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Coming closer, he smiled down at her. “First, you will choose the right horse. Not Picaro, he is a brute for all of his innocent face. Do not believe his deceit.” He pulled her farther back into the stables. “Now this is Josefina, she is gentle. She will care for you like a mother.”
He swiftly saddled the horse, then turned back to her.
Her eyes locked with his, and suddenly, climbing on the horse’s back seemed easy compared to being this close to Stefano, to enduring the searching intimacy of his dark eyes.
Ignoring his hand, Annabelle went around him. Putting one foot in the stirrup, she threw her leg over the back of the saddled dapple-brown mare. To her surprise, she discovered that she hadn’t forgotten how to do it. Her body somehow still remembered how to use her thighs to grip the saddle, her hands to hold the reins lightly.
“Excelente,” Stefano said approvingly. “You have not forgotten how to sit a horse.”
Swiftly saddling a horse in the nearby stall, he swung up on the black gelding in a single movement of beauty and grace. “Follow me.”
Annabelle couldn’t take her eyes from Stefano as he led them out of the stable. He moved so well, and never more so than on horseback. She stared at his muscular backside, at his tree-trunk thighs splayed across the saddle. Then as he rode away from her, she blinked and clumsily urged her horse to follow. The gentle mare took pity on her and obeyed.
The wind blew against them as they rode away from the hacienda. Stefano glanced back at her with a wicked smile, then urged his horse faster with a low whistle. Watching him ride ahead of her, Annabelle was mesmerized by the image of the darkly handsome Spaniard riding the black horse across the wide golden field.
He looked back at her, his horse rearing back on two legs.
“What are you waiting for?” he shouted.
Annabelle felt a fierce answer in her own heart. Leaning low over her mare, she lightly tapped her heels and her horse raced forward with excitement that matched Annabelle’s own.
She soon caught up with Stefano. Smiling at him coquettishly, Annabelle gave a wild, joyful laugh, and raced past him.
She heard Stefano’s shocked laugh behind her, then the rapidly approaching pounding of hooves as he caught up with her.
“The upper paddock,” he called to her. “It’s this way.”
Annabelle felt strangely free, her heart light. She felt young again. They raced their horses side by side and, in the distance, she could see the far-off ocean echoing deep blue into the sky above, as the fields shimmered and waved around them like a golden sea. They rode side by side, hooves flying beneath them as Annabelle looked at him.
Stefano was laughing, his dark eyes alight with joy. “How could you ever give up riding?” he shouted to her. “How could you ever give this up?”
“I don’t know,” she cried. She felt like she’d been sleeping for twenty years, and in this moment, she awoke.
They reached a plateau high in the green cragged hills. Following his lead, she tied her reins as she climbed down from the horse, feeling slightly sweaty but exhilarated as her feet touched the soft earth and her weary legs nea
rly buckled beneath her. The ride had tired her more than she’d expected. But it was worth it.
Was this all it took for Annabelle to reclaim the girl she’d been? One ride across the fields with a handsome man? If so, why hadn’t she done it before?
Stefano went inside a large shed, and she surreptitiously checked her hair and makeup in the compact mirror from her jacket pocket. Her hair was ruffled but her makeup still in place. Perhaps working on the ranch wouldn’t be as difficult as she’d feared.
Stefano came out of the shed with a rope lariat hanging around his neck, then brought out the first of the young foals from the nearby paddock out into the large pen.
“Stay close,” he told Annabelle when she tried to move back to the shade. “You’re going to do this.”
For hours, he worked tirelessly to train each young colt to respond to his command, whether given by voice or gesture—to walk, to stop, to change direction or speed. When he returned each colt to the paddock, he brought out another, then another. Some of the animals obeyed. Some refused at first. But Stefano never lost patience. He worked each foal hard, and as the sun beat relentlessly down on them, his skin soon glistened with sweat.
Annabelle felt a bit sweaty herself, watching him with trepidation. He finally turned back to her, holding out the rope. “Now you.”
She felt a surge of terror. “No, I really.”
“Here.” He pushed the rope into her hands. “Now walk him,” he ordered in a quiet, soothing voice, as if training her as much as the horse.
Annabelle tried her best to follow Stefano’s instructions, but it was physically demanding work. The wily young horse didn’t obey her commands as it had Stefano’s. He kept pulling away, resisting her, yanking hard on the rope until it ripped out of her hands, chafing her skin.
When he was done, Stefano brought out another horse, then another. He kept forcing Annabelle to try again, until all she wanted to do was return to the house and collapse weeping in her bed.
But his words kept echoing in her mind. I think you are a woman who would rather die before you’d give up on anything. So Annabelle didn’t give up. She grimly kept trying.
