Wild Horses Read Free

wail from below. “Now if you’ll just put down that cactus, I’m sure—”
    He froze at the railing, staring down at his car, his mouth unhinging with a silent scream, and then the real thing: “Allie? Allie? Allie! Oh, Allie!” Her name yelped over and over.
    Movement drew her eye to the open doorway, where the redhead came out in a shorty kimono that hit her at midthigh. DeCarlo, M., this must be, showgirl-leggy and showgirl-long, but obviously a showgirl retired, Boyd’s senior by ten years minimum and taller by an inch. Mean-eyed now, her face was rouged flint, sharply angled and interrupted too soon to have been rejuvenated by the flushed dewy glow of sex. Her dyed hair was a bundle of stressed copper.
    “Can’t you shut that fucking thing off?” she shouted, pressed both palms over her ears.
    “What’s your problem?” Allison shouted back. “You can’t hear yourself age?”
    The woman flinched with a genuine terror of years. Her mouth downturned into a vicious snarl; a finger pointed in warning.
    “You put my cactus down, you hear me? You put it down right where you found it—” Switching targets in an eyeblink, “Boyd? Boyd! What are you screaming about?”
    “My car, look at my car , Madeline!” he cried. “It looks like she hit it with a wrecking ball!”
    Madeline went striding across the deck in a waft of Chantilly Lace and Virginia Slims, fuming under her breath. She clutched the wooden railing. “My fern !”
    Madeline DeCarlo went on the attack, the kimono flapping to expose a pocked jiggle of slack-muscled tummy that contrasted with her toned legs. Allison slashed in self-defense with the cactus, but it had no heft, the pot plastic and spewing clumps of sand. She missed, Madeline leaping aside with dancer’s grace, a hard and embattled elegance about her.
    Allison’s next swing tagged Boyd on the right shoulder and brought a howl of anguish, and still he was begging for a chance to explain; they never learned. She hurled the pot to the deck, grabbed the others as quickly as she could, and flung them down as well at the irresistible targets made by those four bare feet.
    And then she darted between them, her fury spent, moving with impunity because she was the only one with shoes. She walked as tall and straight as she could, beneath that brutal sun, crossing the lot to applause from the swimming pool.
     
    *
     
    She’d met Boyd nine months ago at a charity fund-raiser for a children’s hospital — Casino Night, a guaranteed crowd-pleaser with Seattle’s philanthropic finest bellying up to the tables to buy bankrolls of play money. The first thing they lost was perspective. Winning was still everything, even if their wagers weren’t worth the paper they were printed on.
    Allison had gone as a representative of the day care center where she worked, its donation to conscripted labor. Chosen for what — legs? figure? experience handling unruly children? — then sent forth in garters and fishnet stockings, short skirt and push-up bra. Most of her hair was gathered back, the rest falling in wheat-blond twists past her neck. Her oval face tarted up with more makeup than she’d ordinarily wear in a month. She humored the tight-vested pack of coronaries-in-the-making while they puffed cigars and played high rollers, delivering their drinks like a harried pro.
    Boyd, on the other hand, stood behind his blackjack table with an unassailable authority. His black slacks were sharply creased, his shirt was white as an angel’s robe, and his bow tie was not a clip-on. A lacy garter, dark bordello red, was cinched around each biceps, and he’d waxed the tips of his mustache, their angles jaunty, devil-may-care.
    If she hadn’t known better she’d’ve guessed that a steamboat had delivered him directly to the wharves, straight out of 1880.
    He had a knack, had Boyd, plus a crowd around his table to testify to his skills. Boyd Dobbins possessed a near-telekinetic command over each card that