Free The Secret Brokers by Alexandrea Weis

Gwen replied from outside of the stall. “It’s like being in a springtime meadow to anyone who grew up riding horses.”
    A fly buzzed past his face and he immediately started swiping the air around him with his hand. The horse shied away from him and walked over to his hay net.
    “What is your problem?”
    Dallas turned to see Gwen staring at him from the aisle as she stood behind a wheelbarrow filled with feed.
    “I don’t like bugs,” he grumbled.
    “You don’t like bugs!” Gwen exclaimed, and then broke out into a fit of laughter. It was a light, harmonious sound that Dallas never expected from such a serious person. He watched as her eyes brightened and the tension in her face eased.
    Gwen wiped a tear away from the corner of her eye. “Some bodyguard you are. I suppose if a swarm of locusts descends on the place, I’m on my own.” She shook her head as she scooped up a bucket of feed and walked over to Whippadu’s stall.
    “I’m only supposed to protect you from two legged assassins. With the six-legged kind, you’re on your own.”
    Gwen poured the feed into the horse’s bucket. “I’ll make sure I grab for the Raid in case any cockroaches carrying semi-automatics stop by.” She put the bucket down on the ground and gently stroked Whippadu’s brown nose.
    “How did you get started in all of this?” Dallas inquired as he watched her interacting with the horse.
    Gwen shrugged. “I always loved animals, especially horses. I began riding when I was a kid. It was the one thing I was better at than my brothers; they thought horses were for girls. So I worked my butt off ; trained morning, noon, and night. Within a few years, I became one of the top riders in the state. That is when I started learning about racehorse rescue. A lot of the other riders had bought racehorses off the track and trained them to jump. I found my first racehorse soon after I won my first state championship. By the time I was fourteen I had four horses. By the time I was eighteen, I had sold those four and found eight more.” She stroked the long white blaze on the front of Whippadu’s head.
    “And after that?” he persisted.
    She turned to him. “After that I went off to college. By the time I went to nursing school, I had gotten out of riding completely. But I knew I would always go back to it one day. When I married Doug, I began riding again.”
    Dallas pulled a hose over to the side of the horse’s stall and began filling the water bucket by the stall door.
    “How did you and Doug meet?”
    Gwen took in a deep breath as she stepped aside from Whippadu. “I was in nursing school, doing a rotation at Charity Hospital. Doug was doing his residency in cardiology when I was in ICU. We started talking and then he asked me out.”
    “And when did you find out he was gay?”
    Gwen picked the bucket up from the ground. “On our first date. He said he wanted to be friends and that being with a woman…well, he told me he had tried it once, but it wasn’t his thing.”
    “That would have been enough for most women to walk away,” Dallas commented as he pulled the hose away from the water bucket. “Why did you stay with him?”
    Gwen looked down at the bucket in her hands. “That first night, after our pseudo-date, he walked me to my front door. My brother, Jackson, was waiting up. He was always the overprotective type and never liked Doug. When Jackson and Doug started shouting at each other on our front doorstep, I grabbed my brother’s arm and tried to push him back inside the house. Jackson pushed me away and I fell hard to the sidewalk. Doug went ballistic and punched my brother in the face, breaking his nose.” She raised her eyes to Dallas. “All my life I had been fighting with my brothers, competing with them for every scrap of attention from our father. For the first time, someone was watching out for me. Doug started checking in on me, taking me out to dinner, and coming over to my house. We became the