Page 3 of Call Me Yours (Lodestar Ranch #4)

STEVEN

Six Weeks Ago

This wasn’t where I thought I’d be at thirty years old.

For one, I didn’t figure I’d be starting my career from scratch for the third time.

For another, it never once occurred to me that I’d be a walking encyclopedia about fucking pigs , of all things.

For example, I now knew that mini pigs were a thing and that mini, as it pertained to pigs, did not mean small. It meant small er .

She was still a juvenile—I’d been right about that—and she weighed a solid fifty pounds.

According to the vet, Jacob Gunnell, pet mini pigs had recently become a fad on account of some celebrity or other, but once the pig grew out of the cute little baby phase and the owners realized a mini pig was still a whole ass pig , it generally got dumped.

Apparently pigs made terrible pets if you didn’t know what you were doing.

Horseshit. Stevie was a goddamn angel.

Sure, she was every bit as smart as a dog and just as likely to get into trouble if left alone too long. She required intellectual stimulation, entertainment, and friendship.

Which was why I now had three pigs.

In the six weeks since Stevie had been hurled into my life, I had learned a lot of things about pigs. Great and terrible things.

The great: Pigs enjoyed music, and Stevie happened to have good taste. She also liked going for walks, saying hello to people, and belly rubs. She learned how to ring a bell when she wanted to come inside from her pen in the yard, and pigs were easily house trained.

The terrible: Pigs shit right by the water source.

That was nasty. They were omnivores and considered anything in reach of their mouth to be food—and they were always hunting for food.

Roots, bugs, a baby bird that happened to fall from the nest at the exact wrong moment.

..Yeah. I had to lie down after that one.

I still felt nauseous when I thought about it.

But look at that face. How could I be mad at a face like that?

“There’s a lock on the fridge.”

I looked up from watching Stevie, Lindsey, and Christine devour their morning pellets to find my sister standing in the doorway, still in her pajamas, with her blond hair piled on her head in a messy bun and a steaming mug of coffee cupped between her palms.

“Yeah, you missed a ruckus this weekend while you were fooling around in the mountains,” I told her. “Stevie figured out how to open the fridge and made a mess of things. I installed the child lock last night. Code is one-one-one-one.”

Amy arched her eyebrows at me over the rim of her mug. “One-one-one-one? Kind of an easy code to crack, isn’t it?”

I raised my eyebrows right back at her. “She’s a pig, Amy.”

“Right. My brain isn’t on yet.” Laughing, she turned back into the house. “I need more coffee.”

I followed her in, knowing she’d gotten up at the crack of dawn for the sole purpose of making me breakfast and packing me a lunch to take with me on the road, and also knowing it wouldn’t do any good to tell her she didn’t have to, that I was a grown-ass man and could take care of myself, because she’d just remind me she was staying here for free and wanted to earn her keep.

Earn her keep . I hated when she said that.

It was an echo of him . We had both been raised on the idea that a child should be grateful to have been brought into this world to begin with, and that roof over our heads and food on our plates didn’t come for free.

Maybe Dad believed kids had to earn the right to exist, but as far as I was concerned, Amy never had to earn the right to be my sister.

“How was camping?” I asked as I poured myself a second cup of coffee.

Amy pulled the egg carton from the fridge, along with a rash of bacon, which neither of us said a damn word about because compartmentalization was part of farm life. “Not camping. Backpacking,” she corrected.

“Backpacking? You mean you carried your tent and all your food the whole way?” I shook my head. I couldn’t wrap my mind around why anyone would want to do that.

Being born and raised in Oklahoma, I considered myself to be the typical country boy.

Outdoorsy to me meant hunting and fishing, both of which I had done my fair share of.

Sports meant football or the rodeo, and I had done both of those, too—football in high school, and then rodeo for nearly a decade until I turned my career toward training horses.

Moving to Colorado two years ago gave me a new perspective on outdoorsy and sports. Outdoorsy meant spending long days and even weeks in the mountains, far from roads and hospitals. Sports meant anything from rock climbing to trail running to backpacking.

Honestly, the towering peaks intimidated me a bit. They sure were pretty to look at, but I felt no need to go exploring in them. Those mountains were none of my business.

But Amy, she’d had the opposite reaction. One look at that ridgeline and she’d wanted to know everything there was to know about those mountains. And since I couldn’t provide that information, she’d found people who could, joining up with a women-only club for hiking and backpacking.

“It was great.” Amy cracked three eggs into the sizzling frying pan. “It ended up being four of us, and all three of them had a lot more experience than me, but they were real nice about it. I took a ton of pictures. I’ll show you when you get home from work tonight.”

“I’d like that,” I said absently, my mind on the more pressing issue of my baby sister out in the Rocky Mountains with nothing for protection but three other women. “No one brought along a boyfriend? Or a brother?”

“It’s a women-only group,” she reminded me. “That would have been rude.”

“Maybe, but being out there all alone doesn’t seem safe.”

She snorted. “I wasn’t alone. Meg, Amber, and Jessica were with me, like I said. Anyway, there’s nothing more dangerous to a woman than a man, so it would be kind of reckless to bring one with us, don’t you think?” She sent me a smirk over her shoulder before turning her attention back to the eggs.

I glared at her back, but couldn’t fault her logic, even though I knew she was joking. Mostly. “What about bears?” I demanded. “Bears are pretty dangerous, aren’t they?”

“We were prepared for bears.”

“How the hell do you prepare for bears, Amy?”

She slid the eggs, bacon, and two slices of toast on a plate and set it down in front of me. “Do you really want to know? Because I’d be happy to take you out some weekend and show you.”

“Nah, I’m good.”

Her gaze dipped and the corners of her mouth went right down with it. Was she…disappointed? She didn’t actually want me tagging along on her adventures, did she? My eyebrows pinched together, but she turned back to the counter, gathering the ingredients for a sandwich.

“Anyway, bears aren’t the scariest thing out there. Moose are worse.”

“Moose?”

“Yeah.” She nodded vehemently. “Moose are way scarier than bears.”

“Well, how do you prepare for a moose, then?”

She grinned. “You don’t.”

“What do you think?” Terry Quinn asked.

Just from the fact that he posed the question at all, I knew I had made a mistake. If I had done the job perfectly, he wouldn’t have asked for my opinion. He would have said nice work , clapped me on the shoulder with his thick, gnarled hand, and we would have moved on to the next horse.

The problem was, until that very second, I had thought it was good. The old draft mare, Oreo, was a complicated case. Terry had a soft spot for the gentle giants, so he offered his services to Sunshine Rescue at a reduced rate. An interesting choice, because the work was easily four times as hard.

My back ached from the hours I had already spent hunched over these dinner-plate-sized feet, but I crouched so I was eye-level with her knees. “All right. Walk her toward me.”

Terry clucked his tongue and tugged the lead rope.

The mare ambled forward, her heavy footfall muffled by the wood shavings.

She looked fine. Not perfect, but we weren’t aiming for perfect, not yet.

She had arrived at the farm with cracked, overgrown hooves that hadn’t seen a farrier in a decade.

This was our second visit with her, and she still had a long road ahead of her before she was fully sound.

But what I was seeing now was a big improvement. No matter how hard I squinted, I couldn’t see anything I’d do differently. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell Terry that, but I bit it back.

Six months ago, when I started my apprenticeship after completing the technical program, Terry never asked me what I thought, maybe because my novice experience made my thoughts not worth sharing.

He’d go over my mistakes in detail and I was expected to listen and ask questions, not provide insight myself.

Somewhere along the way, when my mistakes became few and far between, he started asking for my opinion—even though he already knew the correct answer.

At first it felt like a trick question. Like he was setting me up to look like a fool, so he could yell gotcha! and feel good about himself.

It took me a while to understand it wasn’t a trap.

He was teaching me to slow down and check my work, and he framed it like a question because I already knew the answer, too, if I would simply pull my head out of my ass long enough to see it.

With forty-odd years of farrier experience under his belt, he took mentoring seriously.

So I bit back my bad attitude and said, “She looks good from the front. Circle her around and let me see how she moves from a different angle.”

Terry nodded and clucked his tongue again. I didn’t see anything amiss on the first pass—other than the obvious trauma that would take a few more visits to fully fix—but on the second pass I figured it out.

My knees crackled and popped as I straightened. “All four hooves are fine. Adequate. If I was going to be a nitpicky son of a bitch about it, I’d say the right hind could be better.”