by Evie Nichole
Of course, Mason’s dad was the first to jump on poor Gregg. He pointed at the scrawny kid and waved to get Aria’s attention. “Why is that kid in my son’s lesson? He doesn’t belong here! Get him off the horse and out of the way. He’s holding them all back!”
Aria groaned. Uh oh. Here we go again!
She could see poor Gregg’s little face crumple as he struggled not to cry. The little boy was ten and looked about eight. He was plagued with all sorts of other little qualities that had been dubbed nerdy by society at large too. It annoyed Aria to no end that his mother insisted he take horseback riding lessons, but Aria sure as heck didn’t want the little boy to be any more emotionally scarred by the experience.
“Hey!” Aria waved to Gregg. “Come here, kiddo! Right here.”
Gregg steered his little black horse over toward Aria. “I’m sorry I’m holding up the class.”
“You’re not,” Aria said flatly. “You’re doing just fine. And honestly, the way you take care of your horse after your lesson is really the important part of learning to ride. Plenty of people can sit in a saddle and let the horse bum around the ring, but those same people can’t scoop poop in the aisles, groom a horse 'til he shines, and make sure their tack is clean and well cared for. Those kind of people are the real cowboys,” Aria assured Gregg.
Gregg’s little face broke out into a grin. “Can I just go back to the barn and brush Topsy?”
“Sure you can.” Aria opened the gate and let Gregg out of the ring. “You know where all the stuff is, and I know that I can trust you to do it right. That’s a big deal. I don’t trust just anyone in my barn.”
Gregg dismounted and began leading Topsy back to the barn, talking a mile a minute to the little mare. Aria shook her head and fought back a huge grin. Sometimes horses were important to people in very different ways than was expected. And just being around the four-legged beasts was soothing to the soul.
“That’s right!” Mason’s dad shouted. “Get him out of there! Mason, you go take his turn. You go trot around and show the rest of these kids how it’s done!”
Mason started to pick up his reins to follow his father’s orders. Aria cursed beneath her breath as she realized that the next little girl in line had already cued her horse to start trotting. With his poor steering skills, Mason was on a collision course for sure.
“Mason!” Aria shouted. “You stay on that rail until I tell you otherwise. Do you understand me? You disobey directions in a lesson and you won’t ride the next time.”
The kid froze. Aria could see in his head that he was fighting that horrible war between following her directions and doing what his dad was telling him to do. For a moment, he sat there on the rail. But one more grunt from the stands and Mason put his heels to his sleepy little horse and sent it bouncing down the rail at a trot.
Aria started running but already knew she was going to be too late. She had been standing by the break in the arena fence. The disaster was happening on the opposite side of the ring. So, nervously obeying the pushiness of his parent, Mason kicked too hard and his horse decided a full throttle trot was fine with him.
Mason’s horse was now dashing toward the back end of Lacey’s horse, which had just come from a trot to a walk because that was the exercise. Because Mason wasn’t steering, his horse decided he was going to have to make an executive decision to avoid being plastered against his barn buddy’s butt.
Lacey gasped in surprise, spinning in her saddle just as Mason’s horse turned a very tidy sharp left. The horse pivoted toward the center of the ring, and Mason could not keep his balance. The kid went flying as the horse continued on at a trot. Of course, when the seasoned lesson horse realized he’d lost his rider, he immediately stopped.
The entire ring was in total confusion. Parents were standing on the bleachers trying to see if their kids were okay. Mason’s father was climbing into the ring. Mason was screaming as though he’d been decapitated. And into it all went Aria feeling as though she were having just about the crappiest night in recent memory.
“I’m going to sue you!” Buck was pointing at Aria as she approached Mason.
She ignored him for the moment and squatted down on the ground in front of the boy. “Look at me, kiddo.” Mason was sobbing with about as much drama as an after-school special. Aria sighed and snapped her fingers. “Hey, quit your crying and look at me. Tell me where it hurts.”
The boy had fallen on his butt. He was wearing a helmet, but there weren’t even any scuff marks on it. He had basically rolled off the horse. He finally seemed to calm down enough to do a mental regrouping.
“Well?” Aria prompted. She held up three fingers. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Three.”
“Good. Can you see stuff clearly?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you move your arms and legs? You can feel everything?”
Aria was about to grab Buck’s tooled cowboy boot and yank it out from under him. The man was hovering back and forth while yakking on the phone to someone—presumably Mason’s mother. He was talking about taking the kid to the emergency room. This was where Aria’s job got a little dicey. If you got on a horse enough times, you fell off. That was how it went. Helmets kept the more serious head injuries from happening unless there was some pretty serious activity going on. But for the most part, a tumble off a slow-moving school horse was not a reason to go running in for a CT scan.
“Here, buddy.” Aria took Mason’s hand. “Let’s get you up and look for scrapes. You look pretty good to me.”
“What?” Buck barked. “Leave him on the ground. We’re having an ambulance come and get him.”
Aria snorted. “That’s hardly necessary. In fact, the most necessary thing right now is to get Mason back in that saddle.”
“What?” Buck seemed to be awfully partial to that word. “You can’t be serious!”
“I thought you wanted your kid to be a cowboy,” Aria pointed out drily. “If cowboys called an ambulance every time they fell off, they would never get out of the ambulance.”
It was easy to see that was striking some pretty deep chords in Buck. Mason was sniffling and looking at his dad for cues. It was up to this grown-ass man to put on his big girl panties and help his son learn a valuable lesson about dusting himself off and moving on.
Aria looked at the remaining six kids in the class. “Hey, guys, we’re going to go ahead and stop here for tonight. Okay? Go back to the barn, untack your horses, and make sure you brush away the saddle marks. These guys have had a workout and you all did great tonight! Tori is inside to help you”—thank goodness for teenaged barn rats—”and I’ll be back there in just a minute.”
There were lots of stares, but the kids did as they were told. It didn’t take long, and Buck, Mason, and the sorrel lesson horse were the only ones left in the ring. Aria had already decided that the horse was going to get an extra flake of hay tonight in his stall. The little gelding had pretty much done his job times ten tonight. The average horse would have thrown up its hooves and quit ages ago. But that was why Aria took her lesson horses so very seriously.
“All right.” Aria put her hands on her hips and checked the cinch on the sorrel horse’s saddle. “Mason, let’s get you back up on this horse.”
“I don’t wanna.” Mason was swiping at his eyes. “I don’t want to ride anymore.”
Buck was sputtering, but Aria had plenty of these conversations under her belt. “I’m sorry to hear that, especially because you were having so much fun just a little while ago.”
“Then I fell off,” Mason reasoned.
“So, it’s not fun anymore?”
Mason screwed up his face. “I don’t want to fall off again.”
“I can understand that.” Aria kept her face very serious. “Why did you fall off tonight?”
“Charlie turned too quick.”
“Why did Charlie turn?” Aria kept nudging the kid’s brain.
Buck snorted. �
�Because he’s glue factory quality. That’s why.”
“Oh, really?” Aria rounded on Buck. “You realize that nine out of ten horses would have tossed your kid sky high and stomped all over the remains, right? They don’t like being steered right into another horse’s butt.”
“Oh!” Mason’s expression actually brightened. It was as if Aria could see the light going off in his brain. “I steered him into Lacey’s horse’s butt.”
“Exactly!” Aria nodded emphatically. “He had to turn fast. If he hadn’t, you would have crashed, and that would have been a whole lot worse. So, what do we always do when we’re in our riding lesson?”
Mason scuffed his toe in the sand. “We follow directions.”
“My directions, right?” Aria cast a sideways glance at Buck. “We follow my directions, and we pay attention to where every other horse in the ring is. We do not steer our horses into bad places, and we keep our heels down! If you’d had your heels down, you wouldn’t have come off the horse.”
“That’s preposterous!” Buck blustered.
Aria was so done with this guy. She was pretty well ready to fire him as a client. She took Mason’s hand and walked both him and Charlie away from Buck. She sat them beside the mounting block in the middle of the ring and helped the kid mount. He didn’t argue this time. He just got on.
“Walk him around,” Aria suggested. “Just walk. You can even hold onto the saddle horn if you want.”
“I wasn’t kidding when I said I was going to sue you!” Buck called after Aria. “You’re completely incompetent as a teacher!”
“Now that’s just not true.”
Aria swung around to see who had decided to join their conversation and was stunned to see Darren Hernandez standing at the edge of the rail. The little boy Jaeger was with him, and the two of them were watching Charlie and Mason.
“Excuse me?” Buck turned around to glare at Darren. “And who the hell are you?”
Darren ducked between the fence rails and entered the ring. Jaeger came with him just like a little shadow. Darren stuck out his hand to Buck. “The name is Darren Hernandez. This is my son, Jaeger. And we’re here to beg Ms. Callahan if she will please start teaching Jaeger here to ride.”
“Please?” Jaeger added, bouncing up and down on his toes. He was actually wearing little cowboy boots and looked damned adorable for a mini Hernandez brother.
Aria couldn’t help but smile. “I think we can arrange something.”
“Hernandez?” Buck’s eyebrows shot up. “You want your kid to ride here?”
Darren faced down Buck and curled his lip. “I’ve known Aria Callahan almost her whole life. She and my sister, Jesse, do some horse trading, and Aria is one of the best riders and trainers I know of, especially when it comes to kids. But if you want faster results, you toddle on down to the Flying W’s rodeo kids program. They’ll get your kid in the ring and get you some ribbons, but he’s not going to learn how to ride and it’ll cost you a hell of a lot more in the long run.”
Aria hid a smile. Darren had certainly put Buck in his place. It wasn’t what she had expected. Darren was certainly different these days. Maybe it was the kid and the new fiancée and the job. It was a damned shamed that having a wonderful kid and a great job hadn’t improved Laredo at all.
“Mason?” Aria turned to the little boy and gestured for him to dismount. “I’ll take care of Charlie for you. I really appreciate you getting back on and riding around. That was really important. But now you and your dad can head on out. I need to talk to my friend Darren here.”
Mason looked confused. “I don’t have to untack Charlie?”
“I’ll take care of it since your daddy isn’t sure you’re going to come back for lessons.” Aria looked at Buck. “He’s welcome to come back, but you need to stop talking about suing me. I haven’t done anything wrong. Not only that, but you signed a whole ream of paper’s worth of forms before your son starting taking lessons here. Those forms said you understood the risk and took responsibility. There have been lots of clients who take their trainers and their barn owners to court for injury. Very few of them win those cases. You get me?”
Buck gave a wordless nod and then snatched up his kid’s hand and walked away. Aria then turned her attention to Darren and Jaeger. Beside her, Charlie was quickly starting to doze. She raised her eyebrows at Darren. She owed him a thank-you for the compliments, but she wasn’t sure exactly what all of this was going to entail. Was getting further mixed up with the Hernandez family really to her benefit?
Chapter Five
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Aria held up her hands and waved them emphatically in front of her as though she were fending off an attack. “You must be kidding!”
“No. Not kidding.” Darren’s expression was totally serious, but his words were almost laughable. “I want you to give Jaeger and Bella lessons. I’ll pay for both.”
“Jaeger is no problem.” Aria would be happy to have a little Hernandez in her program. It was pretty well guaranteed that genetics would at least provide the kid with some natural ability. The Hernandez brothers were riding like bronc busters by the age of three. “But I am not teaching Laredo Hernandez’s daughter without his permission.”
“Fine.” Darren’s mulish expression should have been Aria’s first clue that this was about to go south really fast. “Then we’re not selling you Smokey.”
“Pardon me?” Aria fell back a step and bumped into Charlie, who was probably disgruntled that she’d interrupted his nap. “I thought that was Jesse’s horse.”
“Sort of.” Darren shrugged. “The mare technically belongs to the Hernandez ranch, but you know how all of that goes right now with all this reorganization stuff.” Darren gave an airy wave of his hand.
Aria narrowed her gaze suspiciously and tried to put a few pieces of this ridiculous puzzle together in her head. “Oh. My. God!” she finally exclaimed. “You guys brought that mare here for Bella!”
“Maybe.” Darren cleared his throat. “So, now we’re going to pay board, and when I bring Jaeger for lessons three days a week, Bella will just come with me. I usually take her to dance class for Laredo anyway.”
“I’m going to burn in hell.” Aria covered her face with her hands. “Darren, you are killing me! Do you have any idea how bad it will be if Laredo finds out that his kid is riding without his permission?”
“He’s an ass.” Darren suddenly covered his mouth as he realized he’d said that with his son listening in. Fortunately, Jaeger was petting Charlie’s neck and giving the gelding a nice scratching and seemed to be paying little or no attention to their conversation. “My brother is going through some—some stuff right now.”
“What kind of stuff?” The words popped out before Aria could reel them back in.
Dammit. Why did Aria care? Laredo Hernandez was not her problem. The man was an epic jerk. He’d been that way since he was a kid. Still, for some reason, Aria felt like she had this soft spot for Laredo. It had a lot to do with one particular incident she had witnessed many years ago. It was when Laredo had first gotten married. But Aria didn’t like to think about that. She had been over at the Hernandez ranch visiting Jesse, and she knew she hadn’t been intended to see what she had witnessed. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop it from affecting her.
“Aria?”
“What?” She realized she’d been standing there slack-jawed for more than a few moments. “I’m not going to go behind his back, Darren.”
“Like I said. We’re boarding Smokey here. You don’t have to do anything. You won’t even know anyone else is here.” Darren was grinning broadly as though he’d just won the lottery.
Was this really such a big deal? Aria pursed her lips and thought about the smile on Bella’s face earlier that afternoon. The little girl had been bitten hard by the horse bug. That much was obvious. As a person who had also been bitten by that bug a long time ago, it was hard for Aria not to want to help. This was a kid who was being held back for rea
sons she would never understand. Unfortunately, Aria got it. She knew why Laredo didn’t want his kid riding horses. She just didn’t want to talk to Darren about it.
“Fine.” Aria finally sighed and pressed her lips into a thin line. “I know when I’ve been beaten.”
“Beaten?” Darren looked taken aback. “It’s not like that at all.”
“No?” Aria pointed her finger at Darren. “Do you know why Laredo feels the way he does about riding and horses and pretty much the rest of the ranch stuff altogether?”
“Not really.” Darren gave a shrug. “He keeps telling Maggie—you remember my fiancée, Maggie, right—Laredo keeps telling her that little girls don’t rodeo. They dance and do gymnastics and participate in other girl activities.”
“Ugh,” Aria grunted. “Bella must love that. She’s about as girly as Jesse and I were at that age.”
“Exactly!” Darren crowed. “Which is why you’re helping poor Bella throw aside the chains of gender bias!”
“Oh, do not try that crap with me!” Aria could not help it. She burst out laughing. Then she bent down to Jaeger. “Would you like to ride Charlie back to the barn?”
“Yes!” Jaeger said excitedly.
“Okay. I’m going to put you on his back, and you hold onto the saddle horn for me.” Aria swung the little boy up into the saddle and started leading Charlie back toward the barn. The horse really deserved a comfy stall and some extra hay after his crazy night.
“Aria, come on.” Darren was running along behind her.
Suddenly, Aria stopped moving. Charlie halted and turned his head to look at her with one big brown eye as though she’d lost her mind, and maybe she had. But right now, there were two Hernandez ranch trucks parked in front of her barn. And to Aria’s knowledge, Jesse didn’t get a company vehicle because she wasn’t really a Hernandez.