1. Chapter 1 #2
He puts the horse’s leg down. Gently. Even angry, his hands on the animal are careful. He straightens to his full height, which is a full ten inches above my full height, and he looks down at me with an expression that is technically professional but tonally equivalent to “over my dead body.”
“I’m sure you’re very qualified, Ms. Hartley.
” His voice is even. Controlled. The kind of controlled that costs effort.
“But these horses have a routine. They have a system. They have a handler they trust. You can’t walk into a barn and rearrange an operation because you’ve got a clipboard and a title. ”
“It’s a notebook, actually.” I hold it up. “And I’m not rearranging your operation. I’m building a new one alongside it. Your routine stays until I have a better one ready. Which I will. Because that’s what I do.”
We stare at each other. He’s a wall. A six-foot-two wall made of denim and bad attitude and hands that are clenched at his sides like he’s trying not to say the fourteen things he wants to say.
I’ve been stared down by stallions that outweigh me by twelve hundred pounds. A grumpy cowboy in a dusty hat is not going to make me blink.
“Elise.” He doesn’t take his eyes off me. “Can I have a word?”
“You can have several,” Elise says. “But the answer is going to be the same one Raiford already gave you.”
His jaw tightens again. I’m starting to think that jaw has two settings: clenched and more clenched.
“Fine.” He turns back to the horse. Picks up a brush. Starts grooming the gray with long, steady strokes. “The feeding schedule is on the tack room door. Turnout rotation is on the whiteboard. Vet records are in the office binder.”
He’s done talking to me. I’ve been dismissed. Not rudely, exactly. Just completely. He’s returned his attention to the thing that matters to him, which is the horse, and I’ve been filed under “weather event to endure.”
But here’s the thing.
As I watch him brush the gray, I see his hands change.
Not the words, not the posture, not the attitude.
The hands. They move on the horse with a gentleness that contradicts everything he just said to me.
Long, slow strokes. Following the lay of the coat.
His fingers find a spot behind the gelding’s ear and the horse drops its head and blows out a long breath and leans into him. Trusting him. Choosing him.
A horse that leans into your touch like that doesn’t do it for a hard man. A horse that sighs against your shoulder has been met with patience and consistency and the kind of quiet attention that can’t be faked.
The man brushing that horse is not the man who just spoke to me.
I file this too. Not in the “irrelevant” folder. In a different one. One I don’t have a label for yet.
“Thank you, Mr. Cole,” I say. Professional. Pleasant. The voice I use on every ranch, with every man who thinks the barn belongs to him and the woman with the plan is an intruder. “I look forward to working with you.”
He grunts. Like a fence post with vocal cords.
Elise catches my eye and gives me a look that says “I warned you” and “I’m sorry” and “give it time” all in one glance. I give her a look back that says “you owe me” and follow her out of the barn.
Outside, the sun is lower. Golden. The kind of light that makes everything look like a painting, which is annoying because I’m trying to be professionally focused and the ranch keeps being gorgeous.
“He’ll come around,” Elise says. Walking ahead of me. The braid swinging.
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because he’s good with the horses and you’re good with the horses and good horse people recognize each other. It just takes them a while because they’re both stubborn.”
“You’re calling me stubborn?”
“I’m calling you both stubborn. You drove eleven hours from Texas for a job you’ve never seen in person. That’s either confidence or stubbornness and in my experience they’re often the same thing.”
She’s right. She’s annoyingly right. I drove eleven hours because I saw the photos of the property and the horse list and the job description and I knew.
The way I know when a horse has potential.
The way I know when a piece of land can hold something great.
I looked at the Wylde ranch listing and I felt it in my body, the pull, the certainty that this was the place where I’d build the thing I’ve been building toward my whole career.
I just didn’t factor in the human obstacle. The tall, scowling, irritatingly competent human obstacle with the hands of a sculptor and the communication skills of a rock.