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Sam followed her gaze and smiled. “Not yet.”
Not ever.
“Here you go.”
Natalie turned. Colt stood there with the helmet. An ugly white thing that resembled the top of a golf ball.
“Thanks.”
When she met his gaze, she tried unsuccessfully to shield her thoughts from him.
You’ll be all right.
The words were unspoken, but she heard them anyway. And suddenly she knew everything would be okay. He wouldn’t let her get hurt. That wasn’t his style. The man was a protector. A warrior. A good guy.
She tipped her chin up. “Let’s do this.”
She slipped on the helmet. It was a little too big, but it would do. Sam held the reins as she prepared to mount. She paused before getting on. Sam’s patient gelding cocked an ear in her direction.
Nothing to be afraid of. The arena floor was soft. Even if she did fall off, chances were she wouldn’t strike her head on the ground hard enough to jolt her brain. Thereby causing a seizure. One that might lead to permanent damage or even the end of her life.
“What’s his name?” She grabbed the saddle horn. Although the horse was small by her standards—she was used to animals at least a foot taller than this one—it still felt like climbing a mountain.
“Roger.”
“So this is the horse that refuses to jump?”
“It is.”
She swung aboard. The way her heart pounded against her ribcage one would have thought she’d saddled a wild tiger. Good heavens, what was with her? She’d never been afraid of a horse a day in her life.
She caught Colt’s gaze. He knew what a struggle it’d been for her to climb on, and the realization humiliated her. It shouldn’t matter what he thought—she didn’t even think he liked her—but for some reason it did.
“Too bad you can’t take him over some fences for me.” Sam met Natalie’s gaze. “Colt told me you were in a horse wreck. What happened?”
“I don’t know.” Natalie fingered a strand of Roger’s black mane. “I was told my horse slipped before a jump, but I don’t remember anything.”
“Wow. Was the horse okay?”
“He was fine. Me? Not so much.” It still freaked her out that she couldn’t recall the accident. No matter how hard she tried—it just wasn’t there. “They have it on video, but the angle’s all wrong. He might have chipped a bit, might have slipped, might have spooked at something. All I know is he took off wrong and landed in the middle of a five foot fence.”
“Five feet?”
Talking was good. Talking meant she didn’t have to move. When she put a horse into motion she began to suffer dizzy spells. It wasn’t so bad if she walked, but anything faster and she might as well be riding the Tilt-O-Whirl at the fair.
“Fortunately it wasn’t during a jump-off or it might have been higher.”
“Why don’t you take Roger out to the rail?” Sam suggested.
They both glanced toward Colt and Natalie could tell nothing escaped his notice. He knew she was stalling for time. Could he see the way her hands shook? Had he spotted her pulse beating at her neck? The way her hands clenched and unclenched on the reins? She would swear her heart could be heard outside her body.
“Come on.” She clucked, but the moment the horse took a step forward she wanted to throw up, and not just because of the way moving made her feel. There was the fear she battled back. The sickness at realizing she wasn’t the same as before and might never be. The shame of knowing she hadn’t been honest with Colt and the admission that she owed him the truth.
“Whoa.”
The horse obeyed instantly, his head lifting a notch as she pulled back on the reins.
“What’s the matter?” Colt asked from the rail.
She’d had a traumatic brain injury, damn it. She’d damaged her inner ear.
“I just need a moment.”
“Time out.”
Natalie’s head snapped up, causing her to clutch mane. “I don’t need a time out. I just need a moment to adjust to the sudden change in elevation.”
Too late. Colt walked toward her. He eyed Sam. “Give us a second, would you, Sam?”
The woman nodded, shooting Natalie a look of encouragement before taking Colt’s place on the rail.
“When you said you had balancing issues, exactly what did you mean?” He asked.
“I told you, I can’t ride English anymore. Lifting my body up and down makes me so dizzy I nearly came off the first time I rode.”
“You also said you could ride Western.”
“And I can.” She held Colt’s gaze, a part of her wanting to tell him the truth, the whole truth, but if she did that, she knew she’d lose her last best chance of ever riding again. “Like I said, I just need a moment.”
“You haven’t even broken a walk and you’re already clutching mane.”
She immediately released the strands of black horse hair. “All better.” She lifted her hands. “See?”
He didn’t look as if he believed her, his golden eyes nearly as dark as the black felt of his cowboy hat. “Exactly what happened when you rode Playboy without a bridle?”
“What do you mean?”
“I want to know the details. Were you walking? Trotting? Galloping?”
She didn’t want to answer because by doing so she would reveal more than she wanted him to know. “I was just walking.”
He crossed his arms, tipping back to stare up at her in a way that had her wanting to break the connection of their gaze. “And had you ever trotted since your accident?”
And there it was. The question she’d feared. “No.”
He tipped back farther. “Cantered?”
She took a deep breath. “No.”
“So all you’ve done since your wreck is walk?”
Another deep breath. “Yes.”
“And you decided on that day to practice walking without a bridle?”
“You make it sound like I’m crazy.”
“What happened when you dropped the bit?”
“At first, nothing.”
“And then?”
One of the girls in the arena galloped by again, this one hanging off the back of her mount so that her head rested near her horse’s tail. Dear Lord. Never mind how painful it must be to have the cantle of the saddle digging into your—
“Natalie?”
“Once he realized he had no bridle Playboy started to trot.”
“Were you able to hang on?”
“At first.” Her fingers found mane again and she dug her hands into the silky strands. “But then he started to canter, and the up-and-down motion, well, let’s just say it made things more difficult.”
“Exactly how difficult.”
“I nearly blacked out.”
“Son of a—” If he’d been the demonstrative type she had a feeling he would have thrown his hat at her.
“But I hung on.” Somehow she had, although to this day she didn’t know how. She couldn’t recall Jillian running into the arena, or her friend stepping in front of Playboy and somehow managing to get him stopped. She half-suspected she’d had her eyes closed the whole time. All she knew was that one moment the horse had been running full-tilt and the next she was being helped down to the ground.
“I vomited afterward.”
If Colt had been a character in a sitcom he would have stormed off set. Instead he just stood there, mouth partly open, and though she sat above him by a good two feet, she somehow felt about three feet smaller.
“Why is it every time I talk to you I discover something new? Something I’m not happy to discover. Something that smacks of dishonesty?”
Because she had been dishonest. About one thing at least.
“Because if I told you the whole story, you’d never have agreed to help me, would you?”
She had him there. The brim of his cowboy hat lowered so that she couldn’t see his face. He appeared to be watching one of the Galloping Girlz, this one on a sorrel. Natalie watched, too, because the woman had hooked her foot into a loop near the skirt of the saddle. She anticipated what would happen next and sure enough, the pretty blonde stood up, hooking her other foot through a matching loop on the other side. She stood. No reins. No control. No fear. It took Natalie’s breath away because it was both awe-inspiring and death defying, the woman’s blond ponytail streaming out behind her.
“I won’t be doing that anytime soon.”
Colt’s gaze shot to her own. She saw a flicker of amusement, but only for a moment.
“Probably not.”
His shoulders lifted and then relaxed, as if he’d taken a deep breath, one filled with resignation. Her own breathing slowed.
“All right, look, we’re going to work on some simple balancing techniques today. I’m going to put you out on a lunge line, have you close your eyes, keep you focused on staying aboard, not what your head is telling you might happen.”
She used to do that to the kids she taught. The five-year-olds.
Now, now. You have to start somewhere.
“And tomorrow?”
“More balancing exercises.”
She nodded. “Whatever we have to do.”
“But I can’t work with you every day. Maybe Sam can, but I have performances most weekends.”
“I know.”
“But I’ll do what I can. And we can talk to Sam and see if she can help you when I’m not around.”
Natalie wanted to cry, except she couldn’t because if she did she’d seem like a sissy and she had a feeling Colt didn’t deal well with sissies.
“You’re going to feel like a kid learning to ride all over again, and when you’re not working with Sam or me, I think you should sign up for a rehabilitation program, one that specializes in hippotherapy.”
Hippotherapy. Translation: equine therapy. She’d resisted doing that, hadn’t thought it was necessary. Clearly, she’d been kidding herself. She trusted Colt, and if he said she needed outside help, well maybe it was time to put her pride aside.
“In the meantime bring Playboy over here and I’ll start working with him for you. It’ll be easier for me to prep him for reining competitions.”
Her eyes burned. She realized that she was fighting back sudden tears. She had to blink a few times. “Thanks, Colt.”
“Don’t thank me yet.” He slapped Roger’s neck. “Let’s see how you do today before you start getting excited.”
Chapter Five (#ulink_fcdcd79f-d803-566b-aad1-f332b926f109)
He’d tortured her for an hour.
Natalie had been a saint through it all. Colt had known his ultimatum would leave her with little choice but to do as he asked, and truthfully, he’d half-hoped she’d say no so he’d be off the hook with very little guilt. She’d agreed, though, and then worked hard, despite having to stop from time to time to settle her stomach. Afterward, she’d spent a good hour working with Sam and Roger over a few pieces of wood. She called it ground work, but it wasn’t the kind he was used to. Natalie had said that using the wooden obstacles was the first step to teaching Roger how to jump.
“You look lost in thought.”
Colt glanced up at his sister, Claire. They were sitting in her kitchen, him about to embark on babysitting duties, her heading off to town to run errands. Claire lived on the property, in what had been called the cowboy bunkhouse back when their dad had run a few hundred head of cattle. She’d converted the place into a home, and the siblings now lived a good mile away from each other, Colt at one end of the two-hundred-acre parcel and Claire at the other. He’d always liked the spot where she lived—at the base of a small hill, surrounded by a grove of oak trees with a year-round creek within walking distance—better than the site where his grandfather had built the main homestead, out in the middle of nowhere so he could keep an eye on things, or so Colt had been told.
“I was thinking about that woman I’m helping,” he answered.
“Natalie, right?” Claire swept her long, black hair over one shoulder, the strands twisting in a way that somehow made it look thicker. “Wes and Jillian’s friend.”
He fingered the tab top of a soda can, twanging it as he recalled his first lesson with Natalie. “She popped in on me today.”
Wide, sweeping black brows lifted. “Oh, yeah?”
