Take Me Home Read online

“Salty here is your ride for today,” Sharon said, running the stirrup down the leather so Claire could mount.

  “He’s really big.” Claire eyed the gray gelding dubiously. He had to be over seventeen hands tall.

  “I’ll be happy to give you a leg up,” Tim’s voice rumbled from behind her.

  “Thanks, but I can—” Claire gave up her protest as he bent and laced his fingers together at knee height.

  The slanting sun laid a brushstroke of light across his face, making the dark gray of his eyes turn luminous and the surface of his skin look warm and tempting where it stretched over his jaw. It was all Claire could do not to lay her palm against the plane of his cheek to test its texture.

  “You can handle him fine,” Sharon said.

  “What?” Claire was startled into a blush by what seemed like her friend’s mind reading ability.

  “Salty. He’s strong, but he’s got a mouth like silk.”

  “Oh. Right,” she said, pulling herself together enough to grasp the reins and saddle before bending her knee into the cup of Tim’s fingers.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  All she could manage was a nod.

  Suddenly, she was hurtling upward as though she weighed no more than a cornhusk doll. She swung her free leg over the saddle as the vet halted her flight at just the right moment.

  He wrapped his fingers around her calf and shifted her leg forward in order to check the security of the girth. The gesture was so automatic for anyone who rode that it steadied Claire. “Thanks for the leg up. It felt like I was being launched by NASA.”

  Tim looked up from his task. His height made Salty seem like an average-sized horse. “Sorry about the overkill. I just came from inoculating a several-hundred-pound sow, so my muscles are still in pig-wrestling mode. Not that you look anything like a sow.”

  “I can’t tell you how relieved I am.” Claire grinned. She shortened the reins to let Salty know she was ready to move.

  The vet was still holding her knee and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Don’t you worry about Willow. We’ll make her strong enough to handle your troubles.”

  When the horse took a restless step sideways, and Tim let go, she felt it as a loss. The warmth and strength of his grip were strangely reassuring. With just his touch, he had convinced her that her whisper horse would be in good hands.

  “So Dr. Tim is new to Sanctuary? He sounds local.” Claire held Salty’s head while Sharon unsaddled him. Thoughts of the vet had teased her all through her ride. The strange frozen moment while she waited to shake his hand and the feel of his fingers locked around her knee kept replaying in her mind.

  “He grew up here, but he was so smart he finished high school early. I guess that’s why you don’t remember him. Anyway, he got scholarships to every college he applied to. I heard some schools even sent folks down here to beg him to study with them. Anyways, he’s got more letters after his name than I have in mine.”

  Sharon’s last name was Sydenstricker.

  “With all those credentials, why would he come back to a little town like Sanctuary?” Claire asked.

  “The usual. A broken heart.”

  Claire was surprised. For some reason, she had expected something less trite. “So who broke Dr. Tim’s heart?”

  “His wife.”

  A weird sense of disappointment jangled through Claire.

  “Well, I guess she’s not his wife anymore,” Sharon corrected herself, “since she passed away a little over a year ago.”

  So the vet was mourning the love of his life. Whatever she thought had sparked between them must have been entirely in her own mind, given his recent tragedy.

  “How sad for him,” Claire said, “to lose his wife so young.”

  “She was a pretty famous actress too. Committed suicide right on an empty Broadway stage.”

  “You mean he was married to Anais Tremont? I remember hearing about her death on the news.” Claire tried to imagine the emotional damage he must have sustained when his beautiful, talented wife killed herself. “It sounds to me like Dr. Tim needs a whisper horse more than anyone.”

  “Aunt Claire!” Kayleigh squealed, throwing her arms around Claire’s thighs and squeezing.

  Her enthusiastic greetings always sent a tingle of pleasure through Claire, especially since the eight-year-old had only recently warmed up to her city aunt.

  “Hello, sweetie.” Claire put down a grocery bag on the kitchen’s russet Formica counter and bent to return the child’s hug. “Where are your mom and sister?”

  “Brianna’s reading, as usual.” The little girl rolled her eyes. “Mom’s in the office on the computer. What are you fixing for dinner tonight? Can I help?”

  “I’m counting on you.” Claire opened the door of one of the pine cabinets and quickly stowed away a box of sugary cereal before Kayleigh spotted it. “It’s a very gourmet menu—tortellini with butter and cheese, green beans amandine, and brownies with ice cream and hot fudge sauce.”

  “Yummy! Except for the beans.” Kayleigh grimaced. “I’ll stir.”

  “Let me just go say hi to your mom, and then we’ll get going.”

  Kayleigh climbed onto a plastic step stool and began unloading the groceries, her long sun-streaked braid flicking back and forth across her back as she moved.

  Claire took a deep breath and went in search of Holly. She hesitated a moment by the mantel that held her sister’s Royal Doulton china figurines, one-half of the collection their mother had divided between Claire and Holly when she moved to Florida.

  Claire traced her finger along the smooth, flowing folds of a pink ball gown. When they were young, Holly used to beg to play with the pretty ladies like they were dolls. Claire only wanted to examine the graceful turn of one figurine’s neck or the subtle colorations of another’s swirling cape. It was the beginning of her appreciation of art.

  She felt a stab of guilt as she remembered her china ladies were packed up in a cardboard carton. Her ex-husband, Milo, had dismissed them as being without artistic merit, refusing to have the statuettes on display in their apartment.

  “I should have put up a fight,” she murmured, touching the arc of a hat brim. “These have lines just as beautiful as Milo’s abstract sculptures.”

  She frowned as she noticed one of the figurines was missing. Maybe her sister had moved it to a different room.

  Leaving the comforting familiarity of the statues with a sigh, she found Holly hunched over the old typing table that served as her computer desk, her face lit an eerie blue by the laptop’s screen.

  “Hey, sis! I thought I’d check on you before I start dinner.” Claire closed the door before she leaned down to give Holly a peck on her pale cheek. It still shocked her to see the “pretty Parker sister,” as Holly had always been known, with limp, matted curls and dark circles under her brown eyes. Despite a course of intravenous antibiotics, the Lyme disease refused to ease its grip on her. “Holding up all right?”

  “I’m okay, thanks. Tired, as always.” Holly pushed back the workstation chair and swiveled to face Claire. “Frank just e-mailed to say he’s coming home tomorrow at lunchtime, so you don’t have to come in the evening. He can fix dinner.”

  “I’m glad Frank will be home to see you and the girls,” Claire said, although she was dubious about the meal. Holly’s husband was a sales representative for heavy construction equipment, so he traveled extensively for work. Maybe it was guilt at leaving his sick wife alone so much, but he treated her illness as an inconvenience and rarely did more than order in pizza when he was home for the weekend. “Why don’t I cook something extra tonight, and Frank can warm it up tomorrow?”

  “I said Frank will make us dinner,” Holly insisted with a sharp edge in her voice. Claire almost welcomed the little spurt of anger; it made her sister sound stronger. Then Holly seemed to deflate again as she said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful.”

  “Hey, don’t worry about it. I understand completely.” Cla
ire was pretty sure Frank would be thrilled not to have to prepare a meal. But she wasn’t going to argue any further—she had a more important issue to raise. “I saw on the kitchen calendar that you have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow. Why don’t you let me drive you this time?”

  “I canceled it. Frank’s coming home early.”

  “O-kay.” Why couldn’t Frank take his sick wife to the doctor?

  Holly’s anger flashed again. “I can go to the doctor another day, and I want to see my husband. So don’t make that big-sister-knows-best face at me.”

  Claire bit back the hurt rejoinder she wanted to blurt out. She remembered the days when she and Holly would joke about their husbands’ little quirks and foibles. Now she had to walk on eggshells around the subject of Frank.

  Ironically, Holly returned the favor by not bringing up Milo, just when Claire would have welcomed the chance to discuss her ex-husband with brutal honesty.

  “I didn’t know I was making a face” was all Claire said. “Can I bring you some tea before I start cooking?”

  Holly looked up with tears in her eyes. “I didn’t mean that. I just, I don’t know...I’m so tired I can’t think straight.”

  “And I’m worried about your health, so sometimes we see things differently. But we both have the same goal, and that’s to get you better. So no more arguments or apologies.”

  As Holly looked down at her hands, Claire did a surreptitious scan of her sister’s arms, relieved to find no fresh bruises. One of the disturbing symptoms of the Lyme disease was that it made Holly so tired she banged into things. Ugly, livid marks would appear on her arms and hands without her being aware she’d hurt herself.

  “I met the new vet, Dr. Tim, today,” Claire said, trying to defuse the tension with some local gossip. She even found a certain comfort in just saying the man’s name. “Have you ever seen him? He’s a big guy, but he makes you feel kind of safe, like nothing can hurt you when he’s around.”

  “I’ve heard about him. You know Frank’s allergic, so we can’t have pets.”

  “He’s taking care of a really sick horse at Sharon’s stable.” Claire debated whether to go into the whisper horse story with Holly and decided not to. Their relationship was tenuous enough as it was; if she thought Claire was crazy, it wouldn’t help matters.

  Holly took a deep breath and lifted her eyes to Claire’s. “How much longer are you staying in Sanctuary?”

  Claire blinked and took a step backward. The question seemed hostile, yet her sister’s tone was neutral. Once again, Claire struggled to say the right thing. “I...I don’t know. It depends on how you’re feeling.”

  She thought of the new position waiting for her at the Thalman Art Gallery in New York City. Henry Thalman couldn’t hold it for her indefinitely. She needed to give him an idea of when she would be back. Not to mention the flood of e-mails from friends and colleagues in the art world inviting her to various openings and exhibits. She hoped they wouldn’t drop her from their lists since she kept declining.

  As though she heard Claire’s thoughts, Holly said, “I don’t want to keep you from your life in New York.”

  “You’re more important than anything there.” Which was true up to a point. Milo had darkened that world for her. Even the gallery position, which should have been her dream job, was tainted by his scorn for her ability to recognize good art when she saw it.

  Holly shook her head. “You worked awful hard to get where you wanted to be. You shouldn’t stay here too long, or all that effort will go to waste.”

  Claire couldn’t tell whether her sister said that in order to get rid of her or if she really meant it. She hadn’t told Holly about the job because she didn’t want her to feel pressured into pretending to feel better. Frank pushed his wife that way enough. “Nothing’s going to waste. The Gallery at Sanctuary is a great place to work.”

  “Really?” Holly’s skeptical glance said she didn’t believe her.

  “I’ve always loved matching people with the right art for them. The challenge is the same in Sanctuary as it is in New York.” Of course, the budget here was one-tenth that of the gallery in New York.

  “I guess that makes sense.”

  Claire watched her sister carefully as she braced herself and asked, “So, do you want me to stay here longer?”

  Holly looked at the computer screen, then at her hands, then at the opposite wall. When she turned back to her sister, tears streaked her cheeks. “I don’t know.”

  AS SHE STOOD in the gallery’s back room the next morning, Claire continued her internal debate as to whether Holly wished she would leave or wanted her to stay. Shaking her head, she decided it didn’t matter—she was staying until Holly was better.

  That decision made, she brought her attention back to the painting displayed in front of her. It was by Kay Fogler, a new artist Davis was considering for an exhibit in the gallery. He had asked Claire to give him her opinion on whether the work was ready to show, but she kept putting off her answer. All the niggling doubts her ex-husband had planted in her mind undermined her ability to make a decision.

  The buzzer announced that someone had entered the gallery, and Claire heaved a sigh of relief. Wiping her damp palms on her slim black linen skirt, she went out to greet her new customer.

  Although the man had his back to her, she was sure it was Tim Arbuckle. Among the swirl of color and shape in the gallery’s main showroom, the gravity of his presence drew her eye straight to him. He was standing in front of an expansive landscape by Len Boggs, one of the gallery’s most popular artists. The vet had good taste.

  As Claire walked up behind him, he turned and said, “Morning. I thought I’d stop by and give you an update on Willow.”

  “That’s very kind, but you shouldn’t have gone to the trouble.” Claire halted several steps away so she didn’t get a crick in her neck from looking up at him. Even in her sky-high pink suede pumps, she only came to his shoulder. She liked the sense of rootedness he projected, like a grand oak tree that could withstand any storm.

  “No trouble. There was a parking space right in front of the gallery.” He pushed his hands into his jeans pockets in a gesture she was beginning to recognize. “Your whisper horse is going to be okay, but you’ll never be able to ride her. Her owner seems to have raced her while she was injured, because she’s got some fractures that didn’t heal properly. Then he quit feeding her.”

  Claire was shocked by the strange ragged sound issuing from her throat.

  Somehow Tim appeared to understand and nodded as he said, “Willow’s lucky Sharon rescued her when she did. She might not have survived too much longer. I’ve reported her owner to the racing association.”

  “Will they do anything to him?”

  “They’ll have to investigate, but it’s probable he’ll be banned from racing.”

  “I suppose I’ll have to be satisfied with that, even though it doesn’t seem nearly severe enough. He should be banned from ever coming near a horse again.”

  “You’re right, but unfortunately, the law doesn’t offer animals anywhere near the protection it should.” He ran his hand through his hair in a gesture of frustration before a smile made the corners of his eyes crease. “It’s nice to meet someone who cares so much.”

  Something about that smile touched off the tug of attraction she’d felt the day before. He seemed so comfortably uncomplicated, in his plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up to expose the muscles of a man who routinely handled large, uncooperative animals.

  She felt a yearning to run her fingers over the contours of his forearms and brush back the forelock that once again fell over his right eyebrow. Maybe it was just that he was the antithesis of Milo’s smooth sophistication and effete slimness.

  She firmly clasped her hands behind her and turned toward the Boggs landscape. “Do you enjoy Len Boggs’s work? This is one of his new paintings.”

  “Actually, I’m partial to pictures of horses. I heard you have a Julia C
astillo painting here, and I’ve been meaning to come by and take a look at it.”

  Surprise flicked at Claire. The man’s speech was pure West Virginian until he spoke the artist’s name, and then his pronunciation turned classically Spanish. Add to that the fact he knew Julia Castillo painted horses. She reminded herself that he had been married to a prominent stage actress; he must have rubbed shoulders with some of the artistic set.

  “You’re more than welcome to see it,” she said, “but it isn’t for sale.”

  “And here I thought this was an art gallery, not a museum.” Tim’s gaze swept the paintings spotlighted on the white walls of the gallery.

  “The painting belongs to me,” Claire said, “but I feel such a beautiful piece of art should be shared. You may not be aware of this, but Ms. Castillo has not produced any new work for well over a year. Therefore, we have none to sell.”

  And it was the only painting her ex had left her with in the divorce settlement, so she treasured it beyond its artistic merit.

  Claire doubted Dr. Tim could afford a Castillo anyway. Since there was no new supply of paintings, the value of the existing ones had skyrocketed, another reason she kept hers at the gallery. Davis had recently upgraded the security and fire prevention systems, so she didn’t have to worry about theft or damage.

  “The painting is this way,” Claire said, starting toward the back of the gallery, where a windowless room with extra alarms held the most valuable inventory.

  As Tim followed her down the hallway, she actually felt the floorboards vibrate as his feet hit the old oak planks. Never before had she been so aware of a man’s presence through nothing more than his footsteps.

  She glanced at her companion and caught him doing the same to her.

  “So Sharon said you’re from up north.”

  “Actually, I grew up about ten miles south of Sanctuary,” she said.

  “From your lack of accent, I’d say you’d moved away for some time, then,” Tim said.

  “You’d be correct.” Refusing to be drawn into a discussion of her time in New York, she reached the door to the “Castillo room” and punched in the alarm code. “Are you a collector?”