by Lily Everett
For the first time, Marcus considered that Johnny’s bright smile might be a mask to hide the darkness inside. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said seriously. “I don’t know what happened with you, but I have bad days, too.”
When Johnny met his gaze again, his eyes were weary and knowing. “Yeah. Or bad minutes, like when I startled you. I thought for a second you were going to come at me, fists up.”
Marcus rolled his tight shoulders. “Yeah. Sorry about that.”
“You don’t have to apologize to me. Trust me, I get it. All too well.”
“There are days when it’s hard to leave the past in the past,” Marcus said slowly, choosing his words with care. “And there are days when you think you’re fine, but the smallest thing can set you off and you find yourself right back there again.”
Johnny nodded. “Toward the end of our trip, I was having more bad days than good. Tessa made me promise when we got home, I’d get serious about my sessions out at the barn. So here I am.”
He bent down to the plastic-handled tub at his feet and pulled out an oval brush with soft-looking bristles. With gentle, rhythmic motions, Johnny started running the brush over the horse’s hide. Obviously blissed out, the horse braced its long legs and hung its massive head with a shudder of pleasure.
“I see they’ve got you doing hard labor,” Marcus observed, glancing up and down the halls. If this was a therapeutic riding session, shouldn’t there be more actual riding involved? And where was Johnny’s therapist, anyway?
“We start and end every session like this,” Johnny explained. “Just me and Impromptu, here. I groom him by myself, and it’s my chance to say anything I didn’t get out in the session.”
“You tell the horse?” Marcus didn’t mean to sound skeptical, but it was a little weird, right?
“Sure.” Johnny shrugged. “Impromptu never judges me, do you, boy? He never makes me feel like I need to suck it up and be a man about it, or some bull like that. It’s more relaxing than you might think.”
The words struck a chord deep in Marcus’s chest. They also made him feel like he was accidentally intruding on an important part of his friend’s therapy. “I get that. I’ll leave you to it. I need to go find Quinn, anyway.”
Interest flared bright in Johnny’s dark eyes. “Oh? Is that back on?”
Marcus resisted the urge to palm the back of his neck or shift his weight uncomfortably. “For now. We’ll see how it goes.”
He didn’t like lying to Johnny, but the worst part was how it didn’t feel like a lie. Not exactly.
“Congrats, man.” Johnny smiled with genuine happiness. “I always thought you two were kind of perfect for each other.”
“Yeah, well. We’re giving it another try.” Marcus left it at that. Lying to Quinn’s parents and his prospective customers was one thing. It was a whole other thing to lie to one of his few friends. “It was good seeing you. Come by the bar sometime. Bring that pretty wife of yours.”
“Oh, right, you’re open now! I’m sorry we missed the opening. How’s it going?”
“Business was slow at first, but it’s picking up.” Now that everyone in town thought Marcus was making Quinn happy. If they only knew. He put on a smirk to cover the ache of that thought. “Anyway. I’ll let you get back to your chat with your horse.”
“Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it, man.” Johnny laughed fondly. “There’s something about being around horses. I never thought it would work for me, but I have to admit—I’m glad to be back here. It’s hard work, digging into all the stuff that messed me up over time. But it’s work that’s worth doing.”
There was something almost defiant about the way Johnny said it, like he didn’t expect Marcus to agree, or like he thought Marcus looked down on him for being in therapy, when in fact the exact opposite was true.
“You’re a better man than I am.” Marcus realized his fist was white-knuckled on the edge of the stall door and consciously loosened his grip. “I respect the hell out of you for doing this.”
Johnny relaxed and gave that blinding grin. “Thanks, Beckett. That’s good to hear. But you know, there’s basically nothing I wouldn’t do to become the man Tessa already thinks I am. The man she deserves. This is hard, but it’s worth it. Because at the end of the day, I go home to her and I can look her in the eye, knowing I’m giving this everything I’ve got. If I weren’t doing this … man, I don’t know if I ever could have believed I was good enough for Tessa.”
The conversation stuck with Marcus long after he walked away and left his friend to his meditation with curry comb and gelding. Johnny was a good man. Marcus knew that the moment he met him. Tessa obviously knew it, too. Johnny was the only one who needed to be convinced.
And maybe he never would be. But clearly, the knowledge that he was trying his best was almost as good.
Marcus envied him.
Chapter 12
Quinn found her wayward fiancé with one boot propped on the bottom rung of the outdoor paddock fence, watching Jo Ellen Hollister putting a new mare through her paces.
Quinn joined him at the fence line. The sun beamed down on them, warmer than it had been all year yet, probably coaxing even more of Quinn’s freckles out of their winter hibernation.
“Jo does all the training with the new horses,” she said, enjoying the sight of her boss’s elegant grace atop the chestnut mare. “She’s amazing. It’s like she and the horse can read each other’s minds.”
They watched in silence for a moment, but all of Quinn’s attention was focused on the man at her side.
“Johnny and Tessa are home,” he said abruptly, without taking his eyes off the horse training happening in the middle of the sawdust-floored ring. “I saw him inside.”
“That’s great! I missed them. Did they get the house all packed up? I know it must have been emotional going through all those memories of their life together, before they figured things out.”
“We didn’t talk about that.”
Quinn hid a smile. Of course they hadn’t mentioned anything messy and deeply emotional. Johnny and Marcus were such guys sometimes. But then Marcus surprised her by adding, “We talked about his therapy, though. I mean, the sessions he’s doing out here. Like the ones I’m pretending to do, I guess.”
For some reason, Quinn’s heart started to race. “Oh? That’s good. I’m glad he feels he can share that with you. Some of our clients, especially the ex-military ones … well, when they first come here, it’s like they think there’s some sort of shame in needing help to process what’s happened to them. Which of course there isn’t. Everyone needs help sometimes. I’m glad Johnny can be open about it.”
“He seems to think it’s doing some good. Or that it will, if he works at it.”
“That’s the idea.” Quinn was struggling to keep her tone light. It felt as if something momentous were about to happen. “I’ve seen people here make amazing strides.”
She held her breath, not even sure what she was hoping for—but Marcus dropped his boot off the fence and said, “I’m sure you have better things to do than stand around here talking to me. Don’t let me keep you from your work.”
Quinn wanted to protest that there was nothing more important to her than Marcus, ever, but that wasn’t how she was supposed to feel anymore. She was supposed to be smarter than that. Stronger than that.
And anyway, she did have to work.
“Okay,” she said, feeling a little shy all of a sudden. “Well, I’ve got a few calls to make. Jo’s daughter, Ella, just put me in charge of wrangling donations for the charity auction at the Spring Blooms Festival. It’s a great opportunity for me, but it’s scary, too! There’s a lot riding on the money the auction brings in, so the donation items need to be really good.”
“You’re the perfect person for the job.” Marcus gave her a slight smile that lit up her nerve endings like a field full of fireflies. “Everyone in town loves you. You can call anyone on Sanctuary Island out of the bl
ue and get whatever you ask for.”
Quinn fought the urge to squirm with embarrassed pleasure. “That’s not entirely true, but I appreciate the vote of confidence. Are you going to hang out here, or should I give you a call at the Buttercup when I’m ready to head back to my parents’ house?”
Marcus glanced back into the ring, where Jo Ellen was reining her horse in ever smaller and tighter circles. Her salt-and-pepper hair was in a long braid down her back, her tanned face set in lines of concentration. “I think I’ll see if I can make myself useful here. Now that their best volunteer got a real job, they can probably use some help.”
Flushing at the pride in his voice, Quinn stuck her hands in the back pockets of her jeans and rocked on her heels. “Sounds like a plan. I … you know, I don’t have to start making those calls right this minute. If you wanted a tour of the facilities, I could do that instead.”
Marcus studied her for a long moment before saying, “Johnny was grooming a horse. As part of his therapy. I could try something like that. Or you could show me some of the other exercises you do with the clients.”
Once again, Quinn was poised on the edge of a cliff, unsure what lay below. She wanted to jump, but this felt too important to leap into without looking first. “Marcus, I can’t be your therapist. Besides the fact that I’m not fully trained or licensed yet, we just have too much history for it to be ethical.”
To her relief, surprise widened Marcus’s gray eyes briefly. “Oh, hell no. I’m not looking to hire you to be my shrink or something. That would be way too weird. I was only thinking … no, forget about it. It’s not important.”
Quinn had never heard strong, silent Marcus Beckett sound so unsure of anything in his life. Clearly, whatever this was, it was important to him. “No, it’s fine! If you’re curious, I can definitely go over some of the simpler things I’ve been learning about. I mean, if you’re really interested.”
Stepping back from the fence, Marcus said, “Show me.”
Which was how they ended up in a field behind the barn, staring across the pasture at a dappled gray gelding calmly cropping grass along the far fence.
Marcus looked down at his empty hands, then over at Quinn with a skeptically raised brow. “You expect me to catch that horse with no bridle or halter or rope of any kind. Do I at least get a handful of hay to bribe him over here?”
“Nope!” Quinn leaned against the pasture gate, the rusted metal warm under the early afternoon sun. “Use your words.”
He pressed his lips together, probably to keep from complaining that he never used words if he could help it. Quinn took pity. “Just talk to him, Marcus. About anything. It doesn’t have to be your innermost fears and feelings—although if that’s what comes out, that’s okay. It’s the sound of your voice that matters.”
“This is pointless,” Marcus growled. His hands were fisted inside his pockets, Quinn could see. Luckily, she’d observed this exercise many times before, and there was often a lot of resistance at first. A sense of calm washed over her as she realized she knew exactly what to say.
“It’s not pointless. The point is to make a bond between the client and the horse he’ll be working with, going forward.”
The other point, which she wouldn’t mention because she knew it would make Marcus self-conscious and ruin any chance of it working, was to lay the foundation for him to understand that talking got results. Lots of the ex-military men and women who came through Windy Corner seeking help with PTSD and other trauma-related issues had a hard time opening up. It was perfectly understandable—they lived in a culture that told men they had to be strong at all times and never admit to emotion. Or for the female soldiers, that they had to be twice as tough as any man to make it in the military. Those attitudes didn’t exactly make it easy for them to open up and share.
Hence this exercise, which gave the client some distance from the therapist, who would wait at the gate while the client tried to persuade the horse to follow him with only his voice as a lure.
Not that Marcus was her client, Quinn repeated silently to herself. He was just … interested in what she did all day.
Which was pretty lovely in and of itself, she mused, watching Marcus’s long, denim-clad legs stride across the pasture toward Captain. She’d noticed that people tended to tune her out when she talked about her various jobs. They were always nice about it, but she was more likely to get the verbal equivalent of a pat on the head than a series of probing questions.
Of course, it was her fault for never sticking with anything long enough to give people time to trust it was an actual career and not a passing fancy. She was the girl who’d cried “I want to be this when I grow up!” too many times to be easily believed now.
But her work at Windy Corner was different. And it fed something deep in her soul to believe that Marcus could sense that difference, and honored it.
She crossed her arms on the top rung of the gate and laid her cheek on them. With a sigh, she gave herself permission to enjoy the way the wind off the ocean molded Marcus’s cotton T-shirt to his body and outlined his broad, hard shoulders and back.
Between the shivery possibilities of this moment and the memory of his hands skimming her waist as he devoured her mouth this morning, Quinn was starting to wonder if she’d repeated her worst pattern of behavior with Marcus. Like every job she’d ever tried and quit, had she given up on Marcus when things got rough?
It doesn’t get much rougher than a guy telling you that he’s through with you and you need to move on, the scared, hurt part of Quinn’s heart reminded her.
But maybe there had been more to Marcus’s devastating words that day than she knew. Marcus had always been a volcano of emotion waiting to erupt—it’s what had drawn her to him when they were kids, and it was one of the things she found most compelling about him now. His heart was a mystery, a puzzle, an unexplored land waiting to be discovered.
Was it possible that Quinn was the right woman to conquer that uncharted land after all?
*
This is ridiculous. The words repeated in Marcus’s head like a mantra as he slowed his steps the closer he got to the placidly grazing horse.
He felt like an idiot, hands spread wide as if he were bracing for the horse to try to tackle him. As if he’d be able to stay on his feet if the horse charged him anyway.
The horse—Captain, Marcus remembered—casually shifted his impressive weight until his dark gray dappled hindquarters were facing Marcus. Captain’s tale swished once, lazy and unconcerned with whatever the human behind him was doing.
“I get it. I’m not as interesting as that patch of clover,” Marcus tried. Captain glanced at him, then went back to his lunch. Marcus frowned. The sound of his own voice was loud in the otherwise quiet pasture. He shut his mouth and listened to the buzzing of insects through the tall grass, the rhythmic munch of the horse’s teeth, the shriek of seagulls wheeling high overhead.
All those sounds were natural. They made sense here. Unlike Marcus babbling nonsense to an animal that couldn’t understand him.
Gritting his teeth, Marcus reached a slow, cautious hand toward Captain’s side. The horse’s short-haired hide twitched, as if he were shaking off a fly. Captain took a step away from Marcus before going back to snuffling through the grass for sweet, tender clover.
Come on, Marcus thought, setting his jaw. Keeping his movements smooth and steady, he tried to approach Captain again, this time from the front instead of the side. But again, Captain merely turned his ample backside to Marcus and kept on eating.
They repeated the dance a few more times, and every time, Marcus felt his frustration grow, until finally, he turned on his heel and shouted across the field to Quinn standing outside the gate. “Look, this isn’t working.”
From dozens of feet away, he was still nearly bowled over by the brilliance of Quinn’s smile. “Isn’t it?”
She gestured behind him, to where Captain had paused in his scavenging to crane his head arou
nd and look at Marcus.
Man and horse blinked at one another, unmoving.
“Keep talking,” Quinn shouted encouragingly.
Still feeling like an idiot, but more willing to suck it up if it meant getting this over with, Marcus cleared his throat. “Ah. Hey. Nice horse. So … you want to come with me to the barn? It’s where all the cool horses are hanging out.”
Captain didn’t look convinced by this blatant peer pressuring, but he didn’t go back to eating and ignoring Marcus, either.
“Come on,” Marcus tried. “Make me look good in front of that girl with the red hair, and there might be a carrot in it for you later. Oh, that got your attention, did it? You’re a little food-obsessed, Cap. Although I know how it is when you work hard and burn through calories like a bonfire made of dead leaves.”
Marcus thought back to basic, to days of ten-mile runs in full gear with packs on, obstacle courses in the rain and mud, push-ups in the dirt for any infraction. He was a big guy and his metabolism had always been high—his mother used to ruffle his hair and complain he was eating her out of house and home—but in the army, he could eat six hamburgers in a row and still feel hungry.
“That’s one thing about getting older,” he told Captain, daring to lay a hand on the horse’s sun-warmed neck. “I can’t eat like that anymore. Not that I really want to. I wonder how Dad gets by, without Mom to cook for him. Used to be, he’d forget to eat if she worked a double shift. But I guess he’s survived without her.”
For the first time, Captain took a step closer to Marcus and lowered his head as if investigating his pockets for treats. The big body knocked into Marcus, giving him something to brace against.
“The last few weeks, before Quinn came to me with her crazy scheme, that was me,” Marcus said, low and muffled against the horse’s neck. “I was just surviving. Not really living. I guess that’s been me for a long time. Maybe since my mom died—or maybe it got worse when Buttercup died. But now…”
