Sheikh's Scandalous Mistress

Now, she was confused about how everything had fallen apart.

Cutter Farm was one of the top horse facilities in Lexington, Kentucky, and it was home to some of the best breeding stock in the country. These were racing lines and lineages who claimed their heritage far back, before the days of Man of War and Secretariat, although both of them were progenitors for most of the horses living now. They had horses who had won the derby in recent memory and Tornado’s father, Lightning, was worth close to a million dollars for his own racing record.

So why was the operation bleeding money?

Clicking her tongue, she set off into a trot, rising and falling with the posting position as the wind breezed through her ponytail, that small stray bit of hair that was poking out under her helmet. The cool Kentucky wind was growing cold as the sun set. Kentucky was set up in the corner of the Appalachian Mountains, nestled beneath Ohio, and spring was a weird time in the country; during the day it was almost warm enough, a promise of summer. But once the sun was down, the cold began to set in immediately. March still had bite left to it and, for now, Samantha wanted to be home and untacking her stallion before her hands froze off.

As they approached the stables together, its bright red roof glinting in the sun, Sam finally slid off her horse and ran the stirrups up. Then she patted Tornado’s long and sweaty neck, smiling back at him.

“See, now that’s the exercise we both needed, isn’t it, buddy?”

He snorted and pulled her toward the stables. The young colt knew the routine. As soon as she brushed him down, then he’d be ready for his salt cubes and other treats. Someone desperately wanted his extra carrots today, but that made sense. She’d run him hard and could see the sweat slicking his forelock to his head. He needed all the protein he could get, too. Hoping to get back to her routine, Sam knew she’d be trying to run him more, to do anything to get out of the routine of the office and the endless rows on the excel spreadsheets that never made sense, no matter how hard she tried.

They were going to lose the farm, and she knew it. She just wasn’t sure, short of finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, if there was anything she could do to stop it.

Sighing, she clicked her tongue once more and walked with her steed back to the old building. It would need some painting again, and one of the doors had cracked from another horse kicking it a few weeks ago. That would take some money to fix. Again, things added up on a farm, and it kept her up nights.

“Alright, Tornado, let’s get you settled.”

* * *

“I just don’t get it,” she said, tempted to throw the damn mouse across the room, as if that would make the numbers any less dire.

“What’s that?” Andy said, frowning back at her.

Despite her mood, she stifled a laugh. Andy had one of those massive handlebar mustaches, the kind that made him look like he was about to go roughriding out on the plains with Wyatt Earp. When he frowned, it made the whole thing wriggle across his face.

“I don’t understand where all the money is going. I have no freaking clue. We have great sales, great breeding reputation. We haven’t had any illnesses and, yes, there are always repairs, but it’s never been more than we could handle before. It’s not like we developed some damn sinkhole or had to weather an ice storm. I don’t get why we’re bleeding money.”

“I don’t know either. You father kept the books until his surgery, and I respect that. A man’s finances are his own. Still, I’ve always thought of Gerry as responsible.” Andy shook his head. “Maybe there were old loans he took out that he never wanted you to know about.”

She paused and sighed, pressing the bridge of the nose with her fingers. “You mean things from when Mom was sick?”

“I didn’t say that. I just said that sometimes there are things a man keeps hidden for a reason,” the old hand replied.

“And I get that Dad has his pride. God knows that drove me crazy before he admitted his left hip was so bad off.”

“A man…”

“Has got to do what a man has got to do,” she said, puffing up her chest and forcing her voice to go as deep as it could. “And John Wayne died of cancer after filming a movie on a nuclear testing ground. Sometimes manning up doesn’t do a thing. Sometimes you have to ask for help.”

“Maybe, but they were his books.”

She sighed and raked her hands through her long, honey-gold hair. It tended to tangle when she did her accounting work. She’d twist it back into a bun and secure it with a pen, but that never held it for long. Over a long session, she’d pull out tendrils and fidget with the pen until it was a mess all over again. Once, her Bic had snapped and she’d had a patch of hair the color of a Smurf for two days.

“That’s not good enough. If he were in trouble, all he had to do was ask…unless,” she stopped, her eyes growing wide with understanding. “You think that he didn’t know. I know between the surgery and maybe Mom’s anniversary coming up, he’s been very much hands off. I just can’t tell by how much.”

“He seems chipper now that he can ride again. Frankly, you have to talk to him. This farm has been in his family for four generations. He can’t have it yanked out from under him with no warning. Ain’t no way to do a man,” Andy said, taking in a deep breath and spitting out his chaw into the nearest spittoon.

Gross. Is it too much to ask for no tobacco in the office?

Glaring back at him, she gestured to the old bronzed urn. “You know you’re dumping that.”

“I always do, princess,” Andy replied, hearkening back to a nickname she’d begged her dad and the hands to stop calling her when she was entering high school. “Either way, you can’t solve this problem in the books by yourself. If you could, you’d have done it. I don’t think you have however much it is lying around.”

However much was close to five million dollars. They barely had enough left, according to the books, to keep the farm running for the next year, and that was only if they assumed that no huge sicknesses, weather emergencies, or other general farm disasters happened. The odds that Murphy’s Law would leave them alone, maybe give Sam a full year to figure out how to either become a consummate bank robber or possibly run to Vegas to win the money needed, were extremely low.

Andy wasn’t wrong. If she had five million, then she wouldn’t be terrified about all the money she owed everyone, about losing the only home she’d ever known, the place she’d lived, not only with her parents, but her grandparents back when she was just a kid.