Page 29 of Where She Belongs

He grinned at her and her smile returned. “Well, I think you would make a great farmer. You just need to have a little faith in yourself.”

“I don’t know the first thing about farming,” she continued to argue, but there was less venom in it.

“All you need to do is find a place to start. Heck, you already have a barn cat. So now you move to the next step.”

Her laugh filled the room once again. “Like what? Chickens?” Her eyes widened when she caught that he wasn’t cracking a joke. “Tate, no.”

“Chickens might be a good starting point. Or maybe one of those miniature cows.”

“Ha! That’s not happening. I’d rather get a few goats or an alpaca before I got a tiny cow. What would I do with a tiny cow, anyway?”

He shrugged, but already his thoughts were whirling with the possibilities. He loved seeing this side of her. She was lit up, practically vibrating with a new kind of energy. Despite all the issues surrounding the house and the barn, she looked brighter. “You know what you should do? Before you make any firm decisions?”

“What’s that?” she said, the smile leaking into it.

“Go riding with me.”

Her smile stayed where it was, but everything behind it went out. “No.”

Tate blinked. “No?”

“No.” She set her plate on the floor between them, squared it with the edge of the drop cloth, then squared it again. “I have had weeks of people deciding what’s good for me. My aunt. A man in New York who thinks that’s romance. And now you, sitting on my floor eating my pizza, telling me what I should do before I make any firm decisions.”

“That’s not—” He stopped, because it was. A little.

“I know what a horse feels like, Tate. I know exactly what it feels like. That’s the problem.” Her chin came up. “If I get back on one and I love it, then I’ve got a whole other thing to explain to myself before the summer’s out. So, no. Thank you.”

He’d had the rest of it lined up in his head. He’d say it was just a horse. She’d roll her eyes. Before they reached the paddock she’d be arguing about which one was hers. He could see the whole afternoon, and not one minute of it was going to happen.

So he let it go.

“Okay,” he said.

She’d braced for a fight. It had nowhere to go now. “Okay?”

“You said no.” Tate gathered the plates and got to his feet. “I heard you.”

He was nearly to the kitchen when she said his name. When he turned, she was still sitting on the floor of her father’s living room with her arms around her knees, looking after him as though he’d taken away an argument she’d been counting on.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it, Ry-Ry.” He kept walking. “Horses aren’t going anywhere.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Rylee had said no.

She’d said it out loud, in her own living room, to a man sitting on her floor with a paper plate balanced on his knee. And he’d said okay, and carried the dishes to the sink, and gone home.

Days later she was still turning it over like a stone in her pocket.

That was the trouble with Tate Dennison. Alexander called and called, and every time she said no he heard not yet. Roxy heard no and started negotiating. Tate had heard no and set it down where she could reach it if she wanted it, which was somehow worse, because it meant the only thing standing between Rylee and a horse was Rylee.

Did she want to go riding?

A little. The idea of getting back in the saddle after so long was alluring.

Did she want to go riding with Tate?