Page 13 of Deceit & Desire

ZOE

The next morning,I stifled a yawn and stared across the paddock through bleary eyes. The abused horse somehow looked even worse in the early morning light, as the veterinarian pulled up in her livestock exam truck.

Roman gently stroked the colt’s neck as he fed it a slice of apple. As if sensing my gaze on him, he looked up, his eyes locking with mine. Something in the air crackled to life between us, like a tingle of static electricity waiting to strike. Giving the horse one more gentle pat, he let himself out of the paddock and walked over to stand beside me.

“You look exhausted, Zo.”

God, nobody’s called me Zo in ten years.

My heart ached at the familiar nickname, and my eyes stung with the threat of tears. I blinked furiously, banishing the notion.

Shaking off the tug of nostalgia, I snorted and rolled my eyes at him. “And you have an astounding grasp on the obvious.”

“Good morning to you, too. You’re a ray of fucking sunshine today,” Roman grumbled, shaking his head.

I gritted my teeth and turned to face him fully, needing him to feel the full force of my glare. “You started it. No woman wants to hear that she looks like shit first thing in the morning.”

Roman growled, taking his black Stetson off and running his hand through his hair before jamming the hat back on his head. “Don’t put words in my mouth like that, damn it. I didn’t say you look like shit. I just said you look exhausted, as you should be. Yesterday was a hell of a day.”

Sighing, I reached up and pinched the bridge of my nose. “Sorry. A decade passing hasn’t changed the fact that I’m not exactly a morning person.”

Roman offered me a bittersweet half-smile. “I remember.”

My mind almost wandered back to what Roman was like as a teenager, what he was like at twenty, what we were like together, but it set off all kinds of alarm bells in my head, and I slammed on the brakes on that train of thought.

I’m not fucking going there. I left Blackwell because I wanted to forget.

I opted to change the subject instead. “Who could rest easy after a day like yesterday, though? Not me. Not with everything that happened.”

Despite going straight from work to the airport and barely dozing on my flight from Miami to Bozeman, I didn’t sleep well on Roman’s couch, and I was feeling it, every bone in my body aching with exhaustion.

Part of me wanted to roll over and go back to sleep when Roman shook me awake at 6:30 in the morning to let me know the vet was on her way to check out the colt he’d rescued, but I couldn’t do it. I wanted—no, needed—to be there when the vet checked him out, to know he was going to be all right after everything he’d been through.

My chest squeezed like an iron band had closed around it and was getting smaller by the second, my heart aching for the poor, mistreated animal.

Clutching my cup of coffee in both hands, trying to warm them despite the early morning chill still hanging in the air, I blinked the sleep out of my eyes and took a sip of the near-scalding liquid.

“How is he ever going to be able to truly trust a human being again?” My gaze locked on a spot where the whip had drawn blood, the dark, crusty blotch matting his beautiful buckskin fur just behind his shoulder.

Roman sidled a little closer to me, resting his arms on the paddock rail in front of us, his big, callused hands clasped together. “They say time heals all wounds?—”

Red-hot anger and an old, familiar hollow ache battled for dominance inside me. “That phrase is the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard in my life. I lost my mom twenty fucking years ago, and it hurts just as bad today as it did the day she died.”

“I know.” Roman’s voice was quiet and husky, gentle and reverent. “Grief is a whole different animal than what that colt is dealing with, though.”

“You’re probably right.”

I stared at the colt as the vet climbed out of her big rig, with a mobile livestock care center in tow behind it, and approached Roman. Something about the way she stared at him and didn’t even acknowledge my existence rankled my nerves.

He silently jerked his chin at the colt and the vet spun around, instantly following his silent order to check the animal first.

“You think he’s gonna be okay, though, given time?”

“She’s right. That time-heals-all-wounds mess is a big load of bullshit,” Rick said, his voice cutting through the tension between us. He adjusted his hat, his steady brown eyes locked on the colt. “Whoever came up with that clearly hasn’t lived enough to know better.”

I blinked at him, momentarily surprised, but his calm presence helped soften my anger. Rick tipped his hat toward me before nodding at the colt. “Time isn’t enough for somethin’ like that. He’s gonna need people he can trust, too.”

“You think he’ll ever trust again?” I asked, my voice quieter now.

---