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She nodded her head that it had been six weeks since his last shoe change, so I grabbed the farrier tools.
Cricket was teaching me the trade because she was amazing and knew pretty much everything you needed to know to run a ranch because Emmett had taught her. I loved the lessons because it meant I would be close enough to her I could feel her warmth and smell her hair. I also hated the lessons for the same reasons.
“You want a go?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said quietly.
I picked up the right hind leg and wedged the hoof between my legs right above my knees. I grabbed the nippers and carefully started to wedge the shoe back and forth to loosen the nails, hitting it to provide room between the top of the shoe and the nail itself and used the nippers to pull the nail. I did this slower than Cricket ever had because I wasn’t as practiced, but she wasn’t impatient with me at all. In fact, she was really encouraging, nodding every time she approved of something I did, another thing I liked about her.
She bent beside me and our shoulders touched, a fact she was probably unaware of but I was acutely perceptive of. She leaned forward a bit when I dropped the used shoe and began using the hoof knife.
This was the part I was always most nervous about because if you hit the frog of the hoof just right, you could hurt the horse and I was deathly afraid of causing any pain to the gentle giant.
“Perfect,” she soothed, and I made an attempt toward the heel.
She stopped me with a cool, slender hand on my own when my tool drew closer to the bar and we both stilled, stood motionless, neither looking at the other, but the deep drawing of our breaths told us everything we needed to know.
She lifted her hand, pulled it into a fist at her side, and cleared her throat. “Uh, see this, um, angle of the wall right here?”
I gulped. “Yeah.”
“This is where the painful part of the frog starts,” she explained. “Just take care on this part.”
I nodded and continued the job until she was satisfied with the rasp filing I’d done, and we let the leg rest a bit before fitting the shoe. I grabbed the hoof and put it back between my legs and placed the fitted shoe over the bed. I had a handful of nails in my hand and was losing control of them trying to balance the shoe as well as the hammer.
Instinctively, I went to put a few in my mouth to hold until I needed the next one.
“No,” she said, placing her hand on my forearm. I peered down at her hold then back up at her slowly. “That’s not a good idea.”
She held out her hand and I dropped the nails in her palm.
“Why?” I asked, staring again at her hand.
“Because,” she breathed quietly, “horses’ hooves have a lot of bacteria. Pop Pop never lets us put the nails in our mouths.”
I nodded and watched her beautiful hand slide back down and finished shoeing the horse, dropping the foot back down.
“Now come here,” she said, leading me toward the front of the horse and bent down. I followed her lead and she inspected the final shoe, giving her approval with that clever smile and a thumbs up.
“Good,” she said, standing.
“Thanks.”
She finished the rest in half the time, but I didn’t care. I enjoyed the hell out of watching how beautifully she worked without thinking. It was so second nature to her. She didn’t notice that I was staring and I followed her every move, from the elegant swing of the hammer, how easily she cinched the nails and filed them down, the way her hands smoothed their way down the hoof to check her own work, down to the way her hair swung over her cheek.
When she was done, she let the hoof fall and stood, stretching her back and flipping her hair out of her face. She always gave the horses she shoed an apple for their troubles and would secret lovely things into their ears. She was so unbelievably attractive.
She clicked her tongue and led the horse out and toward its stall. I followed closely, memorizing the way her hips swayed. Inside, I kept the gate open just long enough to let Eugie in and closed it, letting the metallic clang break the silence.
Refusing to look at her, I gripped the top of the gate and grasped the wood so forcefully, I could feel tiny splinters break skin.
“Where?” I asked her.
She sighed. “I can’t say.”
My hands fisted and I slammed them on top of the gate, making my hair slide into my face. “Damn it, Cricket, it’s eating me up inside.”
“Stop,” she said. I could feel she was on the verge of tears.
