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Matt laughed. “You can certainly pet him, but you are going to look kind of weird leading him instead of riding him, especially if I’m riding Boots. I promise, he is the gentlest horse I have. I chose him deliberately because I wasn’t sure how long it’d been since you’d ridden. You said you had some when you were younger.”
“A lot younger,” she said, thinking how many years had gone by and how much she’d forgotten.
“Can I admit I’m a little bit scared?” she finally asked as she put her hand on the sleek neck of the dark brown horse. His mane was black, and she thought that he would be considered a buckskin. Either that or a bay. She couldn’t quite remember what the difference was. At one time, she would have been able to say. She had loved horses from the time she was old enough to know what they were. But it wasn’t something that she’d been able to be around much in her life.
You could be now.
The thought came out of nowhere. She blinked. Thinking. That was true. Matt had definitely shown an interest in her. The fact that he brought horses up without her having to ask, and the fact that he sought her out on the beach, wanted to be with her even when she stiff-armed him, made her think that he would be open for more. And a relationship with Matt would almost assuredly mean she could ride horses whenever she wanted to.
So could her daughters. They’d loved the little bit of riding that they’d done, and they begged for more.
She tried to put those thoughts aside. If the Lord wanted her to be with Matt, He was going to have to show her very clearly. After all, she’d decided that she was here in Strawberry Sands to get her life together, and while Matt had some good thoughts about perhaps God wanting her to get her life together by getting together with him, she wasn’t completely sold on the idea.
Not because of Matt, but because of her. And her girls.
She took a deep breath. “All right. I know I need to do this, I want to. It’s...going to be a beautiful sunset tonight, I think.” She lifted her gaze up toward the lake, where the sun was just now lowering over the horizon. Matt had perfect timing.
“I can give you a hand if you want me to,” he said, wrapping the ends of his reins around the fence before letting go of Boots and just holding onto Bucket.
“I’ll take you up on that. It looks like a long way up, and it’ll probably look like an even longer way down.”
“We’ll just be walking, and I can lead your horse if you want me to.”
He was being so solicitous, and she appreciated it. But she didn’t want to be a baby. “I’ll take you up on that if I have to.”
She took a minute more to admire Bucket. He was such a beautiful horse. His mane and tail flowed in the late breeze, and his coat shone with health.
“All right. I’ll put my left foot in the stirrup, and I’m going to hold onto the saddle horn, and hopefully I’m still able to lift myself up.”
“You can do it. I have faith in you.”
She laughed a little, because she thought maybe his faith was misplaced, but she hoped it wasn’t.
Bucket didn’t move at all when she put her left foot in the stirrup, then gave a jump as high as she could with her right foot, pushing up with her left and trying to straighten it as she swung her right leg over.
To her surprise, she made it up on the first try. It wasn’t exactly graceful, but she was in the saddle.
She remembered to keep her heels down, her toes out, as she settled into the saddle.
“He doesn’t really respond to leg cues at all, so you don’t have to worry too much about that,” Matt reassured her.
“I didn’t take lessons long enough to know too much about leg cues other than that there are some. I think if Bucket isn’t one of the super deluxe models that do everything, he and I will probably get along just fine.”
“I like that. Super deluxe models. I don’t really have any of those. Boots is probably the closest thing I have, and he’s nothing truly special. The horses that we get for renting out, we get more for safety and for responsiveness to riders. After all, I can’t determine what kind of experience anyone will have when they rent from us. So I need a horse that’s going to respond to anything. And not need to be treated with kid gloves.”
“That makes sense. I guess it’s all those things you never think about when the business isn’t yours.”
“True. When you don’t have the experience, it’s kind of hard to imagine what everything might entail. That’s why it’s fun to talk to people and find things out that you don’t know. Expand your circle, so to speak.”
“Good point.” She had definitely expanded her circle by coming to Strawberry Sands. “Living with Lana, your mom, has shown me what kind of mom I want to be. I didn’t have that experience growing up, and I didn’t really have that idea in my head, the idea of being happy and teaching my children to be happy too. Teaching them to enjoy working, and letting them know that work doesn’t have to be drudgery. If we have the right attitude about it, it’s fun.”
He nodded, and she realized she had been rambling a little bit. Probably because she was nervous.
“Bucket can probably tell that he is making me nervous, but I think you can hand me the reins. If he runs away, he can’t go any further than the lake.”
“That’s true, although he can swerve and ride up the beach a pretty good ways. But it’s not like he’s going to run into any obstacles, and as long as you hang on, you’ll probably be able to ride it out until he gets tired.”
“That’s the wrong answer.”
