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“Jesus,” he muttered.
“Yeah, you said that.” Her tone was teasing. “The transition house was in Ohio, on a working farm. There were six vets there, and our occupational therapy was farm work. I’d been raised out here, in the country—my family place hasn’t been a working farm since my grandpa’s time, too much of the land’s been sold off piecemeal for that, but we always had animals. Horses and chickens, a few goats, all that.”
Again, she fell quiet. This time Duncan didn’t feel the need to fill her silence.
“I don’t know,” she continued. “It was something familiar to me, and I needed that. I’m mostly back to normal, but not totally. When I’m stressed, I have trouble processing information, and I can get overwhelmed pretty fast. So I don’t always deal with urgent problems very well, and when I get to that place, I usually get mad and make everything worse. I didn’t feel like I’d be able to handle college or any kind of job where I had a boss breathing down my neck, and I got to thinking about how broken things deserve a good life, too. That’s how Ragamuffin Ranch was born.”
Duncan was stunned. In fact, he was in awe. He hadn’t seen her fight her way back to health, but the mere thought of having to relearn everything about being a person overwhelmed him. And here she was, talking about it like it was just a thing that happened, a thing in her past.
“Tonight was pretty stressful,” he said, unable to think of anything better he could say. “And you dealt with that great.”
She smiled at him. “You weren’t around for the huge meltdown I had in my truck after about a half-hour of being ignored. There was snot and drool and everything. Also, I cracked the dash.”
“I could name five people off the top of my head who would have lost their shit at being stranded on the side of the road in the middle of a January night with a sick, scared horse, and not one of them had to relearn how to walk and talk after they got blown up. I’m sure I would have at least punched something and broken my hand.”
“That’s a nice thing to say,” she told the side window. “It’s not the same, but it’s a nice thing to say.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“Trust me,” Phoebe said. “My mom and I were oil and water. Or maybe—what was the experiment we did in high school?—potassium chlorate and sugar. We got too close to each other and something went boom every time. Turn right at the stop sign. Once my dad passed and there wasn’t anybody between us anymore, it got bad. It was better for everyone involved that she went to Florida and left me behind, and I don’t think she gave a shit that I was in a coma when she got sick and died.”
Duncan stopped at the crossroads that would put him on the gravel road to Ragamuffin Ranch. He looked over, gave her a quick, examining look, and smiled. “I guess you’re the sugar in that metaphor?”
Relieved that he’d chosen to take the lighthearted route through her thorny story, Phoebe grinned. “Let’s go with that, yeah.”
Not much more than two hours ago, she’d been in full meltdown, sitting in an increasingly cold truck while she drowned in panic and rage—and with a horse in even worse shape than her own. No phone, no truck, no hope of any rescue. Every asshole that had flown right past her waving arms had been a little bit of shrapnel to her psyche.
Then, while she was out of sight in the trailer, trying to bring Smoky down from his full-blown panic, a savior had appeared.
A calm, capable, kind savior. Strong and steady. Easy on the eyes, too.
She liked this guy. Enough that she’d spent the past hour puking most of her life story on him.
That part wasn’t entirely her fault. He kept asking questions like he was really interested, and not in the trauma-porn way. Just like he simply wanted to know about her.
It hadn’t been an interview, either. She knew he was her age, that he lived in his family home, too—though he lived with his parents. He was the middle child, with two sisters, and his older sister was a vet who’d just won an award for her work with rescues.
