A Tall, Dark Cowboy Christmas. Maisey Yates

and still complained about her life and her looks.

      The horse books, she had decided, were a safer read. Because she didn’t harbor fantasies about living on a ranch or finding a beautiful, wild steed to ride. It had nothing to do with her life. It hadn’t even been anything she wanted. It had just been an escape. Something so different from the life she lived, being shifted between suburban neighborhoods.

      A life riding horses over rolling hills with golden sun filtering through the trees. There was a lot of dappling sun in those books. And in McKenna’s mind, dappling sun was one of the most romantic images, to this day.

      But it was a fantasy that didn’t get its claws into her soul, because it seemed impossible. Not like having a family someday, which seemed both impossible and like it should be as possible for her as anyone else.

      It seemed surreal she was coming closer to actually having the horse fantasy than ever having the loving family fantasy. But who knew. Maybe the Daltons would fold her into their loving embrace.

      The thought sent a sharp pang through her chest. Like she’d been run through with a shard of glass.

      She stopped walking for a moment and stood, looking out at the mountains that surrounded the ranch. Maybe she had internalized that Anne stuff a lot more than she had realized. Because obviously part of her believed in it, even as she railed against it. Oh, that bright light of optimism that seemed to burn inside of her no matter what.

      “Maybe I’ll fall off the horse and break my neck,” she said cheerfully, taking a step forward and kicking a pinecone out of the way. “Maybe the horse will hate me, and Grant will take it as a sign of my bad character and tell Wyatt to send me packing. Maybe this is all just a dream and I’m still sleeping in a hollowed-out cabin in the freezing cold.”

      “Or maybe, you’re just about to have an uneventful riding lesson.” She looked up sharply, and saw Grant move onto the path.

      “Good Lord, Grant,” she said. “Are you part puma? You scared the hell out of me.”

      “Are you nervous?”

      She flattened her mouth into a line. “I’m not the most Zen.”

      “The horse I got for you could safely ride in circles at a kid’s birthday party.”

      “Well. Now I feel condescended to.”

      “Would you rather be condescended to, or did you want to get bucked off a horse today?”

      “Condescension, please,” she said.

      “Your horse is completely safe, and nothing is going to happen.”

      “You’re just trying to make me feel better.”

      “Have I ever tried to make you feel better?”

      “No,” she said, puzzling. “That’s the weird thing about you. You’re not too nice, but you’re not mean, either.”

      “Is that weird?”

      “Yes,” she said. “It’s really weird. My experience is that when you have the kind of life I had, people either look at you like you’re a very sad little puppy that they pity deeply, or they want to lecture you about how something you’ve done has put you in this position. You haven’t done either thing.”

      “Well, it sounds like you’ve had some things go down.”

      “Understatement.”

      “People end up in weird situations, McKenna. Situations they didn’t plan on. All the damned time. And anyone who doesn’t think that? They’re just scared. They can’t stand the idea that they might find themselves homeless, trying to find a cabin to sleep in on someone else’s property. If they don’t blame some kind of moral failing in you, then what’s to keep them from suffering something that puts them in the exact same place? It’s the same with a lot of life’s crap. Sickness. People always want to know what you did. If you prayed hard enough. If your body was alkaline, or you ate enough kale. They want to believe that in the end they would have been able to do something. And most of all, they want to believe that somehow you deserve something they don’t. Fact of the matter is I’m not sure any of us deserves to have good or bad things that happen to us. They just happen. So I don’t judge you. In the grand scheme of things, I don’t have a whole lot of reasons to pity you, either.”

      McKenna blinked. “My mother abandoned me.”

      “I’m sorry about that.” His face stayed that same shade of beautiful neutral it almost always was.

      “But you don’t feel sorry for me.”

      “If I did, would it change anything?”

      She frowned. “It might... Affirm my feelings.”

      His brown eyes were unreadable. “You don’t need your feelings affirmed. You just have to decide what you’re going to do.”

      “Well, I’m here, so obviously I’ve made some decisions.”

      She didn’t like the fact that he had now graduated to lecturing her. In fact, she preferred a little mindless pity over this.

      “I speak from experience when I say that people feeling sorry for you doesn’t help you do a damn thing. Especially if they are sorry without offering help.”

      “I guess you’re offering help.”

      “That’s Wyatt and Lindy. I’m offering to teach you how to ride a horse.”

      They approached the barn—one she hadn’t been in before—and walked inside slowly.

      It smelled sweet. Dense and dusty, but not entirely unpleasant. She looked around and saw stacks of hay, and could just barely see the tops of a few horses’ heads in the stall.

      “What’s the smell?”

      “Everything,” he said.

      “What does everything mean?”

      “Shavings. Hay. Dirt.” He paused and looked back at her, his expression partly shaded by the brim of his cowboy hat. “Horse urine.”

      “Well.” She wrinkled her nose. “That’s a bit... Earthy.”

      “Horses are. It’s not a bad smell, though.”

      She inhaled, letting it kind of roll over her. “No. I guess it isn’t.”

      “You’ve really never been around horses?”

      “No. I mostly lived in the suburbs. In around different places in Oregon. Predominantly the Portland area. I guess we went to...pumpkin patches and things? And did hayrides? But it seemed like everything was...cleaner.”

      “Probably because it wasn’t a working ranch.”

      “Well, okay, probably not. But I always thought it was fun.”

      “This will be fun for you, too,” he said.

      “Unless I do fall off and break my neck,” she pointed out.

      “I won’t let that happen,” he said, his tone firm.

      “Are you going to rush to lay a pillow out on the ground if my steed starts to act up?”

      His green eyes were unbearably serious when they clashed with hers. “I said I won’t let that happen. I’m not going to let anything happen to you, McKenna.”

      “Are you the horse whisperer?” she asked.

      “I already told you I don’t make mistakes.”

      She couldn’t give him a hard time about that. His tone was so very grave, and mostly, it had nothing to do with his sensibilities and everything to do with the fact that... She just wanted to believe him. Everything in her wanted to believe that Grant Dodge was a unicorn. A good man who did what he said, and who just might keep her from harm. Which made