Free Road to Victory (Dogs of Fire Book 5) by Piper Davenport

snarky smile) and I hissed out a quiet, “Damn it, Dani!” I shook my head. She’d been playing me the whole time with the sympathy. “I take it back. I no longer feel one-hundred percent safe with you,” I lied.
    Dani crossed her arms. “I can’t believe you’d say something so reprehensible to him. You know he loves you, he’d cut off his arm rather than hurt you.”
    “I know. I just needed space.”
    “I get it, honey, but what you did was mean. And, Kimmie, you are a lot of things, but mean isn’t one of them.”
    “I have never been turned down.” I dropped the brush in the bucket. “Ever.”
    “Now you’re justifying being mean because your pride was hurt? You’ve loved that man forever, Kim, I don’t understand why you’d want to hurt him.”
    It was true. I was an awful human being.
    “Because I’m a bitch,” I whispered. “Obviously.”
    “No you’re not,” she said. “You weren’t very nice, but you’re not a bitch. You had a moment of insanity.”
    “You’re being very kind, Dani,” I pointed out. “You usually are, but that doesn’t negate the fact that he’s not interested in me in the very general sense of the word.”
    “Kim, stop it.”
    “What? It’s fine. He’s way too young for me anyway.” I turned back to Fozzie and his care.
    “Sometimes I feel like I’m hitting my head against a brick wall when I’m talking to you,” Dani complained.
    “Well, feel free to stop anytime, I’d hate for you to get brain damage.”
    “I will say one thing and then I’ll leave you to your delusions. I know Knight, probably better than most of the other guys, well, outside of Mack of course, because he’s been working closely with Austin on this super secret whatever it is I’m not allowed to know about.”
    I raised an eyebrow... Dani tended to ramble when she was excited, agitated, bored, sad, lonely, tired, etcetera.
    “All that to say,” she continued, “regardless of the whopping five year age difference, he’s exactly what you need and he knows it, I know it, we all know it... it’s just taking you a little while to figure it out. But lucky for you, he’s on top of it, so I’m going to just sit back and watch the show.”
    “Ohmigod, Dani, bite me.”
    “I’ll let Knight do that.”
    “I just don’t know if I can open up to him, you know? He scares the crap out of me.”
    “I know, Kimmie. I get it. But you’ve already opened yourself up to him! You haven’t even looked at another man since you met him...not in any real sense of the word anyway. So you’re just driving yourself crazy by pining for him without telling him how you feel.”
    I groaned. She was right, but I didn’t really want to hash out the subject anymore. Luckily, Dani left it alone, mostly because Mack and Darien arrived to congratulate me and say goodbye. Once they left, Dani and I packed up, loaded Fozzie into his trailer, and followed Isaac (one of our barn’s hands) who was on hauling duty, back to the barn.
    By the time I arrived home, I took a long bath and fell into bed, managing a full night’s sleep without dreaming. It was a nice reprieve for once.
     

 

    O NE WEEK LATER, Knight stepped up to the horse he was examining and ran his hand over her withers, whispering as he slid his hand down the bad leg. “Good girl. You’re okay.”
    “What do you feel, son?” Doc Farlane asked.
    Knight was interning in his final year at vet school, his specialty working with large animals, and horses in particular were his passion.
    “Heat’s comin’ off her left fetlock. I feel swelling.”
    “Anything broken?”
    Knight shook his head. “I don’t think so. She has full motion, it’s just sore.” He lifted her hoof and grabbed a hoof-pick to clean off the area. “She’s got a nasty scab over the frog. Some dried blood. Looks like she cut it.”
    Doc leaned in to look and nodded. “What’s the treatment plan?”
    “We’ll need to clean it out, give her a tetanus shot and