Read Online Hoofprints (Gail McCarthy series) by Laura Crum - Free Book Online Page A

the color of fallen leaves. There was no denying Amber had style, of a sort, though I thought she looked out of place in a box stall. I also thought the adoring gaze she fastened on Steve Shaw overdone, and a little too girlish on the face of a forty-something woman.
    "Do you think she'll be okay?" she asked him anxiously, though I noticed she'd never once looked at the horse.
    "Gail thinks so." Steve's eyes met mine briefly, and I caught the quick ironic sparkle before I looked away.
    Amber seemed uninterested in my opinions, and laid a hand possessively on his arm. "Will we be able to show her at Salinas?"
    "You bet." Steve looked down at her, his smile radiating blue-eyed charm.
    Seeing that I clearly wasn't needed, I sketched a slight wave and said, "I'd better be going."
    Amber ignored me; Steve smiled with his usual warmth."Come on over and watch me show Plumber this weekend if you have time, Gail. At the Salinas Rodeo Grounds. Saturday morning. You'd enjoy it."
    I saw Amber frown, and a little devil nudged me. "I'd love to, Steve. See you there."
    As I stepped out of the box stall and started down the aisle, I could hear her voice from behind me saying pettishly, "What did you invite her for?"
    I grinned. Amber might like to think she owned Steve, but she clearly wasn't too confident of him. And I more than suspected old Steve had had a lot of practice evading matrimonial lures.
    Still, Amber's brand new fire-engine red Mercedes convertible was parked outside the barn; maybe Steve could see his way clear to being a kept husband-Mercedes and all.
    Spotting Bret sitting in my truck, I hurried over and got in before he could change his mind and jump out.
    "Why'd you leave me in there?" Bret's voice was more than slightly slurred.
    "I had. to look at the horse," I pointed out.
    "Goddamn Steve." Bret shook his head as I drove up the hill. "Wants me to shoe his horses. I know what he does. I charge him thirty dollars and he charges his people sixty. Pockets the extra. That's why he's so rich."
    "I doubt that." I forbore to point out that such ill-gotten gains would hardly provide Steve with a royal income.
    "Sure he does." Bret brightened up at the thought of Steve's larceny and rattled on the rest of the way home about his imagined sexual preferences and his failures in the truck-driving category.
    I tuned him out as much as I could. Bret was about twenty ahead of me at this point; Hemingway or no Hemingway, I was definitely daunted.

SIX
    When we got back to my house, Bret staggered in and flopped on the couch. He looked around my tiny living room with slightly glazed eyes and said, "You aren't quite in the same class as Steve, old buddy."
    "Take it or leave it, pal."
    He stretched out on the couch, already half-asleep. "I'll take it, I'll take it," he muttered.
    I smiled, walked into the kitchen and got some almond praline ice cream out of the freezer. Dishing it into a bowl, I looked at the clock. Nine-thirty. With any luck, I was home for the evening. The ice cream was cold and sweet and satisfying. Bad for my health and figure, but soothing to my tired brain. I settled myself at the kitchen table with a Dick Francis mystery.
    I had been sitting at the table an hour, alternately reading and eating ice cream, when my pager went off. I looked at it in disgust. "Shit."
    Picking up the phone, I called the answering service.
    "There's an emergency in Bonny Doon," the woman said. "Some horse has a severe colic. He's down and thrashing." She repeated the words carefully.
    "Who's the client?"
    "He said his name was Mark Houseman. The address is Twenty-one twenty Pine Flat Road."
    "How do I get there?" Both name and address were new to me, and I wasn't very familiar with the Bonny Doon area. I took down directions. Up the coast, right on Bonny Doon Road, right again on Pine Flat Road where the road forks at a bar called The Lost Weekend. Two miles, on the left, a metal gate painted yellow. The numbers were on a post by the