by Diana Palmer
“Wait here a sec. Don’t go toward him,” he added. “It’s a him?”
“It’s a him.”
“Be right back.”
He went to the stable and got a sack of oats. The palomino was standing in the road, and the girl, Teddie, was right where he’d left her. Good girl, he thought, she wasn’t headstrong and she could follow orders.
“Look here, old fellow,” Parker said, standing beside the dirt road. He rattled the feed bag.
The palomino shook his head, raised his ears, and hesitated. But after a minute, he trotted right to Parker.
“Pretty old creature,” Parker said gently. He didn’t look the horse in the eyes, which might have seemed threatening to the animal. He held a hand, very slowly, to the horse’s nostrils. The horse sniffed and moved closer, rubbing his head against Parker’s. “Have some oats.”
“Gosh, I couldn’t get near him!” Teddie said, impressed.
He chuckled. “I break horses for J.L. Denton. He owns the ranch,” he added, indicating the sweep of land to the mountains with his head.
Parker smoothed the horse’s muzzle. “Let’s see.” He eased back the horse’s lip and nodded. “About fifteen, unless I miss my guess.”
“Fifteen?” she asked.
“Years old,” he said.
“I thought he was only a year or so!”
He shook his head. He hung the feed bag over the horse’s head and smoothed his hand alongside him, all the way to the back.
“You know about horses?” he asked Teddie.
She shook her head. “I’m trying to learn. Mom knows a lot, but she doesn’t have time. There are these YouTube videos. . . .”
“You never walk behind a horse unless you let him know you’re going to be there,” he explained as he smoothed his way down the horse’s flank to his tail. “Horses have eyes set on the sides of their heads. They’re prey animals, not predators. Their first instinct is always going to be flight. As such, they’re touchy and sensitive to sound and movement. They can see almost all the way around them, except to their hindquarters. So you have to be careful. You can get kicked if you don’t pay attention.”
“Nobody said that on the video I watched,” she confessed.
“You need some books,” he said. “And some DVDs.”
She sighed. “Mom said I didn’t know what I was doing. He was such a pretty horse and I didn’t want them to put him down. They arrested his owner.”
Parker just nodded. He was seeing some damage on the horse’s back, some deep scars. There was a cut that hadn’t healed near his tail, and two or three that had on his legs. “Somebody’s abused this horse,” he said coldly. “Badly. He’s got scars.”
“They said the man took a whip to him.” She grimaced. “They told me not to touch him on his front leg, but I was trying to look at his hoof and I forgot.”
“His hoof?”
“He was favoring that one.” She pointed to it.
He patted the horse’s shoulder, bent, and pulled up the horse’s hoof. He grimaced. “Good God!”
She looked, too, but she didn’t see anything. “What is it?”
“His hooves are in really bad shape. Has a vet seen him?”
“I don’t know. The animal control man brought him to the ranch for us. Mom was calling to get the vet, even before he knocked part of the fence down and ran away. She’s going to be really mad.”
Parker noted that the horse had no saddle on. “You didn’t try to ride him bareback, did you?” he asked.
She grimaced. “Mister, I don’t even know how to put a saddle on him. I sure can’t ride him. I’ve never ridden a horse.”
His black eyes widened. “You don’t know how to ride?”
“Well, Mom does,” she said hesitantly. “She grew up on a ranch in Montana. That’s where she met my daddy. She can ride most anything, but she’s been on the phone all day trying to get the movers to find a missing box. They think it went back East somewhere, but they haven’t done much about finding it. It had a lot of Daddy’s things. Mom’s furious.”
He shook his head. “That’s tough.”
“She said we’ll . . . uh-oh,” she added as a small SUV came down the road, pulled in very slowly next to the man and the child and the horse, and stopped.
“Who’s that?” Parker asked.
“Mom,” Teddie said, grimacing.
A blond woman wearing jeans and a black T-shirt got out of the SUV. “So there you are,” she said in an exasperated tone.
“Sorry, Mom,” Teddie said, wincing. “Bartholomew ran away and I ran after him. . . .”
“Bartholomew?” Parker asked.
“Well, he needed a fancy name. He’s so pretty. Handsome.” Teddie cleared her throat. “He did.”
“He broke through a fence. I was on the phone trying to find a vet who’ll come out and look at him, and when I went out to tell you what I found out, the horse was gone and so were you!”
“I was afraid he’d run in the road and get hurt,” Teddie said defensively.
China blue eyes looked up at Parker. “Oats, huh?” she asked as she saw the feed bag over the horse’s muzzle.
He nodded. “Quickest way to catch a runaway horse, if he has a sense of smell,” he added with a faint smile.
“She’s Katy,” Teddie introduced. “I don’t remember who you are,” she added with a shy smile at the tall man with the long black ponytail.
“Parker,” he said. He didn’t offer any more information, and he reached out to shake hands.
“You work for Mr. Denton, don’t you?” Katy asked, and her expression told him that she’d heard other things about him as well.
“I do. I’m his horse wrangler.”
She drew in a long breath. “Teddie, you never leave the house without telling me where you’re going.”
“Sorry, Mom.”
“And obviously the horse doesn’t need a vet immediately, or he wouldn’t have gotten this far!”
“You know about horses, do you?” Parker asked her.
She nodded.
“Come here.” He smoothed down the horse’s leg and pulled up the hoof. “Have a look.”
“Dear God,” she whispered reverently.
“If they lock his owner up forever, it won’t be long enough,” he added, putting the hoof back down. “There are deep cuts on his hindquarters, and on one of his legs as well. One needs stitches. I imagine an antibiotic would prevent complications from the hooves as well, if you got Doc Carr on the phone.”
She made a face. “He’s on another large-animal call. I left my cell phone number for him.”
“Your daughter knows very little about horses,” he began. “An animal that’s been abused is dangerous even for an experienced equestrian.”
“I know. But she was so upset,” came the soft reply. “She’s lost so much. . . .”
“She can learn how to take care of him,” Parker interrupted, because he understood without being told.
“Yes, and I can teach her. But it’s going to take time. I’m in a new teaching job. I’m not used to grammar school children. I taught at college level. . . .”
“We have a community college,” he pointed out.
She gave him a long-suffering look. “Yes, I’m on the waiting list for an opening, but I couldn’t wait. There are bills.”
“I know about bills.”
“So I got the only job available.”
“You aren’t from here,” he said.
She nodded. “My husband’s mother was from here. She was a Cowling, from the Dean River area.”
“I know some Cowlings. Good people.”
“She and my husband’s father had a ranch in Montana where they were living when my husband was born. After her husband died, she came back here to live, on the family’s ranch. She ran it herself until her death early this year. She left my husband the ranch. He was going to sell it, but he was . . . he . . . anyway. It took us some time to get moved here.”
; “It’s a good place to raise a child,” he said, and he smiled gently at Teddie.
“She’s going on thirty,” Katy said, tongue-in-cheek, as she glanced at her daughter.
He chuckled. “Some mature faster than others.”
“We need to get Bartholomew home,” Katy said, and she was staring at the horse as if she wondered how exactly they were going to do that.
“Give me a second to get Wings and I’ll be right back.” He didn’t explain. He just went around the side of the house.
“Honestly, Teddie,” Katy began, exasperated.
“I’m sorry. Really. But he ran away!”
“I know. But still . . .”
“Next time, I’ll come get you first. I will.” Her eyes pleaded with her mother’s.
Katy gave in with a sigh. “All right. But don’t let it happen again.”
“I won’t. Poor old horse,” she added, looking at the palomino. “Mr. Parker said that he’s been abused.”
“He seems to know a lot about horses,” Katy agreed, just as Parker came around the house leading a white mare.
“What a beauty,” Katy exclaimed involuntarily.
“Wings,” he said. “She’s mine. Two years old and my best girl,” he added with a smile.
The horse had a halter and bridle, but no saddle.
Before they could ask what he meant to do, Parker took the oats gently away from the palomino and put them beside the road. He caught the horse’s bridle, led it to the mare, and vaulted onto the filly’s back as if he had wings himself.
“Okay,” he said. “Lead on.”
They laughed. He made something complicated so simple. Teddie and Katy piled into their vehicle and led the way home, with Parker bringing up the rear riding one horse and leading the other. Both went with him as easily as lambs following a shepherd.
* * *
The house was in bad shape, he noticed as he stopped at the front porch and tied Wings’s bridle to it. He patted her gently.
“Just stay right there, sweetheart. Won’t be a minute,” he said in a soft, deep tone, running his fingers along her neck. She looked at him and whinnied.
He went to get the palomino’s bridle and led him, along with the woman and the girl, to the ramshackle barn.
He made a face when he saw it, along with the broken fence where the animal had broken through.
“I know. We’re living in absolutely primitive conditions.” Katy laughed. “But at least Teddie and I have each other, if we have nothing else.” She said it with affection, but she didn’t touch her daughter.
“Yes, we do,” Teddie told her mother. “Thanks for not yelling.”
“You never teach a child anything by yelling,” Katy said softly. “Or by hitting.”
Parker glanced at her and saw things she didn’t realize. He put the palomino in a stall in the stable and closed the gate.
“We have to lock it,” Katy said. She drew a chain around the metal gate and hitched it to the post with a metal lock. “He’s an escape artist,” she added. “Which is how he happened to be hightailing it past your place. I guess he learned to run away when his owner started brutalizing him with that whip.”
“I’d love to have five minutes with that gentleman, and the whip,” Parker murmured as he looked around the barn. “This place is in bad shape,” he remarked.
“One step at a time,” she said with quiet dignity.
He turned and looked down at her and smiled. He almost never smiled, but she made him feel like he had as a boy when he got his first horse, when he dived into deep water for the first time, when he tracked his first deer. It was a feeling of extreme exhilaration that lifted him out of his routine. And shocked him.
She laughed. “It’s what my mother always said,” she explained. “Especially when Dad got sick and had to go to the hospital. He had a bad heart. She knew it when they married. He had two open-heart surgeries to put in an artificial valve, and he had a host of other health problems,” she added, not mentioning the worst of those, alcoholism. “They’d been married for twenty-five years when he died in a car crash. She said she got through life by living just for the day she was in, never looking ahead. It’s not a bad philosophy.”
“Not bad at all,” Teddie agreed.
“Is this his saddle?” Parker asked suddenly, noting the worn but serviceable saddle resting on a nearby gate. The stable was empty except for the palomino, tack on the walls, and some hay in square bales in a corner.
“Yes,” Katy said. “It was my grandfather’s. I’ve had it for years. I brought it with us when we moved. It’s been a lot of places with me, since my teens.” She joined him and ran her hand over the worn, smooth pommel. “Granddaddy competed in bulldogging for many years with a partner, his first cousin, up in Montana. He was very good. But he lost a thumb to a too-tight rope and ended up keeping books for my husband’s father. They lived near Dan’s folks in Montana, but they had a relative who owned the ranch here. When Dan’s father died, his mother sold the Montana ranch and moved back here, to her family ranch. Dan inherited it.” Her expression was wistful. “His grandfather, who founded the ranch, raised some of the finest Red Brangus around,” she added. “He was active in the local cattleman’s association as well. So was Dan’s mother.”
“My boss is, too. He and the Mrs. are pregnant with their first child. She writes for Warriors and Warlocks, that hit drama on cable TV.”
“Oh, my gosh!” Katy exclaimed. “It’s my favorite show! And she actually writes for it?! And lives here?”
“Her husband’s got a private jet,” he explained with twinkling eyes. “He has the pilot fly her to and from Manhattan for meetings with the other writers and the show’s director and producer.”
“That must be nice,” Katy said.
“Mom won’t let me watch that show,” Teddie said with a faint pout.
“When you’re older,” Katy told her.
“You always say that, about everything,” the little girl complained.
“Wait until you’re grown and you have kids,” Katy teased. “You’ll understand it a whole lot better.”
“This place needs a lot of work,” Parker said when they were back outside again. “Especially that fence, and those steps.” He indicated a board missing in the front ones.
“It really does,” Katy agreed. “We’re trying to take it one thing at a time.”
“Fence first, steps second. Got any tools? How about extra boards for the fence, or at least wire?”
Katy was shocked, but only for a minute. She went inside and came back out with a toolbox. “It was my husband’s, but I have no idea what’s in it,” she apologized.
“No problem. Boards? Wire?”
“I think there’s a bale of wire out in the big shed behind the house,” she returned.
“Yes, that big one there,” Teddie said, indicating a metal building that had seen better days.
“My mother-in-law used it mostly for storage,” Katy explained. “She kept some of the Red Brangus, just the breeding stock, and hired a man to manage it for her. He still works for us. . . .”
“Yes, that would be Jerry Miller,” he said, smiling. “I know him. Honest as the day is long, and a hard worker.”
“He has two full-time cowboys and four part-time ones.” She shook her head. “It takes so many people to work cattle. We’ll have our first sale in the spring. I’m hoping we’ll do well at it. I’ve forgotten most of what I know about ranching. But that’s what we have Jerry for,” she added with a smile. And it was just plain good luck that the last cattle sale had left her with a windfall that took care of all the salaries. Wintering the cows and heifers, and their few bulls, would be expensive, due to loss of forage from all the flooding in the West and Midwest, but she knew they’d manage somehow. They always did.
“At least we got the plumbing repaired and a new roof put on,” she said, waving her hand to indicate some rough idea of where the work had been done.
“Exp
ensive stuff,” he commented, looking through the toolbox.
“Tell me about it,” she said, tongue-in-cheek.
He took out a hammer. “Nails?” he asked as he got to his feet gracefully.
“Nails. Right.” She looked around the building until her eyes came to a workbench. “I think he kept them in a coffee can over here.”
She produced it. There was a supply of assorted nails. He picked out some to do the job. He got wire cutters from the tool kit and proceeded to heft the heavy bale of wire over his shoulder.
“Can I help?” Teddie asked.
He chuckled. “Sure. You can carry the hammer and nails.”
She took them from him and followed along behind him to the pasture that fronted the stable.
“I could find someone to do it. . . .” Katy began.
“Not before the horse went through it again.” He frowned and glanced at them as he put down the wire and pulled out a measuring tape. “Why did he run?” he asked belatedly.
Teddie sighed. “Well, there was this plastic bag that had been on the porch. The wind came up and sent it flying toward the corral. Bartholomew panicked.”
Chapter Two
Parker burst out laughing. “A plastic bag.” He shook his head. “Horses are nervous creatures, to be sure.”
“You said they were prey animals,” Teddie reminded him shyly.
“They are.”
“How do you tell that?” the little girl wanted to know.
“Prey animals have eyes on the sides of their heads, not on the front like humans do,” he replied. He went on to explain about the evolution that produced such a trait.
Katy was watching him curiously.
He gave her a dry look. “Oh, I get it. A horse wrangler shouldn’t know scientific things like that, huh? I minored in biology in college.”
She flushed. “Sorry.”
He shrugged. “We’re all guilty of snap judgments. Don’t sweat it.” He glanced toward the house. “Those steps need fixing as much as this fence does.”
“Know any reliable handymen hereabouts?” Katy asked him.
He chuckled. “Sure. Me. I work cheap. A couple of sandwiches and some good, strong black coffee. It will have to be on a Saturday, though. Boss keeps me pretty busy the rest of the week.”