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“Oh, you are a pretty girl. Yes you are,” Morgan cooed, rubbing noses with the puppy. Jenny felt a pang. Her daughter adored animals of all shapes and sizes and used to constantly beg for a dog or cat of her own, until her pulmonologist in Seattle recommended against it.
“What kind of dog is she?” Cole asked, his first words since they’d arrived at the ranch.
“Australian shepherd. I bought her and her brother at a horse auction in Boise last month. I only meant to buy one for a birthday present for my mother but I couldn’t resist Lucy.”
“You have sheep, too?” Morgan asked.
“Uh, no.” He looked a little embarrassed. “But they work cattle, too, and I figured she can help me when I’m training a horse for cutting.”
“Cutting what?” Morgan asked.
“Cutting cattle. That’s a term for picking an individual cow or calf out of a herd. A well-trained cutting horse will do all the work for a cowboy. He just has to point out which cow he wants and the horse will separate him out of the rest of the cows.”
“Wow! Can your horses do that?”
Instead of being put off my Morgan’s relentless questions, Seth seemed charmed by her daughter. “Some of them,” he said. “Sometime when you come out I’ll give you a demonstration.”
“Cool!”
He grinned at Morgan’s enthusiasm and Jenny could swear she felt her blasted knees wobble. Oh, the man was dangerous. Entirely too sexy for his own good. She had to get out of there before she dissolved into a brainless puddle of hormones.
“Morgan, you and I had better go. Cole and Mr. Dalton have work to do.”
She was pleasantly surprised when Morgan didn’t kick up a fuss but followed her out of the barn into the cool November sunshine. Only as they approached the SUV did Jenny pick up on the reason for her daughter’s unusual docility.
In just a few seconds, Morgan had turned pale, her breathing wheezy and labored.
She should have expected it from the combination of animal dander, hay and excitement, but the swiftness of the asthma flare-up took her by surprise.
Still, Jenny had learned from grim experience never to go anywhere unprepared. She yanked the door open and lunged for her purse on the floor by the driver’s seat. Inside was Morgan’s spare inhaler and she quickly, efficiently puffed the medicine into the chamber and handed it to Morgan, then set her on the passenger seat while she drew the medicine into her lungs.
Morgan had that familiar panicky look in her eyes and Jenny spoke softly to calm her, the same nonsense words she always used.
She forgot all about Seth Dalton until he leaned past her into the SUV, big and disconcertingly masculine.
“That’s it, honey,” Seth said, keeping his own voice low and soothing. “Concentrate on the breathing and all the good air going into your lungs. You’re doing great.”
After a moment, the rescue medication did its work and the color started to return to her features. The panic in her eyes slowly gave way to the beginnings of relief and Jenny’s heart twisted with pain for her child’s trials and the courage Morgan wielded against them.
“Better?” Seth asked after a moment.
The girl nodded and Seth was grateful to see the flare-up seemed to be under control. “I’d tell you to go on back into the barn where it’s warmer,” he said to Jenny, “but I suspect the hay or the puppy triggered the attack, didn’t they?”
Her eyes widened as if surprised he knew anything about asthma. He didn’t tell her he could have written the damn book on it.
“That’s what I thought,” Jenny said. She was starting to lose her tight, in-control look, he saw, and now just looked like a worried mother. “I should have realized they might.”
“Why don’t we take her into the house over there for a minute until she feels better? This cold can’t be the greatest for her lungs.”
She looked as if she wanted to argue, but Morgan coughed just then and her mother nodded. “That’s probably a good idea.”
Seth scooped the girl into his arms easily, and headed for the house with Jenny and Cole following behind him. Morgan still breathed shallowly, her little chest rising and falling quickly as she tried to ease the horrible breathlessness he remembered all too well.
“I hate having asthma,” she whispered, her voice far too bitter for a little girl.
He recognized the bitterness, too. He knew just what it felt like to be ten and trapped with a body that didn’t work like he wanted it to. He had wanted to be a junior buckaroo rodeo champion, wanted to climb the Tetons by the time he was twelve, wanted to be the star pitcher on the Little League baseball team. Instead, he’d been small and weak and spent far too much time breathing into a lousy tube.
“Sucks, doesn’t it?” he answered. “The worst is the one time you forget to take your inhaler somewhere and of course you suddenly you get hit by a flare-up.”
She blinked at him and he was struck by how sweet it was to have a child look at him with such trust. “You have it, too?”
He nodded. “I don’t have attacks very often now, maybe once or twice a year and they’re usually pretty mild. When I was your age, though, it was a different story.”
He set her down on his leather sofa and grabbed a blanket for her.
She couldn’t seem to get over the fact that he knew what she was going through. “But you’re big! You ride horses and everything.”
“You can ride horses, too. You just have to watch for your triggers, like I do, and do your best to manage things. When I was a kid, they didn’t have some of the newer maintenance meds they have now and we had a tough time finding the best treatment for me but eventually we did. You probably know you never grow out of asthma, but lots of times the symptoms decrease a lot when you get older. That’s what happened to me.”
“You probably weren’t afraid like I am when I have an attack. Cole says I’m a big wussy.”
Jenny looked pained by the admission and Seth sent the boy a pointed look. At least Cole had the grace to look embarrassed.
“I was just kidding,” the kid mumbled. He needed a serious attitude adjustment, Seth thought, wondering if he’d been such a punk when he’d gone through his rebellious teens.
“I can’t think of anything scarier than not being able to breathe,” Seth told Morgan. “People who haven’t been through it don’t quite understand what it’s like, do they? Like you’re trapped underwater and somebody’s got two fists around your lungs and is squeezing them tight so you can only take a tiny breath at a time.”
Morgan nodded her agreement. “I always feel like I’m trapped under a big heavy blanket.”
“What’s your peak flow?”
She told him and he nodded. “Mine was pretty close to that when I was about your age.” He paused and saw the conversation was starting to tire her. “Can I get you a glass of water or some juice?”
She nodded, closing her eyes, and he rose and went into the kitchen to find a glass. Somehow he wasn’t surprised when Jenny followed him.
“Thank you.” She gave him a quiet smile and he felt an odd little tug in his chest.
“I didn’t do anything,” he said as he poured a glass of orange juice from the refrigerator.
“You were very kind to her and I appreciate your sharing your own condition with her. It’s great for Morgan to talk to adults who have managed to move past their childhood asthma and go on to live successful lives. Thank you,” she said again, following it up this time with another small, hesitant smile.
He studied that smile, the way it highlighted the lushness of a mouth that seemed incongruous with her buttoned-down appearance.
What was it about her? She wasn’t gorgeous in a Miss Rodeo Idaho kind of way. Not tall and curvy with a brilliant smile and eyes that knew just how to reel a man in.
She was small and compact, probably no bigger than five foot three. He supposed he’d call her cute, with that red-gold hair and her green eyes and the little ski jump of a nose.
Seth couldn’t say he had a particular favorite type of woman—he was willing to admit he loved them all—but he usually gravitated toward the kind of women who hung out at the Bandito. The kind in tight jeans and tighter shirts, with big breasts and hungry smiles.
Jenny Boyer was just about the polar opposite of that kind of woman. Cute or not, he probably wouldn’t usually take a second look at a woman who looked like a suburban soccer mom, with her tailored tan slacks and her wool blazer. Jenny Boyer was the kind of settled, respectable woman men like him usually tended to avoid.
Yet here they were, and he couldn’t seem to keep his eyes off her. She might not be his usual type but he sure liked looking at her.
He frowned a little at the unexpectedness of his attraction to her, then decided to shrug it off. He would never do anything about it. Not with a woman like Jenny Boyer, who had Complication written all over her.
Morgan’s color was much better when they returned to the living room. She was sitting up bickering with her brother, something he figured was a good sign.
She took the juice from him with a shy smile.
“Cole and I have things to do but you two are welcome to hang out here until Morgan feels better.”
“I think I’m all right now,” the girl said.
“I should get her home for a nebulizer treatment and to check her peak flow.”
“I can carry you back out to the car if you want.”
Morgan shook her head. “I can walk. But thanks.”
After her daughter was settled in the SUV, Jenny turned to him and to Cole.
“What time shall I come back?” she asked.
He thought of his schedule for the day. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll be running into town about four. We should be done by then so I’ll bring him back and save you a trip. Just take care of Morgan.”
“All right. Thank you.” She looked at her son as if she wanted to say something more, but she only let out a long breath, slid into her vehicle and drove away.
“So are we going to work on the car or what?” Cole finally addressed him after the SUV pulled away.
If Seth hadn’t noticed how concerned the boy had looked during those first few moments of the flare-up, he would probably find him more trouble than he was worth.
“Oh, eventually,” he said with a smile that bordered on evil. “First, you’ve got some stalls to muck. I hope you brought good thick gloves because you’re going to need ’em.”
Chapter Three
Fourteen was a miserable bitch of an age.
Though more than half his life had passed since that notable year, it felt just as fresh and painful now as Seth watched Cole Boyer shovel manure out of a stall.
Though the kid wasn’t tall by any stretch of the imagination, he was gangly and awkward, as if his muscles were still too short to keep up with his longer bones.
Seth remembered those days. He’d been small for his age, too, six inches shorter than most of the other guys in his class, and with asthma to boot. His father’s death had been just a few years earlier. And while he hadn’t been exactly paralyzed by grief over the bastard, he had struggled to figure out his place in the world now that he wasn’t Hank Dalton’s sickly, sissy-boy youngest son.
He’d been a little prick, too, full of anger and attitude. He had brothers to pound on to help vent some of it, but since fights usually ended with them beating the tar out of him, he tended to shy away from that activity. Eventually, he’d turned some of his excess energy to horses.
He trained his first horse that year, he remembered, a sweet little chestnut mare he’d ridden in the Idaho state high school rodeo finals a few years later.
Yeah, fourteen had been miserable, for the most part. But the next year everything started to come together. Between his fourteenth and fifteenth years, he hit a major growth spurt, the asthma all but disappeared and he gained six inches of height and thirty pounds of muscle, almost as if his body had just been biding its time.
Girls who’d ignored him all his life suddenly sat up and took notice—and he noticed them right back. After that, adolescence became a hell of a lot more fun, though he doubted Jenny Boyer would appreciate him sharing that particular walk down memory lane with her son, no matter how miserable he looked about life right now.
He should be miserable, Seth thought. Though he was tempted to turn soft and tell Cole he’d done enough for the day, he only had to think about the damage to his GTO to stiffen his resolve.
A little misery never hurt a kid.
“Can you hurry it up here?” Seth leaned indolently on the stall railing, mostly because he knew it would piss the kid off.
Sure enough, all he earned for his trouble was a heated glare.
“This isn’t exactly easy.”
“It’s not supposed to be,” Seth said.
After three hours, the kid had only mucked out four stalls, with two more to go. The more he shoveled, the grimmer his mood turned, until Seth was pretty sure he was ready to implode.
Tempted as he was to wait for the explosion, he finally took pity on him and reached for another shovel.
Cole gave him a surprised look when Seth joined him in the stall. “I thought I was supposed to be doing this.”
“You are. But since I’d like to take a look at the car you trashed sometime today, I figure the only way that’s going to happen is if I lend a hand.”
“I’m going as fast as I can,” Cole muttered.
“I know. If I thought you were slacking, you can bet I’d still be out there watching.”
Surprise flickered in eyes the same green as his mother’s, but he said nothing. They worked in silence for a few moments, the only sounds the scrape of shovels on concrete, the whickers of the horses around them and Lucy’s curious yips as she followed them.
Only after they’d moved onto the last stall did the boy speak. “Why don’t you have a real job or something?” he asked, his tone more baffled than hostile.
Seth raised an eyebrow. “You don’t think this is real work?”
“Sure. But what kind of loser signs up to shovel horse crap all day?”
Seth laughed. “If this was the only thing I did around here all day, I’d have to agree with you. But I usually leave the grunt work to the hired help while I get to do the fun stuff.”
“Like what?”
“Working with the horses. Breeding them, training them.”
“Whatever.”
“Not a real horse fan?”
“They’re big and dumb. How hard could it be to train them?”
“You might be surprised.” He scraped another shovel full of sunshine. “I can tell you there’s nothing so satisfying as taking a green-broke horse—that means an untrained one—and working with him until he obeys anything you tell him to do without question.”
“Whatever,” Cole said again, his voice dripping with scorn.
