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I’d slept badly the last two nights since I’d almost kissed Rae at The Pub and was not in the mood to deal with people today. Satanic donkeys were more my speed.
That night, after the near kiss and dropping Gabriel home, I’d stayed up waiting for Rae like a parent enforcing their kid’s curfew. I’d had some paperwork for the Texas agriculture commission open on my computer but hadn’t filled it out. I’d been too busy checking the time and waiting to see headlights in the parking lot next to my house to concentrate. When Jameson’s truck pulled up, I’d breathed a sigh of relief. She was home.
Secure in the darkness of my kitchen, I’d watched as Leroy opened the back door and helped Rae out of the big pickup. She waved happily to the guys and blew them a kiss as they pulled out, leaving her alone in the dark. I’d started to go outside, but good sense and my bare feet made me hesitate.
If I went out, what would happen next? Nothing smart, that was for sure.
The wink of her cellphone’s flashlight illuminating had drawn my gaze, and like I’d been in a trance, I followed the bouncing beacon all the way from my side yard to her front porch. Asshe walked away, all I’d thought about was the silk of her skin beneath my fingers.
Cursing myself for a fool, I’d sat back in front of my laptop and tried for the hundredth time to fill out the Ag paperwork. Ten minutes later, I’d given up. Instead, I’d ordered solar-powered pathway lights for express delivery before going to bed. I’d tossed and turned, my head filled with thoughts of Rae until dawn.
I opened another box of dewormer and set it to dispense the proper dose for my horse, Jet. As I entered his stall, I pulled a sugar cube from my pocket and fed it to him.
“You would have been smarter, right? Of course you would’ve.” I fitted his halter over his ears. Jet was a gelding, and thoughts of a pretty filly could only be so distracting since he lacked key equipment.
Castration seemed excessive in my situation. All I needed to do was exercise restraint. Divide my relationship with Rae into two parts. The past, our one-night stand. And the present, a pain-in-my-ass, overzealous marketing woman from the city who was going to commercialize the ranch in all the wrong ways, then take her accolades and leave for California.
“You don’t want the public traipsing all over this place, do you?” I patted Jet, smoothing flyway hairs from his forelock. “We can do it all with a website and a shipping company.”
It was a slippery slope inviting the public into this world. My father had started by holding a few horse shows when I was a kid, then he built a stage and had a few concerts. Next, he added a BBQ joint that seduced tourists driving north from Dallas to stop and eat.
Fast forward twenty years and the BBQ joint had become a franchise, with locations in every third strip mall across the southwest. And the pasture where I’d learned to ride was a carwash. Our cattle sold off and the working ranch horses traded for fancy show ponies.
The Rivers Ranch name used to be uttered with awe like the King Ranch. Now it graced the balustrade on the entrance to a planned community of over two thousand homes in the farthest north Dallas suburbs.
In one generation, it went from a massive two-hundred-year-old cattle operation to suburban sprawl. The first step on the road to its destruction had been turning a working ranch into a tourist attraction.
I uncapped the dewormer and, with minimal struggle, gave Jet his medicine. I followed it up with a second sugar cube. If you can’t spoil your own horse, then who could you spoil?
I did Jet’s paperwork and took a new tube into Flower’s stall. The big, flashy palomino mare was the horse Wilson rode occasionally. I pulled a few stray bits of hay from her blonde mane and smiled, remembering how I’d dyed it green for the Elmer St. Patrick’s Day parade last year. Flower had loved all the attention we got at the parade for her emerald locks and didn’t mind that the vegetable dye took two weeks to fade out.
I uncapped the dewormer and slid the tube between her lips, my thumb over the plunger.
“Do you not answer text messages, or is it just mine?” Rae stomped down the barn aisleway.
Startled, the horse jumped back and tossed her head at the same moment I pushed down on the plunger. Most of the meds ended up squirting over Flower’s lips and nose.
Fuck, that was another fifty bucks.
“Text messages are convenient because they don’t require instant attention or response. If it’s an emergency, call.” I wiped the wasted dewormer off my hands on a rag and tossed it over the stall door.
Flower licked at the mess on her nose, gave up, and rubbed it off on the stall wall in a long sticky smear. Great, another mess to clean up.
I relaxed my features so my exasperation didn’t show and tried to erase the image of Rae’s naked body from my thoughts. It was important I not think about her naked when I spoke to her. Hard-ons were a physical reaction that at my age I could control. Probably. Most of the time.
“Is this an emergency?” I asked, closing and latching Flower’s stall door behind me.
She wore jeans and a silky tank top with white tennis shoes smudged with dirt. She needed boots and real jeans, not those designer things. They hugged her ass and hips nice but wouldn’t last a day in the saddle. Texas fashion was fifty percent looks and fifty percent practical.
“I sent it like thirty minutes ago.” She tapped her foot and huffed at me.
“Yes, ma’am.” I reached down to pat my dog, Major, who suddenly woke up from his extended morning nap in a freshly bedded horse stall to see what all the fuss was about. His black coat was covered in dust and pine shavings.
Done with me, Major stretched and walked to Rae, whose annoyance evaporated as soon as she saw the dog.
“Who is this handsome fellow?” She stroked his head and he leaned into her legs, getting dirt all over her fancy jeans.
I couldn’t help the smile that curved my lips watching her pet my dog.
