Harvesting the Heart Read online

  When she was in the hallway by the elevator, she leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. Nicholas stood beside her, his hands jammed into his trousers pockets. "I guess a drink upstairs is out of the question," he murmured.

  Paige opened her eyes, momentarily confused, as if Nicholas were the last person she'd expected to find beside her. A smile fixed itself on her face. "It was delicious, Nicholas," she said, and Nicholas couldn't help it, he kept staring at the puffy outline of her still-swollen lower lip, which made her look like a 1930s screen siren. She covered her mouth with her hand.

  Nicholas grabbed her fingers and pulled them down to her side. "Don't do that," he said. "Don't ever do that." He slipped his suit jacket over her shoulders.

  "Do what?"

  Nicholas paused for a fraction of a second and then picked up again. "Lie to me."

  He expected her to deny it, but Paige turned to him. "It was awful," she admitted. "I know you didn't mean it, Nicholas, but that isn't really my speed."

  Nicholas didn't believe it was really bis speed, either, but he'd been doing it for so long he had never really considered anything else. He rode down the fourteen stories in the elevator in silence, holding Paige's hand, thinking about what Taylor Street in Chicago might look like and whether, in fact, he wouldn't be caught dead on it.

  It wasn't that he doubted Paige; in spite of his parents' reaction, he knew that they were going to get married. But he wondered how very different two worlds had to be before they kept people apart. His parents had come from opposite sides of the proverbial tracks, but that didn't count, since they'd wanted to swap places anyway. In Nicholas's mind, that sort of equalized them. His mother had married his father to thumb her nose at society, and his father had married his mother to gain entry into a tight circle of wealth that all the new money in the world couldn't buy. He really didn't know how--or if--love ever figured into it, and that was the biggest difference between his parents' relationship and the feelings he had for Paige. He loved Paige because she was simple and sweet, because her hair was the color of an Indian summer, and because she could do an impres

  sion of Elmer Fudd that was nearly flawless. He loved her because she had made it to Cambridge on less than a hundred dollars, because she knew how to say the Lord's Prayer backward without stopping, because she could draw exactly what he could never quite put into words. With an overwhelming fervor that surprised Nicholas himself, he believed in her ability to land on her feet; in fact, Paige was the closest thing to a religion he'd had in years. He didn't give a damn whether or not she could tell a fish knife from a salad fork, if she'd be able to pick a waltz from a polka. That wasn't what marriage was about.

  But on the other hand, Nicholas couldn't help but remember that marriage was a man-made thing, a statute created by society itself. Two souls that were meant to be together--and Nicholas wasn't saying

  that was the case with him; he was too scientific to be so

  romantic--well, two people like that could just mate for life with no need for a paper certificate. Marriage didn't really seem to be about love; it was about the ability to live together for a long period of time, and that was something completely different. That was something he just wasn't sure about when it came to him and Paige.

  He stared at her profile when he pulled up at a red light. Tiny nose, shining eyes, classic lips. Suddenly she turned to him, smiling.

  There had to be a happy medium. "What are you thinking about?"

  she asked.

  "I was thinking," Nicholas said, "that I wish you could show

  me what Taylor Street is like."

  chapter 29

  Paige

  that the perfect end to an evening of seduction is a ten o'clock check through the stable." Eddy and Andy were chestnuts, Thoroughbreds. Tony was a mixed-breed pony she had saved from starvation. Burt was a quarter horse that was older than dirt, and Jean-Claude and Elmo were three-year-olds that had come from the racetrack and were in the process of being broken.

  While she took Jean-Claude or Elmo down to the ring to work on a lunge line, Josh and I mucked the stalls and spread sweet bedding and scrubbed the water buckets. It was hard work, which knotted my back and my calf muscles, but I found that I could rake through an entire stable sometimes without thinking about Nicholas or Max. In fact, almost anything I did in association with the horses

  took my mind off the family I had left behind, and I began to see what held my mother's fascination.

  I was filling the black beveled buckets in Aurora's stall, and as usual she was trying to bite my back every time I turned away. She was the eighth horse my mother owned, the white fairy-tale mare. She had said that she bought her on impulse, because she'd been hoping Prince Charming would come with the deal, but she'd regretted the purchase ever since. Aurora was bitchy and foul-tempered and stubborn to train. "I've done Aurora's water," I called to Josh, who was mucking farther down in the same barn. I liked him--he was a little weird, but he made me smile. He did not eat meat because "somewhere, cows are sacred." He had let me know the second day I was here that he was already halfway down the eightfold path to nirvana.

  I picked up the wheelbarrow Josh had filled with manure and went to the dump pile that composted under the hot Carolina sun. I lifted my face and felt the grime collecting on the back of my neck although it was only eight-thirty.

  "Paige!" Josh yelled, "Get here quick! And bring a halter!"

  I threw the wheelbarrow aside and raced back, grabbing the halter hanging beside Andy's stall. From the far end of the barn I heard Josh's soothing words. "Come closer," he whispered to me, "and walk slow."

  When I peeked out the far door, he had Aurora by the mane. "It's customary to lock the stall when you finish," he said, grinning.

  "I did!" I insisted, and I worked the little clip, just to prove it. But one of the chain-link spokes had broken, and I realized I had probably fastened the clip over that one, and the door had sprung free. "Sorry," I said, and I took Aurora by the halter. "Maybe you should have just let her go," I said.

  "I don't know," Josh said. "I don't owe Lily any favors this month."

  We took a break and went to watch my mother lunging Jean-Claude. She stood in the center of the ring, letting the horse buck and gallop in circles around her. This time, he had a saddle on his back, simply to get used to the feeling. "Look at his conformation," she'd said. "He's a born jumper--nice sloping shoulders, short back."

  "And," Josh had said, "an ass like a truck."

  My mother had patted him on the cheek with the same tenderness she showed her horses. "Just as long as you don't say that about me," she said.

  We watched the muscles in my mother's arms cord and bunch as she tugged on the line that Jean-Claude was valiantly trying to shake free. "How long has she been doing this?" I asked.

  "Jean-Claude?" Josh said. "He's only been here a month. But Jesus, Donegal's her first horse, and he's a champion, and he's only seven." Josh bent down and pulled a stalk of grass from the ground and settled it between his front teeth. He began to tell me the story of my mother and Fly By Night Farm.

  She had been working as a personal secretary to Harlan Cozackis, a Kentucky millionaire who had made his fortune in corrugated cardboard. He was very involved in the racing circuit and bought a couple of horses who placed well in the Derby and the Preakness. When he got pancreatic cancer, his wife left him for his business partner. He had told Lily she ought to go too; who gave a damn if his company was in order, since the co-owner was banging his own wife? But Lily hadn't left. She stopped keeping the books and started to feed Harlan barley soup in bed; she recorded the times he'd taken his painkillers. He tried chemotherapy for a while, and Lily stayed with him the nights after the treatments, holding damp washcloths to his wrinkled chest and mopping up his vomit.

  When he started to die, Lily sat for hours at his side, reading him the odds for local horse races and placing bets over the phone. She told him stories of her days a