He hooks one leg upon his saddle. “It wasn’t a fair fight,” he says in that animated tone he uses for everything, even something so mundane as “looks like rain.” “Girls just don’t have enough coal in the box. Still, pretty legs like those would fetch a pretty sum, if Old Gin ever wants to sell.”
“Yes, sir,” I reply, even though Old Gin would sooner sell his own pretty legs than Sweet Potato’s. Perhaps I can tell Merritt Caroline sent me on an errand... in the middle of a haunted meadow...
“This is Ameer.” The Arabian stands a hand taller than Sweet Potato, with a cresty neck and hind legs like birch trunks. Tossing his head, he puffs and struts the way males do when they know the females are watching. Sweet Potato, who is not in season, pulls the heads off a clump of daisies. “His name means ‘chief,’ and he’s faster than a hat in a hurricane. Those other horses will be eating his dust.”
“He’s on the roster?”
“Yes, ma’am. Even got Johnny Fortune to ride him.”
“Johnny Fortune?”
“Best jockey in the States.” His blue-gray eyes glint like war medals. “He’s like a bird on a fence. You can’t topple him. Father isn’t happy about it—why play when you can work?—but it’s Mama’s race.”
Mr. Payne is grooming Merritt to take over his mills, but Merritt has always been more interested in pleasure than paper. “Well, good luck with that. I must be on my—”
“I hear you’re wrangling my little sister these days.”
I brace myself.
“Where is she?” He glances around him with mock concern. “There are no silken divans here on which to rest her mollycoddled posterior.”
“Paying her respects.”
“I see. To whom?”
“Friends.” Dearly departed ones. I cringe as the net closes over me.
“Wonderful. If she were visiting enemies, I fear that would take all month.”
I cough. It is no secret that Caroline is the sort of girl many like but few love. Merritt’s grin stretches, while I scrape around for a lie.
He wiggles his fingers. “Jo, I don’t wish to vex you. Women’s pettifogs are the least of my concerns right now.”
“What do you mean?”
He sighs. “Father wants me to settle down, gain some respectability,work, of all things. I’m supposed to be at the mills. And my bride, Jane Bentley of Boston, is a bore who insists on staying through the horse race, which means I mustferry her around everywhere. It isn’t fair. I am only twenty-one, and still have many”—his eyes widen a fraction—“wrong turns left to make.” Even as a lad, Merritt was always a rake, catching the neighborhood girls by their pigtails and kissing their cheeks. “If only she had your spunk. You haven’t forgotten Chattahoochee?”
My cheeks warm. When I was eleven and Merritt fifteen, he’d gotten it into his head that he would catch dinner. His father had taken him fishing at the Chattahoochee River the week before, but the only thing Merritt had caught was a cold. After he failed to return by late day, Mrs. Payne sent me to look for him.
I found him throwing rocks into a pool at the base of a waterfall. He was drenched. “Forgot to bring hooks.”
A trout leaped off the top of the fall. In fact, there were so many trout, the water was a writhing, silvery mass.
“There are other ways to catch a fish.”
“I’ve tried,” he lamented. “They’re too slippery.”
Sweet Potato bugles out a neigh, startling me from my thoughts.
Merritt pushes back the round top of his gambler-style hat, exposing squirrel-brown hair shot with gold. “I was doing it all wrong. Trying to catch a fish with my hands was like trying to wrestle a greased hog. You showed me how to catch it only long enough to sling it onto the riverbank. We caught five.” He chuckles.
“That’s Old Gin’s trick, sir. The fish just need redirection.”
“No ‘sir.’ It’s just ‘Merritt’ between friends.” Sea-blue eyes travel around my face.
He got me fired. I have never known the Payne heir to be wicked in the way men with money can be, but a maid cannot be too cautious around her master.
“Well, good day, sirs.” Sweet Potato carries us off. When I glance back around, Merritt, still watching, gives me a bow.
