Free All the King's Horses by Lauren Gallagher Page A

After a moment of hesitation, and all the while eyeing him warily, Star stretched her neck out and sniffed his hand. He slowly, cautiously reached for her neck with his other hand, and as I watched, the mare shifted from agitated and scared to calm and quiet. Affectionate, even. He petted and talked to her until she was well past settled down, until she rested her forehead against his shoulder.
    And only after he’d long since calmed her did he—carefully and never taking his eyes off the horse—reach down to pick up his hat off the dusty ground. Star snorted at it, body tensing like she was going to freak out all over again, so he held out the hat. She inched toward it, then nudged it with her nose. Again. Nothing scary happened, so she tried eating it, at which point he laughed and took the hat out of her reach. In a smooth, extra-slow motion, he put his hat back on, and, rather than freaking out, Star tried to eat it again.
    The Jekyll and Hyde I thought I’d seen the day we met was absent. Completely. Maybe he just wasn’t great at interacting with people, but with a horse, especially one as jumpy as Star, he was even-keeled and calm.
    And while I may not have felt much for the horses these days, something fluttered and tingled in my chest as I watched him calm her and coax her into the arena. There was just something about a man with a quiet hand and unwavering patience with an animal that had always made me swoon, and my heart beat now in a way I didn’t think it ever would again.
    Letting my gaze drift from the black hat to the dusty jeans, I realized it wasn’t just his interactions with Star that had my heart doing funny things. Heat rushed into my cheeks, and I quickly turned away and went back to my to-do list.
    Not that walking away got him out of my mind. Even after I’d gone through the rest of my tasks and had finished the early evening feeding, leaving me free for a few hours before the late-night feeding, I couldn’t keep my mind from wandering, and it kept wandering right back to that moment between Dustin and Star.
    Maybe I’d jumped the gun with him. Sure, he’d been moody the day we met, and he hadn’t been terribly friendly with me since, but it wasn’t like I’d been all that warm myself. Maybe we just needed to get used to each other. Hell, I had no idea what needed to happen, but my gut told me that the Dustin I’d surreptitiously watched earlier today wasn’t the Dustin I’d convinced myself to dislike.
    Walking down the barn aisle, lost in my thoughts and not sure where I was even going, I had to admit I was having a harder and harder time disliking him. In fact, if I’d been in a better place emotionally—if being in a numb void even counted as a place at all, bad or good—I probably would have been doing more than just thinking non-stop about him. What could I say? A good-looking man who had a way with animals, that had always been a recipe for me to trip over my own feet and get tongue-tied and—
    An instant too late, sharp movement and a reddish flash of motion from the corner of my eye turned my head. Before I could get out of the way, Chip’s teeth closed around my arm.
    I yelped in pain and surprise, instinctively swiping at him with my free hand, but found nothing except empty space.
    Rubbing my arm gingerly—there was no blood, and I could still move, so it wasn’t serious—I looked over the stall door. Against the back wall, the chestnut gelding cowered even more than Star had earlier. Head down, legs shaking so bad I thought they’d collapse under him, he watched me with wide eyes. His heart must have been going ninety miles an hour, and I could only imagine what kind of hell he thought was about to rain down on him.
    My own heart kicked into high gear as I glanced up and down the aisle. I hadn’t seen Dustin in a while, and John had gone into town not twenty minutes ago. This was probably a bad idea on a few levels, especially the level of someone who didn’t