AllFreeNovel
Share Us
And she was right in the middle of that thought when Finn looked over at her, that mesmerizing smile still in place, an echo of the heat she felt inside her gleaming in his dark eyes. “Don’t tell me,” he murmured in the same low, coaxing voice he’d used on Jeff. “You want an apple too?”
***
What the hell are you doing?
It was a good question and one Finn didn’t have an answer to.
Intellectually, he knew that staring at pretty Bethany Grant and asking her if she wanted an apple was a bad idea, since obviously she wasn’t a horse and saying it in that low voice amounted to flirting.
But he couldn’t help himself.
Her eyes had gone wide and she was staring at him like he’d just dropped in from the moon, and he found that he liked it.
Her wide smiles, boundless optimism, and relentless friendliness had always felt a bit forced to him. Life could be shit and people could be terrible, and surely no one could be that happy or that friendlyallthe damn time.
He’d always suspected it was a mask, and sure enough, that friendly smile of hers had fallen away, leaving a look of shock on her face, and yeah, hereallyliked it. Because he suspected it was a real, honest-to-God response this time.
A response to him.
That pleased him unreasonably.
Then her pale skin went pink, and his pleasure deepened into satisfaction.
“Um, no thank you,” she said a bit breathlessly, and then, going even pinker, she added, “You know…uh…I think I might go back and um…sit in the truck after all.”
She didn’t wait for him to respond, turning and heading straight back to the vehicle sitting in Clint’s gravel driveway.
Finn watched her walk away, pleased with himself that he’d managed to unsettle her so completely. She was always doing that to him, so turnabout was fair play.
“You frightened her off.” Karl had come up to sit next to Clint, and Clint gave him an absent scratch. “Did you mean to?”
“No.” Finn turned back to the horse, who was still nosing at him for more treats, and tried to ignore the pulsing electricity that had settled in his gut. “Up to her if she didn’t want to stay.”
Clint, who like so many Southern men was bluff, burly, and never said anything unless it was in sentences of five words or less, snorted. “Don’t give me that bullshit. You got the hots for her.”
Finn bit down on the automatic denial, knowing it would come out sounding far too much like a protest to be believable. “She’s pretty,” he said instead. “But not for me.”
“Sure.” The expression on Clint’s craggy face was skeptical. “That’s why you offered her an apple like you were telling her to take her clothes off.”
Finn shot him a look that Clint met with the kind of patience older people reserve for the very young being very stupid, and much to his irritation, Finn found himself justifying. “I only wanted to see if she had another expression that wasn’t that fake smile she keeps giving to everyone.”
“Huh,” Clint grunted. “She the first since Sheri?”
Instantly, the entirety of Finn’s being tensed at the mention of his wife’s name. Five years and he still couldn’t relax when he heard it. The raw pain had eased, just like everyone said it would, but the hole in his soul was still there, and that would never go away.
It was a hole he’d never managed to fill with anything else, though working with his brother guiding people on hikes in the bush and showing them the beauty of the natural world went some ways to doing it.
The horses helped too. And he had Clint to thank for that.
So try not to be a dick to him just because he mentioned Sheri’s name.
Especially when he was no stranger to grief himself. Clint had lost his wife, Marie, ten years earlier; that was how Finn had gotten to know him. He’d shown up at the Rose one day not long after Sheri’s death and told Finn he needed help with the horses.
Dealing with anything that wasn’t grief had felt too hard and he’d wanted to refuse, but Clint hadn’t taken no for an answer. And it turned out the old man had known what was going on. Finn, at first, had found distraction in caring for the animals, then a measure of healing.
Horses didn’t talk. They didn’t want to know what had happened and how you were coping and how they couldn’t imagine what you were going through. They didn’t look upset or drown you in clouds of their own grief. All they needed was food and water and a pat on the nose.
There was a simplicity to it that he’d needed at the time, and sometimes he still did.
