Chapter 3 #3
Cassidy was his obsession.
More than a damned attraction. But it had become worse the minute Jessie had suggested Cassidy get involved in the show.
He took her back to the gates, where the horses waited until it was their turn to run out into the arena.
Starlight was there, tacked up and ready to go.
Cassidy approached the gate slowly, reached her hand out flat, and waited for Starlight to touch her palm with her nose. The horse snorted, then inhaled deeply.
“You don’t need to do any horse-whisperer shit,” he said. “She’s pretty used to taking new riders.”
“Well, that’s fine. But I like to get to know a horse before I get on her. That seems like the bare minimum of civility, don’t you think? You can’t just ride someone you don’t know.”
He had to bite the inside of his lip to keep from answering that he preferred to exclusively ride females he didn’t know. “Of course not,” he said, voice flat.
“This is going to be good,” Cassidy said, speaking directly to the horse. “I promise I’m someone you can trust. I’m not going to do anything to hurt you. So I hope you won’t do anything to hurt me.”
“She doesn’t speak English,” West said.
Cassidy turned and shot him a look. “Does she speak Spanish? Because I do.”
“Nope.”
“Guess I’ll just have to use body language, then.”
Even that sent his mind into a spiral. Using body language with Cassidy Wilder had been a too frequent fantasy recently.
“Get on the goddamned horse, Cass.”
She lifted a brow. “I didn’t realize that you had a packed schedule.”
“I do. I have to go meet with my contractor in an hour. So I need you to get it together.”
That was a lie. He was pretty much his own contractor on the housing project, and he could arrange anything around his schedule if he wanted to. But he needed to get this over with.
She went around to the back of the chute and entered through the door that was there for the rider while he positioned himself at the gate so that he could open it.
Starlight wasn’t a bucking bronco. She wasn’t going to fly out of the chute.
The horse was calm, even as Cassidy approached and put her hand on the mare’s flank. “I’m going to climb on you now.”
“You talk to your dates that way?” Those words came out before he could filter them, and he wished he hadn’t said them because they put an image in his head he really didn’t need. He wasn’t flirting, he hadn’t even sounded like he was, but he did sound like a dick.
She frowned and wrinkled her nose. “Do you talk to everyone this way?”
“Yes. What you see is what you get.”
True enough, honestly. He was too impulsive to be charming, to honest to be likeable, and too emotionally unavailable to have friends close enough to call him out for any of it.
Just the way he liked it.
“Okay. Then maybe we won’t talk.” She positioned her foot in the stirrup, then pulled herself up onto the back of the horse.
Not talking was just fine by him.
“Are you ready?”
She looked up at him, and their eyes met. The feeling he’d had the moment before she pulled up, the calm before the storm sensation that had filled his lungs, intensified.
“Yes,” she said.
He opened the gate, and she urged the horse forward. She didn’t lead with tricks. Instead, she rode in a circle around the arena, changing tempo, getting a read on the horse. She was smart. That was exactly what she should do.
Her approach was cautious, and not at all what he would have done, which was to blast right into the tricks without getting a feel for anything. He just couldn’t stand to be bored.
Regrettably, even watching Cassidy ride in circles didn’t bore him.
Then suddenly, she maneuvered herself up and pushed herself into a squat, then up so that she was standing while the horse continued to circle. She took a sharp breath and closed her eyes, holding her arms out slightly from her sides.
He was sure he’d never seen anything so beautiful, or so terrifying. She didn’t have that surefooted certainty his sister did after all the years of riding in the show, but she was doing it. And he was gripped by the fear that she was going to fall and break her neck.
He’d never sympathized with any of the Wilders before, but right now, he sympathized with Flynn. His breath caught when she moved again, lowering herself and then throwing one leg over the side of the horse to stand in the stirrup while Starlight continued to gallop around the arena.
She wrapped her arm around the horse’s neck and draped herself along the animal’s side, holding herself steady before using her ab muscles to pull herself into a sitting position before hauling herself up and over the back of the horse again so she could urge the horse into a flat-out run.
She stopped right in front of him, both her and the horse breathing hard.
His own heart was raging.
He kept his expression neutral.
He should send her home. Dammit, he should keep her from being anywhere near him. It would be safer for her all the way around.
Instead, he looked her up and down.
“You’ll do. Come back tomorrow.”