Chapter 4
“Long story short—an old rodeo girlfriend of mine called me and told me her husband was going to blow a gasket because she’d bought the horse at an auction, but the investment proved to be a bad one when he wouldn’t let anyone get within five feet of him,” Renata explains, walking shoulder to shoulder with Grace toward the stables.
“I used my powers of persuasion and told the husband we’d work on him, and promised that when we were through, they’d be able to sell him for double what they paid.
I thought it’d be a quick turnaround, but then we actually got the horse. ”
She sucks on her teeth, tilting her head, and adds, “Then Gary decided to quit.”
Grace glances over at her. “I thought he left because the heat got to him.”
Renata grimaces slightly, then gives Grace a faux-innocent smile.
“I may have fibbed a little bit about that.” She must recognize the look of confusion swirling with fear forming on Grace’s face, because she adds quickly, “Look, Gary was stubborn as shit. Ask anyone here. The horse is wild as wild comes, but nothing an experienced, patient trainer can’t manage. ”
“How long did he work on him before he left?”
A pause, pregnant and lingering. Grace practically knows the answer before Renata can even spit it out. “About a day.”
Grace’s brows pull together. Her steps slow, nearly coming to a stop as she holds up her hands. “Hold on now. What exactly am I walking into?”
Renata sighs, unsurprised by Grace’s reaction.
“I’m tellin’ you, Grace, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
We let Gary get too comfortable. He was used to doing things his way and refused to try new methods.
He took things too fast, and the horse put him in his place.
There may have been a little bit of a kick involved, but he was fine. No permanent damage.”
Grace’s eyes widen. “Renata…”
“C’mon,” the woman urges, grabbing on to Grace’s arm to encourage her to keep walking.
“Don’t let Gary’s stupidity scare you away.
You make up your own mind. If you meet him and want to hightail it out of here, I’ll put you in our nicest truck and send you home with a Tupperware full of enchiladas. ”
It’s all Grace can do to continue to keep step with this determined woman who doesn’t seem to understand what it’s like to not get her way.
Grace wonders how the conversation between her and Gary must’ve gone, wonders just how stubborn he must’ve been, because there doesn’t seem to be a single problem in the universe Renata Caldwell can’t finesse her way out of.
The horse comes into view as they approach the metal ring.
He’s a young tobiano—maybe five or six—with a sorrel base and big, irregular white patches.
Grace clocks a few things about him apart from his appearance right away: He’s had little to no interaction with humans, likely has been touched seldom if ever.
He’s afraid, evidenced by the way he doesn’t seem to want to stop moving his feet, and he’s lively.
Fast as all get-out. A man with long gray hair and a well-worn straw Stetson stands in the ring with him, smartly keeping a wide berth as the animal runs back and forth, back and forth, with no discernible destination—anything to protect himself from the danger he feels is imminent every time the man gets closer.
“Pretty, isn’t he?” Renata asks.
Grace nods, then jerks her chin in the direction of the man. “Who’s that?”
Renata leans her forearms onto the metal bars and smiles. “Forty. He’s been with us since my daddy was still running things. Not much of a horse trainer, as you can see, but one hell of a hand and a great cook. You’ll get to see for yourself later at supper.”
Still observing, clocking the way the horse refuses to even look in Forty’s direction, Grace prods, “So, he’s just risking his life for the fun of it?”
Renata chuckles. “He’s been more successful than Gary. The horse wasn’t scared of him; he just plain disliked him. Saw something we didn’t, I suppose.”
Grace doesn’t doubt that—in her experience, horses don’t even have to interact with a person to understand their makeup. They can immediately sense the goodness—or the malice—in someone’s soul.
Renata waves to Forty, and he walks with a bowlegged gait over to them, ruefully shaking his head. The woman smiles and nods in Grace’s direction. “Forty, this is Grace. She’s a trainer, here to see if she’s gonna take Gary’s job.”
Forty tips his hat and puts out a hand, one that Grace squeezes and notices is covered in the kind of leathery calluses forged over years of hard labor. “Pleasure to meet you, Grace.”
“Likewise.”
“Ever tame a wild horse before?” he asks, an eyebrow raised.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, then,” Forty says, nodding. He reaches over to the opening of the enclosure and pops up the lock. Holding it open for her, he smiles. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
There is one objective and one objective only for Grace’s first time meeting this horse: Do not become an enemy.
It’s simple but not easy, and her success in this endeavor will be a good indication of whether she’s cut out for this.
Whether they are a good match. As important as it is for him to be exposed to humans to relieve some of that fear of the unknown, she knows taking it slow is the only way they’re going to make any substantial progress.
And since Renata has yet to give her an official deadline, she doesn’t think it’s necessary to rush it.
Instead, she starts with something easy.
Hal taught her the method when she was a teenager and still a little afraid of wild horses and their unbound power.
“It’s a dance,” he’d said, walking confidently toward a horse until it relented and made eye contact with him.
Then, he’d turned his back and walked the other direction, the horse visibly relaxing in his wake. “A catch and release.”
Grace echoes that now, her feet moving in those same confident steps.
This particular horse is definitely more stubborn than she’d hoped, unwilling to give her even a slight side-eye as she approaches.
He keeps running away, fast and strategic in his efforts to put as much space between them as possible.
“All right now,” she says softly, planting her boots farther into the dirt.
Her strides are slow and purposeful, cutting him off at the pass with a careful mix of authority, patience, and gentleness. “C’mon.”
Straight-on eye contact—a feat that usually takes her about fifteen minutes to accomplish—takes nearly two hours.
And even then, it’s fleeting. She has to repeat the exercise more than a dozen times before he relents and gives her any sort of quarter, finally standing still for nearly thirty seconds.
And then he’s off again, pounding his hooves into the dirt with so much force that the earth seems to shake beneath them.
Eventually, they figure out their own dance.
It’s not fluid or comfortable yet—more clunky and apprehensive than anything else—but it’s something.
Near the end of the session, Grace has managed to establish an extremely tentative level of trust, so much so that she can even get him to start running in the direction she determines instead of in his previously unpredictable zigzags.
The last thing she does is bring out a training flag, which she uses with varying levels of success to direct him, and also get him used to objects moving closer and closer into his personal space.
By the time the dinner bell rings and Grace has corralled him safely into the stables, she thinks she might actually have a shot at this.
Alone and riding somewhat of a high from a challenging but rewarding first session, Grace walks back to the bunkhouse.
She’s smiling to herself when a familiar sound hits her, turning her stomach and causing her heart to thud a little harder: cacophonous laughter and shouting echoes from within the walls of the bunkhouse.
The howling of wolves preparing for slaughter.
Halcyon’s bunkhouse and ranch hands may be unknown to her, but at the same time, she knows their kind like the back of her hand—the obnoxiousness of large groups of men, the unspoken danger that lingers between the lines of their jovial conversation.
There’s a cruel type of camaraderie that links them all, a shared belief that their opinions are law, that their desires are paramount.
At Braxton, anytime she entered a space in which they were congregating, the air would shift.
Their eyes would snap to her, scanning up and down her body with leering, predatory grins etched onto their lips.
A litany of comments would inevitably follow, some made directly, others among one another, as if she weren’t standing directly in front of them.
Grace had learned very early on in her tenure there that the only way to get through it was to tune it out—to not give them the satisfaction of reacting.
Which is exactly what she intends to do as she walks through the barn door of Halcyon’s bunkhouse.
Her hackles are already up, ready to protect her from familiar foes.
Her fists involuntarily clench at her sides as she takes in the scene, noticing a great deal of things very quickly.
First, and perhaps most notably, there’s little fanfare when she enters the room.
The Halcyon hands are scattered about the space doing various things—a couple are tucked into their bunks with earbuds in, one is attempting to polish a pair of boots that appear to be permanently scuffed, and three stand in the expansive kitchen, backs turned as they focus on dinner-related tasks, completely unaware of her presence.
In fact, not a single person even acknowledges her existence, which is strange and wonderful and confusing all at once.