She dropped her hand and stepped back. He walked her toward the front door, with his phone buzzing in his back pocket. “That’s probably Tuck. I told him to call tonight and that you’d probably be gone by now.”
Sure enough, he pulled his phone out and saw Tucker’s name. “Give me just a sec, okay?”
She paused just outside the doorway to Tucker’s office while Tarr slid on the call. “What’s up, brother?”
“We’re getting alerts that the northeast door on the stable is open,” he said. “Bobbie Jo’s trying to pull it up on the camera, but it’s been pushed sideways and we can’t see.”
Tarr frowned. “Briar is on her way home. We’ll go check right now.”
“Something’s definitely wrong,” Bobbie Jo called.
“I’ll call you back,” Tarr said, and he ended the call and jogged back into the house to get his own coat. He slid on his new winter gloves as he joined Briar on the front porch and filled her in on the situation.
She drove them over to the arena and then down to the back side, where their stables stood.
“Oh yeah, that door’s flapping open,” Tarr said.
The big barn door that they usually only opened when they got a big delivery for pallets and whatnot slammed into the side of the barn as Tarr watched.
“I don’t know if I can get that closed in this wind,” he said. “I might need to call Ashton.”
“Let’s try,” Briar said, a note of urgency in her voice. “The horses will be cold.”
“Yeah.” Tarr unbuckled his seat belt and slid out of her SUV. The wind whipped his hat right off his head, and he yelped, then called, “Be careful, Briar!”
It hadn’t started to snow yet, but this wind wasn’t playing games. He wasn’t sure he could muscle the door closed against it, and if the wind grabbed on halfway through and flung it into the barn, it might damage the mechanisms, and he wouldn’t be able to secure it anyway.
Inside the barn, the shriek of a horse met his ear, and Tarr took off running. His heart pounded in his neck, his ears, and up into his head as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing.
“Gemini is loose!” he yelled as he spotted the pretty, cream-colored horse down at the opposite end of the stable. “How did you get out, bud?”
Briar cried out behind him, and Tarr spun back to her, torn between helping a woman or a horse. He went toward Briar and grabbed her hand and pulled her into the barn.
“We’ll have to deal with the door in a minute,” he said. “Gemini is loose.”
She sucked in her breath, and then another one. “Okay,” she said. “It’s okay. Let’s just calm down.”
She smoothed her hands through her hair as Tarr tried to steady his own galloping pulse.Gemini first,he told himself.Door second.“You okay?” he asked, automatically putting Briar at the top of the list.
“Yeah.” She nodded in a still semi-frantic way. “Yeah, I’m okay. Really.”
She moved down the corridor between stalls, reaching out to touch the nameplates of the horses as she went by each one. Tarr liked watching her steady herself with each tap, and she held up one hand toward Gemini as she said, in the kind, soothing voice he’d only heard her use with animals, “Hey there, fella. You’re all right.”
A moment later, she twisted slightly, barely turning her head toward him. “Tarr, I think he’s hurt.”
Tarr followed a little bit behind her, because he was a bigger figure that could spook Gemini, and he didn’t want that to happen. “I’ve got a lead,” he said, pulling one off a hook as he went by.
Briar extended her hand behind her for it, and Tarr put it in her fingers.
“Hey, bud,” she said, and Gemini let her walk right up to him. She slid her hand up his nose and gently slipped the lead around his neck. “We’ve got to get you back in your stall, bud. It’s not safe for you out here.”
With Gemini roped, Tarr turned back to his stall. Several strides later, he arrived in front of it, realizing how the horse had gotten out.
“His stall is damaged,” he said. “That big barn door must have swung in.”
His eyes roamed all over the area where the stall met the outer barn wall. The door had definitely swung in—probablymore than once—and damaged this area enough to get Gemini’s gate to unlatch.
Horses were prey animals, and he’d probably spooked away from the door in search of safety.
