Not gratitude, though that was in there.
Not attraction, though God knows that was in there too.
Something bigger.
Something that felt like the ground shifting under my feet, the tectonic plates of my life rearranging themselves around this man and his club and the promise that I was no longer standing alone between Earl and the wolves.
He must have seen something on my face because his expression changed.
Went from Road Captain to something else. Something unguarded and searching and a little bit afraid.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing.”
It wasn’t nothing. But I wasn’t ready to call it what it was. Not yet.
Somehow, it’s like I blink and it’s Thursday afternoon.
It might be late October, but the heat won’t quit, the kind that makes the barn an oven by midday and turns every surface into something you can’t lean on without getting burned.
I’m finishing the last horse of the day—a big warmblood cross with feet like dinner plates—and I’m tired in the way that lives in your bones, not your muscles.
The kind of tired that comes from weeks of 4:30 mornings and Earl’s chemo appointments and Lockhart’s slow-motion siege and the constant, low-frequency hum of wanting a man I can’t have.
Lee is in the round pen with the bay.
I can see him through the barn doors—the pen is fifty yards out, visible from the aisle if you look.
Which I’m not doing.
I’m focused on the warmblood.
I’m a professional. I don’t watch him work horses through barn doors like a woman pressed against a window.
Except I do. Because the bay is letting Lee touch his hooves.
I set down the rasp, walk to the barn door and stand in the frame with my arms crossed and watch.
Lee is crouched beside the bay.
One hand on the horse’s shoulder.
The other running down the cannon bone—slow, steady, the patient descent that asks the horse to shift its weight without demanding it.
The bay’s ears flick. His head comes up. But he doesn’t pull away.
Lee’s hand reaches the fetlock, cups it, and lifts.
The bay picks up his foot.
Front left. The bad one.
The hoof that’s been the source of every argument and compromise between us for weeks.
Lee holds it—gently, briefly, just long enough to establish that the horse did it and survived—then sets it down. Straightens. Puts his hand on the bay’s neck.
The bay turns his head and touches Lee’s chest with his nose.
