Page 29 of Owned by the Scarred Laird

Chloe looked at the mare. The mare looked back at her with one big, dark eye.

“All right,” she said quietly. “I am nae goin’ to hurt ye. I am nae entirely sure what I am doin’, if that helps. Ye and I are in the same position.”

The mare’s ear twitched again, turning toward her.

“Her neck,” Edward said. “Reach slowly.”

She raised her hand. Her elbow bent too sharply, and he stepped forward and adjusted it without asking, his hand at the back of her arm, straightening it, and the contact lasted two seconds, and she lost the next thing he said entirely.

“Sorry,” she said. “What?”

He looked at her. “Keep yer elbow soft.”

“Soft. Aye.”

She tried. The mare shifted away.

“Too eager,” he said. “She can feel it in yer arm.”

“I am nae eager, I am…” She stopped. She was absolutely eager and anxious, and also very aware that he was standing close enough that she could feel the warmth from his arm, which was making the anxious part considerably worse. “I am concentratin’.”

“Concentrate on yer breath first. Everythin’ else follows.”

She inhaled. Exhaled slowly, just like he had instructed her before.

The mare stilled.

There.

She sensed it—the animal’s attention shifting, with less alarm. She kept her breath steady and her elbow soft, reached out again very slowly, and this time the mare did not move away.

Her fingers found the curve of the neck.

She did not move. She barely breathed.

“Keep going,” Edward said. “She’ll tell ye if she’s had enough.”

She began to move her hand, slow strokes, and the mare dropped her head by a fraction, and Chloe felt the satisfaction of it move through her like something warm cracking open.

She is lettin’ me.

She glanced sideways at Edward without meaning to.

He was watching her hand on the horse’s neck with an expression she had not yet seen on him. Focused, yes, but not in the way he was focused across a desk or in a room full of people he was managing. Something quieter than that. Something that looked, if she was reading it right, like a man who was simply glad a thing was going well.

He was patient. That was the word that kept arriving, no matter how many times she set it aside.

She had been bracing for coldness, for the distance he wore everywhere else, and instead he had stood beside her in a stable for the better part of an hour, corrected her elbow, told her to breathe, and never once made her feel slow or foolish for needing to be told.

She had not been prepared for that.

She had been prepared for a great many things about Edward Mason.

She turned her head to look at him as he watched her.

Not the horse. Her. His expression was unguarded in a way she had not yet seen on him, open in some way she could not fully name, as though the sight of her standing there with her hand on the mare’s neck had caught him somewhere he had not meant to be caught.

He did not look away when she caught him at it.