by Soraya Lane
“Can you imagine working your ass off all your life to prove yourself, and then all you hear is negative crap about how you’d never have gotten where you were without help from your father?”
He shrugged. “No, but I do know what it’s like to be judged because of who your daddy is. Mine was an alcoholic asshole who failed miserably to look after us when our mama ran away. It’s fair to say he did a really crappy job of it, and I’m damn lucky I didn’t end up tarred by the same brush.” Sam paused, wondering if he should say more and deciding not to. His father was gone now, but he still felt the need to work extra hard to prove that he was nothing like the man who’d raised him.
“Ah, so maybe we do have something in common.”
He liked the sound of her laughter, and how much softer her voice had become. “Tell me, it can’t be all that bad. Living here, having all this. Is it worth being pissed at the world for judging you on this one?”
Mia looked at him over the half-door of the stable, her blue-green eyes meeting his. “Yeah, it is. Because, aside from my first horse and that stallion you’ve come to work, I’ve bought all my show jumpers myself, from my own prize money, and I paid my own damn flights to Europe and worked hard to keep myself over there. I fund my own team of horses, I always have, and I don’t even have a groom so I never have to ask anyone for money. I work as hard as anyone out there on the show jumping circuit, but it doesn’t seem to count for anything. Sometimes I wonder why I’ve always been so stubborn, since people’s opinions of me have never changed. Maybe I should just cash in my trust fund checks?”
Sam was quickly starting to comprehend how wrong he’d been about little miss rich girl in more ways than one, and he liked this side of her. Sure, she was mouthy and quick to judge, but then so had he been, and he appreciated a straight shooter. Maybe they’d both judged one another all wrong.
“No, that’s not right,” he said. “Because you know, and it’s you who matters.”
He listened to her sigh and then looked in, curious about what she was doing. He watched as she brushed her horse down, using a soft body brush over the mare’s sleek dark coat, bending low to follow the grooves of her legs. Sam followed her movements then glanced up, noticed the soft curve of her butt in her skin-tight breeches.
“So what’s our plan with the stallion today?” Mia asked, and Sam stepped back, folding his arms and leaning against the outside wall.
“Well, my plan is to not have a plan,” he said. “I feel my way as I go, and I have no idea how long it’ll take to crack this one.”
Mia had let herself out of the stable, and she looked distracted, her eyebrows drawn together as she stared past him.
“What’s that noise?”
He listened to the howling before grinning. “Oh, that’s my dog. Blue,” he said. “I’d say he’s not so happy that I left him in the truck.”
“You were worried I wouldn’t let you have your dog out? On a ranch?” she laughed. “Funny, you don’t strike me as the type to ask first.”
“What does that mean?” he asked, arms folded as he watched her.
“It means that you’re probably used to doing what you like and asking questions after.”
“You’re now an expert in human behavior?” he asked, trying not to laugh at her.
“Hey, sometimes it’s easy to see faults from standing down here than up there,” she said, repeating his own words back to him and putting the brush in her hand back in the box before walking off.
He’d give her that one. She was fiery all right, and he was starting to think the job here might be more interesting than he’d thought.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“To get your poor dog out of there before he dies from lack of oxygen.”
Sam didn’t bother to tell her that he’d left both windows down for air to get through, because he was fairly certain she was trying to rub him up the wrong way just for the hell of it. And she was doing a damn fine job of it, only he was also certain that she’d have no idea how much he was enjoying it. It’d been a long time since anyone had been outright rude to him or spoken their mind. It was one of the things that frustrated him the most right now about his career. He didn’t want to be surrounded by yes people so often, people who liked to stroke egos and make others feel more important than they were. He liked real, and he liked sassy, and there was one particular little cowgirl who was trying very hard to get on his nerves, and was doing the exact opposite right now.
He glared at his dog when he saw him leaning into Mia, gazing up at her as if she was the love of his life. She was making such a fuss of him the dog was as good as mesmerized. Sam whistled and saw Blue’s ears prick, but he didn’t move, loving the attention too much to bother listening to his master.
“Damn traitor,” Sam muttered, half laughing and deciding to head down to the stallion on his own.
He had to admit, being petted by Mia wouldn’t exactly be torture, but he still expected more loyalty from the dog. He’d rescued him from the side of the road, chained up, skinny as a bag of bones and with the biggest brown eyes Sam had ever seen. He’d been working a new job and driven past the dog maybe half a dozen times, and on the day he finished up on the ranch, a two-hour drive from his home, he’d pulled over, broken the malnourished dog free, and taken him with him. And the pooch had been by his side almost every day since.
A wet nose touched his hand and Sam looked down, wanting to growl at the dog for his disloyalty but giving him a pat on the head instead. He had his tongue lolling out, big grin on his face like he was the happiest damn dog in the world.
“Hey, wait up!” Mia called out.
“Not my fault you’re too slow to keep up,” he shot back.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I was only trying to rescue your dog!”
Sam chuckled. “And I’m here to do a job. Keep up if you can.”
He strode ahead, not slowing for her, and when he stopped outside the stallion’s pasture he turned and noticed Mia, red-faced and breathing hard from running after him. He smiled when she blew a stray piece of hair from her face, the escaped tendrils wisping around her cheeks.
“What are you going to do first?” Mia asked.
“First?” Sam repeated, elbows to the timber, leaning low and meeting her gaze when he looked sideways at her. “First you’re going to tell me what the hell happened to this stallion, and how in god’s name you ended up with him.”
Chapter 4
MIA gulped. She’d played that day over and over in her mind so often, but actually talking about it was something else entirely. She smiled at Sam, trying not to let her feelings show, putting on the brave face she’d perfected over the years. She almost hoped their foreman, Stretch, would come over and interrupt them, or one of the other ranch hands, but when she did a quick glance around, there was no one. Even her father would have been preferable to having this particular discussion with Sam.
“See how you go with him today. We can talk more once you’ve spent time with him,” she said.
Sam frowned, his eyes still trained on her even though she was looking straight ahead at the horse now.
“It’s a simple question, Mia,” he said, in a slow voice as if he were speaking to a child. “How did he end up here? What’s happened to him?”
She gritted her teeth, steeled her jaw, not ready to talk to a man she hardly knew about what had happened to the stallion grazing in the field nearby. Tex hadn’t bothered to acknowledge them yet, but she knew he would soon, and when he did it wouldn’t be pretty.
“You don’t think much of me, do you?” she asked in a low voice. “Why can’t I have just decided to buy a temperamental stallion to train as a show jumper?”
Sam laughed, but his face sobered instantly when he saw the serious look on hers as she turned to face him. Her eyes were glistening, she knew it, but she sure as hell wasn’t about to cry. Instead she turned to look out left, staring hard at a mob of Black Angus cattle and slowly trying to cou
nt them—anything to take her mind off what she was hiding from Sam.
“I can’t not like you, I hardly know you,” he said. “So I don’t think lowly of you, that’s silly to say.”
“No, you made a judgment call on me the moment you met me, and that call hasn’t changed,” she argued, turning back to him and hating that she was being so defensive. She couldn’t help it—when it came to Tex and the past, it just hurt too damn bad to go back. “Just work the horse, would you?”
He stood straighter then, and she did the same, unimpressed by how much smaller than Sam she felt when he was pulled up to his full height. His arms folded across his chest, eyes on her, staring at her and making her stare right back at him, so she didn’t feel like she was backing down. She hated bickering with him, but something about him rubbed her the wrong way.
“Fine, when I first came here I picked you as some pathetic socialite who liked to play around with horses.” Sam was like a statue before her. “But I saw you ride today and I thought, hell, there’s a girl with some goddamn talent. You’re good in the saddle, and you rode those big fences boldly.”
She swallowed. Hard. She hadn’t been fishing for compliments, had just wanted to get everything out in the open rather than simmer over things that hadn’t been said.
“You don’t need to say that,” she said, dragging her eyes from him and scuffing her boots into the dirt. She dropped to pet his dog, stroking his fur and smiling down at him before glancing back up at Sam. “I just need for you to take me seriously. This horse is important to me, and I want you to work your magic on him. Can we just leave it at that?”
He nodded, rubbing his hand across his chin. “Look, I came here thinking I was going to be working alone. I was intrigued about the stallion, and I still am, but just the way he behaved the other day? That tells me he’s been through some trauma, and if that involved a rider or abuse or whatever the hell it was, I need to know to keep me and him safe.”
She stood and stared out at Tex. “You know,” she said after a long pause, “he was named Tex because he had an ego as big as Texas, right from the moment he was a foal. He was never easy.”
Sam moved closer to her and they stood side by side, surveying the big horse who was still grazing, as if oblivious to them, head dipped low. But she could see that one of his ears had turned out slightly, that he was listening to them for sure.
“You’ve known him that long then?” Sam asked.
She nodded. “A long time. Only he wasn’t always this much of an asshole.”
“Yeah, well, stallions can either turn out like big teddy bears or arrogant sons of bitches. No different than a bull or any other male full of too much testosterone and not enough manners. And they’re no different than humans, either. You can’t just change a personality, but you can work on changing attitude.”
Mia hoped so, for her sake and for Tex’s. She knew Sam’s reputation, hell, she’d seen him work firsthand, but what if he wasn’t the right person to be working Tex? What if he was just a really good showman who’d managed to do well in front of the camera and crowds? She didn’t know how much longer she could keep Tex if she couldn’t get through to him, and he was too dangerous for her to even attempt to handle. She made a mental note to go visit her father later on—she needed to make sure he wasn’t planning anything without talking to her first.
“We only have a month,” she told Sam. “Maybe a little longer if I beg, but he put one of the ranchers in the hospital last week, that’s why my daddy called you.”
Sam didn’t react, just spoke in his soft drawl. “What happened?”
“We were trying to move him, and he’s become pretty territorial,” Mia explained. “He lashed out, after appearing fairly placid to start with, and I got over the fence but Cal didn’t. He was kicked in the hip and I only just managed to help him out before he got kicked again. He’s in hospital now and my father’s footing the bill, so he’s less than impressed.”
Sam rubbed his chin again and Mia realized he did that whenever he was chewing something over. “You told me you purchase all your own horses,” he said. “But not this one?”
She shook her head. “Not this one. I couldn’t afford him.”
“Why?”
Mia didn’t want to admit how much she’d paid for him, or how much it had cost to truck him here, or anything else much about how she’d ended up with him. “He meant something to me. The price was too high, and I begged my father to buy him for me. I know, it makes me sound like a silly little girl with a heart set on a horse she couldn’t handle.”
“Well, yeah, it does,” Sam said. “And you’re right about him being too much for you to handle.”
“Thanks,” she said dryly. “Great way to boost my ego.”
His expression was hard to read. “For the record, I don’t think you’re a woman with bad taste in horses, but this guy? He’s too hot for most riders to handle, so don’t go taking that as a cheap shot at your ability. I’m just calling the situation as I see it.”
Every time she was pissed at him, he managed to make her feel stupid for flying off the rails at him. Of course Tex was too much horse for her, it wasn’t exactly rocket science to figure that out. She hoped that would be the end to their stupid back-and-forth arguing; it wasn’t like her to be so petty.
“So what do you want to do?” she asked.
“What I want is to move him into a round pen,” Sam said, looking around. She watched as he held his hand up, shielding his eyes. “That’s it over there?”
She nodded, looking from the pen in the distance and back again. “I don’t like our chances.”
Sam climbed up onto the railing and stared at Tex. He’d made it clear that he’d seen them now, and he pawed the ground, shaking his head and staring them down.
“How aggressive is he once you’re with him?” Sam asked. “For instance, if I had a halter and rope on, would he lead?”
She shook her head. “I think he’s past behaving properly. He’s pretty wild these days.”
Sam sat on the fence, and she considered him, wondering who he was and what he was all about. She got the feeling that he hadn’t grown up wealthy at all, he was too grounded, too … she didn’t know what. But it was a feeling she’d had since she met him, that he wasn’t like other guys she’d met. The only thing that didn’t fit was how at ease he’d been when he’d first arrived, not at all overawed by her family’s ranch, which was unusual for someone who hadn’t grown up with money. The massive house and sprawling gardens was usually enough to make a person’s jaw drop. She knew that from years of having people fawn over her, thinking she was important, wanting to be with her and part of the lifestyle they seemed to associate with her. Only she wasn’t special. Her riding made her special, because it was something she trained hard to be good at, but she knew firsthand that money didn’t buy happiness, only privilege.
“What about this,” Sam said, moving back down to stand beside her. “We get in there and make a space with temporary fencing. That way I don’t have to move him until I have his trust, which is safer for everyone involved, and I can make a makeshift kind of ring.”
Mia was the one raising her eyebrows this time. “We?” she asked. “I thought you worked solo?”
He chuckled. “Maybe I need to be more open to change. You can watch, but I don’t want you in there distracting me or him.”
She doubted she was capable of being much of a distraction. Sam hadn’t shown the least bit of interest in her, and the horse would be far more intent on killing Sam than bothering with her. She was fairly certain about that.
“Do you think you’ll be able to crack him within a month?” she asked, terrified of her father deciding to follow through with his threat and have the horse shot if he was still a menace to society by then.
“I don’t know,” Sam replied. “I’ve never worked a horse that I couldn’t form a relationship with pretty quickly, and if I’m honest? It’s because of him that I’m standing
here. I don’t do private work like this anymore because I don’t need to, but something about him spoke to me. I think I’ll learn as much from him as he will from me.”
“You talking about the beast?”
Mia spun around at the deep voice. “Geez, Stretch, I just about jumped out of my skin!”
She grinned at their foreman as he tipped his hat at her, his wicked smile cracking her up as it stretched his tanned, weathered face wide. Her father was beside him, and she gave her daddy a smile, too. It wasn’t often he bothered to venture down to the horses.
“Just the man I was looking for!” he boomed as he locked eyes on Sam.
Mia traded glances with Stretch as her father hooked his thumbs into his belt loops, his big Stetson firmly on his head as he strode toward Sam. She wondered if he’d feign an interest in her horses for Sam’s benefit.
“Good to finally meet you. I’m Walter.” She watched as her father shook hands with Sam, only just shorter than the horse whisperer he was greeting. Even she had to admit that her dad was still handsome, and the way he stood, shoulders straight and head always held high, meant no one would ever have guessed he was knocking sixty five.
“Walter, it’s nice to put a face to the name.”
“Hi, Daddy,” Mia said, leaning in to kiss his cheek when he came closer to her. She loved him to bits, she just hated that he treated her like his little girl so often just because she was the baby of the family. He seemed to forget she was twenty eight.
“What do you think?” Walter asked. “If it was my decision we’d have put him to sleep by now and put us and him out of our misery, but it’s hard to say no after everything that happened. Did Mia tell you he killed his last rider?”
She went ice cold, goose pimples tracking across her skin. If she could have dug herself a hole and crawled inside, she’d have done it. She caught Stretch’s eye and he raised an eyebrow. The old rancher had known her all her life, and he seemed to gauge her reactions a whole lot better than her father did.
“Daddy, why don’t you leave us with the horses?” Mia suggested, clearing her throat. “Sam was just about to get started and…”