simple, powerful lust of a man who permitted himself only infrequent attractions. He watched her moving around the house, taking down this set of curtains for a good washing, polishing andirons in that unused parlor, mixing up a salve for burns to keep in Polly’s kitchen.
Sara was preoccupied, biding her time, doing what the situation called for, but she had an eye on the horizon as well, and it was an anxious eye. Beck wanted to banish her anxieties, to carry her burdens for her and offer her the comfort of a shoulder to lean on—and so much more.
Except she deserved to be able to rely on the man she bestowed her favors and her fears on. Rely on him utterly and exclusively, and Beck was not that man. He sank down on his bed, frowning, as something nagged at the back of his mind, something from the day’s flotsam of conversations and silences.
Allie’s casual information trotted up from the back of Beck’s mind, pushing him to his tired feet even as he cursed the need to check on the mare. He took a lantern and a jacket from the back hall and shuddered at the chill of the spring night.
As soon as he spied Hermione in her stall, Beck knew he wouldn’t be going back into the house any time soon. She was slowly circling, pawing at the straw, her belly distended, her eye both restless and resigned. She swung her gaze at Beck as soon as he approached her stall.
“It’s only me, sweetheart.” He kept his voice low and relaxed, because a mare could stop the foaling process if she became disturbed. “I’ve come to tidy up your nest. Thought you might want a bit of company on a chilly night.”
While Hermione stood along one wall of her stall, pawing occasionally, Beck mucked out her loose box and heaped extra clean straw in one corner. He scrubbed out her water bucket next and forked her a mound of fresh hay into another corner, then left her in peace to resume her pacing.
“I’m told”—he spoke softly to the horse—“I’m good at foaling. Nick says the mares like me, which is fine with me, because I certainly like them. One wonders, though, who the papa of your foal is, Miss Hermione Hunt. You were a naughty girl, going courting without an escort that way…”
He pattered on, until with a heavy groan, the mare went to her knees then lay down on her side. She began to strain, and Beck went silent, standing outside the stall and praying for nature to do what nature alone could do best. A few minutes later, a very undainty hoof emerged from beneath Hermione’s tail.
Beck had assisted at many, many foalings, from the time he’d been a boy at Belle Maison right up through the past two years in Sussex. He was good at it, and he enjoyed it. If the size of that hoof and the one appearing next to it were any indication, Hermione had taken up with a damned draft stud.
She couldn’t help that now, of course, so Beck waited another couple of anxious minutes while the mare made no progress.
Resuming his quiet monologue, Beck eased open the door to the stall and approached the mare.
“Not cooperating, I take it.” Beck knelt and stroked a hand over the mare’s sweaty flank. “Children are like that. Ask my papa. What say I lend a hand, and we’ll see if we can’t persuade the Foal Royal to join us sooner rather than later?”
Hermione rested her head in the straw, lying flat out as if dead, which was only prudent when she was between contractions. God willing, the old girl would need her rest. Beck continued stroking and talking until he was positioned behind the mare, his hands wrapped around the foal’s hooves. When Hermione began to strain again, Beck exerted a steady, increasing pull on those hooves, and the foal started to shift in the birth canal.
“Come to Papa,” Beck gritted through clenched teeth. The mare was laboring to the limit of her strength, Beck’s aching back was screaming with his efforts, and progress was agonizingly slow. The contraction ebbed, and Beck released his hold as the foal slipped back a few inches.
“Next time, my girl, we are going to have a damned foal,” Beck panted, getting his breath while he could.
Hermione grunted and thrashed and began to push again, so Beck went back to work. It took two more back-aching, harrowing attempts, but on a rush of fluid, a sizable filly was born. Beck peeled the placenta back from the foal’s nose, made sure the little beast was breathing, then sat back in the straw, leaning against the sturdy wall.
He beamed at the mare, who had shifted to start licking her new treasure. “Would you look at that? Look what a lovely little business you’ve done here. She’s gorgeous and hale and full of beans already.”
The filly was shaking her head and trying to prop her front feet out before her, while Hermione methodically licked her baby’s coat dry.
“Beckman?” Sara’s voice came from the aisle way. “To whom are you speaking?”
“My newest goddaughter.” Beck rose slowly, careful not to disturb the mare and foal. “Hermione has tended to the Creator’s business tonight, and done a splendid job.”
He eased from the stall, moved, as he always was, by the spontaneous joy of seeing a new life begin. Hermione was acquitting herself like an old hand, but Beck would stay around to make sure the foal nursed in the first hour of its life and the mare passed the afterbirth. After that, there was little he could do to keep the odds running in the filly’s favor.
Sara, wrapped in a thick wool shawl, peered over the half door. “What a little beauty.”
“A big beauty,” Beck countered. “Hermione has an eye for the draft stallions, I think, but the filly’s elegant for all her size.”
“She’s gorgeous.”
Beck was taken aback to see a sheen on Sara’s eyes. He moved in close and wrapped his arms around her. “Mother and baby are doing fine, and all’s well.”
“I know.” This sounded more like lament than agreement. “But she’s so… dear. Precious.” Beck said nothing, thinking dear and precious applied to the female in his arms as well. When he stepped back, he kept hold of her hand.
“I’ll mind them until the baby nurses,” he assured her. “Sit with me over here. They’ll do better with a little privacy.” He tugged her across the darkened barn aisle to sit on a trunk outside Ulysses’s stall. The gelding noted their presence without a pause in his consumption of hay.
“What made you come out here?” Sara asked, her hand still in his.
“Allie told me the signs were pointing to sooner rather than later, and mares are famous for dropping foals in the quiet and privacy of the night,” Beck said. “How about you? What drew you out here on this chilly night?”
“I saw your lantern light.” Sara’s voice was soft, as if she were mindful of the peace conducive to a newly forming bond between mare and foal. “I don’t think North could have been any help, so badly is his back hurting.”
“Does it pain him often?” The ladies seemed better attuned to North’s back than the man himself was.
“When he overdoes, which is to say, yes. Last year, he tried to do the plowing alone, and it did not go well for him. Polly made him hire help for the haying and the harvest, or he’d still be sitting in the hot spring, cursing and refusing help.”
And the ladies would have been without any meaningful protection. The precariousness of Sara’s existence at Three Springs loomed more clearly in Beck’s mind.
“North and Polly are stubborn, but Three Springs requires stubbornness, I think.” Beside him, he felt a little shudder go through Sara’s smaller frame. “You’re cold.” He tucked an arm across her shoulders. “Budge up. I’m good for warmth, if little else. So when are you going to let Allie make another painting?”
He drew away again to drape his jacket around Sara then used his arm about her shoulders to draw her close to his side.
She made no protest, and the feel of her against him comforted in a way that had to do with the mare and foal and with being far from home.
“I should let Allie paint again soon. She needs to paint the way Polly needs to cook and North needs to stomp around the property cursing the weeds, the fences, and the foxes.”
“And what does Sara need?” A safer question than what Beck himself needed.
“To see the people I care for happy and safe,” Sara said. “That’s what I need, Beckman. What about you?”
“This is a mystery.” Beck resisted the urge to nuzzle her hair, was which flowing down her back in one glorious fat plait. “For now, I need to be here in this barn with you, and I need that little filly to thrive with her
