Four

Wolf’s Head Farms, the Thoroughbred ranch owned by Leigh’s grandfather, sat outside the little town of Burnside, Texas, a river town a few miles west of Austin in Texas Hill Country—spring-fed, sunwarmed, green and rolling as England. Better horse country, too, her granddad always said. It was the clear springs, Gene used to say, that made Texas Thoroughbreds grow up to be such fast runners, the fastest anywhere, and though Leigh always suspected it was an old man’s sentimental attachment to the land that kept him there more than any magic springs, she never dared contradict him. Her grandfather loved Texas—loved its harshness, loved its beauty. The prickly irascible nature of the place suited him, suited his sharp mind and quick temper and taciturn disposition, his soft old heart, and she’d known, even as a very young child, that he would never leave it.

She’d grown up on the farm protected by her granddad’s money and his deep love for his impulsive, restless, book-loving granddaughter. Her mother, Abby, had grown up there, too, the younger of Gene Merrill’s two kids—“stubborn as a two-dollar mule,” her grandfather always said, which was ironic coming from a man as stubborn as he was—but despite that one shared quality, they had little in common. Gene was old-fashioned, as strict and controlling as Abby was idealistic and adventurous. Abby’s mother, Leigh’s grandmother, had died of a sudden heart attack when Abby was in high school, and her absence became an ache in her daughter like a missing tooth, and afterward father and daughter never saw eye to eye on much. When Abby graduated high school she ran away to New York to live with a bunch of musicians in a cold-water squat on the Lower East Side against her father’s explicit orders. It was the seventies, after all. Gene was a horseman, an outdoorsman, a self-made businessman and Texan—he didn’t have much patience with punks or hippies and was suspicious of anything as unconventional as a squat. He was deeply disappointed when Abby came home pregnant and unmarried after five years. She’d broken his heart, he said. Still, he took his daughter back into his home, and after Leigh was born he doted on her as much as if she’d been his own child.

Everything between them would have been all right after that, except that Abby wouldn’t name Leigh’s father. The secret was a splinter that burrowed itself between Gene and his only daughter, a constant source of irritation. Leigh suspected her grandfather would have taken a shotgun to her daddy if he’d been able to find him, so Abby kept him a secret, so secret that not even Leigh knew his name or where to find him. It was possible that Abby hadn’t really known herself who he was, but that didn’t stop Leigh from dreaming about him, from imagining Abby as a young girl in the big city, a punk girl with black hair and big black boots and a leather jacket living a whirlwind romance with a mysterious stranger. It didn’t stop Leigh from dreaming that she, too, might run away from home one day, run to New York and have her own adventure there, meet someone mysterious, wriggle out from under her grandfather’s strict control.

Life was quiet at Wolf’s Head—too quiet, for Leigh—and over time New York started to feel like a beacon, calling to her from her bedroom in Texas with its pink canopy, its parade of stuffed animals. At the Burnside library she’d take out all the books on New York: its politics, its complicated geography, its history. She’d cut pictures of Manhattan skyscrapers and brownstones out of magazines and hang them on the walls of her room, pore over real-estate listings to choose fantasy apartments and neighborhoods, watch Woody Allen and Nora Ephron movies and dress like the characters. And she had the perfect career in mind for a girl addicted to romance novels, one that was guaranteed to lead her to Manhattan one day—editor. All she had to do was get terrific grades, go to a top-notch school, and learn everything there was to know about books.

Her mother seemed to love the idea. She’d look at the pictures of Manhattan on Leigh’s walls and the movies about Brooklyn on the TV and say, We’ll go there together one day, Leela. I’ll show you all the places I lived. I’ll introduce you to the people I knew. You’ll be happy there. I know I was. And Leigh would lie with her head in her mother’s lap and smell the hay, the bluebonnets growing in the fields, and she’d think: Someday I’ll have a different life than this. More exciting. More adventurous.

Leigh loved remembering her mother that way, with hay in her hair and promises on her lips, because Abby Merrill had died of breast cancer when Leigh was ten. Afterward most of Leigh’s memories of her mother were of her mother’s illness—Abby losing her hair, Abby sleeping all day, skeletal and hollow-voiced when she kissed Leigh good-bye. What was left of Abby were a few impressions: her mother’s laugh, her mother’s strong hands brushing her hair. Her mother’s kindness. Leigh mourned her and mourned the dream they’d shared. In many ways, moving back east had been as much about reconnecting with that image of her mother as it had been about Leigh’s own career ambitions.

As the years went on, the pain of losing her mother lessened a little bit at a time, helped along by distance and the constant needs of the farm. There were always new foals in the spring, and lambs, and her grandfather’s ornery peacock, Peabody, as playmates and projects. Her grandfather insisted Leigh help with the chores—he believed chores built character, and it didn’t matter if it was for boys or girls—so from the time she was old enough to hold a pitchfork, Leigh helped muck stalls and mend fences and mow grass. Gene took her all over the country to watch his horses race, Kentucky and New York and Florida and California, Leigh cheering her grandfather’s swift horses. At home there were books to read and schoolwork to finish, secret places to explore, and chores, chores, chores—horses to breed, horses to break, always the horses, which managed to be both business commodities and expensive pets. Only the best trainers, the best feed and tack for her grandfather’s Thoroughbreds, who were the best sires and dams in the world.

It was for this reason that her grandfather hired, when Leigh was sixteen, a couple of famous Thoroughbred trainers named Ben Rhodes and Dale Tucker, who were well known for turning even marginal horses into champions, and champions into stars. They arrived at the ranch in Burnside one summer with Jake in tow. Jake was seventeen, resentful as hell about leaving his friends and his old girlfriend back in Kentucky, which he seemed to think was paradise on earth. Real Thoroughbred men lived in Kentucky, Jake had complained, not Texas. Texas might as well be the ends of the earth.

Leigh remembered the day they arrived, a dusty Sunday afternoon in August, the kind of day that stretched out sweltering and indolent, the kind of day she usually spent at Wolf Rock, a little pool at the back of her grandfather’s property fed by a clear underground spring. Above the lip of the pool stood a large limestone boulder that the wind and water had molded, over the centuries, into the shape of a wolf’s head—hence the name of the farm. The water there was always cool and clean, and in the long afternoon hours of the summer, she’d strip off her clothes and soak naked in the water, her skin turning brown in the sun, the air hot and still. Animals came from all over for a drink, and Leigh would hold herself as silent as possible whenever a deer or a coyote (even, once, a small black bear) came stealthily out of the bushes. They always ignored her; she was just another animal to them, not small enough to eat, not big enough to be a threat. The horses would come, too, sometimes rolling in the cool mud at the edge of the spring, scratching their behinds against a tree trunk. When the sun started to go down, Leigh would get dressed and wander home in time for supper, her grandfather admonishing her to take a bathing suit at least. “It isn’t seemly, Leela,” he’d say. “It isn’t ladylike. What will you do if someone sees you? You’re nearly a woman now. I don’t want you to get into trouble.”

“Sure, Pop,” she’d say, and then do as she pleased anyway. Like mother, like daughter.

The afternoon Jake arrived she’d promised her grandfather some help with a three-month-old colt that had taken ill. It had been born in May and walked just hours after birth, the way it was supposed to, but a few weeks later it had sickened, lost its glossy bay coat, and refused to stand. For weeks she and her grandfather had tended it, rubbing lotion on its dry skin, trying to encourage it to get to its feet. They’d had vets by the dozens to see it, but nothing had helped.

Finally her grandfather had made the decision to put it down. Leigh was heartbroken—the colt had the best possible pedigree, out of her grandfather’s best mare and stud—but the poor thing was suffering, and it was time for its suffering to end. She had been there to see the vet give it the injection, stroking its head as it closed its eyes for the last time. Afterward she’d gone for her swim, but her heart wasn’t in it. She’d managed only a quick dip, but the afternoon was already spoiled, so she’d turned and come straight home.

The truck, a big, new red Chevy with Kentucky plates, was waiting by the tire swing in the circle driveway in front of the main house when she came around the bend. She’d forgotten about the new trainers her grandfather had hired, but there was Ben Rhodes, stretching his back after the long drive, looking the place over admiringly—the long, low stables, clean and cool and shaded from the sun by deep porches; the breeding shed and equipment barns; not one but two freshly painted white cottages for the trainers and the farmhands; the brick big house with its two long, low wings fronted by an impressive columned porch, a deep blue swimming pool in back; the rows of live oaks leading up to the house; and surrounding it all, four hundred acres of the best Texas pastureland, dotted by stands of bur oaks and cedars all fed by the best clear underground springs for hundreds of miles around.

“Whoo, there’s a lot of money here,” Ben had said under his breath. He had dark hair shot with silver, wide shoulders stretching a red T-shirt, crinkly, friendly eyes. He gave her a little wave. “Hey, darlin’,” he’d said, “I thought I was coming to Gene Merrill’s place, not a mermaid cove.”

Leigh had been self-conscious all of a sudden about her damp T-shirt sticking to her skin, her dripping hair, the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra. She folded her arms over her chest.

When Ben’s training partner, Dale Tucker, had come around the other side of the truck, a little too close to her, Leigh took two steps back. He was a short man, shorter than Ben by at least a head, and looked Leigh up and down like a man used to judging the value of horseflesh. “My God,” he said. “We’ll have to keep an eye on this one, Ben. She looks like trouble. Rich trouble.” Then he’d winked. Leigh was taken aback—she wasn’t used to grown men speaking to her that way. Most of the grown men she’d known wouldn’t have dared.

It was then that the rear door of the cab opened and a boy stepped out. She definitely did not remember her grandfather telling her the new trainer was bringing his son, and a teenage son to boot. She was sure she’d remember that part. He was tall—taller than she was, which was considerable—and his thin, wiry frame was tanned, probably from hours and hours helping his father in the barn before and after school. He had a thick shock of dark, wavy hair that curled over his ears, and dark blue eyes like his father. He looked around with a bored, almost angry expression, and she remembered being irritated immediately that he’d think anything or anyone here needed his approval. His father noticed her watching them and elbowed Jake in the ribs as if to say, Check that out.

Jake looked at his feet and muttered something to his father she couldn’t hear. He kicked at the ground, raising the dust, and wrinkled his nose. He was looking over her grandfather’s gorgeous spread the way he might have looked at a rattlesnake near his boot, something to be wary of and avoid. Leigh heard him say something to his father, some plea for them to pack up and turn around. “Not on your life,” Ben said to his son. “Gift horses, son. This place is going to be the making of us, I guarantee it.”

“If what you mean is making us into hicks, then I believe you,” Jake had said, low but not low enough that she couldn’t hear.

Leigh was immediately angry. Of course she knew a father’s career meant nothing to a boy who’d been uprooted from his friends and familiar life, but Wolf’s Head was everything in the world to her, and she’d decided, in that moment, to hate him. How could he not see that he’d entered paradise? she had thought. How could he not be grateful to be here? Who does he think he is, anyway?

He looked over at her and shaded his eyes, grimacing, giving her a glimpse of his braces, flashing silver in the hot sun. So much for his mysterious good looks. She was relieved, actually, to see he wasn’t perfect. “You better watch those things, metal mouth,” she called to him. “You’re gonna sunburn your gums if you aren’t careful.”

Jake had looked surprised at first, then settled into a look of practiced, unruffled calm—a look Leigh would grow to know well in the months and years to come. He looked her up and down—her wet hair, her damp clothes, fresh sunburn across her lightly freckled nose, and streaks of light in her dark hair. She was suddenly aware of how tall she was, how skinny and young she felt. “Look at this, a talking horse,” he said, almost to himself. “I didn’t know they had those in Texas, Pop. Why didn’t you tell me?”

Cute and sharp. Too bad he was awful. “Better than a talking ass,” she said, and tossing her hair, she’d turned back to go into the house, leaving a trail of wet footprints behind her. She figured they would be enemies from then on, avoiding each other in the barn, at the pond, at school. Fine, she thought, if that’s the way he wants it, fine by me.

She went into the house to work on her homework at the kitchen table, but the words swam in front of her eyes, and the algebra equations, which normally she was so good at, turned into Chinese. She’d had no idea that a boy was coming to live at the farm, and it had thrown her. She was going to have to stop swimming naked at Wolf Rock or even the swimming pool. She was going to have to start acting like a lady, like her granddaddy said, and all for the sake of a boy she didn’t even like.

She was in the middle of planning a scheme that would get them to leave—something about putting scorpions in Jake’s bed, or his boots—when there’d been a ring at the doorbell. She’d opened it to find Jake standing there looking sheepish. “My father said I need to apologize,” he said, leaning against the doorbell and making it ring once more by accident. He jumped and stood up straight. “He says I shouldn’t get off on the wrong foot the first day with you folks. So.”

“So.”

“That’s it, then. See you around,” Jake said, and started to leave.

Before he could go, Leigh called back to him, “You’re doing a spectacular job of it, you know.”

“What?”

“Apologizing. Saying your father is making you apologize isn’t really the same thing as actually apologizing, is it?”

He grinned and said, “What’s your name?”

“I’m not sure I should tell you. I’m still waiting for that apology.”

“Tell me your name and I’ll give it to you.”

She gave him her best stink eye. “Leigh Merrill.”

He held out his hand for her to shake, and she took it, tightening her fingers around his, still determined to hate him, still keeping up her defenses. “I’m Jacob Rhodes. And I’m sorry, Leigh. Truly. Your granddad’s place here is lovely, if you don’t mind a talking ass saying so.”

When he turned and went back to his father’s truck in a nimbus of dust, his jeans sliding around his hips as he walked, Leigh remembered all her anger slipping off like a snake shedding its skin. For the first time she understood what the girls at school were always fussing about. A boy like that would be worth falling for, if he managed not to ruin everything by opening his mouth.

She went back inside to finish her homework, but it was no use; she couldn’t think of anything except Jake the rest of the day.

Damn him anyway. He would have to be charming.

By the end of that first week they’d established something of a routine: after their chores were done, Leigh and Jake would ride out together to the hillsides and the woods, following the trails along the stream that bordered her grandfather’s property, just a trickle in the heat of midsummer but a nice cool swimming creek in April and May. They would explore the caves up in the hills, full of bats and sometimes coyotes, but other times cool and abandoned and private, only the drip of water for company. They would ride in companionable silence, and before long the ice between them had melted away.

They were determined to be just friends, telling each other their stories, their secrets. Leigh told Jake about her mother, introduced him to Chloe and her friends at school, helped him find his way in the halls of Burnside High. Jake told Leigh about Amy, his girlfriend back in Kentucky, the farms he’d lived on, the horses he’d ridden, the horses he’d helped his father train, his voice swelling with pride. How he planned to go into the family business when he was old enough, train his own horses, be his father’s partner. Maybe they’d even have their own place one day, he said.

“You should,” she told him. “You’d be great.”

“You think so?”

For Leigh, who had never had a sibling, it was like she had a brother all her own. “I do,” she said.

Her grandfather, who hadn’t known Ben had a son to bring with him to Wolf’s Head, was less pleased. He tried to discourage Leigh from seeking Jake out in the afternoons, tried to encourage her to hang out with her friends in town after school instead of coming straight home to spend time with the boy. He didn’t think teenagers of the opposite sex should be so close—to her protests he only said, “It isn’t right, Leela, it just isn’t”—but despite his objections Leigh and Jake would rush to the barn every afternoon, saddling up a couple of trail horses and take off, not coming home sometimes until well after supper. Her grandfather never did anything but scold her, so Leigh did exactly as she pleased.

Then came the day when they rode out to Mammoth Cave, a larger cave higher up in the hills behind her grandfather’s ranch that Leigh had only seen once, from far off—her grandfather had said he’d hide her if she ever went in there alone, that it was too dangerous. She’d never understood why, but if Jake was there, her grandfather couldn’t object, surely? So she and Jake took two good trail horses and spent the afternoon picking their way around the old cattle trail until they found the mouth of the cave, damp and yawning on the hillside.

Inside it was dark and smelled strongly of rotten stone and stagnant water. The entrance was littered with animal bones and petrified coyote scat, but nothing moved in the dark when they threw stones inside, so whatever used to live there must have moved on. They went inside, shining their flashlights on colonies of bats hanging from the ceiling, clambering over the slippery stones. At one point they’d encountered a stone corridor that started off wide and grew gradually thinner and lower until they were squeezing their way through, unsure of where it led or if they’d be able to find their way out again. Leigh nearly panicked, but Jake was there, saying, “Almost there, Leigh. Don’t be afraid. Keep going.”

Then, in near-total darkness, they’d sensed they were in a large empty space, a kind of room or hall within the cave. They shone their flashlights at the ceiling. “My God,” Leigh breathed. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

They’d come into a large inner chamber, perhaps twenty feet high and thirty or forty feet long. The stalactites from the ceiling and stalagmites from the floor had grown together over the centuries, drip by drip, until they touched and fused, long white limestone posts like the columns in a cathedral. Glittering chips of mica flashed their lights back at them, and they stood hushed and awed at the sight.

“Listen to this,” Jake said, taking a deep breath and shouting, “Echo!” His voice came back to him: echo!

“It’s like a church,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”

“I wouldn’t know. I never went to church.”

“Well, you’ve gone now,” she said, thinking if she ever saw God in anything, it was here. “I wonder if we’re the first people who ever came here.”

“If anyone used to come here,” said Jake, “they don’t anymore.”

“It’ll be our secret,” she said. “Like our own church. But better, because there’s no one but you and me to join it.”

“Except the bats,” he said.

“Except the bats,” she said, and then shouted out, “Echo!” Her voice reverberated through the cavern, coming back to her faintly: echo!

She must have startled the bats, because suddenly the air was full of them. They swarmed around the two intruders, flitting close, and Leigh yelped and covered her head with her hands, crouching down. Jake flung himself over her, covering her up with his body. Underneath him she felt cocooned, safe. “Hold still,” he said. “They’ll go in a minute.”

After several long seconds the bats flew off again in the darkness. Jake raised his head to look around. “All clear,” he said, but neither of them moved. It was as if they were afraid to break the spell, to break contact. She could feel the length of him pressing down on her, another cave within the cave.

She leaned into him, leaned into his warmth, and suddenly she was aware of how alone they were, how cool it was in the cave, the heat coming off his skin under his clothes, every millimeter of the places where their bodies touched. She was not surprised, not exactly, but pleased—she realized it was something she had been waiting for, all those months.

He pulled her toward him. His mouth was soft and surprisingly gentle, even with his teeth full of braces.

“What about Amy?” she’d asked, coming up for air.

He grinned. “We broke up when I moved away. I didn’t want to tell you, because I didn’t want you to think I was hitting on you.”

“So you’re not hitting on me?”

“Okay, yes, maybe now I’m hitting on you.”

“What took you so long?”

“I can’t remember,” he said, leaning in for another kiss.

They kissed for a long time in the darkened cave like the last two people on earth. But that was part of his appeal, too—the secret nature of their friendship, its taste of the forbidden. Years later she would understand that more, after she’d grown up a little, that her grandfather’s disapproval had lent a special glow to all those furtive kisses, all those secret afternoons. Maybe Jake wouldn’t have kissed her if he’d thought he’d been allowed to; maybe she wouldn’t have fallen for him if he hadn’t seemed so unavailable, if she hadn’t known her grandfather would hate it right from the start.

Of course her grandfather tried to put a stop to it. Of course he didn’t like Jake and Leigh spending all their time together. He told her he thought Jake was a distraction, something that would get her in trouble, the way her mother did, and you don’t want to end up like her, do you? You don’t need to be getting serious about boys at your age, Leigh. You’re too young, too smart to end up like Abby.

Leigh had tried to defend her mother. “What was so bad about Abby?” she’d asked. “She was a good mother, a good daughter. I thought you loved her.”

“I did. I do. But you have a long way to go if you think she was a good daughter.” Leigh had listened in shocked silence. Gene had never said a bad word about Abby to her before. “You have to understand. She disobeyed me. She quit school when she was seventeen and ran away, got in trouble, and she had only herself to blame for it. She could have done anything she wanted with her life, and she threw it away. I don’t want the same for you, Leigh.”

When she was older she would realize the old man was scared, that he was afraid she’d run away like Abby had done, drop out, disappear, put herself in the path of dangerous people. But at sixteen, Leigh had only thought he was being petty and small-minded, and immediately she’d been angry and wanted to punish him. “What are you saying?” she’d asked. “Are you sorry I was born, Pop?”

The old man had sighed. It was the first time she’d ever remembered him looking old—his face settling into a net of fine wrinkles, his sunburned skin softening into old age. “No, of course not. You know I love you. You know that I wouldn’t trade you for a bag of gold.”

“What, then? Do you think Jake’s a bad person? That he’s using me?”

“No, it’s not that exactly,” Gene had said. “But Jake’s a farm boy, and he’s happy being a farm boy. You have all these plans. You’ve been talking about moving to New York and becoming an editor since you were eight years old. Don’t you want to make sure that happens?”

“What makes you think it won’t happen?” she’d asked, but she’d known what he was thinking.

He didn’t have anything to worry about, not yet. She and Jake hadn’t slept together then, not that Leigh hadn’t wanted to. It was Jake who said he wanted to wait. His girlfriend back in Kentucky—well, he’d told Leigh, the sex had just complicated everything. They’d moved too fast, and after a while he had realized she never cared about him the way he cared about her.

“This time I want everything to be perfect,” he’d said. “I want us both to be ready, when it happens.”

She had been surprised, but she respected him for it: he was waiting until he was sure, until she was sure. She hadn’t known there were boys like that in the world. The losers Chloe always dated would have pounced as soon as they got the chance.

So when her grandfather had insinuated that she was risking her future by sleeping with Jake, Leigh had exploded at him. “You think I’m stupid enough to get pregnant? Well, I got news for you, Pop: we aren’t sleeping together. Jake’s a gentleman. He’s never laid a hand on me, not the way you’re thinking. You’re the one with the dirty mind.”

“Leigh—”

“You don’t like Jake because he’s the help. You think I should date boys with money, boys from rich families or with important daddies, is that it?”

“I never said—”

“I can’t believe you’re such an elitist. All that talk about pulling my own weight, following my ambition, it was just bullshit, wasn’t it?”

Gene had blanched; she’d never dared to use profanities in front of him before.

“Here you are trying to breed me off like one of your mares, only the best bloodlines, the best pedigree. I might as well go on out to the breeding shed and let you pick my husband for me.”

Gene’s face had gone completely white then. “Enough, Leigh,” he’d said quietly, but when she started to say something else he’d cut her off, his voice booming through the house: “That is enough.”

She went silent. She’d gone too far now, and she knew it, but she was angry. She wanted to find a way to take back her words, but she couldn’t, she wouldn’t—he had no reason to think Jake was wrong for her, none but one, that Jake was the hired help. He wasn’t good enough for Gene Merrill’s granddaughter because he wasn’t from a wealthy family, because he wasn’t going to college or making any other grand plans. That was what galled her. That her grandfather, secretly, was something of a snob.

She’d been about to say something else to this effect, but her grandfather had cut her off with a sharp jab of his hand. “I want you to put an end to it. That’s it. I’m finished with this discussion,” he’d said. “Put an end to it, or Jake and his father are off this farm tomorrow. Don’t test me on this, Leigh. I’ve said my piece, now I expect you to obey.”

Before she could have said anything else, he was out the door, leaving Leigh behind to scream at the walls in frustration. Why wouldn’t he listen? Why did he have to be so unreasonable? She’d started to have an understanding of what Abby had gone through with Gene all those years ago. The old man had said his piece, and that was the end of the discussion.

After that she and Jake were never allowed to be alone together. Gene must have said something to Jake’s father, insisted Ben put a stop to their romance or else, because Ben made sure to load Jake up with chores every day after school, mucking stalls, working the racehorses, even letting him break a few of the yearlings. Keeping him too busy for romance.

Always, always she and Jake still managed to find each other again, after supper, late at night, a few minutes in the hayloft, where they could talk in secret, where they could kiss and cling to each other, promising their love, making plans for the day they’d get out of there, the day they’d break free. Instead of keeping them apart, Gene’s orders only cemented their connection to each other.

It was only a few days after Gene issued his decree, in fact, that Leigh and Jake slept together for the first time. She’d come home after school one day and found Jake gone. His father had sent him into town for some feed and other supplies, and Leigh, disappointed yet again, had gone into the house to do her homework and sulk. Her grandfather must have seen her bedroom door closed and knocked twice, softly. “Just checking in,” he said, opening the door a crack.

She could see his face, tanned from the sun, out of the corner of her eye. He looked sad, but she would not give him her forgiveness, not yet, not after what he’d said and done. “Just checking that I’m alone, you mean,” she said. She was lying on her stomach with her math book open in front of her. She wouldn’t look him in the eye.

“Watch your tone, Leela,” he said. “I put up with a lot of sass from you, but you know I’m right about this.”

“You are not right about this.”

“Enough,” he said. Then he stomped back up the hallway and down the stairs while Leigh, in frustration, flung her book at the closed door.

She stayed in her room right through dinner and would have stayed in there all night if there hadn’t been a knock on her window just past eleven, when she was starting to get sleepy and hungry, when the big house seemed as silent and lonely as a tomb. Then the tap, tap of pebbles hitting her window. She looked out, and there was Jake standing in the bright moonlight, in a clean blue T-shirt and jeans, grinning at her like a crazy fool. She raised the sash a little and said, “Are you nuts?”

“Must be,” he said. “Come on out here.”

“I can’t. He’ll hear me.”

“Climb on out the window.”

“Oh sure, no one will hear that.”

“The longer we argue about it, the more likely he is to hear you.”

Leigh groaned. “All right. Hold on.”

She turned the light off in her bedroom to make her grandfather think she’d gone to bed, then raised the sash on the window and swung herself out onto the windowsill. Jake reached up and took her around the waist. She leaned back into him, and he eased her down, then spun her around to face him. “Look at that,” he said. “I was wrong about you, that first day. You aren’t a horse; you’re a monkey.”

“And you’re still a talking ass.”

“Ah, but I’m your talking ass.”

“Lucky you,” she said. She kissed him.

A noise around back startled them, and they went completely silent: it was her grandfather opening the window in his bedroom.

“The barn,” Leigh whispered, and they went around across the lawn toward the stables, keeping to the shadows and away from the bright glow of the moon rising orange over the hills, staying low. In a minute they heard the scrape of the window closing again.

The stables were dark for the night and smelled of dust and creosote and leather polish and horseflesh. The horses nickered softly when they heard footsteps in the aisle, but Leigh gave them a reassuring whoa there, hey there, and they went quiet.

They went down to the tack room and found a stack of clean wool blankets. She took one, but under the bottom blanket she could just feel the cool metal of her grandfather’s .357 Magnum. She picked up the corner of the wool and showed the gun to Jake.

“One of these days,” she said, “the old man is going to get brave enough to open my door and realize I’m not there. When that happens, you’d better learn to run fast.”

“He won’t catch me.”

“It’s not catching you I’m worried about, it’s shooting you. He’s a hell of a shot, you know. He keeps this gun here for coyotes and horse thieves and debauchers of his granddaughter.”

“He won’t shoot me,” Jake said. “Don’t you fret.”

They grabbed a blanket, then climbed up the ladder to the hayloft, the one place she was sure that no one would be that time of night, the one place she knew no one would look for them. She’d spent hours reading alone there when she was younger, trying to escape her list of after-school chores, dreaming of her future in New York. The hay was stacked in bricks, smelling sweetly of the fields in summertime, and the hayloft was hot even in the evening, holding on to the warmth of the day. Leigh spread the blanket over the carpet of hay littering the floor and flopped down on it. Jake lay down next to her, stretching out his full length and leaning over her.

A beam of moonlight was coming in through the open hatch of the hayloft. Below them they could hear the sounds of the horses moving in their stalls, stamping their feet, chewing a bit of hay. A breeze blew through the building, causing a wind chime outside to tinkle. Somewhere the old peacock, Peabody, was standing on a roof and giving his mournful cry: ah-Ah! ah-Ah!

In the dimness Jake was just a shadow, a deeper bit of darkness. His skin was hot where Leigh touched it—the back of his neck, his shoulders, the hard muscles on the back of each arm. His hands wound around her back, and he pulled her in for a kiss, long and slow, leaning into her until they were pressed together knees to chest.

She could feel his heartbeat under his ribs picking up speed like her own. Something was different. He seemed strangely intense, his touches longer, less tentative. There was a pressure in his fingers and breath that hadn’t been there before, a question he was asking with his hands and his body. She realized suddenly that he was trembling.

“What’s the matter?” she breathed.

“Nothing,” he said, his hands stroking her hip, moving up toward her breast, the shiver working up from his core and making his voice shake as well. “I don’t think I’ve ever been happier.”

He found her nipple under her shirt, and her breath caught. “Me, too.”

“Are you scared at all?”

“No,” she said, and meant it. She trusted him completely. After all, it had been his idea to wait until the time was right, and it seemed the time was most certainly now. She knew he would never abuse her trust. He was worthy not only of her trust but of her passion. The time for caution was gone.

She slid her hand up his back, under his T-shirt, his skin velvety and a little damp, following the curve of his spine, the wings of his shoulder blades, the soft place at the base of his throat. She wanted to touch all of him, every bit of him. She sat up and pulled off his T-shirt, leaning back to look at him in the moonlight. He looked like a Greek statue, or a David, his skin marbled and white in the silvery light. The muscles of his chest and belly were flat, taut from working out of doors with the horses. A faint touch of stubble darkened his cheeks and the spot in the middle of his chest, and she kissed him there once, and felt him shudder.

She pulled him to his feet and undid the buckle of his belt, then the buttons on his jeans, and with a thump they both slid to the floor. He stepped out of his jeans and stood still.

“What is it?” he said.

“I’ve always wanted to look at you.”

He looked down at himself and up again, abashed. She saw his hands clench and unclench, as if he were fighting the urge to cover himself, but she reached out and ran a finger up his leg from knee to hip and smiled when she heard him gasp. “Jesus,” he said, his voice ragged.

“Too much?”

“No,” he said, slightly breathless but grinning.

She ran another finger across his backside, enjoying the feeling of it clenching under her touch. She’d had no idea the power she could have over him, or how intoxicating that power could be—that she could tease him, seduce him, enjoy him all she wanted.

Jake’s breath was coming in little gasps, his breastbone rising and falling quickly under her hands. She leaned forward and kissed the spot over his heart, then licked one of his nipples gently. She stood on her toes to reach his neck, then his mouth, all while Jake held himself still, willing himself not to move for fear of breaking the spell.

With one hand she cupped his buttocks, and with the other, she reached down to feel him hard against her thigh. She took him in her hand and felt his whole body shudder. “I can’t—” he panted. “I can’t—Leigh, please, please, Leigh, it has to be now.”

She let go of him and stepped back, undoing her shirt, her jeans, letting them fall to the floor. Then she stood before him naked herself.

He crossed the space between them in two steps, picking her up and wrapping her legs around his waist, lowering her to the floor. She was surprised at how strong he was. His lips moved to her ears, her neck. Her body was dissolving into his, the margins between them evaporating. He put his mouth on her nipples, and she panted. “Jake,” she said. “Jake, please don’t make me wait anymore.”

His mouth on her neck, her breasts. His mouth on the deepest place inside her, his tongue, his wetness melting into her own. Her hands on the back of his hair, on the silk of his shoulders, and she pulled him up to kiss him again before bending over to slide the condom on. Then she lay back and arched her hips to let him ease into her. A quick burst of pain and then it was done, more smoothly than she had imagined. He moved over her, hips pushing into her softness, into the ache, her body so lit with desire she no longer had any sense of where she stopped and he began.

She grabbed him and pulled him into her, deeper, nothing but his body and hers curled around the epicenter of pleasure. He lifted her hips to pull him to her, thrusting until the world went white, and her whole body shuddered. Jake cried out once, twice, and then collapsed on top of her, his weight pleasantly heavy, his neck slick with sweat.

He stroked her hair in the moonlight, rolled off her, and lay quiet while she put her head on his shoulder. It had been surprising only in that she’d enjoyed it more than she would have thought, given what Chloe and the other girls at school always said—that it was usually fast, and painful, and awkward. But maybe it was different when you really loved someone, she thought. Maybe Jake had been right to make them both wait until they were sure what they meant to each other. But as she lay there with her head on his chest, her body still tingling with pleasure, the only thing she was sorry about was that in the morning they’d have to go back to pretending in front of their families that nothing had happened, nothing had changed, when all she wanted was to shout from the rooftops that she loved him, that she was his now and always.

When she thought she could speak, she looked over at him and said, “Think you could do that again?”

He laughed. “Give me a minute,” he said. “I’m sure I could manage.”

Afterward they were inseparable, insatiable, finding each other in the hayloft, at the lake, in the woods. They were careful, so careful not to get caught—Gene still swore to Leigh that he’d fire Ben at the first hint that Jake wasn’t keeping his hands to himself—but there was hardly ever a day they didn’t find at least five minutes to spend together, hardly ever a day when they didn’t have a chance to sneak a kiss in the tack room, a quick I love you between chores.

They managed to keep their relationship a secret from Gene, but Jake’s dad was another story. Ben Rhodes watched them all the time, always aware that his job was on the line if Jake slipped up even a little. He hated Leigh for it, too, staying close whenever she was in the barn, never letting her out of his sight, yet he never spoke to her, just followed her with his eyes wherever she went, a scowl of disgust on his face.

Jake, who was a year ahead of Leigh, graduated high school and started learning the business in earnest from his dad, who sent him on errands to the vet’s, to town, even long trips to deliver horses to buyers, anything to keep him away from the farm as long as possible. Sometimes he would go to Oklahoma, Missouri, Florida, staying away for days or even weeks at a time. Ben had his training partner, the dirty-minded, foulmouthed Dale Tucker, keep Jake out in the training pens for long stretches, working the horses on the lead lines, taking them through their paces on the test track. There was so much work to do on the farm that there always seemed to be some new excuse for Ben to keep them apart. That Christmas, Ben even sent Jake away to his mother’s back in Kentucky for a couple of weeks, maybe hoping he might see his old girlfriend there, that he and Amy would be tempted to pick up where they’d left off.

The night he left, Jake had come to meet her, to tell her he’d be home soon. They slipped into the hayloft after dark, where he told her where he was going and when he’d be back, kissing her long and deeply. “Don’t forget about me,” he said.

“Never.” Two weeks was hardly long enough for her to forget him, she wanted to say, but then they’d never been apart that long before.

“Look,” he said, pulling up one sleeve of his white T-shirt, “I had it done today.”

On the back of one arm was the small dark shape of a bat. “It’s our secret. To remind us of the day in the cave, so I can carry you with me forever.”

Afterward they’d made love in the hayloft and she’d touched the tattoo gently, feeling the place where the skin was raised, the permanent reminder of the day when they’d first declared their love to each other. She’d loved it, and him, more than ever. It didn’t matter where he went, she’d be with him.

Whatever their families did to keep them apart, though, Leigh and Jake weren’t deterred. He called her every day he was in Kentucky, sent her letters almost by the hour. They swore their love for each other, swore they’d be together no matter what his father and her grandfather had to say about it.

All they had to do, Jake decided, was grow up. When Leigh reached the magic age of eighteen, they’d be free to do as they liked. They had to be patient, and wait, and it would turn out all right in the end. Leigh wasn’t sure she could wait that long, but Jake told her to keep her grades up and her nose clean, and before long they’d be old enough to go where they wanted, live how they wanted. “It’s just a few more months,” he said.

“A year,” she wheedled. “A whole year, Jake.”

“Just a year,” he said. “Be strong. I know you can be.”

So Leigh did what he said: she kept her grades up, stayed out of any serious trouble. She didn’t party every weekend like most of the kids she knew; if she wasn’t at home doing homework or chores, she was with Chloe, maybe hanging out in Austin, seeing some live shows, watching Chloe audition for band after band. Sometimes Jake would sneak away and meet up with them. Leigh always called home to let her grandfather know where she was; she kept her curfew religiously, stopped talking back to the old man. She and Jake would come home in separate cars, at different times, as if they hadn’t been together.

She would give Gene no reason to come down on her. She was respectful and courteous and did exactly what she liked when he wasn’t looking, just the way her mother had done, and it worked: Gene relaxed, stopped arguing with her so much. As long as he didn’t know the truth, it seemed, he was happy.

During her senior year Leigh was at the top of her high-school class. She’d already been admitted to Harvard—she’d hardly been able to believe it when the acceptance package arrived—but even before she held the letter in her hands, she’d known it would be impossible to live without Jake in Boston. She knew in her heart that she couldn’t take classes and make new friends and talk to Jake once or twice a week, go months and months without seeing him, touching him.

After Christmas, Leigh started talking about going to the University of Texas instead, staying close to home. Jake didn’t like that, said she was being shortsighted, that most people would give anything they had, everything, to get into the best college in the country. “I can’t let you give up Harvard,” he said. “Not on my account.”

“I can’t go now,” Leigh said one night not long after New Year’s. The hayloft was cool in midwinter, and she could almost see her breath in front of her face. Jake sat up and put her on his lap, wrapping them both in a heavy wool blanket. “Let’s just say I go to UT. I can commute from home, or maybe get an apartment with Chloe in Austin. You can work with your dad until you get your own training business going. Then we can go anywhere we want, do anything we want.”

“You’re going to Harvard. Period.”

“Now you sound like my grandfather.”

“The old man’s just looking out for you.”

“Ugh. Now you really sound like him.”

“We will call a lot, see each other over vacations. This is your dream, your chance to get out of Burnside.”

“It won’t be the same without you.” Leigh shivered, though not just from the cold. “I mean it, I think I might die if I have to go months and months without seeing you. Two weeks at Christmas last year was torture.”

Jake was thoughtful for a minute, quiet. In the time since he’d graduated high school he’d grown quieter in general, more serious. She knew he had a lot on his mind—it wasn’t easy working for his dad and living on someone else’s place, a position that was always in jeopardy because he was in love with the boss’s granddaughter. For weeks she’d felt it: Jake had a lot on his mind. He was getting ready to make some kind of decision, and for weeks she had dreaded hearing what it might be. Moving away. Getting a job someplace, starting his own business. Leaving her behind.

Finally he said, “Let’s get married.”

For a minute Leigh wasn’t sure she’d heard him right. “What?”

“You and me, kid. What do you say?”

“You aren’t serious.”

“As a heart attack. I’ve always known I was going to marry you one day. Why should we wait? We’ll get married and go to Boston together.”

“My grandfather will cut me off, for one thing.”

“I don’t care.”

“I can’t pay for school on my own. Pop’s money is the only reason I can afford Harvard.”

“We won’t tell him. You can live off campus. We’ll get an apartment. You tell him you got a roommate.”

“You think no one’s going to notice you’re gone?”

“I’ll tell my dad I’m going back to Kentucky to live with some friends.”

“We won’t be able to keep it up for long.”

“Sure we will. Long enough to get settled, anyway. After that it won’t matter. You think your granddad will shoot me if we’re married? No way. Not when it’s all legal.”

Leigh imagined her grandfather doing exactly that, showing up unannounced in Boston one day, just dropping in. Wanted to see how you’re doing, Leela. Making sure you’re okay. And then what he would do if he found Jake there, if he saw that they were living together. She imagined police sirens and ambulances and Jake in a body bag, and she wasn’t entirely sure she was exaggerating.

But maybe Jake was right—if they were already married, if they were respectably and legally wed, maybe her grandfather would manage to live with it eventually. He was old-fashioned; he believed in going to church on Sunday, in holy matrimony, in babies born in wedlock. He might not like it, but he wouldn’t punish Leigh after the deed was done. Her mother had come home pregnant and unmarried—that was what had galled Gene, that she’d had a child without a father. Leigh started to think Jake was right, that marriage was their only way out of this mess. She’d have college and Jake and her grandfather’s grudging approval. In time he’d learn to accept Jake. He’d have to.

Jake flung the blanket off his shoulders and got down on one knee, taking her hand in his. “I love you, Leigh Elizabeth Merrill. Will you marry me? Will you please be my wife?”

Leigh could hardly breathe, but she choked out a yes. Jake gave a yelp of joy and caught her in a tight embrace, and they made love in the darkness of the hayloft with the moon shining through the window, secure in the knowledge that they would now be together forever, that there would be no force the world could muster that would keep them apart.

It all had to be done quickly, but legally. A few days after she turned eighteen, at the end of June, they’d go on down to the courthouse and get married. That summer Jake would tell his father that a couple of his friends back in Lexington had invited him to share an apartment with them, that he’d get a job at one of the stables there, start making his own way. Then he’d pack up his old Ford truck, drive up to Boston, and meet Leigh. They’d find an apartment. Jake would find a job. Leigh had some money she’d saved up—not a lot, but enough to live on for a few months until her college fund from Gene came through. So simple.

Afterward it was all they could do to keep their plans a secret. Nearly every night Jake would come to her window, tossing his little pebbles on the glass—tap, tap—and she’d climb out to him, kissing him fiercely in the darkness. They’d go to their place in the hayloft, lie on the blanket in the soft straw, and make love eagerly, struggling to keep their voices down, keep from getting caught. They clung to each other in a haze of sex and sweat, Jake’s mouth devouring her neck, her breasts, Jake’s hands pinning her down while she writhed beneath him and came so hard she thought she might faint. Her cries were so loud that Jake often had to hold his hand over her mouth to keep her grandfather from hearing a quarter mile off.

When it was over they would talk about their plans, the kind of apartment they’d look for in Boston, the classes Leigh would take, the kind of job Jake might find. Leigh said there’d be plenty of places near the city where he could look for a stable-hand job, but Jake didn’t want to, said he didn’t want to trade on his father’s name, or Gene’s, not after they were married. It was just like him to be too proud, to try to prove himself. The Honorable Jacob Rhodes, Chloe always called him. Instead he wanted to learn a trade, maybe take some classes himself at the community college. “Maybe I’ll try tending bar,” he’d say. “That might be fun. Get to meet a lot of girls that way.”

Leigh had swatted him on his bare ass. “Like hell. After we’re married, no more girls for you, mister. Besides, you’re not old enough yet to tend bar.”

“They won’t know that.” He pulled out the fake ID, the one he’d used a bunch of times to sneak into bars in Austin. “Got me a little insurance.”

“Oh good. I’m sure they won’t do a background check.”

“I’ll just use my considerable charm.”

“Or you’ll sound like a talking ass.”

“Won’t be the first time,” he said, and stopped her from replying with a kiss.

The stress on both of them, the waiting, was palpable. Leigh was impatient with her grandfather again, started talking back in ways she had never before dared. The good sense of their plan, the safety she felt now being so close to her goal, made her reckless. She called Gene a snob, an elitist, whenever Jake’s name came up, said there was nothing wrong with Jake except his lack of money, and for long periods of time she and Gene would go through the house without speaking, barely acknowledging each other’s presence.

Jake started arguing with his father more often, too. She’d find the two of them in the barn from time to time, coming around the corner to hear Ben’s voice raised to a furious whisper. You’ll do what I tell you to do, and that’s that, he’d say, and Jake would answer, You know it’s wrong. You know, but you won’t stop it. The two of them would fall silent when they saw Leigh approaching, and she’d give Jake a poignant look, as if to say, This will all be worth it later. It will all be worth it, I swear.

Of course it wasn’t Leigh that Jake and his father were arguing about, but she wouldn’t know that until later, until the trial. When she found out what they were really fighting over, she’d felt foolish, even duped.

The truth was that Ben and his partner, Dale Tucker, had been doping her grandfather’s horses for years, using injections of steroids to cover up limps caused by training injuries, to cover up their own mistakes. They’d started to pull Jake into their secret, too—all those trips he’d taken for his father, Leigh would find out later, were to pick up the drugs for them, to hide what they were up to.

Jake had argued with them that it was wrong, that it was Gene Merrill’s reputation on the line as well as their own. That the horses would suffer for their mistakes. But he hadn’t stopped, had he? He’d kept right on going, picking up the steroids, helping Dale and his father break the rules. He hadn’t told anyone about the doping, not even Leigh, not once in all the nights they spent together. He lied to her about his trips out of state, the work he did for his father. The delivery of the horses was always a pretext, a way for Ben and Dale to keep their noses clean. Ben could have sent anyone to deliver horses, but he sent his own son to make sure that the secret stayed hidden.

It wasn’t until later, at the trial, that details of the doping scheme came out. Jake pleaded guilty to the drug charges and was sentenced to four years on that count. Afterward, at the murder trial, he would take the stand and admit what he and Dale Tucker had been up to, admit his own role in the scheme, although he never mentioned his father’s involvement. Jake put the whole thing on Dale. It was Dale Tucker whom he had gone to see in the barn the night of the shooting, he said. Not a lame horse, the way he and Leigh had first said.

“And why were you wanting to meet with Dale Tucker when you got back to the ranch?” asked Jake’s lawyer.

“Dale was anxious to get his hands on the steroids,” Jake said. “I’d just come from Florida with a shipment. He needed them for the farm’s best colt, which had come up lame in practice earlier in the week. He was racing in less than a week, and if he didn’t improve in a hurry he was going to miss the whole season. There was hundreds of thousands in breeding fees on the line. Millions, probably.”

“So you fetched the drugs, and brought them back to give to Dale?”

“I did. I got back late and met Dale in the barn.”

“Then why did you argue? If you picked up the steroids as requested, and you were planning to give them to him, why didn’t you simply hand them over and walk away?”

Jake raised his head to look at Leigh, just for a moment. “I told Dale I wouldn’t do it anymore, fetching the dope for him. That I was done lying. That’s why he went after me, because I told him I was going to tell Leigh everything. He said he’d kill me before he’d let that happen.”

Leigh would meet his eyes across the courtroom, his familiar dark blue eyes, and see the shame there, the admission of guilt, and she’d realize the truth of it all—that Jake had been helping his father illegally dope her grandfather’s horses, that he’d been running drugs for Ben and Dale for months. That he’d lied to her. It had been happening under her nose all the time, and she hadn’t even known.