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“We just call him Bonanza.”
“Is it a joke?”
“His name?” he asked, baffled. He was giving her that look a lot, which she didn’t deserve because she was not the one not making any sense.
“For one, he’s brown,” she said.
He cleared his throat. “His sire is Blue Roan Stallion, making him Blue Roan Stallion Junior. Blue Roan is a blue roan.” He put the saddle over the horse’s back on a blanket and cinched something under his belly. The beast didn’t seem to mind; he just kept his eyes on her.
“You named a horse Blue Roan Stallion.”
“I didn’t.”
“Well, that’s a relief. I didn’t want to think you were completely deranged.”
“Horse naming is an industry of its own.” He grinned for a second. “I’m a bit better at naming things. I name things all the time.”
Her niggling sense of recognition blossomed into full awareness. “Aidan Scott. The Aidan Scott. The guy who writes the dog books.”
“They’re not dog books. He’s a wolf.”
His books were some of her favorites, and wasn’t that a pisser? He wrote mysteries featuring a K-9 unit with a detective and a dog solving crimes around Appalachia. Goldie drove allover the hills in search of antiques, and audiobooks were the primary way she passed the time.
“You’ve read them?” he asked, sounding suddenly diffident.
She tried to keep her face still. “No, but no wonder you have a million dollars in furniture.”
“What? Where?”
“In your house?”
“I do not.”
“Did you hallucinate buying it?”
He shook his head. “A lot of it came with the house. My mother thrifted some of it. She likes to restore it.”
“I like to restore furniture. I take a twenty-dollar table off a marketplace and sell it for a couple thousand. I don’t restore a $100,000 table!”
He didn’t even react to that; he just stopped moving. “My dining room table is worth $100,000?”
“What do you care? You’ve got film adaptations.”
“The royalty structure isn’t all that lucrative. Never mind. Shall we?”
He opened the stall to get the second horse, the one she would have to ride herself.
She put her hand against the door. “We’ll take your horse.”
He grunted and returned to Bonanza.
“He won’t bite,” he said as she stepped closer. “I mean, hecanbite. But…”
She wanted to hit him but didn’t want to make any sudden movements.
“It won’t hurt if he does.”
“Just because he doesn’t have magical poisoned fangs doesn’t mean it won’t hurt,” she whispered.
