Must Love Horses. Vicki Tharp

      “See those two horses over there?” Hank said to Sidney. “That’s the mare and the colt the horse was pregnant with when Mac saved them from the kill buyer at auction a couple years ago. I’d sent her there to buy some saddle horses.”

      Hank had raised his voice to be heard by his wife and Boomer. After he was finished talking, Hank said to Mac, “If I hadn’t seen you two in action, I would think y’all were a couple a pushovers.”

      “Come closer and say that to my face, cowboy.” Mac’s eyes went dark, mischievous.

      Hank backed off, with a smile on his face. “Not in front of the children, dear.”

      Mac rolled her eyes. Sidney laughed. It was low and throaty, completely at odds from how Boomer had expected her laugh to sound. He shouldn’t have been surprised. In the two days he’d known her, she hadn’t once been what he’d expected.

      He looked at her then, really looked at her. He looked past the short red hair she’d moussed up from her scalp like tiny flames, past the flush on her cheeks from a day in the sun, past the sandy raspberry on her temple, past her firm breasts and exquisite ass. Past all that, he saw the woman beneath: tough, strong, intelligent, with a depth he suspected he could mine for an eon and still not hit bottom.

      “Burro or no burro, you picked a solid string, Sidney. Good job,” Hank said.

      It might have been Boomer’s imagination, but Sidney seemed to grow two inches right in front of his face.

      Hank didn’t give Sidney a chance to respond before adding, “I got a call today, from a potential buyer,” he said. “Coming up in a couple weeks to check out what we have. He’s a big fish. People see he’s buying stock from us, others will want to as well. A good impression is vital.”

      “Sure.” A smile. Tight. Forced. Sidney raised her chin. “I won’t let you down.”

      Hank looked Sidney in the eye.

      Did Hank see what Boomer saw? A woman determined to prove her abilities worthy and her detractors wrong?

      “No, I don’t believe you will,” Hank said.

      Hank and Mac turned toward the big house when Mac called over her shoulder. “Take care of that wound for her, Boomer.”

      * * * *

      At the barn, Bryan stopped Sidney with a hand to her arm and drew her around to face him. He lifted her chin and angled her wound toward the sun. With a light touch, he plucked a caked-on piece of hay from her forehead.

      Sand rained down from her hair. Sidney reached up. The abrasion was superficial, the sand ground in, stuck on with dried sweat and blood. The wound stung every time the wind blew.

      “Come on,” Bryan said. “I have a first aid kit at my cabin.”

      “It’s fine. I’ll clean it when I take a shower tonight.”

      “You know there’s manure in with all that sand.”

      “It’s a scratch. I was raised in a barn. I probably nibbled on a ball of manure by the time I’d learned to crawl. If nothing else, I have one freaking fantastic immune system.”

      “Humor me.” His blue eyes narrowed. He wasn’t taking no for an answer.

      She sighed for dramatic effect. “Okay, fine. But I need to get Eli settled first.”

      Bryan glanced over to where Eli was still saddled in the shade, his hay bag still partially full. “He can wait.”

      “Eli, then me.”

      He looked her up and down, measuring her resolve. He must have figured it was greater than his because he nodded and followed her over to Eli, his limp more profound.

      “I’ve got this, if you want to sit and wait for me.”

      “I can help.”

      She stepped in front of him. “Your stride is short. The lines around your eyes are long, and if you clench your jaws any tighter, you’ll shatter a molar. Jesus, Bryan, if you’re in pain, stop.”

      Then his face softened, a few of the stress lines on his forehead relaxed. “Only my mother calls me Bryan.”

      She wrinkled her nose and suppressed a shiver. His mother? Bryan’s mother was probably a perfectly wonderful person, but having a hot guy tell you that you remind them of their mother, that was sixty-one kinds of wrong. “I remind you of your mother?”

      He laughed. The rumble warm and smooth, like chocolate melting in the sun. He looked her up and down. Long and slow, as if he were mentally comparing every inch of her to his mother. Every. Single. Solitary. Inch. She flushed.

      “Hardly,” he said.

      Her stomach did a weird flippy thing and the synapses in her brain misfired, so she didn’t know what to think about her reaction. She led Eli to the barn. Bryan cranked on the water and handed her the hose.

      Since changing the subject when things got awkward seemed to be working for them, she went with it. “So, you’ve liked to blow shit up—”

      “For a very long time.” Bryan made the mental shift without slipping the clutch or grinding any gears.

      “Legally?”

      His slow smile transformed his face. “Mostly.” When she raised her brows at him he added, “Two or three or four fence posts may not have survived my elementary school days, and there was an old outhouse that fell victim. But that stinky old toilet taught me the need to learn how to shape my charges so the explosion goes in the right direction. I’d call it a win.”

      She squeegeed the water off Eli then turned her horse out with Mac’s mare and colt. “Your mother must have been a saint.”

      “See,” he grinned. “Nothing at all like you.”

      She tried to sock him in the gut, but he moved faster than she’d expected considering his leg was bothering him.

      As they walked down to Bryan’s cabin, Sidney’s mind whirred and shifted into hyperdrive. Two weeks. Two weeks to get four wild horses far enough in their training to impress the buyer. To impress Hank and Mac. To make or break her employment.

      Her heart thumped in her chest, her breath quickened, and her stride lengthened. This wasn’t the start of another panic attack. The panic attacks were all about flight. This? This was all about the fight.

      * * * *

      Boomer held his cabin door open and ushered Sidney inside. She stopped in the center and did a slow 360, taking in the two sets of bunk beds on either side wall, the mini-kitchen with a refrigerator, sink, and microwave that shared a wall with the bathroom tucked behind it.

      She rubbed a hand over the two-seater table, the top scarred and worn at the edges from years of use. There wasn’t much else to see. A one-room cabin didn’t take long to tour. He decided to skip showing her the bathroom, with its baby-shit green shower, toilet, and sink. No point in scaring her off.

      “Very…retro,” she decided.

      “It gets the job done.” He pulled out one of the ladder-back chairs. The joints were weak and the chair racked when you sat in it, but as little as she weighed, it wouldn’t matter none. “Sit.”

      She did. “You live alone.”

      “For now. Alby and Santos have the other cabin. This one was Mac and Hank’s before they moved into the foreman’s house. If they hire anyone else, I guess they’ll bunk here.”

      “What about the cabins you’re building?”

      “Guest cabins.” He retrieved the first aid kit from the bathroom. “Hank’s talking about the Lazy S doing their own guided pack trips into the mountains, hunt trips, things like that.”

      He set the kit on the table, grabbed the other chair,