Almost Home (13 page)

"I'm not your father," Jimmy said hastily. "If
you have any such notion…"

"I didn't mean to imply that. I'm trying to
figure out why my mother had so many mementos from Golden's, and I hope that
leads me to the truth. I don't know if the woman in the photo with you is even
her. It didn't really look like her. But the name was close—Evelyn, Evie."

"No. Sorry. I can't help you."

"Well, thanks for your time."

Leeanne almost forgot to move. But she couldn't let
Jimmy or Katherine catch her in the hallway, not after that bombshell. She
dashed down the hall and into the ladies' room. It took her a few minutes to
catch her breath, to settle her racing heart.

Had Jimmy had a lover she didn't know about? Had he
fathered a child with someone else—a child who was now a beautiful grown-up
blonde? But if he had, he wouldn't have shirked his responsibilities. He wasn't
that kind of man. Unless he hadn't known…

Chapter
7

«
^
»

K
atherine walked out of the
bank and stopped on
the sidewalk, feeling
unsettled after meeting with Jimmy Callaway. A handsome, serious man with the
comforting scent of Old Spice clinging to his skin, he'd seemed a fine option
for a father candidate, until he'd opened his mouth and emphatically denied
knowing her mother. Not only that, he wouldn't even admit to being in the
photograph, and her questions had definitely made him uncomfortable. Why?

Her mind drifted back to the redhead she'd seen in his
office. His wife? In a trench coat? It seemed unlikely. And she certainly hadn't
looked like a business associate. Maybe that was why he'd been so nervous.
Maybe she'd caught them in the middle of something.

As usual, her timing was less than perfect.

With a sigh, Katherine checked her watch and debated
her options. It was midafternoon, the sun rising higher in the sky, and she had
no idea what to do next. Walking down the sidewalk to a bench, she sat down and
took out her spiral notebook. She opened it to a blank page and tried to
concentrate. But all she could see was the smile in Zach's eyes when he'd read
her lists, the amusement in his voice as he'd flipped through the pages.

She shook her head, knowing that trying to figure Zach
out wouldn't be any easier than finding her father. Tapping her pen against the
paper, she wrote down what she had so far; the initial
J,
Golden's, and
the likely candidates, J.T., Justin, and lastly, Jimmy Callaway. She still had
to check out the quilt. She could drive out to J.T.'s farm and try to speak to
him. Although she was feeling a bit shell-shocked from her last confrontation.
Maybe it would be better to wait until tomorrow.

"What should I do?" she murmured, writing
the word
what, what, what,
over and over in her notebook. Usually,
writing down the question made the answer seem so easy, so clear. Today she
came up empty. In fact, looking at her words, she realized how neatly she'd
written them. Even in the face of pure restless desperation, she'd managed to
maintain control over her writing. Damn.

In a sudden burst of anger at herself, she took the
pen and scribbled all over the page, obliterating the lines with ruthless
abandon. It was cathartic to see such a mess. She'd always felt like a mess on
the inside, but she'd never let it show, never let her real self out. Until
now. And she felt suddenly free of the constraints she'd donned fifteen years
ago.

That was when it had begun, when, left alone with a
stepfather she barely knew, she'd tried to conform, to be what he wanted, what
everyone wanted. She'd been so careful to show only the side of herself that
was acceptable, for fear that any other side would lead to her being sent away.
It was bad enough having lost her mother; the thought of being a real orphan,
going to a family she didn't know at all, had terrified her.

She'd done what she had to do to survive. Only she
wasn't a child anymore. Mitchell and Cecily were never going to love her the
way she wanted to be loved, no matter how good a girl she was.

"Excuse me, ma'am, but do you want to buy some
chocolate?"

Katherine looked up to see two small girls dressed in
some sort of uniform holding two large boxes filled with candy.

"Do I want to buy some chocolate?" she
echoed with a smile.

"It's two dollars a box."

"How many boxes do you have?" Katherine
asked.

"Ten."

"I'll take 'em all."

"You will?" The little girls looked at each
other in amazement while Katherine dug out a twenty-dollar bill. "You must
be hungry," one of them said.

"I haven't had lunch yet."

"You're going to eat candy for lunch?" the
other little girl asked in amazement.

"You bet I am," Katherine said with a grin
as they dropped their boxes at her feet. "And I'm going to enjoy every
decadent second," she murmured after they left.

Katherine slipped her notebook back into her purse.
She could think of at least a dozen reasons why she should not be eating
chocolate, but she wasn't going to write them down. For this moment, this one
tiny moment, she was going to do exactly what she wanted to do and to hell with
the consequences. Breaking open the box, she popped the first chocolate into
her mouth and sighed with pure enjoyment. She'd never felt so liberated in her
life

* * *

Friday dawned with a
clear blue
sky
broken only by an occasional puffy white cloud
drifting across the perfect landscape. Katherine rolled down the window of the
car she'd borrowed from Maggie and inhaled the crisp, country-fresh air. It was
a new day, a new beginning, with all sorts of possibilities.

She was ready to continue her search. She'd set off
with every intention of driving out to J.T.'s stud farm and introducing herself
to him and his wife. But the turnoff to Stanton Farms beckoned, and she couldn't
resist.

Zach Tyler wouldn't welcome her with open arms, but
she didn't care. After all, she'd opened her notebook this morning and written
down ten reasons why she needed to see Zach again. Some habits were impossible
to break. The important thing was that she'd come up with one really good
reason why she needed to see Zach: because she wanted to.

It was foolish. She didn't even know the man, yet she
was attracted to him like a bee to a flower. He'd told her not to trust him,
not to like him, not to think anything good of him. But she couldn't believe he
was all bad. Or maybe she could—maybe being with a bad boy was just what a good
girl like her needed.

Not that she had any intention of actually being with
him in the most intimate sense. She'd never go that far out of the lines. But
then, a week ago she hadn't thought she'd leave her job on a whim, hop a plane
to
Kentucky
,
and run her car into a drainage ditch. Nor had she anticipated eating two
pounds of chocolate in one afternoon. At this rate, she just might find herself
in bed with Zach Tyler before the day was out. The thought sent an
irrepressible shiver down her spine.

Two minutes later she pulled into a loosely graveled
parking lot and parked the car in front of a life-size statue of a jockey
wearing burgundy and gold with the letters
SF
branded on his chest.

She slipped out of the car and took a moment to look
around. To the right there were numerous shade trees and a long narrow path
leading up to what appeared to be an impressive three-story house. To the left
were the barns, a half dozen or so buildings going back as far as the eye could
see. And somewhere in that area she could probably find Zach.

Since the day Katherine had first stumbled across Zach
on the highway, she'd thought of him as a rough-edged cowboy; now she was
beginning to realize he was a lot more.

"Can I help you?" a woman asked, stopping in
front of Katherine with a friendly smile. Wearing blue jeans, dusty boots, and
a burgundy T-shirt with the now familiar
SF
crest, she was obviously an
employee of some sort.

"I was looking for Zach Tyler," Katherine
replied.

"He's in the breeding shed. Do you have an
appointment?"

"No, I'm just a friend stopping by to say hello."

"Oh, well, the breeding shed is the second
building on your right. If he's not there, stop in at the office. They can
track him down for you."

"Thanks."

Before Katherine could move, a trio of horses came
flying into view in a nearby pasture. She caught her breath at the sight of a
mother and two foals chasing a bird or a butterfly or something that had set
them into a run on a beautiful spring morning.

"Oh, wow," she murmured.

The girl beside her laughed. "That's Misty and her
babies. Actually, only one of the babies is hers. The other one's mother died
at childbirth, so Misty sort of adopted the baby."

Katherine watched while the two younger horses played
under the mare's watchful eyes. "They're gorgeous."

"That they are."

"I've never really seen a horse up close before,"
Katherine confessed with a laugh.

"You came to the right place. Get Zach to show
you around. We've got some real beauties here."

"Thanks, I will." Katherine took one last
look at the mare and her babies, then walked down the path toward the building
she supposed was the breeding shed. Along the way she couldn't help noticing
how busy the farm was, employees engaged in their daily activities, from hosing
down horses, to walking them in a ring, to pitching hay into buckets and
filling up water troughs.

Katherine could feel her eyes widening with every step
at the same time her nose wrinkled from the odd smells: the horses, the hay,
the manure. She was as far from her thirty-second-floor office as she could
get. There was no sterile air conditioning out here, no men in suits and ties,
no cell phones or pagers, at least not that she could see. There was just the
land, the earth, the animals, the sky, and a mangy old dog sunning himself in
front of the barn.

The large staff, the freshly painted barns, reminded
her that this farm was also big business, just not the kind of business she'd
even known anything about.

"Can I help you?" an older man asked,
stopping in front of her to push his baseball cap up higher on his head. He
squinted at her with friendly brown eyes that lit up his lined face. "I
know you. You're that gal who landed herself in a ditch."

And she remembered him, the other man in the trailer
with Zach.

"That's me," she said lightly.

"Well, you look a lot better than the last time I
saw you. I'm Sam Jamison."

"Katherine Whitfield."

"You come to see Zach?"

"I thought I'd say hello. Is he around?"

"Oh, sure, he's always around. Lives and breathes
this business, you know."

"I got that impression."

"He's in the breeding shed. I'll take you over
there."

"Thanks," Katherine replied, falling into
step alongside him.

"I'm sure Zach will be happy to see you,"
Sam said with a half smile in her direction.

Katherine wasn't so sure, but she appreciated the vote
of confidence. "Have you known Zach long?"

"Since he was a sixteen-year-old smart-ass. He's
still a smart-ass, but he's older now."

Katherine grinned. Obviously Sam and Zach were more
than just co-workers. "I've heard his father has a less than stellar
reputation."

"Yeah. When a boy grows up looking for a man to
model himself after, and that man turns out to be a thief, well, the boy doesn't
know what he sees in the mirror anymore, himself or the son of a thief."

Sam paused, letting his words hang between them. "But
Zach is a good man, smart, honest, blunt. He runs this farm better than anyone
I've ever seen. He's got a real fine horse, too. That makes people nervous.
Folks around here don't want to have to take their hats off to him, but if Zach
has his way, they'll have to do just that."