“Do you remember how to feed them?”
“Uh.” A vague memory brushed her mind: soft, fuzzy lips against her palm. “Hold your hand flat? And don’t ever walk behind them.”
“Words to live by. Can’t always avoid it in some lines of work, mind you.” He winked at her, then strode toward the nearest stall, making a ticking noise with his tongue. The dark bay—yes, bay, she remembered that one. Dark brown body, black mane and tail—stretched its head toward him, clearly anticipating nice things.
Ethan obliged, putting out one hand with a clump of the sweet, grainy stuff on his palm and letting the horse take it. He kept the rest of the goodies in his other hand, well behind his back, as he patted the horse.
After a few seconds Victoria felt obliged to say something to fill the silence. “He’s beautiful.”
“She.”
Of course. “Sorry.”
Ethan shrugged, then wiped his palm on his jeans. “The horse doesn’t care. She is beautiful, though. This is Poppy, Mindy’s horse. Well . . . my mom’s, I guess, technically. But now she’s pretty much Mindy’s. You already saw Logan’s guy, Charley, parked next to my ride back at the house.”
“Oh.”
“It’s cool, there won’t be a quiz or anything. You want to give her some of that sweet feed you got there? We use different feed for actual nutrition, by the way. This is only for treats if we don’t have any fresh stuff handy. Usually no more than a handful a day. Go ahead, she’s waiting.”
“Sure.” The horse was bigger than she remembered horses being, but if she was going to be working here, it was probably something she needed to get comfortable with. She transferred a small amount of the oat stuff into one palm, then held it out flat toward the horse, flexing her fingers back hard. Poppy took the offering with a damp flutter of lips, then snorted gently on her wrist. Emboldened, Victoria stepped closer and stroked the horse’s sleek, dark cheek as she’d seen Ethan done. The horse didn’t seem charmed, instead leaning past her and almost nudging her off-balance.
“Whoa, there.” A hand grabbed Victoria’s other wrist, pulling, and she yanked away as hard as she could, stumbling back a few steps and clamping her free hand over her mouth too late to stop a short shriek from breaking the stillness of the barn. The horse threw her ears back, grunting her surprise as she jerked her head away from the stall door.
Roxie, who’d been napping by a bench a few stalls down, leaped to her feet, instantly alert.
Ethan held up both hands, feed dropping from one of his hands to the floor. “Hey. Hey, sorry. Sorry. She was reaching for your other hand. For the feed? I was worried she was gonna nip you, she does that. Sorry.”
“You—” Victoria couldn’t squeeze words out of her throat. Her heart was pounding too fast. Her stomach lurched, just the way it had when she’d walked home from the coffee shop. She forced herself to exhale, willing her shoulders down and away from her ears. “Use your words next time.”
“Yeah, I will. I’m so sorry.” He was still holding up his hands, as if she were robbing him at gunpoint. She mirrored him, hands up, palms out, in a back-off gesture. She’d dropped her oats, too, and they lay in a broken crumble next to his.
He hadn’t done anything wrong. He’d been trying to keep her from getting bitten. It was okay. She could breathe. “You can . . . you can stand down. It’s cool.”
“What? Oh, right. Um. Let me just . . . so this doesn’t draw rats or bugs. Lamar’ll get ticked if he sees a bunch of . . .” Ethan crouched and swept all the dropped feed into one hand, then deposited it in a trash can near the big door, rubbing his hands against his thighs to clean them as he returned to her. “So . . . are you okay?”
“Yeah.” She said it quickly, then gave herself a few seconds to consider whether she’d meant it. “Generally, yes. I’ve had a really bad week, though. Month. Month and a half. The last week was the worst. My boss, uh . . . ex-boss . . . asked . . . me to . . .” Saying it to Alexandra hadn’t been this tough.
Ethan shoved his hands as deep into his front pockets as they would go and rocked back and forth, up to his toes, then back onto his heels. “If you don’t want to tell me, you don’t have to. If it helps, though, shoot.”
The scene was still sharp in her mind, so she told him exactly what she saw. “I was down on my knees, putting my cash tray away in the lockbox thing. He was in his desk chair, right”—she gestured with her hand, marking a point a few feet away—“about there. Turned around and said I should blow him if I wanted to keep the job. He grabbed himself and kind of . . . stroked. Then he pulled my hand, like he was gonna put it . . . there. I had to walk around him and the desk to get out of the office. It was . . .” She closed her eyes, which didn’t help, so she opened them again to see Ethan looking aghast. “It was a bad day.”
“That fucker. What a—pardon my language. What a . . . I can’t . . . aarrghh, I shouldn’t say any of the words that are coming to mind, but trust me, they’re awful. Oh my God.”
“I’ve probably thought all of those words since it happened.”
“I mean, I’m so sorry that happened to you. There’s just no . . . nothing I could possibly say or do would make it any better, but I . . . wait.” He had an idea; she could practically see the lightbulb go on over his head and his body jolted with sudden eager energy. “I know what might help. A little, at least. Follow me, and you have to be real quiet, okay?”
“Okay.” She had no idea what to expect, but she followed him past several more horses in stalls, down to the opposite end of the barn, and out the other set of large doors to a paved courtyard of sorts, with some other, smaller buildings around it. He was almost bouncing as he walked.
“Guest horse tack room, feed storage.” Ethan pointed to each door in passing. “That over there’s for washing, obviously.” The hose and poles with eye hooks for attaching horse-holding things were a fairly dead giveaway. “And over here . . . shh . . . is the hay barn.”
The building across the courtyard was a miniature version of the horse barn, and only the top half of one side of the double door was open. Ethan unlatched and opened the bottom half as quietly as possible, silently signaled Roxie into a down stay in the shade beside the building, and then gestured for Victoria to follow him into the gloomy space.
He murmured as she caught up to him. “When we catch ’em in time, I move ’em to a nice, clean box in one of the empty stalls so they’ll be safer and we can keep an eye on things at first. But li’l Mabel is wily. She always finds a way to do it somewhere on her own.”
“Do what?”
“Shh.” Ethan paused by a stack of hay bales higher than his head, then peered around the corner they formed. “Hey, Mabel. Pretty kitty. Yeah, you know I won’t hurt you.” He moved forward slowly, talking in a low, even tone as he went. “Brought a friend, but she won’t hurt you either. Preeeeettttty kitty. Hey, kittykittykitty.”
“Mbbbraow?”
Victoria looked around the corner. In the near darkness past Ethan, who was dropping slowly into a crouch, she could make out a nook between stacks of hay, and a small tabby-and-white cat walking toward Ethan. The cat paused to arch her back and stretch before deigning to let Ethan pet her; then she forgot to be aloof and started purring and rubbing herself against his knee.
Soft mewling started up. The kittens, probably, missing their mother’s warmth and milk.
“She’s cool today,” Ethan said. “C’mon over; take a look. No touching yet.”
Victoria tried to move as slowly as he had, finally crouching next to him. Mabel hunched and started back toward her litter when Victoria approached but seemed to relax again once the strange new human was parked next to the familiar one she liked. The little cat stalked back for more attention from Ethan, who spoke softly to Victoria as he petted Mabel.
“When my brother and cousin and I bought this place, it was pretty overrun with cats. Our grandparents hadn’t been keeping up with it. We started catching and fixing ’em as we could,
but we’ll always need a few around to help with the rats, so we’re letting a few breed. Just trying to be selective. Sadly, we do also lose some to coyotes, hawks, stray dogs, accidents. But we’re aiming for a stable population, and we’ll be cross-breeding with some neighbors’ animals, too. This’ll be Mabel’s last litter, and I’ve already retired Spike, the daddy.”
Eyes adjusting, Victoria could make out four kittens nestled in the hay. Two were Mabel’s colors, another pure tabby with no white, and the fourth was calico.
The loudest mewled—one of the Mabel clones—then lifted a wobbly head and cracked its tiny eyes open. It started to commando crawl in its mother’s direction, then managed to stand up for about a second before thumping back to the ground.
Seeming to sense her short break from motherhood was up, Mabel slunk back to the kittens, ending up on her side somewhere between the adventurous one and the other three. She groomed her front paws, apparently utterly uninterested in the four tiny creatures that squirmed their way to her belly to nurse. Then she accosted one of the kittens after it latched on, bathing its body roughly; it kept nursing, apparently resigned to its mother’s ministrations.
Ethan stood as slowly as he’d bent down and backed carefully away from the scene with Victoria in his wake. He waited until they were both out of Mabel’s sight before whispering, “Pretty cool, huh?”
She realized she’d just followed this strange man into an unknown, dark area with no idea what he had in mind—trusted him without a second thought, even after the earlier scare. And it was good to know she could feel that way about anyone right now. Probably not the outcome he’d intended, but it was almost better than the kittens. “Yeah, pretty damn cool. Thank you.”
The kittens had also been insanely cute. Teensy baby animals with their eyes barely open? Please.
It was as if he could read her mind. “Kittens make everything better. In real life, as on the internet.” Ethan led her back into the light, then pointed to the gap between the washing station and the barn. “That way next. On with the tour.”
Chapter 7
It had been such a promising start, Ethan thought sadly. Even with her weird boots and funky rings and inexplicable preference of TNG over DS9, Victoria had seemed amazing when he first met her. But after a week of trying to work her into the routine at Hilltop, what he mostly felt when he observed her stunning appearance was bafflement about how any grown person with most of a college education could be so very, very uneducated about some of the most basic things. Not because she was willfully ignorant or unintelligent but because a lot of things had apparently been so far removed from her existence that she hadn’t even known they needed doing. Much less how to do them.
Like scrubbing the toilets.
“You want me to . . . what?”
He’d rolled his eyes. “Can’t start getting squeamish on me now, Vic. It’s just part of the job. C’mon, you just do it and get it done. It won’t kill you.”
“What? No, I don’t mind cleaning it, I mean . . . I . . .” She looked at the cleaning cart, scanning the various bottles and equipment with a furrowed brow. “I hadn’t closed yet at the shop. I’ve never had to do it, so I don’t . . . I don’t know how. What things do I use?”
He’d blinked, trying to process what she’d just said. “You don’t . . . even know what a toilet brush looks like?”
“Oh, okay, so a brush? Oh, wait, it’s this thing, right?” She gripped the handle of the toilet scrubber, clearly pleased with herself for getting it right. “And you use that squirty bottle of cleaner that bends at the top, to get under the rim part. I mean, I have seen commercials obviously. Okay. I got this.” Her cheerful expression fell when she looked at him, and he realized he must’ve been making a sour face.
He tried to look reassuring instead. “Yeah, that’s what you use. Okay, so, if I can ask just one background question? You lived in an apartment for two years, right? So . . . who cleaned your bathroom?”
She shrugged, as if the answer should be obvious. “The maid service.”
“The maid service.” Of course. Because that was a thing every college student had. In their “loft.” Which Ethan had quickly figured out was Victoria’s word for fancy-ass hipster apartment that probably cost twice as much to rent as his place in San Antonio.
“They came weekly. I went a few weeks without in February, after I realized it was on the list of expenses my parents were still covering and put a stop to it. But I was pretty tired from working and packing, and I’d sold most of my stuff anyway, so there wasn’t much cleaning to do by that point.”
And there was the twist, the weird contradiction that kept him bouncing between finding her insufferable and finding her admirable. She’d done a dumb thing, to be sure, but she had acted on principle and stuck to her guns. Done what she had to, to see it through. Gotten a job. Sold most of her stuff to keep up with her bills. Hadn’t asked friends for money or handouts. She hadn’t even asked her sister to line up the gig at Hilltop; Alexandra had done that without asking, but Victoria had seen it was a good arrangement and gone along with it. So Ethan couldn’t scoff too much. At twenty-two, he’d never have had the balls to make the kind of leap Victoria had. Hell, he didn’t know if he’d be that brave now. Especially given her complete lack of the necessary skill set for survival as a minimum-wage earner.
His reluctant admiration had lasted until it came time for her to use a vacuum cleaner; then the cycle had started anew. He still couldn’t believe he was the only one Logan could find to show her all this stuff, except . . . everybody else already had their assigned work. Ethan was suddenly around all the time. So he supposed it made a certain amount of sense. And it wouldn’t last forever obviously; he’d help train her, then he’d get back to the important business of making rope and figuring out how long he could get away with not taking over Doc’s practice.
Strangely, Victoria had known how to muck out a stall. She’d had to do that when she’d taken riding lessons as a little girl—because of course—although she quickly learned that mucking out one stall for one pony twice a week was poor training for helping to clean an entire horse barn daily.
She could drive a stick shift. But she’d never changed a tire. And when Ethan had mentioned she might need to add oil occasionally to the beat-up truck she’d be borrowing for trips to town, she’d gone as wide-eyed and stuck as a deer in headlights. So he’d shown her how to pop the hood, how the dipstick worked, how to add more oil without getting it all over the engine. And she had seemed to take it all in, but God help the woman if she got a flat out on the road. Thank God she’d decided she had to keep some kind of cell phone; even on an outdated model with a pay-as-you-go plan, at least she could call for help if she got stranded between the ranch and town.
She didn’t know how to check the other fluids either. Or how to get new car insurance once she was no longer on her parents’ policy—which she’d cursed about when she realized and added to the list she was making of stuff people had to pay for on their own. For somebody who wanted to go it alone, she was woefully uneducated on how to actually accomplish that. She kept finding ways her parents were apparently still sneaking help to her by simply paying for things until she discovered them.
But dammit, her determination was commendable. Because as soon as she found out, instead of whining about it, she would sit down with her horribly lean budget plan and figure out when and how to cut off that line of support, even if she couldn’t replace it right away.
“Plucky as fuck,” Logan described her when they met to try to work out the following week’s schedule.
Mindy cleared her throat. “Plucky? Really?”
Ethan raised his hand, waving it to get Mindy’s attention. “I didn’t use the word plucky. Just want that on the record.” He was lying on the couch in the office, boots propped against one arm of the couch, head on the other, one hand pressed to his forehead melodramatically.
“Noted.”
“Wait,” Lo
gan said. “So we can’t say plucky anymore?”
Mindy opened her mouth as if she were about to explain it, then sighed instead. “No. Sorry, hon. Another heroine stereotype bites the dust. You can also strike spunky and feisty off the list.”
“It’s almost like you women are people or something.”
“Crazy, isn’t it?” She turned back to the scheduling board.
Logan leaned back in the leather desk chair, swiveling it from side to side. “You’re still my manic pixie dream girl, though, right?”
“I was never your manic pixie dream girl.”
Logan swung to face Ethan, pointing with his thumb over his shoulder and nodding, mouthing manic pixie dream girl.
Ethan shook his head. “Dude, no. Okay, so we can’t have her on cleaning duty because she takes forever, and I’m seriously worried she’s gonna accidentally mix chlorine and ammonia or something and kill us all. Or some guests. Or herself. She’s fine with laundry, though. Robert adores her, but there’s only so much room in the kitchen or the budget for baking supplies, so that’s definitely a small time commitment per week.” After Mindy moved some magnets around on the board, he continued. “Weirdly, of all the stuff she’s done, I’d say helping out in the barn has gone the best. But Lamar and Diego already have most of that covered. They love her too, by the way. The animals love her. Everybody loves her. She’s like a frickin’ Disney Princess.” Why that made his headache worse he didn’t know.
He covered his eyes, pressing the lids as if he could squeeze the tension out. His phone was in his back pocket, uncomfortably digging into his butt, as though reminding him he still needed to listen to the voice mail Doc Taylor had left him earlier. And tomorrow he needed to finish cleaning his stuff out of his old office so Marguerite would have more room for her things. He wasn’t sure whether to take the stuff to his apartment in San Antonio or store it here at the ranch or . . . All he really wanted to do was spend some time alone, working with some rope and the new batch of dyes he’d ordered. He might even start tonight.
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