Chapter 4 #2
The bay needs hoof work urgently and the bay isn’t ready for hoof work yet.
Those two realities are on a collision course and neither of us is wrong about the piece we’re holding.
The other thing is this: I don’t back down.
Not from anyone.
Not from my father when he came home mean.
Not from the men in this industry who told me a woman couldn’t do this work.
Not from Lee Simms, standing in a feed room with his jaw set and his eyes hard and his body filling the doorway in a way that should feel threatening and instead feels like standing too close to a fire.
“We can compromise,” I say. My voice is steady.
My pulse is not. “Get him comfortable with hoof handling first. Just picking up the feet—no trimming, no tools, nothing invasive. You do the approach, build the trust for the handling. Once he’ll let you hold his feet, I come in and do the work.
We get Grace to sedate him lightly with Dorm for the first session if we need to—just enough to take the edge off, not enough to knock him out.
It protects the rehab and it protects the hooves. ”
Lee is quiet.
His jaw works—the same tell I remember from the feed store, the one that means he’s processing something he doesn’t want to process.
His eyes haven’t left mine.
This close, in this light, I can see things I couldn’t see from across a barn—the gold flecks in his irises, the fine lines at the corners of his eyes that weren’t there years ago, the specific shape of his mouth when he’s holding words back.
I need to leave this feed room immediately.
“That’s reasonable,” he says finally. Grudging. Like the word costs him something.
“I know it is. I’m a reasonable person.”
Something flickers across his face.
Not a smile—Lee doesn’t smile anymore, not that I’ve seen—but the ghost of one.
The faintest tremor at the corner of his mouth, there and gone so fast I almost convince myself I imagined it.
Almost.
I leave the feed room before either of us says something we can’t take back.
My heart is hammering.
My palms are sweating inside my gloves.
The October air hits my face when I step outside and I gulp it like a woman surfacing from deep water.
This is a problem.
This is a very specific, very dangerous problem that I do not have time for and cannot afford and would not choose if someone gave me every option in the world.
I am not going to develop feelings for Lee Simms.
I am not going to stand in small rooms with Lee and notice the color of his eyes.
I’m not. I’m absolutely not.
Rose would know what to do. Rose always knew what to do with feelings—she welcomed them, examined them, let them breathe.
I shove mine into a box and sit on the lid.
It’s a less healthy approach, but it’s gotten me this far.
The rasp slips at 1:47 PM.
I’m working the second mare from pasture four—older horse, calm, no issues with handling. Routine trim. I’ve done ten thousand of these.
My hands know the choreography better than they know how to write my own name.
But I’m tired— 4:30 mornings at Earl’s, full farrier days packed with clients, and evenings spent doing ranch maintenance and driving Earl to appointments and trying to keep an eighty-acre property from collapsing under its own neglect.
Tired makes you sloppy. Sloppy gets you hurt.
The rasp catches on a clip I set too high and kicks sideways across the hoof wall and straight into the heel of my left palm.
A hot, clean line of pain.
I pull my hand back by reflex and blood wells up immediately—bright red, a three-inch slice across the fleshy part of my palm where the skin is thin from years of tool work.
“Shit.” I set the mare’s hoof down and straighten, clamping my right hand over the cut.
Blood seeps between my fingers.
It’s not deep—I’ve done worse, much worse—but it’s in a bad spot.
The heel of the hand gets used for everything in farrier work.
This is going to slow me down for a week at least.
Lee is beside me before I process that he’s moved.
One second and he’s fifteen feet away by the fence.
The next he’s right here—close, too close, his hand reaching for mine with a speed and certainty that bypasses whatever careful distance he’s been maintaining for two weeks.
Instinct.
The reaction of a man whose first impulse, always, is to move toward the thing that’s hurt.
“Show me.” His voice is low, direct. Not asking.
“It’s nothing. Rasp slipped.”
“Show me, Bex.”
I show him.
He takes my hand.
Both of his, around mine.
Lifting it, turning it toward the light, his fingers cradling my palm open so he can see the cut.
His hands are bigger than mine.
Rougher in different places—calluses from reins and rope instead of rasps and hammers, the weathering of a man who works leather and horses and ranch fence wire.
His grip is firm without being tight.
Careful.
The hold of someone who knows how to handle something injured without causing more damage.
I stop breathing.
Not dramatically—not a gasp, not a catch.
Just a quiet cessation, like my lungs have decided they have better things to do than function while Lee is holding my hand in a barn in October.
His thumb moves across the base of my palm, just below the cut, checking the depth.
A clinical gesture. A practical gesture. A gesture that sends a line of electricity from my wrist to the base of my skull and makes every hair on my arm stand up.
His wedding ring presses against the inside of my wrist.
Cool metal. Rose’s ring. On Rose’s husband’s hand.
Against my pulse point, where the blood runs closest to the surface, where he can probably feel my heart rate doing something humiliating.
“It’s not deep,” he says. His eyes are on the cut. His thumb is still on my palm. “But it needs to be cleaned and wrapped. You can’t work with an open wound around horses.”
“I know that. I’ve been doing this for twelve years.” My voice comes out thinner than I want it to.
Breathier.
The voice of a woman whose hand is being held by a man who hasn’t voluntarily touched another human being in what I can imagine is quite a while, and who is touching her now with the kind of focused concentration that makes the rest of the world go soft at the edges.
“First aid kit’s in the tack room.” He’s already moving, his hand still around mine, guiding me like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Like his body has forgotten the rules his brain set up.
Like this—his skin on my skin, his fingers wrapped around my wrist, the casual certainty of a man who knows where he’s going and is taking you with him—is something it remembers how to do even when the rest of him has shut down.
The tack room. Small. Warm.
The same tack room with the thin walls.
He lets go of my hand long enough to pull the first aid kit off the shelf, and the absence of his touch is a physical thing—a cold spot, a vacancy.
He comes back, opens the kit and takes my hand again.
Antiseptic wipe first.
It stings and I hiss through my teeth.
His eyes flick to my face—a check, quick, making sure the pain is manageable—then back to the wound.
He’s focused in a way I’ve only seen him focus on the horses.
That total, single-pointed attention.
Like nothing else exists.
Like my hand is the only thing in the world that requires his care right now, and he is going to care for it properly, thoroughly, because that is what Lee does with broken things.
He wraps the gauze.
Clean, tight, efficient.
His fingers work the bandage around my palm, over the heel, around the thumb.
I look at his face.
He’s close enough that I can see the individual stitches of concentration between his eyebrows, the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw, the way his lips press together when he’s concentrating.
Close enough that if I leaned forward six inches—
He finishes the wrap and tucks the end.
Lee holds my hand for one second longer than he needs to—one second where his fingers are still curled around my wrist and his eyes are on the bandage and neither of us moves—and then he lets go.
He steps back, and the emotional distance between us comes barrelling back like a door swinging shut.
“Keep it clean. Change the bandage tonight.” His voice is back to flat. Professional. The wall is up. Whatever his hands just did, his brain has already filed it under “never happened.”
“Thank you,” I say. My voice sounds almost normal. Almost.
He nods once and leaves the tack room.
I hear his boots on the barn aisle, steady and even, walking away like nothing happened.
Because to him, nothing did.
He saw an injury. He treated it. End of story.
I stand in the tack room and press my bandaged hand against my chest and feel my heart hammering against it and know—with the same certainty I know how to hold a rasp, how to read a hoof, how to position myself under a thousand-pound animal—that I am in very, very serious trouble.
I don’t breathe normally until I’m off Sharp Shooter Ranch.
Earl has a bad day.
I come home from the ranch to find him on the couch instead of the porch, which is the first sign.
Earl Dawson doesn’t lie down during daylight hours.
He considers it a personal failing on par with leaving a gate open or letting a horse stand in wet mud.
The man once worked a twelve-hour branding day with a broken rib because “the cows don’t care about my bones.”
The chemo hit him hard this round.
He’s gray-skinned and hollow-eyed and when he coughs it sounds like something inside him is coming loose.
I make broth because it’s the only thing he’ll keep down and sit with him while he sleeps.
I even check his temperature twice, call the oncologist’s after-hours line, and get a nurse who tells me everything I already know: this is normal, this is the treatment working, this is what fighting cancer looks like from the inside.
This is what it looks like.
A seventy-year-old man who could once throw a calf over his shoulder, curled under a quilt on a couch, too weak to walk to the bathroom without help.