I looked again at the dude posing in the pictures—all muscles, weights, and protein shakes—and watched a brief clip of him shouting about meal plans. In the captions below, he’d listed the subscription prices for whatever it was he was trying to sell, and my eyes bugged out. “How much a week?”
“I know, right?” Harry took the phone back. “There’s hundreds of PTs like him, plugging meal plans and diets when they don’t know jack about nutrition. And don’t get me started on the weight regimes they pimp. Put together with this protein guzzling nonsense and it’s—shit. Sorry. It just winds me up.”
“I can tell. Is this why you don’t eat mashed potato?”
Harry stared at me like I’d grown two heads. Like he thought I hadn’t seen him blanch every time someone put bread on his plate. “What?”
I blinked first. “Never mind.”
“Anyway...” Harry said. “My point is that these media PTs are dangerous. You can’t focus on the latest fad and hope it will build your wellbeing. You wouldn’t expect those ponies in the tack room to recover by just feeding them bran, would you? Your dad told me that horses don’t live well without emotional support. Perhaps there’s parallels.”
“Leaving Jonah out of it, if you’d compared it to horses from the start I’d have known what you meant. I have a limited imagination.”
“I don’t believe that, but I’m sorry for ranting at you. My mate Angelo usually deals with the fall out when I’ve been on social media.”
It was the first time Harry had mentioned friends from back home—from his real life. I wanted to know more... to press him until there was no room left in the “Harry” part of my brain, but he got up before I could voice a coherent question, ready to go and break his back on my farm.
I grabbed his T-shirt and yanked him down for a kiss. It was rough and raw, and over far too soon. “You’ll come back later?”
“Of course,” he said. “We can go for a walk if you’re feeling up to it.”
“Thought I was supposed to stay my arse in here?”
Harry winked and gently bit my cheek. “Then we’ll go after dark.”
* * *
It took me three days to figure out who was fucking around with my stable plan. I sat in Grandpa’s chair and watched Emma lead Shadow to Mani’s stall and forced myself not to holler out of the window at her.
I kept it in until she wandered into the house for dinner. “Why are you fucking with my horses?”
Emma glowered at me across the table as Toby drifted into the kitchen and stopped—eying us both—and clearly considering whether to join us or not. “Fucking withyourhorses? What does that even mean?”
“It means you’ve got Mani in Shadow’s stall, and Shadow kicking up a storm next to Ava and Jazz.”
“Have you heard him kicking?”
Not that I could remember, but that wasn’t the point. I was sleeping like a dead man at the moment, especially at night when Harry lay behind me, his chest pressed against my back— “Why have you moved them?”
“Because isolating Shadow doesn’t make him any happier. Yeah, he made a fuss at first, but he likes it now. I caught him nuzzling Ava this morning.”
“Bollocks.” I didn’t believe her. Most of my days right now were spent staring out of the window, mentally cataloguing what the rest of them were doing wrong, to stave off the mind-numbing boredom of being too wired to rest and too tired to move, and I hadn’t seen Shadow do anything in his new digs but heckle passing cats. “He can’t stay there if he starts on the other horses. It’s not fair on them.”
“I know that. Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot.”
Harry came in as Emma was speaking. Like Toby, he glanced between us, but there was no apprehension in his amused expression, and despite beingso fucking hotfor him, I kind of wanted to punch him.
At least until he dropped into the seat beside me and surreptitiously squeezed my thigh. “What are you two bickering about?”
“Shadow,” Emma said. “Joe thinks the world is going to end because he doesn’t like change.”
“Fuck you,” I shot back. “The world will end if he kicks one of those old mares. He’ll break their...” I trailed off as I realised they were all staring at me. “What?”
Harry squeezed me harder, and Emma giggled, leaving Toby to nervously take his seat and explain. “Erm... it’s just that we were saying this morning that we missed you shouting, boss. Welcome back.”
“I don’t shout.” Beside me, Harry’s shoulders shook with silent laughter. Emma broke into full-on cackles. I threw a digestive biscuit at her. “Bugger off, the lot of you.”
Their obvious amusement didn’t ease my worries about Shadow. After dinner, I called time on my daylight confinement and supervised the horses as they were brought in from the fields. Instead of saving Shadow till last, Emma led him down with the oldest girls. I braced myself for disaster, but nothing happened. He went into his stall like a lamb, only pausing to take a shit where it was least convenient for him to do so.
