Page 11 of Cowboy Stole My Heart
Chapter 4
MIAgulped. She’d played that day over and over in her mind so often, but actually talking about it was something else entirely. She smiled at Sam, trying not to let her feelings show, putting on the brave face she’d perfected over the years. She almost hoped their foreman, Stretch, would come over and interrupt them, or one of the other ranch hands, but when she did a quick glance around, there was no one. Even her father would have been preferable to having this particular discussion with Sam.
“See how you go with him today. We can talk more once you’ve spent time with him,” she said.
Sam frowned, his eyes still trained on her even though she was looking straight ahead at the horse now.
“It’s a simple question, Mia,” he said, in a slow voice as if he were speaking to a child. “How did he end up here? What’s happened to him?”
She gritted her teeth, steeled her jaw, not ready to talk to a man she hardly knew about what had happened to the stallion grazing in the field nearby. Tex hadn’t bothered toacknowledge them yet, but she knew he would soon, and when he did it wouldn’t be pretty.
“You don’t think much of me, do you?” she asked in a low voice. “Why can’t I have just decided to buy a temperamental stallion to train as a show jumper?”
Sam laughed, but his face sobered instantly when he saw the serious look on hers as she turned to face him. Her eyes were glistening, she knew it, but she sure as hell wasn’t about to cry. Instead she turned to look out left, staring hard at a mob of Black Angus cattle and slowly trying to count them—anything to take her mind off what she was hiding from Sam.
“I can’t not like you, I hardly know you,” he said. “So I don’t think lowly of you, that’s silly to say.”
“No, you made a judgment call on me the moment you met me, and that call hasn’t changed,” she argued, turning back to him and hating that she was being so defensive. She couldn’t help it—when it came to Tex and the past, it just hurt too damn bad to go back. “Just work the horse, would you?”
He stood straighter then, and she did the same, unimpressed by how much smaller than Sam she felt when he was pulled up to his full height. His arms folded across his chest, eyes on her, staring at her and making her stare right back at him, so she didn’t feel like she was backing down. She hated bickering with him, but something about him rubbed her the wrong way.
“Fine, when I first came here I picked you as some pathetic socialite who liked to play around with horses.” Sam was like a statue before her. “But I saw you ride today and I thought, hell, there’s a girl with some goddamn talent. You’re good in the saddle, and you rode those big fences boldly.”
She swallowed. Hard. She hadn’t been fishing for compliments, had just wanted to get everything out in the open rather than simmer over things that hadn’t been said.
“You don’t need to say that,” she said, dragging her eyes from him and scuffing her boots into the dirt. She dropped to pet his dog, stroking his fur and smiling down at him before glancing back up at Sam. “I just need for you to take me seriously. This horse is important to me, and I want you to work your magic on him. Can we just leave it at that?”
He nodded, rubbing his hand across his chin. “Look, I came here thinking I was going to be working alone. I was intrigued about the stallion, and I still am, but just the way he behaved the other day? That tells me he’s been through some trauma, and if that involved a rider or abuse or whatever the hell it was, I need to know to keep me and him safe.”
She stood and stared out at Tex. “You know,” she said after a long pause, “he was named Tex because he had an ego as big as Texas, right from the moment he was a foal. He was never easy.”
Sam moved closer to her and they stood side by side, surveying the big horse who was still grazing, as if oblivious to them, head dipped low. But she could see that one of his ears had turned out slightly, that he was listening to them for sure.
“You’ve known him that long then?” Sam asked.
She nodded. “A long time. Only he wasn’t always this much of an asshole.”
“Yeah, well, stallions can either turn out like big teddy bears or arrogant sons of bitches. No different than a bull or any other male full of too much testosterone and not enough manners. And they’re no different than humans,either. You can’t just change a personality, but you can work on changing attitude.”
Mia hoped so, for her sake and for Tex’s. She knew Sam’s reputation, hell, she’d seen him work firsthand, but what if he wasn’t the right person to be working Tex? What if he was just a really good showman who’d managed to do well in front of the camera and crowds? She didn’t know how much longer she could keep Tex if she couldn’t get through to him, and he was too dangerous for her to even attempt to handle. She made a mental note to go visit her father later on—she needed to make sure he wasn’t planning anything without talking to her first.
“We only have a month,” she told Sam. “Maybe a little longer if I beg, but he put one of the ranchers in the hospital last week, that’s why my daddy called you.”
Sam didn’t react, just spoke in his soft drawl. “What happened?”
“We were trying to move him, and he’s become pretty territorial,” Mia explained. “He lashed out, after appearing fairly placid to start with, and I got over the fence but Cal didn’t. He was kicked in the hip and I only just managed to help him out before he got kicked again. He’s in hospital now and my father’s footing the bill, so he’s less than impressed.”
Sam rubbed his chin again and Mia realized he did that whenever he was chewing something over. “You told me you purchase all your own horses,” he said. “But not this one?”
She shook her head. “Not this one. I couldn’t afford him.”
“Why?”
Mia didn’t want to admit how much she’d paid for him, or how much it had cost to truck him here, or anything elsemuch about how she’d ended up with him. “He meant something to me. The price was too high, and I begged my father to buy him for me. I know, it makes me sound like a silly little girl with a heart set on a horse she couldn’t handle.”
“Well, yeah, it does,” Sam said. “And you’re right about him being too much for you to handle.”
“Thanks,” she said dryly. “Great way to boost my ego.”
