"About as well as the others." She unlocked the front door and dropped her purse on the hall table. "Give me five minutes to change."
She retreated to her bedroom and stared at her closet, trying to figure out what someone wore to meet a horse. Everything she owned was either too formal or too impractical, designed for climate-controlled offices and business dinners, not barns and animals and whatever world Dustin inhabited when he wasn't cooking dinner in her kitchen.
She settled on jeans and a t-shirt, adding sneakers that had never seen anything more challenging than a treadmill. When she emerged, Dustin was leaning against her kitchen counter with his phone pressed to his ear.
"Yeah, Jake, I know. But I'm not ready yet." His voice carried an edge of frustration that she rarely heard from him. "Another week, maybe two, and then we'll see."
Jake. The name was familiar from texts she'd seen him answer, someone from his rodeo world who kept trying to convince him to come back sooner than he should.
Someone who wanted to take him away from her.
The jealousy that shot through her was sharp and irrational. Jake wasn't a threat. Jake was just a friend, a traveling partner, someone from the life Dustin would be going back to soon.
Except she didn't want him to go back. She wanted him to stay. Wanted to wake up to the sound of his shower every morning for the rest of her life. Wanted to share coffee and dinner and all the small intimacies that came with building a life together.
Wanted him with an intensity that should have scared her but instead just felt right.
"No, I'm not going soft," he said, catching sight of her. His expression changed. Softened in a way that made her heart stutter. "I'm being smart. There's a difference."
When he hung up, there was frustration in his expression, but it melted away when he looked at her.
"Everything okay?"
"Just people who think they know what's best for me." He slipped the phone into his pocket and looked her over. "Ready to meet Thunder?"
The drive to Riverside Stables took fifteen minutes through winding country roads that got progressively more rural as they left her subdivision behind. She'd driven this way before, but always as a destination to somewhere else, never paying attention to the farms and pastures and the kind of wide-open spaces that made her feel simultaneously free and terrified.
"Nervous?" Dustin asked as he pulled into the gravel parking lot.
"Should I be?"
"Thunder's a gentleman. Worst thing he'll do is try to search your pockets for treats." He turned off the engine and looked at her with an intensity that stole her breath. "But horses are big, and they're prey animals, which means they react first and think later. Stay calm, move slowly, and let me handle him until you're comfortable."
The barn was bigger than she'd expected, clean and well-maintained with the kind of attention to detail that suggested someone cared deeply about the animals housed there. The smell hit her first. Hay and leather and earth, not unpleasant, just different from anything in her usual experience.
"Fleming. About time you showed up."
The woman walking toward them was probably in her fifties, with gray-streaked hair pulled back in a ponytail and the kind of tan that came from years of outdoor work. She moved with an easy confidence that suggested she'd been around horses longer than Vanessa had been alive.
"Beth, this is Vanessa. She's the one renting me the room."
Beth looked her over with sharp eyes that missed nothing. "City girl?"
"Guilty as charged," Vanessa said, and was surprised when the older woman smiled.
"Nothing wrong with that. Just means you get to learn everything from scratch instead of having to unlearn bad habits." She gestured toward the back of the barn. "Thunder's been asking for you. Well, as much as a horse can ask for anything."
They walked down a wide aisle lined with stalls, past horses that ranged from massive draft animals to sleek thoroughbreds. Vanessa tried not to flinch when one of them stuck its head over the stall door and snorted at her.
"That's just Baxter saying hello," Beth said. "He's harmless. Thinks he's a golden retriever."
At the end of the aisle, Dustin stopped in front of a stall that held a brown horse with intelligent eyes and a white stripe down his face. The animal lifted his head when he saw Dustin, making a sound that was part greeting, part demand.
"Hey, boy." Dustin's voice changed when he talked to the horse, becoming softer, more intimate than she'd ever heard it. "Miss me?"
Thunder pushed his nose against Dustin's chest, and she watched his face transform. This wasn't just a working relationship or a business partnership. This was love, pure and simple, the kind of bond she'd only read about in books.
The kind of bond she wanted with Dustin.
