Page 20 of Take a Chance (Blue Creek Ranch #1)

Malachi

P ay did get sick but not too bad. The next morning I asked him if he wanted me to stay home with him or if he wanted to go to chill with Mrs. Jenn. He chose to go to the main house.

Normally, we’d walk over there, but this time I lifted him into the truck and we drove over.

“We’ll be just fine. If anything changes, I’ll let you know, but as you might assume, I’ve done this a couple of times in my life….” Her expression was all understanding mom, and yeah.

Pay went inside, wrapped in his “starry blanket”—actual constellations, not cartoon stars—and Mr. Raven tucked under his arm.

“Can I leave you my mom’s number?” I asked Jenn hesitantly. “It’s just that when he’s ill, he used to hang out with her during the days and he still likes to talk to her if he’s feeling under the weather.”

“Of course! Let me get my phone.” She popped back inside and emerged with her phone in hand. “Will you give her a heads up?”

I read her Mom’s number. “Yeah, I’ll text her next.”

“Excellent!” she said brightly, then patted my arm. “We’re going to be fine.”

I took a deep breath and let it out. “Yeah. Okay. But if it’s too m—”

“I will let you know.” She smiled, so damn gently this time. “But it won’t be.” With that, she turned and went inside.

Right. Time to go to work.

It took Pay exactly one and a half days to feel better. Kids bounced back something fierce sometimes.

Meanwhile, he’d called his Nana from Jenn’s phone and somehow I’d forgotten that grandmas tended to flock together. Just like that, Mom was invited to the ranch and she and Jenn were fast friends.

Things went back to normal, but somehow, every time I got lost in the rhythm of mucking the stalls or doing something else repetitive that didn’t require concentration, my brain chose to remind me of how kind Crew had been when Pay was ill.

I wasn’t used to anyone but my parents caring. Even that talk we’d had about my dad not having been “weird,” it wasn’t completely true. It was easy to see how much the recent past had colored my view of the man. He’d be my hero once, well, most of my life. He’d been Pay’s Grandpa.

The last nine months or so, since his death, had pushed him firmly off that pedestal he’d been in my mind. Kids looked up to their parents. But then when that pedestal crumbled to dust, what were you supposed to do?

I could only hope and do my best to not ever make that happen with Pay’s view of me. I wasn’t perfect, hell, I could be far from that, but I would never betray him like that.

“Hey, Mal?” Wy called from her office.

“Yeah?” I was just finishing up the last stalls, so I walked over.

“Once you’re done with mucking, Hawk needs some help.”

“Oh, okay.” I shrugged. “I’ll head there in a few.”

“Good man,” she murmured, already squinting at her laptop screen again.

Barn 4, or the training barn, was Hawk’s domain. Well, his and Gemma’s. They did vastly different things, though.

Gemma trained the rescues when the time came in their recovery to do that. She also handled the less time-consuming project horses they got.

Hawk, on the other hand, handled specialty cases, like making horses bomb proof and training the yearlings. He also took on horses with behavioral issues and worked his magic, much like he was doing when I stepped up to the inner gate between the barn and the attached arena.

Gemma came to stand with me, and we quietly watched as her brother plopped down to sit in the middle of the arena, his back to the… probably a quarter horse or a mix that seemed to be—annoyed at him?

“She’s pushy. So he’s been telling her to get away every time she’s approached him in that way. Now he’s showing her he doesn’t care about where she is at all. It’s pissing her off,” Gemma explained quietly.

“Makes sense. He’s making himself small. That’s smart. She knows he’s not intimidated in the least.”

The mare huffed and started to approach Hawk in a loose arc. When he didn’t move, just sat there cross legged and relaxed, she stopped right behind him. She went to nudge him, but his soft “ah-ah” made her pull her head back.

She thought for a moment, then carefully huffed a few times against his neck without touching him. Finally, she stepped closer, so she didn’t need to stretch her neck as she lowered her head until her nose was next to his shoulder. Not on him, not behind him, but next to him.

After a few moments of her relaxing further, he moved slowly and carefully, the grace in his wiry body as surprising as it kind of wasn’t. He stood and turned to her, digging a piece of carrot from his pocket. He gave it to her and patted her neck, murmuring something to her.

She huffed again, then shook herself a little. She carefully lowered her head to show Hawk she could use another treat. He chuckled and gave her one, then started to walk toward us.

“Hey,” he said, smiling. “Now that I have the two of you here, we should have a meeting.”

My eyebrows popped at the phrasing. “Oh, okay.”

“Don’t worry, I don’t know what he wants, either.” Gemma handed Hawk the lead rope hanging nearby.

The mare had followed him, so he told us to meet in his office once he had returned her to the paddock.

Hawk’s office was in the old hay loft. There was still hay on the second half of it, but the office was cozy and had a comfortable looking, well-worn couch, a desk and a visitor’s chair, and a desk chair that must’ve cost as much as everything else combined.

A large window behind the desk had a view of the paddocks.

“Do you share this space?” I asked Gemma as I peered over the desk and into the gorgeous view.

“Coffee?” She was gesturing at the Keurig at a little wet bar in the corner.

“Yeah, sure. Black is fine.”

She started on drinks for us all and shook her head. “Not really. I don’t need an office and if I want to work on a computer, I can borrow his desk. Hawk mostly meets clients here. Or sleeps on the couch.”

“Hey, I don’t do it that often,” he said as he climbed up the last few steps.

“Are you two twins?” I asked, because they looked very much alike.

Hawk took off his ball cap and tossed it on the desk. “No. She’s number six, I’m seven. The twins are Demi and Emery on the older end and then Judson and Keegan who are the youngest of us all.”

“Right,” I said, the explanation I’d gotten at the cookout returning to me slowly. “There’s quite a few of you so excuse me if I don’t remember everything anytime soon.”

Gemma snorted. “Oh no. It’s definitely not a requirement. Half the time I need to think about it if someone asks how old each of us is.”

She handed me a coffee and then another one to Hawk.

I went to sit on the couch and sighed happily.

“Surprisingly comfy, isn’t it?” Hawk grinned as he joined me. “I get shit about it all the time.”

“I can see how you’d sleep here.”

“Don’t you start enabling him.” Gemma shook a finger at me.

Soon, she sat in the visitor’s chair—a nice leather one that had wheels and must’ve been a desk chair once—and turned around to face the couch.

“So,” Hawk started, then took a sip of his coffee before continuing. “I have an assignment from a new client. I need to find a horse that works for what he has in mind but also looks like what he wants.”

Gemma and I both winced.

“You’re not saying that he wants a standard bay, are you?” she made an educated guess.

“Not in the slightest. He wants a snowflake appaloosa. Black base. Not brown. Not red. With a fair amount of spotting, but not too much. Mare that’s at least four years old, but not older than ten, and at least fifteen two but bigger is better.”

I whistled. “That’s going to be hard to find.”

“Yeah. So that means going to auctions for a bit. I have a few months to find this horse, plus training time on top. He just wants a bomb proof horse, more or less, so it should be easy enough—I know, famous last words—but it’s the finding that’s going to be… tricky.”

Gemma looked at her brother and asked what I didn’t want to. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because he’s going to pay big bucks and I really want that swimming pool for hydrotherapy.”

“Not a water treadmill?” I asked, because that would be a lot cheaper.

Hawk shook his head. “I feel like a pool would be much more useful in the long run. But I want it indoors and while we have the space on the property, we don’t have a ready building.”

“So, we’re looking for a horse that’s impossible to find so we can get a pool house for ponies,” Gemma summarized, clearly happy with the alliteration. “What else?”

“Well, I also want to build a few things for training. Like the wobbly bridge and a couple of other things. We can put them where the old corral was near the paddock on this end.” He gestured toward the windows.

I hummed thoughtfully. “You’ll need more hands for building?”

“Yes, but I can only have Gemma for half a day, while I also am not going to put more than half a day into the project, and if our halves don’t match….”

“That’s where I come in.”

“Exactly. I’ll also want another person with me whenever I drive to auctions, so depending on where it is, if you don’t mind Mom watching your kiddo….” He trailed off, but his tone and body language suggested I had all the say on this matter.

“I would rather not go far enough for an overnight trip, unless I can bring him with me, and he’s starting daycare in a few weeks.”

“We can work with that,” he said in an easy tone.

We chatted for a while longer, before Gemma left to check on some of the rescues, and Hawk and I went to figure out the space for the new stuff.

Coincidentally, it was next to the paddock where I had Jaina. Not because it was close to the stock barn—because the distances were quite big here—but because said paddock was huge and I’d wanted her to be able to stretch her legs.

“This used to be a corral?” I asked as we examined the ground, walking around the spot that was still reasonably even.