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Ten or twenty minutes? Get a feel for the whole process? Beth had been out there for at least two hours.
She stared at him, mouth hanging open. He grabbed the empty mason jar and set it on the ground. When he straightened, he tilted her hat so she had no choice but to meet his beautiful blue-eyed gaze.
“Where does it hurt?” he asked.
Beth clamped her jaw shut, crossed her arms, and lifted her chin.
“I believe I said everywhere.”
Eli laughed softly. “Like here?” He kissed the tip of her defiant chin, and despite the heat, chills ran down her spine.
“Yeah,” she sighed. “I guess it hurts there…a little.”
He moved on to her neck, whispering as he peppered her skin with feather-soft brushes of his lips. “And here?”
She squeaked out a breathy “Yes,” and Eli kissed another trail to her ear, nipping at her lobe. Beth held her breath.
“Too much to go for your first ride? Because I pulled all her tack. You did such a good job that we just need to let her get a quick drink of water, and then we can saddle up and go.”
She leaned back and grabbed him by the shoulders, heart hammering in her chest.
“Really?” her voice trembled. “You’re not messing with me or tricking me into cleaning out her stall or something like that?”
If someone had asked Beth a month ago if she wanted to hop on the back of a horse, she’d have had some pretty choice words in response, none of them approaching the affirmative. But the prospect of hopping on Midnight’s back somehow felt right, like the rightest thing she’d thought of doing in a really long time.
Eli nodded. The corner of his mouth quirked into what was getting to be—for Beth at least—a heart-stopping grin.
“Yes, really. And no, I’m not tricking you. Like I said, not a tricker or messer or whatever you want to call it. I’m gonna make Boone clean out the stall this week, hers and Cirrus’s.”
She glanced down at her dirt- and sweat-stained T-shirt, at her damp jeans.
“I look like that character from Peanuts who’s always walking around in a cloud of dirt.”
Eli shook his head and gave her hat a playful twist back and forth on her head.
“You look like a cowgirl who trusts her horse, and that mare most definitely trusts you. Only thing to find out now is how she feels bearing some extra weight on her bum leg, but something tells me once she realizes it’s you, she’ll be ready to give it a go. You’re her rider, Beth. For whatever reason, on that very first day you met, she chose you and you chose her.”
Beth threw her arms around his neck and rose on the tippiest tip of her right toes, pulling him into a tight yet decidedly off-balance hug.
For a long moment, she simply held him until she worked up the nerve to speak.
“I choose you too, Eli,” she whispered in his ear, even though those five words scared her far more than saddling up and finally embarking on her first ride.
For two weeks, Beth had risen at dawn to have her time alone with Midnight, making a ritual of grooming the mare—which Beth had whittled down to ten minutes—and leading her around the arena. And for two weeks, Eli showed up in the tack room with a thermos of coffee and two mugs, sharing a quiet moment before he helped her into the saddle and watched her learn to balance with one foot in one stirrup, watched Midnight learn to carry a rider despite her own uneven gait, until they both no longer needed Eli to walk beside them as they made loop after loop along the trodden path.
Except on this morning, Beth barely made it out of the guesthouse’s front door without barreling into her sister.
“Lanes!” she shouted, stopping short as her sister stumbled back, raising both hands in the air so as not to spill the two coffee tumblers she was holding. “What are you doing here?”
Delaney stood frozen for several seconds, looked above her at the still right-side-up tumblers, and finally lowered her arms.
“Here.” Delaney handed her sister one of the coffee cups. “An Americano with steamed almond milk and salted caramel syrup. You’re welcome.”
Beth’s eyes widened, and a smile spread across her face. She hadn’t minded Eli’s drip coffee with the basic fixings, plain old milk and sugar, though she avoided the former. But this was a treat.
“You remembered? Even the almond milk?” Beth carefully unscrewed the lid and breathed in the bittersweet aroma.
Delaney raised her brows. “You think I’d forget that my baby sister gets a little gassy if she has too much lactose?”
