5. Chapter 5
Brynn
Iknow he wants me.
I’m not stupid. I’m not inexperienced. I’ve been around enough people to know the difference between someone who dislikes you and someone who wants you so badly it comes out as hostility.
Beckett Cole wants me. The way he looked at my mouth in the tack room. The way his voice dropped. The way he stepped back like touching me would stop his heart.
The realization is inconvenient. Because I want him too.
Not the wall. Not the scowling, the short sentences, the jaw that never unlocks. I want the man I saw in the barn at midnight. The patient hands on Rebel’s neck. The person who sat on a cold floor in the dark and let a frightened animal come to him on its own time.
I want the man who taped my schedule to his tack room door. Who feeds Rebel first now without being asked. Who watched me work Josie and said “she hasn’t let anyone walk her like that” with his voice cracked open like a door he didn’t mean to leave unlocked.
And apparently I want the man who leaves things for me and pretends he doesn’t.
Two mornings ago, I found a pair of insulated work gloves on the barn office desk. My size. The good kind, thin enough to handle reins but warm enough for a Montana morning. No note.
I asked Jake if he knew where they came from. Jake looked over my shoulder at Beckett, who immediately developed an intense interest in a feed invoice.
I didn’t ask again.
I’ve worn the gloves every morning since.
The wanting is a problem because I didn’t come here for a man. I came here for horses. I came here to build a program with my name on it, and getting tangled up with the foreman is not the plan.
But I also know this: Beckett Cole does good deeds without announcing them.
Covers a shift so someone can be home with a new baby.
Fixes a fence on his day off because he noticed it sagging.
Leaves a bag of carrots in the feed room without a note, the kind Birdie likes, the ones you have to drive twenty minutes to the grocery store to get.
Nobody talks about it. Which means he’s been doing it long enough that it’s just who he is.
It’s Thursday night, three weeks into the program, and I’m doing a last check on the horses before bed when I notice Rebel isn’t eating.
His hay is untouched. His water bucket is full. He’s standing in the back of his stall with his head low and his flanks tucked up tight.
My stomach drops.
I open the stall door. I put my hand on his barrel. His skin is hot. His gut is silent. No sounds. A healthy horse’s gut is a symphony of gurgles and movement. Rebel’s is quiet.
“No,” I say. “No, no, no.”
Colic. The word every horse person dreads. Abdominal pain that can go from manageable to fatal in hours. A horse can’t vomit. If the gut stops moving, things go wrong fast.
I grab my phone. I call the vet. Sawyer Cross answers, his voice flat and all business even at this hour. I give him the symptoms in clipped sentences. He’s forty minutes out. He tells me to get him walking and monitor his vitals every fifteen minutes.
I clip a lead rope to Rebel’s halter. He doesn’t want to move. He paws once, circles, and tries to fold down onto his knees. Lying quietly wouldn’t scare me. Thrashing would. A thousand-pound horse in pain can hurt himself fast in a stall, and right now Rebel can’t seem to get comfortable.
“Come on, buddy.” I ease him forward. Sawyer told me to walk him as long as he’s willing and comfortable, so that’s what I do.
I put pressure on the lead. He resists. I put more pressure. He takes a step. Then another. I get him out of the stall and into the barn aisle and I start walking.
I need help. I need someone who knows this horse and this barn and can help me manage a thousand-pound animal in pain until the vet gets here.
I call Beckett.
He answers on the first ring.
“Rebel’s colicking,” I say.
He doesn’t ask questions. He doesn’t say “are you sure.” He says, “I’m coming,” and the line goes dead.
He’s in the barn in four minutes. Jeans, boots, no hat. His hair is messy and his shirt is untucked and he looks like a man who went from sleep to crisis without stopping. He takes one look at Rebel and his face goes tight in a way I haven’t seen before.
“How long?” he asks.
“I found him ten minutes ago. Hay untouched, no gut sounds, flanks tucked. The vet is forty minutes out.”
“Heart rate?”
“I haven’t checked. I’ve been trying to keep him moving.”
Beckett steps to Rebel’s side. He puts two fingers under the horse’s jaw, against the artery. He counts. His lips move. His eyes are closed.
“Fifty-two,” he says. “Elevated. Has he tried to roll?”
“Not yet.”
We walk. Side by side, with Rebel between us. Up and down the barn aisle. The rhythm of hooves on concrete. Rebel’s head is low and he’s dragging and every few steps he tries to stop and paw at the ground, which means the pain is getting worse.
“Keep moving, buddy,” Beckett says.
Fifteen minutes in, Rebel goes down. His knees buckle and he drops hard, then throws his body sideways.
“Back,” Beckett snaps.
I move because he’s right. There are four steel-shod feet moving in directions I can’t predict, and getting ourselves killed won’t help Rebel.
Beckett stays near his head, out of the arc of his legs, keeping the lead clear so Rebel can’t tangle himself in it.
“Easy, buddy. Easy.”
Rebel tries to roll again. “Come on.” Beckett’s voice changes. Low. Steady. The same voice I heard during the storm. “Up, Rebel. Come on, buddy.”
Rebel rocks onto his chest.
I move in on the other side as he tries to rise. “Come on.”
He scrambles to his feet. One front leg shoots sideways as he finds his balance and the hoof clips Beckett’s forearm. Beckett grunts but doesn’t let go.
Rebel stands, trembling and sweating, eyes wide.
We’re both breathing hard. Beckett has one hand on Rebel’s halter and one on his neck. I have the lead rope gripped so tight my fingers are white.
“Your arm,” I say. There’s a red mark on his forearm where the hoof connected. It’s already swelling.
“It’s fine.”
“Beckett.”
“It’s fine.” He doesn’t look at his arm.
We walk him in short stretches. When he settles enough to stand quietly, we let him. When he gets restless again—pawing, circling, unable to get comfortable—we move.
We trade off. Beckett walks him while I check his vitals and vice versa.
Somewhere in the walking, we become a team.
There’s a sick horse and two people who know what they’re doing and the only thing that matters is keeping him alive until the vet gets here.
Beckett tells me things. Things about Rebel. Things I haven’t heard.
“He was skin and bones when he came off the trailer,” he says. Walking beside me. Rebel between us. “Ribs showing. Worm load that would’ve killed a smaller horse. He wouldn’t let anyone near him for a month. I just sat in his stall. Every day. An hour. Didn’t touch him. Didn’t talk. Just sat.”
“Until he came to you.”
“Took five weeks.”
I look at Beckett over Rebel’s lowered head. His face is open in a way I’ve never seen during the day. Open and tired and worried and completely without defense. The wall is gone. Because there’s no room for it. The wall is a luxury and right now there’s only the horse.
“He’s going to be okay,” I say.
“You don’t know that.”
“I know his gut sounds are coming back.” I put my ear against Rebel’s barrel. Faint gurgles. Soft. But there. “Listen.”
Beckett leans in. His ear against Rebel’s side. We’re on opposite sides of the horse, our heads close, and the barn is quiet except for the faint music of a gut starting to work again.
He closes his eyes. He exhales. The relief moves through his whole body.
“Yeah,” he says. “I hear it.”
Dr. Cross arrives in a truck that looks like it’s been through more emergencies than a field hospital.
He’s tall, broad, and has the bedside manner of a man who saves his patience for the animals.
He nods at us. Walks straight to Rebel and puts his hands on the horse and his whole demeanor changes.
The gruffness drops away. His hands are careful and sure and his voice is gentle in a way that doesn’t match anything else about him.
He examines Rebel, running through all the tests and usual checks while Beckett and I watch, giving him room to work.
Later he gives Rebel a dose of Banamine for the pain and mineral oil through a nasogastric tube to get things moving.
His face gives away nothing until he straightens up and the tension in his shoulders releases about a quarter of an inch.
“He’s more comfortable. I don’t feel anything that has me loading him for surgery right now, but we’re not done watching him.
Check him every hour. No feed until I tell you.
Call me immediately if the pain comes back, his heart rate climbs, or the gut sounds disappear again.
” Then packing up his bag, he adds, “You caught it early.”
“Brynn caught it,” Beckett says. Looking at me. “I was asleep.”
It’s the first time he’s given me credit for anything. Out loud. To another person.
Sawyer glances between us. His expression doesn’t change, but something in his eyes registers the way Beckett is looking at me. He says nothing about it. He clicks his bag shut and walks out.
The man is grumpy and efficient and clearly better with horses than with people. I like him.
Rebel is standing in his stall, looking exhausted. The pain medication is working. His head is dropping. Not the low, sick drop from earlier. The tired drop of a horse whose body is coming back to itself.
We’re standing outside his stall. Side by side. Close enough that I can feel the heat coming off Beckett’s body. We’re both covered in sweat and horse hair and grime.
“Thank you,” Beckett says. Not looking at me. Looking at Rebel. “For calling me.”
“He’s your horse too.”
“He’s not my horse. None of them are. They’re Raiford’s.”
“That’s not true and you know it.”
He turns his head. Looks at me. The crisis stripped the wall away and he hasn’t put it back yet.
“You saved him,” he says.
“We saved him.”
“You caught it. You knew what to do. You made the call.”
“You kept him from tangling himself in that lead when he went down. You kept both of us from doing something stupid. I needed you.”
“You would have figured it out.”
“Beckett. He was panicking. A thousand pounds on concrete with a lead rope he could’ve wrapped around a leg. I couldn’t have managed that safely by myself.”
“You called the vet. You had the right instincts. I just showed up.”
“You just showed up and got kicked in the arm by a panicking horse and didn’t even blink. That’s not ‘just showing up.’”
“It’s what anyone would’ve done.”
“It’s what YOU did. Stop giving it away.”
“Stop giving me credit I don’t deserve!”
“You absolutely deserve it!”
“So do YOU!”
“That’s what I’ve been SAYING!”
We’re facing each other now, breathing hard.
I don’t remember turning. The stall light is throwing shadows across his face and his jaw is doing its thing and my hands are on my hips and we are, impossibly, fighting.
We just spent an hour saving a horse’s life together and we’re standing in this barn arguing about which one of us deserves the credit.
“Are we seriously fighting about this?” I say. “Right now? We’re fighting about who gets credit for saving the horse?”
He stares at me. His chest is heaving. His eyes are dark and wide and wild with something that has nothing to do with Rebel.
“Yes,” he says. “Because you won’t just take the damn compliment.”
“Neither will you!”
He grabs me.
His hands close around my waist and he pulls me into him and his mouth finds mine and the argument ends. It ends completely. Every word I was about to say dissolves against his lips.
This is not a gentle kiss. This is three weeks of fighting and watching and wanting crashing together in a dark barn at midnight. His hands are in my hair and mine are fisted in his shirt and he’s kissing me like he’s angry about it. Like wanting me is the worst thing that’s ever happened to him.
I kiss him back just as hard. I pull him closer and his arms tighten and my boots leave the ground and I don’t care.
He pins me against the stall door and the wood is rough against my back and his body is pressed against mine and I wrap my legs around him and he’s everywhere.
His mouth, his hands, the sound he makes against my throat that is low and rough and desperate.
“Brynn.” My name in his mouth, bitten off and wrecked. He pulls back just enough to look at me. His breathing is ragged. “I’ve been trying not to do this.”
“I know.”
“I can’t stop.”
“I know that too.”
He presses his forehead against mine. I can feel his heartbeat through his shirt. It’s hammering.
“This is a terrible idea,” he says.
“The worst.”
“We work together.”
“We do.”
His eyes are dark. No wall. No distance. Just the man.
“I’m going to kiss you again,” he says.
“Okay.”
He does. Slower this time. Deeper. The desperation settling into something steadier. His arms holding me up and mine around his neck and the taste of coffee and relief.
Somewhere behind us, Rebel shifts in his stall. The hay rustles. A gut gurgles.
He lowers me to my feet. We stand in the dark barn holding each other and we don’t talk about what this means or where it goes or how complicated it’s going to be.
There’s time for that. Tonight there’s just a horse that didn’t die and two people who kept him alive and the simple, terrifying fact of wanting someone and being wanted back.
His hand finds mine. Our fingers lace together. His palm is rough and warm and covers mine completely.
“I should check his vitals in an hour,” I say.
“I’ll stay.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know.”
We sit on the barn floor. Side by side. Backs against the stall wall. Our shoulders touching. Rebel dozes above us. The barn is quiet.
At some point his head tips against mine. At some point my eyes close.
We stay.