“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Got a saddle on him yet?”
“As if.” I stared at the betting shop across the road—my father’s regular haunt when he wasn't pissing it up in the Legion. “He hasn’t had a saddle on him in years, and I doubt he will again.”
“Because you don’t have time to work with him?”
“No—I get on him bareback when I can—but he doesn’t want to be ridden by anyone who ain’t Grandpa or you, and that isn’t going to happen, is it?”
Jonah said nothing. Shadow had been Grandpa’s horse, but his brother, Dorn, had belonged to my father. The stallions had been like night and day—one black, one dappled grey. Their personalities too. Dorn would let anyone ride him, would eat apples from children’s hands, and kiss their cheeks with his rubbery pink lips. We’d loved him like we’d loved Grandpa, but they were both gone, and we were stuck with Shadow who hated the whole world... except my useless drunk of a dad.
“You could always come by and pitch in,” I said when the silence made my teeth itch. “With Shadow, I mean. It’s all I can do to lead him down from the field these days.”
“Thought I was banished?”
“You are when you’re bladdered. Have a day off, mate.”
“A day means nothing when the years are so long. You know that better than I do. Take care of the horses, son. They’re blessed to have you.”
My father’s hand was warm on my arm, and then he got out of the van. I didn’t watch him shuffle up to his scuffed front door, never did, but another sliver of my heart went with him with every doddery step. Andthatwas why I hated him so much. Because as hard as I tried not to love him, in moments like these, I still fucking did.
I pictured Dicky McGee and wished I’d killed him.
And then I put the van in gear with a heavy sigh. I’d forgotten to grill my father about his latest fuck up, but there was a dozen Dicky McGees in this town. I couldn’t kill them all.
* * *
Shadow danced around the apple trees in the corner of the top field. I watched his elegant footwork as I hammered the final nails into the patched fence. In another lifetime, he could’ve been a show horse. Shame he was too good at shagging for us to geld him and sell him on to someone with the time and inclination to train him.
“As if you could ever sell him.”Emma’s scoffing from the last time I’d mooted the idea echoed in my head as I chucked my tools in the box. She was right, but that wasn’t the point. Shadow was fit as a fiddle and relatively young. With Grandpa gone, he had no real place on Whisper Farm. Apart from the shagging, of course. His stud income had paid the hay bill last winter.What more do you want from him? His leg to fall off?
I leant on the fence and rubbed my face, pressing the heels of my grimy hands against my temples, like I could silence the conflict in my brain by pressure alone.As if I could ever sell him.But that didn’t make me feel any less guilty about keeping a healthy horse in a stable that had been built for animals in need.
“All right, mate?”
I jumped and spun around, my hands falling from my face. Harry was behind me dressed in running gear, his broad shoulders wrapped in a pristine white T-shirt, his muscular calves a devilish vision in skin-tight black Lycra. “What are you doing up here?”
“Running. Emma said there was a good route through the fields now most of the horses are in.”
“Don’t go in this field.” I jerked my head at Shadow. “He’ll charge you.”
Harry grinned. “She told me that too.”
I nodded and waited for him to jog on, but he came to the fence and rested his cut forearms on the newly mended post. “He was your grandfather’s horse?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t imagine an old man riding him. He looks wild.”
“He can be, but Grandpa and my dad had a way with stallions. They bred them for a while.”
Harry’s gaze flickered to the wreckage of the old stud farm in the distance. Did he know that Jonah had razed it in a botched insurance scam? Had Emma told him that too? Jesus. The bloke had only been here twenty-four hours.
Lacking the words to match Harry’s friendly curiosity, I whistled through my teeth. Across the field, Shadow stopped his prancing and looked at me. He wouldn’t come—he rarely did—but the acknowledgement was progress, and Lord knew we needed some of that around here.
“He’s beautiful,” Harry said. “I’ve never seen a horse like him.”
“Get many horses in London?”
