Free A Broken Cowboy (BWWM Interracial Romance) by Renee Phillips

time before he spoke, not lifting his head from where it was nestled in her hair. “I want to go inside.”
    Mimi looked up at him, somewhat alarmed. “Really? Why? I mean, wow that’s great, but why now?”
    “Because I don’t want to keep being afraid,” he said, smiling weakly. “And it gets too cold for you to live outside.”
    “Did you want to try going inside now ?” she asked as he nodded uncertainly. “Well, should I go too? Or is it better if I wait out here?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Okay, well, I’m going to go in and I’m going to leave the door open. You just take your time and do what feels right.” She smiled and turned away, returning to her cabin and trying to busy herself with anything that would take her mind off Gabriel and his struggles. She knew she couldn’t fix his situation, that whatever he needed to do he would have to do on his own timeline. If she forced the issue or tried to push him into something he wasn’t ready for, he would run away like a scared rabbit and be gone. The very last thing he needed was someone staring at him, waiting for him to move.
    Mimi passed the time looking up horse care on her computer. She had only seen the inside of the barn a couple of times, and declared it too scary to deal with since she didn’t have animals. Now that the horses were back, she’d have to ready it for their arrival and have feed delivered. She researched the price of feed from the store in town on their website, and found the name of a couple of equine vets who could come out if needed.
    All the time that she worked, she watched out the window for Gabriel out of the corner of her eye. She saw him circle the cabin a few times, and heard him come up on the porch only to head back to the safety of the yard more than once. True to her word, she left the door open so he could experiment at his own pace, and resorted to placing as many heavy objects as she could on her papers to keep the gentle gusts of wind from sending them drifting to the floor.
    Finally, Gabriel made it to the doorway but stood there, unable to move. Mimi watched him, searching his face for any emotion at all. He rocked forward and back on his heels, not letting himself go any further, stuck between what he wanted and what the war-torn primal part of his brain told him was safe and logical.
    Mimi got up and crossed the room to stand in front of him. She lowered herself to the floor and gestured for him to sit, too. Once he reluctantly settled himself cross-legged on the porch, even the toe of his boot not crossing through the door, Mimi spoke.
    “How does this feel?” she asked, pointing at the floor where he sat.
    “Horrible,” he answered quietly after thinking it over. “Terrifying.”
    “Okay. At least it has a name.” She looked down, avoiding Gabriel’s eyes. “My father was shot right in front of me. He owned a little convenience store in our neighborhood, and one day in broad daylight a man came in and robbed him. He shot my daddy after getting all the money out of the drawer, just for the fun of shooting him. The man even knew I was there because he saw me sitting on a stool behind the counter, and he shot my daddy anyway, right in front of me. I was only six years old.”
    Gabriel didn’t speak, but Mimi could feel him watching her face.
    “For years, I didn’t have a word for how I felt. I knew I was supposed to feel bad, and that I should feel something like sadness. And I did. But I didn’t have the right word to know how I felt. No word that I knew seemed strong enough. ‘Fear’ is the same word you would use when you watch a scary movie or ride a roller coaster, not when you have nightmares for years that a man is going to hunt you down and come back one night to shoot you, too. ‘Hate’ is the same word we use to say how much we don’t like broccoli. ‘Sad’ is the same word for when the baseball game gets rained out. None of the words worked anymore, so I couldn’t even know