by Joanna Sims
* * *
The first week of the summer session kept Lee so busy that it was easy to put her transgression with Colt out of her mind. Most of the time. Colt was busy finishing projects on the property and she was busy making sure that everything for the first week rolled out smoothly. But at the end of the day, when the volunteers were rinsing off the horses and putting hay in the stalls, and the sun was setting in the distance, and no one needed a moment of her time, Lee’s mind inevitably returned to Colt.
“He certainly is good with our kids, isn’t he?” Gail bustled into the room with a cup of water in her hand.
Gail caught Lee in the act of watching Colt with one of their riders. Lee quickly turned her chair around so her back was to the window.
“I’ve been noticing that, yes.”
Gail poured the water on the wilted fern that sat on Lee’s desk. The fern, a gift from her mother, was a testament to Lee’s inability to sustain a plant’s life. Gail had taken pity on the fern, which had recently turned a bit brown and crispy, and was making a valiant effort to revive it.
“Everyone loves him.” Gail tried to fluff the brittle branches of the fern. “The kids, the parents. Everyone. God has truly blessed us this summer.”
Gail stared down at the fern with motherly concern before she turned around and headed back into the reception area of the office.
It hadn’t escaped Lee’s notice that Colt had added something special to Strides of Strength—not only was he incredibly handy, making short work of their honey-do list—but he was a rare male role model for the boys who came to ride in their program. He was a real cowboy—one who was kind to them.
It also hadn’t escaped Lee’s notice that Colt was actively avoiding her. At first she thought that was a positive, but she missed him. Bottom line. She missed him popping into her office or swinging by to give her an update on his progress. And she wasn’t altogether sure what she should do about it. Nothing had changed between them—she was still the head of a vital community program and he was still a man working off his community service. Yet, in her heart, everything had changed between them. She hadn’t fallen into bed with Colt because she was so hard up that she couldn’t control herself to be alone with a handsome cowboy. Colt had been right about her—she did love him. It was just a fact that Lee was in love for the second time in her life. It didn’t make a bit of sense, but she knew herself well enough to know that it was true.
* * *
Colt had been licking his wounds for a week, avoiding Lee as much as he could. He still wanted to be close to her but he forced himself to stay away. He should have known when he looked around her house, which was set up as a bit of a shrine to her marriage to her late husband Michael, that Lee was far from ready for a relationship with him. The only thing that cheered him up—unexpectedly—were the riders who had flooded the facility for the summer session. Colt had met kids with cerebral palsy, autism, Fragile X and CHARGE syndrome. There were several riders who also had Down syndrome and he watched with pride as Callie acted as a role model for a younger generation. When he was first assigned to Strides of Strength, he had thought the court had been out of its mind. How could he be a good fit for a program like that? But he was. As it turned out, these kids were his people. He had a natural way with kids with disabilities—they made sense to him and he made sense to them. It didn’t matter that they couldn’t speak in sentences—some didn’t speak at all—he understood them. And they had already become a part of his circle of friends.
“Hey there, Abigail.” Colt saw one of his favorite riders walking toward him on the concrete sidewalk.
Abigail was a tiny little girl who resembled a Cabbage Patch Kids doll and she was as cute as a bug with her pink walker. Abigail was nonverbal but so determined. One of the wheels of Abigail’s walker got stuck on a small rock on the sidewalk, which stopped her forward motion. Abigail scrunched up her face and pushed on the walker as hard as she could. The little girl looked back at her mom, making an angry sound, her dark brown curly pigtails swinging.
“I’ll get it for you, Abigail.” Colt knelt down so he was eye level with the little girl. He reached out, picked up the rock and tossed it into the nearby grass.
“Say thank you, Abigail.” Abigail’s mother, a woman in her mid-twenties, slender with the same dark brown curly hair as her daughter, was trailing behind. Close enough to keep an eye on her adventurous daughter, but far enough back that Abigail could have a sense of independence.
Abigail, up on her tiptoes to propel herself forward, looked up at Colt, then pushed past him as he stepped onto the grass so she had plenty of room.
“Thank you.” Abigail’s mom smiled at him.
“My pleasure.” Colt watched Abigail for a moment longer. “She’s really getting the hang of her walker.”
“She’s made so much progress since we’ve been here,” she said, a pleased, relieved smile on her face. “And it’s only week one.”
Colt waved to the mother, then refocused his attention on the task at hand—going to see Lee. The projects in the barn were complete, which gave him a reason to break the ice with her. It was just time to tear down the wall they had erected between them. Lee wasn’t ready for a relationship with him, that much he had figured out. But that didn’t mean he didn’t love her—that didn’t mean he couldn’t wait for her to be ready.
“Uncle Colt!”
On his way to Lee’s office, Colt bumped into Callie.
He gave his niece a fierce hug, always so glad to see her.
“Guess what?” Callie’s round face was beaming with excitement.
“What?”
“Tony’s coming tomorrow!”
“He is?”
“Yes.” Callie clapped her hands together joyfully. “He is. He’s coming with his mom, and we are going to talk all about the engagement party, and we are going to go dress shopping, but not Tony because he can’t see me in my dress, and then we are going to go to the Miss Gail’s church because Tony’s father is Catholic but Tony’s mom isn’t Catholic, she’s Baptist, so we are going to get married in Miss Gail’s church.”
Instead of waiting for him to respond to the lengthy news dump, Callie hugged him again tightly, giggled, waved and then trotted off toward the nearby barn.
“Okay.” Colt smiled after his niece.
There was a magic at Strides that he wouldn’t have known about if he hadn’t been forced by the courts to be there. These kids—from his niece to Abigail to all the others he had met—always gave him something to smile about. They were all struggling with disabilities that gave them challenges in life he couldn’t imagine handling on a day-to-day basis and yet they made him feel good.
“Hi, Miss Gail.” Colt took off his hat and hung it on one of the hooks on the wall.
“Hi, dahlin’,” Gail said in her Georgia peach drawl.
“She in there?”
Gail nodded. “She’s on the phone but you can go on in.”
Colt knocked on the door softly and then opened it. He watched Lee very carefully but her face didn’t register anything but happiness to see him, so he didn’t feel uncomfortable entering her office when she waved him inside.
“I am so sorry to hear that, Lisa.” Lee gestured for him to shut the door behind him. “We understand. Family has to come first. Take care of your father and if and when you are ready to return, our door is always open.”
Colt sat down in one of the chairs opposite Lee’s desk. His mind naturally returned to the day, three short weeks ago, when he had first laid eyes on Lee Macbeth. That was the day he had fallen in love with her and the feeling had only grown stronger. Watching her with her kids, whether she was providing therapy directly or supporting other therapists to serve their needs, she was so beautiful on the outside, but Colt had discovered how truly beautiful she was on the inside.
“Everything okay?” he as
ked when she hung up the phone.
They hadn’t spoken but once or twice since their intimacy at her house and they hadn’t had a moment alone. Oddly, it wasn’t as awkward between them as he had imagined in his mind.
“Lisa’s father is in the hospital. She’s flying to Baltimore tonight.”
Lisa was one of the volunteers; Colt knew that Lee was always worried about having enough volunteers to run the program. Now she was down one.
“How long will she be gone?”
“She’s not sure. It could be a week, it could be a month.”
Colt nodded his understanding. There really wasn’t anything helpful he could say.
Lee spun her chair around to look out the window for a moment, then she twisted the chair back to face him. She leaned forward and rested her elbows on the desk. The way she was looking at him, like she was in the middle of hatching an intriguing plan, got his attention.
“Everyone has been telling me how great you are with the kids,” she said.
“That’s nice to hear.”
Lee tapped her fingernail on the desk. “I’ll admit I didn’t really think that you would be a good fit with our kids.”
“That makes two of us.”
“But you are,” she added. “A good fit.”
Colt smiled. No one was more surprised than he was. He simply had a knack for interacting with kids with disabilities. “I really like the riders.”
Lee smiled at him—a bright, natural smile—a smile he hadn’t seen on her face, directed at him, since he fixed her battery. “They really like you. Even Brent, who doesn’t like anyone, actually seeks you out. That’s huge for him.”
“Brent’s good people. I like him.” Brent was a teenager with autism who spoke in short phrases and had a lot of behavior and sensory difficulties. To Colt, he was just a cool kid who liked to fist bump with him.
“When you first started working here, I really couldn’t imagine you working directly with the students,” Lee said with a small shrug. “I really couldn’t.”
Colt was relieved that when they were talking about business, at least, things seemed pretty normal between them. “Same here.”
“But I was wrong.”
Colt sat up a little in his chair. “In what way?”
“I think you would be great working with the kids,” Lee elaborated. “In fact, you’re so tall you could actually side-walk with Sweet Girl. Most of our volunteers are too short and their arms start to get tired too quickly when they side-walk with her. And she has such great motion for kids who need to build core strength like Abigail.”
“You actually want me to work with the kids?” This was a high compliment from Lee and Colt knew it. She was very particular about who worked directly with her riders and he hadn’t passed muster in the beginning.
“Would you be interested?” She leaned forward a bit, her face hopeful. “We’re down a volunteer.”
He always wanted to impress Lee, but his response was sincere. “I think I’d like that.”
Lee’s apple cheeks rounded as her smile widened. “We’ll have to get you trained.”
“Just say when.”
“I’ll talk to Gilda about it. Either she will train you or I will.” Lee continued to beam at him and he just allowed himself the luxury of admiring her pretty face.
After a moment, she seemed to remember that he had come into her office without the explicit chore of becoming a volunteer.
“Did you need something in particular?” she asked.
“The barn’s done,” he said casually, but inside he was excited to tell her that her biggest to-do at the facility was complete and he had been the one to get it done for her.
“Are you serious?” Lee’s eyes widened a bit. “All of it?”
“Every last thing on your list,” he told her. “I was hoping you’d have some time today to come check it out with me.”
Lee glanced down at the time on her phone. “I’m free right now.”
“Then let’s go.” He stood up.
Colt grabbed his hat off the hook, brushed his hair away from his forehead and adjusted the hat so it fit right on his head. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lee staring at him. It wasn’t a stretch for him to figure what might be on her mind. The last time she saw him put his hat back on, he had been picking it up off her living room floor.
“Don’t get lost, you two.” Miss Gail’s laugh chimed in the small space like a holiday bell.
Colt held open the door for Lee and tipped his hat to Miss Gail. “I’ll have her home before dark.”
“See that you do, young man,” the pianist said with a knowing smile. Colt had the distinct feeling that Gail had picked up on the natural chemistry between himself and Lee. It made Colt wonder how many other people at Strides could see the obvious. He wondered how many people could plainly see that they were in love.
Chapter Nine
Together, they walked through the property, much as they had on Colt’s first day, but for Lee, it felt completely different. She had been dreading the time when they would have to face each other alone after their indiscretion and yet it hadn’t felt uncomfortable for her in the least. He was still just Colt—respectful, easygoing, willing-to-lend-a-hand Colt.
On the other hand, she found herself looking at his lips and his hands and his legs, and finding it difficult not to remember what it felt like to be touched by him. To be kissed by him. To be fully connected to him in a way that she had only been connected to one man before. It was the oddest tug and pull in her brain—on one side she was drawn to Colt, like a magnet being pulled to a magnetic surface. On the other side, her brain couldn’t even begin to process the idea of a man coming into her life in any meaningful way. Michael had been her one and only forever. How could a woman expect more than that?
On the way to the red barn, she felt Colt watching her walk. She looked over at him with a question in her eyes.
“How do you do that?” he asked her.
“Do what?”
“Walk like you have both of your legs.”
The way he worded it, so bluntly, made Lee laugh. “Trust me, it wasn’t always like this. My first prosthetic was terrible and it hurt to wear it. I didn’t just jump right up and start running like I’d seen on YouTube videos, which really ticked me off because I was used to being ahead of the curve on everything in my life.”
“Fake-limb honor roll.”
She smiled at him. “I absolutely wanted to be on the fake-limb honor roll. But that didn’t happen. It was months before I could walk on my starter prosthetic for more than an hour. But to answer your question, I had a great physical therapist for my gait training—that was really what allowed me to learn how to walk unaffected. Also, the type of foot I use really simulates the articulation of the joints of a real foot.”
“I didn’t know until that day I saw you jogging,” Colt told her.
She nodded. “I worked hard at it.”
When they entered the barn, Colt took her on the tour, showing her the final installation of the fans and the automatic waterers that, until Colt had come to their facility, had been sitting in their boxes in the warehouse.
“Colt.” Lee felt herself become emotional when she walked into the barn. Perhaps to some it seemed ridiculous to get emotional over fans and watering systems or a roof that wouldn’t leak. But the horses who were housed in this barn had often had rough lives before being donated to the program. They were older and had aches and pains, and gave so much to their riders—they deserved to be comfortable when they were resting.
“I can’t say thank you enough.” Lee walked into one of the empty stalls and activated the automatic waterer in the corner.
Colt was standing in the aisle of the barn. She noted that he was careful to keep a respectful distance. He was afraid to get too close to her and she would ha
ve thought that this would be her preference—but it wasn’t.
“If you’re happy, then I’m happy,” Colt said, his arms loosely crossed in front of his body.
“I’m happy.” She closed the stall gate behind her. “And the roof?”
“Tight as a drum. Zero leaks.”
Lee rubbed her eyes to catch the tears that were forming. “I’ve been wanting to do this for these horses for such a long time. There has never been enough money. And then you come along and just—” she shrugged her shoulders “—fix all of it.”
“It wasn’t that big a deal.” He took a step forward and then stopped.
She looked into his face, really looked into his eyes. “It’s a very big deal to me.”
They stood together in the aisle of the barn and Lee could feel that Colt wanted to reach out to her. She almost walked into his arms and hugged him for fixing the barn. She wanted to do it, but couldn’t allow herself that moment. She was completely conflicted about her obvious feelings for Colt. But she wasn’t conflicted about how it would look if she got involved with him while he was working off his community service.
Colt cleared his throat and something in Lee’s gut seized.
“While I’ve got you alone, Lee,” he said in a lowered voice. “I think we should clear the air a bit between us.”
He was right. It was unavoidable. And at the moment, this barn was about the most private spot on the property with all of the activity centered on the open arena by the front of the facility.
Lee nodded her head and sat down on a couple bales of hay stacked just outside the stall. Colt knelt down in the aisle way in front of her and tipped the brim of his hat up so she could see his eyes.
“I’ve been torn up inside about how we left things the other day.”
Lee clasped her hands together, wishing she hadn’t made such a mess of things between them. If only she had fought her impulses more. If only she had told herself, No you can’t make love to the cowboy.