Theherwas a sleek chestnut mare currently being led toward them by a short, whip-thin man.
"She's incredible." Adam couldn't keep the admiration out of his voice. The mare was muscled with clean lines. She’d been brushed so her coat had a gorgeous sheen. "Where did you find her?"
"A farm in Kentucky. She's too rough for this year's Preakness, but next year..." Frank nodded, and the jockey climbed into the exercise saddle and reined the horse to the dirt track that Adam knew made up a quarter mile circle in the otherwise empty field.
The horse shifted, and Adam almost missed the moment she burst into motion, it happened so quickly.
He squinted against the morning sunlight, not wanting to miss one breath of the display. The mare's long stride ate up the track. Each beat of her hooves against the soft dirt took only the fleetest second. It was as if she were flying.
It was beautiful.
This sight, Adam could never hope to capture behind a desk. The breathless beauty of a horse racing not because she was forced, but because she lived for these moments.
Like anothershehad.
For one moment, he felt the wind cool against his face, heard an echo of laughter, and was back in BelAnders Park with Breanna White of the Bear Creek, Wyoming, Whites.
He'd been instantly smitten by the girl—for she had been a girl then—who would challenge him to race when he'd been surrounded by a group of friends. Her wild beauty had captivated him. And then she'd disappeared, presumably to return home to the West.
Three years, and he still wondered what might've happened if he'd abandoned his horse and his friends and followed her through the city streets.
Nothing. Nothing would've happened. She'd been a girl, a teenager really, but still in the last throes of childhood.
And he was rooted here in Philadelphia. Chained to theDaily Explorer. Entrenched in his mother's social machinations.
Frank's mare rounded the last curve and past the two men, sand flying even as the jockey slowed and then walked her again around the track.
"So...?"
"She's worth her weight in gold," Adam told his friend.
Frank punched a fist into the air. "I knew it," he crowed. "I knew it the moment I laid eyes on her. You've the best eye for horseflesh I know. We'll be taking home the Stakes next year."
Adam clapped his friend on the back, laughing as he spun dreams out, the same dreams Adam had once dared to hope for.
Two hours later, Adam was hunkered down over the battle-scarred desk where Father had pigeon-holed him two years ago. TheExploreroffice bustled around him, other reporters banging away at their typewriters or muttering in conversation with each other. Typesetters worked on tonight's edition that would hit the streets tomorrow morning before dawn.
Father hadn't known the freedom Adam would find in writing, even if it was only a window cracked open occasionally. Not the door meant for escape.
Across the office, a telephone rang. Adam’s typewriter seemed to almost glare at him, waiting for something meaningful to pour from his fingers onto the page.
It rarely did.
Adam's gaze flicked to his father's office. Maybe today he would march in there and quit. He struck the fanciful thought. Father would disown him.
Father's light was off, the door closed tightly. Had he gone home early?
No.
More likely, he'd run off to some important meeting with his cronies. Father was never home early, not once in all the years Adam could remember. He worked from dawn until dusk, sometimes later. Adam saw him more often at the parties Mother either hosted or attended than at the supper table.
Father wanted Adam to be just like him. To take over the paper, eventually. It had been Adam's duty since birth.
Adam could think of no worse fate. Oh, he knew the business. Father had insisted he start work as a hawker at age fourteen. He'd learned typesetting at seventeen. Then he'd been promoted to junior reporter.
Groomed to take over.
He tugged at the collar of his shirt, suddenly feeling the closeness of the walls, the strangling sensation of expectation that permeated every surface inside this building.
