Cowboy Crazy

chapter 36



Deep down, Sarah knew she was being foolish. She was liable to get attached to the horse, and then it would be even harder to leave. The best insurance would be to make plans. That’s what she’d done for the past decade: map out a plan of attack and stick with it.

Taking out her cell phone, she dialed Kelsey’s number.

“Hi, Kelse?”

“Sarah.” Her sister sounded relieved and angry all at once. “Where have you been?”

It was the way she sounded when she couldn’t spot Katie on the playground and then the girl popped out of the bushes laughing. When had Kelsey become such a mom? It was like their roles had switched.

“I stayed at the ranch.”

“With Lane?”

“No.”

“That’s too bad. He was nice.”

“Yeah, he seems that way, but he’s not. Kelsey, he was the one who bought Flash.”

“Flash?” Kelsey sounded stunned. “Wow, what a coincidence. That’s amazing. Does he still have him?”

“No.” Sarah could barely get the words out through clenched teeth. “He bred him, though. He has a colt that—well, it could be the same horse.”

“Cool.”

“Cool? Is that all you have to say?”

“Yeah. You loved that horse. Isn’t it cool to see his baby?”

“Kelsey, he stole Flash, remember? Two thousand dollars. The horse was worth twenty.”

“I know, but we had to sell him fast and—well, that’s how it worked out. It’s not like we could have kept him.”

“I could have kept him.”

“How? Without Roy…”

“It would have been hard, but I could have done it. I could have taken him to rodeos again, won some prize money.”

“How? How would you have gotten him there? Who’d drive the truck? You had to be in the trailer with him or he’d kick it to bits.”

Sarah gripped the phone so hard her hand hurt. “Never mind, Kelse.”

She didn’t need to be reminded that she should have been in that trailer. Instead she’d been putting on mascara. Primping while Roy got killed.

Kelsey knew her so well she could even read her silences. “Sarah, it wasn’t your fault.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does to you. I know it does.”

“If I’d been there, Roy would be alive.”

“No, he…”

“That’s not what I called about anyway. I need to tell you something.” Damn, this was the hardest phone conversation she’d ever had. “I lost my job.”

“Oh, Sarah.”

“It’ll be okay,” Sarah said. “You’ve got Mike now. He’s still working, right? So you and Katie’ll be okay?”

“We’ll be fine. But it’s not all about me, you know.” She muttered something Sarah could barely hear. It sounded like “it never was.”

“What did you say?”

“I said it never was.” Kelsey sounded defiant, as though she was letting loose something she’d kept bottled up a long time. “It was never about me. It was about you, needing to be—I don’t know. Needing to be needed.”

Sarah didn’t know how to respond.

“Sorry,” Kelsey added. “But that’s what Mike said. Look, I’m grateful,” Kelsey sounded sullen, “but if you hadn’t always been there taking over, I might have listened to his message. I know you were trying to help, but…”

“Kelsey, he left you and you collapsed. What the hell were all those headaches about?”

“They were about being stressed,” Kelsey admitted. “You helped, and I appreciate it. But I’m okay now, all right? I don’t need help. I can make it on my own.” She paused a moment. “With Mike. I know you think it’s wrong to take him back, but the whole thing was mostly a misunderstanding.”

“Okay,” Sarah said. The phone suddenly seemed heavy in her hand.

“What we need to talk about is you,” Kelsey said. “I can’t believe you’re still harping on the whole deal with Flash. Come on, what’s done is done. I’d forgotten all about whoever bought him. I remember you made him into some kind of bogeyman, some evil outside force that ruined our lives. Well, he didn’t.”

“We lost the ranch, Kelsey.”

“We lost it because Roy made bad decisions. He gambled on that horse, and he lost. There was something wrong with Flash, you know? I was scared to death of him.”

“I loved him.”

“I know you did, but he was screwed up. Nobody could deal with him. So stop blaming everything on somebody who took a load off our hands.”

Sarah felt like the air had been sucked out of the car. Her sister blamed Roy for what had happened to them. Roy, who had saved their family and died. Died for her, in a way.

“Look, I have to go.” She had no idea where. She wasn’t about to ask Kelsey for a place to stay anymore.

She pulled the phone away from her ear and heard her sister protesting in a tinny, faraway voice. “No, wait. Sarah, we need to talk about this.”

“I’m fine.”

“No you’re not. Jeez, Sarah, let it go. What are you hanging onto all this stuff for? You have to forgive him.” Her tone softened. “You have to forgive yourself. What happened with Flash didn’t ruin our lives. It was just the way things went, okay? It wasn’t your fault.”

“Sure.” Sarah tried to sound casual. “I know that.”

Kelsey sighed. “So what did you call about?”

“Nothing,” Sarah said. “Just letting you know where I am.”

“Which is where?”

Sarah looked out the window at the acres of sagebrush stretching from the car, the faint blue mountains in the distance. “The Carrigan Ranch,” she said. “Or the LT, or whatever. I think I might stay here a while.”

She clicked the phone shut and eased down the road to the ranch, nursing the Malibu over the ruts and ridges. Going slow wasn’t such a bad thing anyway; it gave her time to think.

By the time she reached the ranch, she’d thought, all right. She’d managed to wipe everything Kelsey said out of her mind and focus on the horse ahead of her. Horses had always been like that for her. When you worked with a horse, it was you and the animal. The rest of the world faded away.

Today, that would be a good thing. She shut off the engine and stepped out of the car, breathing in the scent of old wood, hay, and sunshine as she stared out at the complex network of corrals.

Which were empty.

Not only was there no red dun stallion, there were no horses at all.

She strode into the barn and was greeted with a chorus of impatient whinnies. The graceful heads of a dozen quarter horses hung over stall doors at regular intervals down the long wood alleyway, their soft eyes gazing expectantly at her. There was a dull thud as one of the more impatient critters kicked at his stall door.

“Hey, babies, what’s wrong? Didn’t anybody let you out?” She stopped at the first stall, where a pretty sorrel mare was nosing at the sad remnants of yesterday’s grain. “Didn’t they feed you?”

“I’m trying,” said a voice from the end of the alley. She squinted into the sunshine streaming in the doorway at the far end of the barn. She could barely make out the silhouette of a hunched figure in a wheelchair struggling to maneuver with a bucket of grain in his lap. Trevor was dragging a hose behind him, but as she approached, he dropped it. The handle on the nozzle struck the floor and squirted a column of water into the air, flipping away from him like a snake.

“Dammit.”

Sarah ducked and grabbed the hose, jerking the handle to shut off the water. She held it awkwardly in front of her, staring at Trevor. Should she give the hose back to him, or help him? She never knew how to behave with disabled people. Did he want assistance, or would he take her help as an insult?

“If you want to give that mare some water, that would help,” he said. “She’s not going out with the others today. She got a good kick from somebody yesterday and her leg swole up.”

Sarah hauled the hose over and looked in at the mare. She did indeed have a swelling on her right front cannon bone. Filling the bucket that hung next to the door, she turned to Trevor. “Does she get grain?”

“Three scoops. Then a couple flakes of hay.”

“What about the others?”

He spun to a stop in front of the next stall, which held a grey gelding who was a little on the thin side. “Blue gets grain too, but only two scoops. And we mix in a cup of sweet feed. He’s a poor keeper, has trouble keeping weight on.”

Sarah reached up to stroke a red dun nose that had poked out of the third stall on the right.

“Cinn,” she said. “Good boy.”

“That’s not Cinn. That’s Blue,” Trevor said. “Another son of Flash.”

“How many are there?”

“Just the two.” He angled her a hopeful glance. “You taking the job?”

“No, but I won’t let the horses starve.” She cussed herself mentally even as the words flew out of her mouth. The guy was doing his best, and he clearly wasn’t neglecting the horses. He just couldn’t move fast enough to get the job done, and it seemed like he’d started kind of late.

“We usually have help, but she called in at the last minute. Could you do it just for today?” He gave his legs a rueful glance. “I can do just about anything, but it takes a while and these guys don’t like waiting.”

“Who would call in and let this happen?”

“Somebody who likes their job at the diner better than working with horses.”

Sarah remembered him mentioning a high school girl who’d come to clean the cabin. “Emmy?” she asked.

“That’s her. She’s a good kid, really. She’s just young. Doesn’t think.”

“She waited on me this morning.”

He flashed her a smile. “You went back to Suze’s?”

“Sure did.”

“Always knew you had spunk. How’d it go?”

“Better.”

“Good. It’ll keep on getting better, too.” He sobered. “You ought to stay, Sarah. Quit that job with Carrigan and work for us. We’ve got to find somebody, and frankly, not everybody can handle Lane.”

Apparently he didn’t know she’d been fired. “Yeah, well, I can’t handle Lane either.”

“I heard different.” The grin was back. “But seriously, we need some help. Emmy won’t do it, because she doesn’t want to do ranch work. Only reason she took the part-time position was to make money. I think she’s kind of scared of the horses, and let me tell you, that girl is clumsy with a capital C. She manages to feed the horses a little grain, but mostly she spills it.”

Sarah smiled.

“It is kind of funny sometimes, but not today. I guess she thought Lane was still going to be here, because I can’t imagine she’d leave me to this on purpose.” He gestured toward the chair, the hose, the grain. “I thought he was going to be around too. He said he was getting off the road for a week or two, and then he left first thing this morning.”

So Lane hadn’t planned on leaving. He’d done it for her, and now Trevor had to deal with the fallout.

“Well, I’ll help for today,” she said, scooping grain into the gray’s feed bucket. “Where’s the sweet feed?”

***

Sarah stabbed the manure fork into the ground and watched the horses milling in the corrals. The smile on her lips felt strained, as if she hadn’t used those muscles for a while, but she felt genuinely happy for the first time in weeks—maybe months. There were a few new foals in the pens, spring babies who’d just passed the gangly, wobbly stage and were gallivanting about while their mommas watched indulgently. An older mare stood in the shade next to the barn, one leg cocked, eyes closed as she simply enjoyed the sunshiny day. Sarah felt herself relax too, picking up on the mare’s calm. That feeling of peace hadn’t been there for a long time. Once in a while her conversation with Kelsey crept into the back of her mind, but she shook it off and kept working.

She’d spent the morning feeding horses and turning them out, following Trevor’s directions as to what horse went where. Then she’d spent an hour mucking stalls, forking the leavings into a rusty old trailer that she’d hauled out to the manure pile with an ancient, wheezing tractor. She’d forked it all back out again until beads of sweat rolled down her back, prickling the skin between her shoulder blades, and she was pretty sure she’d streaked her face with grime from wiping off the sweat. Her hair hung lank and damp over her forehead. She hadn’t felt this good in years.

She’d forgotten how therapeutic hard work could be. You didn’t have to think or strategize when you cleaned stalls; you could just shut down your mind and shovel.

What if this was her job? What if she went to a place like this every day, instead of an office? She felt like herself here, not like an imposter. Maybe Lane was right, and she needed to find her old self again.

But she couldn’t do it here, with the man who bought Flash. Could she?

Maybe Kelsey had a point. Maybe she should stop blaming “the buyer” for all that had happened to her family. Now that she’d put a face on the shadowy figure who’d haunted her all these years, he seemed a whole lot less demonic.

But if she stopped blaming him, she’d have to blame herself. Because it wasn’t Roy’s mistake that had cost her family everything. It was her vanity that had cost Roy his life, and her failure that had lost Flash.

She grabbed a halter from a nail on the wall and threaded her way through the corrals, following the path pounded in the dirt. Horses lifted their heads as she passed, watching her briefly, then returning to their grazing. When she reached the corner of the barn, she looked at the round pen and smiled.

Cinnamon Chrome. He was two years old, barely started. And he was waiting for her.

As she approached, the horse jerked his head up and snorted, seeming to react to something inside the pen. Maybe a leaf had flipped up in the breeze, or a shadow shifted and spooked him. He’d seemed like a calm boy yesterday, but something was definitely setting him off. As she watched, he broke into a trot and moved past the gate out of sight. She watched him circle past it two more times before she got close enough to see what was happening.

The horse was loping in a circle around the pen, and at the center of the circle was Trevor. He spun his chair nimbly with one hand so he could keep the horse running. As Sarah stepped up to the gate, he gave her a grin.

“Lane said you worked this guy a little yesterday. He seemed to have some doubts you’d keep it going, so I figured I’d come out and make sure he didn’t forget what he learned.” He edged the chair to the right and Flash broke into a lope. “Seems like he’s doing good. Must be somethin’ to see after what happened with Flash, huh?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Hearing Trevor mention Flash again felt like being punched in the gut. She started to back out of the gate, but he turned the chair to face her.

“You can pretend it didn’t happen if you want.” His tone was casual and conversational. Did he not know what he was doing to her? Even the horse had paused, one front foot in the air, stunned by the tension in the air.

“I probably wouldn’t talk much about my issues either if I didn’t have to,” Trevor continued. Obviously, he knew—but he wasn’t going to stop. “Sometimes I think it’s lucky for me my scars are on the outside. People ask, I tell, and in the long run I feel a lot better for letting it out.” He smacked his chest twice with his fist. “You keep it in here, it’ll either eat you up or turn you hard.”

She swung through the gate and closed it.

“Hey, wait. Can you hold that for me?”

She couldn’t say no. Cinn was still poised and ready to run at the slightest movement, but when Trevor wheeled through the gate the horse bent to crop a few strands of grass at the edge of the ring.

“I’ve got some stuff to do in the house.” He nodded toward the halter. “See if you can get that on him and lunge him a little. But don’t work him too long. You know two twenty-minute sessions’ll get you a lot farther than one long one, right?”

“Right.”

“And when you’re done, go ride that chestnut if you want.” He nodded toward a muscular gelding in a nearby corral. “He’s got a big motor, needs to be loped out every day. When you’re done with that, stop up to the house for a bite of lunch and I’ll give you more. Work’s never-ending around here.”

She eyed him a moment, thinking she’d say no. She’d planned to just visit Cinn and go. But there was a day’s honest work to be done, and in her heart she wanted to do it.

She wasn’t sure she could. But she wanted to.

She nodded, and he grinned. “Enjoy your second chance,” he said.