Page 8 of The Front Runner
This place is about to become a cemetery for everyone I can’t manage to keep safe.
* * *
“Stefan, sit down.”
I barely hear her silky voice over the rush of the rain falling. I shake my head and keep throwing dirt back into the hole. When I retrieved the foal’s body, Mira looked at me sadly. I don’t want her pity. I don’t want her to look at me like that. I just want to bury the foal and then carry on with my day like this shitty fucking night never even happened.
I freeze when I feel her hand come to rest on my back again, her slender fingers laying across the expanse between my shoulders, heating the skin beneath through my soaked shirt.
Her touch is warm. But her voice is not. “Sit. Down.”
“I can’t. I need to finish filling this hole.”
Her other hand shoots out and wraps around the wooden handle of the shovel. “No. It’s my turn.”
I stand up straight now and peer down at her. “This isn’t what I pay you for.”
She rolls her eyes at me, but yanks on the shovel. “Don’t I know it. But I’m going to do it. So back off.”
“You look tired,” I say, looking her up and down, her stern face peeking out from beneath the hood of her raincoat.
Her gaze scans me, and that signature smirk touches the edges of her lips. “I guess I’m in good company.” I get distracted by her mouth for just long enough that she yanks the shovel right out of my hands. I expect some sassy comment, but she just turns around and starts shovelling scoops of heavy, wet soil into the big hole.
My feet root to the ground as I watch her work, misty rain falling around us as the sun comes up over the Cascades, casting a blue glow across the valley. It’s eerie and beautiful all at once, and suddenly I feel just as tired as Mira accused me of looking.
I sink to the ground right where I am, not caring about how wet or muddy I might get. I’m past that point. It feels like I’m having an out-of-body experience—that’s how tired and stunned I am.
“Why are you helping me?” I blurt out to the woman in front of me, who I could have sworn is completely indifferent to me but is going out of her way to help me right now. At the very least, her friends hate me. Helping me would probably be a crime in their books.
She doesn’t look up. The shovel clinks and rasps against the small pebbles in the pile of silty dirt. It smells fresh and earthy between the soil, and the lake, and the rain.
“Because you needed help,” she eventually responds.
“What are all your friends going to say about you doing this?”
She stops now, jams the shovel into the ground, and puts one booted foot on top of its edge as she looks down at me. Intelligent eyes and pink cheeks, her chest rises and falls with the exertion of digging. “Not sure. I don’t usually ask their permission to do what I think is right.”
I scoff and stare at the upturned tip of her nose, the way a droplet of water drips off it. Leave it to the woman who saves lives for a living to be all morally superior when I’m so clearly morally gray. I wonder what she really thinks of me.
“You know what they say about assuming, Dalca. And you definitely shouldn’t make assumptions about me.” Mira glares at me so hard that I drop my eyes. I’m not in the mood to face off with anyone right now. So, I sit, lost in thought, getting soaked to the bone while my veterinarian finishes covering the grave. I don’t even bother interrupting her to take the shovel back. She doesn’t strike me as the type of woman who needs my help.
Plus, I’m probably no gentleman as far as she’s concerned.
When she’s done, she drops the shovel on the ground and comes to stand over me. Her warm breath puffs out in front of her as she speaks. “I’ll be back later today to check on Farrah. You should get some sleep.”
“Are those the doctor’s orders?” My tone is condescending—it’s kind of my default mode, I sometimes talk that way without even meaning to. I sound like a spoiled, rich kid with mommy issues even though I’m thirty-four years old.Adorable.
She puts her hands on her hips and quirks one shapely brow in my direction, scolding me silently. “Never believed you were quite the dick people make you out to be. But when you talk like that, I can see it.”
I clench my jaw, working my teeth against each other, internally berating myself. When I finally look up to offer her an apology, she’s walking back toward her Gold Rush Ranch truck, hips swaying with a gait that defies how exhausted she must be right now.
I should have thanked her. She helped me. In the dark. In the rain. And I acted like a sullen little prick.
Her friends call meDalca the Dick, but right now is the first time I’ve actually felt like one.
4
Mira
