Showdown Page 3

  “What about the blue one?” she asked hopefully.

  “The one you wore for the Jockey Club party last summer?” Linda looked surprised. “But it’s so last season, darling. Besides, I thought you said you hated it and it washed you out?”

  “I do, and it does,” said Milly, wriggling out of the pink dress and pulling on her jodhpurs, despite her mother’s protests. “But it’s the lesser of two evils, isn’t it?”

  Though no longer allowed to ride herself, Milly spent as much time as possible helping out at the stud, desperate to be near her beloved horses one way or another, and she’d never gotten out of the habit of wearing her riding gear.

  Gesturing toward the pile of pink ruffles on the floor, she grimaced. “Honestly, Mummy,” she said with a shudder, “if the whole point of this cattle market is to get one of those chinless boys to fancy me, you can’t send me out there in that.”

  “For the last time, darling, it is not a cattle market,” said Linda, a note of exasperation creeping into her voice. Having come from decidedly humble beginnings herself—she’d grown up in a nondescript semi on the outskirts of Cambridge, a fact she went out of her way to keep hidden from the other smart Newmarket society wives (all of whom, naturally, had known about it for years)—Linda worked like a slave to ensure that Milly would never want for the sort of social opportunities that she, as a girl, had been denied. A smidgen of enthusiasm, even gratitude for her efforts, would have been nice.

  “It’s a debutantes’ ball,” she sighed. “If you gave yourself half a chance you might actually enjoy it. When I was your age, I would have killed to go to an event like this. Killed.”

  “When you were my age, there’d have been a point to it,” said Milly tactlessly. “The queen would have been there, and at least coming-out would have actually meant something. Now we have to curtsey to a bloody cake! I’m going to look like a right lemon.”

  Scowling, she pulled on her riding boots and a filthy green sweater covered in cat hair from where Luther, the Lockwood Groves ancient tom, had slept on it. Only once she’d pulled it over her head did she realize she was still wearing the tiara.

  “Careful!” screeched Linda, watching her tugging at the fragile headdress like a lead rope. “If you break that, Milly, you won’t be going near those blasted stables for the next millennium. Let me do it.”

  Threatening to keep her away from Cecil’s horses, Linda had long ago learned, was the one threat her daughter took seriously. As a child, there were times when the only way to cajole Milly into doing her homework or tidying her room was the promise of an evening ride or a weekend trip to a point-to-point with her father. She was seventeen now, but some things hadn’t changed.

  Ignoring her wails of protest—that child could sulk in the Olympics if she put her mind to it—Linda carefully unpinned the tiara and placed it gently back into the tissue-paper-lined safety of its box.

  “Can I go now?” said Milly gracelessly. “Dad might need some help. Anyway, I want to have a look at Bethlehem Star before Easy has his wicked way with her.”

  “Oh, all right,” said Linda. She did wish Milly would make some effort to hide her unashamed interest in the nitty-gritty of the horse-breeding business. Ever since she’d had to give up riding herself, she’d become obsessed with the stud. No one liked to hear their only daughter talking about the quality of stallion ejaculate or the pros and cons of artificial vaginas. It was bad enough when Cecil did it.

  “But don’t be a nuisance,” she called down the stairs after Milly’s disappearing back. “And if you must handle the horses, please be extra careful not to bruise yourself anywhere that shows. I don’t want you looking like a prop forward at the ball. Milly? Are you listening to me? Milly!”

  But it was too late. With the lure of the stables beckoning, her daughter was already long gone.

  Outside in the yard, a steady drizzle was falling. Connor, the newest and youngest of the stable lads, was sweeping away the wet mud with a stiff broom.

  “Morning,” said Milly brightly as she passed him. He blushed and mumbled something incoherent that may or may not have been “hello.” He was only seventeen himself and fancied his boss’s daughter like mad. Not that Milly had ever noticed. A dyed-in-the-wool tomboy, she had yet to show much interest in boys, to her mother’s crushing disappointment. With the honorable exceptions of Frankie Dettori and the latest heartthrob jockey on the scene, Robbie Pemberton, both of whose posters hung above her bed, the only males she had ever been interested in were four legged and shared her own penchant for Polo mints and sugar lumps.

  “Just in time.” Nancy MacIntosh, Newells’s chief vet, greeted her warmly as she strolled into the stallion barn. “Oh, by the way, bad news. Rachel’s here with her dad.”

  “You’re kidding!” said Milly furiously. “Since when did that cow come to coverings?”

  “Dunno.” Nancy shrugged. “But she’s here now. Waltzing around the breeding shed like the Queen of Sheba apparently.”

  Hovering behind Nancy were Pablo, Easy’s Argentine groom, and Davey Dunlop, who rejoiced in the title of penis washer. Both grinned when they looked up and saw Milly. All the staff at Newells liked the boss’s daughter. Unlike her brother, Jasper, she was never rude or arrogant, and she knew enough about her father’s horses to make herself actively useful around the yard.

  Since the day she had been old enough to toddle over to a mounting block, Milly had been crazy about horses. Growing up on such a prestigious and successful stud farm—clients came to her father from all over the racing world, from Dublin to Dubai and Kentucky to Kempton, to stand their prize stallions at his stud—she had dreamed of one day riding Thoroughbreds to victory herself.

  But that was before her accident changed everything.

  Milly herself remembered nothing of the fateful day two years ago: her fall, headfirst at the water jump; the six minutes in which the paramedics had frantically tried and failed to get her to regain consciousness; her father, ashen faced in the ambulance, holding her hand. It was as if it had all happened to someone else.

  Up until that point, riding had been her life and racing her future. The archetypal daddy’s girl, she was Cecil’s constant shadow, begging to accompany him to point-to-points or on his many trips around the country, sourcing new stallions. Not that he had needed much persuading. He adored his little daughter and loved nothing more than watching her clamber fearlessly up onto ponies ten times her size or canter hatless around the fields at Newells, whooping with delight and abandon.

  From a very early age it was clear that she was an extraordinarily talented rider. After sweeping the board at all the local gymkhanas and Pony Club events—her room was plastered wall-to-wall with rosettes, almost all of them firsts—she had gone on to compete at regional and even national level, roundly trouncing all the other young Newmarket hopefuls, Rachel Delaney included. Her greatest triumph was being named by the Newmarket Pony Club as the Most Promising Under-Sixteen-Year-Old when she was only fourteen, a title that stuck in Rachel’s throat far more than Milly knew.

  Ironically, it was Cecil himself who had pushed her to enter the three-day event. Milly hadn’t wanted to do it because it meant missing a big race weekend in Newmarket. But he’d convinced her it would be good for her to broaden her skill base. And she, always eager to please him, had gone along with it.

  All he could think of at the hospital, as his darling girl’s life hung in the balance, was that if she died it would have been his fault. When the doctors told him she was going to be okay, it was as though he’d been given a second chance: a chance to protect her properly, as a father should. And that meant no more riding. Ever.

  Milly, of course, had other ideas.

  “But the doctor says I’m fine, Daddy,” she’d pleaded desperately, when Cecil announced his decision in the car on the way home from the hospital. “All my verteb . . . vraeteb—”

  “Vertebrae,” corrected Linda absently.

  “They’re al
l fine. In six months they’ll be exactly like they were before, Dr. Stafford said. I’ll be back in the saddle in no time, he said. Please, Daddy. You can’t stop me riding. You can’t!”

  “I don’t give a damn what Dr. Stafford said!” Turning around to the backseat, the father she had always worshipped as her champion and protector roared at her like never before. “You could have bloody died, Mill, do you understand me? You’re not riding again, not in six months, not ever while you live under my roof. It’s for your own good. And I don’t want to hear another word about it.”

  Unfortunately for Cecil, he was to hear plenty more words about it. His own stubbornness was more than matched by his daughter’s, and in the two years since their conversation in the car, Milly had never ceased trying to persuade him to change his mind. She was convinced that if she just chipped away at the stone for long enough it would eventually crumble.

  But it hadn’t. Not yet, anyway. And in the meantime, she’d been forced to watch as not just Rachel but Jasper too—Jasper who had all the horsemanship skills of a paralyzed dung beetle—began their professional careers as jockeys, moving forward with what ought to have been her life.

  Having loafed his way through an extortionately expensive private school education, Milly’s brother Jasper left school at sixteen with little more than an F in woodworking to his name. His own plan—to sit around and do nothing, indefinitely—was roundly vetoed by Cecil, who presented him with a stark choice: he could either join the army, where with any luck a bit of string-pulling could help him into his grandfather’s old regiment; or he could try to ride out his claim as an apprentice and become a professional jockey.

  Both options sounded hellish to Jasper, but in the end he’d chosen the latter, on the simple grounds that he hated the sight of blood, especially his own, and was therefore probably marginally more likely to survive his twenties as a jockey than as a soldier. Eight years later, at twenty-four, he found the job actually suited him rather well. Despite his evident lack of flair, trainers would still give him rides out of loyalty to his father. And though the pay wasn’t great, the opportunities for pulling girls more than made up for it.

  But for poor Milly, watching her brother’s career was like pouring sulfuric acid into an open wound. Worse still, now that she was no longer riding competitively, her mother had decided to seize the opportunity and “reclaim” her from Cecil, filling her newly-freed-up time with what she deemed to be more suitable, feminine pursuits, like amateur dramatics and, of course, the never-ending round of dreaded parties and balls.

  “It’s no good moping around the stables day and night looking like a scarecrow,” Linda insisted. “You need to get out more.”

  “Honestly, Mummy,” said Milly indignantly. “You make me sound like a mental patient.”

  But Linda took no notice. Once she got an idea into her head, she plowed ahead regardless with all the unstoppable determination of a Sherman tank. Milly’s fate was well and truly sealed.

  The staff at Newells were like a family, and having witnessed Milly’s blissfully carefree childhood, it was horrible for them to have to watch her teenage years unfold so unhappily. Not only had the love of her life, her riding, been taken away from her but her parents seemed determined to add insult to injury by turning her into something she wasn’t, dragging her off to endless dances and plays and cookery classes, all of which she quite patently loathed.

  The hours she spent at the stud with Nancy, Pablo, and the others soon became Milly’s lifeline—the one thing that made living at home even slightly bearable.

  Sidling up to Easy, she nuzzled affectionately against his shoulder.

  “I’d leave him be if I were you,” said Pablo. “’E’s very overexcited this morning. Aren’t you, boy?”

  Easy, contrary as usual, decided to prove his groom wrong by standing stock-still at this pronouncement, as if suddenly engaged in a very competitive game of musical statues. But a glance down toward his business end, as the vets called it, quickly gave him away.

  “Bloody hell!” Milly laughed, clocking his impressively swollen appendage. “Look at that.

  “I know,” said Nancy. “And he hasn’t even seen the mare yet. She’s been locked away with a teaser for the past fifteen minutes.”

  “Teasers” were cheap, standard bred colts that were used to put mares in the mood before their real “date” showed up. No one wanted Easy rocking up at the breeding shed unwelcomed, especially not with a partner as valuable as Bethlehem Star.

  “I hope they don’t keep him waiting long,” Milly said, looking at her watch. “Look at him—he’s ready to rumble.”

  “Morning, all.”

  The collective sigh was audible as Jasper swaggered into the barn. Extremely handsome in a classic tall, dark, and handsome sort of way, Milly’s older brother was also hideously vain, not to mention lazy and spoiled. Overindulged since babyhood by his doting mother—he had always been Linda’s favorite—his natural egotism had been allowed to run rampant to the point where now, in adulthood, it teetered on the brink of megalomania.

  “What do you want?” Milly scowled. She’d been looking forward to helping supervise this morning’s cover. The last thing she wanted was J. hanging around, making trouble.

  “Oh, well, that’s charming.” He pouted, catching sight of his reflection in the grimy mirror next to the message board and taking a few moments to rearrange his hair and remove a stray strand of spinach from between his teeth. “I thought I’d pop down and lend you all a hand, that’s all. No need to throw your toys out of the pram.”

  “Bollocks,” said Milly, accurately voicing the silent sentiments of the others. Jasper had never shown the remotest interest in the stud, or Easy, nor did he ever “lend a hand” unless there was something in it for him. “You’re here to see Rachel, aren’t you?”

  “Rachel? Is she here too?” His feigned innocence was utterly unconvincing. Like the rest of the male population of Newmarket, Jasper thought Rachel Delaney was gorgeous—not as gorgeous as himself, obviously, but gorgeous enough to warrant being flirted with nonetheless.

  Milly ground her teeth in frustration. As if that bitch being here weren’t bad enough, now she had her idiot brother in Casanova mode to contend with.

  “Just keep out of our way, all right?” she hissed. “The mare’s a maiden, so things could get tricky.”

  Maiden mares especially were known for lashing out and kicking their would-be suitors. Milly had seen more than one stud so badly injured by a recalcitrant mare that he had had to be put down. If anything like that were to happen to Easy, she’d never forgive herself.

  “Keep your hair on,” said Jasper. “Like I said, I’m here to help. I’ll be good as gold.”

  “J.?” Cecil walked in and did a double take to see his son loitering by the mirror, looking as out of place as a lost extra who’d somehow stumbled onto the wrong film set. “What are you doing here?”

  “Christ, not you too,” said Jasper, tossing back his handsome head and doing his best to look wounded. “You’re always on at me to take more of an interest in the stud. And then when I do, you complain about it. I can’t win.”

  Cecil frowned. His son’s drama queen antics irritated him beyond belief. If only Linda weren’t always so bloody soft on the boy.

  “Yes, yes, all right,” he said. “Just keep out of the way, okay? This is an important cover. I don’t want anyone fucking it up.”

  Jasper’s pout intensified.

  “As if I would!”

  Turning to her father, Milly changed the subject. “How’s the mare?” she asked anxiously.

  “She’s fine, I think,” said Cecil. “A little jumpy, but we’ve given her a nice big shot of Dormosedan to take the edge off. I don’t think she’ll give him any trouble.”

  Jasper’s eyes narrowed. It drove him mad the way that everyone at the stud, including his father, treated Milly with respect while he got dismissed like a meddlesome schoolboy. Who the hell did his s
ister think she was, anyway?

  “You know Rachel’s over there,” said Cecil in an aside to Milly as they made their way over to the breeding shed, with Nancy and Easy leading the way.

  “So I hear.”

  “Be polite, all right?”

  “Hmmm,” Milly grunted. “I’ll try.”

  “Don’t try,” said Cecil firmly. “Do it. This is business, Mill. I’m not having you piss off my biggest owner because of some silly, childish vendetta. Are we clear?”

  “Yeah, yeah, okay.” She nodded grudgingly. “We’re clear. I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Pablo quietly, once her father was out of earshot. “Rachel Delaney is a snooty beetch. We all hate her.”

  Milly grinned. “Thanks. Nice to know I’m not the only one around here who does. J.’s got his tongue hanging out, and even Mummy seems to think the sun shines out of the girl’s arse.”

  “She does?” said Pablo, raising a skeptical eyebrow. “Well”—he dropped his voice even lower—“I tell you what. Her ass is certainly beeg enough to have planets orbit around it, that’s for sure.”

  Even Milly couldn’t help but laugh at that.

  “Oh, Pablo,” she said, flinging her arms around his neck and kissing him on the cheek. “I do love you.”

  In fact, very annoyingly, and despite Pablo’s unflattering pronouncement about her rear end, Rachel was looking even hotter than usual that morning. Standing arm in arm with her doting father in skintight white leggings and half chaps, her black riding jacket tailored to within an inch of its life to emphasize both her slim waist and her supernaturally large breasts, she looked not unlike Jessica Rabbit going hunting.

  Though it had always baffled Milly, Rachel’s hatred of her was in fact very straightforward. Milly was the bug on her windscreen, the grit in her oyster, the one small, insignificant, and yet utterly infuriating obstacle in her otherwise perfect life. Rachel was already the richest, prettiest, most envied girl in Newmarket. But what she wanted more than anything, what she considered nothing less than her birthright, was to be the best, most admired female rider in the country too. Milly Lockwood Groves had made that impossible.