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The foal tried to get away but Clea wouldn’t let her. She spanked her all over the butt and sides.
“Hey, now, wait a minute here,” Jake said, diving for the door to stop the fight before blood flew. “What’s the matter with you? Good God, woman, this filly’s barely alive and—”
“And you’d better…get a companion…for her before she grows into a…little monster,” Clea said, between slaps.
Jake jerked the latch open and stepped in, reaching for the rope.
“You can leave now,” he said. “I’m sorry she kicked you. Are you hurt?”
Clea stopped spanking but she held on to the rope. The filly looked at her and Clea returned the look, both of them breathing hard.
“You’ve probably…been spending…too much time with her,” she said. “Handling her too much.”
“Well, then, we can thank our lucky stars that you’ve come to set us straight,” he said.
Sarcasm didn’t faze her.
“Have y’all been trying to pet her and play with her? She’s got to learn that people have to be the boss.”
Her calm, superior tone made his blood boil. “You some kind of expert?” he asked.
“You know all about orphan foals? Wild-horse orphan foals?”
“Horses are horses,” she said. “The wildness is in her bones and, if you think about it, it’s in the domesticated ones, too. They’re all born knowing that they’re prey, so we have to earn their trust.”
“And so you do it by slapping her around?”
“And their respect,” she said. “Her mother or any other horse would’ve been a lot rougher on her. She has to learn her manners.
“Come on,” Clea said and marched out of the stall, motioning for him to follow.
That surprised him. And irritated him even more. But he went, so the filly could think about her lesson.
And so he wouldn’t be trapped in there for Clea to stand in the hall blocking the door while she gave him more lectures on the nature of horses.
He walked past her and went into Sugar’s stall, which was next to the foal’s, and started saddling.
Clea said, “You were shocked at what I did, but you would’ve done the same to a bigger horse.”
“You said it yourself—a bigger horse,” he snapped. “I’m not one to beat up on something smaller than me.”
“Her mother would’ve bitten a chunk out of her. You all can halterbreak this baby, teach her to lead, maybe brush on her a little, but after that let her alone.”
This woman made him so mad he could hardly see straight.
“Get another foal in here for her to grow up with,” she said. “More than one if you can. It’ll make all the difference for her for the rest of her life, because then she’ll know how to fit in.”
He’d planned to ignore her until she gave up and went away. He’d decided not to argue with her. But he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
“One orphan baby is all we can handle around here.”
“She needs to be with other horses so she can learn how the world works and how to find her place in the pecking order.”
“When she’s a little bigger I’ll put her out with the using horses.”
“She needs something her own size. So she can see when her companion’s getting ready to kick or bite. So she can learn the body language that she’ll need to read her whole life.”
He rolled his eyes. “Anything else, professor?”
“Yes. So she’ll be more athletic, quicker, more prepared to get out of danger or avoid it. Older, bigger horses tend to be too indulgent with a foal. Even stud horses.”
He started pulling up the latigo on his saddle.
“When you do put her out, don’t put her with a whole herd all at once. Just do it one horse at a time.”
“Sounds like you know everything there is to know about this deal,” he said dryly.
She shrugged. “You just have to let them learn to be real horses. They’re social animals.”
He could not talk to her. He would ignore her. As long as he talked to her, she’d stay here aggravating him.
But curiosity got the best of him. All this confidence and knowledge was such a contradiction to the way she looked and acted about everything else.
“How’d you come to know so much about orphans?”
“I’ve raised three of them since I was a kid,” she said, leaning back against the stall wall and crossing her arms beneath her gorgeous breasts as if settling in to tell him her life’s story. “The first one I did all wrong, but the other two turned out great.”
So maybe she wasn’t a total incompetent, after all.
But he didn’t want her getting all wrapped up in this foal and coming over here all the time to tell him what to do with it. Or asking him how to start her life over in new places. He did not need somebody else driving him crazy and sucking his energy.
Not when he was just getting over Victoria. This woman was probably divorced, too. Had to be, since she wasn’t used to being free and on her own.
He finished cinching the saddle and slipped the bridle on.
The old guys would be here in a minute with the feed and then Clea would be their problem. From now on he would be keeping to himself.
He buckled the bridle and led Sugar out into the aisle. He moved past Clea with a backward glance at her feet, which had shavings clinging to her high heels. “A barn’s no place for those shoes.”
She snapped back, “I happened to be on my way to town when I saw the snake. Which seems like a hundred years ago instead of an hour.”
He could tell by the sound of her voice that she was following him.
He threw an answer back over his shoulder. “Maybe that’s because we coulda gone to Canada in the time it took you to back out to the road.”
Silence. He led Sugar on out of the barn and stopped to get on her.
Clea walked out into the sunlight. It turned her hair into a halo.
“Why’d you let me do that?” she asked. “Any other man would’ve tried harder to make me get out of the driver’s seat. Why didn’t you?” He looped the reins into place in front of the saddle and stepped back to mount. But before he stuck his toe in the stirrup, he looked her in the eye.
Any other man. Yeah. She probably had a dozen of them after her all the time. Somehow that thought irritated him even more.
“It’s not up to me to let you do anything. Or to try to make you do anything. I’m not in charge of you. I’ve already got way more on my plate right now than I ever wanted, and I sure as hell don’t want to be responsible for one more living, breathing thing.”
Her blue eyes sparked with temper. “You really think a lot of yourself, don’t you, Jake Hawthorne? Well, you can rest easy. I’m not trying to attach myself to you—all I came in here for was to see the wild-horse baby. I can take care of myself.”
“No, you can’t. You’re a woman alone looking at wintering in Montana and you don’t have a clue how to survive.”
“What’s it to you?”
“I’m your closest neighbor under the age of seventy.”
“So what?”
“I would never refuse to help a neighbor. Or a woman. Or anybody weaker than I am. But I’ve got a job. I don’t have time to take you to raise.”
“Nobody’s asking you to. Nobody will ever ask you to take care of me. You’re jumping to the conclusion that I’m helpless based on nothing except the fact that I’m not very good at backing a trailer. Is that stupid, or what?”
“And based on the fact that you’re used to having a man take care of you and buy you fox-fur vests and fully loaded trucks and trailers. Hired hands, too, to wash your dishes and build your fires and carry out your trash, and horse psychologists to teach you about your orphan foals.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“I knew that much the minute I saw you. A minute after that I knew you can’t shoot well enough to save yourself from a snake, much less a bear.”
“Bear?” Buck yelled from a stone’s throw away.
Jake looked up. He hadn’t even seen—or heard—the old guys coming.
“Somebody seen a bear? Least you could do would be to warn us ‘fore we come outside with a bucketful of milk.”
Buck and Teddy were laughing as they came, silly as kids.
“Are there really bears around here?” Clea asked.
“Well, we ain’t seen none right here,” Teddy said, pointing at the ground. “But yes, ma’am, there’s black bear and grizzly, too, all over this country.”
Jake thought her face lost a little of its color. Good. Maybe she’d go back home to Texas or Oklahoma or wherever it was she’d come from.
CHAPTER FIVE
BEARS? That was all Clea could think about as she drove away. Real life, with bears in it.
Evidently, pickup truckloads of eccentric—not to mention prickly and insulting—trespassers and wrong houses and hours of moving and packing and unpacking and constant barn chores and kicks in the thigh from orphan foals weren’t enough for her orientation into real life.
Bears. Her breath caught. She’d better put Ariel in the barn every night for sure. But what about daytime? And what about all those stories about bears tearing their way into cabins? Maybe she should go sleep in the barn with the shotgun if there was word of bears around. But how would she ever hear those rumors? Her neighbor, Jake, certainly wouldn’t want to be responsible for keeping her informed.
The old guys would come see about her, though. She would bet on it. She’d had a terrible time just convincing them to stay home and let her move by herself.
But she wouldn’t let them, not now. Now she had to prove to Jake—in addition to Daddy and Brock—that she could take care of herself.
They weren’t her major focus, though. Mainly she had to prove it to herself. This whole morning had been pretty unsettling.
But she would think positive. Dealing with the foal had grounded her some and reminded her that she wasn’t a complete incompetent.
She would keep herself positive and learn how to be self-sufficient instead of worrying. She had a million things to do before the snow flew. Practice shooting, for one. Right now, if she shot at a bear, she’d probably hit Ariel. At least a bear would be a bigger target than a snake but it was also a much bigger danger. She could get away from the snake when she saw it, but she’d read somewhere that no human being can outrun a bear.
Clea straightened in the seat, took a long, deep breath and hit her fist on the steering wheel. So be it. She wasn’t running anyhow. She was here and she would survive.
By the time she got back to Jake’s place—without going by to see her own house because she was going to move into it no matter what it was—she’d locked bears away in their own compartment in her mind. Tonight, after she was all settled in the place where she was supposed to be, after the physical work of moving had taken the edge off her nerves, then she would go on the Internet and find out where to get the best information possible about how to share the neighborhood with bears.
She parked at the end of the driveway where she wouldn’t have to drive past Jake’s trailer again, hurried past the wrecked truck in the front yard without really looking at it because it was just too painful and, once inside, changed her shoes and went to work. Too bad Jake wasn’t there to see that now she was wearing shoes appropriate for moving.
For a man who acted as if he were on another planet, he certainly had noticed a lot of details about her. Her shoes, her vest, her rig.
As she worked, their conversation cycled through her mind. What was the deal with him, anyhow? What were his “way too many responsibilities”? He appeared to be single—Buck and Teddy had mentioned him moving in with them and, after all, she was in his house this minute and there was no evidence of a woman’s presence, or that of children.
He had extremely few possessions, also. Maybe he was divorced, with three or four children to support. Instinctively, though, she didn’t think so.
Had he been talking about the foal? But the old guys were doing most of its care, as far as she could see. He’d probably just said that to make his point.
For a man who basically was the strong, silent type, he could certainly put a person in her place. Using only a very few words, of course.
Smiling grimly at her own joke, she focused on getting out of his house as fast as possible. She took it room by room, starting in the kitchen where she packed up her favorite insulated travel mug and coffee, then fastened a note to the refrigerator with his tractor-shaped, feedstore magnet: I take responsibility for the food I ate. I’ll replace it.
In the bedroom, she stripped her sheets off the bed and put his back on it, slapping away random thoughts of how he might look lying in them and what he might or might not be wearing at the time. She was thinking as a photographer, that was all, but she no longer cared whether he’d pose for her or not. She didn’t want to spend that much time with him.
When she drove up to her new place, her spirits lifted. It was what the realtor had described to her of course and although it was newer and didn’t have the atmosphere that Jake’s old cabin had, it definitely had a glass-and-wood A-frame charm of its own. The four-stall barn was even newer than the house. It sat at the edge of an acre-or-so that was fenced with peeled logs, which would be a fine turn-out pen. She could use it to ride in, too, when she wanted to practice her jumps and flat work.
The tiny kitchen was stocked with the supplies she had ordered. The view was wonderful in every direction and the loft bedroom with its own balcony made her feel like an eagle in its aerie. It even had an almost-decent-size closet.
Clea skipped lunch to start her Montana life all over again. She kept her thoughts positive as she looked out at the vast space that lay between her and any other human being and wondered idly whether Buck or Teddy carried a cell phone. Or whether there were game rangers in the area who she could call, just in case.
Staying busy had always been her antidote to worry, so she worked from just after noon until nearly sundown unloading everything, taking her time arranging and rearranging the few personal decorative things she’d brought. The furniture wasn’t great but it wasn’t awful either, with a few old and battered mission-style pieces she really liked. Her burled wood bowl was perfect on the coffee table.
She spent most of her effort on the living room, which was basically the only room. It and the kitchen were all one great room, the loft was open to them, except for its tiny bathroom and the small room that held the washer and dryer in the back of the cabin.
It was by far the smallest house she’d ever lived in. It gave her the same cozy feeling she’d had in the dollhouse Daddy had paid the gardener to build for her when she was a little girl. Cozy and safely in charge of her world. It was the only place she’d ever felt that way.
Long after she outgrew the dollhouse, she remembered that feeling, and as a new bride moving into the McMansion that Brock had had custom built on the acreage he had bought for its resale value, she had longed to feel that way again. Maybe she would have if she’d married anyone else but Brock.
That really had been her very first lesson in real life.
She’d been in Frisco, shopping for hours on end as she did sometimes when Brock was out of town. Early on in the marriage, when she still thought she loved him and when she missed him terribly.
When he’d still treated her with the deference her daddy’s daughter deserved and pretended that he loved her, too.
The window of a new interior-design shop caught her attention because the eclectic blend of styles was such a homey-but-sophisticated, interesting-but-soothing creation that it pulled her to the window and held her there until the young fledgling designer came to the door and spoke to her. An hour later, Clea had hired the woman.
