Her Perfect Match Read Online Free Page A

deceased?”
    Jackson heard the genuine sympathy in her voice, and his opinion of the woman went up another notch. He nodded.
    “Oh, I’m so sorry. Where did you say you hail from?”
    “Out west, ma’am,” he answered vaguely, afraid perhaps his questions had given away too much. “I’d already talked to your brother about the job here, soyour name stuck in my head when I saw it in the playbill. It’s a small world, they say.”
    He hated lying, but he wasn’t ready to tell her who he was. Especially not in front of a witness. This was between him and Meg Taggert.
    Hoping to change the subject, Jackson quickly asked, “So, Cole, do you want me to have one of the men see to your animals?”
    Cole hesitated then sighed. “I’ll take care of them. A bet is a bet, and she beat me even if she cheated. I’ll see you at dinner, cheater,” Cole called after his aunt.
    Meg Taggert had an answer for her nephew but Jackson couldn’t seem to focus on what they were saying. He was too bowled over by the meeting. Then he heard her laughter floating behind her on the summer breeze as she sailed toward Laurel House.
    “Now that your aunt’s gone, why don’t you let me take care of the horses? You probably shouldn’t even have been riding with that separated shoulder of yours,” he told Cole.
    “Oh, it’s coming along.” Cole glanced after his aunt and rotated the recently separated shoulder a bit, wincing. “But now that you mention it, maybe I did overdo it a little.” He turned the reins over to Jackson with a grin. “Besides,” he said, a chuckle in his voice, “she really did cheat. Thanks a lot, Jack.”
    He watched Cole walk toward the barn where he probably planned to check on the recovering mare, then Jackson whistled for a couple of the kids Ross hired from a teen program at the local high school.He gave orders for the care of each animal then turned and headed for his office. Minutes later he sank into the chair behind his desk, his thoughts on the woman he’d just met.
    So that was his mother.
     
    Elizabeth had fled to Laurel Glen and Glory after a particularly nasty scene with her mother. It seemed Louise Boyer had found yet another son of yet another friend who was simply perishing to take her out.
    He had money. Gobs of money. And, better yet, he was lonely. He worked eighty hours a week as an associate at O’Connor, Belzer, Creasey and McAllister, one of Philadelphia’s top law firms. And he was wife shopping. It was time, he’d decided—the next step if he was going to advance his career.
    If only Elizabeth would be charming and smile and be nice, her mother told her. If only she’d bring him up to scratch and marry him, he would surely bail them out of the financial mess her father’s poor investments had caused.
    At first Elizabeth hadn’t been able to believe her ears. Her mother had never before been so forthright about her plans. It told Elizabeth her parents’ money troubles were worse than she’d thought. It also sounded annoyingly like the plot of a Victorian novel, Elizabeth had informed her mother. She was not for sale. She’d gone on to explain that she was a woman of the new millennium and her parents’ financial problems were not hers.
    Two hours later, she was finally feeling humanagain. The pasture fence leading into the yard near Stable Two loomed, challenging her and Glory. None of the workers was anywhere nearby, so she gave Glory her head and they flew over the fence—two parts of a whole. She reveled in that moment of weightlessness just before Glory began the downward arc to the ground.
    She laughed and patted her seven-year-old Irish draft horse on her gracefully curved gray neck as they slowed to a stop. It had been five long days since she’d had the opportunity to put Glory through her paces, and the wonderful freedom of riding filled her.
    “That could be dangerous, Ms. Boyer,” Jack Alton declared as he marched up to her. “If you don’t care about your