Chapter 26 #2
Briar smiled back. “All right. See you later.” With that, she swiped her clipboard up from the bottom bench in the bleachers, tossed a wave over her shoulder, and continued toward the stables.
Tarr went that way too, entering through a different gate and taking his time as he went through Daisy Chain’s cool down and aftercare.
He finally put her in her stable with a bag of oats and fresh straw, and then he went to stand at Tuck’s side and watch Rosie ride.
It wasn’t surprising to him at all that she’d won Female Rookie of the Year and been the barrel-racing champion.
She was incredible in the saddle, and her horses trusted her explicitly.
She never made a mistake, and as she finished her ride, Tarr said, “How do you even train her?”
Tucker sighed. “I have to look stuff up on the internet, man.” Then he ducked through the fence and started walking toward her, calling, “That was good, but your left elbow is coming up too much when you make that second turn.”
Tarr chuckled to himself. “Left elbow.” No barrel racer needed to be told about their left elbow. But Rosie was paying Tuck good money to be here to train and to become the best, and Tucker did know how to bring that out in a rider.
Tarr left the arena, automatically falling into a prayer. First, that everyone at the farm would be kept safe, animal and human alike, and second, that he and Briar would have an amazing afternoon and evening together.
“Bless her to like me,” he whispered as he got behind the wheel. It was something he’d asked God for several times in the past, but as Tarr uttered the words, something dark entered his mind.
This was not the thing he should be asking for.
He couldn’t make Briar like him any more than God could, and he didn’t want her to be coerced anyway. He frowned to himself as he adjusted the heater, pressed the button to get his seat warming up, and backed away from the arena.
“I just feel like she’s such a match for me,” he said, starting to puzzle through his feelings by speaking out loud. “And why would I feel like that if she’s not meant to feel the same?”
God, of course, did not answer him, but Tarr continued to talk, telling the Lord, “I do want to get married and have a family, whatever that looks like. And not only because my momma wants me to, Lord, but because it feels like what I want. And you know, I want it with her.”
He looked left and right when he reached the stop sign and then pulled out onto the highway, heading for the grocery store to get the bread bowls and broccoli salad that Briar liked.
“She’s a good woman,” he said next. “And that’s all I need: someone good who can keep me in line and remind me that I want to be good too.
She gives me someone to work for, because I want to be the man she deserves. That’s not bad, is it?”
He didn’t want to change everything about himself, though part of him thought he might for Briar. “No,” he said out loud. “I want to be who You want me to be. And hopefully that’s the man that Briar needs, too.”
He finally felt like he’d reached a resolution in his thoughts, and he quieted.
No matter what, he knew he shouldn’t be praying for Briar to like him, but perhaps for his own heart and mind to be opened, so he could see her clearly, and come to know for himself if he really could spend the rest of his life with her.
Tarr had never been very good at fitting into a mold, and Briar had never asked him to.
He went up and down the aisles at the grocery store, getting more of the steel-cut oats she liked for breakfast, in addition to the bread bowls, the broccoli salad, and another bag of the gourmet Caesar that she liked.
She’d told him that she loved winter for lots of reasons, one of which was that it was soup season, and she loved nothing more than a soup-and-salad-dinner on a blistering winter night.
He grabbed another bag of rolls from the bakery before getting himself a new container of protein powder, some frozen mixed berries to go with it, and a pound of sun-dried tomato turkey to make his sandwiches for lunch.
With his grocery shopping done, he returned to the farm, and as he pulled up to Briar’s cheery cabin—under a sky that was already darkening at four-thirty p.m.—Tarr realized that he should be praying for things he could control and change, and that wasn’t anything about Briar.
It was only about himself.
So, as he killed the engine and looked at the bright yellow squares of Briar’s windows, he murmured, “Bless me to know how to change and what not to change to be a man that she could love and marry.”
He wasn’t sure if he was that man right now or not, and he wasn’t sure if Briar had reached the point inside herself that she believed in love and marriage again.
She’d told him she was trying, and that he had caused her to start thinking and feeling things that she hadn’t felt or believed for years.
Just the fact that she had a doctor’s appointment next week told him that, and he added one more prayer to his hour-long conversation with the Lord:
“If it be Thy will, bless her with good news at her appointment…when she finally gets the courage to go to it.”