big and the valley was too deep. The loft was a safe place to hide when it was all too much.
Catherine peered over the wall of hay. “Hi.”
“You okay?” I asked as I neared, still giving her space in case I was the reason she had flown out of the house like her very fine ass was on fire.
Catherine stood and composed herself as she slipped out from behind the bales.
She was in a pair of denim cutoffs and a simple white T-shirt that had no business being as sexy as it was. Her lips were tinted red, teasing me with the memory of that cherry gloss.
“Just fine,” she said dismissively, smoothing down nonexistent wrinkles on the front of her shorts.
“Really?” I mused as I sauntered forward. “Because I’d say you were training for a marathon with the way you were hauling ass down here.”
Her cheeks turned pink. “I just…needed to get out of the house.”
“All the space in the world and it still feels suffocating sometimes, doesn’t it?”
Denim eyes flashed with surprise. “Yeah. Feels that way.”
I looked around the pitched roof. “I used to come up here when I was a kid. It was my hiding place.”
“Me too.” Catherine stuffed her hands in her back pockets. “Well, not when you were a kid. When I was a kid. If my mom was late picking me up from riding, I’d come up here and build forts with the hay bales.”
The toes of my boots hit her flip-flops. “What brings you up here today?”
Those cherry lips tightened in the corners, and her eyes darted to the left. “House was too big.”
“Why was it too big?” I softly pressed.
Catherine let out a pent-up breath and plopped down on one of the bales. I took it as an invitation to take the spot beside her. “Maybe two weeks was a little ambitious,” she admitted.
My brows knitted together. “What’s going on? This morning Hallie told me most everything’s been taken care of.”
I didn’t want Catherine to be stressed. This was my mess to be worked up about. She should be able to put her feet up and relax for the next two weeks.
“It has been,” Catherine said quickly as she pulled at a thread that was unraveling from the hem of her shorts.
“Then what’s the matter?”
She used the bales behind us as a backrest and closed her eyes. “I didn’t think about the fact that it would take me more than two weeks to get up the courage to call my father and ask him to walk me down the aisle.”
Oh.
I rubbed the back of my neck. “I—um…I didn’t know he was…in the picture.”
“He’s not,” she admitted. “Not really, anyway.”
For as long as I had known Catherine Foster, it had just been her and her mom. I had never known anything about her father.
“I’m not going to ask for anything you don’t want to tell me, but if there’s something you want to get off your chest, I’m a good listener.” I caught her eye and cracked a smile. “Besides. We’re about to be married.”
She let out a nervous breath. “Yeah.”
Silence lingered between the two of us as flecks of hay and dust danced in the sunlight.
“By the way, we need to get wedding bands,” she said out of the blue. “They don’t have to be anything fancy. I can take care of it. I just don’t know your ring size.”
Her M.O. was way too obvious, changing the subject to avoid talking about it. There were much more subtle ways to get around it, but I didn’t press. If Catherine wanted to talk about her father, she would.
I draped my arm around her shoulders. “Let me know when you want to go into town.”
Catherine sat silently for a few more minutes before she spoke up again. “My dad doesn’t…acknowledge me.”
“Then he’s missing out.”
Catherine eased into my side as I traced abstract shapes along her bicep.
“That’s what my mom always said.” She let out a deep breath.
“She’d always tell me that it was his problem and that there was nothing wrong with me.
” There was a pregnant pause. “But then she would do everything she could to make me worthy of him wanting me. Wanting us.” Pain was woven into each word.
“What do you mean?”
Catherine dropped her shoulders in a passive shrug.
“She gave me a proper name. Something long and stuffy. Something that would be appropriate in his high-society circles. Catherine Grace Foster. She started me in pageants when I was five. Put me in respectable extracurriculars like riding and piano lessons. Growing up, people called me Catie. When I was—oh, I don’t know—eleven or twelve, she told me I should start going by my full name because it was more polished.
Enrolled me in cotillion and etiquette classes.
We didn’t have a lot of money, but Mom did everything she could to make it look like we were fine.
She made all of my pageant dresses out of old prom dresses she would find at the thrift store.
She’d take apart the seams and make something new.
When I was little, the prize money would keep the lights on.
When I got older, it turned into scholarship money for college.
Pageants put me through my undergrad and MBA.
” Cath shook her head. “All that and it still wasn’t enough for him to acknowledge us. ”
“Sounds like a lot of pressure to put on a kid.”