by Jeannie Watt
* * *
TESS HAD NEVER been near a horse. That much was evident from the way she cautiously approached Snippy. When she gingerly stroked the little mare’s neck, the horse turned her head to put her nose on Tess’s arm and Tess stepped back—but not as fast as she had that day Zach had taken her elbow when she was about to trip.
“She doesn’t bite or anything,” he assured her as he put the blanket on then settled Beth Ann’s saddle in place. He had to readjust the cinches and lengthen the stirrups, guessing at Tess’s length.
“Okay.” Tess stroked Snippy’s neck again then ran her fingers through the mare’s long mane. When she stepped back she sniffed at her hand. “Horses have a rather distinctive smell.”
Zach grinned as he tightened the cinches. “It’s a good smell,” he assured her. One that made him feel good anyway.
When he was done he crossed the reins over Snippy’s neck and stood back. Tess stayed right where she was on the other side of the horse.
“You need to come around to this side. Horses have a near side and an off side. You’re on the off side. You mount on the near side.”
“There are rules?”
“There are,” he assured her. And he wasn’t quite sure how he was going to help her onto the horse without touching her.
She walked around the horse and stopped beside him. “What now?”
“You’re going to put your left foot in the stirrup, grab the saddle horn and use it to help you swing your other leg over. And you’re going to try to keep your weight centered over the horse’s back when you do it.”
“Is that all?”
“Pretty much.”
“Care to demonstrate?”
He shrugged. “Sure.” He patted Snippy’s neck then slowly mounted, demonstrating everything he’d just said.
“All right,” Tess said, approaching the horse. She lifted her leg, placed her foot in the stirrup and hopped in place as she tried to get her balance, then pulled her foot back out of the stirrup again and stood back. She cast a sidelong look at Zach.
He pressed his lips together momentarily, then said, “If it doesn’t bother you too much, I can help you into the saddle and we can work on mounting later.”
“That’s fine,” she said. They faced off awkwardly for a few seconds, the incident where she’d jerked away from him obviously on both their minds. She moistened her lips and then said, “I don’t mind being touched, as long as I know it’s coming.”
The elephant was now squarely in the center of the room, but Zach let it be. If Tess wanted to tell him what had happened to her, she would.
“Okay. I’m going to make a stirrup with my hands. You’re going to step in it and I’m going to boost you into the saddle.”
“If you say so,” Tess said cautiously.
Zach laced his fingers together and held them near the saddle’s stirrup. Tess took hold of the saddle horn and put her foot into his hands. “Give a jump.” She did, he boosted and Tess landed neatly in the saddle.
“Top of the world, Ma,” she said with a laugh as she awkwardly gathered the reins.
“Here. Let me show you how to hold them.” Zach arranged the leather in her hands, thinking it really had been a long time since he’d touched a woman. Tess’s hands were soft and she smelled good, like a field of grass and sunshine.
When he glanced up at her, she was biting her lip.
“It’s normal to be a little nervous,” he said quietly.
“This feels strange. And wonderful.”
“You’re good to go.”
“Go where?” There was a touch of panic in her voice, but she was still smiling. She was loving this. He could see the excitement in her eyes.
“Nudge her with your heels and we’ll walk to the end of the driveway and back.”
“Nothing fast.”
“I’ll be on foot,” he assured her. “Today we’ll just walk for a bit and then if you’re still game, maybe I’ll saddle up Roscoe another day and we can ride across the field.”
Tess nudged Snippy, who obediently moved forward. Tess lurched slightly, but kept her balance without grabbing the saddle horn and off they went down the driveway. She didn’t look at him the one time Zach shot her a quick glance, but he could see she was getting a kick out of the experience.
“How’s your balance?”
“I haven’t fallen off yet.”
“Doing better than me, then.” She laughed and he was struck by how warm and husky it was.
“Would you like to go a little faster?” he asked when they got to the county road and turned around.
“I, uh...”
“No faster than I can jog in work boots.”
“All right.”
“Hang on.” Zach made a clucking noise and started to jog. Snippy jogged beside him as she’d been taught. She had a wonderfully smooth trot, not like Roscoe’s pile-driving gait, and when he glanced back at Tess she was smiling widely.
Damn but she was beautiful when she smiled.
* * *
ZACH SLOWED TO a walk as they approached the barn and Tess let go of the saddle horn she’d been clinging to for dear life, even though the horse hadn’t been going that fast. “Wow,” she said. “I had no idea how much fun riding was.”
“Then maybe we can do it again.”
She dismounted before he could tell her how, and did a fair job of it, hopping a little as she pulled her shoe out of the stirrup.
“Want a beer?” he asked as he took the reins from her.
She would have loved a beer, but she shook her head. “It’s too late.” She wanted to get out of there before the kids got home.
“Big date?”
Tess snorted. “As if.”
When their eyes met, she could tell that he’d read more into the statement than she’d intended—he thought she was saying she was too ugly for a big date. She should have kept her mouth shut. She wasn’t looking for sympathy or empathy. She was looking for...what?
“I have to let the dogs out. They’ve been in the house for a long time.”
He nodded, but when he spoke it wasn’t about the dogs or her getting home. “What happened to your face?” he asked softly.
“I had an accident.” The words fell out of her mouth and then she firmly shut her lips.
Zach waited, but when it became obvious she wasn’t expanding on her answer, he reached up to lightly touch the right side of her face, the good side, tracing the back of his finger from her cheekbone to her jawline. Her eyes wanted to drift shut from the sheer sensuousness of his touch, but she forced them to stay open as she reached up to take his hand by the wrist, stopping his movement.
“I need to go home.”
“I understand,” he said as she slowly let go of his wrist, taking a step back. Once there was some space between them, she felt like she could breathe again.
“I don’t think you do. I—” she pulled in a very deep breath, feeling like she was about to dive off a cliff “—I don’t mind it when you touch me.” I like it. “But—” she tightened one corner of her mouth “—you’ve probably noticed I have some issues I’m working through.”
A faint smile tilted his mouth. “Yeah. I noticed.”
“It’s something that’s going to take me some time to work through.” Damn. Could she get any more cryptic? She wouldn’t blame him if he just told her to go to hell—that he wasn’t into games. But he didn’t.
“You want to come back and ride
again sometime?”
“Yes.” She spoke without giving herself time to think because she didn’t want to think. She wanted to spend time with him. She didn’t want him to touch her too much. Yet. Not until she had a read on the situation and what they both expected from it.
“Day after tomorrow? Two o’clock?”
“Sounds good.” And then Tess turned and started down the driveway before she agreed to anything else she wasn’t certain she should do.
* * *
“YOU SHOULD SEE the pretty dresses that Tess draws,” Lizzie said when Zach tucked her in after getting home late from a Wesley supply run. Apparently she and her sisters had stayed at Tess’s for such a long time that afternoon that Beth Ann had called and asked Tess to send the kids home.
“Yeah?” Zach asked, smoothing back the wisps of hair on Lizzie’s forehead. His baby was still young, but she was growing up so very fast.
“She draws them and then she colors them and she’s going to make one special for me. And after Darcy teaches her all the sewing stuff she needs to know, she might make the drawings into real dresses!”
“Really?” Zach said.
“Mmm-hmm.” Lizzie nodded adamantly. “She got a dress dummy today in the mail to put her fabric on.”
“We named it Sylvia,” Emma said from the doorway. “Darcy and I helped her put it together. That’s why we were there for so long tonight.”
“Darcy already explained.” Zach stood after kissing Lizzie on the forehead.
“And there was also the matter of the cookies,” Emma said as she stepped out into the hall. “Lizzie was eating them as fast as Tess could pull them out of the oven.”
“Was not,” Lizzie called from deep in her blankets.
Zach and Emma walked down the hall toward her room. Emma stopped at her door, her forehead wrinkling. “Tia got really bent out of shape about us being late.”
“She was worried. You should have called her,” Zach said.
“We did,” Emma said.
“Maybe she didn’t understand.” Although Zach had no idea how she couldn’t have understood.
“Maybe,” Emma said slowly, but she didn’t sound convinced.
Zach debated then headed back downstairs without knocking on Darcy’s door. As she got older, she valued her privacy, so he did his best to respect that. But when he started down the stairs, she opened the door a crack to call out, “Good night, Dad.”
“Good night, kiddo. Sleep well.”
He paused on the landing, looking out the small window there. Tess’s lights were off except for one.
How things had changed, for both of them, in just a matter of weeks.
* * *
TESS LOOKED FORWARD to her next riding lesson more than she wanted to admit. As she walked down Zach’s driveway, she told herself that, her attraction to Zach aside, it was also a matter of being hungry for adult company, that she spent too much time alone. But ten minutes later, after she’d mounted Snippy and Zach had casually put his hand on her knee to demonstrate exactly what he wanted her to do with her feet and legs in order to communicate with the horse, Tess admitted to herself that she was hungry for more than just adult company.
She nodded as he explained how to gently press the horse’s side with her left or right knee while she used the opposite rein to turn, but she barely heard what he said.
“Got it?” he asked.
“Got it,” she lied, trying to remember the last time she’d reacted like this to something as simple as a touch on her knee. Just a touch. Not a squeeze or a stroke. A touch.
Which made her wonder, where was all this heading? Were they on similar courses? Or did they have totally different objectives? Did it matter as long as they had the same goal?
For a person who hated questions, Tess had a ton right now.
Zach’s wife died three years ago, and from the way the girls chattered during their visits, it appeared there wasn’t a woman in the picture except for their aunt. Was he done grieving and ready to move on? If so, Tess could see where it would be intimidating to jump back into the dating game after a long layoff.
Which made her wonder if she was a nonthreatening way to do just that. The scarred woman next door hungry for any attention? Tess gave a soft snort at the thought. No, she hadn’t exactly been giving off the I-need-attention vibe.
So, in the end, the big question was what was Zach interested in and would it mesh with what she wanted? If he was looking for a person with whom he could get deeply involved, then she was not what he was looking for.
Zach mounted in one smooth move and Tess swallowed dryly. He was so damned sexy. No getting around that.
Picking up his reins, Zach gestured with his head at the open gate leading to a vast green field. “Ready?”
“Ready,” she said, even though she wasn’t. Sometimes you had to make a move even if you weren’t fully ready...in many areas of life.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“DAD, DAD, DAD!”
Zach dropped his razor in the sink, where it landed with a splash, and yanked open his bathroom door, ready to deal with an emergency, just as Emma appeared in the doorway of his bedroom. She thrust her hands out in front of her, an expression of sheer joy lighting her face.
“It’s a kitten,” she explained, not trusting him to properly identify the tiny black-and-white creature that barely filled her palm, its eyes little more than barely open slits.
“I see that.”
“It’s Misty’s kitten. She just brought this one to the house and disappeared. Tia said she’s going to get the others. I need to get this one back to the mitten box, where Misty left it.” She grinned happily at him. “And I thought she was getting fat because I was feeding her too much.”
Zach felt a ridiculous surge of relief. Okay, one small disaster avoided. He’d lived in fear of the girls finding what was left of Misty along the edge of the road or in a field.
By the time he got down to the kitchen, Misty had dropped off another kitten and Beth Ann was helping the girls make a box.
“I think we should follow her,” Lizzie said, cuddling the first kitten close to her chest.
“Let her do it her way,” Emma said sternly. “She’s following her instinct and we don’t want to mess it up.” She looked up at Zach as he came into the kitchen. “Do we, Dad?”
“Probably not,” Zach agreed.
“We get to keep the kittens, don’t we?” Lizzie asked, shielding the tiny animal she held as if someone was going to snatch it from her.
“We could use help with the mice,” Zach said.
“But maybe we’ll take advantage of the spay/neuter clinic we should have taken advantage of earlier,” Beth Ann said, catching Zach’s eye over the girls’ heads.
“If we’d done that,” Darcy said under her breath as she arranged the blanket, “then we wouldn’t be having all this fun now.”
“Fun or not, we need to be responsible,” Beth Ann said with a snap in her voice. “A couple of cats are fine, but if we have three or four ready to multiply, we’re going to have cats coming out our ears.”
“Here comes another,” Lizzie announced happily as Misty trotted in the door, looking right and left as she traveled, holding a yellow kitten by the scruff of its neck. “Oh, I can’t wait to tell Tess.” She smiled up at her dad. “Can I tell her now?”
“How?”
“I can call her!”
“Yeah,” Emma said. “
Maybe she’d like to come over and see them. Maybe she’d like to have one!”
“With those dogs?” Darcy asked.
“She says they are super well trained,” Emma said, “but we’d better check before we give her a kitten.”
“I get to call her,” Lizzie said, clutching the kitten as she headed for the phone.
“No.” Beth Ann spoke before Lizzie had gone two steps.
The girl turned toward Beth Ann with a perplexed frown. “Why?”
Beth Ann drew in a deep breath and looked at Zach. “It’s almost dinnertime,” he said, pulling the excuse out of the air.
Beth Ann turned her attention back to the mother cat, who deposited the kitten in the box with the other and then settled in with them and began cleaning the closest kitty’s ears.
“You’d better put the one you’re holding back,” Beth Ann said to Lizzie.
“All right,” Lizzie said sullenly.
“That must be all,” Emma said, sounding decidedly disappointed.
“Hey, three’s a good number,” Zach said. “One for each of you.”
“Then Emma will have two cats,” Lizzie pointed out. “I think we should give one to Tess.”
“We’ll keep them all,” Beth Ann said.
Zach watched as his sister-in-law, who was not a cat fan, began taking plates out of the cupboard, her movements short and jerky.
Darcy met his eyes with a slight frown and then got to her feet and started helping Beth Ann set the table. Dinner was a fairly stilted affair. Emma and Lizzie were focused on the kittens in the box behind the stove and Darcy was focused on Beth Ann. He wasn’t the only one who noticed that his sister-in-law was mad about something.
As soon as dinner was done, the girls started the dishes and Beth Ann said good-night. Zach followed her out the door.
“What’s going on?” he asked flatly.
She simply shook her head.
