Max (7 Brides for 7 Brothers Book 5) Read online

  “Uh… what?” Knox sounded as confused as Max had felt when he’d driven up and seen Ellie on that horse earlier.

  “Saddlebreds,” he said. “They prance. Pretty enough, but useless. No racehorses. No purses. Nothing but prancers who like to eat and take up space.”

  Knox was laughing now. Max tried not to feel annoyed about it.

  “Hey, you don’t really know they’re useless. What if there’s money in these horses? Surely people don’t raise them for the hell of it.”

  Max put a hand to his forehead and rubbed. “If there was, don’t you think the world would have heard of it? There are pictures in the house and barn. People wearing fussy hats and long coats, sitting on top of horses and looking like they have sticks up their asses. I seriously don’t think there’s money in this, Knox. Dad left me a fucking useless horse farm.”

  And a woman who definitely did not want to cooperate in disposing of said farm.

  Knox wasn’t laughing now. “Dude, I’m sorry. But don’t you think there’s something more there? Something Dad wanted you to know?”

  “If he wanted me to know that life is hard and we don’t always get what we want, well, I already knew that. If he wanted me to know that women are unreasonable and emotional, I knew that too.”

  “There’s a woman?” Max could hear Knox’s curiosity.

  “Yeah, there’s a woman. Her name’s Ellie. Her mother was friends with ours. Dad loaned her mother money.”

  “I take it her mother isn’t there anymore?”

  “Ellie’s was the only name on the contract Dad left me. I assume her mother’s gone, but I didn’t ask.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “Yeah, I should.” She’d expressed sympathy for his loss, and he hadn’t said a word about hers. If there was a loss. Maybe her mother had retired to Florida and was lying on a beach somewhere. But if she had, wouldn’t she be named on the contract as one of the beneficiaries of the proceeds?

  Max blew out a breath. “I own the farm, but I can’t sell it for a year after Dad’s death. Not unless Ellie agrees to sell. And she won’t. Not anytime soon.”

  “So don’t sell. Live the life of a gentleman farmer. Raise horses and bale hay for the next few months. See what the fuss is all about.”

  Max pulled the phone from his ear and stared at it for a second. Knox was losing his damn mind. No other excuse for it since Knox had spent his time wandering up the Pacific coast and falling for a woman who ran a yoga studio. Knox might be capable of leisure, but Max damn sure wasn’t. If he wasn’t doing a HALO jump out of an airplane at thirty-five thousand feet in the middle of the night over enemy territory, then he was on the front lines with his guns and his buddies and they were making a difference in the world.

  He did not do idle. He did not do gentleman farmer.

  Except you just moved into this house, didn’t you?

  Yeah, but that was temporary. His father might have wanted him to stay here, but he’d done it mostly to prove to Ellie Applegate that she didn’t control what went on around here anymore. She definitely didn’t control him. Just as soon as she got sick of him being in her hair, they’d come to an arrangement.

  “I think you know better than that, Knox,” he said coolly.

  Knox laughed. “You never know until you try. You might like slowing down for a change.”

  The hell he would.

  Ellie sat across from her friend and watched as Janet flipped through the pages of the contract the Brannigan family lawyer had faxed over. Janet was an attorney, but she wasn’t Ellie’s attorney because Ellie couldn’t afford that kind of help. But she was a friend, and as a friend she’d agreed to look at the document pro bono. She slipped her glasses off and looked up. She wasn’t smiling.

  “It’s pretty straightforward, Ellie. Max Brannigan owns the farm and any horses registered to the farm. He can sell, but only with your agreement—and he only needs that for a year, which is up in September, unfortunately. After that he can do what he wants with it. Right now you get half the proceeds from a sale… After that, you get nothing unless he decides to give it to you.”

  Ellie sat back in the overstuffed leather club chair in front of Janet’s desk and felt as if someone had whomped the air right out of her. “That’s not your standard agreement, is it?”

  “No, it’s definitely not.”

  “Is it legal?”

  “It appears to be, yes. It was Colin Brannigan’s property to do with as he wished. He loaned your mother money, but they had no formal contract. All they had was an IOU that she signed and a schedule of payments. If Max wants to accept that, he can. He doesn’t have to.” She stuck one end of her glasses into the corner of her mouth for a second. “You could take him to court and try to get him to adhere to the original IOU—but it would be expensive and you’d probably lose. He has the deed to the property, and he has the right to dispose of it.”

  “With my agreement.”

  “For one year from the date of his father’s death, yes.”

  Ellie scrubbed a hand over her head. “Isn’t that odd? Why a year? Why give me half?”

  Janet shrugged. “Colin Brannigan was from California. They’re all weird out there.”

  Ellie snorted. “No kidding.”

  “So how are the horses registered?”

  “They’re all in the farm’s name. Except for Champ. He’s mine. A birthday present from Momma before she got sick.” Thank God. She shivered at the thought of how badly this could go for her if Champ belonged to Applegate Farm and therefore to Max.

  “That’s good.” Janet leaned forward, a sudden gleam in her eye. “So what’s Max like, hmm? Colin might have been an older man, but he wasn’t a bad-looking one.”

  “How do you know?”

  Janet smiled and opened a desk drawer. When she plopped a handful of celebrity magazines on the desk, Ellie gaped. Janet shrugged again. “It’s mindless entertainment. I like reading about all the outrageousness in Hollywood.” She leaned back in her seat. “Anyway, Colin Brannigan owned Skylight Pictures. He was in the rags a lot until he died. Tragic, poor man.”

  “Cancer, wasn’t it?”

  “Aggressive and sudden, or so the news said. He was only sixty-seven.”

  Ellie thought of Max sitting in her living room and felt a pang of sympathy for him. She knew from experience that it wasn’t easy to lose a parent. And though she couldn’t fathom Max’s life as a Brannigan or understand what his relationship with his father had been, she still couldn’t imagine it was an easy thing to absorb. Especially as suddenly as Colin had passed.

  “So,” Janet said, interrupting her thoughts. “Is he handsome?”

  Ellie hoped the current of heat flaring to life inside her wasn’t making her cheeks red. If it was, Janet very politely didn’t comment.

  “I suppose he is. If you like that kind of thing.”

  Janet guffawed. “Girl, who doesn’t?”

  Ellie’s mouth twisted. “All right, yes, he’s freaking gorgeous. Tall, dark hair, gray eyes, and muscles that go on for days. Too bad he’s an arrogant jackass.”

  “So many of them are, darling.”

  “Isn’t that the truth?”

  “He’s moved in, huh?”

  “He won’t stay long. I put him in the worst room in the house. I predict he’ll be gone by tomorrow—Saturday at the latest. He won’t stay there when he can move to the Gratz Park Inn or the Castle Post and be waited on hand and foot.”

  Janet turned the contract and pushed it toward her. “You might as well keep this for reference. I know it’s not what you wanted, but at least you have some time. If Champ wins like you hope, you can sell him and offer to buy Max out.”

  Ellie frowned as she folded the contract in half. “Yeah.”

  Janet’s face creased with sympathy. “I thought that’s what you wanted, Ellie. You’ve been working your ass off to turn that horse into the best five-gaited colt in the country.”

  She stuffed the co
ntract into her purse and folded her arms. God, she was ridiculous sometimes. “It is what I want. But I’ll miss him, Janet. I’ll miss what could have been if I kept him for breeding.”

  Applegate Farm was once known for their superior stock. She wanted it to be that way again. She wanted to restore their reputation and prove they still had what it took to succeed. And she wanted to prove that she was as good a horse trainer as her mother had once been. Before her mother had gotten sick. Before she’d lost it all.

  “He’s a million-dollar horse, El. You may never get another one.”

  “Only if he wins,” Ellie said, her throat tight. Which he needed to do in the next couple of weeks at the first show of the season and then keep on doing all spring and summer long.

  “You’ll be fine. You’re an Applegate.”

  But I’m not Momma, she wanted to say. I don’t know what I’m doing the way she did.

  “Thanks.”

  “You wait and see, Ellie. I might not be much of a horsewoman, but I know what I’m talking about.”

  Ellie turned into her long driveway and prayed for the strength to deal with whatever waited for her up at the house. She’d spent a couple of hours with Janet. They’d gone to lunch at Malone’s in Lexington, and then she’d stopped by the tack store on the way home and picked up a gallon of Absorbine liniment to rub the horses down after their workouts. As she came out from beneath the stand of trees that shielded the view of the barns and house, she put her foot on the brake and stared.

  There was a dumpster. Beside her house. And there was a man hauling carpeting out the door and tossing it into the dumpster. She shook her head, certain she must be hallucinating, but the scene didn’t change. She pressed the gas and went up to the house, stopping and jumping from the truck as Max came out the door with another wad of carpeting.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she demanded.

  He stopped and looked at her. He was wearing a clingy white T-shirt, of all the damn things, and sweat glistened on his arms and face. He had on gloves and a face mask. His dark hair was damp, and his chest was broad, and her heart was beating entirely too fast.

  He hauled the carpet to the dumpster and chucked it inside. Then he faced her, dirt streaking his shirt, and eyes flashing fire as he pulled the mask down.

  “I’m ripping up that awful shag carpeting. What’s it look like?”

  She strode over and stopped in front of him, fury pumping into her. “I was gone for three hours. Three hours. And you’ve rented a dumpster and started tearing out the carpet? What gives you the right?”

  He grinned, and her heart did that skip-jump thing she was beginning to expect. “You did, sugar. Update the damn room yourself. Remember that?”

  Oh, for heaven’s sake. Ellie closed her eyes for a second. Dammit, she had said that. She’d been angry—and no way had she thought he’d do it. Maybe she should have known better.

  “I do now.”

  “Cheer up, Ellie. You aren’t the one doing the work or footing the bill.”

  “Well, thank God for small favors.”

  He laughed. “Sarcasm? Why am I not surprised?”

  She sniffed. “If you want to renovate, go for it. But just remember, that’s the room you’re staying in. If you make it uninhabitable for yourself in the interim, you’ll have nowhere to go but the barn. Or a hotel.”

  “I think I can manage. I’m not refinishing the floors today. Only ripping out the carpet.”

  He shoved a hand through his damp hair. It stuck up in places, and he was still sexy in spite of it. Lord have mercy, her libido did not need to flare up now. Over two years, Ellie. That’s a long damn time.

  Yes it was, but so what? There would be time for men later. Once she’d turned Champ into the sensation he was going to be. She hadn’t missed having a man in her life at all. She still didn’t miss it—except this one made her think there were parts of having a man around that she might have been missing after all.

  “Well, keep it quiet. I don’t want to hear you banging around in there when I’m trying to sleep.”

  He snorted. “It’s not even three in the afternoon yet. What makes you think I’ll still be doing this tonight?”

  She cocked a hip and put a hand on it. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing? I’d have thought a rich tycoon’s son would hire people to do the dirty work, not get dirty himself.”

  He shook his head slowly. It was a mocking gesture, and she felt the weight of it like a stone in her gut. Okay, so she was doing a lot of assuming here. But he hadn’t shown her any differently.

  Isn’t that what he’s doing right now?

  “I’m not a stranger to hard work if that’s what you’re thinking. Some parents with money give their children everything and teach them the value of nothing. Some give their children nothing and teach them the value of everything. I’ll let you guess which one my father was.”

  So maybe being born with a silver spoon wasn’t everything. She thought of her mother and her stories about growing up with Kathleen Brannigan—who wasn’t a Brannigan then, of course. Kathleen had loved horses too. They’d spent summers riding as much as they could and working in the stable under Ellie’s grandfather in order to learn everything about training horses.

  Ellie’s mother had been born to it, but Kathleen had worked hard to earn the right to sit at the feet of a master. She’d been good with horses, Momma said. She had good hands and a good seat, and she might have gone far if she hadn’t answered a different calling in life.

  And then she’d died in a car accident far too young. She’d left behind a husband and seven sons. Momma had cried for days when she’d heard the news. Ellie had only been five, but she remembered the time Momma had gotten upset about her friend. Ellie hadn’t quite understood why it was a bad thing that Kathleen Brannigan had gone to heaven, but of course she understood that kind of loss now.

  She’d just assumed that Kathleen’s children had been spoiled by the money and privilege, but she didn’t really know that. She should apologize to him, but the words got stuck in her throat. She was certainly putting her foot in her mouth today, wasn’t she?

  “Speaking of hard work, I have horses to feed,” she said. “I’d better get to it.”

  He frowned for a second. “Do you need help?”

  She started to reject his offer, but something stopped her. Miguel wasn’t here this afternoon to help. If she accepted Max’s offer, she’d get done that much faster and she could move on to other chores. She might not like him much, but she didn’t have to like him to accept his help. “If you’ve got a few moments, yeah, that’d be great.”

  He peeled off his gloves and tucked them into the pocket of his jeans. “Then let’s get going.”

  4

  Max wasn’t sure why he’d offered to help feed horses. He walked down to the barn with Ellie, all the while trying not to think about how her hair hung thick and shiny to the middle of her back or how her shirt clung to the curves of her body, emphasizing her breasts. He hadn’t seen her when she’d left the house earlier, so he didn’t know what she’d been wearing.

  Now he was having a hard time thinking about anything else. Clingy black shirt with decorative buttons on the sleeves, a pair of faded jeans, and black boots that zipped up the center before disappearing beneath her jeans. She was curvy in all the right places, and she was small enough that he still had trouble believing she could handle horses the size of the one she’d been riding earlier.

  She walked into the open barn and headed for a room where she slid the door open and started dipping grain from a covered bin, tossing it into a wheelbarrow. When it was full, she rolled it into the aisle.

  “You can grab an armful of hay and follow me.”

  If the barn had been tranquil before, now it was alive with the sound of horses nickering for food. Ellie pulled up to the first stall, scooped up some grain, and dumped it into the feed bucket through an opening in the stall.

  She came over and
took some hay from him, showing him the amount. “Give this much to each horse, okay?”

  “Got it.”

  She opened the stall and tossed the hay inside, then went down the line, scooping grain into buckets while he followed and dropped hay into each stall. He had to go back a couple of times for more, but when it was done he calculated that they’d fed twelve horses.

  “What about the ones in the pasture?”

  “They’ve been fed already. They don’t need as much with the grass.”

  Ellie rolled the wheelbarrow back into the feed room. A cat came running from somewhere, and she cooed to it before dumping cat food into a bowl and scratching its back while it ate, purring loud enough to be heard across the room where Max stood.

  Ellie looked up and smiled. He liked her smile, but it faded quicker than he wanted it to.

  “Thanks for helping.”

  “You’re welcome. Wasn’t too hard.”

  She came toward him and he stepped out of the way while she pulled the door closed.

  “What about the cat?”

  “Caesar?” She pointed to the walls that didn’t go all the way to the roof. “He’ll scale that wall in half a second flat. Then he’ll stroll along on the rafters for a while before he decides to come down.”

  Max gazed down the length of the wide aisle that went from one end of the barn to the other. “You have room for more horses.”

  “Forty stalls. They were full at one time.”

  “But not any longer.”

  Her gaze clouded for a second. “No, not any longer.” She shrugged. “The horse business is tough. There are highs and lows, like with anything. Horses are a luxury, and they’re typically the first to go when times are rough. Keeping a horse for your kid costs more than piano lessons or karate or most other sports. It’s a no-brainer when it’s time to economize.”

  He looked at the nameplates on the closest stalls. Applegate’s Highland Flame. Applegate’s Bronze Beauty. Applegate’s No Regrets.

  “You bred all these horses?”

  She followed his gaze. “Many of them, yes. My mother had a gift for figuring out which bloodlines to cross for the results she wanted. At one time, Applegate horses were prized for their sensibility and smooth action. You can still find Applegate’s Cavalier in the bloodlines of many of today’s champions.”