All the King's Horses

by Lauren Gallagher

  He’d still irritated me enough I wouldn’t have minded seeing a horse take a bite out of him just for spite, and he had perhaps inadvertently tripped some instinctive revulsion, but that didn’t change the fact that he was the clean-shaven, well-rested version of the man who’d screwed up my blood pressure yesterday. Or that jeans were invented for a butt like that. Lord help me when the time came and I saw him in the saddle.

  I shivered, then banished the thought because it made it that much harder to tell myself he was an ass, and went back to doing all the things I was paid to do, which didn’t include ogling my new boss. After I stole one last look at him just for the hell of it.

  Throughout the sweltering afternoon, as I cleaned stalls and moved horses around, heat more than exertion made me sweat, which meant three surreptitious trips into the tack room to fix my makeup like a vain high school kid.

  Only a few more days, I reminded myself as I self-consciously looked to make sure no one saw me, then I don’t have to bother with this crap anymore.

  It would help if the bruise faded instead of getting darker, but I had enough concealer with me to keep the discoloration hidden until it was finally gone, so I tried not to worry about it too much.

  Around six thirty that evening, my to-do list was done for the day, and there was nothing left except the late-night feeding, so I went back up to my house. As soon as I’d closed the door behind me, I released my breath and looked around, smiling to myself. Though Dustin lived under the same roof, a wall kept him on his own side, and this tiny half of the duplex was something no place had been in years: mine. Rented or not, this space was mine and mine alone, and I loved it.

  Even if it was backed up against the place where Dustin slept. Slept, and maybe—

  I rolled my eyes and laughed at my own thoughts. Guess I was getting desperate for any thoughts that weren’t about being miserable. At least having impure thoughts about Dustin was better than stumbling around in an emotionless daze like I’d been doing recently, and these days, I’d take anything I could get that wasn’t numb and dragging. I figured my new boss was kind of like that football player in high school I used to lust after. A complete and utter douche bag I wouldn’t have touched for a million bucks, but he sure was nice to look at. Made that nauseatingly boring calculus class a lot more bearable. Okay, so Dustin wasn’t that bad. Just a little moody for my taste. And he was that hot. Maybe the occasional glance at Dustin’s butt or those beautiful blue eyes would make shoveling his horses’ shit while taking his shit a little more appealing.

  Giggling to myself, I rolled my eyes again and went to the refrigerator to get something to drink. Which reminded me, I really needed to take a trip into town and buy a few groceries, because there was nothing in the fridge except a couple of bottles of water I’d had in the truck on my trip. Definitely needed to go shopping, and I had just enough time right now to make the trip—forty-five minutes each way—into town.

  After downing half the ice-cold bottle, I went into the small bathroom and rinsed the sweat, dust, and makeup off my face. As the dirt and concealer smeared off my skin and onto the washcloth, my good humor faded. And it faded a heck of a lot faster than that stupid bruise on my cheekbone insisted on doing.

  I lowered my hands, resting them on the sink as my bruised reflection looked back at me.

  Screw it. The grocery store could wait. Staring at myself now, focusing on that blue-green reminder of things I didn’t want to think about, I didn’t feel like going anywhere or doing anything. My stomach turned to lead. My shoulders slumped under an invisible weight, and I made a mental note to make sure that eventual trip for groceries included a stop at the liquor store. Though alcohol had played a nasty part in my recent history, including that bruise, I wasn’t above drowning in a bottle when I needed to escape all things painful. And as heavy and impenetrable as this numbness seemed to be, I knew it would break eventually, and when it did, it would hurt. A lot.

  What a lovely contradiction. I wanted this numbness to go away but didn’t particularly want to be there when it happened.

  Well, which is it, Amy? Do you want to feel it or not?

  God. Yeah. Mariah was right. I was going off the deep end.

  And if there was anyone left on the planet I could talk to…

  I dropped onto my bed and speed-dialed my sister.

  “Hey, you,” Mariah said. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m…doing.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  Fixing my gaze on the barn outside my window, I said, “Just adjusting, I guess.”

  “What exactly are you adjusting to?” she asked. “I mean, what on earth are you doing wherever you are?”

  “I’m, well, just doing odd jobs on a farm right now. Something to keep my hands busy and a roof over my head while I get my head together.”

  “You have a roof here, sweetheart, and—” She paused. “Wait, you’re a farmhand?”

  Heat flooded my cheeks. “You could say that.”

  She laughed. “Amy, what in the world are—”

  “I just need a break, all right?” It came out sharper than I’d intended, and I sighed. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Listen, I just need a little time to regroup, and when I saw the ad for this job, I jumped on it.”

  “You’re picking up shit and feeding someone else’s horses to regroup?”

  “It means I’m around the horses all the time.” I lay back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. “But there’s no pressure to work with them.”

  Mariah was quiet for a moment. “Huh. I guess…I guess that makes sense. I think?”

  “It probably doesn’t.” I rubbed my eyes with my thumb and forefinger. “I’m not even sure it makes sense to me. But I’ll see what happens.”

  “How is it going so far?”

  I thought about Dustin’s weird demeanor. “Probably too early to decide one way or the other.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  I laughed halfheartedly. “No, it’s not that bad. Just an adjustment.”

  “I guess it would be. Going from Ms. Trainer to horseshit-removal specialist.”

  “Something like that.” I swallowed hard. Absently, I pulled my ring out from under my shirt and turned it on its string between my fingers. “So, um how was the funeral?”

  Silence hung over the line for almost a full minute before Mariah said, “Honey, do you really want to wallow in that? It’s only been forty-eight hours since you couldn’t make yourself show up.”

  I sat up and idly picked phantom burrs off my jeans. “I should have gone.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know.” I sighed. “I just…couldn’t. I couldn’t deal with hours of listening to all the reasons Sam was the most amazing human being ever to walk the earth.”

  “I guess I can’t blame you for that.” She paused. “How’s your face?”

  My reflection flickered through my mind, and I groaned. “Oh, it looks great.”

  “Is it healing?”

  “I think so.” I absently touched my discolored cheekbone with my fingertips, flinching from my own light touch. “It’s a little darker today than it was yesterday, though.”

  “Darker? Oh, lovely.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Well, it’ll probably fade soon,” she said. “You know how bruises are. They get worse before they get better.” She paused. “There’s no swelling, is there?”

  “No. It wasn’t that hard, don’t worry.” I laughed humorlessly. “You know me. I bruise if the wind changes.”

  Mariah didn’t laugh. “Just keep an eye on it. Make sure it really is just a bruise.”

  “It is. Don’t worry.”

  “Don’t worry. Yeah right.” She exhaled hard. “Honey, that’s about all I’ve done since you left. I’m working twice as many horses right now, remember?”

  I winced. “Sorry…”

  “Don’t be. I’ll manage it, and I have Tim, Curt and Dena to help
when I need them. I just want you to be okay, that’s all. And where are you, anyway?”

  I continued turning my ring back and forth between my fingers. “It doesn’t matter. Just…don’t worry about it.”

  “Baby, we’re all worried about you,” Mariah said. “Your husband died, and you just disappeared. We all just want to know you’re okay.”

  “I am.”

  “Are you?”

  Watching my gold ring catch the late afternoon sunlight, I sighed. “I really don’t know, honestly.”

  “And is it helping, being wherever it is you are?”

  I gritted my teeth, glaring out at the barn as if it was the reason for my frustration. “Not really.”

  “Then why not come home?”

  “I don’t know.” I shifted my gaze back to the ring between my fingers. “I’m thinking about it, to be honest.”

  “Then do it,” she said. “Baby, this is your home. We all miss you.”

  “I miss you too,” I whispered. “Hey, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Go ahead.”

  I chewed my lip, unsure exactly how to word it and if my sister would think I was an idiot no matter how I phrased the question. Finally, I said, “Do you still, like, connect with the horses?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, like do you have a bond with the ones you work with?”

  She was quiet for a moment. “Well, not with every horse, no. It’s kind of hard to get that when you’re only working with one for ninety days.”

  “True. But what about your own horses?”

  “Yeah, I suppose I do. Probably not like I did when I was a kid and only working with two horses at a time, but…yeah.” She paused. “What about you?”

  “No,” I whispered. “Not at all.”

  “Really?”

  I swallowed, my mind wandering back to the babies visiting Dustin and me at the fence yesterday, which made me that much more aware of that numb void deep in my chest. “I look at them now, and I feel…nothing.”

  “You’re probably just burned out, sweetie,” she said. “Riding every hour of every day, what do you expect?”

  Sighing, I shoved my ring under my shirt. “I don’t know. I have no idea what I expected. But…it wasn’t this.”

  Mariah fell silent again. Then, “Maybe this really is what you need. What you’re doing right now. Some time away until you get your feet under you again. You’re burned out, you’re grieving.” She paused. “You take as much time as you need, sweetie.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Definitely. I’ve got things under control on this end. Just do whatever you need to do to get yourself together.”

  I closed my eyes. “I owe you so big.”

  “We’ll settle it up later,” she said with a playful grin in her voice. “Just take it easy and don’t stay out there forever, okay?”

  “I will,” I said. “And I won’t be here forever.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  Chapter Four

  Dustin

  I’d known Amy for all of twenty-four hours, and already something about her didn’t sit right. Like the tour of the property had been the polite beginning of some kind of utter disaster.

  By the time we’d been over everything from feeding schedules to the quirks and idiosyncrasies of some of the horses—like Snow’s Houdini-like efforts at escaping enclosures or Mesa’s preference for grazing instead of walking—I was less certain of Amy than I was of Blue’s future. I didn’t get her. At all.

  She insisted she knew what she was doing, but something about her still didn’t add up. It wasn’t that I expected farmhands to be well-versed in all things horses, or have a deep understanding of equine psychology, but people like her unnerved me. There was something inherently unsettling about someone who didn’t have the vaguest interest in one horse or another, especially when they expected to work around horses. People like her fell into the same category as those who could walk past a puppy without at least looking at it and smiling. There was something missing, and the void it left made me deeply uncomfortable.

  It was getting on to feeding time, and Amy was bringing in horses around the same time I returned to the barn. Naturally, as they always were this time of day, the horses already in their stalls were extra interested in anyone coming down the aisle. Any one of us could come bearing food, as far as they were concerned. Even if we didn’t, most of the horses were fairly friendly and curious. And they were probably more than a little curious about why this person they didn’t recognize barely acknowledged them. If they weren’t, I sure was.

  There was one horse who didn’t come to his door to see who the newcomer was, and I’d expected that. He cowered at the back of his stall like he always did. When he saw me, his ears went up, but he laid them back again when he heard her. He did that with everyone. Couldn’t say I blamed him this time.

  I rested my elbow on his door and thought about the moment I’d introduced Amy to this one yesterday.

  “This is Chip,” I‘d said, and I didn’t take my eyes off the chestnut gelding. More than any other horse, you didn’t turn your back on Chip. “You’ll want to be careful with him.”

  “Oh?” She’d looked past me at the gelding, and, surprise, surprise, nothing registered in her expression beyond the most basic curiosity. Same as with every horse, from the babies to Ransom to the abuse cases. Like she was looking over farm equipment instead of horses.

  “He’s another rescue,” I’d gone on. “From the same farm as Blue and Star, actually, but I’ve had him longer.” Just the thought of what he’d been through made me grimace. “He had a long, long show career, and the owners abused the hell out of him.”

  “Poor thing,” she’d said flatly.

  “No kidding. His feet and legs were a mess when the rescue group got hold of him.” I’d paused, watching the beautiful red gelding eye us warily from the other side of the stall with decidedly more interest than Amy watched him. “He’s doing a lot better now. Almost sound. Physically, anyway.”

  “Not rideable?”

  “Not even close.” I’d sighed. “Usually the ones who come from that farm are just timid and nervous. Comes with having the shit beat out of them. This one, I don’t know what switch they flipped in his head, but he gets scared, he gets aggressive. And it doesn’t take much to scare him.” I’d gestured at his hooves. “That’s why his feet are still such a goddamned mess.”

  Amy craned her neck over the door and looked down. Her tone flat and her expression indifferent, she asked, “Afraid of the farrier?”

  I nodded. “And the farrier’s scared to death of him. Takes a metric ton of sedatives to calm Chip enough, and no small amount of persuading to get the farrier near him. Ever seen a horse drugged out of his gourd still manage to take a chunk out of someone’s hide?”

  Her eyebrows flicked up, which was the most expressive she’d been around a horse so far. “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.” I pushed up my sleeve, revealing a scar just above my elbow. “He was twitched and so drugged up he was practically unconscious, but the farrier went to put a shoe on him, and he went nuts. Snapped at me, jerked his foot away from the farrier.” I pulled my sleeve down again. “We decided to keep him barefoot for a while.”

  “Smart move,” she murmured. She watched him silently, and I watched her. I wondered what went on in her mind. A lot of my farmhands over the years had been inexperienced with horses but not completely uninterested and disconnected like she seemed to be.

  Not that she seemed terribly interested in or connected to anything, really. The woman was like indifference personified, and she unnerved me. She’d been attractive at first sight, but I kept her at arm’s length now.

  “You’ll want to avoid him,” I said finally. “Just let me turn him in and out, and you can clean his stall whenever he’s out to pasture. But”—I gestured at the door—“don’t mess with him.”

/>   Irritation flickered across her face and tightened her lips—oh, now you show emotion?—but she just nodded, and I’d led her out of the barn after that.

  I sighed as my thoughts returned to the present. I gave Chip one last look, then left Amy to feeding, and I headed toward the house. On my way across the parking area, my gaze drifted toward the pickup truck parked in front of her side of the house. It was dusty, and the front end was covered in the remains of a sizeable chunk of Eastern Washington’s insect population, but it was a nice truck. No rust in the paint. Diamond-plate running boards. Solid tread on the tires. Definitely manufactured within the last five years. It probably even had its oil changed on a regular basis.

  Whether she’d bought it herself or Daddy had, that truck wasn’t cheap, and farmhands who drove onto the property in something like that didn’t stay long. Most people didn’t unless they had to.

  I looked out at the pastures where Amy was going to bring horses in for the evening.

  Her interactions with horses aside, Amy seemed nice enough. A little quiet, maybe a bit shy. And pretty, I’d give her that. Good God, I’d give her that and then some. But as with Blue, good looks didn’t change whatever was underneath. Blue’s gorgeous color and conformation didn’t make him rideable any more than Amy’s pretty face made her a person who should be working around horses. Or someone I could be around without grinding my teeth with frustration. She was friendly and polite toward my parents and me, as well as the clients who came and went throughout the day.

  The way she interacted with the horses, though, that still bothered me. Or rather, the way she didn’t interact with them. They greeted her in the barn? No reaction. They nuzzled her in search of treats? No response. One of the babies did anything at all? Nothing.

  Completely cold. It wasn’t right. Why the hell did she even want to be around the horses? She reminded me of those show-sour horses we got once in a while. The ones who’d won every title within a five-hundred-mile radius, but did it with their ears pinned and eyes completely cold. One too many trips around the show ring took all the life right out of them, and there was nothing for it but a few months of pasture living and trail riding.