The Curse of February Fourteenth

by Liz Isaacson

  Monday morning found her in a new pair of cowgirl boots. This time, brown leather peeked up at her from beneath the hem of her jeans, but they didn’t make her a cowgirl. But they made her look like one, and that was all she needed until she could figure out how to actually become one.

  “I’m looking for Brynn?” she said upon arriving out at Three Rivers Ranch and entering the building she’d been told to look for.

  A cowboy glanced over at her from a stack of shelves where he was working. “She’s out in the stables.”

  “Oh, um.” Trina would need to look up exactly what a stable was, and she wondered for a flash of time if her phone had WiFi out here. She had a sinking feeling she’d need to learn a lot of horse vocabulary before the day ended.

  “Cal will take you out.” He nodded to someone behind Trina.

  She spun, her heart—which had withered but not stopped beating these past few months—jumping to the back of her throat like a silly frog.

  And there he stood. Easily the most handsome man Trina had ever laid eyes on—and she’d traveled around the world since she was ten years old—Cal stood a few inches taller than her, wearing that delicious black hat and a smile that slipped the longer she stared at him.

  Self-consciously, she reached up and tucked her now-short hair behind her ear. It didn’t stay but flopped right back out of place. She’d bleached and dyed her hair the color of butterscotch, and then cut ten inches off it so it now stuck out of her head at odd angles. At least to her. She was used to pulling it into a ponytail and going, but that morning, she’d had to primp and prod and flat-iron the short pieces into their proper places.

  “Mornin’,” Cal said, his voice somewhere on the awed scale. Probably close to a seven or eight.

  Trina couldn’t respond. Cal blinked at her before glancing to the other cowboy. “Who is she?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Trina,” she blurted, finally able to get her name out. It was safe; she hadn’t told him at the dance a couple of nights ago. “I’m Trina Salisbury, and Brynn hired me for some, um, general horse care.” She did a little curtsy without knowing why. “It’s my first day.”

  “She’s in the stables,” the cowboy said again, sliding a file into a slot in the bookcase.

  Cal ran his eyes down the length of her body and back to the hat that felt silly perched on her head. “All right, then. Come with me.” He maneuvered past her into the narrow hallway that led to a door with sunlight streaming through it.

  “You haven’t been here before?” he asked as he stepped through the door and held it open for her.

  “No.” The smell of hay and rot and animal dung met her nose, and she suddenly regretted her snap decision to work on a farm. A ranch. The sign had definitely said Three Rivers Ranch.

  “She hired me over the phone.” Trina glanced at Cal, thinking he’d soothe the bats flapping through her insides. But his handsomeness only stirred the mammals into a riot.

  He nodded, pressed his hat further onto his head, and started along a fence that separated the humans from the horses.

  And oh, my, there were a lot of horses. Trina’s hand fluttered to her throat, sure she was about to throw up. What had she been thinking? She’d been hitting tennis balls for twenty-four years, not hauling hay or saddling horses. She didn’t even know how to haul hay or saddle horses. And she didn’t think there would be a handy manual tacked to the wall to help her out.

  “What do you do here?” she asked Cal, trying to get her heartbeat to even out. It’ll be fine, she told herself. Brynn said this job was moving horses from one place to the other. Giving baths. Stuff like that.

  “Stuff like that,” had been Brynn’s exact words, and now Trina wondered what “stuff” she really meant.

  Honestly, anything would be better than being caged inside a giant mansion in the hills above LA, watching the paparazzi as they jostled for position right up against her gate.

  “I’m a veterinary technician,” Cal said over his shoulder. “Squire Ackerman—he owns the ranch—is the lead vet. But I have a specialization in large animal care, and with all the horses out here, Squire needed a Number Two.”

  Cal was anything but Number Two, but Trina kept that thought to herself. Still, she enjoyed the view from the back as he led her out to a large, square-U shaped building with a wide aisle down the middle.

  Horse stalls lined both sides, and every item was hung exactly in its place. Cal moved with easy strides like he’d worn cowboy boots his whole life.

  Trina’s feet slipped and her toes pinched inside the unyielding leather boots. He turned the corner to reveal even more stalls, and Trina’s breath caught in her throat. There were way more horses here than she’d ever imagined.

  “There she is,” Cal said, nodding with his head in a very cowboy way. His Texas drawl shot shivers right down Trina’s legs, and she followed his gaze as she drew in a shaky breath.

  A woman wearing jeans, a long-sleeved purple shirt, and a cowgirl hat stood at a stall, stroking an impossibly huge black horse. Her blonde braid hung down her back, and she looked every bit as country-western as Cal.

  Trina had never felt so out of place.

  “Thanks,” she managed to say before she walked away.

  “Hey,” Cal said in a gentle voice. Trina turned back to him. He once again devoured her with his eyes, and Trina’s face flushed with heat. “Do I know you? Have we met?”

  Her lungs seized, forgetting how to breathe in her most crucial moments. “I—I don’t think so. I’ve only just come to town for the job.”

  Cal stalked closer, his gorgeous lake-blue eyes narrowing. “You’ve only just come to town?”

  “Well, I’ve been here for a couple of weeks.” She almost cringed with the lie. A fib, really. And who cared?

  Cal would care, she thought. Though she hardly knew him, he seemed like the type to value honesty and integrity above all else.

  Which was exactly why he could never know who she really was, where she really came from, or why she’d come to Three Rivers. He certainly wouldn’t be interested in getting to know her then, though he wore the look of a starved man staring at Thanksgiving dinner right now.

  “Thanks,” she said with a little wave before turning and hurrying toward Brynn. She felt split down the middle—half of her really wanted to see Cal again, and the other half hoped they never had cause to bump into one another out here at the ranch.

  Chapter Three

  Cal watched the tall, lithe woman with neat muscles in her arms and legs walk away from him. She reminded him of the butterfly.

  He shook his head.

  That woman had possessed long, dark hair the color of Kit Kat’s tail. He shook his head harder. “Shouldn’t compare a pretty woman to a horse,” he muttered to himself.

  Butterfly had also had blue-gray eyes harboring storms, but Trina’s eyes were all blue, with only a tremor of fear in them. Fear that was completely reasonable on her first day of a new job.

  Cal turned away from her, the cowgirl boot he’d taken back to his cabin and thoughtfully placed on his mantel mocking him. He’d asked the other boys who’d gone to the dance if they knew who she was. Looked for the woman at church. He’d even put a bug in Heidi’s ear about anyone new who had come to town.

  No one had been able to help him learn anything new about his mysterious butterfly.

  He stopped by Kit Kat’s stall just to see the old bay horse. He didn’t work ranches or rodeo circuits anymore, but Kit Kat was a loyal friend who always seemed eager to say hello to Cal when he stopped by.

  “Hey there, fella.” Cal stroked the horse’s cheeks. “You haven’t seen a beautiful woman wearing wings, have you?”

  The horse actually nickered, and Cal grinned at him. “That’s what I thought.” He sighed as he headed back into the front office to pick up the list of horses that needed attention today. Of course he had the two who’d been injured—Grand Junction and Honeybee—but Brynn also kept him o
n a pretty tight rotation with her other horses.

  She did pay a third of his salary, so Cal didn’t mind. He liked working with the horses at Courage Reins the best, as they were trained therapy equines, without temperaments or issues. Brynn’s horses were told all day long how awesome they were, and some of them pranced around like they knew it.

  Cal chuckled to himself that he was thinking about horses as people again. As he reached the door of the stable, he cast a long look over his shoulder, trying to conjure up the sound of Butterfly’s voice to see if it matched Trina’s.

  He couldn’t remember, and he turned away from the stable—and all thoughts of the mysterious woman who had completely invaded his mind.

  Cal put his energy to work, and enjoyed the cooler fall temperatures, his horses, and the steady beating of his heart. In his younger days, when he ran the rodeo circuit, he’d learned to listen to the pulse of his heart in his ears, feel it in his chest, before the run started.

  He’d learned to trust himself by listening to his heartbeat. Learned to trust the pulses of the horses in his care. Learned to trust his instincts based on what the beats told him.

  He caught sight of Trina as he left the stables in favor of lunch. She looked frazzled and kept running her hand over her hair like she couldn’t understand what was going on. She danced away from the horse when she should’ve gone toward it, and Cal’s lips twitched upward.

  Brynn corrected her, and Cal started to duck his head just as Trina looked at him. A spark started in his gut, and he actually took a step toward her. She broke the connection between them as she took the reins from Brynn and started to lead the horse through a gate.

  Foolishness filled Cal from bottom to top. What was wrong with him? Perhaps he hadn’t dated in so long that every woman seemed wonderful.

  That’s not true, he told himself as he hurried out of the stable and toward the dirt road that would take him home. You don’t like Margaret.

  His phone rang as he mounted the steps to his cabin. Petra. His mouth turned dry as he swiped on the call. “Petra?” he asked. “What’s wrong? Is Sabrina okay?”

  “Sabrina’s fine,” his ex-wife drawled. “Why do you always ask if she’s okay?”

  “I don’t know,” Cal said, avoiding the argument. He asked, because Petra only called when something wasn’t okay. Otherwise, she texted.

  He moved into the kitchen while Petra said, “We’re catering a wedding next weekend, and I was wondering if you could take Sabrina even though it’s not your turn.”

  “Of course.” Cal pulled out a loaf of bread. “So I’ll have her this weekend and next.”

  “Right.”

  “Maybe she could just stay with me on the ranch,” he said. He didn’t mind the hour-long drive to Pampa, where Petra lived with her mother and helped with the family restaurant that had been named a historical marker last year. “She’d have to miss school, but its just first grade. How much can they be doing?”

  “They do a lot,” Petra said, a touch of defensiveness in her voice.

  “I’ll read with her every night,” Cal said. He wasn’t sure why he wanted his daughter to come, only that he never got to see her during the week because of school, and he missed her.

  “They do math too,” Petra said.

  “I can do math.” Cal spread peanut butter on his bread and opened the fridge to find the strawberry rhubarb jam Miss Kelly had made earlier that fall. His jar was empty.

  “I’ll talk to Sabrina.”

  “Have her call me after school,” Cal said, unwilling to let Petra have that much control over the conversation with their six-year-old.

  “All right,” she said moments before saying good-bye and ending the call.

  Cal ate his lonely lunch at the kitchen table that only had two chairs. He wasn’t sure what a six-year-old would do all day while he worked with horses, but he had a television and a phone, and Sabrina had always enjoyed coming to the ranch.

  He stood and washed his hands, unsatisfied from his meal of bread and peanut butter. But this afternoon, he was working over at Courage Reins, and that lifted his spirits. Reese always had candy at the front desk, which he manned, and sometimes Pete brought in lunch for everyone.

  Oh, yes, Cal’s first stop would be the conference room to see if he could fill his stomach with something better.

  He moved toward the front door and had his hand on the knob when his gaze landed on the black cowgirl boot resting on his mantel. The light blue stitching flamed up, reminding him of those beautiful wings, the tight, black clothing Butterfly had worn, the haunted quality in her eyes that had called to Cal’s soul.

  He reached out and traced on fingertip along the upper part of the stitching. Who was she? he wondered. Had she left town already?

  Help me find her, he prayed, quite sure that God didn’t concern himself with desperate cowboys in the Texas Panhandle but determined to keep praying just in case He did.

  Pete had brought in doughnuts that morning, and several remained in the long brown box on the conference room table. Cal helped himself before stopping by the front desk to chat with Reese for a few minutes.

  The other cowboy handed him a list of three horses Pete had identified for check-ups that day, and Cal took the hint to get to work.

  Courage Reins shared barn and stable space with the ranch, so Cal headed across the street to find the appointed horses. The ranch didn’t have quite the five-star accommodations as Brynn did, so he had to open a door to enter the stable.

  And a horse pushed its way right out, nosing him in the chest and causing Cal to stumble backward.

  “Whoa,” he said, noticing the wild look in the horse’s eyes. “Whoa there.” He caught hold of the reins and managed to get the horse stilled.

  “Oh, you got him.” Trina came running down the aisle, panic in her expression that matched Cash the Check’s.

  “This is a champion barrel racing horse,” Cal said. “What are you doin’ with him over here?” He reached up and stroked the horse’s neck, pulling the reins tighter to communicate to the animal that he was okay. Safe. Someone else was in control here, and he could just relax.

  “Brynn told me to bring him over here because he’s….” She cleared her throat and shuffled her feet around like the cement beneath her boots was made of lava.

  “He’s a stud,” Cal said, heat rising to his own face for some reason.

  “Right. A stud.” Trina exhaled. “And he sort of got all, I don’t know, freaked out or something, and I lost my grip on him.”

  Cal liked the sound of her voice, the way she spoke with a calm lilt to her words. She definitely wasn’t from Texas, but he didn’t know where she came from.

  “So who’s he supposed to be with?”

  “Iron Beauty.”

  Cal clucked his tongue as he started walking and Cash the Check lowered his head and plodded along beside him. “Iron Beauty is in the next stable over. Come on, I’ll take you.”

  “Thanks.” Trina caught up to him and matched her stride to his. “This is a big place, and it’s—”

  “Your first day,” Cal said at the same time she did. He grinned down at her. “Did you get lunch?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “I ate a handful of crackers on the way over here.”

  “That’s not lunch.”

  She lifted one shoulder in a shrug Cal could only classify as sexy. He tried to think of something intelligent to say. “You gotta take a lunch out here. There will always be something keeping you from eating. But it’s not healthy to work straight through.”

  She glanced up at him, a shy smile staining her face. It reached her eyes, lighting them up, and Cal felt like he’d been kicked in the chest by a champion bronc riding horse. One that could buck hard. “You sound like you’ve had some experience with skipping lunch.”

  “More than I want to admit.” He chuckled as he reached the door to the correct stable. He paused, wanting to draw out t
heir encounter.

  “So no skipping lunch,” she said, reciting it like she was making a list of things to improve upon for Day Two of her new job.

  “Nope.”

  “Anything else I should know?”

  Cal was sure there were dozens of things he could tell her that would make her life easier out here at the ranch. “You’ve got a hat,” he said, letting himself scan her body again. He’d done it a couple of times that morning, and she was just as curvy and beautiful now as she had been then.

  All his subdued thoughts surged forward, making his next tip one word.

  “Sunscreen.”

  “I’m used to being outside all day,” she said.

  “Water?” Why it sounded like a question he wasn’t sure.

  “I am thirsty.”

  “Well, let’s get this stud delivered to his lady, and then we’ll head over to my cabin and get you a drink.” Cal couldn’t let a woman go thirsty on the ranch. That wouldn’t be gentlemanly.

  He found Garth waiting outside Iron Beauty’s stall, and he delivered Cash the Check to the foreman with a tip of his hat.

  It almost felt natural to reach for Trina’s hand and lead her down the gravel path to his cabin. He stuffed his hands in his pockets instead.

  “You’ll probably want to wear long sleeves or a jacket once winter comes,” he said, noticing her tanned arms.

  “Does it get very cold here?”

  “Where are you from?”

  “California.”

  “Colder than California,” he said as he went up the steps to his cabin. He opened the door and let her enter first. He went into the kitchen to get some ice water, letting her examine his place.

  “What’s this?” she asked, and Cal swung his attention from the ice cube tray to find her holding the black cowgirl boot.

  He spasmed, sending ice cubes all over the floor. His phone rang at that moment, and he hid his flaming face as he turned to answer his daughter’s call.

  Chapter Four

  “Hey, baby,” Cal drawled from the kitchen. Trina’s stomach flipped over once, then twice. She looked down at her cowgirl boot and back to the very prominent spot where he’d placed it.