Free Abiding Love by Kate Welsh Page B

name’s Morning.”
    “A girl horse?” Mark asked disdainfully.
    Jack grinned. “You could always ride C.J.’s husband’s gelding. Cole wouldn’t mind at all.”
    “No, he will not ride Mischief,” Beth said, swatting playfully at Jack’s cowboy hat over the stall door.
    She stepped into the aisle and swung the wood-and-iron door closed, shutting Xandra inside, giving her time to regain her equilibrium. Through the iron filigree topping the stall walls Xandra saw Beth give Mark an affectionate hug and the boy blush scarlet.
    “A lot of men ride mares, Mark,” Beth told her nephew. “There’s no stigma attached to it. Believe me, you don’t want to ride Cole Taggert’s horse. He’s too temperamental for a beginner…as my husbandwell knows. Jack’s just teasing you, something he does to everyone.”
    Mark nodded and turned, following Jack back down the aisle, their boots clomping on the Belgian block floor. He stopped just past Fly Boy’s stall, never having seen Xandra. She felt foolish. She should have said hello to the boy. If he saw her now, he’d think she’d been avoiding him, that she was interested in him only because she was paid to advise him during school hours. She reached out to Fly Boy, ran her hands over his neck and down his white blaze. It wouldn’t do for the quarter horse to start demanding attention of the newcomers.
    “Aren’t you taking lessons too, Dad?” Mark asked in a tone that said he’d decided Adam’s reluctance to ride was out of fear.
    Apparently, Mark was still looking for a chink in his father’s armor. Through the slats of Fly Boy’s stall and those of the next one along the row, she could see Adam, and she understood the look that crossed his features. It was only there for a moment, quickly masked with a cocky grin, but Xandra knew what she’d seen. The only thing that scared Adam Boyer was failing at fatherhood. She wondered what would happen if Mark figured that out.
    Before Adam could respond to Mark’s gibe with more than a pasted-on grin, Jack said, “Whoa, Mark, I don’t think I could teach your father a thing about riding no matter how long it’s been since he was on a horse. Get your aunt Beth to show you the scrapbook she has on your father’s riding career.”
    Adam turned to Beth, a look of such love and yearning on his face that it brought tears to Xandra’s eyes. “You kept some of the stuff I left behind?”
    “I’d forgotten all about it. Jack’s the one who had to carry it here when I moved from Boyerton.” Beth crossed to her brother and they embraced. “Some of it got a little mutilated before I found it,” she admitted, her voice muffled by Adam’s shoulder until she stepped away. “I rescued it from the trash after Father had your room cleaned out. Maggie was my lookout and I was an eleven-year-old cat burglar. It was a great adventure.”
    “Maggie was big on providing adventures,” he said, and blinked, his eyes going misty.
    Xandra felt even worse now intruding on a private family moment. In a way she was glad, though, because seeing Adam so vulnerable over the old woman Beth had supported and cared for in her waning years gave Xandra an unexpected peek at a new side of him. He suddenly seemed less like a war-hardened bully.
    It could be an act, the cynical side of her, created by her brother and Michael, speculated.
    “I wish I’d gotten to see Maggie again before she passed away,” Adam said, leaning his back against the neighboring stall. Beams of sunlight shone in his honey-colored hair. He sighed and his wide shoulders slumped a bit. “I can’t believe I only missed her by two months. She was more of a mother to me thanour real mother was. It’s hard knowing she never got all the letters I sent to the house for her.”
    Beth smiled gently, wistfully, as she laid her hand on Adam’s shoulder. “She knew. She was forever telling me not to assume too much about your silence all those years. She suspected they’d