Page 47

He spends three weeks being the best friend she could ask for.

Nothing more.

Nothing less.

Pure hell.

With the latch of a stall door digging into my ribcage, I watch Adam as he shoves a rubber teat in the mouth of a hungry, orphaned foal.

Perched on my hip, my eldest nephew whispers, “Is he gonna be okay?”

Adam and I make eye contact. Swaying gently from side to side while I think, I decide to offer as close to the truth as I can get without breaking Alex’s heart. “We don’t know yet, kiddo.”

Probably not is the real answer. That poor mare we rescued hung on long enough to birth her foal and nurse him through the first couple weeks of life, but it doesn’t look like that was enough.

He’s just so small . Premature, malnourished, grieving.

We’re doing everything we can—Adam and the DVM degree I had no idea he possessed are practically attached to the little guy—but shit. It’s not looking good.

“What’s his name?”

Again, I look to Adam for guidance, who shakes his head. “Doesn’t have one yet.”

The chubby arms looped around my neck tighten. “Can I name him?”

Gnawing on my bottom lip, I wonder just how bad of an idea that is. Letting a toddler name the scrawny, adorable foal that’s unlikely to survive the winter. Would he even listen to me if I actually said no?

Slowly, cautiously, I mouth, “What were you thinking?”

“Applesauce.”

I choke on an inappropriate laugh. “Really?”

Alex shrugs like there’s at least another decade attached to his lifespan. “I like applesauce.”

“Excellent point,” Adam calls from where he’s crouched in the hay with fucking Applesauce . “I like it.”

As the sweet little face I adore blossoms into a grin, I can’t resist smooshing mine against it. “Me too.”

With a pleased giggle, Alex smooshes me right back, harder because while three—three and a half, he’s taken to telling everyone because another kid at his daycare learned the concept of a half-birthday and December is Alex’s—is apparently not the age when a little boy learns about gentle .

Nipping my fucking nose and making me wonder if he’s been sneaking around with Ruin, he does a backbend in my arms. “Finny,” he hollers melodically, risking a date with the dirt as he wriggles relentlessly in my grip. “My horse is Applesauce.”

My breath lodging like a sharp, foreign object in the back of my throat, I watch Serenity’s farrier hang up his apron and saunter our way. “ Your horse, huh?”

“Uh-huh. He might die though.”

As dark eyes and quirked brows flit to me, I rush out, “I did not say that.”

Completely deadpan, Alex backs me up. “Mama said animals die sometimes and that’s okay because it’s the circle of life.”

I cover my mouth to stifle a snort. Jesus .

As Finn uses a cough to cover his own reaction, he pokes the little boy who worships him. “Are you sure you’re really three-and-a-half? Not thirty?”

Alex pulls a horrified face. “Thirty is old.”

Hiding my smile against his temple, I whisper, “Ask Finn what age he is.”

As his mouth drops open, the poor kid looks genuinely distressed. “Are you thirty ?”

“Not quite.” Chuckling, Finn smoothes a hand down the back of Alex’s head only to abruptly rip it away when it grazes mine where it lies flat between his shoulder blades.

And that right there represents the past month of my life.

No, not a month—nineteen days.

Nineteen days since the white, whittled rose. Nineteen days since of course we are. Nineteen days since a palpable shift occurred in mine and Finn’s relationship.

We’re friends. Of that, I am abundantly sure. Because he treats me the same way he treats Yasmin. The same way he treats Theo and Adam. The way he treats my sisters and my brother and everyone else we work with or run into.

The problem is he never treated me the same way he treats everyone else before. And I didn’t realize that until he stopped.

I didn’t realize that sure, he’s a tactile person, but he was a special kind of tactile with me.

It was careful and considerate, but it was frequent and it was affectionate and it was…

intimate. I didn’t realize that he does understand the concept of personal space, he just didn’t apply it to me.

I didn’t realize that I woke up every morning wondering what facet of my being he would decide to compliment—I didn’t realize I cherished the random praise so much, until it stopped coming.

Until it shifted from posture and fingernails and the length of my fucking neck and became good job and great work and nice one .

I don’t like it. I don’t like that I don’t like it.

I don’t like that the absence of all that casual touching I used to bat away has left me bereft, that him not doing something as simple as sitting beside me on the sofa leaves me cranky, that a mere man has such power to alter my mood.

I hate that I lie in bed at night, wondering what I did yet devoid of the fucking balls to just ask.

To ask him . I have asked Yasmin. More than once.

“What’s his damage?” I gripe at her almost daily, and every time she just shrugs, changes the subjects, makes it abundantly clear that I’m not imagining things yet doesn’t do shit to clear anything up.

And as I grunt that question again now, after returning my nephew to his mother and joining Yas in warming up a couple of horses for a trail ride, her response is no different. “So he hasn’t told you anything?”

Tugging on the lead rope connected to a docile old mare named Lady, Yasmin shakes her head. “Nope.”

My fingers close tightly around my own rope, making my own mare snort, and I scratch Bowie apologetically behind her ears before asking, “But you know?”

She purses her lips unhappily, but she relents. “I suspect.”

“Share with the class.”

“I’m not one for gossip.”

I bark a laugh. “Since when?”

Dipping into the cloth bag clipped to one of her belt loops, she tosses a carrot at me. I catch it, feeding it to Bowie before dipping into my own treat bag for an apple to throw at my fellow hand.

“Did he…” I throw out at the same time, the words a whole lot heavier than any piece of fruit. “Did he tell you?”

There’s no need to clarify. Yasmin knows what I’m asking, she knows about the nothing that could’ve been something if it were to have happened, but it didn’t .

“He was a little…” she starts apologetically, cautiously, almost as if she thinks I’ll be mad that they discussed the closet non-incident. “Rattled.”

“Is that why he’s being like this?” I seek clarification I know I won’t get. “Fucking hell, if almost kissing me sends him into such a spiral, imagine what would’ve happened if we actually did.”

Yasmin looks away quickly, hiding whatever expression contorts her face.

Frosted grass crunching beneath our boots, she waits a few strides before hesitantly clearing her throat. “Did you want to? Are you… Are you interested in Finn? Like that?”

I scoff. I snort. I wave off the utterly ridiculous suggestion.

But, as Yasmin points out, I don’t say no.

My mouth opens, but still, the word doesn’t come out.

“It’s okay if you are.”

I’m not, I scream inside my head while staying completely fucking silent.

I’m not. Jesus, it’s so dramatic, but I can’t be.

Finn is so fucking far from every guy I’ve ever been interested in.

Like my sister-in-law once said—like everyone probably says, like Yasmin’s probably thinking right now—he’s too nice for me.

He’s a good person. He doesn’t treat me like shit, and considering that’s the crux of every single one of my past relationships— situationships , I should say, because I’ve never actually been in a real relationship—I don’t see how he could ever appeal to me.

“Is that what this is about?” I press some more, the flustered pitch of my question making Bowie’s ears twitch. “He thinks I like him and it makes him that uncomfortable?”

“No, Lottie.” Yasmin angles her head, chin dropping, gaze soft. “He doesn’t think that at all.”

“Well then what—”

Someone saves me from the infuriation of another unanswered question.

At least ten minutes early for our thrice-weekly training sessions, Carmen stands on the other side of the paddock fence, hollering my name and waving me over. Shooting Yasmin an entirely unsatisfied look, I hand over Bowie’s lead rope and jog towards the trainer.

“Before we start,” she calls out as I near. “Got a question for you.”

I yell back, “Shoot.”

“You have full permission to stab me with a pitchfork if I’m crossing a line.”

Laughing, I brace my palms on the top slat of the fence and haul myself up. “Color me intrigued.”

“It’s about Finn.”

One leg cocked like a fucking dog as I swing it over the fence, I freeze. Jesus. Of course it is. “Okay.”

“I was thinking I might ask him out.”

I straddle the fence for a second, careful with my response—with my reaction, with my face, with whatever might be on it. “And you’re telling me this why?”

Carmen just inclines her head. Looks at me the same way Yasmin was just looking at me, and my brain is one big question mark.

Hopping to the ground, I have to use more energy than I should to shrug. To calmly, nonchalantly, couldn’t-give-a-shit-ly say, “Go for it.”

Carmen squints at me for a long moment before she shrugs too. “Okay.”

And then she does it. She strides away, towards where the guys are transferring bags from the couple of Subaru Foresters that belong to the ranch’s last batch of guests before we shut for the big wedding and the holidays.

She pulls Finn aside, and my gut twists. She tugs him towards the barn, out of ear shot of everyone, and something thick and acrid rises in my throat. She says something that brings a bright, wide smile to his face. That makes him nod enthusiastically.

That’s all I can stomach before I have to look away.

A low whistle has my scowl shifting from the coarse hair between my fingers to the farrier slowly approaching. Whether his caution stems from me or my horse, I’m unsure.

Either way, the sight of him pisses me off. “What do you want?”

Finn doesn’t even blink at my less-than-friendly tone. In fact, he looks like he was expecting it—he came prepared with a mug in either hand, hot-chocolate-scented steam drifting through the chilly winter air towards me.

Stopping a healthy distance away, he lifts one of the mugs he’s cradling. “Thought you could use this.”

Sighing, I drop Ruin’s braided mane, shoulder-checking his lithe body in a silent scram .

As he sidles away to graze elsewhere, I follow Finn back towards the paddock fence, leaning against it beside him and silently accepting the offered beverage, and trying not to be so very irritated by all that space he leaves between us.

“Looked like a hard session.”

I grunt at the marshmallows melting in my beverage. Fucking understatement. It was horrible. The worst we’ve had since we started, and that’s saying a lot.

Desensitizing Ruin has been a long, difficult road, but we’ve been getting somewhere. He can stand to be in the presence of other horses. He doesn’t shit himself at every cough or car horn or loud voice. Even the dogs, in all their hyperactive glory, are more of a nuisance to him now than a threat.

Men are his real problem. Big, hulking men like the kind that frequent Serenity—like the kind that need to be all up close and personal with hooves that are capable of causing a whole lot of damage.

“He was just having an off day,” Finn claims, the same way he did earlier when my fickle stallion almost kicked him in the balls. “It’s not your fault.”

And that’s where he’s wrong. It was my fault.

I was the problem. I was snippy and short and riddled with hostile energy, and I was directing it all at Finn, and Ruin picked up on it.

He fed off it and reproduced it tenfold, channeling it into being the same unwrangle-able menace he was when he first got here, and fuck if that didn’t punch me right in the gut.

He’s been doing so good, he’s come so far, and I just obliterated his progress in a single session.

“It was an off day,” he repeats like he can read my mind, like doing so is easy for him. “ You’re off today.”

“Ah. So it is my fault.”

A tutting reprimand falling from downturned lips.

“I’m tired,” I correct, and at least that’s partly the truth. “Not off.”

“Trouble sleeping?”

Why, yes, Finn. Now that you mention it, the endless pondering of why you don’t yank on my fucking ponytail anymore has been keeping me up at night.

I have nothing to say, no honesty to give, so I shrug.

The fence creaks as Finn shifts. In my peripheral, I watch his hand disappear into his pocket. Watch it come out holding an orange. Watch nimble fingers peel away the bitter rind, pick the fruit free of pith, and seperate a clean segment that he holds out to me.

Our fingers brush as I take it, and I fucking hate that I savor the small touch.

That I have to because he deprives me of anything else.

He passes me another piece and the same thing happens, I feel the same way, I feel worse because he’s stopped talking.

I feel worse because I’m thinking well, at least he’s here. Silent and distant, but here.

“So,” he says slowly once the fruit is gone, when there’s nothing left to occupy our mouths. “Something happened today.”

I take my sweet time swallowing a mouthful of hot chocolate. “Oh?”

“Carmen asked me out.”

Oh. “Yeah, I knew that.”

“You did?”

“She told me.” I clear my throat. “Good for you.”

“You think?”

“Obviously,” I force out.

“Obviously,” he repeats. “You don’t think it’s a bad idea?”

“It doesn’t matter what I think.”

He says nothing.

“But if you’re asking,” I rush to add because fuck, that sounded a little bitter, didn’t it? “I think it’s great. You’re perfect for each other.”

“Yeah,” I assume he agrees—but later, when I play the conversation back, I won’t be so sure.

Too much of a coward to lift my gaze, I fix a tight smile on the notch of his throat. “Go out with her. Have some fun.”

Finn swallows hard. “Okay.”

If I didn’t know any better, I’d think he sounded disappointed.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d think I was pretty damn disappointed too.