Chapter 10
LAUREN
M atthew studied me carefully. “It’s alright if you don’t want to tell me.”
I wasn’t expecting him to confront me so bluntly about my past and why I’d come out here to a remote location by myself, leaving my normal life behind.
In all fairness, we’d been having frank discussions about our families almost since I’d met him, so he certainly wasn’t out of line.
For two people who didn’t know each other well, our conversations had been deep and vulnerable, and I felt like I could trust him to keep a secret.
Could I trust everyone else around us, though?
What if he told his brother Sam or a staff member my real name?
Would they sell their story to the press and further jeopardize my privacy? I couldn’t risk it.
“It’s nothing illegal or life-threatening or anything like that,” I promised. “I just needed to get away from some drama back home and clear my head. Does that make sense?”
He smiled, even though I was dodging the question. “Best it can without knowing the details. And I’m not asking for any of those. I will say, I’m sure glad that assistant sent you to the wrong place.”
“Me too.” Sounds of the creek filled the silence as I thought about what to say next. I picked a few blades of grass as I formed the words in my head, wanting to make sure I got them right. “I would tell you everything if I could, Matthew, but I can’t right now.”
His expression was more reserved than before he asked the question. “No worries. It was too forward of me to ask. Guests deserve total privacy.”
“It was fine to ask,” I said quickly, “and I hope I’m more than a guest to you. I feel like we’ve become friends.”
“I’d like to be your friend, Lauren.”
The air between us crackled with what felt like way more than “friend” energy, but we were adults who understood that this was all that could exist right now, and we’d take what we could get.
For a while, Matthew and I both seemed lost in our thoughts.
I wished I could be someone named Lauren Wagonblast, a carefree tourist in Wyoming, not Lauren Cozzi, who was dealing with an ugly divorce and running away from a hungry media cycle.
I’d been silly to think I could hide from my real life out here.
No matter how far you run, even on the fastest horse in the world (which Alma most certainly was not), your past will always catch up with you.
“Let’s ride some more!” Gigi called out to us. She was already pulling on her socks, having finished her wading adventure in the creek.
“I have an idea,” Matthew said. “Are you up for a gallop across the field?”
My pulse rate quickened. “Maybe? I think so?”
He stood up and extended a hand toward me. “That’s good enough for me.”
Running Alma across an open meadow was an experience I would never forget.
An awesome sense of freedom and power surged through me as horse and rider became one, the wind whipping through her mane.
She might not have been the fastest horse out there, and I wasn’t the best equestrian, but that didn’t matter one bit.
Tears streamed from my eyes and a grin stretched across my face as we pounded across the grass toward an imaginary finish line.
“And you thought it was too late for you to get back on a horse,” Matthew teased as we rode back to the ranch, returning to our slower pace.
“I guess Alma and I both have a few more good years in us.”
“More than a few,” he said.
When we got back to the stable, we hung up our tack in a tidy room with tongue and groove paneled walls made of knotty pine, and then we brushed down the horses before putting them out in the pasture.
Once we’d completed those tasks, I assumed we’d all head back to the main buildings together.
Instead, Matthew handed Gigi a pitchfork.
“You go on up,” he said. “We’re going to muck stalls for a little while and feed and water the horses.”
Gigi made a sour face. “Yuck. This is the only part of horses I don’t like. The poop.”
Matthew slung his arm around her thin shoulders. “Has to get done, though.”
She sighed deeply, looking quite forlorn. “I know.”
“I’m happy to help.” I spoke up without even thinking about it first, but I meant what I said.
“No,” Matthew said firmly. “I can’t have a guest mucking stalls.”
At the same time, Gigi cheered. “Yay! Stay and help us. We have an extra pair of barn boots you can wear.”
I smiled at Matthew. “See? It’s decided. I’m helping.”
He shook his head at me. “I can’t let you do that.”
“Why not? Is it an insurance thing? Worried I’m going to slip in a pile of poo and break a leg?”
He laughed as he grabbed a wheelbarrow from a nearby wall. “No, it’s not that. You’re a paying guest, not staff. You shouldn’t have to do any work while you’re here. Especially not this kind of dirty work.”
“Okay, you can pay me.”
He set down the wheelbarrow and put his hands on his hips. “Pay you?”
“I’ll take one of those Silver Sage Ranch caps like the one you were wearing the other day,” I said. “A black one, if you have it.”
He hooked his fingers in the loops of his jeans, and I could tell he was weighing whether or not to keep arguing. “Take the hat, and I’ll throw in a t-shirt.”
“Okay, fine,” I said. “A t-shirt and a hat. Happy now?”
“You got yourself a deal.” He gestured toward a nearby stall. “This way to the boots. Ladies first.”
Minutes later, we were using pitchforks to sift manure out of hay, cracking jokes while we worked. I laughed harder than I had in ages.
“I can’t believe Doug is a horse,” I said as I cleaned his stall. “When I first got to the ranch, you and Walt were discussing his ankle, and I assumed Doug was an employee.”
“He does work here,” Gigi said. “So technically, he is an employee. He just gets paid in hay and oats.”
“It’s an unusual name for a horse,” Matthew agreed.
“He came to us with the name Sir Galahad, but Mom said it didn’t fit him because he feared everything from garden hoses to butterflies.
You’ll see he has a white snip under his nose that looks kind of like a mustache, so Mom started calling him Doug after her brother.
The name stuck. Walt and I are the only ones who ride him, because he spooks so easily. ”
“I could ride him just fine,” Gigi grumbled.
“Did you ever think about selling him,” I asked, “since he’s not very good as a trail horse?”
Matthew frowned. “No one else would have wanted him, and we didn’t want to send him to a horse sanctuary. Doug’s part of the family.”
I tossed a pile of hay. “I’m learning so much about the history of this place today. I’m glad I stayed to help.”
“I thought a city slicker like you would be too fancy for barn work,” Matthew said with a glint in his eye.
“I’ll have you know,” I said haughtily, “that my first pet was a hamster, and I was the one who cleaned his cage every week, all by myself.”
He whistled long and slow. “Impressive. You should have mentioned you had experience with this type of work.”
“See,” I said, “people aren’t always what they seem on the outside. Remember that, Gigi.”
“People think I’m a weirdo,” she said, not sounding too sad about it.
“That’s what they see on the outside because I don’t dress like the other girls, and I don’t want to talk about boys.
They have no idea how fast I can ride a horse or that I know how to take a boy down if he gives me any trouble. Right, Dad?”
“That’s right, sugar. Knee him in the nuts then head butt him in the nose.”
I had the cutest picture in my head of Matthew teaching Gigi self-defense. Good for her. A girl needed to be prepared.
“Can we stop now?” Gigi leaned on the handle of her pitchfork. “I’m tired.”
“Fifteen more minutes,” Matthew said. “Tired is good. It means you worked hard.”
“That’s what you always say.”
I smiled as I tossed manure into the wheelbarrow, enjoying their father-daughter banter.
He could not have been a more different parent than Freddy, who overindulged our kids terribly.
I always had to be the strict parent because someone had to teach the boys how to save their money and show up for their commitments even when they didn’t feel like it.
It annoyed me to no end that he got to be the fun parent all the time.
“I bet your kids never had to muck stalls,” Gigi said, as if she were reading my mind. “Right, Lauren?”
“My sons never mucked stalls,” I admitted, “but I think they would have benefitted from it. Your dad is giving you a chance to develop a strong work ethic. That’s the most important thing in life.
If you have everything handed to you, you don’t learn the value of hard work or how good it feels to accomplish something on your own steam.
I made my sons get summer jobs from an early age because that was important to me, and now they tell me they’re glad I did. ”
Freddy was furious the first time I “forced” Julien to work on his summer break from high school because he couldn’t take the boys to France and Switzerland for months on end, frittering their days away the way he did.
We were long past doing family vacations together by that point, so I told him he could have the first two weeks of summer to travel with the boys, and everything from there on had to be spent working at least a part-time job in the city.
If they couldn’t find their own work, I had plenty for them to do at my office.
Freddy had called me a “jejune, workaholic American” to which I replied, “This workaholic American has been supporting your ass for twenty years” and that ended the summer job argument.
“I’m going to raise horses here at Silver Sage when I grow up,” Gigi said, her voice singing with pride. “If Dad lets me, that is. I want to breed Appaloosas.”