Born Of The Bluegrass

Dani waited until he was almost past her, then ducking beneath the rail, caught the child by the arm.

“Whoa there,” she said in the same voice she used to calm the horses. Still the boy squirmed to get away. She wrapped both her arms around him and lifted him up, bracing his wiggling body against her chest. He locked his legs around her and arched back so naturally she didn’t have time to stop him. He was hanging upside down and laughing once more, so free and full of glee, she found herself chuckling even as she tightened her arms and pulled him upward. They met face to laughing face. She saw the child’s silver eyes. It could have been her own soul staring back at her.

Chapter Two

“Good God, boy, you’ll give your grandmother and I both a heart attack one of theses days.”

Dani looked up to the voice, saw the same silver circles.

“Sorry.” The blood was beginning to come back into Reid’s face. “He’s four. And hell on wheels. I swear I’m going to have to attach a shank line to his shorts.”

“Four,” Dani repeated in a quiet voice. Her gaze went to the boy.

The child nodded and held up four fingers.

She smiled. The ache multiplied, moved across her skin.

“I’ve trained thousand-pound animals.” Reid shook his head. “But forty pounds of four-year-old…” He looked at the boy, his eyes soft as a night she remembered.

“They’re a special breed.” She almost touched the child’s hair, the same color as hers when she’d been a child.

Reid reached for the boy. “I’m afraid being raised by an overindulgent uncle and a doting grandmother doesn’t help the situation.”

Uncle? She didn’t mean to tighten her grip on the boy. “He’s not your son?”

The surprise in her voice caused Reid to look at her. She straightened her arms to give him the boy, still not sure she could let go.

“He’s my brother’s boy.”

No! She almost denied it aloud. Reid still studied her. She steeled her expression while emotions sliced through her: confusion, guilt, yearning, hope. She let go of the child.

Reid settled the boy on one hip. His gaze stayed on her. She faced him, her features purposely bland, her insides twisting. She’d been so sure.

“My brother died several years ago. There was an accident.”

She knew. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m the boy’s legal guardian.”

It made sense, she told herself. Perfect sense. Until she looked at the boy’s profile.

“He must give you and your wife a run for your money.” The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. She had to know.

“No wife.” Reid looked at the boy. “Just you and me. Right, bub?”

“Right, bub,” the boy repeated.

Dani watched the man and child. It was like a dream.

“If you can teach the Thoroughbreds to run like that, you’ll make a fortune in this business one day.” Reid’s tone became stern. “Until then, Trey Adam Hamilton III, the barns aren’t your personal playground.”

She heard the name. Reid’s brother’s name.

“Understand?”

The boy nodded.

“Okay then.” Reid lifted the boy, swung him up on his shoulders.

The child wrapped his arms beneath Reid’s chin, crouched low over the man’s crown. “Rider up.”

Reid smiled as he caught the boy’s hands in his own. “It’s in the blood, I’m afraid.” The boy bucked up and down on his shoulders.

Dani stared at the child, wondering whose blood ran through those tender veins.

“An obvious champion,” she said. She didn’t realize she was hanging on to the hem of the boy’s shorts until she gave it an affectionate tug. She looked down and saw the strawberry-colored mark on the child’s thigh. Her fingers gripped the material. The first time she’d seen that thick V-shape, she’d thought it had looked like a bird in flight. She had to let go.

“Are you fellas ready?” Cicely called. Dani forced her fingers to drop, her gaze to shift from the boy to where Cicely stood, fanning Georgia Hamilton. “Your mother, Reid, needs a beverage,” Cicely said.

“Just gathering my guy here,” Reid told her.

The child rested his chin on the Reid’s crown, looked down at Dani. “Celery,” he pronounced.

“Cicely,” Reid corrected, trying not to smile. He lost. Still smiling, he looked at Dani. “Thank you.” Moving one hand up to support the boy, he extended his other hand to Dani in gratitude. Her hand touched his, withdrew before his fingers found hers.

“Trey,” Reid instructed, his silver eyes still on Dani. “Thank the nice lady for reining you in.”

Twin silver eyes looked down into hers. “Thanks, nice lady.”

She touched his bare sweet knee. “Any time.”

The boy looked down at her and smiled. How often had she imagined what he looked like, how his laughter sounded, what he would feel like in her arms? Her hand stayed on the child.

“Thank you again,” Reid said. “Say goodbye, Trey.”

“Bye,” the child told her.

“Goodbye.” Dani let go, clasping her hands behind her back to hide their tremble.

SHE FOUND her father sitting between Willie and Lou at the bar that served the huge blue margaritas. It was early. The night was maybe only two or three rounds old.

He looked up, meeting her reflection in the mirror behind the bar. His hair had grayed at the temples, and there was bloat beneath the eyes from alcohol and age, but overall, the face so many women had found handsome hadn’t changed. Good genes he would say. Bloodlines.

He tapped his cigarette against the ashtray’s edge. “Sit down. Have a sip with me and the boys here. I’m going to tell them about the day I rubbed a Derby winner.”

“C’mon, Mick, don’t you have any new stories?” Willie raised his beer to his smiling lips. Dani’s reflection in the mirror stayed grave.

Mick pushed his empty glass toward the edge of the bar, signaling the bartender. He was a man who believed a life of excess was the only life worth living. It was often the secret to his appeal. One day it would kill him.

“Some stories deserve repeating. The home stretch at Churchill Downs is one of them, right, love?” Mick met his daughter’s eyes in the mirror.

“I need to talk to you.”

Mick took a sip from the full tumbler the bartender put down in front of him and studied his daughter in the mirror’s reflection. “Let the ol’ man buy you a drink first, Dani girl. You’re getting as high-strung as the ponies.”

She felt the tension in her limbs, the jerk in her pulse. “No.” One syllable but it sounded of a madness in the making.

Her father swiveled slowly, his drink wrapped in one hand. Lou and Willie studied their beers. Mick studied her. She smelled the whiskey in his glass, on his breath. She should wait for a few more rounds when the liquor loosened his tongue. She thought of the child. She couldn’t wait.

“I saw Reid Hamilton today.”

Her father looked at her a long second. He swiveled back to the bar, avoiding her mirrored gaze. He stubbed out his cigarette long after it stopped smoking. Just as she decided he was going to ignore her or try to escape, he raised his gaze and gave her a long look in the mirror. With an exhale part breath, part sigh, he slid off the stool and gestured grandly to the square tables in the back. “Let’s have a seat, shall we?”

Sipping from his drink, he led the way. He was shorter than her, but his build was as narrow and taut. In his youth, he’d dreamed of wearing the silks, but the dream and the paddock were as close as he’d ever come.

Father and daughter sat down, facing one another. Dani’s hand clenched into a ball on the scarred table-top. She covered it with her other hand, her fingers curling, pressing into the thin flesh, slim bones. She had too much at risk to fall apart now.

“I saw Reid Hamilton today.”

Mick’s gaze shifted for a second, then came back to her. He took a long drink. His eyes watched her above the rim. She squeezed her hands together.

“So you’ve said.” He set his glass carefully on the wet ring that had formed on the wood.

She should’ve waited. Waited until the whiskey had made him brash. She’d been in too much of a hurry. Reckless.

“He had a child with him. A boy.”

She watched for his reaction. He reached out, his fingertips touching the cool sides of the glass.

“He said it was his nephew. His brother’s boy.”

Her father drew circles on the glass’s damp surface.

“I held the child in my arms.”

Her father’s hand went still. He lifted his fingers, touched the wetness to his lips.

Dani’s hands clutched each other as if to snap bone. “I held the child in my arms.”

Her father raised his glass to his lips. “Dani.” He stopped, said no more. He drank.

Her voice was eerily even. “Reid Hamilton isn’t the boy’s uncle. He’s his father.”

Mick pulled out a pack of cigarettes, tapped one out and lit it, his eyes narrowing. “You said the child is the brother’s boy.”

“The child is Reid Hamilton’s son.” The words bubbled up, burned her throat. “He has a son.” She’d become a broken record.

“He has a son. My son.” It wasn’t a question. She wouldn’t ask. She wouldn’t let it be denied.

“Dani.” She heard pity in her father’s voice. The drum of her blood became louder.

“He’s my son. I saw him. I held him.” Her hands unclenched, reached out, pleading.

Mick exhaled. The stale smells of smoke and liquor came, clung to her. He tapped the cigarette on the ashtray’s edge. “That’s it? You held the boy in your arms and you decide he’s your child?” He kept tapping the cigarette after the ashes had fallen.

“The boy looks like Mom.” Her father stiffened, reached for his drink. “He looks like you.”

He set down the drink. His hand stayed curled around the glass. “Then he’ll have good luck with the ladies, but why would that make the boy your child?”

She looked away from the reasonableness in her father’s face.

“Reid Hamilton himself said the boy was his nephew.” Mick adopted a patient tone. “Why would he say that if it weren’t so?”

“You will have to tell me that. Tell me.” Her hand reached out, gripped her father’s hand holding the drink. Liquor sloshed over the sides of the glass. “Tell me.”

With that awful patronizing expression still on his face, her father pulled a fresh linen handkerchief from his pant pocket. No paper tissues for Mick Tate. Always a clean handkerchief, snow-white and starched. He ironed them himself. He had dried her tears with them. He now patted the whiskey off her hand.

“Today you saw Reid Hamilton with a child.” His tone stayed patient. “A child who’s about the same age as—”

She pulled her hand away. “I didn’t say anything about the child’s age.”

“No, but I’m guessing the boy isn’t five-foot-six and starting to shave or you wouldn’t have assumed he was your son, would you?” He smiled indulgently.

“He’s four. And he is my son.” She heard the plea in her voice and was ashamed.

“Dani, listen to me, five years ago, you weren’t much more than a child yourself.”

Five years ago. Her eighteenth birthday. Her father had been determined to mark the occasion. He had arranged the car, the dress, the engraved invitation that got her past the gate into Georgia Hamilton’s legendary pre-Derby dinner dance. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d strung the extra stars that seemed to light the sky that night over Hamilton Hills.

She stared at the man opposite her. His whole life Mick Tate had been trying to make fairy tales come true. That one night he had succeeded.

Three months later the pregnancy test had showed positive. Dani had stopped believing in fairy tales.

“What you did was the right thing to do.” Her father’s voice brought her back. “It was a brave thing.”

“To give my child up?” Pain sliced into her.

“To give your child more.” Mick lifted the cigarette to his lips, drawing deep, watching her. He picked up his drink. “Let me tell you what happened. Today you saw Reid Hamilton with a child about the same age as your baby would be, and it all became a bit too real. Much, much too real. Now the guilt gnaws at you. That’s what happened. Conscience.” He cradled his glass, looking into the amber liquid. “Such a liability.”

The waitress came to their table. Her father drained the glass and handed it to her. “Another double, darling. How ’bout you, Dani girl? Ready for that drink?”

She shook her head. Mick shrugged his shoulders and smiled at the waitress, watched the woman walk away. Dani studied her father’s profile. At one time, he could make her believe anything. It had been his charm. And her undoing.

He turned to her, saw her study. “You did the right thing, love. It’s no life for a child.”

“You didn’t give me up.” She spoke quietly.

“No, but after your mother died, I had Nanny to look after you until she got sick. By that time, you were old enough to come with me. Still, don’t think I wouldn’t have sent you to your mother’s family if they would have had you. Sons of bitches. With their fat bank accounts and their precious reputations, thinking they can pick and choose their kin like ordering from a Chinese menu.” He reached for the drink no longer there, the burn of anger and alcohol in his eyes. “No, I didn’t give you up. I was too damn selfish. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t want more for you than bouncing from track to track, living in roach boxes, hoping for a triple to get us out of last week’s hole.”

The waitress returned and set the drink on the table. Mick lifted the glass, gave the woman a wink and took a long swallow. He put the glass down, the look he gave the liquor more appreciative than the one granted the waitress.

“Believe me…” He leaned back too far in his chair. He teetered for a moment, then steadied. “Your child has more.”

She looked at this man who had brought her to a magical place where horses flew and money multiplied and her mother had always laughed long and full while bits of betting slips floated through the air like confetti. “My baby had a birthmark. A small V-shape on his right thigh. The boy with Reid today has the same mark. He’s my child.”

Her father looked down, studied the liquor.

“He’s my child.” She waited. A song started to play on the jukebox. Sudden laughter across the room made her jump, but at their table, there was only silence.

“A blood test will prove it.”

Her father looked up, studied her. “I did it for the boy.” He looked away. “I did it for you.”

She sat perfectly still, fearing one wrong word, one revealing movement, and he’d stop. Her father took a drink, and then another until when he set the glass down, his hand didn’t shake anymore. She held her breath, the blood humming in her head.

“You were in trouble. I was always in trouble. You know all that.” His hand waved a dismissal before reaching for his cigarettes. “We both wanted to give the child more. The Hamiltons could give him more. He’s growing up well taken care of, never wanting. Plus these people aren’t strangers. They’re his real family. He’s with his father, for Pete’s sake.” Mick took a quick drink.

“Reid doesn’t even know the boy is his son.” The truth was worse in her own thin voice.

“If he’d known the child was his, he might’ve tried to find out who the mother was. I wanted to protect you.”

“He didn’t know who I was that night. No one did.”

“What if he’d decided to find out? What if he’d found out the mother of his child wasn’t some mysterious Southern deb but the gal who mucked out the shedrow stalls?”

It was true. She’d deceived Reid first.

Mick gestured, the ash falling off his cigarette on to the scarred table. “We’re talking the Bluegrass, darling. Where people are assessed just like the horses—by their pedigree. You know that.” He drank, the liquor going down faster. His glass hit the table too hard. “You know that.”

She watched him raise his empty glass as the waitress passed nearby. He’d never forgiven her mother’s family for not believing he’d loved their daughter. They’d thought he was after her money. But he had loved her. He loved her still.

He set the glass on the waitress’s tray, turned back to Dani. “I wasn’t going to see this child treated like the dung they tiptoe past on their way to the box seats.”

She wanted to protest Reid wouldn’t be like that, but she had no right. If she’d been sure, she would have gone to him when she first found out she was pregnant. She hadn’t. An elegant illusion named Danielle DeVries had bewitched Reid that night. The reality was a stable groom named Dani Tate. Once he had learned of her deception, why would he have had anything to do with her?

“The tests from the grandmother’s blood proved the boy was family, and that’s all they wanted to know. Now he’ll grow up a Hamilton. As he should.” Dani knew if her father had a drink, he would’ve raised it in a toast.

“Plus the price on the offspring of a dead son would be much higher, wouldn’t it?”

She’d surprised him, catching him before he could school his expression. She loved her father but she knew his flaws. She felt a whirling in her empty stomach and was afraid she was going to be sick.

He masked his surprise, lit a fresh cigarette, looked to see if the waitress was coming. “I was in trouble. You know that.”

Yes, she’d known that. They’d gone south the next day. Kentucky had always been home, but her father and she worked the East Coast circuit, their location usually dependent on how many miles her father needed between himself and the bookies he owed. Eventually things would cool off or her father would hit enough daily doubles to go home to Kentucky. They had been on their way to Florida when Dani had heard about the accident at Hamilton Hills. She had been working at Hialeah Park when she’d learned she was pregnant. After the baby was born, she’d run, working the circuit west to Santa Anita Park, then up north to Portland Meadows, never staying too long in any one spot. Eventually she’d circled back to the East, settling on Fox Run Farm in upstate New York. She’d never gone back to the Bluegrass.

“I had the lawyer who handled the arrangements only ask for what I needed. Not a penny extra.” Her father’s drink arrived. The drone of blood in Dani’s head became louder. She watched him take a long sip. He leaned back, laced his fingers together like a reasonable man. “What’s fair is fair.”

“You sold your own grandson.” She spoke from the pain and sorrow that always ran through her sparse veins.

His hand slapped the table. “It wasn’t like that.” He leaned forward, lowered his voice. “You couldn’t give the boy the life he deserved. I did.”

There was the rush of blood in her head, the sour taste in her mouth, and the terrible truth. She stood up too fast, her chair scraping the faded floor.

“Where are you going?”

She looked blindly at her father, shook her head. She didn’t know. She was working on instinct now.

“Dani, sit down. Listen to me.” His calm tone only made the confusion inside her worse. She gripped the chair. Her father’s eyes were bright from whiskey but his speech was still clear, his stare steady. “You wanted your child to have the best, and he does. He’s safe and he’s loved.”

“He’s healthy, too. And handsome.” She heard her own anguish. She looked away, her gaze darting about the dim room, unable to look directly at anything. The deep, frantic mix of emotions inside her threatened. She closed her eyes, afraid to make any movement at all. When she opened them, she saw the brightness in her father’s eyes had become moist, brilliant.

“You need a drink, Dani.”

“I don’t need a drink.”

“Something to eat.” She heard the caring.

She shook her head.

“You’re tired. Go get a good night’s rest.”

“I don’t want to sleep. I don’t want to eat. I don’t want to drink.” She hung on to the edge of the chair, her knees buckling, her strength gone. Pain and longing were the only life left inside her.

“I want my baby.”

SHE WENT HOME. Not to the small anonymous room in town she’d rented with her percent of recent winnings, but to the only home she’d ever known. The night guard waved her through without a glance at the employee tag she wore around her neck. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen her here after hours.

She parked in the almost empty lot and cut across the gravel and grass to the barns. The cinder block dormitories were dark. The 4:00 a.m. feeding always came too fast.

The shedrow was sleeping. Lights were minimal—the silent flare of a solitary cigarette; subtle security lights turned the night from black to gray; the wink of fireflies.

She walked on, the turf yielding, the gravel, graveyard gray. All paths led to the track. All ended at the winner’s circle. She breathed in the incense of unspoken dreams, the sweat of loss, the rare sweet sachet of success.

Home.

Where the stakes were high. And second chances few.

One stumble and it could be over. She’d seen it happen as recently as last Thursday in the fourth. Maybe it was the sloppy track? Maybe it was a small hole, a bad step? Who knows? One minute a thousand-pound machine is barreling toward glory; the next, a winch is pulling its carcass across the finish line.

She followed the bend of the training track, seeing horses and riders where there were none.

A son. Her son. She grabbed the track’s outside rail and held fast. In a world where second chances were rare, she knew she’d been given a gift.

She walked the track’s perimeter, circling with the phantoms of those who’d tried and won and those who’d tried and lost. It had been a night much blacker than this when her knees had pulled up and her body had clenched and pain at first not much more than a woman’s weeping had become a storm. Her legs had split, and she had stopped breathing, stopped thinking, stopped feeling until there was a rush of warmth and a wail of life to match her own. The night had ended then. The darkness had lifted and, in a haze, she’d seen a blood-streaked bundle, white and pink and so pretty, she’d held out her hands. They’d laid him naked on her breast. It wasn’t enough. She’d asked for a little more time. They’d brought him to her washed and wrapped in blankets. She’d inspected every inch of that tiny body, memorizing, promising not to forget, trying to explain. She fell asleep, cradling him in her arms. He’d been gone when she awoke. She’d never touched her baby again.

Until today.

Her hands held each other now as she walked with the night’s ghosts. She had no rights, she knew that. She had relinquished all claims. She would never demand anything—not family or love or forgiveness. She would ask for nothing from the child or his father. But would it be so wrong to be near, to watch the child grow from a toddler to a boy to a man? Invisible, silent, watching, protecting, she would be no more than the specters surrounding her now. Surely it wasn’t asking too much?

Her father was right. The child had a home, a family, a name. She would do nothing to jeopardize that. She would ask for nothing, expect nothing. She had no rights.

But she’d given her son up once. She wouldn’t give him up again.

NOW WAS the one moment Reid knew peace—when the morning was dawn, soft and moist and warm as the steam rising from the barrels of water heating in the backstretch. When all the world was vague and muffled—the hooves on the turf, the talk between the trainers huddled at the rail, watching their charges. It wouldn’t last long. The mist would break, and the horses, the people would no longer be illusions in the lavender August light. Everything would become real once more, and Reid would remember that what was one minute could be gone the next. A turn of the head, a chance look and whole lives could change. But, for now, moving though the morning haze, he might have been dreaming.

He joined his trainer, Smiley Woods, at the rail. Smiley had trained two of Hamilton Hills’ three Derby champions, and Reid knew the man would be welcome at any farm he choose. He’d even told him so when Hamilton Hills’ financial state became public, and the offers for Smiley’s services began pouring in. But Smiley had only shook his head and said, “This is where I belong.” Such was the spell Hamilton Hills could cast.