Chapter Fourteen
Jonah Linton held a pitchfork the way a man held a snake he’d just discovered in his boot.
Both hands clamped around the handle at mid-shaft, elbows locked, the tines angled toward the ground like he planned to stab the earth rather than move hay with it.
Logan watched from the stable gate, worked his jaw, and decided, for the third time that morning, that patience counted as a virtue and he could stand to practice more of it.
“Lower on the handle.” Logan stepped forward and adjusted Jonah’s grip. “Left hand at the base, right hand about halfway up. You ain’t fencin’ with it, you’re scoopin’.”
Beside him, Grace leaned against the corral fence with both arms hooked over the top rail, watching her brother wrestle with hay as if it owed him money. She’d left Miriam with Pa on the porch, and the old man had taken to the job with a smile hiding beneath that mustache of his.
“Here.” Mason jogged over and grabbed a second pitchfork. “Watch me. You drive it in at an angle, like this, then scoop up and toss. Smooth. One motion.”
The hay arced through the air and landed in the trough in a clean pile. Textbook. Even Logan had to admit the kid threw a decent forkful when he bothered to do it right.
Jonah tried it.
Drove the tines in crooked, yanked up too fast, and sent hay spraying in every direction, including his own face. He sputtered and spat out a piece of timothy grass.
“That’ll happen.” Thomas drifted over from the water pump, drying his hands on his trousers because the man had never used a towel in his life. “Took Mason about a week before he stopped feedin’ the hay to himself instead of the horses.”
“It did not take a week.”
“It took eight days. I counted.”
Grace pushed off the fence. “Let me try.”
Logan pinched the bridge of his nose.
He appreciated the enthusiasm. He did. Really. But the next twenty minutes played out like a demonstration of everything that could go wrong between a city-raised woman and a working ranch.
She tried the pitchfork. Same result as Jonah, except she also managed to step on the tines and catch the handle across the bridge of her nose when it swung up.
Then she moved on to filling the water trough, which involved pumping the well handle, which she did too hard on the upstroke and popped the lever clean out of its housing.
Mason fixed it in five minutes while Grace apologized four times.
After that, Thomas handed her a brush and pointed her to one of the geldings in the near stall, because grooming a horse ranked about as simple as ranch work got.
Except the gelding, a wall-eyed gray named Captain, who spooked at everything, including his own shadow, took one look at Grace approaching with the brush and sidestepped into the water bucket, which flipped and soaked her boots and the bottom six inches of her skirt.
“He don’t like new people,” Thomas shrugged. “Give him a minute.”
“A minute? He just drenched me.”
“That’s his way of sayin’ howdy.”
Meanwhile, Jonah had graduated from pitchfork disaster to attempting the grain buckets, and, credit where it landed, the man poured straighter than he forked.
Mason walked him through the feed schedule, which bin held which grain, how much each horse got based on size and workload, and Jonah nodded along with the focus of someone who genuinely intended to remember all of it.
Good. Fine. Logan could work with that.
Grace, though. Grace squared up to Captain again with the brush raised like a weapon, and Captain rolled his eyes and pressed himself against the far wall of the stall.
“Easy, bud.” She inched forward. “I’m just gonna brush you. Just a nice, gentle...”
Captain sneezed on her.
Full blast. Right in the face. The kind of sneeze that came with a spray of horse snot and bits of grain, and Grace froze with her eyes shut and her mouth clamped into a line so tight it nearly disappeared.
Mason doubled over laughing. Thomas covered his face with both hands. Even Jonah, who’d given up on the pitchfork and sat on a hay bale eating an apple, shook his head and grinned.
Logan handed her his handkerchief.
“Okay,” Grace wiped her face. “Okay. That horse hates me.”
“He don’t hate you. He’s just particular.”
“Particular. Sure.” She balled up the handkerchief and shoved it in her apron pocket. “Is there anythin’ on this ranch I can touch without it explodin’, flippin’ over, or sneezin’ in my face?”
“Come on.” Logan tilted his head to the far end of the stable. “There’s somebody I want you to meet.”
The last stall on the left sat apart from the others, wider by two feet, with a window cut into the back wall that let afternoon light pour across the straw. Logan unlatched the gate and swung it open, and the mare inside lifted her head from the hay net and blinked at them.
Penny.
A chestnut Morgan with a blaze running crooked down her nose and a disposition so calm she could sleep through a thunderstorm. Fifteen years old. Broad in the back, easy in the gait, and so gentle-mouthed she’d take a carrot from a baby’s hand without so much as a nick.
Ma’s horse.
The horse Ma had ridden every day for eight years, brushed every morning, and talked to every evening.
The horse that’d stood in this stall since the day Ma died and nobody had ridden since, because riding Penny would’ve meant sitting where Ma had sat, and none of them could bring themselves to do it.
“This is Penny.” Logan stepped into the stall and ran his hand down the mare’s neck. “She belonged to Ma.”
Grace’s face changed. The set of her mouth softened, and she moved into the stall slowly, the way she moved around Miriam when the baby dozed, like the air itself might crack if she pushed through it too fast.
Penny swung her head to Grace and blew warm air through her nostrils. Grace held out one hand. Palm up. Fingers loose. The mare dropped her nose into Grace’s palm and lipped at it, searching for a treat, and then, when no treat appeared, just rested her muzzle there.
“Hey, girl.” Grace curled her fingers and scratched under Penny’s jaw. “You’re a sweet one, ain’t you?”
Penny leaned into the scratch and closed her eyes.
And the thing in his chest that he’d been trying real hard to file under nothing important for about three weeks now shifted again, and this time it had a name, and the name was the kind of word a man like Logan didn’t use lightly, so he just sat there with it and let it be true.
“She likes you.” He cleared his throat. “She don’t do that for everybody. Thomas tried to pet her last spring, and she turned her whole backside to him.”
“Can’t say I blame her.”
“I want you to have her.”
Grace’s hand stopped mid-scratch. “What?”
“Penny. She’s yours.”
“Logan, I can’t take your Ma’s horse.”
“You ain’t takin’ her. I’m givin’ her. There’s a difference.”
“She’s your Ma’s. That’s too much. I don’t even know how to ride.”
“I’ll teach you.”
Grace looked at the mare. Penny opened one eye and bumped her nose against Grace’s hand until the scratching resumed.
“She’s been standin’ in this stall for two years with nobody to ride her.” Logan leaned against the stall wall. “My Ma would’ve hated that. She’d have wanted Penny out on the trails, workin’, breathin’ fresh air. And she’d have wanted her with somebody who treats her right.”
Grace bit her lip. Then she pressed her forehead against Penny’s neck and stayed there for a few breaths, and the mare curved her head around and rested her chin on Grace’s shoulder.
“Alright.” Grace’s voice came out muffled against the horse’s coat. “But if I fall off and break somethin’, that’s on you.”
“You ain’t gonna fall off.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know Penny. She’d sooner lie down and die than dump a rider. Gentlest horse in the county.”
Twenty minutes later, he had Penny saddled and led her into the yard. Grace stood by the mounting block, looking at the stirrup the way Jonah had looked at the pitchfork.
“Okay.” Logan patted the saddle. “Hop on up.”
“That’s... real high.”
“It’s a horse, Grace, not a church steeple.”
“From down here, it looks about the same.”
So, he changed the plan. Instead of putting her up alone, which would’ve ended with Grace in the dirt and Penny standing over her looking embarrassed for both of them, he swung up into the saddle first and held out his hand.
“Come on. You’ll ride up front. I’ll steer.”
She grabbed his hand, he pulled her up, and she landed sideways across the saddle in front of him, which, no, that wouldn’t work. He shifted her around until she sat forward with her back against his chest and her hands on the pommel.
“Hold here. Firm. And just... lean with the horse. She turns, you turn. Don’t fight it.”
“What if she goes fast?”
“She won’t go fast.”
“But what if she does?”
“She’s fifteen years old, Grace. She ain’t gone fast since the Grant administration.”
He nudged Penny forward, and the mare stepped out of the yard at a walk so smooth it could’ve rocked a cradle. Grace stiffened against his chest for the first few strides, all locked joints and white knuckles on the pommel. Then, somewhere between the barn and the first gate, the rhythm caught her.
Her grip loosened.
Her spine unclenched, one vertebra at a time.
She settled against him, her shoulder blades pressed into his chest through the flannel, and the top of her head came up to about his chin.
Her hair smelled like the soap she used, the lavender kind she made from flowers she’d dried on the kitchen windowsill.
They rode the property line past the south pasture, where the new creek stones caught the sun.
At the creek crossing, Penny stopped to drink, and Grace leaned forward to watch the water run over the stones Logan had laid last week.
A trout flashed silver under the surface, there and gone, and Grace made a small noise in her throat.
Logan had crossed this creek about ten thousand times.
The trout had always lived there. But, seeing it register on somebody else’s face—someone who’d grown up next to the Hudson and probably thought a fish meant something gray and dead on a dock—made him appreciate the creek all the more.
Grace asked about everything.
What grew where. Why the creek ran shallow on one side and deep on the other. What the gray bird perched on the fencepost ate. Whether the mountains had names. How long it took to ride to town. Whether he’d ever seen a bear up close. Whether the bear had been friendly.
“Bears ain’t friendly, Grace.”
“Not ever?”
“Not unless your definition of friendly includes bitin’ your arm off.”
“I bet some of ’em are nice. Like big dogs.”
“They are nothin’ like big dogs.”
“You don’t know every bear.”
He laughed.
Penny’s ears swiveled back at the sound like she’d forgotten what it meant.
Honestly? He’d forgotten too. He’d been running this ranch for two years with his jaw clenched and his fists tight and his whole body braced against the next bad thing.
Somewhere in all that bracing, he’d misplaced the part of himself that could just.. . ride a trail and laugh about bears.
Grace shifted the reins in her hands. He’d given them to her about a mile back, keeping his own hands over hers at first, then pulling back as she found the feel of it. Penny responded to her like she’d been waiting, turning easy on the lightest touch.
“She’s wonderful.” Grace ran one hand down the mare’s mane. “She’s just... wonderful.”
“Yeah.” Logan looked at the back of Grace’s head, at the way the late sun turned her dark hair coppery at the edges. “She sure is.”
And he meant the horse. Mostly. Mostly, he meant the horse.
They turned for home, and somewhere on that ride the word rearranged itself in his head.
Home had been the ranch and the land and the work for so long, he’d stopped questioning it.
But Grace was warm against his chest, and her hair smelled like wind and the soap she used, and he thought if she ever left this place again, she’d take the word with her.
He reined Penny up to the porch rail and swung down first.
Then he reached up for Grace.
She braced both hands on his shoulders and slid off the saddle. The motion brought her close, real close—closer than the horse or the help required—and he caught her at the waist. As her boots touched ground, neither of them stepped back.
Her hands stayed on his shoulders. His hands stayed at her waist. The evening air ran cool between the mountains and carried the smell of pine smoke from the chimney.
She tipped her chin up and looked at him, close enough that the freckles across her nose separated into individual constellations. That her breath landed warm on his jaw. If he leaned forward, just a fraction, just the smallest distance a man could cover and still call it a choice—
“Hey! You two are gonna stand out there moonin’ at each other all night, or is somebody gonna come cook? ‘cause Rafe’s got his hand on a skillet and I’m pretty sure he’s fixin’ to make that stew again. Mason is not a happy camper about it!”
Jonah. In the doorway. Grinning like a man who’d just caught something and planned to hold it over everybody’s heads for the foreseeable future.
Grace dropped her hands and stepped back. Color flooded up her neck, visible even in the failing light.
“I better...” She jerked her thumb toward the house. “Before your father poisons everybody.”
“Yeah. Go. Go on.”
She turned and crossed the porch in three quick strides, ducking past Jonah, who winked at Logan before following her inside. The screen door banged shut.
Logan stood by the horse.
Penny bumped her nose against his shoulder and huffed.
“Yeah.” He rubbed the mare’s ear. “I know.”
Because the truth had gotten too big for that locked room in his chest. The furniture he’d been rearranging in there for weeks had settled into a shape he recognized, a shape with a name he hadn’t said out loud yet and couldn’t quite bring himself to think all the way through.
But it started with the way she’d pressed her back against his chest on that trail and asked about bears.