Paternity Lessons. Maris Soule
was getting to her with those intense blue eyes of his and the fact that he cared. She was intrigued by the prospect of working with a wild Mustang gone bad, and she was intrigued by Tyler Corwin. “I’ll have to go see the horse,” she said. “There are some I can’t help.”
“All I’m asking is that you try,” Tyler said, his smile growing wider. “If you can just get him to the stage where Lanie can handle him.”
“You said her doctor feels the horse will help her physically as well as emotionally. How is her physical health?” Shaunna asked. “Is she fit enough to work with this horse?”
“Yes. She has a slight limp and hasn’t regained all of her strength, but her doctor feels riding will help strengthen her muscles.”
“From what you’ve told me, she won’t be riding the horse for a while. But I’d expect her to work with him on a daily basis, especially in the beginning.”
“If that’s what it takes, she’ll be here. All I ask is that you not put her in any danger. I do care about her.”
“I’ll want to see the horse and meet her before I make a decision.”
“You want to meet her? Lanie?” Shaunna noted a flash of panic in his look and had a feeling there was something he wasn’t telling her. At the lift of her eyebrows, he quickly acquiesced. “Okay,” he said. “You tell me when, and we’ll be here.”
“How about Saturday? Say ten o’clock?”
“Saturday, ten o’clock it is.”
Tyler left the house with mixed feelings. He was sure once Shaunna saw Lanie’s horse, she would move the Mustang to her stable. If what he’d heard about her was true, she wouldn’t allow that horse to spend two more minutes, much less two months or even two days, in his current condition. Even he didn’t want that, and he was no horse lover.
What worried him was taking Lanie to meet Shaunna. He knew how Lanie acted around Alicia, how she acted around him. Lanie’s doctor said Lanie’s behavior was her way of testing him.
Well, she certainly was.
The battle was constant, and he sometimes wondered if it was worth it. Lanie was so angry, and nothing he said seemed to help. Nothing he did made a difference.
Yet he couldn’t give up. He still remembered how she’d been as a baby, smiling when he went to take her out of her crib and reaching for him with those tiny, chubby hands of hers. She’d loved him then, just as he’d loved her. One way or another, he was going to find a means of breaking through the wall she had erected... that fate had erected.
He wondered if he should have told Shaunna the whole story about Lanie. It might have helped her understand things. Then again, he hadn’t told Alicia. He hadn’t told anyone but his parents and Lanie’s doctor. It seemed better that way.
Somehow he would find a way to get past Lanie’s anger. And perhaps her doctor was right. Perhaps the horse would help. Perhaps Shaunna Lightfeather would help.
He smiled when he thought of Shaunna. He’d been attracted to her, which he found surprising. Not that she didn’t have an appeal. With her high cheekbones, swarthy coloring and unusual eyes, she was a good-looking woman, in a natural sort of way. Striking. Sexy.
He shook his head as he drove back toward Bakersfield. He was thinking crazy. One thing he’d discovered in his thirty-four years was that physical attraction was not enough. And from what little he’d learned and observed about Shaunna, he knew she wasn’t a woman who would fit into his life-style. Not at all.
She definitely wasn’t a businesswoman. Stacking bills on a kitchen table wasn’t a good business practice, and when she’d shown him around her stable, after agreeing to “look” at Magic, Tyler had found himself both impressed and dismayed. On the positive side, although the stable showed its age, everything was neat, in good repair and clean. There were no smelly, dark, tomblike stalls in either of her two barns, and from the looks of her fencing, he didn’t think any horse—wild Mustang or not—would be getting out.
And she’d been right when she told him that every stall she had was filled. It was when she said that half of the horses belonged to her—were basically abandoned horses she’d rescued—that he began to understand why so many of those bills on her kitchen table were marked as overdue and why she’d asked if he knew a good accountant, one who was honest. Emotions rather than good business sense seemed to rule her decisions. Emotions he wasn’t above playing on.
Nope, from his initial impressions, he wouldn’t say Shaunna Lightfeather was a good businesswoman at all. But it didn’t hurt his ego to know that she’d found him attractive. At least, her actions made him think she did. It was the only explanation he could give for what happened when she accidentally backed into him, bumping her rear end into his hips.
She’d gotten all flustered and pulled away as if burned by a hot poker. She’d actually blushed, the color turning her skin a richer tan. He’d found her behavior appealing. It had been a while since he’d seen a woman blush.
Appealing, but inconsequential, he told himself. After all, what did they have in common? She loved animals, had them all over the place: dogs, cats, horses and cattle. There was even a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest. He hadn’t owned a pet since the dog he’d left behind when he divorced Lanie’s mother.
He had an extensive library of classical CDs. Shaunna listened to country and western. It had been playing on both the radio in her house and the ones in her barns. And he could just see her at a business dinner. She’d probably shock his clients with her frankness. She’d certainly shocked him when she talked about castrating the colt she was working with. It was her hand gestures that had gotten to him. Nothing had been left to his imagination. He’d even had the urge to squeeze his knees together.
No, they had nothing in common.
Except, perhaps, a little chemistry.
He grinned and turned onto the highway. Maybe Shaunna had realized that. Maybe she’d told him about castrating that horse as a warning. Well, she didn’t have to worry. He wasn’t about to start something. Chemistry could be ignored. He’d been doing it for years.
“Just take on the horse,” he said to himself, then added, “and Lanie.”
Chapter Two
Tyler and his daughter arrived promptly at ten o’clock Saturday morning. Shaunna watched the two of them get out of the car. Tyler was less formally dressed than the first time she’d seen him, his suit replaced by khaki pants, a tan golf shirt and brown loafers. He looked like an ad from GQ, and she knew what an hour of working with horses would do to his clothes.
His daughter was more appropriately dressed. The girl had on jeans, a Western-style plaid shirt and cowboy boots. She was as leggy as a colt, thin and pale, and her reddishbrown hair lacked luster. In some ways, Lanie reminded Shaunna of the Mustang they were about to discuss. Both showed the effects of trauma, Lanie’s the result of an automobile accident, Magic’s caused by the actions of his caretakers.
Lanie limped slightly as she walked toward Shaunna, and Shaunna could see that the girl had a scar on her forehead. It disappeared into the uneven part between her two braids, and considering the stray hairs hanging down the girl’s neck, Shaunna guessed that Lanie had braided her own hair.
What she found intriguing was how little the girl resembled her father. Although Shaunna could see that both Lanie and Tyler had blue eyes, the shapes of their faces were entirely different, along with their hair coloring and body builds. Then again, Shaunna knew she resembled her mother far more than she did her father, especially in her eyes.
Besides the differences in their looks, there were other things Shaunna noticed about the pair walking toward her that piqued her curiosity. Father and daughter kept a distance between them, didn’t touch and didn’t look at each other. Both were