High Country Cowgirl. Joanna Sims

and that’s when he saw that the lovely woman had had a slight shift in opinion of him.

      Bonita slipped her sunglasses to the top of her head. The expression on her face said it all: she was impressed. Their eyes met; Gabe was immediately drawn in to rich, mahogany brown.

      “This is unexpected,” she told him in a blunt manner, her eyes back on the rig.

      He decided not to be offended. After all, Little Sugar Creek was purposefully humble. The main house at Sugar Creek was a statement of the wealth his father had amassed, but Gabe didn’t need anything fancy. He just needed comfort, function and easy-to-care-for, because he spent a good deal of his time on the road.

      “All right.” Bonita’s body language, her tone, as well as the expression on her face, had all softened, signaling to him that she had decided to give him a chance to earn her business. “I’d like a tour.”

      * * *

      “Hi, Mom.” Bonita smiled fondly at her mother on video chat. “How are you feeling today?”

      “I miss you, mija,” her mother said, affectionately calling her “my daughter” in Spanish.

      “I miss you, too, Mom. I’ll be home soon.”

      Today was the day that Bonita had been waiting for—Vested Interest was going to begin the journey from Virginia to Montana. In advance of the trip, she had taken her father’s personal private jet to Washington, DC, her old stomping grounds, and had a chance to visit with friends and go out on the town. Oh, how she missed living close to the nation’s capital.

      “I’ve got to go, Mom. Jill is driving me and we’re almost there.”

      “Hi, Mom!” her friend Jill called out from the driver’s side.

      One last “I love you” to her mom and Bonita ended the video chat. With a wistful sigh, she admired the Virginia landscape. “I miss it here so much,” she told her friend. Montana was picturesque, but as far as Bonita was concerned, that’s all that was in the plus column. Other than that, it was desolate, backward-thinking and boring.

      “We miss you!” Jill exclaimed. “Last night was long overdue.”

      “Agreed.”

      Bonita had attended graduate school at George Washington University, located in the heart of Washington, DC, and had made so many good friends along the way. Many of her friends, like Jill, went on to take jobs in Congress or went on to attend law school.

      Bonita’s plan had been to go to law school and then pursue a career in politics. But that was before her mother was diagnosed with an incurable, degenerative illness, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. That devastating diagnosis changed the trajectory of Bonita’s life.

      Her mother, Evelyn, had dreamed of retiring to Montana. With time not on their side, her father retired early, putting the day-to-day operations of his lucrative consulting business in the hands of a chief operating officer, and bought his wife the ranch of her dreams just outside Bozeman, Montana.

      Bonita, who had decided to change majors and prepared herself to attend medical school, decided to take an extended break after graduate school to help care for her mother. It hadn’t been a difficult decision to make, but living in Montana had been a hard change for Bonita. She missed her cosmopolitan life—she missed her friends.

      “Darn it,” Jill complained. “It looks like we’re here already. This visit was too short!”

      “I know,” Bonita agreed. She had thought she would get back to DC much more frequently than had actually happened in reality. It was difficult not to feel a pinch of envy for all of her friends who on social media seemed to be having the time of their lives. While her life seemed to have ground to a halt.

      Jill pulled through the gates of Prestige Farm, a state-of-the-art equestrian facility that had been Bonita’s home away from home for much of her teens and twenties. She didn’t have any reason to feel nervous, and yet her stomach felt a bit unsettled. She had never had to have one of her horses transported on a trip that would take over thirty hours. Maybe that was it. Or maybe, it was the thought of encountering Gabe Brand again.

      “Promise me.” Jill parked her Mercedes just outside the main office of Prestige Farm. “Promise me. You’ll come back for another, longer visit soon.”

      Bonita got out, lifted her suitcase out of the trunk and shut it. “I promise.”

      They hugged each other tightly, sad to be parting.

      “Besides, don’t you want to see Mark sooner than later?”

      Mark was a very handsome attorney who had been in their circle of friends for years; but this year, he was single. He had asked Bonita out for dinner her last night in DC and she had accepted, with the caveat that they were just two old friends sharing a meal. Mark had wanted to kiss her “good-night” and she had let him. It was the first kiss she had experienced since she broke things off with her college boyfriend; even a sweet kiss couldn’t change how she felt about starting a new relationship. For now, her focus needed to be her mother.

      “He lives here. I live there.” Bonita shrugged. “I’ve never really liked long-distance relationships. Too much effort.”

      “Your father owns a private jet,” Jill said, a conspiratorial gleam in her hazel eyes.

      “Maybe if I met the right guy,” Bonita said with another noncommittal shrug.

      “Mark could be the right guy.”

      She didn’t want to kiss and tell, so she just kept her mouth shut. But the first kiss with Mark hadn’t set off any bells and whistles. Instead, she dropped the subject, gave her friend another hug and then waved as Jill drove away and headed back to her life in DC.

      Luckily, Bonita didn’t have a moment to be melancholy. Her longtime dressage instructor, Candace, noticed her standing in the driveway with her suitcase, looking like a waif.

      “Big day!” Candace was a tall, lanky woman with cropped blond hair framing a long, tanned, makeup-free face.

      “A long time coming,” Bonita agreed.

      They stowed her suitcase in a locker in the climate-controlled tack room and then headed toward a small turnout paddock to see her boy.

      “He’s been doing great.” Candace leaned her arms over the fence.

      Bonita felt happy, truly happy, when she was able to lay eyes on her horse again. His full name was Valdemar’s Vested Interest and he had been imported from Germany two years prior as an upper-level dressage prospect. Now that she was taking a break from school, her father wanted her to get back into showing. But in her heart, Bonita wasn’t sure that she wanted that for herself.

      She clucked her tongue at Val to get his attention. The gelding, so regal with his long gray-and-white tail and his shiny dappled, blue-gray body, lifted his head for a brief moment before he went back to grazing. Was it right for her to take him out of the heart of dressage country and move him to cattle country?

      “How have you been? How’s your mother?”

      Bonita filled her trainer in on the last several months of her life, trying to sound more positive about the move than she actually felt.

      “Here’s the million-dollar question. Have you been riding?”

      They turned away from the paddock. “Honestly? Not much. I mean, I’ve been hopping on Mom’s old girl just to keep her moving, but other than that...” Bonita’s words trailed off. “I don’t know what to tell you. I feel stuck since I’ve moved out there. Frozen. I feel completely out of my element, disoriented. I just can’t seem to get myself motivated to do much of anything, other than making sure Mom’s okay. I’m hoping Val will give me the motivation I need to snap out of it.”

      “I’ll tell you what,” Candace said, “Once you get Val settled, I’ll come out to Montana. He’s fit. He’s been on a