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I took out my phone and snapped a photo of a nearby calf drinking from his much larger mom, but when I went to share the pic, my finger froze over the button.
Who would believe I’d taken it? Absolutely no one.
I turned around and made it a selfie, trying my best to catch the mama and baby in the frame while I made a silly face.
Suddenly, the cow moved out of the way with a hop, dislodging the baby until it stumbled. I turned around to see Boone riding toward me across the pasture. He frowned, pulling his horse to a stop by the fence. “Aren’t you supposed to be learning how to ride instead of taking selfies for your Myspace account?”
Myspace?
I opened my mouth to say something snarky about his age, but Mercy came jogging over. “My bad, boss man. Was just getting ready to show him the ropes. Come on, Richie Rich. Let’s get you on a horse.”
My teeth crunched with the need to correct Boone, to tell him I’d been admiring his place and everything he had going on here, but it wasn’t worth explaining. He clearly wanted to see me as a spoiled city boy, no matter how hard I’d already worked for him.
“Can’t wait,” I said, flashing a smile at Mercy instead. “Been wanting to learn how to ride a horse my whole life. Why, it’s like a dream come true.”
I felt the heat of Boone’s judgmental stare on my back as I followed the rodeo star back toward the barn.
And when Birdie came racing up beside me, nudging my leg for some pets, I tried not to feel smug that at least someone around here thought I was worth something.
7
BOONE
It shouldn’t have surprised me that the minute Richard thought I was out of sight, he slacked off and started lallygagging around, snapping selfies as if the entire world would end if someone went a day without seeing his face.
Though, I had to admit it was a pretty good face with all that smooth skin and windswept hair. And those lips, always plump and slicked wet from whatever kind of overpriced products he used. I frowned, cutting off that train of thought before it set me down a road I didn’t want to travel. Or rather, that I knew I shouldn’t travel, whether I wanted to or not.
I needed something to take my mind off the latest hire, so I headed to my office in the main house. For the next hour, I tried to distract myself with updating the spreadsheets I used to track the herd, but after accidentally deleting one of the columns and spending half an hour panicking and trying to restore the data, I gave up before I did any real damage.
Usually, I didn’t find it so difficult to focus. Normally, I enjoyed the mindlessness of data entry and the pleasure that came with seeing the status of the ranch operation in black and white.
But this afternoon, my mind was elsewhere, and I knew exactly where it was: outside in the paddock near the barn, where a pampered city boy was supposed to be learning to ride. Though knowing Richard, he was even now trying to talk his way out of the lesson.
As his boss, it was my responsibility to make sure he wasn’t shirking his duties, wasn’t it? Really, I had no choice but to go out and check in on things—make sure everything was going smoothly. After all, the last thing I wanted was for something to go wrong and for Richard to end up injured.
The thought of something happening to him had me surging to my feet, sending the wheeled chair behind my desk careening across the floor to the wall. As I hastened my way outside, I told myself that the anxiety churning in my gut was only concern about the havoc a workplace accident would wreak on my insurance premiums.
But the sense of relief I experienced the moment I spied Richard standing in the middle of the dirt paddock, looking hale and hearty with his hands fisted on his hips, went way beyond caring about insurance woes.
There was something primal to the way I felt. My need to reassure myself of his well-being was almost physical. A need I hadn’t felt for a long time.
I frowned. I’d been through enough in life to learn that needing something you couldn’t have only invited heartache. And Richard was the very definition of someone I couldn’t have. He was only here for a month. Working on the ranch was a lark, another experience for him to post on social media before moving on. He’d be gone as fast as he’d come, leaving behind a cloud of expensive-scented dust.
The smart thing, I knew, would be to ignore the way my gut churned over Richard and walk away. Find something else to do. Except by then, I’d noticed that half of the ranch was circling the paddock, watching Mercy’s lesson like it was a late-afternoon sideshow.
