Free Aly's House by Leila Meacham

else this morning. Come over here, Miss Kingston, and meet Lady Loverly.”
    Aly obeyed. The horse’s abdomen was huge. “Why,” she exclaimed, glancing at the swollen udders, “she’s expecting!”
    Joe glanced at her in surprise. “She sure is. How’d you know?”
    “Women know these things, Mr. Handlin,” Aly said loftily, stressing the last name and deciding not to confess that she had stayed up way past midnight reading a book that Marshall had given her. “When will she foal?”
    “In about a month. In the meantime, we have to keep her away from the stallions. Should one cover her”—Aly could guess what that meant—“Lady Loverly would most likely abort, and we would lose a valuable foal, not to mention what might happen to my sweetheart here.” He patted the chestnut neck one last time and moved on to the next stall, explaining that the first thing he did “of a morning” was to go into each horse’s stall and check him or her all over—“to make sure nothing has happened during the night.”
    “Like what?” asked Aly.
    “Well, the horse could have injured itself in some way or become sick. And of course with the mares, there’s always a slim chance of a miscarriage.”
    Aly watched Joe lift the white-socked foot of a Thoroughbred stallion and examine the hoof closely. She could come to like Joe, but it was plain he had reservations about her. She suspected the reason had to do with her last name. She asked suddenly, “Weren’t you a classmate of my sister?”
    Joe raised up and placed his hand at the base of the Thoroughbred’s ear. “Feel right here,” he ordered.
    Aly placed her hand where his had been. “It’s warm,” she said.
    “It should be. Anytime that area feels cool, it’s a symptom of a temperature. Horses can’t talk, you know. They can’t let you know that they have a pulled muscle or a toothache or an upset stomach. You have to look for the symptoms that indicate their problems.”
    “But didn’t you two date for a while?” Aly persisted as they moved to the next stall.
    Joe did not look at her. “I wouldn’t say that we dated. When she was a sophomore, I took her out a couple of times, that’s all. I was a senior then.”
    Now Aly remembered the gawky, carrot-topped boy that Victoria had kept waiting in the uncomfortable elegance of the Kingston living room. Awkward and self-conscious, in jeans too short for his lanky height, he had stood first on one foot and then the other as he’d tried to make conversation with Eleanor—as out of place in such surroundings as he was in Victoria’s love life. Aly had wondered at the time what her sister was up to.
    As if recalling the same memory, Joe fastened a hand on the stall door and turned to her, his light green eyes silvering with the remembered humiliation. “Your sister got me to go out with her as part of a hazing routine when she pledged the Cotillion Club. I didn’t know that, of course. I should have suspected something when the prettiest girl in school came on to me out of the blue. But I didn’t. After two dates, when her quest was completed,” Joe spit out the words, “she brushed me off quicker’n you would a red ant.” He barked a laugh, the eyes glittering. “You Kingstons aren’t noted for the way you handle folks. Or maybe you are, come to think of it. I hear your old man just foreclosed on the Wayne farm. That so?”
    “Yes,” Aly answered stiffly, embarrassed and feeling the helpless anger that always afflicted her when she encountered people hurt by members of her family. She pulled at the stall door, but Joe held it shut. Apprehensively, she glanced up at the hostile face.
    “Then you better hear this, Miss Kingston. I don’t know what you’re doing out here, or what your old man has on Matt that would force him to hire you, but horses ain’t like people who can be played with and dropped when you lose interest. Thursday is my one day off a week. If I come back out here on Friday