Free Our Red Hot Romance Is Leaving Me Blue by Dixie Cash Page A

y’all having supper with us.”
    As soon as the door closed, Debbie Sue turned to her husband, one hand on her hip. “Now, where was I?”
    “You were on your way to bed.” Buddy scooped her into his arms and carried her toward the bedroom.
    She clung to his shoulders. “No fair,” she wailed. “You’re bigger and stronger. You’re taking advantage.”
    “I know,” he replied. “But I promise this conversation will have a better outcome if we’re naked.”

seven
    T he next morning, Justin walked out of his house, into the cool pleasance of the early hour. The rising sun showed as a bright orange ball hovering just above the horizon. Layers of mauve, lavender and gold swept the sky like brush strokes. He liked rising early and enjoying the quiet beauty as well as a brief respite from the unyielding heat that would come later in the day.
    He ambled toward the barn, a place he had largely avoided for a year. Debbie Sue had been wrong, accusing him of keeping Rachel’s horses penned up and never letting them graze. Sometimes he had done the perfunctory chores—feeding, watering and turning them out to pasture and returning them to their stalls at night. He had hired a farrierto come by periodically and check their feet. But most of the time, he had hired the teenager up the road to do the chores. He knew he should do more. Rachel had spent hours with the two horses.
    All this talk about the animals and Debbie Sue scolding him for neglecting them had made him feel guilty. He chastised himself for not paying more attention to them. Rachel had loved them so much and Debbie Sue was right. They too had lost someone they loved. What if he and Rachel had had a child? Would he have avoided it and neglected it in the same way just to avoid his own personal pain?
    A sliding bar secured the gate to the corral. Slipping it to the left, he opened the gate just wide enough to squeeze through, crossed to the barn and the two horse stalls. He filled a bucket with oats and dumped them into feeding troughs in the corner of each stall. The horses watched him with bored detachment, obviously understanding the routine and their roles better than he did. He couldn’t even remember their names. He had to admit he had never bothered to learn. His firefighting career and horse ownership didn’t complement each other.
    Inside the eight-by-eight tack room, a bucket of grooming tools sat on a shelf to the side of the door. Justin didn’t know the purpose of each tool, but he did know what do with the one he had seen Rachel use most frequently. He carried the curry comb back to a stall and started on one of the reddish-colored mares, talking in low, comforting tones. The mare’s ears pricked forward, her eyes wary. Rachel had said the ears and eyes of a horse were their most effective means of communication. He couldn’t keep from wondering what these animals would say to him if they could talk.
    He brushed the mare in earnest, dislodging weeks of dirt and debris. Her muscles rippled and twitched and she looked at him with huge, soft brown eyes. As he brushed, he began to feel better, doing something Rachel would want him to do. He didn’t know what had come over him. He had never been unkind to animals. From the time he was a small boy, he had always been the first to jump to the aid of a helpless creature. His mother had delighted family and friends with tales of how he saved a kitten that had fallen into an irrigation ditch and how once he had taped an entire box of Band-Aids on a scratch on his grandparents’ milk cow, that had promptly slobbered them off. He remembered lying in bed when storm clouds rolled through and crying for all of the animals left out in the open with no shelter.
    He labored vigorously, brushing the mare and concentrating only on the task at hand. When he finished one horse, he moved to the second. Debbie Sue had been right about one thing. He should have done this long ago. Not just for the benefit of the