Free Saddled (The Stables Trilogy #3) by Penny Lam Page B

something, but it wasn't a cock. She was thinking more along the lines of a fist.
     
    “I don't know if you could tell, but I think J.B. is coming around to me. He watched Reece paint me for quite some time today. And you should see the way he touches me. Sneaking in little caresses.” The brunette sighed and began to stand. “I’m going to win. Just thought you'd like to know.”
     
    She sauntered back to her stall, leaving Maple trembling in the sweltering heat.
     

     
    Brie's painting took almost a week. Each night when she returned, she made sure to come and tell Maple all about how J.B. watched her be painted, or how Reece complimented her nonstop. According to her, he practically couldn't keep his hands off of her when J.B. wasn’t around.
     
    “Maybe I’ll have both of them,” Brie cooed. She frowned. “Though J.B. keeps calling me Rachel.” Meeting Maple’s gaze, she brightened. “Fine, though. I’ll play the dead wife while I’m rolling in his billions of dollars, and you’re some horrible man’s broodmare.”
     
    Maple stewed and seethed. Brie was under her skin. It made it impossible to eat, in addition to not sleeping, and by the end of the week the water in the grooming stall always ran pink with the blood from her punishments.
     
    At one point J.B. hit her so hard, so often, that her entire back was a flaming field of welts. That night he’d checked her pussy and, finding it dry, frowned. She couldn’t meet his eyes.
     
    Her frustration was exaggerated more when the subsequent paintings of the other girls only took Reece a few days each. That meant he had dragged it out with Brie, lending weight to all of her bragging.
     
    Brie had warned her that people like Maple didn’t get happy endings. Wasn’t that something Maple had once believed herself? But then J.B. had opened to her. It had clouded her, given her hope and purpose. Now she spent her time wondering if she’d been right all along, and Brie just knew the inside scoop.
     

     
    “Maple, you're up,” J.B. barked outside of her stall. Quickly, he dressed her in her tack. It was so familiar now that the bit eased and settled into the back of her mouth, her jaw no longer aching from it. She closed her eyes as he buckled the harness in place. It was tight, claustrophobic, and she was grateful.
     
    Her emotions and anxiety were too much. Her mind was brutally exhausted. The cage of the leather around her head helped her feel secure. Sane. It staved off the insanity she thought might be worming its way into her mind.
     
    Taking her reins, he led her from the stable.
     
    The sunlight struck so bright that she was blinded for the first few feet of walking, stumbling in the heat-cracked dirt.
     
    Almost immediately her sweat dripped, running in tiny beads between her breasts and ass cheeks. The blazing sun baked it on, making her feel a bit like she was a glazed pastry.
     
    The walk to his house seemed longer than she remembered, but that might just have been because she couldn’t stop looking around in wonder. When she’d worked for J.B., the arid landscape around the house and stables had become so normal she barely saw it. Now, having been hidden in his stable for so long, it looked new and gorgeous. Each spike of grass and tiny tumbleweed excited her. She loved the low, ochre grass of the pastures for the horses and steer.
     
    Narrowing her eyes against the brightness, she tried to see her horse friends in the other stable. She could smell it as they marched by, the rich horse and manure odor calling to her like home. Absentmindedly, it occurred to her that J.B. might have hired a replacement for her. This thought was particularly horrifying. Someone new, unknown, might be in the space she most thought of as hers. Changing things. What if they didn’t understand all the quirks of each horse? What if they were complacent with J.B.’s frustratingly stubborn desire to slowly kill Bane by deprivation?
     
    Maple was so