“You—” I swat at him, but he dodges with a happy shout. I huff, crossing my arms, then immediately uncross them when I remember how this vest makes everything more…prominent.
Too late. I catch Callum as he shoots his gaze skyward, all bashful and gentlemanly.
He definitely noticed.
“Of course I’ve seen ponies,” I say with as much dignity as I can muster. “But we don’t travel by horseback in the twenty-first century. We have cars.”
Callum frowns. “You wish to hitch a cart to this poor beast?”
“Not cart—car. Which I guess is kind of like a cart, only it’s metal and goes really fast.”
He gives me a long, skeptical look. “Sounds tiring for the animal.”
“It doesn’t use animals. That’s my point. It’s a machine. It runs by itself.”
He grins, shaking his head. “Nothing’s as trustworthy as a good horse.”
“But—”
He lifts a hand, cutting me off with an easy smile. “I insist you tell me all about your special carts as we ride.”
He turns to the speckled gray, loosening her reins from where they’re looped around a branch.
I blink. Wait.
“Ridethat,” I say, voice flat.
“’Tis only a pony, love.”
“Not like any pony I’ve ever seen.”
“You’ve not seen aHighlandpony.” Callum pats the animal’s back, his voice full of affectionate pride. “This one here, she’s sturdy. She could climb a mountain, if you’d a mind to.” He steps aside, gesturing toward the animal with a flourish. “Well? Your mount, fair lady.”
He called these creatures ponies, but the word doesn’t do them justice. These are ponies on steroids. Thick legs, wide barrel chests, shaggy all over, with long manes and dense, tufted coats.
As I inch closer, I realize the gray is a lot taller than she first seemed. Her stocky build and short legs had tricked me into thinking she was lower to the ground. But she’s not short. Not at all.
I frown at her back. “Uhhh, I can’t.”
He frowns, genuinely perplexed. “Whyever not?”
My cheeks burn. Whoever heard of a farm girl who can’t ride?
I grew up around horses. I used to love them. Our neighbor let me visit their horses whenever I wanted. Theyhad this one ginger-colored mare, a tall, sleek, high-strung show horse probably worth more than Poppa made in a year. They called her Priss—short for Priscilla, which, to seven-year-old me, was just about the stupidest name imaginable. So I called her Red instead.
Maybe it was that our coloring matched, both of us glowing the slightest bit orange in the sunshine, but I was positively in love with that animal.
It took months, but gradually, Red learned to trust me. Like, really trust me. Whenever she saw me, she’d come straight to the paddock fence—straight to me—to whiff and nuzzle, pressing her velvety nose into my palms in search of treats like sugar cubes, apple cores, or carrot tops.
Until the day Janet saw me. Until she dared me.
“When I was a lass,” she’d proclaimed from behind me, “I rode bareback afore I could walk.”
I startled at the sound of her voice. Like the woman herself, it always emerged from out of the blue, both sought-for and dreaded. It was enough to spook Red, who bolted away like I was a stranger instead of her best human friend.
I curled my hand into a damp fist, palm sticky with sugar and horse spit. “I’m not here to ride her. I just came to give her treats.”
“You dinnae like to ride?”
