Chapter 4 #2
“Guilty. It worked. Didn’t it? I got him to finally call Red with that stunt.” Emma turns to me with an expression I recognize and fear. “Josh, why don’t you show Lindsay the horses while I check on the crew?”
“Emma...”
“Go on. Lindsay probably wants to see the pretty animals, not just the business side.”
Before I can object, my sister has disappeared into the barn, leaving Lindsay and me alone in the muddy yard. She looks down at her ruined clothes and laughs. “I probably shouldn’t get near any animals in this condition. I smell like their lunch.”
“The horses won’t mind. They’re used to the smell of grain. Like you said, they’ll be all over you.” She smells good, making me want to be all over her too. As a horse shifter, I appreciate her scent of grain while the human side is just enjoying her pheromones and natural scent.
We walk toward the pasture where our riding horses graze, and I watch Lindsay’s reaction carefully. Most women either squeal about how cute they are or immediately want to pet them. Lindsay observes them with the analytical attention she’s been giving everything else.
“They’re beautiful.” She leans against the fence rail, studying the horses with genuine appreciation. “Do you ride them, or are they just for breeding?”
“Both. That bay mare is Duchess, and she’s one of our best trail horses. The chestnut is Thunder. He’s a show horse but also does ranch work.”
“What about that one?” Lindsay points to a large black horse standing apart from the others.
“That’s Midnight. He’s mine.” I can’t keep the pride out of my voice. “Quarter horse, fifteen years old, and smarter than most people I know.”
“He’s gorgeous.” Lindsay watches Midnight graze, and something in her expression makes me curious. “Is it weird to you, to be a horse shifter and breed horses?”
I startle slightly. “I wasn’t sure you’d detected that about me.”
She nods. “I noticed it at the restaurant, but since our shifter status never came up…”
I nod. “It’s impolite to just blurt out questions about it to a stranger.”
She frowns slightly. “Is that a hint that I shouldn’t have asked?”
I adjust my position against the post. “Not at all. You don’t feel like a stranger.”
Lindsay smiles, looking satisfied. “Neither do you.”
I want to kiss her, but I hold back. It’s too soon for that, and I’m not a teenager with his first crush.
“To answer your question, it’s not that strange.
I’m a horse shifter, but that doesn’t make me a horse.
I share their instincts and senses along with their form sometimes, but I’m always aware of who I am and have my full intelligence in either form.
A horse has been domesticated to the point of needing humans, for the most part, other than the wild horses, so it’s a mutually beneficial relationship. ”
She nods, still not telling me what kind of shifter she is. I can smell the pheromones, but I don’t recognize exactly what her form is. She must be rare, which fits with what I’m uncovering about her. “What about you? Are you a unicorn shifter?”
She laughs, though her cheeks flush. “I wish. That would be amazing, wouldn’t it? I’ve never met any of those.”
“Me neither.” I can’t resist pushing a hair off her cheek when it blows across and sticks to the drying sheen of sweat on her face. “You’re something special, though. Unfamiliar.”
She laughs, still looking slightly embarrassed. “I’m a donkey.”
I blink, slightly startled to imagine this polished woman, with her designer clothes and air of luxury, shifting into a donkey. “I’ve never met one of those either.”
Her smile is a touch bittersweet. “My mother was a donkey shifter. She said we’re a dying breed. Too stubborn for most mates to handle.”
Is that a hint of challenge in her tone? If so, I’m up for the task. “Said?”
She nods. “She died years ago. It’s mostly just me and Dad now, along with a couple of close friends and the occasional disastrous date that wrecks my apartment.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.” She looks back at the horses again almost wistfully.
That prompts me to ask, “Do you ride?” I’m proud of how mature I am in that I only briefly imagine her riding me before forcing my thoughts back to more appropriate areas.
“I used to before college and life got complicated.” She glances at me. “I was actually pretty good at it.”
I gesture toward Midnight. “Want to meet him?”
“Looking like this?” Lindsay gestures to her grain-covered clothes.
I chuckle, especially since she seems to sincerely want to make a good impression on my stallion. “He’s seen worse.”
I call Midnight over, and he approaches the fence with the calm confidence that’s made him my favorite horse for the past decade. Lindsay extends her hand carefully, letting him sniff her fingers before attempting to pet him.
“Hello, handsome.” Her voice takes on a gentler quality as Midnight allows her to stroke his neck. “You’re a sweetheart. Aren’t you?”
Midnight nickers softly and pushes his nose against her shoulder, which would be sweet if it weren’t for the fact that he immediately starts trying to eat the grain stuck to her shirt.
“I think he likes you.” I watch Lindsay laugh as Midnight continues his grooming efforts. “Or he likes your cologne.”
“Eau de Horse Feed, it’s very popular this season.”
We spend another hour moving equipment and checking on the animals.
Lindsay’s enthusiasm never flags, even when she nearly launches a startled chicken into orbit by dropping a feed pan too close to its coop.
Her stubborn refusal to quit despite obvious frustration impresses me more than any romantic gesture could.
“I think I’m getting the hang of this.” Lindsay attempts to move a section of portable fencing and promptly gets tangled in the wire mesh. “Or not.”
“It takes practice.” I help extricate her from the fencing. “Most people don’t master ranch work in a single day.”
“Most people probably have better spatial reasoning skills.” She examines a scrape on her hand where the wire caught her. “This is harder than it looks.”
“Everything worthwhile is.”
By late afternoon, Lindsay is exhausted, muddy, and clearly out of her element, but she’s still debating with Andrew about inefficient equipment placement.
The sight of her, covered in dirt and completely disheveled but still trying to solve our logistical problems, makes my chest constrict as I struggle to draw in a deep breath for a second.
“You know, if you moved the feed storage closer to the main barn, you’d cut your transport time in half,” she tells him, gesturing with hands that are caked in mud.
“City girl’s got a point,” Andrew says grudgingly. “We’ve been doing it this way so long we stopped thinking about efficiency.”
“Sometimes, you need fresh eyes to see obvious solutions.” She pushes a strand of hair out of her face, leaving another streak of dirt. “I admit my eyes are pretty fresh when it comes to actual farm work, though.”
“You did well today.” I mean it. “Most people would have given up hours ago.”
“I don’t give up easily. Must be because I’m as stubborn as a donkey.” She winks at me before looking around at the chaos we’ve managed to organize throughout the day. “Besides, this was educational. I understand your work better now.”
“What did you think?” I’m on edge, genuinely invested in her opinion and hoping I’ve impressed her.
“It’s more intricate than I expected. The business side, I mean. You’re essentially running a small corporation with all the attendant challenges, plus you have to factor in variables like weather and animal behavior that most businesses don’t deal with.”
Her assessment is more accurate than most people’s after years of exposure to ranch life. “That’s exactly what it is.”
“I respect that.” She starts toward her car but then turns back. “Thank you for letting me help. I know I was probably more hindrance than help, but I learned a lot.”
“You weren’t a hindrance.” She takes a few steps before I remember she has a change of clothes. “Hey, you can use the guest shower if you don’t want to get all that in your car.”
She grins and nods, going to the BMW long enough to retrieve a small overnight bag. I show her the guest room on the first floor and leave her to it. She emerges from the house twenty minutes later, freshly washed with no makeup, and takes my breath away.
I follow her to the BMW like an awkward colt, trying to remember how words work. She’s simply dressed and all bare beauty that makes it hard to think. “You worked hard, and you didn’t complain once.” I blurt it out like our conversation never stopped for her to take a shower.
It takes her a moment, but she says, “I had a good time.” Lindsay pauses with her hand on the car door. “Even covered in mud and horse feed for a while.”
“Would you like to do it again sometime? The ranch work, I mean. We could probably find some tasks that don’t involve quite so much manual labor.” I flash what I hope is an enticing grin.
“I’d like that.” Her smile is genuine and a little surprised. “Maybe next time I’ll bring more coffee.”
“That sounds like a plan. You’re delicious.” I flush like an idiot. “I mean, your coffee choice was delicious.”
Lindsay looks delighted, with a hint of flirtation in her laugh as she gets into her car.
She waves to me and drives off, navigating the muddy drive with the same careful attention she brought to every task today.
As the BMW disappears down the road, I realize I’m looking forward to seeing her again, and not just because she’s beautiful or interesting.
Today, I saw Lindsay tackle something completely outside her comfort zone with determination and humor. She approached our world with genuine curiosity instead of romanticized expectations, and she didn’t quit when things got difficult.
Emma appears beside me as the car disappears around the bend. “So, what do you think?”
“I think she’s not what I expected.”
“Better or worse?”
I consider the question while brushing mud off my jeans. “Better. Definitely better.”
“Good.” She grins. “Because she’s good for you. I can tell.”
I turn to lift a brow, showing skepticism. “How can you tell?”
“You’ve been smiling all day, and you haven’t checked your phone once.” She heads back toward the barn. “That’s a first.”
She’s right. For the first time in months, I’ve been completely present in the moment instead of worrying about what comes next.
Lindsay did that somehow. She showed up in designer clothes and threw herself into manual labor without hesitation, and somewhere between the grain disaster and the chicken incident, I stopped thinking about all the reasons why dating never works for me and started thinking about all the reasons why it might work for a horse shifter and a donkey shifter.
It seems entirely possible we’re a good match, which feels like a gift of some sort that I didn’t expect but want desperately now that I have it.