The October air hit my lungs like ice water as I cut across the east field toward the tree line. I could see the damage from fifty yards out. Rail splintered clean, Brutus’s hoofprints churned deep into the mud on the other side. Beyond the fence, the county road curved blind around a ridge. A horse on that road was a dead horse.
I ducked through the gap and spotted him right away, standing in the drainage ditch on the far shoulder, ears pinned, nostrils flaring. He’d spooked himself getting through the fence and now he was too rattled to move.
“Easy, boy.” I slowed my approach, halter behind my back, voice low and steady. “Easy. You’re okay.”
Brutus snorted and shifted sideways. Toward the road.
“Don’t—”
A truck rounded the curve. Not fast, but fast enough. Brutus bolted, not toward me, not away from the road, but straight down the gravel shoulder like it was a runway.
I sprinted after him. Stupid, because you can’t outrun a horse on your best day and you definitely can’t do it in barn boots on loose rock. I made it maybe thirty yards before my foot caught a rut and I went down hard. Palms, knees, the halter flying out of my grip.
Before I could push myself up, someone blew past me at a dead run.
Graham.
He’d come from the pasture side. Vaulted the broken fence rail like it wasn’t there and hit the shoulder at full speed, angling wide to get ahead of Brutus without driving him into the road.
I scrambled to my feet and watched, heart slamming.
He didn’t chase the horse. He got in front of him, thirty feet ahead, off to the side, and then he just stopped. Stood still. Let Brutus see him.
The gelding slowed. Trotted. Stopped.
Graham didn’t move. Didn’t speak. One hand extended, palm down. The exact technique I’d shown the group during their riding assessment on day two.
He’d been paying attention.
Brutus huffed. Took a step. Another. Then dropped his head and walked straight to Graham like he’d been heading there all along.
Graham caught the halter, the leather one Brutus was already wearing, thank God, and held him steady, murmuring something low in that accent that worked on horses and women with equal and infuriating effectiveness.
I picked up my lead rope and walked over on legs that weren’t entirely cooperating.
“You okay?” Graham asked. His eyes were on me.
My palms were scraped raw. My left knee was bleeding through my jeans. I was breathing like I’d sprinted a quarter mile, which I had, and my heart was doing something that had absolutely nothing to do with the running.
He was sweating. Shirt damp, forearms taut where he gripped the halter. A streak of dirt across his jaw. He pushed his hair off his forehead with his free hand, casual, unconscious, and the gesture did weird things to my insides.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Your knee’s bleeding.”
“I said I’m fine.”
I clipped the lead rope to Brutus’s halter, and my fingers brushed Graham’s in the handoff. Half a second. Skin on skin.
Instantly, I felt...
Everything.
“Thank you,” I managed to say, because I wasn’t so far gone in my own pride that I’d let it override basic decency. He’d just saved my horse. “For catching him.”
“Anytime.”
We stood there on the shoulder of the county road with a fifteen-hundred-pound animal between us and not nearly enough distance. He was right there. Close enough that I could smell him, sweat and dirt and something underneath that was justhim, and my body remembered exactly what it had felt like when his arms were around me in the barn.
