Chapter 6 #3
He approached without rushing, his hands open at his sides, his movements deliberate in a way that reminded Rainey of nothing so much as a man walking through a minefield.
The horse watched him come, her ears pinned.
She took one skittering step away, then another, and stopped with her hindquarters pressed to the wall again, but Evander kept coming.
“The cat’s gone,” he said, still in that low voice. “You’re safe. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
Rainey stood frozen at the edge of the porch, watching. Tilly had come to stand beside her, her body pressed against Rainey’s leg, and the dog’s hackles had lowered, but she still trembled with alertness, her eyes fixed on the tree line.
Evander reached the horse. He didn’t grab for her halter, didn’t try to hold her. He just stood beside her, one hand rising slowly, and let her smell his knuckles. Then he touched her neck, light, just the tips of his fingers, and the horse flinched.
“Easy.” He stroked her neck in long, even passes, and Rainey watched the shaking begin to subside, degree by degree, until Sable no longer looked ready to bolt. “Let me see.”
He crouched, and the horse let him, though her muscles stayed bunched. He ran a hand down her side, stopping short of the scrape, studying the wound without touching it. The blood had already started to clot, bright crimson against the dark hide.
“It’s shallow,” he said, more to himself than to Rainey. “She caught herself on the lean-to when she spooked.”
Rainey found her voice. “She’s yours?”
He didn’t look up. “Yes.”
The horse’s panic had faded to a fine tremble, and the wildness in her eyes had dimmed to wariness. “You always keep a horse that spooks at shadows?”
“I keep a horse that needs keeping.” He straightened, his palm still resting on Sable’s neck, and he looked at Rainey for the first time since he’d fired the gun.
“She came off a reservation roundup eight years ago. Untouched. Unbroken. She’d been passed over three times because nobody wanted a horse that wouldn’t trust them. ”
Rainey felt something shift in her chest. She couldn’t name it. Didn’t try. “So you took her.”
“I needed a backcountry horse. She needed someone who wouldn’t fence her in.” He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
Sable blew out a breath and lowered her head. The tension bled out of her spine as Evander’s hand moved down her neck in a slow, steady rhythm.
Rainey thought about all the years she’d spent running from men who wanted to control her, and how she’d learned to tell the difference between a hand that hurt and a hand that steadied.
Sable could tell the difference. That was why she let him touch her.
And that was why Rainey had taken his hand last night and fled into the dark with him.
“How long did it take?” Rainey asked. “Before she let you near her?”
“Months.” He was still stroking the horse’s neck, his movements slow and even.
“I’d leave food at the edge of the clearing and sit on the porch and wait.
Didn’t take the first bite until I’d been doing it for three weeks.
After that, she started coming closer. Took me another month to get a hand on her. ”
“You didn’t force her.”
“She’d had enough of that.” His jaw tightened, and he looked away from her, toward the tree line where the mountain lion had vanished. “Roundups are hard on them. The last thing she needed was another human telling her what to do.”
Rainey looked at the horse. At the blood drying on her side. At the fine, constant tremble in her shoulders, even now, even with Evander’s hand on her neck. She thought about the burn scars on her own skin, hidden under sleeves. The way the body remembered what the mind couldn’t.
“She’s still shaking,” she said.
Without a word, he turned and walked back toward the cabin. She watched him go, baffled, then understood when he came back out carrying a blanket.
He draped it over Sable’s back. The horse flinched at the first touch of the fabric, then settled as the weight of it came down over her.
Evander stayed at her neck, one hand on her cheek, talking too low for Rainey to make out the words. The sound of his voice was enough. The horse’s ears relaxed, and the trembling eased, and after a long moment she leaned into him, just slightly, her weight shifting toward his.
Rainey stood in the cold morning with her arms wrapped around her ribs and Tilly pressed against her leg, and she couldn’t look away.
This was a man who swore up and down he preferred to live alone, but he’d spent months earning the trust of a feral horse nobody wanted, and he had a dog that looked at him like he was a god.
“You’re bad at being alone,” she said.
He didn’t turn around. His hand stayed on Sable’s neck, and his voice came back flat and even. “I live alone.”
“No, you don’t. And I don’t think you really want to.”
He didn’t answer. He turned back to his horse, and she got the distinct impression she had been dismissed.
She walked back toward the cabin, and Tilly followed her, and behind her she heard Evander’s voice again—low, patient, steady—and the soft stamp of Sable’s hooves on the packed dirt of the lean-to.
The man who swore everyone was safer without him kept gathering up the wary and the unwanted and giving them the one thing no one gave him.
A home.