Earn his Trust (Blue Creek Ranch #2)

Chapter 1

Hawk

I watched as my sister Demi wobbled onto the couch after breakfast and shook my head fondly. She was so damn big now; her twins were weighing her down and kicking the crap out of her in equal measure.

I got up and gave Demi’s daughter, Aria, a kiss on the top of her head. My dad was having a discussion with her about the strawberries she was smearing everywhere. Demi’s twin, Emery, appeared out of thin air, kissed Mom’s cheek, and grabbed a to-go mug of coffee.

“Sorry, I can’t stop; I’m already late!” The life of a doctor at a small-town clinic.

“You need to have breakfast!” Mom watched as he went to check on Demi.

“I’ll have an early lunch. I got a call about a patient, so I’ve got to go.” He placed his hand on Demi’s stomach and smiled. “Bye, babies, see you later!”

Then he said goodbye to Aria and dodged more of the family on his way out. Look, there were a lot of us.

My brother Crew, his partner Malachi, and Mal’s son Payton took their spots at the table. I brought my empty plate to the sink and saluted everyone, then left to escape to the training barn.

We had a massive operation. Several different horse-related businesses that myself and more than half of my nine siblings ran like a well-oiled machine.

I liked walking to my barn in the mornings and walking back in the evenings after work. If I needed to move during the day, I would use an UTV or ATV, unless I was on horseback, of course. We were fairly spread apart on the property, because everyone needed space and we had plenty of it.

Normally, we tried to use the vehicles as little as possible, but I was the farthest away and had some privileges in that area.

Juanpablo, our alarm donkey who had the run of a large pasture closest to the main house, let out a short bray when he spotted me.

I tended to give him some carrot pieces when I passed him each morning.

Even if I was taking the shortcut to my domain, the training barn, or Barn 4 as it was called in shorthand, I still walked past the donkey because I was one of the few people he actually liked.

It took a good fifteen minutes to walk from the house to B4 if you took the road that connected every barn. I didn’t mind, though. If I were completely honest, the walk was good for my left hamstring that had gotten kicked a handful of months ago.

Nothing had shown up in the X-rays Emery had made me submit to, and I’d been mostly fine after a couple of weeks.

Sometimes though, I woke up and felt the injury.

It was probably because I slept like the dead, completely still and barely moved during the night.

Mom always said it had freaked her out when I was little.

Some of the hands were already getting to work around the various barns.

Lovett slowed his truck as he was passing me, and I hopped into the bed instead of going to sit in the front with him.

He took us past the broodmare barn, the weanlings and yearlings barn that also had our quarantine section at one end, and the stock barn.

Since that was Lovett’s destination, he parked by the other vehicles and I hopped off. I tipped my ball cap at him, and he grinned like he did every morning if I caught a ride, not that it was very often. We didn’t really talk. I wasn’t talkative in the mornings. Or ever, really.

It wasn’t long until I made it to my kingdom. We weren’t religious in the least, but I could admit I felt blessed to have been born in a family that didn’t actually bat an eye when one of their youngest kids wanted to build his own business from the ground up.

I was twenty-four now, and for the last six years I’d worked my calling—training horses.

I’d made a name for myself. I was still called a wunderkind sometimes, which was mildly annoying given that I was a grown ass adult, short as I was. My family tended to joke that they were surprised that I hadn’t been born with hooves because I was definitely half horse myself.

Horses had always made sense to me in a way humans hadn’t. Horses I could read. Well, humans, too, I just didn’t care for most of them all that much.

I stepped into the barn and was greeted by a deep, almost rumbly nickering from my heart horse, Humphrey.

“Morning, boy,” I called out as I turned the lights on.

I went to pet him as he hung his large head over the stall door. A Friesian and quarter horse cross, he wasn’t that tall, but he was perfectly stocky and I liked to think of him as my multitool; he could do so many things.

“I’ll get you your food in a second.” I handed him some carrot bits, then went to the feed room to start the morning routine while the horses began to make noise around me.

I had sixteen stalls in my barn, two of which were for Humphrey and Gemma’s mare, Noemie.

My sister was my right hand when it came to training.

She tended to take care of the easier cases, including those of our rescues who only needed to learn to trust people again and then be retrained for whatever they seemed suitable for.

I trained the harder rescues, sometimes with the help of Humphrey who was the calmest horse I’d met outside Malachi’s mare, Jaina.

For the real income, I took on other people’s horses.

I trained them to whatever specifications they needed.

Whether it was completely new skills on a young horse or teaching them out of bad habits, I would do it gladly, for a paycheck.

I enjoyed the tricky cases the most, because they gave my brain more to work with.

Malachi had taken over some of the youngling training, so I could do more of the other stuff.

When Mal came to work with us earlier this year, it hadn’t taken long for us to realize where his real talents lay.

Not that he wasn’t great at everything he took on and had an impressive work ethic, but he shone when he got to train horses.

I’d poached him from Wyanne at the stock barn, and she still grumbled about it on occasion.

It was all in good fun, and he did go help her whenever needed.

I got everyone fed—including the few more skittish rescues we had at the moment—and went up to the hay loft office while I waited for them to be ready for turnout. Then again, Gemma would probably be here by then and start on that as she arrived.

Once my computer was on, I started to check my emails. One in particular made me smile wide. Finally.

For the last six months or so, I’d been on the hunt for a Very Specific horse. Specific enough that the client was now colloquially called Goddamn Cahill around here.

The man seemed to have more money than good sense, based on the ludicrous amount he’d wired me when I started my search. The sum was to be used to buy the horse of his dreams and then to begin the training.

I’d finally found the mare a few months ago in Kentucky. Since we were in Colorado, it was a 20-hour drive to the appaloosa breeders, the Knight Family, who had her.

She was everything Carter Goddamn Cahill had wanted, once I trained her to his liking. The horse needed to be a mare, above a certain height, and a very, very specific color that was rarer than hen’s teeth, as Russ, our old foreman, would say.

Speaking of the devil, I heard him greet the horses one by one as he shuffled his way across to the hay loft stairs.

Russ had been here before my parents ever acquired the property almost thirty years ago. He’d worked as the foreman until my brother Crew took over a few years ago. Russ was getting old, but he was tenacious as ever. He’d been my best friend since I was a kid, because somehow we’d just clicked.

“Here you are, kid,” he grunted when he got to the top of the stairs. “What’s got you grinnin’ like that this early?”

He moved to the visitor’s chair and sat down heavily enough that I had to do my best to not react to it. He’d been getting slower in the last year or so, given that he was about seventy. I hoped it was just his struggle to get going in the mornings and nothing more than that.

“Suzanne Knight emailed me. The foal has been weaned and as soon as I wire her the money, the mare is ours.”

Russ let out a big huff and chuckled. “Well, I’ll be damned. Cahill needs to be appreciative or I’ll kick his ass; I don’t particularly care that he’s richer than Jesus.”

I snorted. “Yeah, yeah. I’m just happy to have the money he promised me so I can start to really make plans for the pool building.”

Russ scratched his stubbly, weathered cheek. “That’ll be a big project.”

“Yeah, but with the money Cahill is paying, I can afford to have it done right and by professionals.”

“True, true….”

The door downstairs opened and closed, and Gemma whistled a tune as she started up the stairs.

“Guess what, Sis?”

She stopped by the stairs and looked at me. “What?”

“We got the mare.”

She whooped loud and jumped a couple of times before rushing around the desk to hug me vigorously. She was a year older than me, but sometimes she felt like she was the younger one of us.

“That’s awesome! I’m so happy for you!”

After some more celebration, she went to start the day downstairs and Russ ambled along with her. I called Suzanne and made the arrangements. Since she had a trusted company she used for long distance transport, I was willing to go with them without question.

“Once I know when we’ll be loading her in and when she’s supposed to be there, I’ll let you know. Oh and I’ll give them your contact information and such.”

“That sounds good to me.” I exhaled quietly, I hoped. “Are you absolutely sure I’m not stealing her from you?”

She chuckled. “No, Hawk. It’s okay. She had a rough pregnancy with this last one and she’s not going to have any more babies. She’s pretty to look at, but I don’t have a true need for her. I’d rather not have her reduced into a gorgeous lawn ornament, you know.”

The mare, who Suzanne called Ramona—a name I was sure Cahill would change to his liking—was eight years old, and she’d had three foals.

She hadn’t been used for anything else for the last four years, which meant I had to pretty much treat her like a young horse to give her a proper chance to get back to whatever level of training she’d had before the foals.

“Okay then. I’ll wire you the money and once you have the information, let me know. We’ll be waiting for her.”

“Are you going to tell the buyer now?” she asked. She hadn’t really understood why I hadn’t told Cahill when Russ and I had initially traveled to Kentucky and paid a reservation fee for the mare.

“Yeah. I’ll have to call him and let him know when she’s going to be here. I’m sure he’ll want to be here as soon as he can.” I wasn’t even sure where Cahill was now or whether he was going to be staying for more than a little while during the initial arrival.

“Well, I know she’s in good hands with you at Blue Creek.”

“And you also know I wouldn’t be buying an asshole a horse in the first place,” I reminded her.

She snorted. “That’s true.”

We ended the call, and I made myself a cup of coffee on my Keurig.

Then I finished the emails I needed to get done, and started on one of the trickier rescues we’d had for a couple of weeks now.

She seemed ready to start trusting people again, and I wanted to use that momentum to see where she was at.

A couple of days passed, and I got word that the mare would arrive in two days. I was happy with that schedule, even though it kind of coincided with Demi getting closer to popping.

I wanted to be there for her, even if half of the family, including Emery and Demi’s fiancé, Luke, were already hovering like crazy. It was interesting how an unflappable doctor like Emery lost his cool when it was about his twin.

Luke was better, but he’d also kind of freaked himself out along the way by reading too much about things that could go wrong in twin pregnancies.

Mom had tried to talk him down a little, since she had actual experience of having two sets of twins, but we all knew Luke wasn’t doing well the closer the birth came.

I could always tell my oldest brothers, Bodhi or Crew, to be there for Demi and they would be. Hell, our sisters would be too. I just…. I wasn’t sure why I felt like I needed to be there, as well.

When I told Russ this, he chuckled and squeezed my shoulder. “It’s because you know you’re the calmest one in a crisis, and she knows this, too.”

For a Marine, Bodhi wasn’t great in a crisis when it came to family. He tried to be, but we all knew how much it got to him. Crew was unflappable, but he was such a kid person that he would be worrying more than me to start with.

I, on the other hand, didn’t really mind kids. Hell, I happened to like some of them—like Mal’s too-smart-for-anyone’s-good son Payton who had just turned five—but I never wanted kids of my own.

Growing up as the seventh of ten children, I’d gotten the solitary gene from somewhere. I hadn’t liked kids much when I’d been one, and I’d had no way of getting away from my siblings. Except trying to live in a hut in the woods for a while when I was like six, but that hadn’t lasted for long.

So there I was, faced by the mare coming in and needing to call Carter Cahill.

I’d googled the guy before I’d agreed to work for him, of course. He’d made a lot of money from some startup or other back in the day. He was in his mid-forties and seemed to be the type that thought that money could buy him everything.

Including a snowflake appaloosa with black base coat, with just the right amount of spotting.

Which… yeah. There wasn’t an abundance of those to buy.

We’d gotten lucky, and we had paid a lot for his mare, but the fact that he’d casually wired me over double of what we’d paid before there was any idea if we’d even find a horse, thinking that money solved everything, including making a horse like that materialize? Yeah.

I was pretty sure it would be great to be just wealthy enough to not have to think about where to scrounge up the money for any upgrade you needed to make, but to put the kind of money into a horse for the looks only?

That the fact of having to pay even more to get me to train her too was barely an afterthought?

Something about all of this made me dislike Cahill on principle. I just hoped he was a decent horseman, or at least trainable, because there was no way I would let anyone be crappy to a horse as special as this one.

It was Thursday evening when I finally called Cahill to tell him that the mare would arrive at Blue Creek Ranch on Saturday afternoon. Then I crossed my fingers that everything would go okay. You never knew, after all.