by Joanna Sims
“How’re things going with the new crop?” Boot turned the subject to the volunteers, steering the conversation to emotionally neutral territory.
Lee uncrossed her arms. “They’re doing great. I’m super happy with them. I put them through their paces today and everyone was on point. We don’t have even one weak link this summer, thank goodness, because our rider numbers are up and our volunteer numbers are down.”
“It’s been a good thing to have Colt on the property,” Boot added. “He’s been a big help to me, I can tell you that.”
This wasn’t the first time Boot had sung Colt’s praises. It hadn’t escaped her notice that the two men had already formed a bond. Boot wasn’t one to form bonds easily, not after losing Michael. When she was growing up, Boot had been the life of the party. After Michael passed away, he had shrunk back into himself, like a turtle retracting its head and legs into its protective shell. Boot had sloughed off his friends, choosing to surround himself with his broken gadgets and flea market rescues. Lee often wondered if Boot surrounded himself with broken things that couldn’t seem to be completely fixed because he couldn’t seem to fix himself.
“Hello.” Gilda arrived, carrying a thermos.
Boot stood a hair straighter when he heard Gilda’s accented greeting. “Afternoon, Gilda.”
The manager seemed a bit hesitant as she stepped forward to offer the thermos to Boot.
“I brought you some authentic coffee from Vienna.”
“Much appreciated.” Boot took the thermos. “I could use a pick-me-up. I’ve got a lot of hooves to trim this afternoon.”
Gilda smiled, her eyes expectantly on Boot’s face, her arms crossed in front of her body in a way that struck Lee as unusual. “I hope you like strong black coffee.”
“Is there any other way to drink coffee?” Boot asked, untwisting the top of the thermos and breathing in the scent of the rising steam.
“No. I don’t think there is.” Gilda ducked her head. “Well, I hope you enjoy it. I must return to my work.”
Lee had watched the exchange between her father-in-law, a widower for nearly fifteen years, and her manager with curiosity. There was some interesting chemistry brewing between the two of them.
“What’s going on there?” she asked.
Boot glanced over at her a bit shyly. “Nothing for you to bother with.”
“Oh, really?”
“Gilda is a nice lady,” her father-in-law said.
“Yes, she is.”
“But,” he added seriously, “I already had my forever.”
The teasing smile dropped from her face. Boot had loved his wife to pieces—that was the truth. No matter how many times the single ladies tried to get his attention, he was steadfast in his belief that a man should only marry one woman in his lifetime.
“I understand,” Lee said softly. She did understand how Boot felt—all too well, in fact. She had already had her one and only forever too.
Chapter Five
“Come on, man. What’s goin’ on with you? We’re takin’ the boat out. We’re goin’ fishin’. We’ve got enough beer to last us all day.”
This was a familiar complaint from his friend Chad ever since he had begun his community service.
“I hear you, man. I just can’t,” Colt said. He had his phone on speaker so he could keep both of his hands on the steering wheel. Ever since his arrest, Colt had begun to take an inventory of his life and found it severely lacking. This was the last time he wanted to be on the wrong side of the law. The greater Bozeman area had been his playground. He’d played hard and gotten away with a lot of bad behavior because of his last name and his father’s connections. This was the first time he’d actually had to pay a consequence for his actions and it felt like a turning point.
“I want to get ahead of some work out at Lee’s place,” he added when his friend went silent on the other end of the line.
“I thought you didn’t have to be out there on the weekends.”
“I don’t. Ben’s gonna meet me out there and make a plan to get those fans installed.”
There was another pause on the line. He had grown up with Chad and the rest of their crew of five tight-knit friends. Out of all of them, he had been the last holdout—the one the crew could always count on to bend the rules, act like a clown and generally make a spectacle out of himself. He had a built-in job at Sugar Creek and his father, Jock, no matter how angry and frustrated he got with him, wasn’t going to fire him from the family or the ranch. So Colt had just never really bothered, or had a reason, to grow up. And then he got arrested, which brought him to Lee Macbeth’s doorstep. Meeting a woman like Lee had flipped his perspective on life upside down.
“Ever since you’ve been hangin’ out at that place, you haven’t been acting like yourself, man.”
Colt’s hands tightened on the wheel until they hurt—it felt like his friend was being negative about Lee’s program.
“I’m gonna let you go, Chad,” Colt said before he stabbed the red end-call button on his phone. “Catch a big one for me, bud.”
Chad’s words had put a strange knot in his gut—and it was not because his friend thought he was being lame for not drinking all day on the lake. It was something in Chad’s tone that made Colt think that his friend wasn’t so evolved when it came to kids with disabilities. Colt searched his own mind. Had he been one of those kids in school who made fun of children who were different? If he were honest with himself, he had to admit that he had. He teased kids—he had harassed kids—all to get a laugh from his friends. If Colt took a poll among the people he’d gone through school with, maybe even the term bully could have been applied to him.
“You were a jerk,” Colt muttered to himself. “A real jerk.”
The kids at Strides were Lee’s entire world and it was a world Colt wanted to belong to. He knew Chad had tried to shame him into turning his truck around and heading out to the lake but it had had the opposite effect. He didn’t want to be the class clown anymore. Lee’s life stood for something. He wanted his life to stand for something too. And that certainly wasn’t going to happen by hanging out all day getting drunk with the same group of guys he had gotten drunk with on a stolen twelve pack of beer in middle school. The time had long since passed for a change.
Colt’s phone rang, breaking his brooding train of thought. It was his older brother Liam calling. Colt had seven siblings total—four older half brothers, two younger brothers and one sister, Jessie, who was the baby, the only daughter, and their father’s undisputed favorite.
“You going to be around later on this afternoon?” Liam asked when he picked up the line.
“I should be. You coming out to work on the truck?”
Liam had built a cabin on Sugar Creek Ranch property but had moved to Triple K Ranch when he’d married Kate and adopted Callie. Even though Liam had moved out of the cabin, he had left his antique truck project housed in the shed. Then his brother Shane had lived in Liam’s cabin for a time until he had had the good sense to marry Rebecca after a short engagement. Now, it was his turn in the cabin.
“I was thinking about tinkering with it a bit. Kate and Callie are driving me nuts with the wedding plans.”
Colt laughed. “I bet. What time are you thinking about coming out?”
“I don’t know. Around noon or so.”
“I should be done by then. I’ll meet you out there.”
Colt hung up the phone and turned onto the road that would lead him to Strides. Up ahead on the lightly traveled road was a jogger. It caught Colt’s attention because it wasn’t typical to see anyone—much less a woman—jogging alone on a relatively deserted stretch of highway. As he pulled closer, Colt recognized a familiar swing of a ponytail. It was Lee. She was wearing shorts and a tank top. This time, it wasn’t the ponytail that caught his attention and made his brain scatter for a
moment while he tried to make sense of what he was seeing for the first time. Nothing could have prepared him for what he was seeing.
Colt pulled up beside Lee and rolled down the window on the passenger side. “What are you doing out here by yourself?”
Her pretty face flushed and breathing hard from the run, Lee looked at him through the open window. She pushed sweaty strands of hair back from her forehead before using the bottom part of her tank top to wipe the sweat out of her eyes.
“I’m blowing off some steam,” she said with her smile. It never failed—when Lee smiled at him, he fell just a bit more in love with her. “What are you doing out here by yourself?”
“I’m meeting Ben at the barn. This was the only day he could get out here.” Colt leaned over and pushed open the passenger door. “Hop in and ride back with me. It’d be better if you could hear what Ben’s thinking about how much capacity we need for the fans and the watering systems.”
Lee looked to the right toward the entrance to Strides. It wasn’t far by car, but it was still a bit of a distance on foot. After a second of thought, Lee nodded.
“Okay.” She grabbed the handle at the top of the door, stepped up with her right foot and then slid into the seat next to him.
While she buckled her seat belt for the short ride to the entrance to her property, Lee caught him staring at the bottom part of her left leg. He hated that she had noticed him looking, but he had to imagine that she had grown used to the stares.
“Bionic leg.” She smiled at him without any self-consciousness and patted her prosthetic. Lee’s left leg had been amputated below the knee.
“It’s nice.”
Colt winced at the idiotic comment that had just come out of his mouth. It’s nice? What kind of thing was that to say about someone’s prosthetic leg?
Good naturedly, Lee turned her head toward him, still smiling, her ponytail swinging to the right. “Thank you. I just got a great new foot for it.”
The relaxed, easy way Lee dealt with her prosthetic set him at ease. How could he have not known that she was missing part of her leg? There was never any clue in the way she walked. Heck—he had just seen her jogging on the road better than he could do on his best day. He wanted to ask her what happened, but let the questions—so many of them—form and then drift away.
“I like your tattoo.” Colt was seeing a completely different side to Lee. The woman riding next to him in his truck was revealing body secrets that had been hidden beneath her always crisp and professional clothing. On the top part of her left arm, she had a colorful rising phoenix tattoo.
She thanked him, looking down at her own arm. “I never thought I was a tattoo kind of girl. But I guess I am after all.”
Colt glanced over at the tattoo, noticing that the phoenix only had a right leg and claw. The left leg and claw were noticeably missing. He imagined that this tattoo represented Lee—she was the rising phoenix. But rising from what pile of ashes?
“That’s Ben’s truck right there.” Colt pointed to the white van with Gallatin Electric painted on the side.
“Perfect timing then,” Lee said as he pulled his truck into a parking spot in front of the office. She opened the door, swung her legs out and hopped down to the ground. Colt resisted the urge to reach out to help her, even though he could plainly see that she didn’t need his help.
“Let me change real quick and I’ll meet you in the barn.” She clapped her hands together with a bright smile. “I’m so excited about the fans!”
In that moment, he forgot about her bionic leg and just focused on her sweet smile and lovely face. He’d never seen any woman get so excited about stall fans; but then again, he’d never met anyone like Lee Macbeth before.
Colt turned off his engine and watched Lee walk with that purposeful stride toward the main office. It was a shock—plain and simple—to realize that the woman he’d fallen for was missing part of her leg. He’d seen plenty of amputees when he went to the VA hospital with his brother Shane, but he’d never dated a woman with a disability before. What in the world had happened to Lee? What in the world had happened?
“Thanks for coming, Ben.” Colt forced his brain to get back to the business of the day. Ben was in high demand. Folks always needed a reliable electrician and Ben had a reputation for being the best. Ben also happened to be one of the crew from his school days who had learned a trade, started a business and then drifted away, bit by bit, from the group. Come to think of it, Colt couldn’t remember the last time Ben had joined them for poker night or a day of drunken fishing. It had been years, not months.
“Nice place.” Ben stood with his hands on his hips, looking around at Lee’s facility. “I don’t have much reason to come out this way. This is a bit outside of my area.”
“I know it is. I appreciate you making the trip out here on a Saturday.”
“We go way back,” Ben said.
“That’s a fact.”
Ben was a short, stocky man with a fleshy face, unruly eyebrows, cropped brown hair and a country-boy drawl. His button-down shirt was stretched snugly over his barrel belly, but Ben could manage to find his way into all kinds of tight spaces in attics and crawl spaces even with the extra weight on him.
“Let’s go take a gander at this project of yours,” his old friend said.
Colt led the electrician through the property to the red barn.
“It looks like the wife is keeping you well fed, my friend,” Colt teased Ben.
Ben chuckled at the good-natured ribbing with a pat on his stomach. “I tell you, I married one heck of a cook.”
“How is Missy?”
“Pregnant.”
Colt stopped walking for a step before he continued moving forward. None of Colt’s friends had become fathers in a community where people tended to marry and start families young. “Congratulations!”
“Five months.” Ben beamed at him.
“Do you know what you’re having?”
“It’s a girl.”
“Daddy’s little girl,” Colt said.
“That was the first thing I thought when I heard the news,” his friend agreed.
Colt led Ben into the barn and began to take him through the plan for the fans and the watering systems. He was just wrapping up the talking points when Lee arrived, dressed in dark slim-fitting jeans, her standard Strides of Strength polo with sleeves long enough to cover the tattoo he now knew was there on her arm, and her hair was slicked back from her face. He couldn’t stop himself from looking down at her left leg, trying to detect some hitch in her walk. But it wasn’t there. If a person didn’t know that Lee had a prosthetic leg, they wouldn’t be able to figure it out just by her walk.
“Lee Macbeth,” Colt made the introduction. “This is one of the best electricians you’ll ever meet, Ben Campbell.”
Ben greeted her respectfully, shaking her slender hand and then getting right down to business. Ben took Lee and Colt through the options to bring enough electrical power into the old structure to support the new fans and watering systems, and in a short time, Colt could see that Lee trusted the electrician’s word. Ben’s appearance, with his faded frayed shirts and his thread-worn jeans belied the expertise he had gained in the years he had been perfecting his craft. The minute Ben started talking, that’s when Colt saw the respect grow in Lee’s eyes.
Ben shifted his weight and hoisted up his sagging jeans. “It’s a mighty big project and I’ve got a full plate at the moment.”
“These horses do such important work. I wouldn’t have a program without them. They mean everything to me. They mean everything to a lot of really special kids. Their comfort and their safety is the most important thing to me,” Lee explained to Ben. “Colt says that you’re the best. I need the best.” Lee walked over to rub the nose of one of the horses in the barn. “They are my family.”
If Ben wa
s on the fence about donating his time to the project, and it seemed to Colt that he might be, then Lee’s sweet personality and genuine concern and love for her horses changed his mind.
Colt saw the shift in Ben’s expression—one moment he was trying to hem and haw his way out of the job and the next he was looking at his phone to find a time when he could come back to do the job.
“The soonest I can get back out here is next Saturday. That’s the best I can do.”
“We’ll take it!” Lee clasped her hands together happily, her hazel eyes shining with excitement. “You have no idea what this means to me, Mr. Campbell.”
“Ben,” he corrected. “By God, when I hear Mr. Campbell, my gut twists.” He looked at Colt with a grin. “Do you know how many times I sat up there in the principal’s office with a pile of rocks in my gut while Principal Bennett told the secretary to call Mr. Campbell again? He always had to add the again just to make a point. I’m flat-out traumatized from it.”
“One or both of us was always in the principal’s office,” Colt explained to Lee.
“That was darn near our second home.” Ben hiked up his pants again. “That’s why I’m glad that the wife and I are having a girl. Boys are too much trouble by half.”
“You’re having a baby?” Lee’s eyes brightened. “That’s wonderful!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Lee scrunched up her face. “Okay...now it’s my turn. Please don’t ma’am me. I’m not that old!”
“That’s fair.” Ben smiled at her. Colt could tell that his old friend liked Lee. It was the first inkling that Lee could fit into his world, something he hadn’t really considered—he was too busy trying to figure out how to fit into hers.