Page 8 of Christmas with the Cowgirl
“Taking on a new career, Baylor?”she asked dryly.“Last Stand matchmaker?”
“I would never!”Nic exclaimed, in an exaggeratedly shocked tone.
“So if I go ask Tris, or Emily, they’ll say you never stuck your nose in at all, huh?”
“I can only be responsible for what I say, not what others understand,” she said in that same tone.
Riley laughed because she couldn’t help it.“Okay, now you’re stealing from the chief.”
She’d heard that locally famous Shane-ism from the man himself once, when he was herding a group of intoxicated tourists out of the proverbial china shop before they broke anything more.Right before he’d added to the noisy bunch, “You have the right to remain silent.Please exercise it.”
“Anyone better to…er, borrow from?”Nic asked, laughing herself now.
“Nope,” Riley agreed.And felt rather proud of herself that she’d managed to divert Nic from that leaping assumption she’d made.
That she’d been half right—after all, who could not react to the presence, in all senses of the word, of a man like Miles Flint?—was something Riley would have to deal with.
Nip it in the bud.You don’t have time for nonsense, and even thinking twice about some Hollywood power broker is worse than nonsense.
There.That was firm, decisive, and final.
Now all she had to do was live up to it.
Chapter Five
“Ithink youneed to figure out how to thank Riley,” Jackson said over their Sunday morning waffles.
Jeremy, with a bit of maple syrup smeared on his chin, looked at his father thoughtfully.“Yeah.Yeah, I do.But how?”
Miles noticed the boy then looked at Nic, as if for help.It warmed him to see how the two had bonded.There was utter trust in Jeremy’s expression when he looked at her, and he didn’t think he was wrong about the love in this woman his friend had found when she looked back at him.
“Well,” Nic said, with a very thoughtful expression on her face, “you’re very good at drawing, maybe you could draw her something.”
Jeremy’s expression turned just as thoughtful.“Like what?”
“We’ll have to figure that out,” Jackson said, wiping his own chin.
Miles took his last bite, pondering how much nicer this was than running down to the corner bistro and grabbing something to eat on the go.And thought again about the first thing he’d noticed upon reaching Last Stand—that it wasn’t quite Christmas yet here.Unlike in L.A.where it had been, according to retailers, Christmas since the day after Halloween and Thanksgiving didn’t exist outside the grocery stores.
“You think up the cool stuff.What should I draw?”
Miles blinked, both at the boy’s assessment and the fact that he’d asked him at all.This wasn’t really his bailiwick, but a thought did occur to him.
“What about a drawing of Pie and the new guy together?Like they were this morning, when you let them out into the corral.Already friends.”
Jeremy lit up.“Yeah!”
He got up from the table and ran toward the steep stairs against the back wall, headed to the loft that was his domain.Miles knew it had originally been just a ladder, but when Maverick had become part of the family, they’d changed it to some stairs the dog could navigate so he could stay with his beloved boy.
He couldn’t help smiling at Jeremy’s enthusiasm.He’d gone down to the barn with the boy when they’d first gotten up, and he’d been both amused and impressed with how well the about to turn eight-year-old had handled the ponies.As if he were an old hand, or had been around them all his short life.He supposed it was like that when you found something you loved.It had been for him, ever since he’d become part of bringing stories he loved to the world at large.
And the two ponies had indeed looked as if they’d been together much longer than twenty hours.He wondered how much of it was simply having another their own size around, instead of only the big ones.
He wondered idly what the exact break point was between pony and horse.He’d have to look that up.Not because he needed to know, but because that’s the way his brain worked.
Or you could just ask the woman who knows darn near everything there is to know about the beasts…
“Hey, Nic, when does a pony become a horse?How big, I mean.”
