Page 32 of Her Guarded Hero

“So, I hired him. His first assignment was to work with one of our new horses. We were slammed, that’s why I hired him. After a week I could tell he didn’t like taking orders from me because I was a woman. I didn’t have time for his bullshit, so I just put Hal in charge of him. He was working with to break a young and eager filly. Yeah, she was a little rambunctious, but it should have been easy.”

“I take it, it wasn’t.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know why I was doing a walk through the barn one night, but I did. I couldn’t find Lily in her stall. I checked the corral, but she wasn’t there. I finally checked the horse trailers, and that’s where I found her. The bastard was actually hang-tying her, so she’d be more malleable when he went to train her.”

“What’s hang-tying?”

“It’s when the halter is connected to a chain hooked into the ceiling and the horse’s neck is forced upwards. It’s like they are on their tiptoes. It’s barbaric.”

Her rage was palpable.

“Let me guess, she’d be so tired and sore, she wouldn’t put up a fight the next day.”

“You got it one,” Aurora agreed. She pushed out of his arms. “After I took care of Lily, I got my shotgun and rousted him out of bed and kicked him off our land.”

He grinned. Seemed that Aurora liked her shotgun. Then he frowned. “Wait a minute. Didn’t you get Hal or Erwin to back you up?”

“I was too pissed to think of it. The little shit refused to open the door. He was a little scaredy cat. I used the key to let myself in.”

Dalton’s blood ran cold at the thought. “Jesus Aurora, he could have had a gun trained on you.”

“The little fuck picked on young horses, he would be too scared to pull shit on me. I knocked him upside the head with the butt of my gun. He ended up crawling around half the time to grab his shit. I actually kicked him in his ass out the door,” she said with a laugh.

Dalton didn’t care if she found it funny, it made him sick to his stomach. God knows what could have happened while she was alone in that cabin with that man.

“The next day I put the word out to everyone I could think of about the little shit. I faxed and e-mailed his ID around to make sure nobody would hire him. His name is mud in the horse community.”

“Do you know where Ned Little is today?”

“Not a clue.” She yawned, it pushed her breasts into prominence. He needed to keep his mind on task, and not focused on her body. But what a body.

“I need to get to bed.” She peered at the clock on the stove. “Only three more hours of shut-eye,” she sighed woefully. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

It took everything he had not to offer to tuck her in.

What the hell was he thinking? He only hooked up with women who didn’t want relationships, and Aurora screamed white picket fence. He needed to stop thinking about her.

He shifted his stance. Maybe staying here hadn’t been such a good idea, but he just hadn’t been able to stomach the idea of Aurora being unprotected.

He strode back to his bedroom and snagged his cell phone. Kenna was going to hate him, but that didn’t stop him from texting Dex. If the man wanted to mother the Western Hemisphere, then he was just going to have to start mothering Aurora too.

Dalton threw the phone down next to him on the bed and peeled out of his shirt and jeans. He waited for Dex’s call. He started to get pissed when twenty-five minutes passed by.

“Is everything okay? Is everyone safe?” Dalton asked when Dex finally called him back.

“Yeah, everyone’s good,” Dex answered.

“Then what the fuck? What took you so long to answer? I said it was important.”

Was he being an irrational, impatient prick? Definitely. Was it because he was a horny asshole? Most likely. But he was worried about Aurora too.

“I was in the middle of a delicate operation,” Dex said with a smile in his voice.

The way he said it just pissed Dalton off more. The man had been getting lucky.

Dammit!

“Whatchya need? I figure since it’s three in the morning it’s important.” The man was laughing at him.